Does your VCR check video tapes to see if the person pressing play is old enough, or even if anyone is present to enter a code to watch particular levels of films?
No, because up until this point, the technology really hasn't been there to make this a possibility. The X-Box isn't the first, either.
My guess is that it is an attempt at political control (e.g. the system will cover browsing and allow you see dubya's site but not al's) and perhaps even as a form of market research (they gather "login" results to assure the parents it isn't being hacked). I don't like MS so I can only ascribe truly evil reasons
You read WAY too much Slashdot.
15 year old wants to play third-life and you know as their parent it is ok for them but the Y-Box only allows authorised games to be used (prevent piracy) and then only by users with authorised age proofing Id
This is not what the X-Box is doing. If the Y-Box comes out next year and does what you say, then it will probably not do very well. Just because Microsoft is attached to this doesn't mean you automatically have to slap a conspiracy theory on it.
Not really. With medicine, if you lack attention for a few minutes, you risk finding your kid plain dead.
Well, the analogy was not for the consequences of the two things, but merely the notion of helping parents keep kids out of doing things they shouldn't be doing.
Not quite the same as finding him playing a violent video game and having an opportunity to teach him why you don't want him to do this, and discuss alternative video games
If you turn a video game off from letting a kid play, and he asks you why.. you can have your little talk then without him seeing the stuff and being extremely curious.
You're probably right about it not being real useful in parenting, but it really can't hurt (except if you're like that guy who doesn't want to pay for it.. Christ:P).. and notice the title of the story. That's why I shot it down as not being censorship.
Adults can stop their kids by teaching them, not by censoring them.
Tell a 10 year old kid not to play Quake because there is blood and guts and naked girls (ok, not in my Q3, but you get point..) and he'd probably still try to sneak in a game of Quake. I wouldn't necessarily blame curiosity on bad parenting.
What is a VChip if not censorship?
It depends on where you draw the line for censorship. I consider censorship to be the restriction of speech or expression of someone by and outside source of illegitimate authority. Parents are one of the only forms of authority who should be allowed to "censor" stuff from their kids. That's what this does.. though "censor" is a rather strong word for it. Is covering their kids' eyes during the scary parts of a movie "censorship?"
No, you're wrong. This isn't stopping adults from using the media they own. It's letting adults stop their kids from using the media the adults own. Having Macrovision, region coding, and censorship in the same breath as the VChip and parental controls on computers is a sure sign of ignorance.
Gotta love the knee jerk reaction to this comment that all the/. geeks throw out about the poster being an irresponsible parent. I'm just adding my comment into the mix because it seems to me that only one or two other people in the thread made the point that the VChip is a tool for parenting not a replacement. You cannot watch your kids 24/7, and even if you do tell them "no" it's always good to be able to keep them from the temptation of breaking the rules.
Granted, I'm not a parent, not even close, but I'm sick of seeing the idiocy of this issue.. the notion of "Microsoft being the nanny" because they're adding a feature to their video game system to allow parents to choose what can or cannot be played is absolutely ridiculous.
There's no difference between this and childproof lids on medicine and the fact that you need to be carded at movies or be with a parent. You can't very well have a person carding a kid everytime they want to use a R rated video game, can you? If the parent wants to let the kid play the R rated game, then they just turn the thing off.
It's not censorship. People on this site use the term way too loosely.
God. MS-NBC is a freaking propaganda machine, not a news source.. look at this article on XP. "Goodbye Mac snobs" ?? The article has less tact and maturity than most trolls on here..
Scoop, don't let the flamers get you down. I hear it all the time from people complaining about my site. Sometimes they have good suggestions, but a lot of the time those who are nasty are just bitching about stupid stuff that anyone who didn't look at computing like a religion wouldn't care about.
Though it's still pretty ugly, and apparently not as elegant, my servlet forum software might interest you.
Re:Another site with bloody lousy HTML!!
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Glasscode Released
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· Score: 2
Hey there.. I'm the "another web guy" you're talking about, and I've tried my best to make it be functional and readable at the same time.
There's 6 other skins. Take your pick. If they all suck to you, then sorry I did my best. If you're really that annoyed by it, you can try downloading the skin SDK and making your own skin and sending it to me:P
Re:Big problems that havn't been addressed
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Glasscode Released
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· Score: 2
Ok i'll bite.
We have databases for a reason. They allow you to manipulate, store, and access data faster than text files.
Lack of useful features? Uhm. Ok.
Try the "Text-only" skin.. it's not perfect but it looks decent in Lynx.
Well, it's hard to argue such vague points, but it's slow because it's being slashdotted, it's ugly because i'm a programmer not a graphics artist.. some people like it anyway.. (download the skin SDK), the moderation system isn't too important, and as for it being bloated.. well, whatever.:)
Re:With all the Java Sucks comments...
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Glasscode Released
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· Score: 2
I sped it up alot by adding mem=128M to lilo.conf.
And you made fun of me because it was impossibly slow.. it was running Java on 64 megs of RAM
Someone shoot me:) Let the flames against my lack of knowledge begin.
Can anyone suggest a way to speed it up, software wise? I'm using IBM's VM 1.3, which I'm pretty sure is the fastest available (correct me here if I'm wrong). I'm using JServ, which of about 5 servlet engines I tested with it, ran the fastest.
I do agree that the bottleneck seems to be the servlets (not Apache).. weither it's the MySQL or the Java I can't tell.
Any suggestions?
Then again, since it's a Celeron 450 w/128MB RAM dynamically generating content, I suppose there's only so much you can expect when faced with the slashdot effect:)
First you e-mail me a while ago asking for my source code so you can make some commercial website. I said its not ready and it will be released eventually for non-commercial use. Then you made some threats or something ridiculous. Then you spread lies about me on k5.. and now this. Would you please grow up? You're embarassing me and yourself.
Ironically enough, your selfish behavior was a large factor in helping me decide to release it initally as non-commercial, to protect myself from people like you.
As for my "community building" being a facade.. look at the team of people (including myself) that bring you half-empty. We're not the most selfish of types. You can't make money from a site like half-empty, anyway. I took a lot of crap on k5 about the fact the site had banner ads. What nobody realized is that banner ads does not equal revenue for myself. It goes to dyndns.org's bandwidth bill.
I told you to call me (and gave you my phone number) if you had any guts to talk to me in person about what your problem was. You never did.
Well, I had never intended for this to be something I would release. It started out as me making a website from scratch, not necessarily making a forum system from scratch. It evolved into something that I thought others could use so I started writing it in a manner that would allow people to use it for any site, not just half-empty.
Besides, I couldn't fork a Perl/PHP project like slash/scoop and use Java, now could I?:)
I'm going to GPL it fairly soon, I just didn't want to see someone open up a clone of half-empty and oust me before things got started (via better advertising.. remember nebby == poor college kid)
I'm not going to enforce it on banner ads or anything like that, really. The only situation I'm worried about like I said is a clone of half-empty.. the rest I could care less about.
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode
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Glasscode Released
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· Score: 2
The thing is getting toasted right now b/c of the/. effect, its hard to say if its because of the servlets or because of the amount of traffic (mind you, it's running on a celeron with 128MB RAM:))
You don't really need a book to learn servlets, especially if you've coded cgi scripts in Perl or Python or whatever. You just need to sit for an hour and learn the API, just like anything else (the servlet API is pretty dang small)
I don't know JSP pages, so they might be worthy of an entire book.. but servlets were something I picked up in a day or two.
My site runs Glasscode, a Slash/Scoop like engine and then some written in servlets. The abstraction you can provide with OOP made certain features pretty easy, such as droppable components and "Glassboxes" similar to slash's slashboxes. The OOP Java provides also makes it rather expandable.
One argument here is that even if geeks band together and don't buy these drives, Ma and Pa will because they won't know any better.
Well, one thing worth noting, is all it would take is a single smart CEO of a hardware or computer company to realize that this standard is a bad thing, and then launch an advertising campaign hinged on the fact that their hard drives don't hinder what you can copy. "Dell computers won't keep you from copying files! No wonder they're number one!".. this will be pretty effective once the MS Windows dialog "Sorry you can't copy that file here because MegaCorp B said so" becomes as common as the BSOD and the "Goodbye" AOL voice.
Once again, the whole point is that if you are paying for cable, you should be able to time-shift. Guilty until proven innocent.. this is what corporations want you to think is the correct way to deal with copyright protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Does your VCR check video tapes to see if the person pressing play is old enough, or even if anyone is present to enter a code to watch particular levels of films?
No, because up until this point, the technology really hasn't been there to make this a possibility. The X-Box isn't the first, either.
My guess is that it is an attempt at political control (e.g. the system will cover browsing and allow you see dubya's site but not al's) and perhaps even as a form of market research (they gather "login" results to assure the parents it isn't being hacked). I don't like MS so I can only ascribe truly evil reasons
You read WAY too much Slashdot.
15 year old wants to play third-life and you know as their parent it is ok for them but the Y-Box only allows authorised games to be used (prevent piracy) and then only by users with authorised age proofing Id
This is not what the X-Box is doing. If the Y-Box comes out next year and does what you say, then it will probably not do very well. Just because Microsoft is attached to this doesn't mean you automatically have to slap a conspiracy theory on it.
Not really. With medicine, if you lack attention for a few minutes, you risk finding your kid plain dead.
Well, the analogy was not for the consequences of the two things, but merely the notion of helping parents keep kids out of doing things they shouldn't be doing.
Not quite the same as finding him playing a violent video game and having an opportunity to teach him why you don't want him to do this, and discuss alternative video games
If you turn a video game off from letting a kid play, and he asks you why.. you can have your little talk then without him seeing the stuff and being extremely curious.
You're probably right about it not being real useful in parenting, but it really can't hurt (except if you're like that guy who doesn't want to pay for it.. Christ
Adults can stop their kids by teaching them, not by censoring them.
Tell a 10 year old kid not to play Quake because there is blood and guts and naked girls (ok, not in my Q3, but you get point..) and he'd probably still try to sneak in a game of Quake. I wouldn't necessarily blame curiosity on bad parenting.
What is a VChip if not censorship?
It depends on where you draw the line for censorship. I consider censorship to be the restriction of speech or expression of someone by and outside source of illegitimate authority. Parents are one of the only forms of authority who should be allowed to "censor" stuff from their kids. That's what this does.. though "censor" is a rather strong word for it. Is covering their kids' eyes during the scary parts of a movie "censorship?"
No, you're wrong. This isn't stopping adults from using the media they own. It's letting adults stop their kids from using the media the adults own. Having Macrovision, region coding, and censorship in the same breath as the VChip and parental controls on computers is a sure sign of ignorance.
Better Microsoft play nanny and keep id Software from doing so.
Gotta love the knee jerk reaction to this comment that all the /. geeks throw out about the poster being an irresponsible parent. I'm just adding my comment into the mix because it seems to me that only one or two other people in the thread made the point that the VChip is a tool for parenting not a replacement. You cannot watch your kids 24/7, and even if you do tell them "no" it's always good to be able to keep them from the temptation of breaking the rules.
Granted, I'm not a parent, not even close, but I'm sick of seeing the idiocy of this issue.. the notion of "Microsoft being the nanny" because they're adding a feature to their video game system to allow parents to choose what can or cannot be played is absolutely ridiculous.
There's no difference between this and childproof lids on medicine and the fact that you need to be carded at movies or be with a parent. You can't very well have a person carding a kid everytime they want to use a R rated video game, can you? If the parent wants to let the kid play the R rated game, then they just turn the thing off.
It's not censorship. People on this site use the term way too loosely.
God. MS-NBC is a freaking propaganda machine, not a news source.. look at this article on XP. "Goodbye Mac snobs" ?? The article has less tact and maturity than most trolls on here..
You might be interested in reading my rant on half-empty.
Well I've been able to install it. I can't very well use 3d studio max and photoshop in mandrake, can I? :)
Have you ever used Windows 2000? I find it to be incredibly stable and usable. Blows Linux out of the water for a desktop platform.
Scoop, don't let the flamers get you down. I hear it all the time from people complaining about my site. Sometimes they have good suggestions, but a lot of the time those who are nasty are just bitching about stupid stuff that anyone who didn't look at computing like a religion wouldn't care about.
Though it's still pretty ugly, and apparently not as elegant, my servlet forum software might interest you.
Hey there.. I'm the "another web guy" you're talking about, and I've tried my best to make it be functional and readable at the same time.
:P
There's 6 other skins. Take your pick. If they all suck to you, then sorry I did my best. If you're really that annoyed by it, you can try downloading the skin SDK and making your own skin and sending it to me
Ok i'll bite.
We have databases for a reason. They allow you to manipulate, store, and access data faster than text files.
Lack of useful features? Uhm. Ok.
Try the "Text-only" skin.. it's not perfect but it looks decent in Lynx.
Well, it's hard to argue such vague points, but it's slow because it's being slashdotted, it's ugly because i'm a programmer not a graphics artist .. some people like it anyway .. (download the skin SDK), the moderation system isn't too important, and as for it being bloated.. well, whatever. :)
I sped it up alot by adding mem=128M to lilo.conf.
:) Let the flames against my lack of knowledge begin.
And you made fun of me because it was impossibly slow.. it was running Java on 64 megs of RAM
Someone shoot me
Can anyone suggest a way to speed it up, software wise? I'm using IBM's VM 1.3, which I'm pretty sure is the fastest available (correct me here if I'm wrong). I'm using JServ, which of about 5 servlet engines I tested with it, ran the fastest.
:)
I do agree that the bottleneck seems to be the servlets (not Apache).. weither it's the MySQL or the Java I can't tell.
Any suggestions?
Then again, since it's a Celeron 450 w/128MB RAM dynamically generating content, I suppose there's only so much you can expect when faced with the slashdot effect
First you e-mail me a while ago asking for my source code so you can make some commercial website. I said its not ready and it will be released eventually for non-commercial use. Then you made some threats or something ridiculous. Then you spread lies about me on k5 .. and now this. Would you please grow up? You're embarassing me and yourself.
Ironically enough, your selfish behavior was a large factor in helping me decide to release it initally as non-commercial, to protect myself from people like you.
As for my "community building" being a facade.. look at the team of people (including myself) that bring you half-empty. We're not the most selfish of types. You can't make money from a site like half-empty, anyway. I took a lot of crap on k5 about the fact the site had banner ads. What nobody realized is that banner ads does not equal revenue for myself. It goes to dyndns.org's bandwidth bill.
I told you to call me (and gave you my phone number) if you had any guts to talk to me in person about what your problem was. You never did.
Actually, the server is in Ithaca, NY, and I'm in NJ.. still home for winter break.
.. "Why?? Why??"
The server is slowly murmuring to its lonely self
:)
Well, I had never intended for this to be something I would release. It started out as me making a website from scratch, not necessarily making a forum system from scratch. It evolved into something that I thought others could use so I started writing it in a manner that would allow people to use it for any site, not just half-empty.
:)
Besides, I couldn't fork a Perl/PHP project like slash/scoop and use Java, now could I?
I'm going to GPL it fairly soon, I just didn't want to see someone open up a clone of half-empty and oust me before things got started (via better advertising.. remember nebby == poor college kid) I'm not going to enforce it on banner ads or anything like that, really. The only situation I'm worried about like I said is a clone of half-empty.. the rest I could care less about.
The thing is getting toasted right now b/c of the /. effect, its hard to say if its because of the servlets or because of the amount of traffic (mind you, it's running on a celeron with 128MB RAM :))
You don't really need a book to learn servlets, especially if you've coded cgi scripts in Perl or Python or whatever. You just need to sit for an hour and learn the API, just like anything else (the servlet API is pretty dang small)
I don't know JSP pages, so they might be worthy of an entire book.. but servlets were something I picked up in a day or two.
My site runs Glasscode, a Slash/Scoop like engine and then some written in servlets. The abstraction you can provide with OOP made certain features pretty easy, such as droppable components and "Glassboxes" similar to slash's slashboxes. The OOP Java provides also makes it rather expandable.
It's going GPL sometime around new years.
One argument here is that even if geeks band together and don't buy these drives, Ma and Pa will because they won't know any better.
.. this will be pretty effective once the MS Windows dialog "Sorry you can't copy that file here because MegaCorp B said so" becomes as common as the BSOD and the "Goodbye" AOL voice.
Well, one thing worth noting, is all it would take is a single smart CEO of a hardware or computer company to realize that this standard is a bad thing, and then launch an advertising campaign hinged on the fact that their hard drives don't hinder what you can copy. "Dell computers won't keep you from copying files! No wonder they're number one!"
Once again, the whole point is that if you are paying for cable, you should be able to time-shift. Guilty until proven innocent.. this is what corporations want you to think is the correct way to deal with copyright protection.