They look like chopped off 3" CDs, so I think that a 3" CD adapter ring (the reverse of those old 45 RPM adapters) would clip onto it well enough. Of course you wouldn't be able to fit the adapter ring in your wallet.
Nowhere in the article does it say this chip can do any sort of processing. (RTFL!)
Researchers say that the chip stores data in the form of tiny magnetic fields
This sounds like it's merely the latest development in magnetic core memory. I had heard people were working on core memory on a chip a couple of years ago (the other Slashdot Effect: old stories presented as today's news?), so the idea itself is nothing new.
And nowhere in the article does it mention anything about the speed of the device. While I'm sure it's faster than a 15k RPM hard drive, I doubt it's fast enough to replace SRAM cache memory, or even PC100 SDRAM. Magnetic storage on a chip would be good competition for flash memory, though. Just imagine a SCSI device containing a board full of these chips.
That's IE3's fault. It doesn't allow the web site to supply HTML tags in text editing fields. I had the same problem under NT4 until I upgraded to IE5.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled message thread.
Williams quoted Lili Fini Zanuck who is co-producing the telecast with her husband, Richard, as saying that Parker "will come up with some funny solutions to his own problems
See, the thing is, foul language is not funny in and of itself, only when it has shock value, and that tends to wear out quickly. The comedy comes in making the audience come up with the foul language in their heads on their own.
In fact, that's one problem I had with the movie (the other being I generally don't like musicals)... I like how they bleep out The F-Word on the TV series, and don't bleep out much else, because it makes it more funny when you notice how much else doesn't get bleeped!
Another example: The second Austin Powers movie had the montages where they cut off the last word of a sentence where it would have been profanity, then cut to the start of another sentence with the same or a similar sounding word. Again, it's not the profanity that's funny, it's how it's covered up.
This is a great troll!
on
A New DeCSS
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But why couldn't this have been saved for Trollin' Tuesday?:-)
What if someone is sending opt-in mail that was requested and is required to tag the email in just the same way as opt-out spam? Then this becomes less than worthless, as it would require information you want to read to be tagged the same as junk mail.
And there's one other problem. This will just be used as another excuse for spammers to put at the end of their spams to justify their uselessness to society.
I seem to recall that he said binary drivers are okay, but that he would make no effort to keep the API unchanged if it was a choice between compatibility with binary drivers vs improving the kernel.
There's only one use for this, and that's to satisfy the RIAA/MPAA types that it is sufficiently difficult for Joe Bitshift to intercept copy-protected movies and other images and save them as an unencrypted file. There is also a desire to move toward similar encryption to audio output devices as well.
Remember how one of the arguments in the DeCSS case is that with players which dump the data into the video card frame buffer, you can simply re-digitize the picture to create your own MPEG-1 files? Well, that's what this is all about.
It has nothing to do with "Van Eck" or "Tempest" radiation, because those read the image off of the CRT tube's electron beam.
Will drivers for this crap be avaliable for Linux, which requires GPL kernel drivers due to its design? It's possible. An important reason why CSS was cracked is that software implementations of DVD players existed, making it much easier to determine the encryption algorithm. A proper hardware implementation can keep the "secrets" out of the drivers themselves.
I do see one problem with maintaining sufficient security with this scheme, though. If you get data from an outside source (the internet, a DVD, etc.) which has to be processed before being displayed, all processing steps have to be kept in hardware where only encrypted intermediate data is available to the main CPU. I think this will be sufficiently difficult to maintain (after all, someone has to process those.IFO files from a DVD) that this will in the long run not be feasible.
Through a buyout, perhaps? Or an IPO? It seems these days you can do an IPO with no other source of capital than VC. You can be drowining in red ink, but as long as your product has the attention of enough eyeballs, the IPO crowd will love you.
Sounds like the icon that should have been used in the first place. An aqua embossed silouette (sp?) of Tux would be perfect. An option to select from various "aquified" icons like Red Hat, KDE, and Gnome icons would be even better.
stating violation based on using of copyrighted materials - the Mac OS and Apple logos in this case.
This is one of my pet peeves, right up there with misspelling "lose" as "loose". Copyrights are, as the name implies, the right to copy something. Trademarks are logos and words which are used by companies to identify and distinguish themselves.
Trademark law has one important difference from copyright law, and that's the "enforce it or lose it" clause. If Apple didn't go after these and other unauthorized uses of its trademarks, it could end up losing the rights to them. It's much worse with words, and Xerox has a never-ending battle to avoid having their company name become a generic word.
If copyright law was like this, it would either be complete anarchy (it's too easy to copy something in private) or a complete police state (to hunt down every instance of illegally copied material).
I've never used it myself, but I know some of the hotels I've stayed at offer some kind of Net access via Ethernet jacks in the rooms.
You obviously have never stayed in hotels between the Mississippi river and the Rocky Mountains. Or at least not one that charges less than $200/night. While I have seen a few places with modem jacks, I have never seen hotels with Ethernet jacks! And even with modem jacks, they may have only a limited number of phone lines, so you still won't be able to dial out.
And he's going down freaking Route 66! Aside from its source end in Chicago, it goes through some of the most unwired parts of the country! Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Amarillo ain't exactly high-tech cities, but they're the best he'll find.
As has been mentioned before, it's hard enough to find gasoline (aka petrol:) along its extent, much less modem POPs. About the only two things you can count on are 1-800 phone numbers and electricity. You can't even count on having RJ-11 jacks available, but at least three-prong grounded electrical outlets have been required by electrical code for decades now.
I would have to second the person who suggested Compu$erve, as they should have just about as much POP presence as AOL, and they have a decent business presence in.uk as well, thus letting him sign up and cancel with much less trouble. By the way, 1-800 service will not be free, even with the AOL "free hours".
And cybercafes? ROFL! Even the libraries in all but the largest cities along the way can't be expected to have internet terminals. It's not quite the third world, but someone from the east coast might have a hard time believing just how vast the gap is between cities out there.
The difference is in how many names you are sitting on. Just a couple gotten with the intent of using them is not cyber-squatting, and you will not burn in digital hell for your sins.
The real cybersquatters have dozens or even hundreds of domains, then point them all to "under construction" or "for sale" web pages. May they bit rot in hell.
If it is a trademark of your company, it's probably a good idea to hold on to it. Set up a web page under it to redirect to your company's "real" web page, but keep it maintained and paid for. Trademark law in the USA has this nasty little "use it or lose it" provision that you have to enforce your trademark or you lose all rights it.
If it's a name unrelated to any name your company uses or plans to use, I suppose it would be a good idea to sell it. Set up a web page under it indicating it is for sale, and leave that up for a couple of months before auctioning it. Give it an absurd price like a million dollars or so at first (depending on how good a name it is), just in case there's a sucker out there with more money than sense, but remember to remove mention of the price if you put it up for auction!
No, if you rent a single CD (not one CD but a single release containing about 4 songs) from a rental shop in Japan, you'll pay about 150-200Y (1.50$ to 2$ american), maximum.
Well, I didn't say anything about how much the rentals cost, because I didn't know anything about that, but you have a really good point.
In my original post, I was going to say something about renting a CD and then ripping it (to MP3 or CD-R) instead of just taping it, but I couldn't come up with the right words. Copying to MD isn't quite as "open source", but still just as effective.
When you compare this download thing to renting a CD and then copying it to MD, which also doesn't let you make a copy of the copy, you have something almost identical to what Sony is trying to do. The only difference is that an MD-discman is a little bit bigger than their "music pen".
Actually, there's one small difference. It's moving bits, not atoms. If it weren't for the "Japan-only" thing, this would make it possible for people who were not in Japan to import music without having to do overseas mail-order (expen$ive $hipping) or wait for local import stores to receive their own bulk-orders.
But as we know Sony is aiming for world domination anyhow, it is obvious they aren't doing this out of compassion for J-pop fans outside of Japan.
...and you really don't need to be able to read Japanese to find out what it's about, because they put up an English page. I can read some Japanese, but I didn't need to.
Anyhow, this is indeed SDMI, and you are only allowed to have a copy on one computer and transfer it one time to a digital device, for the low, low:-) price of 350 yen! (about $3.50 US)
The compression is Sony's ATRAC (the same one used in MiniDisc, which I've heard is a better quality compression format than MP3), and here's the part that/.'ers should love: you have to use Windows Media Player! That's right, Windoze only! I think there is a non WMP player (called "Type E"), but I would expect it too to only runs under Windoze. Yes, I know that Microsoft is "considering" a Linux version of WMP, but I wouldn't be surprised if this music distribution system didn't work with Linux even then.
Their site says that "bitmusic will only be available to consumers in Japan; access from locations outside Japan is restricted.". I don't know how they plan to do this, other than by checking IP block ranges (post-CIDR IP blocks are assigned geographically, and I think Japan had only a limited number of IP blocks before CIDR routing was implemented).
And you have to turn on JavaShit to use the web site.
As for the cost, you have to understand the music market in Japan. CDs in Japan tend to cost about 3200 yen (about $30), though two-disc soundtrack sets are usually only a few bucks more. I think it's that high because CD rental and taping of rentals is legal in Japan. CD singles (usually two songs + karaoke tracks) cost on the order of 1000 yen (I think). So the cost really is comparable to that of a single track on a full CD. Oh, and for some reason I do not understand, in Japan, all CDs go out of print two years after original release. Apparently, this happens no matter how popular they are.
Pan is one I was specifically referring to. I had to upgrade quite a few Gnome packages to get it to work (still a useful learning experience), then was rewarded with a segfault upon opening my first message.:-(
I would also like to see GUI news programs use windows with vertically divided panes, so that I can see both a lot of headers and long messages all at once without getting RSI from all the scroll bar usage.
Or better yet, separate windows for each newsgroup's list of headers and for each individual message. What is this obsession with cramming everything into a single window with half a dozen panes/frames anyhow? This is a windowing system, not a web browser! So use more windows!
Are you just being a silly First Poster, or do you really believe this?
Not only does it not pass the "mom test", but I'm pretty damn good with computers, and it took me a couple of months just to figure out how to properly configure XFree86.
Most of the X config utilities suck rocks, and keep trying to give you modelines with wierd sync rates because they think your monitor can handle them. Just let me pick the resolution and vertical sync from a list of VESA standard rates, please. I'll go in and edit the config file when I have the freaking time to tweak things.
So far, I have found only two useful installers. Xconfigurator at least bothers to put a whole bunch of standard sync rates (with the correct sync polarity) into the config file where you can comment out the unwanted rates. And the configuration from TurboLinux 4.0 lets you choose the vertical sync from within their X setup program itself.
SAX and XF86Setup both try to put in wierd sync rates, and I don't think either of them got the sync polarity right for my old NEC Multisync 4D at 1024x768.
And then there's the issue of useless installs. Trying to install a "Gnome Workstation" in SUSE 6.2 gives you something almost completely useless, and using anything but the TurboLinux window manager in TL 4.0 gives you completely useless setups, some of which aren't even configured to give you an xterm or "Run" item on the menus!
After many evenings spent on trying to make a Linux desktop system (as opposed to a server in the other room), I have finally settled on RH 6.1 as the most usable Gnome install without having to search over half the net downloading stuff.
I still use MacOS to read email and usenet. If I could find a usable GUI newsreader for which I didn't have to figure out which packages to install to get it to compile, only to segfault when reading the first message, that would be a start. But what I want is something as usable as NewsWatcher. I also want to be able to edit text and read email and news in Japanese, and MacOS 9.0 has really good support for that.
Co-incidentally, I installed Netscape 4.7 on my machine that only had IE installed. One of the first sites I went to featured a doubleclick ad for Telus, the phone company where I live. I never gave out any information about myself with the new browser, so they are definately tracking beyond just the cookie files. Either they are doing reverse-DNS lookups, or track the fact that I had just been logged in with the same IP with a different browser and made the transistion themselves.
Did you fill in your e-mail address as requested when you installed Netscape? They can get that information without using cookies. Then when you connect to them, wham bam, they can give you a freshly baked cookie based on a database lookup of your e-mail address.
IMHO, a web browser should be used only for web browsing, and not for reading usenet or email. So I always set my email address to "president@whitehouse.gov" or some similar bogosity.
One other possiblity is that they could have looked up your IP block geographically. Even with ISPs that are located in more than one city, the dialups themselves have fixed IP block ranges, so it is not impossible to determine your city from your IP address. It just takes time to build the database.
I basically grew up hacking on the TRS-80, and all this brings back a few memories.
One thing that I see in this interview where I have to agree with BillG is about the patch points for the BASIC ROM. Having personally disassembled both the Z-80 and 6809 versions, and written many patches and extensions just for the fun of it back in my high school and college days, I agree that the kind of support that would be needed to document them is enormous.
Basically, anyone who is a good enough programmer to use those things is a good enough programmer to figure it out on his own. Besides, you need to understand how the whole ROM works and the coding style before you can use them anyhow. Use the Binary, Luke!
I don't understand why DBK was so hung up on this particular point. Well, I do see his point, but I also see that it would have been pretty near impossible to document this in a way that it would be usable.
But I will say this about the ROM. I could only find about 35 bytes worth of suboptimal code in the old Level II BASIC ROMs. This is in comparison with the ColecoVision BIOS ROM, of which I've found over 1K out of the 8K of code that can be optimized. BillG certainly knew how to program the 8080/Z-80 back in those days.
I would expect that the "coating" isn't on the outside of the disk. It's in the middle of the sandwich, next to the data layer.
Sorry, nice try. A DVD is a sandwich of two polycarbonate discs, with a layer of glue between them. Each of the discs has pits stamped into one side, then covered with a reflective material like aluminum. The pit side of both discs are toward the inside. In the case of a single-layer disc, the second disc is a dummy, and is often stamped with a picture. (There are rumors that scrap discs are used for the other side on a few DVDs, but you'd have to remove the label paint to know for sure.)
You can't put anything between the disc and the data layer, because the data layer is the inside surface of the disc.
This only leaves two other options. Either put it in the polycarbonate, or paint it on the outside surface. You can't control the thickness of the plastic, and the thickness of the degrading material can be controlled, ergo it is painted on the outside surface.
I think the real problem with making a "backup" of these discs is that they will be featureless pan & scan transfers, with no extras, probably not even a menu. And maybe even with wonderful uninterruptable 5-minute promo ads in the "FBI time" after you insert a disc. Bleah.
The DIVX business model relied on replays after the original playback period expired. This was where they were going to make all their money. Not by having you throw out the discs, but by having you turn your own home in to a "branch office" of the rental store.
It probably failed because most renters just want to see the movie once, and never again.
So this scheme is going to have to have a lot lower manufacturing costs than DIVX if it is going to break even. Maybe they can save a quarter by using paper sleeves instead of cardboard "jewel" boxes, but they still have to press a DVD-ROM either way.
And since DIVX was software only, there was no materials cost involved in the scheme (beyond the support in the player, which customers paid $100 for, another strike against DIVX!) other than the CPU time to do the encryption.
But this new scheme requires the processing of actual atoms, so it has an inherently higher cost of production. It will cost more to create a disk which will generate less potential revenue than DIVX.
One problem I see with this is that the coating is just that... a coating. The data is in the middle of the disc, like the jelly in a peanut butter sandwich.
Then someone will come out with a "DVD Cleaning Liquid" which removes the ugly... uh... stain. Yeah, that's it, it's just stained. Yeah, I accidentally poured hot grits on my DVD. That's it, that's the ticket.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that optical discs have been degraded with a coating, just the first time for a "time-delay" coating. The original DiscoVision laserdiscs often used a "scrap" side for any title that used an odd number of sides. (Laserdisc is two layers bonded together, just like DVD.) These extra sides were coated with hairspray-like substance, which can be removed with isopropyl alcohol.
So what happens if the phone rings or you have to take a crap while watching a "this disc will self-destruct in ten minutes" DVD? And what kind of shelf life does the coating have? Will DVDs need a "freshness date" on them?
Besides, do people really want throwaway DVDs? Sure it can be a pain to return rentals, but you eventually have to go back to get more rentals anyhow. One big problem with DIVX was that you had to go all the way to Circus City, of which there might be one or two in any given city, rather than a local video rental place, of which there would likely be one within two miles of where you live.
Go outside and get some fresh air, already! The big room with the blue and/or gray and/or black ceiling won't hurt you.
Slashdot Mirror
They look like chopped off 3" CDs, so I think that a 3" CD adapter ring (the reverse of those old 45 RPM adapters) would clip onto it well enough. Of course you wouldn't be able to fit the adapter ring in your wallet.
Nowhere in the article does it say this chip can do any sort of processing. (RTFL!)
Researchers say that the chip stores data in the form of tiny magnetic fields
This sounds like it's merely the latest development in magnetic core memory. I had heard people were working on core memory on a chip a couple of years ago (the other Slashdot Effect: old stories presented as today's news?), so the idea itself is nothing new.
And nowhere in the article does it mention anything about the speed of the device. While I'm sure it's faster than a 15k RPM hard drive, I doubt it's fast enough to replace SRAM cache memory, or even PC100 SDRAM. Magnetic storage on a chip would be good competition for flash memory, though. Just imagine a SCSI device containing a board full of these chips.
That's IE3's fault. It doesn't allow the web site to supply HTML tags in text editing fields. I had the same problem under NT4 until I upgraded to IE5.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled message thread.
Williams quoted Lili Fini Zanuck who is co-producing the telecast with her husband, Richard, as saying that Parker "will come up with some funny solutions to his own problems
See, the thing is, foul language is not funny in and of itself, only when it has shock value, and that tends to wear out quickly. The comedy comes in making the audience come up with the foul language in their heads on their own.
In fact, that's one problem I had with the movie (the other being I generally don't like musicals)... I like how they bleep out The F-Word on the TV series, and don't bleep out much else, because it makes it more funny when you notice how much else doesn't get bleeped!
Another example: The second Austin Powers movie had the montages where they cut off the last word of a sentence where it would have been profanity, then cut to the start of another sentence with the same or a similar sounding word. Again, it's not the profanity that's funny, it's how it's covered up.
But why couldn't this have been saved for Trollin' Tuesday? :-)
What if someone is sending opt-in mail that was requested and is required to tag the email in just the same way as opt-out spam? Then this becomes less than worthless, as it would require information you want to read to be tagged the same as junk mail.
And there's one other problem. This will just be used as another excuse for spammers to put at the end of their spams to justify their uselessness to society.
I seem to recall that he said binary drivers are okay, but that he would make no effort to keep the API unchanged if it was a choice between compatibility with binary drivers vs improving the kernel.
There's only one use for this, and that's to satisfy the RIAA/MPAA types that it is sufficiently difficult for Joe Bitshift to intercept copy-protected movies and other images and save them as an unencrypted file. There is also a desire to move toward similar encryption to audio output devices as well.
.IFO files from a DVD) that this will in the long run not be feasible.
Remember how one of the arguments in the DeCSS case is that with players which dump the data into the video card frame buffer, you can simply re-digitize the picture to create your own MPEG-1 files? Well, that's what this is all about.
It has nothing to do with "Van Eck" or "Tempest" radiation, because those read the image off of the CRT tube's electron beam.
Will drivers for this crap be avaliable for Linux, which requires GPL kernel drivers due to its design? It's possible. An important reason why CSS was cracked is that software implementations of DVD players existed, making it much easier to determine the encryption algorithm. A proper hardware implementation can keep the "secrets" out of the drivers themselves.
I do see one problem with maintaining sufficient security with this scheme, though. If you get data from an outside source (the internet, a DVD, etc.) which has to be processed before being displayed, all processing steps have to be kept in hardware where only encrypted intermediate data is available to the main CPU. I think this will be sufficiently difficult to maintain (after all, someone has to process those
Or at least let's hope so.
Through a buyout, perhaps? Or an IPO? It seems these days you can do an IPO with no other source of capital than VC. You can be drowining in red ink, but as long as your product has the attention of enough eyeballs, the IPO crowd will love you.
Or an outline of Tux, done in the same blue hues?
Sounds like the icon that should have been used in the first place. An aqua embossed silouette (sp?) of Tux would be perfect. An option to select from various "aquified" icons like Red Hat, KDE, and Gnome icons would be even better.
stating violation based on using of copyrighted materials - the Mac OS and Apple logos in this case.
This is one of my pet peeves, right up there with misspelling "lose" as "loose". Copyrights are, as the name implies, the right to copy something. Trademarks are logos and words which are used by companies to identify and distinguish themselves.
Trademark law has one important difference from copyright law, and that's the "enforce it or lose it" clause. If Apple didn't go after these and other unauthorized uses of its trademarks, it could end up losing the rights to them. It's much worse with words, and Xerox has a never-ending battle to avoid having their company name become a generic word.
If copyright law was like this, it would either be complete anarchy (it's too easy to copy something in private) or a complete police state (to hunt down every instance of illegally copied material).
Sounds like a challenge for someone to write a DDoS tool that installs either via a VBScript trojan email or a malicious ActiveX control.
I've never used it myself, but I know some of the hotels I've stayed at offer some kind of Net access via Ethernet jacks in the rooms.
:) along its extent, much less modem POPs. About the only two things you can count on are 1-800 phone numbers and electricity. You can't even count on having RJ-11 jacks available, but at least three-prong grounded electrical outlets have been required by electrical code for decades now.
.uk as well, thus letting him sign up and cancel with much less trouble. By the way, 1-800 service will not be free, even with the AOL "free hours".
You obviously have never stayed in hotels between the Mississippi river and the Rocky Mountains. Or at least not one that charges less than $200/night. While I have seen a few places with modem jacks, I have never seen hotels with Ethernet jacks! And even with modem jacks, they may have only a limited number of phone lines, so you still won't be able to dial out.
And he's going down freaking Route 66! Aside from its source end in Chicago, it goes through some of the most unwired parts of the country! Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Amarillo ain't exactly high-tech cities, but they're the best he'll find.
As has been mentioned before, it's hard enough to find gasoline (aka petrol
I would have to second the person who suggested Compu$erve, as they should have just about as much POP presence as AOL, and they have a decent business presence in
And cybercafes? ROFL! Even the libraries in all but the largest cities along the way can't be expected to have internet terminals. It's not quite the third world, but someone from the east coast might have a hard time believing just how vast the gap is between cities out there.
The difference is in how many names you are sitting on. Just a couple gotten with the intent of using them is not cyber-squatting, and you will not burn in digital hell for your sins.
The real cybersquatters have dozens or even hundreds of domains, then point them all to "under construction" or "for sale" web pages. May they bit rot in hell.
If it is a trademark of your company, it's probably a good idea to hold on to it. Set up a web page under it to redirect to your company's "real" web page, but keep it maintained and paid for. Trademark law in the USA has this nasty little "use it or lose it" provision that you have to enforce your trademark or you lose all rights it.
If it's a name unrelated to any name your company uses or plans to use, I suppose it would be a good idea to sell it. Set up a web page under it indicating it is for sale, and leave that up for a couple of months before auctioning it. Give it an absurd price like a million dollars or so at first (depending on how good a name it is), just in case there's a sucker out there with more money than sense, but remember to remove mention of the price if you put it up for auction!
No, if you rent a single CD (not one CD but a single release containing about 4 songs) from a rental shop in Japan, you'll pay about 150-200Y (1.50$ to 2$ american), maximum.
Well, I didn't say anything about how much the rentals cost, because I didn't know anything about that, but you have a really good point.
In my original post, I was going to say something about renting a CD and then ripping it (to MP3 or CD-R) instead of just taping it, but I couldn't come up with the right words. Copying to MD isn't quite as "open source", but still just as effective.
When you compare this download thing to renting a CD and then copying it to MD, which also doesn't let you make a copy of the copy, you have something almost identical to what Sony is trying to do. The only difference is that an MD-discman is a little bit bigger than their "music pen".
Actually, there's one small difference. It's moving bits, not atoms. If it weren't for the "Japan-only" thing, this would make it possible for people who were not in Japan to import music without having to do overseas mail-order (expen$ive $hipping) or wait for local import stores to receive their own bulk-orders.
But as we know Sony is aiming for world domination anyhow, it is obvious they aren't doing this out of compassion for J-pop fans outside of Japan.
...and you really don't need to be able to read Japanese to find out what it's about, because they put up an English page. I can read some Japanese, but I didn't need to.
:-) price of 350 yen! (about $3.50 US)
/.'ers should love: you have to use Windows Media Player! That's right, Windoze only! I think there is a non WMP player (called "Type E"), but I would expect it too to only runs under Windoze. Yes, I know that Microsoft is "considering" a Linux version of WMP, but I wouldn't be surprised if this music distribution system didn't work with Linux even then.
Anyhow, this is indeed SDMI, and you are only allowed to have a copy on one computer and transfer it one time to a digital device, for the low, low
The compression is Sony's ATRAC (the same one used in MiniDisc, which I've heard is a better quality compression format than MP3), and here's the part that
Their site says that "bitmusic will only be available to consumers in Japan; access from locations outside Japan is restricted.". I don't know how they plan to do this, other than by checking IP block ranges (post-CIDR IP blocks are assigned geographically, and I think Japan had only a limited number of IP blocks before CIDR routing was implemented).
And you have to turn on JavaShit to use the web site.
As for the cost, you have to understand the music market in Japan. CDs in Japan tend to cost about 3200 yen (about $30), though two-disc soundtrack sets are usually only a few bucks more. I think it's that high because CD rental and taping of rentals is legal in Japan. CD singles (usually two songs + karaoke tracks) cost on the order of 1000 yen (I think). So the cost really is comparable to that of a single track on a full CD. Oh, and for some reason I do not understand, in Japan, all CDs go out of print two years after original release. Apparently, this happens no matter how popular they are.
Someone needs to snag that picture of a 2x4 brick and use it as the /. icon for Legos!
Pan is one I was specifically referring to. I had to upgrade quite a few Gnome packages to get it to work (still a useful learning experience), then was rewarded with a segfault upon opening my first message. :-(
I would also like to see GUI news programs use windows with vertically divided panes, so that I can see both a lot of headers and long messages all at once without getting RSI from all the scroll bar usage.
Or better yet, separate windows for each newsgroup's list of headers and for each individual message. What is this obsession with cramming everything into a single window with half a dozen panes/frames anyhow? This is a windowing system, not a web browser! So use more windows!
Are you just being a silly First Poster, or do you really believe this?
Not only does it not pass the "mom test", but I'm pretty damn good with computers, and it took me a couple of months just to figure out how to properly configure XFree86.
Most of the X config utilities suck rocks, and keep trying to give you modelines with wierd sync rates because they think your monitor can handle them. Just let me pick the resolution and vertical sync from a list of VESA standard rates, please. I'll go in and edit the config file when I have the freaking time to tweak things.
So far, I have found only two useful installers. Xconfigurator at least bothers to put a whole bunch of standard sync rates (with the correct sync polarity) into the config file where you can comment out the unwanted rates. And the configuration from TurboLinux 4.0 lets you choose the vertical sync from within their X setup program itself.
SAX and XF86Setup both try to put in wierd sync rates, and I don't think either of them got the sync polarity right for my old NEC Multisync 4D at 1024x768.
And then there's the issue of useless installs. Trying to install a "Gnome Workstation" in SUSE 6.2 gives you something almost completely useless, and using anything but the TurboLinux window manager in TL 4.0 gives you completely useless setups, some of which aren't even configured to give you an xterm or "Run" item on the menus!
After many evenings spent on trying to make a Linux desktop system (as opposed to a server in the other room), I have finally settled on RH 6.1 as the most usable Gnome install without having to search over half the net downloading stuff.
I still use MacOS to read email and usenet. If I could find a usable GUI newsreader for which I didn't have to figure out which packages to install to get it to compile, only to segfault when reading the first message, that would be a start. But what I want is something as usable as NewsWatcher. I also want to be able to edit text and read email and news in Japanese, and MacOS 9.0 has really good support for that.
Co-incidentally, I installed Netscape 4.7 on my machine that only had IE installed. One of the first sites I went to featured a doubleclick ad for Telus, the phone company where I live. I never gave out any information about myself with the new browser, so they are definately tracking beyond just the cookie files. Either they are doing reverse-DNS lookups, or track the fact that I had just been logged in with the same IP with a different browser and made the transistion themselves.
Did you fill in your e-mail address as requested when you installed Netscape? They can get that information without using cookies. Then when you connect to them, wham bam, they can give you a freshly baked cookie based on a database lookup of your e-mail address.
IMHO, a web browser should be used only for web browsing, and not for reading usenet or email. So I always set my email address to "president@whitehouse.gov" or some similar bogosity.
One other possiblity is that they could have looked up your IP block geographically. Even with ISPs that are located in more than one city, the dialups themselves have fixed IP block ranges, so it is not impossible to determine your city from your IP address. It just takes time to build the database.
I basically grew up hacking on the TRS-80, and all this brings back a few memories.
One thing that I see in this interview where I have to agree with BillG is about the patch points for the BASIC ROM. Having personally disassembled both the Z-80 and 6809 versions, and written many patches and extensions just for the fun of it back in my high school and college days, I agree that the kind of support that would be needed to document them is enormous.
Basically, anyone who is a good enough programmer to use those things is a good enough programmer to figure it out on his own. Besides, you need to understand how the whole ROM works and the coding style before you can use them anyhow. Use the Binary, Luke!
I don't understand why DBK was so hung up on this particular point. Well, I do see his point, but I also see that it would have been pretty near impossible to document this in a way that it would be usable.
But I will say this about the ROM. I could only find about 35 bytes worth of suboptimal code in the old Level II BASIC ROMs. This is in comparison with the ColecoVision BIOS ROM, of which I've found over 1K out of the 8K of code that can be optimized. BillG certainly knew how to program the 8080/Z-80 back in those days.
I would expect that the "coating" isn't on the outside of the disk. It's in the middle of the sandwich, next to the data layer.
Sorry, nice try. A DVD is a sandwich of two polycarbonate discs, with a layer of glue between them. Each of the discs has pits stamped into one side, then covered with a reflective material like aluminum. The pit side of both discs are toward the inside. In the case of a single-layer disc, the second disc is a dummy, and is often stamped with a picture. (There are rumors that scrap discs are used for the other side on a few DVDs, but you'd have to remove the label paint to know for sure.)
You can't put anything between the disc and the data layer, because the data layer is the inside surface of the disc.
This only leaves two other options. Either put it in the polycarbonate, or paint it on the outside surface. You can't control the thickness of the plastic, and the thickness of the degrading material can be controlled, ergo it is painted on the outside surface.
I think the real problem with making a "backup" of these discs is that they will be featureless pan & scan transfers, with no extras, probably not even a menu. And maybe even with wonderful uninterruptable 5-minute promo ads in the "FBI time" after you insert a disc. Bleah.
The DIVX business model relied on replays after the original playback period expired. This was where they were going to make all their money. Not by having you throw out the discs, but by having you turn your own home in to a "branch office" of the rental store.
It probably failed because most renters just want to see the movie once, and never again.
So this scheme is going to have to have a lot lower manufacturing costs than DIVX if it is going to break even. Maybe they can save a quarter by using paper sleeves instead of cardboard "jewel" boxes, but they still have to press a DVD-ROM either way.
And since DIVX was software only, there was no materials cost involved in the scheme (beyond the support in the player, which customers paid $100 for, another strike against DIVX!) other than the CPU time to do the encryption.
But this new scheme requires the processing of actual atoms, so it has an inherently higher cost of production. It will cost more to create a disk which will generate less potential revenue than DIVX.
One problem I see with this is that the coating is just that... a coating. The data is in the middle of the disc, like the jelly in a peanut butter sandwich.
Then someone will come out with a "DVD Cleaning Liquid" which removes the ugly... uh... stain. Yeah, that's it, it's just stained. Yeah, I accidentally poured hot grits on my DVD. That's it, that's the ticket.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that optical discs have been degraded with a coating, just the first time for a "time-delay" coating. The original DiscoVision laserdiscs often used a "scrap" side for any title that used an odd number of sides. (Laserdisc is two layers bonded together, just like DVD.) These extra sides were coated with hairspray-like substance, which can be removed with isopropyl alcohol.
So what happens if the phone rings or you have to take a crap while watching a "this disc will self-destruct in ten minutes" DVD? And what kind of shelf life does the coating have? Will DVDs need a "freshness date" on them?
Besides, do people really want throwaway DVDs? Sure it can be a pain to return rentals, but you eventually have to go back to get more rentals anyhow. One big problem with DIVX was that you had to go all the way to Circus City, of which there might be one or two in any given city, rather than a local video rental place, of which there would likely be one within two miles of where you live.
Go outside and get some fresh air, already! The big room with the blue and/or gray and/or black ceiling won't hurt you.