would like to see a more serious effort made to use existing laws against unfair trade practices, misrepresentation, computer fraud and abuse, before new technology-specific laws are passed
Here, here -- why aren't fraud and other bad-trade laws used more often? Is it a lack of resources? A cultural zeitgeist that embraces legal-gymnastics and rationalizations as legal compliance for prima faciae unethical conduct? Part of the current administration's pro-corporate/pro-business mindset?
It just seems that as long as you're not outright *stealing*, you can get away with pretty much anything, and it's not fraud. Has this always been the case?
There are a few anectodal stories about drives from the same manufacturing batch being likely to fail right around the same time.
That actually never occured to me, but at least where I work there's little that can be done about it. We buy HPaq servers, typically with enough drives for whatever the application is all at once, and the bureacracy makes part diversity impossible.
For worse or for better, though, since HPaq doesn't make drive anymore, it's not unusual to get different vendor's drives in the carriers.
I dunno, though, whether WriteNow was Word's equal with stuff like Mail Merge and tables.
It all depends on what you want to do. I went to do a mail merge for the first time in a long time, and the mail merge functionality in Office XP is so dag-blame complicated it took me the better part of an afternoon to sort it out.
It struck me that I could almost do Crystal-Reports level reporting with the XP Word mail merge functionality.
Embedding a wireless camera in the surfboard sounds interesting, as does the idea of a wireless camera attached to the surfer -- the PC just seems superfluous.
Besides, Endless Summer has some great surf footage, including on-board footage, and that was done with film cameras in the 1960s.
You can't get the 5.1 feeds at all on an SA Tivo, and even if someone has cracked the DTV stream and you could bit-extract the stream off of a DTivo, you'd still be looking at lengthy transcodes to MPEG2 for DVD.
I'm actually fine with my setup now. My home-brew DVD collection is great for airplanes and other trips where there are long hours with nothing to do.
Cheaper, perhaps, except that if a 2nd drive in the RAID5 array goes before that hotspare finishes synchronizing, your data is toast.
But how likely is that to happen? We've had RAID-5 based systems here as long as I can remember, and I can't remember a situation where two disks failed at once. The closest we came was a situation where a drive failed (no hotspare), and a lazy admin didn't verify that the rebuild happened. When another disk failed, the whole logical drive was lost. But that wasn't a spare or simultaneous failure issue, it was a dumbassness issue.
As far as RAID-6 goes, there's a Wikipedia entry on it, and it almost sounds like RAID-4's dedicated parity disk with mirroring of the parity drive. I've never seen a controller that actually implemented RAID-4 or 6, though. Usually it's 0, 1, 5, and 10.
You're right that just running the VT100 firmware wouldn't be any more useful than say, a VT100 itself.
I'd guess I'm imagining that the VM would naturally have to act as something of a UI/wrapper for the emulation session, if anything to map the IO from the PC hardware to the terminal's virtual hardware.
This layer could also allow for some of the more expected terminal emulation features, like session text capture, network functionality (telnet/ssh), window management, keyboard mapping, modem control, cut/paste, and so on.
The 'core' would be the actual terminal firmware, providing otherwise 100% perfect emulation, since it wouldn't be emulating a VT100, it WOULD be a VT100.
Instead of writing software that's supposed to follow the commands for the various flavors of terminal, why not instead an actual emulator that lets you run those terminals firmware? Even really good emulation software doesn't always get emulation just right, leading to annoying display glitches, or only arbitrary functions are supported leaving much of the original terminal's functionality out.
IIRC the VT100 was based on the 8080 CPU; why not apply the same techniques that MAME uses -- download the firmware and run the firmware in an emulator or VM and actually be using the terminal itself? Some of the on-screen functionality would have to be simulated due to the PC's lack of corresponding text modes and fonts, but that's what a GUI is for anyway, and similar to what game emulators due to account for the lack of specific hardware devices the original games had.
I'd imagine that the legal problems with this would be even less than the arcade people face, since the code inside those terminals isn't really worth any money to anyone.
A lot of good VT emulation variants (ANSI, Linux, SCOANSI, VT100, VT102, VT220), as well as ANSI color, very customizable in terms of keyboard (include an Emacs mode), ASCII/Zmodem sending, scripting, SSH1/2 (several standards supported), Telnet, TAPI and COM port mode.
It's worth the money; my version from '99 still runs fine under XP.
I wouldn't get the 5.1 feed onto DVDs. About 90% of the movies I record end up onto DVD-R simply because time prevents me from watching more than 2 a week.
If I watch HBO or any of the other movie channels live, I usually get a 5.1 signal off the cable box. Strangely, many movies on HBO offered in HD don't have 5.1 soundtracks, only 2.0 soundtracks, even though I know the movie has a 5.1 soundtrack on DVD.
I got a "package" that includes Encore, HBO and Cinemax, and I don't ever even watch PPV. I go through the schedule every week or so on the Tivo and program it to record all the movies that look remotely interesting. Those I don't watch on the Tivo I dump to my Panasonic DVD recorder (the one with the 80GB HDD), and then usually dump to DVD-R.
In about 8 months or so of doing this, I've accumulated around 100 DVDs of movies and rented maybe 10, usually because I was eager to see them or they were 'special' enough that the money was worth it to get the 5.1 soundtrack and widescreen presentation.
I can't remember a desktop IDE hard disk failure in the last 5 years. We've had some logic board problems and CD/DVD drives crap out, but no hard disks. We've run our desktop machines around 4 years recently, so this covers about 500 or so machines.
Hotspares are way cheaper than RAID-10 and are as reliable, barring simultaneous, multiple disk failures. Most controllers will also allow you to have a single spare usable for multiple logical drives, further lowering the cost.
I replaced 6 out of ~60 of our "high quality" name-brand HP and HPaq SCSI hard drives last year. All were less than 3 years old and all are installed in name-brand racked servers and disk array cabinets, in a clean, modern, and well air-conditioned data center. None get pounded too hard except during the weekly full backup, either.
I don't think buying "high quality" SCSI drives does all that much for you, frankly. If it makes you feel more 5up3r 3l1t3 and validates your purchase, great, but experience shows it's not a panacea.
If you can't see a major difference between good HD (the insect shows on DiscoveryHD) and DVDs, then your TV sucks, seriously.
No, I see that easily. HD where the source is an HD video camera is stunning, and this includes the TNT NBA playoffs I watched and Discovery.
Where I don't see the difference are better-mastered DVDs and the movies I have access to in HD (HBO HD). Filmed content doesn't seem to pop quite like video content does.
LCD Projections suck for image quality... should've gotten a rear projection CRT!
You must not have shopped what I shopped. Even the best Pioneer Elite CRT RPs had awful off-axis performance, and then there's the constant tuneups required to keep convergence from being something other than a joke. And then there's the size factor -- I don't want a fscking set that huge.
...it's the guy making money off the "product" that is. The Chinese may be hosting spammers and the Russian mob may be selling zombies, but how many of the people collecting the dollars are living here in the USA?
Targeting those people should be easier (you can follow the money trail), and if they see themselves facing big fines or jail time, I'm pretty sure they'll roll over on any US contacts they have for the people sending the actual spam messages.
Not yet, but before you know it there will be 1080p or higher....I already bought my HD set last fall, so I kind of quit paying attention, but I think one manufacturer *already* sells a display capable of upconverting to 1080p now.
The reason I mentioned 1920p, despite the lack of a an extant HD standard for it, is that the HD DVD standard should be designed to scale to future display capabilities. That is if its a "real" standard and not just a gimmick to fix DeCSS and make us buy new media.
Certainly 1080 line HD footage doesn't look as good to me as a cinema projection
It doesn't even look as good as 720p video, either. I don't have that much to go on besides HBO-HD, but the HD version is clearly more detailed than the non-HD version, but it's hardly as stunning as HD video from basketball or Discovery-HD.
What I wonder is what the effective resolution of film was. If I'm sitting 100 ft from a 65' diagonal movie screen, how does that compare from sitting 10' from a true 720p HD TV?
Personally, I find the content of the better-mastered DVDs (progressive scan, on my Sony Grand Wega III TV) to rival or even exceed the filmed HD content available to me via HBO HD.
Discovery HD is pretty stunning, but primarily when they show content shot on HD video, although their film transfers look a little better, too. Sports is OK on HD, but they appear to cut between HD and SD cameras during the same telecast, and the overall production is seldom even in 16x9, let alone HD. TNT's basketball coverage in HD was good for the Lakers/Timberwolves season, although Fratella, Collins and Albert need to see a fscking dentist if they're going to do the traditional pre-game in HD!
I personally don't think HD DVD as a content format is going to mean much for at least 5 years; we're just *now* seeing some important films show up on SD DVD; having to wait for the corpus of films to get re-telecined to HD may take as long as a decade. Some newer releases may have been telecined to HD and then downconverted to SD DVD format, but I'd bet its not that many titles.
I also wonder if 35mm film has the grain necessary to be more than just a mild improvement in HD over SD. Getting all of Hollywood to quit using 35mm filmstock in exchange for HD cameras would take a generation, barring pro-quality HD cameras, editing and other equipment suddenly becoming pro-sumer priced.
I have a T730 with Verizon and the phone isn't KISS at all, it's pretty complicated, capable of downloading and running software.
What bothers me is the *fake* simplicity and lockout. Why can't I just hook this phone to my PC with the USB cable and access the filesystem, transfering programs, ringtones, images and so on to the phone? With the phone software I can get some address book sync (it's such a shitty package, I regret buying it).
Of course, I know it's all about Verizon making money off of downloads, but its such bullshit selling a "closed" device with fake simplicity. Yes, I know I can get warez copies of Moto phone tools, but how much harder would it be to make the phone show up as a USB storage device? The addressbook as a CSV file? A directory each for tones and images?
Slashdot Mirror
I watched that one recently.
would like to see a more serious effort made to use existing laws against unfair trade practices, misrepresentation, computer fraud and abuse, before new technology-specific laws are passed
Here, here -- why aren't fraud and other bad-trade laws used more often? Is it a lack of resources? A cultural zeitgeist that embraces legal-gymnastics and rationalizations as legal compliance for prima faciae unethical conduct? Part of the current administration's pro-corporate/pro-business mindset?
It just seems that as long as you're not outright *stealing*, you can get away with pretty much anything, and it's not fraud. Has this always been the case?
There are a few anectodal stories about drives from the same manufacturing batch being likely to fail right around the same time.
That actually never occured to me, but at least where I work there's little that can be done about it. We buy HPaq servers, typically with enough drives for whatever the application is all at once, and the bureacracy makes part diversity impossible.
For worse or for better, though, since HPaq doesn't make drive anymore, it's not unusual to get different vendor's drives in the carriers.
I dunno, though, whether WriteNow was Word's equal with stuff like Mail Merge and tables.
It all depends on what you want to do. I went to do a mail merge for the first time in a long time, and the mail merge functionality in Office XP is so dag-blame complicated it took me the better part of an afternoon to sort it out.
It struck me that I could almost do Crystal-Reports level reporting with the XP Word mail merge functionality.
Embedding a wireless camera in the surfboard sounds interesting, as does the idea of a wireless camera attached to the surfer -- the PC just seems superfluous.
Besides, Endless Summer has some great surf footage, including on-board footage, and that was done with film cameras in the 1960s.
iTunes AAC (mpeg 4)
Brush of knees, wipe Steve Jobs' jiz from the corners of your mouth, announce your're not really a whore, you actually like him.
How often did you find yourself going up the dirt road?
You can't get the 5.1 feeds at all on an SA Tivo, and even if someone has cracked the DTV stream and you could bit-extract the stream off of a DTivo, you'd still be looking at lengthy transcodes to MPEG2 for DVD.
I'm actually fine with my setup now. My home-brew DVD collection is great for airplanes and other trips where there are long hours with nothing to do.
Cheaper, perhaps, except that if a 2nd drive in the RAID5 array goes before that hotspare finishes synchronizing, your data is toast.
But how likely is that to happen? We've had RAID-5 based systems here as long as I can remember, and I can't remember a situation where two disks failed at once. The closest we came was a situation where a drive failed (no hotspare), and a lazy admin didn't verify that the rebuild happened. When another disk failed, the whole logical drive was lost. But that wasn't a spare or simultaneous failure issue, it was a dumbassness issue.
As far as RAID-6 goes, there's a Wikipedia entry on it, and it almost sounds like RAID-4's dedicated parity disk with mirroring of the parity drive. I've never seen a controller that actually implemented RAID-4 or 6, though. Usually it's 0, 1, 5, and 10.
You're right that just running the VT100 firmware wouldn't be any more useful than say, a VT100 itself.
I'd guess I'm imagining that the VM would naturally have to act as something of a UI/wrapper for the emulation session, if anything to map the IO from the PC hardware to the terminal's virtual hardware.
This layer could also allow for some of the more expected terminal emulation features, like session text capture, network functionality (telnet/ssh), window management, keyboard mapping, modem control, cut/paste, and so on.
The 'core' would be the actual terminal firmware, providing otherwise 100% perfect emulation, since it wouldn't be emulating a VT100, it WOULD be a VT100.
Instead of writing software that's supposed to follow the commands for the various flavors of terminal, why not instead an actual emulator that lets you run those terminals firmware? Even really good emulation software doesn't always get emulation just right, leading to annoying display glitches, or only arbitrary functions are supported leaving much of the original terminal's functionality out.
IIRC the VT100 was based on the 8080 CPU; why not apply the same techniques that MAME uses -- download the firmware and run the firmware in an emulator or VM and actually be using the terminal itself? Some of the on-screen functionality would have to be simulated due to the PC's lack of corresponding text modes and fonts, but that's what a GUI is for anyway, and similar to what game emulators due to account for the lack of specific hardware devices the original games had.
I'd imagine that the legal problems with this would be even less than the arcade people face, since the code inside those terminals isn't really worth any money to anyone.
A lot of good VT emulation variants (ANSI, Linux, SCOANSI, VT100, VT102, VT220), as well as ANSI color, very customizable in terms of keyboard (include an Emacs mode), ASCII/Zmodem sending, scripting, SSH1/2 (several standards supported), Telnet, TAPI and COM port mode.
It's worth the money; my version from '99 still runs fine under XP.
I wouldn't get the 5.1 feed onto DVDs. About 90% of the movies I record end up onto DVD-R simply because time prevents me from watching more than 2 a week.
If I watch HBO or any of the other movie channels live, I usually get a 5.1 signal off the cable box. Strangely, many movies on HBO offered in HD don't have 5.1 soundtracks, only 2.0 soundtracks, even though I know the movie has a 5.1 soundtrack on DVD.
I got a "package" that includes Encore, HBO and Cinemax, and I don't ever even watch PPV. I go through the schedule every week or so on the Tivo and program it to record all the movies that look remotely interesting. Those I don't watch on the Tivo I dump to my Panasonic DVD recorder (the one with the 80GB HDD), and then usually dump to DVD-R.
In about 8 months or so of doing this, I've accumulated around 100 DVDs of movies and rented maybe 10, usually because I was eager to see them or they were 'special' enough that the money was worth it to get the 5.1 soundtrack and widescreen presentation.
I can't remember a desktop IDE hard disk failure in the last 5 years. We've had some logic board problems and CD/DVD drives crap out, but no hard disks. We've run our desktop machines around 4 years recently, so this covers about 500 or so machines.
It should cost less than a used car.
And it will, if the used car is a Mercedes S600 with under 50 miles on it.
Hotspares are way cheaper than RAID-10 and are as reliable, barring simultaneous, multiple disk failures. Most controllers will also allow you to have a single spare usable for multiple logical drives, further lowering the cost.
I replaced 6 out of ~60 of our "high quality" name-brand HP and HPaq SCSI hard drives last year. All were less than 3 years old and all are installed in name-brand racked servers and disk array cabinets, in a clean, modern, and well air-conditioned data center. None get pounded too hard except during the weekly full backup, either.
I don't think buying "high quality" SCSI drives does all that much for you, frankly. If it makes you feel more 5up3r 3l1t3 and validates your purchase, great, but experience shows it's not a panacea.
If you can't see a major difference between good HD (the insect shows on DiscoveryHD) and DVDs, then your TV sucks, seriously.
No, I see that easily. HD where the source is an HD video camera is stunning, and this includes the TNT NBA playoffs I watched and Discovery.
Where I don't see the difference are better-mastered DVDs and the movies I have access to in HD (HBO HD). Filmed content doesn't seem to pop quite like video content does.
LCD Projections suck for image quality... should've gotten a rear projection CRT!
You must not have shopped what I shopped. Even the best Pioneer Elite CRT RPs had awful off-axis performance, and then there's the constant tuneups required to keep convergence from being something other than a joke. And then there's the size factor -- I don't want a fscking set that huge.
...it's the guy making money off the "product" that is. The Chinese may be hosting spammers and the Russian mob may be selling zombies, but how many of the people collecting the dollars are living here in the USA?
Targeting those people should be easier (you can follow the money trail), and if they see themselves facing big fines or jail time, I'm pretty sure they'll roll over on any US contacts they have for the people sending the actual spam messages.
Not yet, but before you know it there will be 1080p or higher....I already bought my HD set last fall, so I kind of quit paying attention, but I think one manufacturer *already* sells a display capable of upconverting to 1080p now.
The reason I mentioned 1920p, despite the lack of a an extant HD standard for it, is that the HD DVD standard should be designed to scale to future display capabilities. That is if its a "real" standard and not just a gimmick to fix DeCSS and make us buy new media.
Certainly 1080 line HD footage doesn't look as good to me as a cinema projection
It doesn't even look as good as 720p video, either. I don't have that much to go on besides HBO-HD, but the HD version is clearly more detailed than the non-HD version, but it's hardly as stunning as HD video from basketball or Discovery-HD.
What I wonder is what the effective resolution of film was. If I'm sitting 100 ft from a 65' diagonal movie screen, how does that compare from sitting 10' from a true 720p HD TV?
Wish they'd think ahead and make it 1920p.
Personally, I find the content of the better-mastered DVDs (progressive scan, on my Sony Grand Wega III TV) to rival or even exceed the filmed HD content available to me via HBO HD.
Discovery HD is pretty stunning, but primarily when they show content shot on HD video, although their film transfers look a little better, too. Sports is OK on HD, but they appear to cut between HD and SD cameras during the same telecast, and the overall production is seldom even in 16x9, let alone HD. TNT's basketball coverage in HD was good for the Lakers/Timberwolves season, although Fratella, Collins and Albert need to see a fscking dentist if they're going to do the traditional pre-game in HD!
I personally don't think HD DVD as a content format is going to mean much for at least 5 years; we're just *now* seeing some important films show up on SD DVD; having to wait for the corpus of films to get re-telecined to HD may take as long as a decade. Some newer releases may have been telecined to HD and then downconverted to SD DVD format, but I'd bet its not that many titles.
I also wonder if 35mm film has the grain necessary to be more than just a mild improvement in HD over SD. Getting all of Hollywood to quit using 35mm filmstock in exchange for HD cameras would take a generation, barring pro-quality HD cameras, editing and other equipment suddenly becoming pro-sumer priced.
I have a T730 with Verizon and the phone isn't KISS at all, it's pretty complicated, capable of downloading and running software.
What bothers me is the *fake* simplicity and lockout. Why can't I just hook this phone to my PC with the USB cable and access the filesystem, transfering programs, ringtones, images and so on to the phone? With the phone software I can get some address book sync (it's such a shitty package, I regret buying it).
Of course, I know it's all about Verizon making money off of downloads, but its such bullshit selling a "closed" device with fake simplicity. Yes, I know I can get warez copies of Moto phone tools, but how much harder would it be to make the phone show up as a USB storage device? The addressbook as a CSV file? A directory each for tones and images?