Turtle Beach will have to add support to Secure Audio Path to its sound card drivers. Without support for the Secure Audio Path, Turtle Beach won't be able to get Microsoft to sign its Win32 drivers.
If you get rid of your dial-up internet account ($20 per month) and your land-line
Doesn't the emergency call dispatch service (911 in the USA) have a harder time pinning down your location for calls from a mobile phone than for calls from a landline phone?
E-mail, which is still far and away the #1 reason most people go online, might as well have been designed for dial-up users.
Even when your mailbox gets a MB of spam e-mail (enlarge your penis, real estate scams, Klez viruses at 125-200 KB a piece, etc) per day that you must download before you can even filter?
With some home broadband Internet providers, you'd be lucky to have the service even be compatible with a platform other than Microsoft Windows on x86.
Windows95/ME: Upgrade
The operating system designed as an "upgrade" from Windows 95 (namely Windows 98 Second Edition) is no longer sold. The operating system designed as an "upgrade" from Windows ME (namely XP) won't run on many machines that were sold with WinME because their CPU is too slow, their RAM or HD is too small, or their hardware doesn't have Win2k/XP drivers.
Win98/NT/2K/XP: add $20/month for StupidOS tax
So you're asking $240 per year just for the privilege of running an operating system that supports the video, sound, and network cards that came bundled with the computer that I bought before you instituted the pricing scheme? I don't exactly understand what you mean by a "'Surf at your own risk' disclaimer".
The channel ID overlay can be drawn in a single frame (1/30th second).
In theory, it can. However, the low fill rate of the video architecture in the decoder boxes keeps the overlay from being quickly drawn in practice.
They also grab info like the show name, channel name, etc. from sideband data -- none of which is available on analog cable.
Not even on TV sets with Gemstar Guide Plus?
Or you could learn how to actually use new technology -- like menus.
Which, again, are slow because of the severe lack of fill rate on the overlays.
you bring up the menu and see what's on now, what's on soon
Unless your cable provider has set up the menus to show only 10 channels and 30 minutes per page. Waiting for the menu to switch pages becomes excruciatingly slow because of the fill rate problem.
Besides, you can't always tell by reading the menus which channels are showing men dressed in flowing robes (which I like) or women dressed in 1860s crinolines (which I also like) or which channels are showing T&A (which some Slashdot readers seem to like).
But why pay extra for [digital cable TV vs. the dish]?
For one thing, you apparently get a better repair contract. For another, you get shorter-term service contracts, which can be important if you're only home for summer vacation. For another, you get a discount on cable Internet access, which has a much better latency (important for web surfing and game playing) than satellite Internet access.
I can't stream paper, but I can stream POP3 e-mail. I can begin filtering messages by body text before they have all downloaded. Heck, sometimes I actually finish reading all the legit mail before the Klez shit finishes downloading.
One gigabyte, divided by 5 kilobytes per second (average effective downstream rate for "56K" dial-up given line noise and TCP overhead), equals 200,000 seconds, or just under 56 hours. At that rate, an online DVD store would have already shipped the package.
Many users of the World Wide Web do not have the money to purchase such equipment. They make do with their old Pentium 133 with 32 MB of RAM that runs Netscape 4.x. It would cost real money to upgrade their browser, and it's illegal for many people to earn money.
nine-tenths of them look at 4.01 Transitional, get validation under it, say "Hey, I've got standards-compliance!", and walk away
How does a web developer achieve both Strict standards compliance and Netscape 4.x compliance? Some people don't have the money to buy even the four-year-old computer hardware capable of running Mozilla, so they stick with Netscape 4.x, which runs at an acceptable speed on their hardware.
Because if you serve XHTML to IE 5.x or 6.x under the application/xhtml+xml content-type, IE will render it not as an XHTML page but in a form more similar to source code: an XML tree. Somebody told me that to get IE to render it as HTML, I have to use some sort of XSL stylesheet. Does anybody know of an XSL stylesheet that allows use of XHTML with IE in the normal manner?
Most of the 'clueless home users' I know (and I can think of half a dozen right now) only share what they download; they don't add new resource to the network.
When I was on WinMX, I shared some tracks ripped from the CDs I owned, as well as recordings of my own original performances. However, far fewer people downloaded my CD rips and original work than downloaded the music I had downloaded. Just because I share something doesn't mean that anybody will download it.
Besides, how is a new user supposed to obtain resources other than pop music (such as anime) in order to begin sharing them?
mpaa.com would be immediately switched to IIS and the guy responsible for using Linux/Apache would be out on his ass.
Sure, out on his ass with respect to the record labels and movie studios, but in an article on the editorial page, where he helps convict the studios in the court of public opinion.
I haven't checked netcraft to see what mpaa.com is actually running; this is just an example.
www.mpaa.org and www.riaa.org run IIS on Windows 2000, but as I mentioned previously, a majority of the actual labels run Apache or AOLserver.
Fair use is part of copyright law. The DMCA's circumvention ban is completely orthogonal to copyright law. According to the decision in the MPAA v. 2600 case, making a backup of a copyrighted DVD is fair use, but it's still banned because fair use is a defense only to copyright infringement, not to circumvention.
An NTSC frame, refreshed in two interlaced passes every 1001/30000 of a second, has 480 picture scanlines and 45 vertical blank scanlines. Thus, NTSC is called "480i" for "480 lines, interlaced".
Unfortunately, I won't be able to enjoy Kingdom Hearts because 1. the PS2 is still too expensive, and 2. I'm boycotting the instigators of the Bono Act.
What has Square (And almost every other producer of Not-Roleplaying Games) done all these years
They published Tobal and Ehrgeiz, two 3D fighting games with 60fps graphics (impressive on PS1) and the freedom of motion of a wrestling game (up moves away from screen, down moves toward screen).
Shooting someone in Quake 3 is really no different than shooting someone in Wolfenstein 3-D
Wolf3d, with sideways movement buttons overlayed with its turning buttons, didn't stress moving sideways to avoid fire. Wolf3d, with its single-plane level design, didn't stress taking strategic positions. Wolf3d, with its hundreds of drones and then a tank game design, didn't stress AI. Heck, Wolf3d didn't even have a deathmatch, and Quake III is ALL deathmatch.
Combine it all. Give me a world where I can command a fleet from my chair, or go out with a rifle and frag enemies of the Imperium.
The America's Army series does this. There's an RTS version and an FPS version.
You don't think Jack Valenti knows what webserver software the MPAA's running, do you?
But when the papers[1] print stories about the media companies' technological hypocrisy (using free software but wanting to ban it), then you can be sure Valenti will know.
[1] I specified newspapers rather than TV because the TV news networks are affiliated either with MPAA members or with Microsoft, the publisher of IIS. CBS, UPN = paramount; Fox News = fox pictures; ABC = disney; CNN = AOL(tw); NBC, MSNBC = microsoft
and dump the RAM storage and active memory to flash at power down.
So you're advocating some extremely aggressive caching. Flash memory isn't fast enough to take a full gigabyte write in an extremely short period of time when a machine suddenly loses power.
After a bit of Google searching, I found this: JFFS2, a journaling filesystem for flash memory and other non-volatile random-access memory devices with limited rewrites per sector. It has some "wear leveling" features.
Basically, they says to the effect that when a Palladium application is in memory, the OS will fail to allow non-Palladium applications to also be in memory.
That doesn't mean that they can't spawn a new virtual machine for each Palladium application. Microsoft doesn't have to implement exactly the system described in the patents. According to Microsoft's Palladium FAQ:
Third, unlike some antipiracy proposals endorsed by some content owners, no "Palladium" application can censor, monitor or disable another "Palladium" application -- or in fact any software running on a user's machine -- without the user's permission.
Applications that don't load Palladium.dll just won't be able to open any locked documents.
ARM ADS, dedicated MP3 chips, and bus power
on
New MP3 Portables
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Oh Apple, when will you do the right thing? The libraries for Ogg Vorbis decoding are released under the BSD license. They can be compiled via [either GCC or] ARM ADS and its free
GCC and the Tremor library (integer arithmetic Vorbis decoder) are free software, but ARM ADS software is hardly "free". It's proprietary and $6,000 per seat.
How hard is this for them? What I really think is the problem is that QuickTime and iTunes cannot deal with variable bit rate audio codecs, so playing them on Mac OS is a no-no.
Actually, the big problem is that the iPod player runs audio through a chip that takes MP3 audio on one pin and produces PCM audio on another. It's much harder to change hardware than software.
Oh, and USB2 connection? Sure you don't have to pay a buck to apple every time you sell a device, but the power has to be a separate plug.
Not necessarily. USB 2.0 devices can be bus-powered. Besides, you need batteries anyway for when the device is disconnected from the host computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Turtle Beach will have to add support to Secure Audio Path to its sound card drivers. Without support for the Secure Audio Path, Turtle Beach won't be able to get Microsoft to sign its Win32 drivers.
If you get rid of your dial-up internet account ($20 per month) and your land-line
Doesn't the emergency call dispatch service (911 in the USA) have a harder time pinning down your location for calls from a mobile phone than for calls from a landline phone?
Burning cell phone!
E-mail, which is still far and away the #1 reason most people go online, might as well have been designed for dial-up users.
Even when your mailbox gets a MB of spam e-mail (enlarge your penis, real estate scams, Klez viruses at 125-200 KB a piece, etc) per day that you must download before you can even filter?
Linux, *BSD, & Mac: $29.95/month unlimited
With some home broadband Internet providers, you'd be lucky to have the service even be compatible with a platform other than Microsoft Windows on x86.
Windows95/ME: Upgrade
The operating system designed as an "upgrade" from Windows 95 (namely Windows 98 Second Edition) is no longer sold. The operating system designed as an "upgrade" from Windows ME (namely XP) won't run on many machines that were sold with WinME because their CPU is too slow, their RAM or HD is too small, or their hardware doesn't have Win2k/XP drivers.
Win98/NT/2K/XP: add $20/month for StupidOS tax
So you're asking $240 per year just for the privilege of running an operating system that supports the video, sound, and network cards that came bundled with the computer that I bought before you instituted the pricing scheme? I don't exactly understand what you mean by a "'Surf at your own risk' disclaimer".
The channel ID overlay can be drawn in a single frame (1/30th second).
In theory, it can. However, the low fill rate of the video architecture in the decoder boxes keeps the overlay from being quickly drawn in practice.
They also grab info like the show name, channel name, etc. from sideband data -- none of which is available on analog cable.
Not even on TV sets with Gemstar Guide Plus?
Or you could learn how to actually use new technology -- like menus.
Which, again, are slow because of the severe lack of fill rate on the overlays.
you bring up the menu and see what's on now, what's on soon
Unless your cable provider has set up the menus to show only 10 channels and 30 minutes per page. Waiting for the menu to switch pages becomes excruciatingly slow because of the fill rate problem.
Besides, you can't always tell by reading the menus which channels are showing men dressed in flowing robes (which I like) or women dressed in 1860s crinolines (which I also like) or which channels are showing T&A (which some Slashdot readers seem to like).
But why pay extra for [digital cable TV vs. the dish]?
For one thing, you apparently get a better repair contract. For another, you get shorter-term service contracts, which can be important if you're only home for summer vacation. For another, you get a discount on cable Internet access, which has a much better latency (important for web surfing and game playing) than satellite Internet access.
He asked if he could get the Internet on floppies instead of a CD because he didn't have a CDROM drive.
Actually, the installer for Netscape 2.0 that came with my first ISP account was floppy-based.
What about streaming video?
Have you ever seen streaming slideshows on a 56K? Not everybody can afford broadband.
You can't stream the mail.
I can't stream paper, but I can stream POP3 e-mail. I can begin filtering messages by body text before they have all downloaded. Heck, sometimes I actually finish reading all the legit mail before the Klez shit finishes downloading.
1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection.
One gigabyte, divided by 5 kilobytes per second (average effective downstream rate for "56K" dial-up given line noise and TCP overhead), equals 200,000 seconds, or just under 56 hours. At that rate, an online DVD store would have already shipped the package.
CheapBytes: the fastest way for dial-up users to get an OS distro.
And delivery is only best-effort, you know
The United States Postal Service offers insurance for many items sent through it.
if you sniff their versions properly you can redirect them to a page that has links to upgrade their browsers.
According to the Mozilla 1.2a release notes, its system requirements include the following:
Many users of the World Wide Web do not have the money to purchase such equipment. They make do with their old Pentium 133 with 32 MB of RAM that runs Netscape 4.x. It would cost real money to upgrade their browser, and it's illegal for many people to earn money.
Search engines can look at the meta-data I provide. There must be four specifications for that at this point.
Google ignores <meta /> elements because of the rampant spamming associated with unscrupulous use of keywords in <meta /> elements.
nine-tenths of them look at 4.01 Transitional, get validation under it, say "Hey, I've got standards-compliance!", and walk away
How does a web developer achieve both Strict standards compliance and Netscape 4.x compliance? Some people don't have the money to buy even the four-year-old computer hardware capable of running Mozilla, so they stick with Netscape 4.x, which runs at an acceptable speed on their hardware.
why hide XHTML behind the text/html content-type?
Because if you serve XHTML to IE 5.x or 6.x under the application/xhtml+xml content-type, IE will render it not as an XHTML page but in a form more similar to source code: an XML tree. Somebody told me that to get IE to render it as HTML, I have to use some sort of XSL stylesheet. Does anybody know of an XSL stylesheet that allows use of XHTML with IE in the normal manner?
You're not giving away anything, aside from having your hardware switch packets, just like everything else.
What about giving your time for maintaining such hardware? And what about the cost of hardware upgrades when load increases?
Most of the 'clueless home users' I know (and I can think of half a dozen right now) only share what they download; they don't add new resource to the network.
When I was on WinMX, I shared some tracks ripped from the CDs I owned, as well as recordings of my own original performances. However, far fewer people downloaded my CD rips and original work than downloaded the music I had downloaded. Just because I share something doesn't mean that anybody will download it.
Besides, how is a new user supposed to obtain resources other than pop music (such as anime) in order to begin sharing them?
mpaa.com would be immediately switched to IIS and the guy responsible for using Linux/Apache would be out on his ass.
Sure, out on his ass with respect to the record labels and movie studios, but in an article on the editorial page, where he helps convict the studios in the court of public opinion.
I haven't checked netcraft to see what mpaa.com is actually running; this is just an example.
www.mpaa.org and www.riaa.org run IIS on Windows 2000, but as I mentioned previously, a majority of the actual labels run Apache or AOLserver.
timeshifting was found to be protected "fair use"
Fair use is part of copyright law. The DMCA's circumvention ban is completely orthogonal to copyright law. According to the decision in the MPAA v. 2600 case, making a backup of a copyrighted DVD is fair use, but it's still banned because fair use is a defense only to copyright infringement, not to circumvention.
An NTSC frame, refreshed in two interlaced passes every 1001/30000 of a second, has 480 picture scanlines and 45 vertical blank scanlines. Thus, NTSC is called "480i" for "480 lines, interlaced".
after playing Kingdom Hearts yesterday
Unfortunately, I won't be able to enjoy Kingdom Hearts because 1. the PS2 is still too expensive, and 2. I'm boycotting the instigators of the Bono Act.
What has Square (And almost every other producer of Not-Roleplaying Games) done all these years
They published Tobal and Ehrgeiz, two 3D fighting games with 60fps graphics (impressive on PS1) and the freedom of motion of a wrestling game (up moves away from screen, down moves toward screen).
Shooting someone in Quake 3 is really no different than shooting someone in Wolfenstein 3-D
Wolf3d, with sideways movement buttons overlayed with its turning buttons, didn't stress moving sideways to avoid fire. Wolf3d, with its single-plane level design, didn't stress taking strategic positions. Wolf3d, with its hundreds of drones and then a tank game design, didn't stress AI. Heck, Wolf3d didn't even have a deathmatch, and Quake III is ALL deathmatch.
Combine it all. Give me a world where I can command a fleet from my chair, or go out with a rifle and frag enemies of the Imperium.
The America's Army series does this. There's an RTS version and an FPS version.
You don't think Jack Valenti knows what webserver software the MPAA's running, do you?
But when the papers[1] print stories about the media companies' technological hypocrisy (using free software but wanting to ban it), then you can be sure Valenti will know.
[1] I specified newspapers rather than TV because the TV news networks are affiliated either with MPAA members or with Microsoft, the publisher of IIS. CBS, UPN = paramount; Fox News = fox pictures; ABC = disney; CNN = AOL(tw); NBC, MSNBC = microsoft
and dump the RAM storage and active memory to flash at power down.
So you're advocating some extremely aggressive caching. Flash memory isn't fast enough to take a full gigabyte write in an extremely short period of time when a machine suddenly loses power.
After a bit of Google searching, I found this: JFFS2, a journaling filesystem for flash memory and other non-volatile random-access memory devices with limited rewrites per sector. It has some "wear leveling" features.
Basically, they says to the effect that when a Palladium application is in memory, the OS will fail to allow non-Palladium applications to also be in memory.
That doesn't mean that they can't spawn a new virtual machine for each Palladium application. Microsoft doesn't have to implement exactly the system described in the patents. According to Microsoft's Palladium FAQ:
Applications that don't load Palladium.dll just won't be able to open any locked documents.
Oh Apple, when will you do the right thing? The libraries for Ogg Vorbis decoding are released under the BSD license. They can be compiled via [either GCC or] ARM ADS and its free
GCC and the Tremor library (integer arithmetic Vorbis decoder) are free software, but ARM ADS software is hardly "free". It's proprietary and $6,000 per seat.
How hard is this for them? What I really think is the problem is that QuickTime and iTunes cannot deal with variable bit rate audio codecs, so playing them on Mac OS is a no-no.
Actually, the big problem is that the iPod player runs audio through a chip that takes MP3 audio on one pin and produces PCM audio on another. It's much harder to change hardware than software.
Oh, and USB2 connection? Sure you don't have to pay a buck to apple every time you sell a device, but the power has to be a separate plug.
Not necessarily. USB 2.0 devices can be bus-powered. Besides, you need batteries anyway for when the device is disconnected from the host computer.