Why do you need a website? Both article and blurb point out that Mac users won't even notice it's there, which means it's got to be a Windows executable triggered by the Autoplay.
So turn off Autoplay (either with TweakUI or holding down shift when you put the disc in).
By the time I spec up a machine how I want it, Dell hardware isn't stunningly cheap - you get absolutely fleeced for drive and memory upgrades. But what I can't do myself is compete with what they charge for the legit copy of XP and Excel that my wife needs (and no, OpenSource alternatives don't do the job, as it's not about quality but guaranteed compatibility and it working the way she's used to).
I think there's two elements to that, though. Firstly, they don't appear to be using every one of the methods in that patent right now - it's a bit of a landgrab of everything they've considered, including a bunch of stuff to deliberately confuse spammers trying to improve their ratings.
But also, they may be assuming you're rather linear in your working methods, and mark down sites where you came back again for another search on the same terms straight away.
I see you've neglected step 0 on your Tivo list, however - buy subscription to Tivo, at the same price as I pay for the actual channels I currently watch.
Sure VCR programming sucks, but it beats paying a £10/month subscription.
I think the handling is the grandparent's point. Making a car that has a top speed or even acceleration similar to a Ferrari or Porsche isn't that difficult (I'm seriously tempted to make a comment about how even American manufacturers can manage it). A metric shedload of turbos and other shenanigans make lots of far cheaper cars get there.
The point about a decent European sportscar isn't that it can get to x mph in y seconds, but that you can do z mph round a bend without ending up in a hedge, in some style and comfort, without having to use only the top 2000 rpms before the engine goes boom in order to have any torque whatsoever.
Sorry? You've lost me. But then, I was removing unsightly 'My ' prefixes from Computer, Documents and so on ever since Windows '95 (with a bit of help from TweakUI here and there).
The patent seems to be specifically for Project Gotham. Which is odd, because the Kudos points thing was present in the first game, Metropolis Street Racer, too.
The really interesting part is that if it applies to Project Gotham, then it's also true of their previous game, Metropolis Street Racer (indeed, PGR is really just MSR: Special Edition in terms of actual gameplay). Which was released on the Dreamcast, before the XBox was even a neat idea.
Our informal review of the records at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) revealed a relative dearth of patent applications for the film industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the film industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales. Why is that? Patents, by their very nature, grant the right to exclude your competitors from stealing the fruits of your labor, and yet this powerful tool appears to be overlooked by the majority of the industry.
So, who will be the first to patent the three act structure, the mismatched buddy pairing and so on? Just think how much money EON would have made if they'd only had the sense to patent Spy movies with fancy gadgets?
Not only do you have to reinstall Windows, but if the damn thing has fucked your burner software sideways, you can't even take a backup first.
I'm sure I'm not the first to advocate the locking up of anyone responsible for this shit; it's clearly an offense under the Computer Misuse Act carrying a custodial sentence to do that.
More than that, whether enough money is gained from ex-pirates to offset the number of us who'll be avoiding these "CDs" (in the loosest sense, since they obviously aren't Redbook) because anything which interferes with ripping will break iTunes and so we can't put the music on our iPods / iRivers / chooseyourownmp3players.
Surely the whole point of fancy low-level randomness is that generic off-the-shelf writers can't do these tricks?
Apart from anything, if the first writer can, then so can the second one, so they're scuppered either way.
Fundamentally, though, all these fancypants copy-protection schemes hit the problem that I'll be straight back down the shop with the disc in my hand to complain if iTunes won't touch it. Everything I buy needs to play in (a) my in-car CD player, (b) my NAD home system and (c) my iPod. If any of the above fail, then I don't want the disc.
Since iTunes rips files as unencrypted AAC, copy protection schemes that work (fortunately I've yet to find one) mean the disc is worthless to me.
What has a point is the massive database they get to build with everyone's personal information in, in order to keep tabs on us all, sorry, "verify the ID Card details".
Survey after survey conducted for the Government shows that only a minority are actually against the idea of ID cards. The fact that people for them don't have a fecking clue, and this minority consists of everyone who actually understands how their ludicrous claims would have to be implemented seems to have passed Blair by.
Sorry, wrong answer. This week the cost is £93 + whatever the setup costs come to.
And that's the estimate based on a wild guess that someone will just happen to invent all the missing technology all by themselves somewhere between now and 2008, so we won't have to pay for it.
If they do it for less than £15B I'll be so shocked I might actually get one. No, that really would be going too far.
The people building this will be EDS (yes, those guys who hosed 60,000 Department Of Work And Pensions machines a while back by manually copying XP binaries all over the Windows 2000 system tree).
We know this, because no other company wants to touch the contract with a fecking barge pole, for obvious reasons. There is no way in hell they'll get anything other than bad publicity over it, whether it works or (as is 100% guaranteed) doesn't.
Re:Now there's no point in subscribing
on
Morpheus is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'd just love to be Mr. Ruin-a-movie, but as anyone who has had the misfortune to sit through Revolutions knows, we've all been well and truly beaten to that title by Andy and Larry.
Given you've posted AC, you'll probably not see this but...
How exactly does the iRiver do this, then? When I played with a friend's H340, we copied some tracks over, and I think you could only get at them through some routes and not others. I take it there's a "scan the drive and update the database" program you need to run seperately, then?
Assuming that's the case, I'm not surprised Apple decided that its users didn't need to know about all that crap and just had iTunes do the database thing automatically.
There's two different versions of simplicity to be balanced here, though. The simplicity of just dropping files onto the drive to put music on it, versus the simplicity of fast access to tracks via multiple smart playlists, multiple hand-built playlists, genre, artist or track.
The latter required them to stick all the info in a database to get both performance and battery efficiency. In turn, this means forcing the user to either upload in a way that the database is kept up to date, or to go down iRiver's method of having you do that as a seperate act. Choosing iTunes was just a design decision, and a very good one in my eyes - the horrible UI was why I didn't buy an iRiver H140 instead, even though they look shinier and have a pair of optical connections.
Given how simple it is to get the files off an iPod (cd to iPod_Control\Music on the drive it mounts as under Windows, then copy away to your heart's content), this strikes me as rather less about locking things down, and rather more about Apple's standard working method of not presenting things to the user that most users don't care about, and the few that do are probably savvy enough to get at it the hard way.
The clever part in the plugin is that it updates the iPod's DB and Playlists to do UPloading without going via iTunes, should you have some sort of aversion to the program.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you need a website? Both article and blurb point out that Mac users won't even notice it's there, which means it's got to be a Windows executable triggered by the Autoplay.
So turn off Autoplay (either with TweakUI or holding down shift when you put the disc in).
It's got to be that, yes - the article claims it doesn't cause Apple users any problems at all, which is a bit of a dead giveaway.
Since I've turned off autoplay on the CD drive, I'm guessing I won't notice anything either.
The software is the real difference, yes.
By the time I spec up a machine how I want it, Dell hardware isn't stunningly cheap - you get absolutely fleeced for drive and memory upgrades. But what I can't do myself is compete with what they charge for the legit copy of XP and Excel that my wife needs (and no, OpenSource alternatives don't do the job, as it's not about quality but guaranteed compatibility and it working the way she's used to).
That's the way I search already; I agree that it's a lousy way to judge a site's worth.
But then, there's no indication that they actually use all the methods in the patent. This could well be a poisson-rouge.
Citing Corby's case isn't exactly an example of how things _should_ work though, is it.
To give another real-world example, should you be guilty of posession if there's kiddy pics in your junkmail?
I think there's two elements to that, though. Firstly, they don't appear to be using every one of the methods in that patent right now - it's a bit of a landgrab of everything they've considered, including a bunch of stuff to deliberately confuse spammers trying to improve their ratings.
But also, they may be assuming you're rather linear in your working methods, and mark down sites where you came back again for another search on the same terms straight away.
I see you've neglected step 0 on your Tivo list, however - buy subscription to Tivo, at the same price as I pay for the actual channels I currently watch.
Sure VCR programming sucks, but it beats paying a £10/month subscription.
I think the handling is the grandparent's point. Making a car that has a top speed or even acceleration similar to a Ferrari or Porsche isn't that difficult (I'm seriously tempted to make a comment about how even American manufacturers can manage it). A metric shedload of turbos and other shenanigans make lots of far cheaper cars get there.
The point about a decent European sportscar isn't that it can get to x mph in y seconds, but that you can do z mph round a bend without ending up in a hedge, in some style and comfort, without having to use only the top 2000 rpms before the engine goes boom in order to have any torque whatsoever.
Sorry? You've lost me. But then, I was removing unsightly 'My ' prefixes from Computer, Documents and so on ever since Windows '95 (with a bit of help from TweakUI here and there).
The patent seems to be specifically for Project Gotham. Which is odd, because the Kudos points thing was present in the first game, Metropolis Street Racer, too.
The really interesting part is that if it applies to Project Gotham, then it's also true of their previous game, Metropolis Street Racer (indeed, PGR is really just MSR: Special Edition in terms of actual gameplay). Which was released on the Dreamcast, before the XBox was even a neat idea.
Our informal review of the records at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) revealed a relative dearth of patent applications for the film industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the film industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales. Why is that? Patents, by their very nature, grant the right to exclude your competitors from stealing the fruits of your labor, and yet this powerful tool appears to be overlooked by the majority of the industry.
So, who will be the first to patent the three act structure, the mismatched buddy pairing and so on? Just think how much money EON would have made if they'd only had the sense to patent Spy movies with fancy gadgets?
Not only do you have to reinstall Windows, but if the damn thing has fucked your burner software sideways, you can't even take a backup first.
I'm sure I'm not the first to advocate the locking up of anyone responsible for this shit; it's clearly an offense under the Computer Misuse Act carrying a custodial sentence to do that.
"The only thing preventing copy is a program running from the CD when using a certain Redmond OS."
Surely you need to cut an inch off the disc all round to fit it in the Cube anyway?
Oops. Wrong Redmond company...
More than that, whether enough money is gained from ex-pirates to offset the number of us who'll be avoiding these "CDs" (in the loosest sense, since they obviously aren't Redbook) because anything which interferes with ripping will break iTunes and so we can't put the music on our iPods / iRivers / chooseyourownmp3players.
Surely the whole point of fancy low-level randomness is that generic off-the-shelf writers can't do these tricks?
Apart from anything, if the first writer can, then so can the second one, so they're scuppered either way.
Fundamentally, though, all these fancypants copy-protection schemes hit the problem that I'll be straight back down the shop with the disc in my hand to complain if iTunes won't touch it. Everything I buy needs to play in (a) my in-car CD player, (b) my NAD home system and (c) my iPod. If any of the above fail, then I don't want the disc.
Since iTunes rips files as unencrypted AAC, copy protection schemes that work (fortunately I've yet to find one) mean the disc is worthless to me.
The ID cards don't have a point at all.
What has a point is the massive database they get to build with everyone's personal information in, in order to keep tabs on us all, sorry, "verify the ID Card details".
Survey after survey conducted for the Government shows that only a minority are actually against the idea of ID cards. The fact that people for them don't have a fecking clue, and this minority consists of everyone who actually understands how their ludicrous claims would have to be implemented seems to have passed Blair by.
Sorry, wrong answer. This week the cost is £93 + whatever the setup costs come to.
And that's the estimate based on a wild guess that someone will just happen to invent all the missing technology all by themselves somewhere between now and 2008, so we won't have to pay for it.
If they do it for less than £15B I'll be so shocked I might actually get one. No, that really would be going too far.
The people building this will be EDS (yes, those guys who hosed 60,000 Department Of Work And Pensions machines a while back by manually copying XP binaries all over the Windows 2000 system tree).
We know this, because no other company wants to touch the contract with a fecking barge pole, for obvious reasons. There is no way in hell they'll get anything other than bad publicity over it, whether it works or (as is 100% guaranteed) doesn't.
I'd just love to be Mr. Ruin-a-movie, but as anyone who has had the misfortune to sit through Revolutions knows, we've all been well and truly beaten to that title by Andy and Larry.
Given you've posted AC, you'll probably not see this but...
How exactly does the iRiver do this, then? When I played with a friend's H340, we copied some tracks over, and I think you could only get at them through some routes and not others. I take it there's a "scan the drive and update the database" program you need to run seperately, then?
Assuming that's the case, I'm not surprised Apple decided that its users didn't need to know about all that crap and just had iTunes do the database thing automatically.
As someone who did some Rocket Science at university, I'd have to say that it isn't exactly Brain Surgery.
There's two different versions of simplicity to be balanced here, though. The simplicity of just dropping files onto the drive to put music on it, versus the simplicity of fast access to tracks via multiple smart playlists, multiple hand-built playlists, genre, artist or track.
The latter required them to stick all the info in a database to get both performance and battery efficiency. In turn, this means forcing the user to either upload in a way that the database is kept up to date, or to go down iRiver's method of having you do that as a seperate act. Choosing iTunes was just a design decision, and a very good one in my eyes - the horrible UI was why I didn't buy an iRiver H140 instead, even though they look shinier and have a pair of optical connections.
Given how simple it is to get the files off an iPod (cd to iPod_Control\Music on the drive it mounts as under Windows, then copy away to your heart's content), this strikes me as rather less about locking things down, and rather more about Apple's standard working method of not presenting things to the user that most users don't care about, and the few that do are probably savvy enough to get at it the hard way.
The clever part in the plugin is that it updates the iPod's DB and Playlists to do UPloading without going via iTunes, should you have some sort of aversion to the program.