You can get some quite startlingly good results out of cheap baby digitals. There are lots of things that they just can't do, of course, but the $100 toy-cam that you can keep in your pocket all the time has a lot going for it compared with the $3000 pro-cam that's sitting with its lenses in the camera bag at home.
I checked out a couple of the "Hydraulic" cases (here, along with some fancier cases from the same company), and I've recently reviewed some other generally available boxes, as well.
I have, of course, just attempted to scam one of these to review on my site (most recent pointless case-mod widget review on Dan's Data: this one), but I can't help but think that there's a basic flaw in the idea.
Namely - aren't most modders and overclockers running the distributed.net client, or some similar background task, which keeps our CPU utilisation at 100% all the time?
I could draw a tachometer on the front of this PC, and it'd be 100% accurate:-).
The Gatling rubber-band gun has been around for a while. It's now sold by the same most excellent people who made this trebuchet kit, but the rubber-band machine gun isn't actually something those guys make, any more than this catapult watch is.
Surefire Products are the makers of the Gatling rubber-band gun; it's their flagship product, and they (and their resellers) don't actually expect to sell many (or any) of them.
Surefire's far cheaper rubber-band handguns, on the other hand, are excellent:-).
As far as PCs-that-look-like-CRT-iMacs go, there are lots of machines being sold under different labels that're all based on the bare-bones Palladine LCDpc, which I review here. It's a pretty nifty piece of gear, actually, provided you can get a bare-bones one for a decent price and don't mind lacerating yourself when you install hardware in it.
I reviewed the Mimio kit a while ago. It's quite technically interesting, and it certainly beats those excitingly expensive PHB-impressing purpose-built digital whiteboards. You just stick it on like a car window Garfield, and it works.
> Given all that, to see a bit of difference between HD and
> NTSC you have to have at least a 35" diagonal display device.
At normal living-room TV-watching distance, sure.
If you're sitting not more than a couple of feet away from the screen, though - as I'll warrant you are, at this moment - the difference is very obvious, and very worthwhile.
My HDTV is, at the moment, an old 15 inch monitor, sitting next to my bed. I'll probably swap in a second hand 17 incher, or something, when I get around to it.
The 15 inch screen doesn't have enough resolution to display all the detail in a 1080i letterboxed image, but even so, HD is very clearly superior to SD.
Here in Australia we've had digital television broadcasting, including (at least theoretically) HD, since the first of January 2001. Our new TV standard has been a pretty much complete flop so far, for a number of reasons. But if you live in a major city, you now can watch HDTV if you want to. Well, when it's being broadcast, anyway; the rest of the time you get Standard Definition.
If you use a computer monitor as your display, HDTV isn't terrifyingly expensive. That's no good if you want a 45 inch screen, of course, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.
I bought an HDTV box a little while ago and wrote an article on the subject of getting all this stuff happening for cheap. You can read the article here.
We're going to be waiting forever, as usual, aren't we?
Just to save Mr Firstenberg some time, I'll list a typical collection of objections to the validity of Randi's offer, as proffered by various alleged levitators and mind readers, on Mr Firstenberg's behalf:
"There is no money. There is too little money. There is too much money. I want to see the money in a pile. Proximity to cash compromises my spiritual enlightenment. Randi is a powerful anti-psi ray emitter. Randi is a cannibal and I am afraid of him. The FBI will forcibly change my gender if I win. I want it in Tongan Pa'angas, not US dollars. Money is an illusion. Property is theft. I'm a teapot! I'm a teapot!"
Yes, I know about the 1.8 inch drives in the smaller storage widgets, including the iPod. I mention in my review that the whole iPod actually costs about the same as the higher retail prices for a drive like the one it contains:-).
If it's just the storage you're after, not the MP3 playing, I coincidentally just put up a review of a couple of external boxes that accept a 2.5 inch laptop drive (not really tiny, but not really expensive either...) which both have USB 1.1 and IEEE-1394 connectivity. One of them's pocketable, one of them's bigger and looks like a 3.5 inch drive, for no very good reason. They both let you get 20Gb of decently fast storage (as long as you use the FireWire port) for about half the price of a 5Gb iPod.
> "It is a defence to a prosecution under this section for the defendant to prove that
> access to the matter unsuitable for minors was subject to an approved restricted access
> system at the time the matter was made available or supplied by the defendant."
Unfortunately, as I understand it, "a password protected section of your site" is almost certainly not "an approved restricted access system", even if you do indeed give the password only to your adult friends.
Now, any sane judge who understood the issue would of course not convict you in the above situation, but according to the letter of the law an "approved restricted access system" is as defined by the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 as amended, and you can read the definition here.
In brief, such a system must verify age via a declaration from each person granted access, which must be accompanied either by paper proof of ID and age, or, for electronic applications, by a digitally signed message including credit card details.
So, technically, if your friends did not provide you with these things, I think you'd still be in violation of the proposed legislation, even if the site was only ever accessed by you and your friends at the old folks' home.
Yeah, yeah. Always happens. Bookmark the page (it only just went up, so there's no Google cache of it yet), come back later, spend the intervening time sending me money so I can afford a phatter server:-).
> However, Digital Photography Review has this
> story with reams of specs and evaluation data.
Um... actually, that just looks like the reformatted press release to me. Phil Askey's camera reviews are superb, I agree, but that isn't one. I think I might have written the first real review of this widget to hit the Web. I'm not betting anything on that, though:-).
To assuage all your poor Server Not Found souls, here's the text of the review's conclusion:
Who's this camera for?
Well, if you want a super-ultra-tiny camera, the DCR-IP7 is pretty much where it's at. But there are Mini DV cameras that aren't a great deal bigger. Sony's own DCR-PC9, for instance, weighs less than 500 grams. JVC's GR-DVP3U weighs 350 grams, and is inconsequentially larger than the DCR-IP7.
Mini DV cameras have better video quality than Micro MV, they're cheaper, they've all got i.LINK ports, and their i.LINK ports actually work with normal DV gear.
So if you just want a minuscule travel-cam, this probably isn't the product for you.
What if you really dig the idea of e-mail from your camera, for some reason?
If you simply must have that feature, then this is the camera for you. Well, this or its bigger cousin, the DCR-PC120.
But seeing as all you can do with this thing's "networking" is connect to a dial-up Internet account, I'm uncertain what use it is for the vast majority of users.
No way are you going to be sending your intrepidly collected reportage from the field to the newspaper office over a mobile phone dial-up connection, even if there aren't any attachment file size limits. And if you're travelling the world, I doubt you want to phone home at great expense in order to send people grainy low-res video clips of your adventures.
Frankly, I found the DCR-IP7 rather frustrating. Not because of usability issues, so much as missed opportunities. Here's this thing with FireWire and USB and Bluetooth, and (alleged) standard file format still and video input and output. And there just aren't enough simple elementary connections between those things. The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
You should be able to see this camera as a mass storage device via all three interfaces and just copy video from the tape without installing anything but a simple driver. You can't.
You should be able to use the camera as a Windows Video device. You can't.
Heck, you should be able to access the camera with a TWAIN driver. You can't.
And because the camera uses Micro MV, you can connect it via i.LINK/FireWire to a DV device if you like, but it won't bloody work. So everything's funnelled through MovieShaker. Which sucks.
Hey, Sony. Maybe MovieShaker is the talk of the town in Tokyo, or something, but would it kill you to put in an Expert Mode or something next time, and actually have six people test your software before you release it?
You wouldn't think it'd be that hard. Include basic functions. Verify actual operation of said basic functions. Then include happy smiling faces and integrated techno video clip generators, if you must.
If this camera cost a thousand Australian bucks, I'd cut it some slack, but it doesn't. It's stunningly expensive.
The next time I see a Sony device with "Network" and "IP" in its name, I want to be able to just plug it into freakin' Ethernet, OK? Include FireWire and Bluetooth and 802.11b and RS-232 and RFC 1217 if you want, but also put a simple RJ45 socket on the thing and give it a DHCP client and a basic HTTP interface. You can get those features in cheap and cheerful home Internet sharing boxes; I think you could manage to cram them into a camera.
I, for one, would love an instant home-LAN video server camera dingus, especially if it could work as an Internet image source as well, which it could, with that simple little Web server built in. Webcams that can do this exist already - they're expensive, but so's this camera.
Sony can make avant-garde bleeding-edge products that work really well. Their MVC-CD1000 digital still camera with its 77mm CD-R drive, for instance, is still almost as technologically impressive as it was when I reviewed it more than a year ago. But now you can buy new CD1000s for $US650 on eBay. That's half of the original list price.
If the MVC-IP7 can be had for a mere $AUD2250 or so in a year's time, it might be worth getting. Micro MV doesn't have annoyingly bad image quality, and there ought to be more Micro MV-aware software and hardware around in a year, so you won't be stuck with Pokemon-themed McSoftware when you want to edit stuff. Or artificially constrained by silly format barriers.
Right now, though, this camera's the video equivalent of a wild out-there impractical concept car that for some reason has made it into the dealerships. No sane person would want to drive it, but a fool and his money are welcome to try.
If I were you, though, I'd hand the DCR-IP7 back to the booth babe.
I suspect I'm not the only person who thought of this while reading that article (yes, I did read all of it, thanks for asking:-).
This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.
A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:
Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?
Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?
Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.
Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?
Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?
Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?
Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?
I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.
Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:
"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."
On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?
And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.
I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.
Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.
Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.
Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this:-).
Scott Rosenberg, the author of the Salon piece, says Windows "makes you go on a mad hunt through menus and folders and options to find the dialogue box that lets you [change the app that opens a given file type]". Well, yes, it does, unless you shift-rightclick a file and use the "Open With..." option.
This doesn't really weaken Rosenberg's argument, of course, because this is just one of the zillion and three Windows shortcut thingies that Joe Average doesn't know about. Joe's no more likely to use this than he is to fish his way through to the long-form File Types dialogue. But all of us windswept and interesting Slashdotters who choose/are forced to use Windows ought to know it:-).
Dang it, I used to use an Amiga. Directory utilities on the Amiga just looked at the darn file header. Your IFF image could be called notapicture.txt and it'd still display JUST FINE. A 1Gb footprint for WinXP (which, I hasten to add, I _am_ going to install when next I upgrade my Tiny God), and it still can't do that?!
Come to think of it, that'd be an anti-Sircam-ish sort of feature. "You have attempted to open a file whose extension is PIF, but which appears to be an ordinary executable. That's odd. Would you like to check this file against the new and wonderful Microsoft Proprietary Crushing All Opposition Virus Database to see if it's one of the many things that takes advantage of our monopoly almost as well as we do?"
> His site is unreadable to visitors using NS 4.0x
Or, to put it another way, no it isn't. I just read a few pages in Navigator 4.08 for Windows, no problemo.
Mind you, I've had the occasional e-mail from people telling me that there's some magic cookie in my HTML that stops _Mozilla_ from rendering it properly.
Slashdot Mirror
It, um, reads less like a press release than does the Explosive Labs piece :-).
It's here.
Those of you who find this cool, and haven't already read my trebuchet kit review, probably should :-).
My own review of the IBM 42H1292 and related 'boards is here, in case anybody cares.
Quite. I talked about this a bit in the cheap digital camera comparison I did a while ago.
You can get some quite startlingly good results out of cheap baby digitals. There are lots of things that they just can't do, of course, but the $100 toy-cam that you can keep in your pocket all the time has a lot going for it compared with the $3000 pro-cam that's sitting with its lenses in the camera bag at home.
A couple of links:
Codegen ATX-9001 server case (rather inexpensive for what you get)
Lian Li PC-6 and PC-5 (fairly cheap Lian Lis - whoever woulda thunk it? This review links to various other Lian Li reviews of mine)
http://www.dansdata.com/trackir.htm
Namely - aren't most modders and overclockers running the distributed.net client, or some similar background task, which keeps our CPU utilisation at 100% all the time?
I could draw a tachometer on the front of this PC, and it'd be 100% accurate :-).
Surefire Products are the makers of the Gatling rubber-band gun; it's their flagship product, and they (and their resellers) don't actually expect to sell many (or any) of them.
Surefire's far cheaper rubber-band handguns, on the other hand, are excellent :-).
As far as PCs-that-look-like-CRT-iMacs go, there are lots of machines being sold under different labels that're all based on the bare-bones Palladine LCDpc, which I review here. It's a pretty nifty piece of gear, actually, provided you can get a bare-bones one for a decent price and don't mind lacerating yourself when you install hardware in it.
Ze review, she is here: http://www.dansdata.com/mimio.htm.
I review the Mini-Z here, by the way. Lots of pretty pictures of stock and hopped-up cars.
> NTSC you have to have at least a 35" diagonal display device.
At normal living-room TV-watching distance, sure.
If you're sitting not more than a couple of feet away from the screen, though - as I'll warrant you are, at this moment - the difference is very obvious, and very worthwhile.
My HDTV is, at the moment, an old 15 inch monitor, sitting next to my bed. I'll probably swap in a second hand 17 incher, or something, when I get around to it.
The 15 inch screen doesn't have enough resolution to display all the detail in a 1080i letterboxed image, but even so, HD is very clearly superior to SD.
As, ahem, you'd know, if you'd read my article.
If you use a computer monitor as your display, HDTV isn't terrifyingly expensive. That's no good if you want a 45 inch screen, of course, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.
I bought an HDTV box a little while ago and wrote an article on the subject of getting all this stuff happening for cheap. You can read the article here.
Prove a paranormal ability and Randi will give you one million U.S. dollars, baby.
Seriously. A million bucks. No kidding.
Well, Mr Firstenberg?
We're waiting.
We're still waiting.
We're going to be waiting forever, as usual, aren't we?
Just to save Mr Firstenberg some time, I'll list a typical collection of objections to the validity of Randi's offer, as proffered by various alleged levitators and mind readers, on Mr Firstenberg's behalf:
"There is no money. There is too little money. There is too much money. I want to see the money in a pile. Proximity to cash compromises my spiritual enlightenment. Randi is a powerful anti-psi ray emitter. Randi is a cannibal and I am afraid of him. The FBI will forcibly change my gender if I win. I want it in Tongan Pa'angas, not US dollars. Money is an illusion. Property is theft. I'm a teapot! I'm a teapot!"
Yes, I know about the 1.8 inch drives in the smaller storage widgets, including the iPod. I mention in my review that the whole iPod actually costs about the same as the higher retail prices for a drive like the one it contains :-).
Check it out.
> access to the matter unsuitable for minors was subject to an approved restricted access
> system at the time the matter was made available or supplied by the defendant."
Unfortunately, as I understand it, "a password protected section of your site" is almost certainly not "an approved restricted access system", even if you do indeed give the password only to your adult friends.
Now, any sane judge who understood the issue would of course not convict you in the above situation, but according to the letter of the law an "approved restricted access system" is as defined by the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 as amended, and you can read the definition here.
In brief, such a system must verify age via a declaration from each person granted access, which must be accompanied either by paper proof of ID and age, or, for electronic applications, by a digitally signed message including credit card details.
So, technically, if your friends did not provide you with these things, I think you'd still be in violation of the proposed legislation, even if the site was only ever accessed by you and your friends at the old folks' home.
Yeah, yeah. Always happens. Bookmark the page (it only just went up, so there's no Google cache of it yet), come back later, spend the intervening time sending me money so I can afford a phatter server :-).
> However, Digital Photography Review has this
> story with reams of specs and evaluation data.
Um... actually, that just looks like the reformatted press release to me. Phil Askey's camera reviews are superb, I agree, but that isn't one. I think I might have written the first real review of this widget to hit the Web. I'm not betting anything on that, though :-).
To assuage all your poor Server Not Found souls, here's the text of the review's conclusion:
Who's this camera for?
Well, if you want a super-ultra-tiny camera, the DCR-IP7 is pretty much where it's at. But there are Mini DV cameras that aren't a great deal bigger. Sony's own DCR-PC9, for instance, weighs less than 500 grams. JVC's GR-DVP3U weighs 350 grams, and is inconsequentially larger than the DCR-IP7.
Mini DV cameras have better video quality than Micro MV, they're cheaper, they've all got i.LINK ports, and their i.LINK ports actually work with normal DV gear.
So if you just want a minuscule travel-cam, this probably isn't the product for you.
What if you really dig the idea of e-mail from your camera, for some reason?
If you simply must have that feature, then this is the camera for you. Well, this or its bigger cousin, the DCR-PC120.
But seeing as all you can do with this thing's "networking" is connect to a dial-up Internet account, I'm uncertain what use it is for the vast majority of users.
No way are you going to be sending your intrepidly collected reportage from the field to the newspaper office over a mobile phone dial-up connection, even if there aren't any attachment file size limits. And if you're travelling the world, I doubt you want to phone home at great expense in order to send people grainy low-res video clips of your adventures.
Frankly, I found the DCR-IP7 rather frustrating. Not because of usability issues, so much as missed opportunities. Here's this thing with FireWire and USB and Bluetooth, and (alleged) standard file format still and video input and output. And there just aren't enough simple elementary connections between those things. The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
You should be able to see this camera as a mass storage device via all three interfaces and just copy video from the tape without installing anything but a simple driver. You can't.
You should be able to use the camera as a Windows Video device. You can't.
Heck, you should be able to access the camera with a TWAIN driver. You can't.
And because the camera uses Micro MV, you can connect it via i.LINK/FireWire to a DV device if you like, but it won't bloody work. So everything's funnelled through MovieShaker. Which sucks.
Hey, Sony. Maybe MovieShaker is the talk of the town in Tokyo, or something, but would it kill you to put in an Expert Mode or something next time, and actually have six people test your software before you release it?
You wouldn't think it'd be that hard. Include basic functions. Verify actual operation of said basic functions. Then include happy smiling faces and integrated techno video clip generators, if you must.
If this camera cost a thousand Australian bucks, I'd cut it some slack, but it doesn't. It's stunningly expensive.
The next time I see a Sony device with "Network" and "IP" in its name, I want to be able to just plug it into freakin' Ethernet, OK? Include FireWire and Bluetooth and 802.11b and RS-232 and RFC 1217 if you want, but also put a simple RJ45 socket on the thing and give it a DHCP client and a basic HTTP interface. You can get those features in cheap and cheerful home Internet sharing boxes; I think you could manage to cram them into a camera.
I, for one, would love an instant home-LAN video server camera dingus, especially if it could work as an Internet image source as well, which it could, with that simple little Web server built in. Webcams that can do this exist already - they're expensive, but so's this camera.
Sony can make avant-garde bleeding-edge products that work really well. Their MVC-CD1000 digital still camera with its 77mm CD-R drive, for instance, is still almost as technologically impressive as it was when I reviewed it more than a year ago. But now you can buy new CD1000s for $US650 on eBay. That's half of the original list price.
If the MVC-IP7 can be had for a mere $AUD2250 or so in a year's time, it might be worth getting. Micro MV doesn't have annoyingly bad image quality, and there ought to be more Micro MV-aware software and hardware around in a year, so you won't be stuck with Pokemon-themed McSoftware when you want to edit stuff. Or artificially constrained by silly format barriers.
Right now, though, this camera's the video equivalent of a wild out-there impractical concept car that for some reason has made it into the dealerships. No sane person would want to drive it, but a fool and his money are welcome to try.
If I were you, though, I'd hand the DCR-IP7 back to the booth babe.
Thanks, but no thanks.
This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.
A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:
Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?
Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?
Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.
Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?
Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?
Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?
Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?
I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.
Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:
"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."
On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?
And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.
I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.
Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.
Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.
Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).
It wouldn't matter if Z'Dar was on the other side of the planet. And asleep. He'd still win.
The Zen review is on page four.
PC-76 server case
PC-70 full tower
PC-31 mini-tower
PC-60 midi-tower
Scott Rosenberg, the author of the Salon piece, says Windows "makes you go on a mad hunt through menus and folders and options to find the dialogue box that lets you [change the app that opens a given file type]". Well, yes, it does, unless you shift-rightclick a file and use the "Open With..." option.
:-).
This doesn't really weaken Rosenberg's argument, of course, because this is just one of the zillion and three Windows shortcut thingies that Joe Average doesn't know about. Joe's no more likely to use this than he is to fish his way through to the long-form File Types dialogue. But all of us windswept and interesting Slashdotters who choose/are forced to use Windows ought to know it
Dang it, I used to use an Amiga. Directory utilities on the Amiga just looked at the darn file header. Your IFF image could be called notapicture.txt and it'd still display JUST FINE. A 1Gb footprint for WinXP (which, I hasten to add, I _am_ going to install when next I upgrade my Tiny God), and it still can't do that?!
Come to think of it, that'd be an anti-Sircam-ish sort of feature. "You have attempted to open a file whose extension is PIF, but which appears to be an ordinary executable. That's odd. Would you like to check this file against the new and wonderful Microsoft Proprietary Crushing All Opposition Virus Database to see if it's one of the many things that takes advantage of our monopoly almost as well as we do?"
> His site is unreadable to visitors using NS 4.0x
:-)?
Or, to put it another way, no it isn't. I just read a few pages in Navigator 4.08 for Windows, no problemo.
Mind you, I've had the occasional e-mail from people telling me that there's some magic cookie in my HTML that stops _Mozilla_ from rendering it properly.
I just can't please you people, can I