Obviously you haven't used the ubermaus (or the Intellimouse Explorer as the rest of the world seems fit to call it). The thumb buttons and the back/forward buttons truly allow for one handed browsing. Sure, alt-left/right work really well (I use them all the time on any system without the ubermaus), but the extra thumb buttons are damned addicting. The simplicity and ease makes the ubermaus a joy to use (as long as you're not left handed, heh). Most people go back more than forward and so logically, the back button is significantly larger than the forward button.
Other than a natural bias against Microsoft or an irrational fear of removing your fingers from the keyboard, there's no reason not to like the ubermaus. (OK, it's horrible for lefties and some people claim it's heavy but that's it.) It's not as if you're going to be using the mouse in vi or anything; it's for just for browsing, a normally graphic experience anyway.
True, but what I said is still applicable now. Until the authorities "get it" about encryption and/or encryption becomes popular for normal use, email isn't a viable option for secure communication under any circumstances in my mind.
I've got to wonder: if you're so concerned about privacy with all this email snooping going on, why use email at all? If you're doing something clandestine, you're pretty much assured that someone is looking in. Encryption and that steg-o-something or other merely wave a big flag that says "hey! we're doing something clandestine, look into us more closely!"
So if you know they're watching, why bother hiding? I'd suggest something like a private website in a secure (physical) location that logs access; perhaps [encrypted] voice chat which would be expensive to monitor and hard to distinguish from the general internet traffic, rather than a dumb proxy that just logs email sessions.
Secret recipes and practices of the stone masons would probably fall under the catagory of trade secrets, perhaps the least offensive of all forms of IP. The objectionable part of IP that didn't exist until recently is the belief that you should retain control over your ideas once you have already released them to the general public.
Entering radical anarchist mode.. (For lack of a better term; I'm not an anarchist. Bit of a nihilist, but that's another story.)
As an inventor, your claim to fame is thinking up the right thought first. Does that make you special? Are you entitled to any benefits pertaining to that coincidence of thought and time? If you don't feel like sharing, is the world that worse off? Wouldn't the really important stuff get out there anyway, even if you couldn't make a fortune off it? Side rant: who's paying all those amateur astronomists who discover all the cool stuff in space? How is that any different?
IP isn't about money and being rewarded; it's about control and power. Those things can lead quite easily to lots of money, but they can also have hurt when placed in the hands of people who don't use them properly.
I've done a few custom hacks on Diablo 2 (yes two) myself, and I can tell you it has nothing to do with harassing other players. (I haven't released any cheats nor have I used them on a character I played seriously or competitively.)
To tell the truth, I think this guy is pretty much right on. D2 repeats itself (with harder bad guys) once you beat it the first time around, and I found it was much more fun to test everything and try to change every little aspect of the game.
Mozilla is open source. Mozilla will form the basis of Netscape 6, which will contain other non-Free code. The difference is easy to see; download the Netscape 6 Preview Release and then download M16. The difference is mostly packaging and marketing, but it's a clear insight into the future of Mozilla; Mozilla will always be a fully capable browser, but Netscape 6 is the preferred option for non-technical users.
$30 for a better-than-average cooling system (peltiers etc. are for people who want to stretch out an already high-end system) vs. $200 for a faster chip.
Overclocking will give you a much better price/performance ratio, and it rarely really damages the CPU as long you don't run too fast too long without adequate cooling. With a little time you can tell what works for your CPU and what doesn't and it's easy to tell how fast is too fast.
Worst comes to worst, you have to drop your CPU to spec, and you're out $30.
I'm assuming you're referring to a CPU that is no longer stable when run at spec. Any overclocker that returns a CPU just because it doesn't overclock well should be tarred and feathered.
You're missing something there. If a store is respectable enough to test a used CPU before restocking it, then they are respectable enough to mark it as used. If you're looking for 100% uptime, buy from respectable dealers and don't buy used items.
If your CPU is obviously unstable, then you have every right to return it just like the overclocker. And if the CPU is unstable only three times a year, no overclocker is going to return it. The overclocker isn't smarter than you; he isn't going to find the problem before the warranty is over if you aren't. Typical overclockers, as well, have much better cooling than normal users and thus have a higher tolerance for instability. While it may take an overclocker months to realize a problem, it would take a normal user mere days.
Your situation is silly. If you happen to be coupled with an untrustworthy dealer who doesn't marked used parts, AND the CPU isn't unstable enough to be noticed by the dealer or you immediately, AND you happen to be in a situation requiring total stability AND you don't happen to have proper cooling (on par with the shop's testing), THEN overclocking could cause you a headache three times a year.
The real problem with overclocking is not with the occasional overclocker with no balls who returns a bad CPU, but untrustworthy vendors who deliberately overclock CPUs and systems without telling customers and sell them at higher prices. This is a much bigger problem, especially with non-technical users. Australia apparently had a huge problem with Athlons recently, where major vendors would do it. AMD seems to be respectful of both overclockers and non-technical users; new versions of the Athlon will permit overclocking but clearly display that they are overclocked.
Finally, the personal anecdote: my Celeron 366 has run completely stable at 458, for several months without any stability problems. I would never return it as defective if problems arose due to overclocking, and in fact I couldn't; the warranty has already expired.
Okaaay, so how are people going to get it to use it if you can't distribute it? If you've got it, wouldn't that insinuate you've illegally received it? How many people outside of the hacker community have a copy already? What does it matter if you've got it legitimately if everyone else doesn't think so (especially the lawyers)? It seems a moot point to me. This is not something to ignore.
The point is that DeCSS will suffer the same fate as warez. No one with a reputation to protect would suggest that the masses download warez from international servers to "screw it to the man," but DeCSS opponents seem to be relying on such a thing should the MPAA ultimately prevail.
Regardless of how "right" you think you are, it's silly to think that normal people are going to turn to methods of software pirates and violate the express wishes of their own government to watch DVDs.
It's 5400 RPM for Christ's sake! Maxtor is more or less admitting that the drive isn't fast enough by releasing the DiamondMax Plus 45, a smaller 7200rpm drive. StorageReview has a nice take on Maxtor's new releases.
Barring spectacular performance from the DiamondMax Plus 45, the IBM Deskstar 75gxp (available in sizes up to 75gb) is still the king of IDE drives. The 75gxp has some very impressive specs, does well in every benchmark thrown at it, and has some insanely low street prices.
We can't trust this press release either; it lacks key details about price, speed, and availability. Don't expect to see any of those three drives soon and don't expect them to be anything worth writing home about.
In the end, we have one drive from Maxtor that might match the 75gxp for speed, and it's only 45gb. The DiamondMax 80 is a joke, a measely extra 5gb for a far inferior drive.
Want insanely fast IDE RAID? Get a couple of 75gxp drives now for less money.
Only those copies that reside in the US. Unless the MPAA can get a judgment in all the other countries where DeCSS is hosted as well.
Still, do you think there's many people mirroring DeCSS in Zimbabwe? The demand and the know-how are in the west, and you can't deny that the US is a significant portion of the west. As well, the MPAA isn't going to remain satisfied with the US if and when they get their way in the US. (Read: lots of international lobbying and corporate threats.)
Only those that have no spine.
Heh, I've actually worked with a few librarians, and they don't have any stomach for anything remotely illegal, much less anything explicitly deemed so. The point is that anyone (in US jurisdiction) that wants to stay within the lines is SOL.
Nah, Brisco County Jr. was great, except perhaps when it tried to take itself too seriously; the time travel thing was plain stupid.
His small part in Xena/Herc was good for few laughs; I think the problem with Jack of All Trades is that they try to recreate the Xena/Herc character as a main character, which doesn't work at all.
Bruce Cambell in X-Files could work, provided they write him his own character rather than trying to recreate Mulder or Ash. Ash in X-Files would be just too weird.
It's one CD. It's a DVD rip. It's encoded with DiVX. It was most likely ripped with DeCSS. (DeCSS is part of the most popular method to rip DVDs to DiVX.) It is available on the Internet if you know where to find it.
I feel sorry for the DeCSS guys because they don't even know it's happening, and stuff like this will likely come back to bite them on the ass once the MPAA finds out.
Just because it's out there doesn't mean that the law can't affect it. I imagine that many copies of DeCSS will be deleted voluntary if the court so orders. Warez is illegal and it's still out there, but you don't touch it if you want to stay legit; the same thing will happen to DeCSS. Librarians looking to do a fair use compilation won't dare use DeCSS-based decoding software.
The philosophy aside, the law does greatly impact things and should not be treated so lightly; we should be working within the system rather than ignoring it.
Naw, Sentinels wouldn't have to be a budget buster. Make them 100% CG and only show up in the last 4 minutes of the movie. The focus of the rest of the film would be finding out what the bad guys are doing (building Sentinels) and trying to stop them from doing it. The X-Men think they've destroyed the Sentinels, but wait! In the ruins of the Sentinel factory, a sole Sentinel boots up, leading into Movie 3.
A movie about Sentinels wouldn't have to feature Sentinels (which would still be cool if they could do it).
RE: Time Travel: I doubt that the movies will ever go into enough detail to cover the time traveling stories, but they're great stories that each deserve a triology of their own. A guy has to hope...
The new poll, "who do you think will be voted off the island this week?" has Gervase nearly tied with Greg, who won't be cast off if you believe the javascript order. So either they don't know or don't want to know about CBS' little flub, or they are deliberately throwing the poll.
I really agree with you on that; the accent was totally unbelievable and distracted from her performance. Towards the end of the movie the accent kind of dropped and she seemed to be doing a more believable "American" accent. I saw her on the Daily Show before the movie came out and she has some sort of accent naturally; I want to say New Zealand, but IMDB says she was born in Canada.
Wolverine's dialog had just that right edge of rudeness without turning him into a complete asshole - it was in some ways more than the comics (I don't think he's ever called anyone a "dick" in the comics) but that's because you can do more in a movie (even a PG-13) than in a Code-Approved comic book.
He didn't say bub enough. At my count it was once. As we all know he has to punctuate every sentance with bub. Like "don't mess with me, bub." I think it's pseudo-Canadianism, but it's funny as all hell.
Though I can't speak for the entire X-Men fanbase, those I've talked to, who read and enjoyed the comic, tended to like the film. Fans seem to be understanding; X-Men is a huge undertaking, and the movie does the best it can. My friends and I could spot the inaccuracies a mile away and predict the plot scene for scene, but we were still genuinely entertained, focusing more on what they got right rather than what they skimmed over.
Your average teenage movie goer or comic book fan won't notice the bad acting (though Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were spectactular), and Wolverine and Rogue are nice subjects to focus on.
The most understandable gripe I've heard, which surprisingly wasn't mentioned here, was that the movie spent a lot of time setting up the characters for the inevitable sequel, leaving the conflict with Magneto to fall short of a spectactular climax. The sequel is obvious from a mile away, and hard core comic book fans could write the script by themselves (see below for my predictions). Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos have more or less confirmed that a sequel will happen if the original does well enough, which isn't too big of a stretch considering a opening weekend take of 57 and a half million.
Here's my predictions on the sequel, based mostly on the comic book and the events in the movie. If you've read the comic book you'll probably say "well duh," but here goes:
Wolverine discovers his past up in Canada and has a scrape with Sabertooth, predictably being absent until the last minute because the other X-Men are helpless without him for some reason. Magneto breaks out. Introduce one or two "new" characters. Mutiny in Magneto's ranks would be probable, as Magneto has been in jail for some time. I'm betting on sentinels (large robots specifically designed to track down and capture mutants) as the further advancement of the the mutant vs. human plot.
Eh, I've always been confused by the people who knowingly and willingly kill their bandwidth so some strangers on the net can download the same songs over and over again at hideous speeds. There are some weird people out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you haven't used the ubermaus (or the Intellimouse Explorer as the rest of the world seems fit to call it). The thumb buttons and the back/forward buttons truly allow for one handed browsing. Sure, alt-left/right work really well (I use them all the time on any system without the ubermaus), but the extra thumb buttons are damned addicting. The simplicity and ease makes the ubermaus a joy to use (as long as you're not left handed, heh). Most people go back more than forward and so logically, the back button is significantly larger than the forward button.
Other than a natural bias against Microsoft or an irrational fear of removing your fingers from the keyboard, there's no reason not to like the ubermaus. (OK, it's horrible for lefties and some people claim it's heavy but that's it.) It's not as if you're going to be using the mouse in vi or anything; it's for just for browsing, a normally graphic experience anyway.
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True, but what I said is still applicable now. Until the authorities "get it" about encryption and/or encryption becomes popular for normal use, email isn't a viable option for secure communication under any circumstances in my mind.
--
I've got to wonder: if you're so concerned about privacy with all this email snooping going on, why use email at all? If you're doing something clandestine, you're pretty much assured that someone is looking in. Encryption and that steg-o-something or other merely wave a big flag that says "hey! we're doing something clandestine, look into us more closely!"
So if you know they're watching, why bother hiding? I'd suggest something like a private website in a secure (physical) location that logs access; perhaps [encrypted] voice chat which would be expensive to monitor and hard to distinguish from the general internet traffic, rather than a dumb proxy that just logs email sessions.
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Resolved riaa.com to 208.225.90.120
Resolved riaa.net to 208.225.90.120
Resolved riaa.org to 208.225.90.120
Not only are they trying to stop the music revolution, but they're domain squatting! Hmm.. I wonder who has riaasux.com..
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Beer! Hah! If those Oregonian folks only knew my birthday was tomorrow, they'd give up drinking for sure!
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Shush. What's more important is that tomorrow (July 28th), is MY BIRTHDAY.
Slashdot accepts silly things about "Sys-admin day," but nothing about my birthday. I feel so rejected..
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Secret recipes and practices of the stone masons would probably fall under the catagory of trade secrets, perhaps the least offensive of all forms of IP. The objectionable part of IP that didn't exist until recently is the belief that you should retain control over your ideas once you have already released them to the general public.
Entering radical anarchist mode.. (For lack of a better term; I'm not an anarchist. Bit of a nihilist, but that's another story.)
As an inventor, your claim to fame is thinking up the right thought first. Does that make you special? Are you entitled to any benefits pertaining to that coincidence of thought and time? If you don't feel like sharing, is the world that worse off? Wouldn't the really important stuff get out there anyway, even if you couldn't make a fortune off it? Side rant: who's paying all those amateur astronomists who discover all the cool stuff in space? How is that any different?
IP isn't about money and being rewarded; it's about control and power. Those things can lead quite easily to lots of money, but they can also have hurt when placed in the hands of people who don't use them properly.
--
Pshaw!
I've done a few custom hacks on Diablo 2 (yes two) myself, and I can tell you it has nothing to do with harassing other players. (I haven't released any cheats nor have I used them on a character I played seriously or competitively.)
To tell the truth, I think this guy is pretty much right on. D2 repeats itself (with harder bad guys) once you beat it the first time around, and I found it was much more fun to test everything and try to change every little aspect of the game.
--
Mozilla is open source. Mozilla will form the basis of Netscape 6, which will contain other non-Free code. The difference is easy to see; download the Netscape 6 Preview Release and then download M16. The difference is mostly packaging and marketing, but it's a clear insight into the future of Mozilla; Mozilla will always be a fully capable browser, but Netscape 6 is the preferred option for non-technical users.
--
$30 for a better-than-average cooling system (peltiers etc. are for people who want to stretch out an already high-end system) vs. $200 for a faster chip.
Overclocking will give you a much better price/performance ratio, and it rarely really damages the CPU as long you don't run too fast too long without adequate cooling. With a little time you can tell what works for your CPU and what doesn't and it's easy to tell how fast is too fast.
Worst comes to worst, you have to drop your CPU to spec, and you're out $30.
--
I'm assuming you're referring to a CPU that is no longer stable when run at spec. Any overclocker that returns a CPU just because it doesn't overclock well should be tarred and feathered.
You're missing something there. If a store is respectable enough to test a used CPU before restocking it, then they are respectable enough to mark it as used. If you're looking for 100% uptime, buy from respectable dealers and don't buy used items.
If your CPU is obviously unstable, then you have every right to return it just like the overclocker. And if the CPU is unstable only three times a year, no overclocker is going to return it. The overclocker isn't smarter than you; he isn't going to find the problem before the warranty is over if you aren't. Typical overclockers, as well, have much better cooling than normal users and thus have a higher tolerance for instability. While it may take an overclocker months to realize a problem, it would take a normal user mere days.
Your situation is silly. If you happen to be coupled with an untrustworthy dealer who doesn't marked used parts, AND the CPU isn't unstable enough to be noticed by the dealer or you immediately, AND you happen to be in a situation requiring total stability AND you don't happen to have proper cooling (on par with the shop's testing), THEN overclocking could cause you a headache three times a year.
The real problem with overclocking is not with the occasional overclocker with no balls who returns a bad CPU, but untrustworthy vendors who deliberately overclock CPUs and systems without telling customers and sell them at higher prices. This is a much bigger problem, especially with non-technical users. Australia apparently had a huge problem with Athlons recently, where major vendors would do it. AMD seems to be respectful of both overclockers and non-technical users; new versions of the Athlon will permit overclocking but clearly display that they are overclocked.
Finally, the personal anecdote: my Celeron 366 has run completely stable at 458, for several months without any stability problems. I would never return it as defective if problems arose due to overclocking, and in fact I couldn't; the warranty has already expired.
--
"... but DeCSS opponents seem to be ..."
Uh, make that DeCSS proponents.
Replying to my own post. Geez, I've no life.
Okaaay, so how are people going to get it to use it if you can't distribute it? If you've got it, wouldn't that insinuate you've illegally received it? How many people outside of the hacker community have a copy already? What does it matter if you've got it legitimately if everyone else doesn't think so (especially the lawyers)? It seems a moot point to me. This is not something to ignore.
The point is that DeCSS will suffer the same fate as warez. No one with a reputation to protect would suggest that the masses download warez from international servers to "screw it to the man," but DeCSS opponents seem to be relying on such a thing should the MPAA ultimately prevail.
Regardless of how "right" you think you are, it's silly to think that normal people are going to turn to methods of software pirates and violate the express wishes of their own government to watch DVDs.
Can you say FAST????
Not really.
It's 5400 RPM for Christ's sake! Maxtor is more or less admitting that the drive isn't fast enough by releasing the DiamondMax Plus 45, a smaller 7200rpm drive. StorageReview has a nice take on Maxtor's new releases.
Barring spectacular performance from the DiamondMax Plus 45, the IBM Deskstar 75gxp (available in sizes up to 75gb) is still the king of IDE drives. The 75gxp has some very impressive specs, does well in every benchmark thrown at it, and has some insanely low street prices.
We can't trust this press release either; it lacks key details about price, speed, and availability. Don't expect to see any of those three drives soon and don't expect them to be anything worth writing home about.
In the end, we have one drive from Maxtor that might match the 75gxp for speed, and it's only 45gb. The DiamondMax 80 is a joke, a measely extra 5gb for a far inferior drive.
Want insanely fast IDE RAID? Get a couple of 75gxp drives now for less money.
--
Only those copies that reside in the US. Unless the MPAA can get a judgment in all the other countries where DeCSS is hosted as well.
Still, do you think there's many people mirroring DeCSS in Zimbabwe? The demand and the know-how are in the west, and you can't deny that the US is a significant portion of the west. As well, the MPAA isn't going to remain satisfied with the US if and when they get their way in the US. (Read: lots of international lobbying and corporate threats.)
Only those that have no spine.
Heh, I've actually worked with a few librarians, and they don't have any stomach for anything remotely illegal, much less anything explicitly deemed so. The point is that anyone (in US jurisdiction) that wants to stay within the lines is SOL.
Nah, Brisco County Jr. was great, except perhaps when it tried to take itself too seriously; the time travel thing was plain stupid.
His small part in Xena/Herc was good for few laughs; I think the problem with Jack of All Trades is that they try to recreate the Xena/Herc character as a main character, which doesn't work at all.
Bruce Cambell in X-Files could work, provided they write him his own character rather than trying to recreate Mulder or Ash. Ash in X-Files would be just too weird.
Read the NFO file for FreeMpeg4's release of The Matrix.
It's one CD. It's a DVD rip. It's encoded with DiVX. It was most likely ripped with DeCSS. (DeCSS is part of the most popular method to rip DVDs to DiVX.) It is available on the Internet if you know where to find it.
I feel sorry for the DeCSS guys because they don't even know it's happening, and stuff like this will likely come back to bite them on the ass once the MPAA finds out.
Just because it's out there doesn't mean that the law can't affect it. I imagine that many copies of DeCSS will be deleted voluntary if the court so orders. Warez is illegal and it's still out there, but you don't touch it if you want to stay legit; the same thing will happen to DeCSS. Librarians looking to do a fair use compilation won't dare use DeCSS-based decoding software.
The philosophy aside, the law does greatly impact things and should not be treated so lightly; we should be working within the system rather than ignoring it.
Naw, Sentinels wouldn't have to be a budget buster. Make them 100% CG and only show up in the last 4 minutes of the movie. The focus of the rest of the film would be finding out what the bad guys are doing (building Sentinels) and trying to stop them from doing it. The X-Men think they've destroyed the Sentinels, but wait! In the ruins of the Sentinel factory, a sole Sentinel boots up, leading into Movie 3.
A movie about Sentinels wouldn't have to feature Sentinels (which would still be cool if they could do it).
RE: Time Travel:
I doubt that the movies will ever go into enough detail to cover the time traveling stories, but they're great stories that each deserve a triology of their own. A guy has to hope...
The new poll, "who do you think will be voted off the island this week?" has Gervase nearly tied with Greg, who won't be cast off if you believe the javascript order. So either they don't know or don't want to know about CBS' little flub, or they are deliberately throwing the poll.
Yeah, but that wouldn't be as neato as CSS..
I really agree with you on that; the accent was totally unbelievable and distracted from her performance. Towards the end of the movie the accent kind of dropped and she seemed to be doing a more believable "American" accent. I saw her on the Daily Show before the movie came out and she has some sort of accent naturally; I want to say New Zealand, but IMDB says she was born in Canada.
Wolverine's dialog had just that right edge of rudeness without turning him into a complete asshole - it was in some ways more than the comics (I don't think he's ever called anyone a "dick" in the comics) but that's because you can do more in a movie (even a PG-13) than in a Code-Approved comic book.
He didn't say bub enough. At my count it was once. As we all know he has to punctuate every sentance with bub. Like "don't mess with me, bub." I think it's pseudo-Canadianism, but it's funny as all hell.
Though I can't speak for the entire X-Men fanbase, those I've talked to, who read and enjoyed the comic, tended to like the film. Fans seem to be understanding; X-Men is a huge undertaking, and the movie does the best it can. My friends and I could spot the inaccuracies a mile away and predict the plot scene for scene, but we were still genuinely entertained, focusing more on what they got right rather than what they skimmed over.
Your average teenage movie goer or comic book fan won't notice the bad acting (though Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were spectactular), and Wolverine and Rogue are nice subjects to focus on.
The most understandable gripe I've heard, which surprisingly wasn't mentioned here, was that the movie spent a lot of time setting up the characters for the inevitable sequel, leaving the conflict with Magneto to fall short of a spectactular climax. The sequel is obvious from a mile away, and hard core comic book fans could write the script by themselves (see below for my predictions). Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos have more or less confirmed that a sequel will happen if the original does well enough, which isn't too big of a stretch considering a opening weekend take of 57 and a half million.
Here's my predictions on the sequel, based mostly on the comic book and the events in the movie. If you've read the comic book you'll probably say "well duh," but here goes:
Wolverine discovers his past up in Canada and has a scrape with Sabertooth, predictably being absent until the last minute because the other X-Men are helpless without him for some reason. Magneto breaks out. Introduce one or two "new" characters. Mutiny in Magneto's ranks would be probable, as Magneto has been in jail for some time. I'm betting on sentinels (large robots specifically designed to track down and capture mutants) as the further advancement of the the mutant vs. human plot.
Oh yeah. Third movie: time travel!
Eh, I've always been confused by the people who knowingly and willingly kill their bandwidth so some strangers on the net can download the same songs over and over again at hideous speeds. There are some weird people out there.