"Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapter"
Do you remember these adaptors? They were 1" wide rings of plastic that had tiny clips on them so they could grasp a 3" cd and pad it out to 5". That should work fine for these slot-loaders; they certainly did on our old car-cd slot loader, anyway.
Ok, lets ignore for one moment the fact that no-one would run out and buy the tens of albums a week that some people take from servers just because they are there.
Since most people copying mp3s don't care that much about the sound quality, they wouldn't be buying the $15 CD. $9 cassette tapes for them! Or can they play a game where just because REM's Reveal album comes in a hyper-expensive limited edition book version mp3ing it counts as $40 business lost, not $15?
Come to think of it, if I were to post some of my vinyl rarities up could my local collectors shop claim $100 per track in lost business?
"I agree the U.S. makes the most pollution. The U.S. is also responsible for the most manufacture with the highest worker efficiency"
Well, you see thats the basis of the argument, when you get down to it. The Europeans want to argue from a basis of pollution per head of population, and the Americans (well, Dubya at least) argue that we should measure pollution per unit of GDP. Never the twain shall meet it would appear, to occasionally hilarious results, e.g. the time one/GDP 'expert' was arguing on 'Today' (the top UK news programme) and was all like "no, if you'd just agree that this is the correct way to measure, then I wouldn't have to talk to your country like you're a three year old". Surreality to your breakfast table, really.
It really boils down to if the argument 'we build more stuff than you, so of course we deserve to generate more pollution' makes sense. Personally, I think its another demonstration of how Bush thinks in terms of companies rather than people, but I'm an outsider so your disagreement is understandable.
I'd point out that Thief and to a fair extent Deus Ex aren't 'pure' shooters at all, and as leaders of the sneak-em-up genre are as close to being first-person RPGs as they are to a shoot everything and run like crazy blaster such as Quake 2 or Doom. Goldeneye is also very laid-back, and actually makes you play a bit more like Bond than a Duke Nukem character. So both your most popular genres are quite broad, and between them encompass most major PC releases of recent times.
Ok, I'll disagree. I have all three of those platforms and didn't buy Tony Hawks. I did get it for the GBA however, and much prefer the 720-style view. I've played the Playstation version a little and didn't like it at all. All in all, as with every list it says more about the compilers than the games though. Warcraft II above Quake? Mario 64 not in the top three? I'm sure everyone can find something to disagree with.
Well, as I'd have to think for quite a while before agreeing to put it at anything other than number 1 this is quite clearly a matter of opinion. Don't forget that this was voted for by a whole bunch of people rather than an arbitrary list, so someone must agree with me that its really good. SMB3 was great, but to this day people try to release third-person 3d platform games, and to this day there hasn't been an equal to its perfect control and camera. Just go grab a Tomb Raider or Sonic Adventure game and laugh at how hard the rest of the world finds making something so intuitive.
Yes, it was kind of amusing to see all the papers that Morris was attacking saying that he was sick. How dare he make a program that makes fun of stupid journo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a serious problem that should be left to 'professionals' like the News Of The World to comment on?
The NSPCC even had the gall to _complain_ that it might make celebs more wary of publicising campaigns without paying any attention to what they are saying! The fact that these people fell for the nonsense says a few rather depressing things about the quality of the real charities campaigning as well.
Forget just using CDDA for PCs being a problem. I and many others I know use the digital out from our players because the amplifier has a superior decoder. This is all fun and games little Britney's NSync single, but the moment you kill an audiophile's B&W speakers because they sensibly use digital connectors lawsuits could get _really_ expensive...
"Athlon T-bird become the value market chip once Athlon 4's hit the streets?"
I'm just making an educated guess here, but I would strongly suspect that any 'Duron 4' would be a reduced cache version of the Athlon 4, just as the Celeron and Duron were cache-inhibited versions of their siblings. As well as this, I'm sure AMD want to maximise the number of chips with their new instructions on as well; the enhanced performance of Athlon 4, just like the Pentium 4 relies to some extent on those new features being exploited.
To killfile Katz articles is simple.
1) login
2) choose preferences
3) tick the box marked JonKatz under 'Exclude stories from the homepage: Authors'
4) save the change
aah, thanks for clearing that up. I guess I've read too many/. trolls to catch the 'funny' rather than 'nasty' tone, though now you say it I feel a bit dumb for missing it. You're right there will be a difference, but then as someone who only accepts my minidisc player for walkman use I'm too picky to bother with 128kbps recording for anything other than live bootlegs anyway. Oh, and as the proud owner of a proper good old fashioned Soundblaster 64 card and a decent hifi I don't have too much trouble with the analogue way - its been great for cutting CDR compilations of my 12" vinyl records.
Actually, while you're being informative do you know if the digital out from my CD player into a soundcard would already have been error corrected, or if the protection is still in place? If the player will fix the digital stream before it hits my fibre then the 'protection' is toothless.
Its been mentioned in just about every story about these 'copy protected' CDs that because many modern car CD players act like CD ROM drives (attempting to use the TOC for CD Text, random play etc) that the 'protection' stops them playing on them. Unfortunately until we know for sure what discs have this on we can't confirm that.
So says the individual calling someone 'nitwit', 'stupid', someone who is 'polluting the online earspace' and shoud 'die an agonizing death'. MP3 is lossy, and frankly if you want to complain about sound quality then start with the company who decided to break the error correction algorithm on the CD, who is sticking deliberate distortion and hiss onto the signal, rather than someone who points out a workaround for all those who are sufficiently uncaring about sound quality as to use a format with lossy compression in the first place.
"The present invention contemplates a system for reproducing information in material objects at a point of sale location wherein the information to be reproduced is provided at the point of sale location from a location remote with respect to the point of sale location, an owner authorization code is provided to the point of sale location in reponse to receiving a request code from the point of sale location requesting to reproducing predetermined information in a material object, and the predetermined information is reproduced in a material object at the point of sale location in response to receiving the owner authorization code."
Maybe I'm stupid, but from the abstract above, and a quick scan of the patent its constantly referring to the reproduction of material objects. I thought that patents were specific enough that if you say 'material object' then 'non-material information' doesn't get covered. By bending the meaning a bit I can see how this might be construed to cover, say one of those machines that can download and bind a book for you in a shop, but I can't see it meaning I have to pay to ftp a copy of Counterstrike, as there is no 'point of sale' there is no transaction and the exact material object isn't reproduced. Given that data down networks is older than 85 anyway (I remember strange TV programs that broadcast simple programs when you hooked your BBC micro up to them) I can't see this as right.
At the risk of a -1, redundant, if you could get to the slashdotted article you'd find that they know "If it can be played, it can be ripped" so have gone for the solution of making a sufficiently broken, non-standards conforming disc that it can't be played on hardware with any decent kind of error correction. Most cheap so-called 'hi-fi' cd players junked proper error correction circuits a long time ago as needless expenditure, which is why cds seem so unreliable and easy to scratch compared to in the past, and they are counting on computer-only users and people with quality equipment to be a small enough minority to get away with it. Personally, I don't own a player that doesn't have a digital out connection, so I can't see me playing these broken discs anyway.
Mind you, I'd most likely just buy the vinyl if they try this on something I like...
You see uniforms as dangerous? I guess its probably cultural difference time again. There is a certain historical thing about it, but the way I saw it was that you'll probably end up having to wear a suit at work when you leave, so you might as well associate smart dressing with hard work all along. I suspect this is one of the main reasons casual dress is much more popular in the US workplace than the UK.
re: population growth with killing of female babies.
Its something that has been seen several places; basically this is happening frequently not universally. Male children are considered much more of an asset (partially the tradition of dowries, partially due to the earning potential of men in the society), so families aren't often prepared to face the relative financial burden of girls. Also, under population controls (e.g. China) the temptation to hush up the daughter so that they are allowed to have a son is present. At this point though the issue of population isn't really an issue however, so your question kind of becomes moot.
That whooshing sound was an in-joke flying over. You'll be needing one of these to get it. By all means uphold an Amazon boycott and buy it elsewhere if you wish, but they are easy to link to.
To be fair to the previous author, "WPA does not prevent typical hardware modifications" isn't necessarily the first conclusion you'd reach when you find your quantity of ram, serial id of graphics card and the serials from your IDE devices are encoded in it. Care to name which "typical hardware modifications" don't include upgrading your graphics card, adding more memory or getting a bigger hard-drive? Oh, I forgot, we can still go out and spend a fortune buying the latest iteration of Microsoft Mouse "Now with a 17.5% faster scan rate!"
"$300 console plus TV/monitor isn't much cheaper than a PC"
Oops there. This is about the $100 Playstation and Dreamcast as far as I can see - no mention of the $300 PS2 anywhere in the blurb, anyway. Given that there is no internet solution available currently for the PS2 (although I don't know one for the Playstation either to be fair) this makes sense. Certainly, my cheap little Dreamcast makes a rather sweet internet solution for the price.
He didn't say he wanted Barney to be dead, he merely expressed that if Barney were reach the state of death the site in question explains how to achieve that he would love the strangely toned dinosaur. Legally, a world of difference, I'm sure you'll agree.
Thats a simple one to answer - if a hard drive doesn't have any moving parts, like, say a read/write head or platter, then it _is_ one of these portable storage devices. The big difference is capacity for price. I dread to think how expensive 72Gb of SmartMedia would be.
This isn't a net censorship issue, per se. You can hide behind all the net anonymity you want, but if you tell them where to deal with the money you win or lose then they know who you are.
Slashdot Mirror
"Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapter"
Do you remember these adaptors? They were 1" wide rings of plastic that had tiny clips on them so they could grasp a 3" cd and pad it out to 5". That should work fine for these slot-loaders; they certainly did on our old car-cd slot loader, anyway.
Ok, lets ignore for one moment the fact that no-one would run out and buy the tens of albums a week that some people take from servers just because they are there.
Since most people copying mp3s don't care that much about the sound quality, they wouldn't be buying the $15 CD. $9 cassette tapes for them! Or can they play a game where just because REM's Reveal album comes in a hyper-expensive limited edition book version mp3ing it counts as $40 business lost, not $15?
Come to think of it, if I were to post some of my vinyl rarities up could my local collectors shop claim $100 per track in lost business?
Its true, thats probably the earliest recorded date of 'First Post!' being posted.
Remember its never a bug its a feature.
"I agree the U.S. makes the most pollution. The U.S. is also responsible for the most manufacture with the highest worker efficiency"
/GDP 'expert' was arguing on 'Today' (the top UK news programme) and was all like "no, if you'd just agree that this is the correct way to measure, then I wouldn't have to talk to your country like you're a three year old". Surreality to your breakfast table, really.
Well, you see thats the basis of the argument, when you get down to it. The Europeans want to argue from a basis of pollution per head of population, and the Americans (well, Dubya at least) argue that we should measure pollution per unit of GDP. Never the twain shall meet it would appear, to occasionally hilarious results, e.g. the time one
It really boils down to if the argument 'we build more stuff than you, so of course we deserve to generate more pollution' makes sense. Personally, I think its another demonstration of how Bush thinks in terms of companies rather than people, but I'm an outsider so your disagreement is understandable.
I'd point out that Thief and to a fair extent Deus Ex aren't 'pure' shooters at all, and as leaders of the sneak-em-up genre are as close to being first-person RPGs as they are to a shoot everything and run like crazy blaster such as Quake 2 or Doom. Goldeneye is also very laid-back, and actually makes you play a bit more like Bond than a Duke Nukem character. So both your most popular genres are quite broad, and between them encompass most major PC releases of recent times.
Ok, I'll disagree. I have all three of those platforms and didn't buy Tony Hawks. I did get it for the GBA however, and much prefer the 720-style view. I've played the Playstation version a little and didn't like it at all. All in all, as with every list it says more about the compilers than the games though. Warcraft II above Quake? Mario 64 not in the top three? I'm sure everyone can find something to disagree with.
Well, as I'd have to think for quite a while before agreeing to put it at anything other than number 1 this is quite clearly a matter of opinion. Don't forget that this was voted for by a whole bunch of people rather than an arbitrary list, so someone must agree with me that its really good. SMB3 was great, but to this day people try to release third-person 3d platform games, and to this day there hasn't been an equal to its perfect control and camera. Just go grab a Tomb Raider or Sonic Adventure game and laugh at how hard the rest of the world finds making something so intuitive.
Yes, it was kind of amusing to see all the papers that Morris was attacking saying that he was sick. How dare he make a program that makes fun of stupid journo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a serious problem that should be left to 'professionals' like the News Of The World to comment on?
The NSPCC even had the gall to _complain_ that it might make celebs more wary of publicising campaigns without paying any attention to what they are saying! The fact that these people fell for the nonsense says a few rather depressing things about the quality of the real charities campaigning as well.
Forget just using CDDA for PCs being a problem. I and many others I know use the digital out from our players because the amplifier has a superior decoder. This is all fun and games little Britney's NSync single, but the moment you kill an audiophile's B&W speakers because they sensibly use digital connectors lawsuits could get _really_ expensive...
"Athlon T-bird become the value market chip once Athlon 4's hit the streets?"
I'm just making an educated guess here, but I would strongly suspect that any 'Duron 4' would be a reduced cache version of the Athlon 4, just as the Celeron and Duron were cache-inhibited versions of their siblings. As well as this, I'm sure AMD want to maximise the number of chips with their new instructions on as well; the enhanced performance of Athlon 4, just like the Pentium 4 relies to some extent on those new features being exploited.
To killfile Katz articles is simple.
1) login
2) choose preferences
3) tick the box marked JonKatz under 'Exclude stories from the homepage: Authors'
4) save the change
bingo - no more Katz stories.
aah, thanks for clearing that up. I guess I've read too many /. trolls to catch the 'funny' rather than 'nasty' tone, though now you say it I feel a bit dumb for missing it. You're right there will be a difference, but then as someone who only accepts my minidisc player for walkman use I'm too picky to bother with 128kbps recording for anything other than live bootlegs anyway. Oh, and as the proud owner of a proper good old fashioned Soundblaster 64 card and a decent hifi I don't have too much trouble with the analogue way - its been great for cutting CDR compilations of my 12" vinyl records.
Actually, while you're being informative do you know if the digital out from my CD player into a soundcard would already have been error corrected, or if the protection is still in place? If the player will fix the digital stream before it hits my fibre then the 'protection' is toothless.
Its been mentioned in just about every story about these 'copy protected' CDs that because many modern car CD players act like CD ROM drives (attempting to use the TOC for CD Text, random play etc) that the 'protection' stops them playing on them. Unfortunately until we know for sure what discs have this on we can't confirm that.
"and then you spew that into an mp3 encoder"
So says the individual calling someone 'nitwit', 'stupid', someone who is 'polluting the online earspace' and shoud 'die an agonizing death'. MP3 is lossy, and frankly if you want to complain about sound quality then start with the company who decided to break the error correction algorithm on the CD, who is sticking deliberate distortion and hiss onto the signal, rather than someone who points out a workaround for all those who are sufficiently uncaring about sound quality as to use a format with lossy compression in the first place.
Still, nice trolling - I certainly caught it.
"The present invention contemplates a system for reproducing information in material objects at a point of sale location wherein the information to be reproduced is provided at the point of sale location from a location remote with respect to the point of sale location, an owner authorization code is provided to the point of sale location in reponse to receiving a request code from the point of sale location requesting to reproducing predetermined information in a material object, and the predetermined information is reproduced in a material object at the point of sale location in response to receiving the owner authorization code."
Maybe I'm stupid, but from the abstract above, and a quick scan of the patent its constantly referring to the reproduction of material objects. I thought that patents were specific enough that if you say 'material object' then 'non-material information' doesn't get covered. By bending the meaning a bit I can see how this might be construed to cover, say one of those machines that can download and bind a book for you in a shop, but I can't see it meaning I have to pay to ftp a copy of Counterstrike, as there is no 'point of sale' there is no transaction and the exact material object isn't reproduced. Given that data down networks is older than 85 anyway (I remember strange TV programs that broadcast simple programs when you hooked your BBC micro up to them) I can't see this as right.
At the risk of a -1, redundant, if you could get to the slashdotted article you'd find that they know "If it can be played, it can be ripped" so have gone for the solution of making a sufficiently broken, non-standards conforming disc that it can't be played on hardware with any decent kind of error correction. Most cheap so-called 'hi-fi' cd players junked proper error correction circuits a long time ago as needless expenditure, which is why cds seem so unreliable and easy to scratch compared to in the past, and they are counting on computer-only users and people with quality equipment to be a small enough minority to get away with it. Personally, I don't own a player that doesn't have a digital out connection, so I can't see me playing these broken discs anyway.
Mind you, I'd most likely just buy the vinyl if they try this on something I like...
You see uniforms as dangerous? I guess its probably cultural difference time again. There is a certain historical thing about it, but the way I saw it was that you'll probably end up having to wear a suit at work when you leave, so you might as well associate smart dressing with hard work all along. I suspect this is one of the main reasons casual dress is much more popular in the US workplace than the UK.
re: population growth with killing of female babies.
Its something that has been seen several places; basically this is happening frequently not universally. Male children are considered much more of an asset (partially the tradition of dowries, partially due to the earning potential of men in the society), so families aren't often prepared to face the relative financial burden of girls. Also, under population controls (e.g. China) the temptation to hush up the daughter so that they are allowed to have a son is present. At this point though the issue of population isn't really an issue however, so your question kind of becomes moot.
That whooshing sound was an in-joke flying over. You'll be needing one of these to get it. By all means uphold an Amazon boycott and buy it elsewhere if you wish, but they are easy to link to.
To be fair to the previous author, "WPA does not prevent typical hardware modifications" isn't necessarily the first conclusion you'd reach when you find your quantity of ram, serial id of graphics card and the serials from your IDE devices are encoded in it. Care to name which "typical hardware modifications" don't include upgrading your graphics card, adding more memory or getting a bigger hard-drive? Oh, I forgot, we can still go out and spend a fortune buying the latest iteration of Microsoft Mouse "Now with a 17.5% faster scan rate!"
"$300 console plus TV/monitor isn't much cheaper than a PC"
Oops there. This is about the $100 Playstation and Dreamcast as far as I can see - no mention of the $300 PS2 anywhere in the blurb, anyway. Given that there is no internet solution available currently for the PS2 (although I don't know one for the Playstation either to be fair) this makes sense. Certainly, my cheap little Dreamcast makes a rather sweet internet solution for the price.
He didn't say he wanted Barney to be dead, he merely expressed that if Barney were reach the state of death the site in question explains how to achieve that he would love the strangely toned dinosaur. Legally, a world of difference, I'm sure you'll agree.
'You know, for drinks'
The Coen Bros. always rule, and this time they are even on-topic!
Thats a simple one to answer - if a hard drive doesn't have any moving parts, like, say a read/write head or platter, then it _is_ one of these portable storage devices. The big difference is capacity for price. I dread to think how expensive 72Gb of SmartMedia would be.
This isn't a net censorship issue, per se. You can hide behind all the net anonymity you want, but if you tell them where to deal with the money you win or lose then they know who you are.