In 100 years from now, I went to a Broadway show and heard this announcement:
Ladies and gentlemen, in tonight's performance the part of f903af6e-981c-4f2a-af4d-80e4b0e894c4 will be played by 4c24be6b-d272-4c82-aaa3-d09ab52872f4. Enjoy the show, and we thank you for your support of the performing arts.
...is to write it in the whitespace on $100 bills. They're quite happy to accept the free flow of our money, but not the free flow of information. I'll hereby dub this IP over TD, or "IP over Trade Deficit". Working on the RFC now.
Let it be said here first: All set-top boxes should be required to have an "UNAMORPHIC" setting that permits the anamorphic video to be sent directly to the 4:3-only video output ports, including COMPOSITE and S-Video. This would allow higher-quality recordings to be made (and viewed) on sets which are forced to use those ports, like PVR software and video capture cards.
For example, using a Hauppauge PVR250 capture card, it connects to a STB (cable, satellite) via S-Video and uses an IR Blaster to change channels. Hi-def channels are automatically "letterboxed" by the STB before going down S-Video, which throws away 25% of the possible video information that will never be seen by the PVR250 for recording. Braindead.
If the STB would just send anamorphic video down the COMPOSITE or S-Video outputs, the capture card would get the info at full-resolution and I can force the proper aspect when converting or during playback later.
This would also have the side-effect of improving the world of people who are too dumb to understand how to hook up their fancy new TVs, since they would then be "stretching" the anamorphic video and it would wind up being displayed CORRECTLY on their 16:9 set.
There can't possibly already be legislation against such a technology. Yet.
When I first became aware of AACS, I read what I could of the spec and pondered whether it would be possible to produce and distribute a disc which deliberately uses the properties of NVM and the MKB/HRL specification to insert a bogus "maximum value" HRL which contains a do-nothing (or nothing useful) revocation list.
The net result of this is, once inserted, the disc guarantees that all future discs will play regardless of the player codes which have ever been, or will ever be, revoked. Since it has no concept of time except for the supposedly monotonically increasing version numbers of the HRL, it should be possible to max out the HRL value so no disc can ever update the player's revocation list.
I'd be suprised to find out that this is not possible.
No two ways about it, AT&T lex is buggy. This is partly because it was the first implementation, and partly because it was written by an undergraduate summer intern.
You've never met my mother-in-law
on
eSATA Connectors
·
· Score: 1
I'd love to introduce you to my mother-in-law. Over Christmas a year ago, she explained that she was having trouble getting her email since she switched to cable modem service from dial-up. Upon inspection, I found that she had conveniently inserted the USB cable into her DB9 serial port, which fit quite well if you're absolutely unaware of how it's supposed to work. The computer didn't have a USB port at all, or an Ethernet port, but that's what was supported by the cable modem.
Don't assume that all physical connectors being different guarantees that end-users won't outsmart them.
In a few years a Word document may seem like digital garbage but add another 400 years to that and it will be insight into today's society, no matter how trivial.
"pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma"
From A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
that nobody will use the full potential of their Shelby GT, and Chevrolet announces that nobody will every use the full potential of their Corvette. It's just very difficult to find a place where you can drive that fast with all the accessories turned on and the radio cranked up to 11, and have it make sense to do it all at the same time.
Now, I'm sure there were lots of games that got closer to red-line on old hardware (like an Atari 2600), but back in the day, I'm also sure that more people drove their Ford Model A's closer to maximum output, also.
I think this statement would better be phrased as: PlayStation 3 has lots of untapped potential.
For me, S.M.A.R.T. predicted--almost to the week--when a Maxtor drive would fail. It gave me two months' warning, and indicated a projected failure date. I added a new drive, re-purposed the failing drive as "spare" storage, then waited to see if the prediction was correct. Dead on.
S.M.A.R.T. cannot predict sudden catastrophic failure, but failures related to drives slowly "wearing out" over time are covered very well.
One thing I have not seen in this thread is a discussion of which HD manufacturers are making the "most reliable" drives lately. Maxtor, WD, Seagate, Hitachi, etc.?
...and should not be from a legal perspective. For example, there is no click-through agreement I must re-affirm each and every time I use my credit card, yet I am still bound by its terms of use agreement. That agreement also states that the agreement may be amended with fair warning, and continuing use of the credit card is a tacit agreement to any future updates to the terms of use.
Just because I don't automatically and unthinkingly click past some arbitrary GUI element does not free me from the responsibilities as a cardholder. The same is true for the terms of use for some computer network or workplace compute resource.
I believe they are getting hung up on the fact that some splash screen with a "dismiss" button is not a binding contract. No, but your terms of employment are. The problem here was the use of the EULA-like login/logoff message as an ersatz contract, instead of your employment agreement in general.
If you don't want workplace computers used for unquestionably non-work related activities, then treat that like a credit-card agreement. It sure works for my bank. They can yank my card if I use it to acquire illegal items and "fire" me.
All I can say is thank goodness the first person on the moon wasn't put there by a commercial entity. I'm sure the first words would have been something like, "That's one small step for a man, but a Taco Bell Gordito(tm) is much bigger!"
Either that, or some other government making a political sound bite that promotes a specific ideology or theology instead of something referencing the accomplishments of mankind in general, would have been equally disturbing.
I'm really proud that the folks at NASA took time to plan what would be said, realizing that it would be a historic moment.
At some point, these "rich application frameworks" will get to the point where we've got a complete re-implementation of the X protocol over HTML. What a day.
IIRC, according to the Jargon File, Windows has reached critical mass.
critical mass: n. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus epsilon bugs. (This malady has many causes: creeping featurism, ports to too many disparate environments, poor initial design, etc.) When software achieves critical mass, it can never be fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten.
Vista is their re-write, which is an admission of this situation.
Today's technologies fail us in the Hot Wheels and Matchbox super-fun-playtime department.
It's hard to stack up a bunch of Wikipedias to make a good starting point for a track. Old School Encyclopedias worked much better in that regard.
Really, though, what I'm unable to find is somewhere to buy a spool of hotwheels/matchbox track by the foot, and the plastic connectors that join the ends together. I know we used to have gobs of 2-/3-foot sections, and a box of plastic connectors. I don't want the pre-fab self-contained kits with a limited size and possibilities. I want tracks that span several rooms of the house.
You can't get that in Wal-Mart or We-B-Toys, as far as I know.
How would you feel if, when paging through your favorite magazine/newspaper/periodical, you were forced to pause for 5 seconds at each advertisement, and it wouldn't let you change pages or skip directly to the article you desired? What would you think if the publishers were of the opinion that you were "stealing" content if you never glanced at any print ads while reading their content?
Don't be tricked into thinking ABC broadcasts shows to make money. ABC sells the time of a captive audience (you) to advertisers to make money. Anything they make from DVD sales or in syndication is just gravy on top. That is their business model, and DVRs threaten it, since they no longer can prove that anyone bothers to watch the ads on their DVRs.
It may be illegal to use this "additional information" about prospective employees, since the types of information you would find out from social network sites (and personal web pages) have a high probability of crossing the line into areas that are illegal to inquire about during an interview:
* Race
* Religion
* Marital/family/sexual status
* Age
* Sexual preference
If HR departments, or hiring managers, deny an applicant based on looking at his/her info on some random internet page, and that can be proven to be the cause of denial, then their decision could be subject to litigation over protected status.
Whether a candidate is "some chatty fool" should be determined during the interview process, if that matters to you. It should not be divined from googling them after they've left your office.
Thanks for the replies, but I have a specific, technical question that can only be answered by another user of the SA3250HD STB. I'm well aware that most Motorola STB's will turn analog TV signals into MPEG-2 Transport Streams over 1394, but I'm not sure what the SA3250HD does.
The relevant links for legaleze of HDTV requirements related to 1394 can be found here:
The relevant text only mentions that high-def set-top boxes must include a "functional" 1394 interface, but not whether non-digital channels must also be accessible via that interface.
Other links indicate that the SA3250HD does not convert analog channels to MPEG2-TS for firewire:
So, the parent poster, who claims to use (or have used) MythTV via 1394 on a SA3250HD STB, would be in the best position to answer my question. Speculation will not help me further.
I've been researching this STB specifically in the last week, and have a technical question for you:
Will the SA3250HD provide, via 1394, the Analog cable channels that are not sent digitally to it, or do you only get the "clear QAM" (pure digital, non-encrypted) channels via the 1394 connector?
For instance, my cable provider only offers channels like Comedy Central and Sci-Fi via Analog, and the STB makes them available (I know for sure) on its DVI-HDCP port. I was wondering whether those same channels would be available also via the 1394 connection on the SA3250HD.
A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money.
--Everett Dirksen
Let's not lose sight of the fact that trillion-dollar budgets are made up of millions here and millions there. What seems perfectly reasonable ("just a drop in the bucket") to some seems like a foolish waste of money to others.
I'm all in favor of NASA, space research, pure science, etc. However, when we start thinking of 5 million dollars as nothing to worry about, we've already lost our bigger budgetary battle.
In personal finance, most people don't think about 5 dollars here and 5 dollars there, especially when they come in the shape of venti lattes. However, if one were to think hard about what else could have been done with each of those 5 dollars, and make more reasonable and fiscally-responsible decisions (make your own coffee, for instance), you could probably have done something more useful, or interesting, for that $1500+ you may have spent on coffee in a year.
However, don't take this as a rant against spending those 5 million on research. Just don't get careless of how you abstract the importance of 5 million dollars in general. After all, it's not only money, it's also Money.
Slashdot Mirror
...is to write it in the whitespace on $100 bills. They're quite happy to accept the free flow of our money, but not the free flow of information. I'll hereby dub this IP over TD, or "IP over Trade Deficit". Working on the RFC now.
Let it be said here first: All set-top boxes should be required to have an "UNAMORPHIC" setting that permits the anamorphic video to be sent directly to the 4:3-only video output ports, including COMPOSITE and S-Video. This would allow higher-quality recordings to be made (and viewed) on sets which are forced to use those ports, like PVR software and video capture cards.
For example, using a Hauppauge PVR250 capture card, it connects to a STB (cable, satellite) via S-Video and uses an IR Blaster to change channels. Hi-def channels are automatically "letterboxed" by the STB before going down S-Video, which throws away 25% of the possible video information that will never be seen by the PVR250 for recording. Braindead.
If the STB would just send anamorphic video down the COMPOSITE or S-Video outputs, the capture card would get the info at full-resolution and I can force the proper aspect when converting or during playback later.
This would also have the side-effect of improving the world of people who are too dumb to understand how to hook up their fancy new TVs, since they would then be "stretching" the anamorphic video and it would wind up being displayed CORRECTLY on their 16:9 set.
There can't possibly already be legislation against such a technology. Yet.
When I first became aware of AACS, I read what I could of the spec and pondered whether it would be possible to produce and distribute a disc which deliberately uses the properties of NVM and the MKB/HRL specification to insert a bogus "maximum value" HRL which contains a do-nothing (or nothing useful) revocation list.
The net result of this is, once inserted, the disc guarantees that all future discs will play regardless of the player codes which have ever been, or will ever be, revoked. Since it has no concept of time except for the supposedly monotonically increasing version numbers of the HRL, it should be possible to max out the HRL value so no disc can ever update the player's revocation list.
I'd be suprised to find out that this is not possible.
I'd love to introduce you to my mother-in-law. Over Christmas a year ago, she explained that she was having trouble getting her email since she switched to cable modem service from dial-up. Upon inspection, I found that she had conveniently inserted the USB cable into her DB9 serial port, which fit quite well if you're absolutely unaware of how it's supposed to work. The computer didn't have a USB port at all, or an Ethernet port, but that's what was supported by the cable modem.
Don't assume that all physical connectors being different guarantees that end-users won't outsmart them.
In a few years a Word document may seem like digital garbage but add another 400 years to that and it will be insight into today's society, no matter how trivial.
"pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma"
From A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Motorola hasn't made ANY chips since 2004 when they spun off their semiconductor products group and it became Freescale Semiconductor.
Only one poster (poopdeville) in this whole thread seems to have gotten this correct.
If you're talking about chips, and you think of Motorola, you should really be thinking of Freescale now.
that nobody will use the full potential of their Shelby GT, and Chevrolet announces that nobody will every use the full potential of their Corvette. It's just very difficult to find a place where you can drive that fast with all the accessories turned on and the radio cranked up to 11, and have it make sense to do it all at the same time.
Now, I'm sure there were lots of games that got closer to red-line on old hardware (like an Atari 2600), but back in the day, I'm also sure that more people drove their Ford Model A's closer to maximum output, also.
I think this statement would better be phrased as: PlayStation 3 has lots of untapped potential.
For me, S.M.A.R.T. predicted--almost to the week--when a Maxtor drive would fail. It gave me two months' warning, and indicated a projected failure date. I added a new drive, re-purposed the failing drive as "spare" storage, then waited to see if the prediction was correct. Dead on.
S.M.A.R.T. cannot predict sudden catastrophic failure, but failures related to drives slowly "wearing out" over time are covered very well.
One thing I have not seen in this thread is a discussion of which HD manufacturers are making the "most reliable" drives lately. Maxtor, WD, Seagate, Hitachi, etc.?
at least give the attribution:
Guaranteed Effective All-Occasion Non-Slanderous Political Smear Speech
By Bill Garvin
MAD #139, December 1970
...and should not be from a legal perspective. For example, there is no click-through agreement I must re-affirm each and every time I use my credit card, yet I am still bound by its terms of use agreement. That agreement also states that the agreement may be amended with fair warning, and continuing use of the credit card is a tacit agreement to any future updates to the terms of use.
Just because I don't automatically and unthinkingly click past some arbitrary GUI element does not free me from the responsibilities as a cardholder. The same is true for the terms of use for some computer network or workplace compute resource.
I believe they are getting hung up on the fact that some splash screen with a "dismiss" button is not a binding contract. No, but your terms of employment are. The problem here was the use of the EULA-like login/logoff message as an ersatz contract, instead of your employment agreement in general.
If you don't want workplace computers used for unquestionably non-work related activities, then treat that like a credit-card agreement. It sure works for my bank.
They can yank my card if I use it to acquire illegal items and "fire" me.
Read this sentence to confirm the fact that you want to visit goatse.cx.
Oops. Too late. Hence, the click.
All I can say is thank goodness the first person on the moon wasn't put there by a commercial entity. I'm sure the first words would have been something like, "That's one small step for a man, but a Taco Bell Gordito(tm) is much bigger!"
Either that, or some other government making a political sound bite that promotes a specific ideology or theology instead of something referencing the accomplishments of mankind in general, would have been equally disturbing.
I'm really proud that the folks at NASA took time to plan what would be said, realizing that it would be a historic moment.
At some point, these "rich application frameworks" will get to the point where we've got a complete re-implementation of the X protocol over HTML. What a day.
Geesh, why does no one link to the original USENIX paper on DTrace:
Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems
Quite a fascinating read, actually.
Dear God, I hope not. If so, you could be arrested in the "real world" just for printing more Monopoly money.
This is the most idiotic thing I've heard about in a long time.
IIRC, according to the Jargon File, Windows has reached critical mass.
critical mass: n. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus epsilon bugs. (This malady has many causes: creeping featurism, ports to too many disparate environments, poor initial design, etc.) When software achieves critical mass, it can never be fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten.
Vista is their re-write, which is an admission of this situation.
Today's technologies fail us in the Hot Wheels and Matchbox super-fun-playtime department.
It's hard to stack up a bunch of Wikipedias to make a good starting point for a track. Old School Encyclopedias worked much better in that regard.
Really, though, what I'm unable to find is somewhere to buy a spool of hotwheels/matchbox track by the foot, and the plastic connectors that join the ends together. I know we used to have gobs of 2-/3-foot sections, and a box of plastic connectors. I don't want the pre-fab self-contained kits with a limited size and possibilities. I want tracks that span several rooms of the house.
You can't get that in Wal-Mart or We-B-Toys, as far as I know.
How would you feel if, when paging through your favorite magazine/newspaper/periodical, you were forced to pause for 5 seconds at each advertisement, and it wouldn't let you change pages or skip directly to the article you desired? What would you think if the publishers were of the opinion that you were "stealing" content if you never glanced at any print ads while reading their content?
Don't be tricked into thinking ABC broadcasts shows to make money. ABC sells the time of a captive audience (you) to advertisers to make money. Anything they make from DVD sales or in syndication is just gravy on top. That is their business model, and DVRs threaten it, since they no longer can prove that anyone bothers to watch the ads on their DVRs.
It is a "pocket Universe" on the 'net, that draws in all the clueless.
What we may have here is the beginnings of our own "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B", or at least an early passenger manifest.
It may be illegal to use this "additional information" about prospective employees, since the types of information you would find out from social network sites (and personal web pages) have a high probability of crossing the line into areas that are illegal to inquire about during an interview:
* Race
* Religion
* Marital/family/sexual status
* Age
* Sexual preference
If HR departments, or hiring managers, deny an applicant based on looking at his/her info on some random internet page, and that can be proven to be the cause of denial, then their decision could be subject to litigation over protected status.
Whether a candidate is "some chatty fool" should be determined during the interview process, if that matters to you. It should not be divined from googling them after they've left your office.
Thanks for the replies, but I have a specific, technical question that can only be answered by another user of the SA3250HD STB. I'm well aware that most Motorola STB's will turn analog TV signals into MPEG-2 Transport Streams over 1394, but I'm not sure what the SA3250HD does.
1 500/edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2004/octqtr/pdf/47c fr76.640.pdf
e .htm
The relevant links for legaleze of HDTV requirements related to 1394 can be found here:
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/12feb2004
The relevant text only mentions that high-def set-top boxes must include a "functional" 1394 interface, but not whether non-digital channels must also be accessible via that interface.
Other links indicate that the SA3250HD does not convert analog channels to MPEG2-TS for firewire:
http://home.comcast.net/~timmmoore/firewire/readm
So, the parent poster, who claims to use (or have used) MythTV via 1394 on a SA3250HD STB, would be in the best position to answer my question. Speculation will not help me further.
I've been researching this STB specifically in the last week, and have a technical question for you:
Will the SA3250HD provide, via 1394, the Analog cable channels that are not sent digitally to it, or do you only get the "clear QAM" (pure digital, non-encrypted) channels via the 1394 connector?
For instance, my cable provider only offers channels like Comedy Central and Sci-Fi via Analog, and the STB makes them available (I know for sure) on its DVI-HDCP port. I was wondering whether those same channels would be available also via the 1394 connection on the SA3250HD.
A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money.
--Everett Dirksen
Let's not lose sight of the fact that trillion-dollar budgets are made up of millions here and millions there. What seems perfectly reasonable ("just a drop in the bucket") to some seems like a foolish waste of money to others.
I'm all in favor of NASA, space research, pure science, etc. However, when we start thinking of 5 million dollars as nothing to worry about, we've already lost our bigger budgetary battle.
In personal finance, most people don't think about 5 dollars here and 5 dollars there, especially when they come in the shape of venti lattes. However, if one were to think hard about what else could have been done with each of those 5 dollars, and make more reasonable and fiscally-responsible decisions (make your own coffee, for instance), you could probably have done something more useful, or interesting, for that $1500+ you may have spent on coffee in a year.
However, don't take this as a rant against spending those 5 million on research. Just don't get careless of how you abstract the importance of 5 million dollars in general. After all, it's not only money, it's also Money.