The only way that they can prevent copying is if they were to replace every TV in the world with TVs that can decode an encrypted signal *after* it enters the TV.
The Federal Communications Commission (US analog to Canada's CRTC) has mandated that TV stations go digital by January 1, 2006, when the FCC will terminate television stations' analog spectrum licenses.
Could've been a libc mismatch with my Debian-unstable system, but [KaZaA for Linux] wouldn't accept user input after starting up and logging in.
That might be the whole point: if I remember correctly, you start a client daemon (with &), and then you use other apps to send commands to that daemon and interact with the network. (Normally, a GUI wrapper would handle that for you.)
Without the experience I had with 6502 assembly language on the Apple II trying to get a gambling game suite called "Place Your Bets" to respond to keypresses and draw graphics faster than Applesoft Molasses Basic, I never would have had the knowledge of the 6502 processor necessary for NES development.
That's funny... the last computer I owned that I didn't write a Tetris clone for was an Apple II.
From their legal page, it seems that their encoding software apparently uses LAME. Isn't that kind of sad?
Thomson Multimedia (parent company of RCA and GE electronics division) controls patents on MP3 technology and charges a royalty of 2 percent of revenue on electronic music distribution. Thomson must be making a wad of dough on this deal.
In other words, we're legally within our rights to be able to make backups. If the technology prevents that, then they're taking away our legal rights without due process, which is illegal.
The common law and statutory law traditions on which United States law is built holds that a more recent act of Congress can supersede older law. In this case, the part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act intended to implement the WIPO treaty effectively repealed part of the Audio Home Recording Act in cases where such otherwise permitted copying would require circumvention of an effective access control measure.
Call me paranoid, but I won't run software that comes from the music industry on my computer.
So, in other words, you won't run Winamp or Mozilla. Winamp is made by Nullsoft, a division of AOL Time Warner Inc. Mozilla is made by the Mozilla Organization, with the bulk of the code contributed by Netscape Communications, a division of AOL Time Warner Inc. Warner Bros. Records is a label of AOL Time Warner Inc.
This is why I copy all my CDs (legally) to my hard drive in MP3
Which program do you use to encode them? Has the publisher of the program paid the Thomson royalties for use of MP3 technology? This is why I copy all my CDs (legally) to my hard drive in Ogg format.
and use WinAmp across the board
It's spelled Winamp (small a), and the "Win" has nothing to do with the name of any Microsoft operating system product, just as the name "Windows" has nothing to do with DOS.
A few months ago they started pushing their Pay Upgrade more and more. Then they started slicing off quota space (down to 2.5 now)
Hotmail has ALWAYS had a 2.0 megabyte quota for the last two and a half years I've been on the system. If you always move all incoming messages to a local folder (trivial with Outlook Express) every time you log on, you will never run into the quota unless several people "send you this file in order to have your advice."
In fact just today I got an email from them informing me that I must now login once every 30 days or my account will lose all emails and contact lists.
Well, I log in nearly every day through Outlook Express's Hotmail support.
Unless I opt for the $19.95 Paid Upgrade of course...
How is Apache HTTP Server not a "server on Windows"? Since around 1.3.12, Apache has worked fine on Win32 systems, even Win9x systems. Many people I know use it on their workstations for file-sharing and personal web pages. Of course, you shouldn't be running a Microsoft OS on a production server, but sometimes IE and Mozilla react slightly differently when retrieving pages from http://localhost than from file:///C/web (for example, you can use SSI and PHP), and in any case, you often don't want to be FTP'ing your files around all the time between the development box and the test server, or you can't afford a dedicated test server for the content creators.
With 8-Track there was nothing specifically stopping me from making an archival copy in any format I wanted. With copy protected CD's it has specific mechanisms to prevent me from making copies in a prefered medium for my own use.
Unless the new copy protected discs (that is, discs produced after Compact Disc Digital Audio has been declared obsolete) require encryption all the way to the speaker cone, the players will provide a line-level analog output on either an RCA, 1/4", or 1/8" plug. You can record through analog to a CD recorder, to a computer, to a cassette deck, or even to an 8-track deck. No 8-track deck recognizes SDMI watermarks.
Unlike motion picture audio, pop music is typically listened to in a noisy environment, and you won't lose too much from one generation of D/A/D conversion.
If it wasn't for domain names email addresses might be as complicated as a phone number, and who can remember those.
Phone number? You can tell your clients to "look in the white pages" or "look in the yellow pages under widgets." That's roughly equivalent to "type our name into Google," especially if your business is in Open Directory.
because I wanted to play DiVX and games, both of which demand more than a K6-266
I accept that a 266 MHz K6 processor probably doesn't have enough oomph for real-time MPEG-4 decoding, but games should work. Heck, Tetris and Tunneler run even on an 8 MHz 286, and a Tetris clone that uses mode 7 is (barely) playable on a 25 MHz 486.
More recent first-person shooters, on the other hand...
I find AOL/TW less scary than MS, at least on a personal level.
At least Microsoft didn't spend millions lobbying both political parties to pass the Bono Act and DMCA like AOL(tw) did back when it was just Time Warner.
If I want to avoid their media conglomeration entirely, I can. And if I do, it doesn't affect me.
It does in the United States, where you can go to jail merely for watching a DVD.
Microsoft, on the other hand, by trying to extend its monopolies
I wasn't claiming that the N64 was the first to have shoulder buttons, I was saying that it was the first to have a button that worked like a trigger (like the Dreamcast, GameCube, and XBox).
What's the difference between a "shoulder button" and a "button that works like a trigger"? I was stating that N64'z Z button is a shoulder button.
What is more likely is that Microsoft is trying to divide the pie into two segments and PC types: business and home.
The worry here is that "business" systems (that is, real PCs) will be available only to corporations and cost $5,000 for the base model, something that very few free software developers can afford.
Also, a closed system can be made more stable
Which will prompt Sun, HPaq, etc. to sell "integrated" (i.e. closed) business "solutions" instead of relatively open workstations and servers. Do you know of any large market (money-wise) for open systems?
Also, as far as the analog shoulder buttons go, yes, the DC had those first, but but the GameCube's are so much more comfortable (besides, the N64 was the first to use a trigger
Nope, Super NES was the first. In the right-side playing position (left hand on center arm, right hand on right arm, which most games used), the N64's Z trigger corresponds to the Super NES's L trigger.
However, [a portable system] isn't competition for home systems.
If you only have one TV and multiple children, it is. The kids will fight over who gets to play on the TV and who has to sit out and play on the GBA.
I won't grant that the Gamecube controller is a rip-off of the Playstation's controller. To me it is a natural evolution.
Granted.
with the added bonus of the D-pad and Analog both being usable with an easy switch.
This is going to make Tetris Worlds hellish. It'll be quite difficult to make the pieces do what you want because the digital pad is so far away from the palm of the hand that the thumb must be twisted from the normal 45-degree orientation to reach the pad. You may get similar problems to what happens when trying to play Tetris with a SideWinder USB joypad (SWPNP or SW GamePad Pro), such that it's next to impossible to push straight down without also pushing to the side.
The button layout on the right is the SNES layout reoriented around the reality of a primary button (A), secondary button (B) and optional extra buttons (X, Y).
Two problems: 1. It's confusing for Super NES veterans, who associate the primary button with the letter B and the upward direction with the letter X and see the Cube's buttons as rotated 90 degrees clockwise, and 2. it's nearly impossible to press B and Y with one thumb on the Cube's controller.
The SNES had four equal buttons
According to nintendo developer guidelines (which have been partially leaked over the years), the Super NES had two main buttons (A B) and two secondary buttons (Y X).
However, the hardware interface treated B and Y as primary and A and X as secondary. The interface was based on the NES Four Score interface, which concatenated the data of players 1 and 3 (each in A B Sel St Up Dn Lt Rt order) onto player 1's port and players 2 and 4 onto player 2's port. Super NES, on the other hand, uses B Y Sel St Up Dn Lt Rt A X L R 0 0 0 0 order, where the 0's apparently have something to do with mouse quadrature (the mouse buttons are sent on A and X; try plugging a mouse into port 2 and using the pad test in kirby's avalanche).
but they were rarely uses as such.
Several Super NES games used the buttons as a second directional pad, such as Smash TV, where B fired south, A+X fired northeast, etc. Many PlayStation games (such as Forsaken) also came configured this way. This was made explicit in the design of the Virtual Boy and Nintendo 64 controllers.
The C-buttons had the advantage of letting the N64 ACT like a 6-button controller
And the Wishtech Adaptoid (an N64 to USB/HID adapter) even returns button information to Windows as if it were a 6-button.
(for things like Street Fighter).
Or in real-time tactical sims such as Starcraft 64.
Personally, I like this movement for several reasons... for the consumer, the PC-ness of computers will begin to disappear and become transparent
Yes, but what if Microsoft releases a closed system that developers have to pay big bucks to get into? (They already have: XBox.) Say goodbye to free software if PCs begin to head in that direction.
If it is running a web browsing feature, chances are that Microsoft will want to run Internet Explorer on it. If so, will we be seeing the same security holes of the console that we see on the PC?
This might be how some reverse engineer cracks a future version of the XBox and runs its own code on the system, opening the floodgates to independent software development. Microsoft does not want this to happen. Ever.
Look at the 3 consoles. PS2 wins if you want a quantity of games, period.
Four.
Nintendo currently sells two consoles: the GameCube, and the 32-bit Game Boy Advance. (Yes, the GBA is a console. It has twice the power of Super NES, and a third party makes a TV adapter.) The GBA can play over a thousand official games, including games designed for Game Boy and Game Boy Color. (Are there more Game Boy games or more PS1 games?) That doesn't even count the demos and mini-games that any C programmer can develop and run on the system with a flash card or $50 link cable.
Gamecube has an amazing controller
I agree, but a fellow has to admit that it's a copy of PlayStation's with the L1 button removed, the L2 and R2 buttons made analog (like Dreamcast), and the left pad and stick interchanged.
Intel only looks good in integer math... games don't do integer math
Yes, 3D games are mostly floating-point, but 2D games (such as ports of some arcade fighting games) use integer math, and game AI uses heavy integer math.
Microsoft needs to bundle: a mediocre DVD player, a mediocre video game player
Microsoft currently sells this for $330 (XBox + DVD dongle).
a mediocre MP3 jukebox
Well within the XBox's capability, but Microsoft would rather use the WMA format than what some journalists have termed "Music Piracy 3".
a mediocre PVR (VCR Replacement)
So you're proposing an XBox + Ultimate TV combo deck. It'll be a while before Microsoft can get costs down to put the price below $300.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way that they can prevent copying is if they were to replace every TV in the world with TVs that can decode an encrypted signal *after* it enters the TV.
The Federal Communications Commission (US analog to Canada's CRTC) has mandated that TV stations go digital by January 1, 2006, when the FCC will terminate television stations' analog spectrum licenses.
Updated!
Could've been a libc mismatch with my Debian-unstable system, but [KaZaA for Linux] wouldn't accept user input after starting up and logging in.
That might be the whole point: if I remember correctly, you start a client daemon (with &), and then you use other apps to send commands to that daemon and interact with the network. (Normally, a GUI wrapper would handle that for you.)
Without the experience I had with 6502 assembly language on the Apple II trying to get a gambling game suite called "Place Your Bets" to respond to keypresses and draw graphics faster than Applesoft Molasses Basic, I never would have had the knowledge of the 6502 processor necessary for NES development.
That's funny... the last computer I owned that I didn't write a Tetris clone for was an Apple II.
From their legal page, it seems that their encoding software apparently uses LAME. Isn't that kind of sad?
Thomson Multimedia (parent company of RCA and GE electronics division) controls patents on MP3 technology and charges a royalty of 2 percent of revenue on electronic music distribution. Thomson must be making a wad of dough on this deal.
Did you sign the CD?
Can signing the charge slip can be interpreted as signing the goods?
In other words, we're legally within our rights to be able to make backups. If the technology prevents that, then they're taking away our legal rights without due process, which is illegal.
The common law and statutory law traditions on which United States law is built holds that a more recent act of Congress can supersede older law. In this case, the part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act intended to implement the WIPO treaty effectively repealed part of the Audio Home Recording Act in cases where such otherwise permitted copying would require circumvention of an effective access control measure.
Call me paranoid, but I won't run software that comes from the music industry on my computer.
So, in other words, you won't run Winamp or Mozilla. Winamp is made by Nullsoft, a division of AOL Time Warner Inc. Mozilla is made by the Mozilla Organization, with the bulk of the code contributed by Netscape Communications, a division of AOL Time Warner Inc. Warner Bros. Records is a label of AOL Time Warner Inc.
This is why I copy all my CDs (legally) to my hard drive in MP3
Which program do you use to encode them? Has the publisher of the program paid the Thomson royalties for use of MP3 technology? This is why I copy all my CDs (legally) to my hard drive in Ogg format.
and use WinAmp across the board
It's spelled Winamp (small a), and the "Win" has nothing to do with the name of any Microsoft operating system product, just as the name "Windows" has nothing to do with DOS.
A few months ago they started pushing their Pay Upgrade more and more. Then they started slicing off quota space (down to 2.5 now)
Hotmail has ALWAYS had a 2.0 megabyte quota for the last two and a half years I've been on the system. If you always move all incoming messages to a local folder (trivial with Outlook Express) every time you log on, you will never run into the quota unless several people "send you this file in order to have your advice."
In fact just today I got an email from them informing me that I must now login once every 30 days or my account will lose all emails and contact lists.
Well, I log in nearly every day through Outlook Express's Hotmail support.
Unless I opt for the $19.95 Paid Upgrade of course...
Which also includes MSN Communities web hosting.
He said servers on Windows and he was right.
How is Apache HTTP Server not a "server on Windows"? Since around 1.3.12, Apache has worked fine on Win32 systems, even Win9x systems. Many people I know use it on their workstations for file-sharing and personal web pages. Of course, you shouldn't be running a Microsoft OS on a production server, but sometimes IE and Mozilla react slightly differently when retrieving pages from http://localhost than from file:///C/web (for example, you can use SSI and PHP), and in any case, you often don't want to be FTP'ing your files around all the time between the development box and the test server, or you can't afford a dedicated test server for the content creators.
With 8-Track there was nothing specifically stopping me from making an archival copy in any format I wanted. With copy protected CD's it has specific mechanisms to prevent me from making copies in a prefered medium for my own use.
Unless the new copy protected discs (that is, discs produced after Compact Disc Digital Audio has been declared obsolete) require encryption all the way to the speaker cone, the players will provide a line-level analog output on either an RCA, 1/4", or 1/8" plug. You can record through analog to a CD recorder, to a computer, to a cassette deck, or even to an 8-track deck. No 8-track deck recognizes SDMI watermarks.
Unlike motion picture audio, pop music is typically listened to in a noisy environment, and you won't lose too much from one generation of D/A/D conversion.
If it wasn't for domain names email addresses might be as complicated as a phone number, and who can remember those.
Phone number? You can tell your clients to "look in the white pages" or "look in the yellow pages under widgets." That's roughly equivalent to "type our name into Google," especially if your business is in Open Directory.
Bob_Smith@thecompany.com is easy to remember, true. So is Bob_Smith@mail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, ect.
But many customers won't take you seriously if you're running your business's e-mail off a free yahoo or hotmail account.
because I wanted to play DiVX and games, both of which demand more than a K6-266
I accept that a 266 MHz K6 processor probably doesn't have enough oomph for real-time MPEG-4 decoding, but games should work. Heck, Tetris and Tunneler run even on an 8 MHz 286, and a Tetris clone that uses mode 7 is (barely) playable on a 25 MHz 486.
More recent first-person shooters, on the other hand...
I recall someone actually studied "toon-town" physics
Other than the widely circulated Cartoon Laws of Physics from a 1994 IEEE journal, got any links?
I find AOL/TW less scary than MS, at least on a personal level.
At least Microsoft didn't spend millions lobbying both political parties to pass the Bono Act and DMCA like AOL(tw) did back when it was just Time Warner.
If I want to avoid their media conglomeration entirely, I can. And if I do, it doesn't affect me.
It does in the United States, where you can go to jail merely for watching a DVD.
Microsoft, on the other hand, by trying to extend its monopolies
Except AOL(tw) doesn't try; it succeeds in extending its monopolies.
Updated!
Why not simply have the BIOS itself throw up the logo
Then they wouldn't be able to scare publishers into becoming licensed.
They'll give a million dollars to any DB2, WebLogic or SQL Server user
Isn't Microsoft SQL Server a Windows-based database server based on Sybase?
all your database are belong to usI wasn't claiming that the N64 was the first to have shoulder buttons, I was saying that it was the first to have a button that worked like a trigger (like the Dreamcast, GameCube, and XBox).
What's the difference between a "shoulder button" and a "button that works like a trigger"? I was stating that N64'z Z button is a shoulder button.
What is more likely is that Microsoft is trying to divide the pie into two segments and PC types: business and home.
The worry here is that "business" systems (that is, real PCs) will be available only to corporations and cost $5,000 for the base model, something that very few free software developers can afford.
Also, a closed system can be made more stable
Which will prompt Sun, HPaq, etc. to sell "integrated" (i.e. closed) business "solutions" instead of relatively open workstations and servers. Do you know of any large market (money-wise) for open systems?
Also, as far as the analog shoulder buttons go, yes, the DC had those first, but but the GameCube's are so much more comfortable (besides, the N64 was the first to use a trigger
Nope, Super NES was the first. In the right-side playing position (left hand on center arm, right hand on right arm, which most games used), the N64's Z trigger corresponds to the Super NES's L trigger.
but I'm not sure if it was analog).
It was digital.
However, [a portable system] isn't competition for home systems.
If you only have one TV and multiple children, it is. The kids will fight over who gets to play on the TV and who has to sit out and play on the GBA.
I won't grant that the Gamecube controller is a rip-off of the Playstation's controller. To me it is a natural evolution.
Granted.
with the added bonus of the D-pad and Analog both being usable with an easy switch.
This is going to make Tetris Worlds hellish. It'll be quite difficult to make the pieces do what you want because the digital pad is so far away from the palm of the hand that the thumb must be twisted from the normal 45-degree orientation to reach the pad. You may get similar problems to what happens when trying to play Tetris with a SideWinder USB joypad (SWPNP or SW GamePad Pro), such that it's next to impossible to push straight down without also pushing to the side.
The button layout on the right is the SNES layout reoriented around the reality of a primary button (A), secondary button (B) and optional extra buttons (X, Y).
Two problems: 1. It's confusing for Super NES veterans, who associate the primary button with the letter B and the upward direction with the letter X and see the Cube's buttons as rotated 90 degrees clockwise, and 2. it's nearly impossible to press B and Y with one thumb on the Cube's controller.
The SNES had four equal buttons
According to nintendo developer guidelines (which have been partially leaked over the years), the Super NES had two main buttons (A B) and two secondary buttons (Y X).
However, the hardware interface treated B and Y as primary and A and X as secondary. The interface was based on the NES Four Score interface, which concatenated the data of players 1 and 3 (each in A B Sel St Up Dn Lt Rt order) onto player 1's port and players 2 and 4 onto player 2's port. Super NES, on the other hand, uses B Y Sel St Up Dn Lt Rt A X L R 0 0 0 0 order, where the 0's apparently have something to do with mouse quadrature (the mouse buttons are sent on A and X; try plugging a mouse into port 2 and using the pad test in kirby's avalanche).
but they were rarely uses as such.
Several Super NES games used the buttons as a second directional pad, such as Smash TV, where B fired south, A+X fired northeast, etc. Many PlayStation games (such as Forsaken) also came configured this way. This was made explicit in the design of the Virtual Boy and Nintendo 64 controllers.
The C-buttons had the advantage of letting the N64 ACT like a 6-button controller
And the Wishtech Adaptoid (an N64 to USB/HID adapter) even returns button information to Windows as if it were a 6-button.
(for things like Street Fighter).
Or in real-time tactical sims such as Starcraft 64.
Personally, I like this movement for several reasons ... for the consumer, the PC-ness of computers will begin to disappear and become transparent
Yes, but what if Microsoft releases a closed system that developers have to pay big bucks to get into? (They already have: XBox.) Say goodbye to free software if PCs begin to head in that direction.
If it is running a web browsing feature, chances are that Microsoft will want to run Internet Explorer on it. If so, will we be seeing the same security holes of the console that we see on the PC?
This might be how some reverse engineer cracks a future version of the XBox and runs its own code on the system, opening the floodgates to independent software development. Microsoft does not want this to happen. Ever.
Look at the 3 consoles. PS2 wins if you want a quantity of games, period.
Four.
Nintendo currently sells two consoles: the GameCube, and the 32-bit Game Boy Advance. (Yes, the GBA is a console. It has twice the power of Super NES, and a third party makes a TV adapter.) The GBA can play over a thousand official games, including games designed for Game Boy and Game Boy Color. (Are there more Game Boy games or more PS1 games?) That doesn't even count the demos and mini-games that any C programmer can develop and run on the system with a flash card or $50 link cable.
Gamecube has an amazing controller
I agree, but a fellow has to admit that it's a copy of PlayStation's with the L1 button removed, the L2 and R2 buttons made analog (like Dreamcast), and the left pad and stick interchanged.
Intel only looks good in integer math... games don't do integer math
Yes, 3D games are mostly floating-point, but 2D games (such as ports of some arcade fighting games) use integer math, and game AI uses heavy integer math.
Microsoft needs to bundle: a mediocre DVD player, a mediocre video game player
Microsoft currently sells this for $330 (XBox + DVD dongle).
a mediocre MP3 jukebox
Well within the XBox's capability, but Microsoft would rather use the WMA format than what some journalists have termed "Music Piracy 3".
a mediocre PVR (VCR Replacement)
So you're proposing an XBox + Ultimate TV combo deck. It'll be a while before Microsoft can get costs down to put the price below $300.
a single company controlling something like: AOL ... Time Warner ... ESPN
No. ESPN is Disney, the other company we love to hate thanks in no small part to the late Sonny Bono, and ESPN.go.com is Disney and Microsoft.