Let me just say it again. giFT. giFT, giFT, giFT. If you're into file-trading and you've got Linux (or some other Unixlike that will compile it), run it. If you're into file-trading and programming and you use some other OS, maybe you should consider writing a port.
Or you could use Limewire or some other Gnutella, I suppose, but I have been trying for days and I have yet to get anything to download from Gnutella. It just keeps rechecking and rechecking and nothing ever sends. giFT might have a smaller network, but at least it actually works most of the time.
Not only in the US--they control the distribution world-wide, including in Japan. That was what they really wanted when they went after the Ghibli library a few years back--the lucrative Japanese market. America was just an afterthought, and we can see the results of that now.
That was why the Mononoke DVD almost didn't have Japanese audio--Buena Vista Japan objected, fearing that the Japanese would import the DVD back into Japan, and DVD pirates would make cheap knockoffs, and it would hurt their bottom line.
The thought over on the Miyazaki Mailing List is, in part, that Spirited Away might just be Miyazaki's second chance in the USA. If it turns out to be a big hit, then that might kick Disney into gear cranking out the DVDs, if they can put "From the director of Spirited Away" on the cover in big letters. See this message from Marc Hairston for the reasoning.
Over the last few days, I got a torrent of messages into my inbox. Though they didn't seem to come from suse or savoix; they came from someplace called lusopeople.com. I wonder if this has anything to do with them or not? The majority of them are all just foreign garbled messages.
At any rate, the torrent seems to have abated; perhaps it's over now.
Well, it is still under development. They're still working the bugs out and adding in necessary features. I know I don't do any development on my machine, but I was able to install it by CVS following their instructions just fine.
But yes, they do need Windows and Mac clients. And I expect that, once everything's ready, they'll have them. Heck, you might even volunteer your services to help them code up one.
(And now, looking at my giFT-fe window, I see 128 users sharing 106,692 files for 541.0 gigabytes. Not bad for a tiny Linux-only network still in beta.)
Yes, and after FastTrack's little stunt with Morpheus causes the Federal Government to look at it and go, "Uhm, yeah, right, you don't have any control over your network. That's real good, tell us another one" and pull a Napster on it, giFT will be what we have left. And it'll still be better than Gnutella, because despite Limewire's patching and fixing, the network just doesn't scale that well.
Unlike FastTrack, which is run by a company looking to turn a profit, and thus is readily attackable through the courts, giFT (OpenFT) will be completely decentralized and user-to-user, just the way FastTrack claimed to be. They might attack the people who distribute the software, but as deCSS showed, there'll always be mirror sites.
At this moment, I see 65 people on OpenFT, sharing 64,042 files totalling 399.0 gigabytes. Granted, that's not an awful lot compared to FastTrack, but then, there isn't a working FastTrack client for Linux anymore, so you take what you can get. And of course, the more people share, the more stuff there'll be to search through. And sooner or later, there will be Windows & Mac OpenFT clients.
And let's not forget the idiotic action of their bondholders at the 11th hour, when they felt AT&T was not offering enough money for @Home's assets. "Let's call their bluff!" the bondholders said. "They're not gonna switch over if they can get @Home for less than it would cost to switch over, even if they have to pay more than they'd like to!"
Only, whoops, AT&T wasn't bluffing! "Sorry, guys, we've got our own network; we don't need you anymore. Have fun in bankruptcy court." And everyone else soon followed suit. I bet that three hundred million AT&T was offering would look mighty good to those bondholders about now . . .
It wasn't the author of the article, either; it was a computer consultant who was in the store shopping.
Favorite line from the article:
Unsure whether the kid was a thief or an out-of-uniform employee, [Dallas computer consultant Kevin] Webb watched as he left the store. "I thought there's no point in getting any more involved in this imbroglio," Webb said. "Besides, this is Texas. You never know what he might have been carrying."
Re:CA unemployment myths vs realities: my own stor
on
OddTod Laid Low by the Law
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Myth 3: You're better off getting a job at Wal-mart or something.
Reality: A "good" basic job might pay the same as the unemployment, but it'll also eat 40 hours a week of job-hunting time -- and management at that McJob isn't going to let you go on interviews every other day, either. Even if the McJob might pay a little more, it may hinder your ability to get Work In Your Field, which is a net loss in the long term.
What's more, almost no Wal-Mart or K-Mart or any other retail store is going to give you a full-time job. You'll be stuck at 25 hours a week, maximum, because if they let you work any more they'd have to pay you benefits--and they'd rather have twice as many half-time workers and not pay the benefits.
$500 really isn't much for jackets, realistically speaking. Leather jackets--I mean genuine quality leather jackets, not the flimsy made in Taiwan things you get at Kmart--will often cost in the $300-$500 range already. $500 for a super-high-tech battery-powered jacket wouldn't seem to be that bad for someone used to spending that much anyway just to look cool. The only question in my mind would be how long the battery lasts.
The sad thing is, if the MPAA were to do something like this, it would be so crippled with DRM and downloading limitations and format limits that it wouldn't be useable. It would be the same joke that those pay-for-download music services are now.
Defeating Geographic Region Control
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 2
Most of the comments I've seen for this story talk about how it will be good (or bad) for employee surfing. It occurs to me that this will also be a way to defeat the websites that try to lock out certain regions from being able to access them, for matters of national licensing and such. (I saw a story about that sort of thing on/. a while back, but I'm too lazy to go look it up.:)
In re tub dropping . . . that's what Ziplock bags are for. Especially the Glad ones with the little physical zipper device that makes sure the bag seals. Use that, you can read in the tub with no problems--because if you do accidentally drop it, and the bag is sealed, you'll almost certainly be able to fish it out before any harm can be done.
Actually, all the Region 2 native Japanese discs that have been released so far of Hayao Miyazaki's anime also include the English dub and English subtitles (though they're actually "dubtitles," i.e. captions for the English dub--and, in the case of Kiki's Delivery Service, they're dubtitles for the Streamline dub, which isn't even on the disc!).
A lot of anime which have English dubs, such as Giant Robo, include them on the DVD sets as a matter of course, just because, hey, they have the room, and the Japanese seem to think English is "kewl". (Which would also explain why they commissioned Macek to dub and then Japanese subtitle Macross: Love Do You Remember and Megazone 23 Part II--you can still find copies of those subtitled dubs floating around fansub trading circles to this day--and why the Armitage: Polymatrix movie was done only in English, with Japanese subtitles for the folks at home.) Some companies have even started including genuine English subtitles on their discs, though the names of the series escape me (I want to say Gunbuster, though I can't remember specifically).
That being said, gaijin fans have been importing anime from Japan ever since the days of the laserdisc, which didn't even have a capacity for subtitles. After all, if you're going to do a fansub, you want crystal-clear originals--and hey, DVD is even better than laserdisc. There's even a program out there for Windows that lets people view their unsubtitled DVDs in conjunction with downloaded fansub scripts (though it didn't work very well for me when I tried it). And when it comes right down to it, people watched anime in straight Japanese with synopses, scripts, or best guesses for years before fansubbing was even possible.
So claiming that all-region DVD players are not a boon to anime fans because Japanese discs don't have English is a bit misinformed or downright disingenuous. Better do some more research next time.
She breathed a short laugh. "For all that I try to be all modern and galactic, that feels so strange. All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it, just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow."
Not really. Even the Self-Checkout lanes need an attendant, and even with the attendant, many customers feel they're too impersonal and just don't want to use them. Cashiers will still be required to process checks (since the computer hasn't yet been invented that can economically recognize all handwriting and verify that the check is written in the right amounts and to the right entity), to correct prices that aren't in the computer properly or manually enter the UPC for items whose bar codes are unreadable, to deactivate security tags (especially the ones that need to be physically removed), and, last but not least, to give the customer a smile and a have-a-nice-day-please-come-back.
IHNJ, IJLTS "The Chinese have been making great strides in copyright protection."
(I Have No Joke, I Just Like To Say)
Re:VERY dangerous, but don't forget the benefits
on
Sun Joins RFID Program
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My retail-store place of employment has a system which is occasionally used during the busiest of times when all the available cashiers are on-line and there are still long queues. A manager uses his hand-held bar code scanner to zap all the items in a customer's cart while he's waiting in line, then all the cashier has to do is scan the bar code on a little card and the register rings up every item that the manager zapped.
Speaking as a cashier who's worked with this system, I would find it very convenient not to have to scan every item before I bagged it (especially with the arcane "rings per minute" efficiency monitoring system my store uses, which requires pressing weird button combinations to stop the clock when we're not doing something). And speaking as a customer, I would find that sort of speedy checkout much more enticing.
They just have to balance the convenience with privacy concerns somehow...
Re:If this goes on credit cards and drivers licens
on
Sun Joins RFID Program
·
· Score: 2
I can't see why it would go on credit cards. Credit card companies aren't stupid, they know that anything that can provide information about the card to anyone other than the retailer is a bad thing. Why? Because they're the ones who have to eat the cost of credit card fraud. In part, this is why modern cash registers don't print the full card number on customers' receipts.
There's no problem to be solved here the way there is with replacing bar codes/EAS tags. Credit card swiping is already a perfectly serviceable way of paying.
Driver's licenses, OTOH...well, as much as they're "national ID card"ifying these, I could see it happening. I could see a cop checking your license plate and reading your driver's license (to be sure it's not suspended or out of date and matches to the list of people authorized to drive the car) at the same time he hits you with a radar gun...
To be fair, you have to look at this not just as replacing bar codes, but also as replacing EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) stickers and EAS "gator tags" (the paintbomb doohickeys that clip to clothing and other expensive items with a place to clip them). Those, and the equipment to read them, are also expensive, not to mention unreliable (cashiers can miss taking them off; once they're disabled they're permanently disabled; if they're attached to magnetic media (e.g. VHS), disabling them in the wrong way can also wipe the media), and they also require manpower to apply. (Speaking as someone who's been told more than once, "Hey, you're not busy, stick these stickers on all those items.")
Plus, there's the issue of the SCOTS (Self Check-Out Terminal System) registers, that almost nobody seems to want to use at my store. They require customers to scan and bag the items themselves, then involve weight sensors in the bagging table to try to make sure that the customer didn't "sweetheart" himself and bag more items than he scanned. These are often unreliable as well. ("Wrong item bagged." "What do you mean wrong item? I just bagged the one I scanned!") A radio-ID tag would make this class of device a lot more accurate.
Some folks (who are older than I am) will probably recall the similar furor surrounding the adoption of UPC bar codes. I recall hearing about all sorts of privacy concerns, mostly from nutcases who thought these were the Mark of the Beast talked of in Revelations. (In my BBS days, I once downloaded a Tetris clone called Quatris, that included a lengthy readme file "explaining" this, complete with ASCII graphics of a morose-looking fellow with a bar code on his forehead.)
But by and large, bar codes seem to have done okay by us, privacywise, and they're used in the manufacturing and distribution of almost everything, from nonprescription medicine to package delivery. Similarly, I don't think that the people developing this system are secretly chortling and snickering at how this will take away everyone's privacy...well, hmm, maybe Scott "you have no privacy, get over it" McNealy is, but I don't think the other people are. Perhaps some sort of a compromise can be worked out.
The folks who are really concerned about this as a privacy issue need to go visit and abuse all of the test sites they can identify. Drop the confidence level far enough, and the tech won't be adopted.
Sounds good, but just be sure to abuse them in a way that they overcharge you, not that you slip out with more goods than you've paid for--because if they catch you intentionally hacking the system to take a bunch of stuff out without paying for it, you'll find yourself charged with shoplifting so fast your head will spin, and no amount of claiming "I was just proving a point" will get them to see it otherwise. (q.v. the fellow who worked for Intel and was arrested for running a password cracker on an Intel machine to demonstrate how lax their security was.)
Even if they were, would they? I work at a chain retail store that uses EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) tagging. Every one of those little mothers is supposed to be disabled or removed at the checkout stand. But the doors still go off a surprising number of times over the course of the day.
(What's really fun is when someone forgot to disable the tag built into a particular brand of shoe. So the poor fellow will set off every EAS scanner of every store he enters or exits until someone figures out why.)
Slashdot Mirror
Let me just say it again. giFT. giFT, giFT, giFT. If you're into file-trading and you've got Linux (or some other Unixlike that will compile it), run it. If you're into file-trading and programming and you use some other OS, maybe you should consider writing a port.
Or you could use Limewire or some other Gnutella, I suppose, but I have been trying for days and I have yet to get anything to download from Gnutella. It just keeps rechecking and rechecking and nothing ever sends. giFT might have a smaller network, but at least it actually works most of the time.
Not only in the US--they control the distribution world-wide, including in Japan. That was what they really wanted when they went after the Ghibli library a few years back--the lucrative Japanese market. America was just an afterthought, and we can see the results of that now.
That was why the Mononoke DVD almost didn't have Japanese audio--Buena Vista Japan objected, fearing that the Japanese would import the DVD back into Japan, and DVD pirates would make cheap knockoffs, and it would hurt their bottom line.
The thought over on the Miyazaki Mailing List is, in part, that Spirited Away might just be Miyazaki's second chance in the USA. If it turns out to be a big hit, then that might kick Disney into gear cranking out the DVDs, if they can put "From the director of Spirited Away" on the cover in big letters. See this message from Marc Hairston for the reasoning.
Over the last few days, I got a torrent of messages into my inbox. Though they didn't seem to come from suse or savoix; they came from someplace called lusopeople.com. I wonder if this has anything to do with them or not? The majority of them are all just foreign garbled messages.
At any rate, the torrent seems to have abated; perhaps it's over now.
Now there seem to be 188 users online, sharing 256,727 files, totalling 1.18 terabytes!
Still small potatos compared to KaZaa, for sure, but it's heartening to see the numbers growing as people start tuning in and turning on. Yahoo!
Well, it is still under development. They're still working the bugs out and adding in necessary features. I know I don't do any development on my machine, but I was able to install it by CVS following their instructions just fine.
But yes, they do need Windows and Mac clients. And I expect that, once everything's ready, they'll have them. Heck, you might even volunteer your services to help them code up one.
(And now, looking at my giFT-fe window, I see 128 users sharing 106,692 files for 541.0 gigabytes. Not bad for a tiny Linux-only network still in beta.)
Yes, and after FastTrack's little stunt with Morpheus causes the Federal Government to look at it and go, "Uhm, yeah, right, you don't have any control over your network. That's real good, tell us another one" and pull a Napster on it, giFT will be what we have left. And it'll still be better than Gnutella, because despite Limewire's patching and fixing, the network just doesn't scale that well.
Unlike FastTrack, which is run by a company looking to turn a profit, and thus is readily attackable through the courts, giFT (OpenFT) will be completely decentralized and user-to-user, just the way FastTrack claimed to be. They might attack the people who distribute the software, but as deCSS showed, there'll always be mirror sites.
At this moment, I see 65 people on OpenFT, sharing 64,042 files totalling 399.0 gigabytes. Granted, that's not an awful lot compared to FastTrack, but then, there isn't a working FastTrack client for Linux anymore, so you take what you can get. And of course, the more people share, the more stuff there'll be to search through. And sooner or later, there will be Windows & Mac OpenFT clients.
And let's not forget the idiotic action of their bondholders at the 11th hour, when they felt AT&T was not offering enough money for @Home's assets. "Let's call their bluff!" the bondholders said. "They're not gonna switch over if they can get @Home for less than it would cost to switch over, even if they have to pay more than they'd like to!"
Only, whoops, AT&T wasn't bluffing! "Sorry, guys, we've got our own network; we don't need you anymore. Have fun in bankruptcy court." And everyone else soon followed suit. I bet that three hundred million AT&T was offering would look mighty good to those bondholders about now . . .
Favorite line from the article:
What's more, almost no Wal-Mart or K-Mart or any other retail store is going to give you a full-time job. You'll be stuck at 25 hours a week, maximum, because if they let you work any more they'd have to pay you benefits--and they'd rather have twice as many half-time workers and not pay the benefits.
$500 really isn't much for jackets, realistically speaking. Leather jackets--I mean genuine quality leather jackets, not the flimsy made in Taiwan things you get at Kmart--will often cost in the $300-$500 range already. $500 for a super-high-tech battery-powered jacket wouldn't seem to be that bad for someone used to spending that much anyway just to look cool. The only question in my mind would be how long the battery lasts.
The sad thing is, if the MPAA were to do something like this, it would be so crippled with DRM and downloading limitations and format limits that it wouldn't be useable. It would be the same joke that those pay-for-download music services are now.
Most of the comments I've seen for this story talk about how it will be good (or bad) for employee surfing. It occurs to me that this will also be a way to defeat the websites that try to lock out certain regions from being able to access them, for matters of national licensing and such. (I saw a story about that sort of thing on /. a while back, but I'm too lazy to go look it up. :)
In re tub dropping . . . that's what Ziplock bags are for. Especially the Glad ones with the little physical zipper device that makes sure the bag seals. Use that, you can read in the tub with no problems--because if you do accidentally drop it, and the bag is sealed, you'll almost certainly be able to fish it out before any harm can be done.
Actually, all the Region 2 native Japanese discs that have been released so far of Hayao Miyazaki's anime also include the English dub and English subtitles (though they're actually "dubtitles," i.e. captions for the English dub--and, in the case of Kiki's Delivery Service, they're dubtitles for the Streamline dub, which isn't even on the disc!).
A lot of anime which have English dubs, such as Giant Robo, include them on the DVD sets as a matter of course, just because, hey, they have the room, and the Japanese seem to think English is "kewl". (Which would also explain why they commissioned Macek to dub and then Japanese subtitle Macross: Love Do You Remember and Megazone 23 Part II--you can still find copies of those subtitled dubs floating around fansub trading circles to this day--and why the Armitage: Polymatrix movie was done only in English, with Japanese subtitles for the folks at home.) Some companies have even started including genuine English subtitles on their discs, though the names of the series escape me (I want to say Gunbuster, though I can't remember specifically).
That being said, gaijin fans have been importing anime from Japan ever since the days of the laserdisc, which didn't even have a capacity for subtitles. After all, if you're going to do a fansub, you want crystal-clear originals--and hey, DVD is even better than laserdisc. There's even a program out there for Windows that lets people view their unsubtitled DVDs in conjunction with downloaded fansub scripts (though it didn't work very well for me when I tried it). And when it comes right down to it, people watched anime in straight Japanese with synopses, scripts, or best guesses for years before fansubbing was even possible.
So claiming that all-region DVD players are not a boon to anime fans because Japanese discs don't have English is a bit misinformed or downright disingenuous. Better do some more research next time.
She breathed a short laugh. "For all that I try to be all modern and galactic, that feels so strange. All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it, just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow."
-- Diplomatic Immunity , Lois McMaster Bujold, chapter 1,
Not really. Even the Self-Checkout lanes need an attendant, and even with the attendant, many customers feel they're too impersonal and just don't want to use them. Cashiers will still be required to process checks (since the computer hasn't yet been invented that can economically recognize all handwriting and verify that the check is written in the right amounts and to the right entity), to correct prices that aren't in the computer properly or manually enter the UPC for items whose bar codes are unreadable, to deactivate security tags (especially the ones that need to be physically removed), and, last but not least, to give the customer a smile and a have-a-nice-day-please-come-back.
IHNJ, IJLTS "The Chinese have been making great strides in copyright protection."
(I Have No Joke, I Just Like To Say)
My retail-store place of employment has a system which is occasionally used during the busiest of times when all the available cashiers are on-line and there are still long queues. A manager uses his hand-held bar code scanner to zap all the items in a customer's cart while he's waiting in line, then all the cashier has to do is scan the bar code on a little card and the register rings up every item that the manager zapped.
Speaking as a cashier who's worked with this system, I would find it very convenient not to have to scan every item before I bagged it (especially with the arcane "rings per minute" efficiency monitoring system my store uses, which requires pressing weird button combinations to stop the clock when we're not doing something). And speaking as a customer, I would find that sort of speedy checkout much more enticing.
They just have to balance the convenience with privacy concerns somehow...
I can't see why it would go on credit cards. Credit card companies aren't stupid, they know that anything that can provide information about the card to anyone other than the retailer is a bad thing. Why? Because they're the ones who have to eat the cost of credit card fraud. In part, this is why modern cash registers don't print the full card number on customers' receipts.
There's no problem to be solved here the way there is with replacing bar codes/EAS tags. Credit card swiping is already a perfectly serviceable way of paying.
Driver's licenses, OTOH...well, as much as they're "national ID card"ifying these, I could see it happening. I could see a cop checking your license plate and reading your driver's license (to be sure it's not suspended or out of date and matches to the list of people authorized to drive the car) at the same time he hits you with a radar gun...
To be fair, you have to look at this not just as replacing bar codes, but also as replacing EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) stickers and EAS "gator tags" (the paintbomb doohickeys that clip to clothing and other expensive items with a place to clip them). Those, and the equipment to read them, are also expensive, not to mention unreliable (cashiers can miss taking them off; once they're disabled they're permanently disabled; if they're attached to magnetic media (e.g. VHS), disabling them in the wrong way can also wipe the media), and they also require manpower to apply. (Speaking as someone who's been told more than once, "Hey, you're not busy, stick these stickers on all those items.")
Plus, there's the issue of the SCOTS (Self Check-Out Terminal System) registers, that almost nobody seems to want to use at my store. They require customers to scan and bag the items themselves, then involve weight sensors in the bagging table to try to make sure that the customer didn't "sweetheart" himself and bag more items than he scanned. These are often unreliable as well. ("Wrong item bagged." "What do you mean wrong item? I just bagged the one I scanned!") A radio-ID tag would make this class of device a lot more accurate.
Some folks (who are older than I am) will probably recall the similar furor surrounding the adoption of UPC bar codes. I recall hearing about all sorts of privacy concerns, mostly from nutcases who thought these were the Mark of the Beast talked of in Revelations. (In my BBS days, I once downloaded a Tetris clone called Quatris, that included a lengthy readme file "explaining" this, complete with ASCII graphics of a morose-looking fellow with a bar code on his forehead.)
But by and large, bar codes seem to have done okay by us, privacywise, and they're used in the manufacturing and distribution of almost everything, from nonprescription medicine to package delivery. Similarly, I don't think that the people developing this system are secretly chortling and snickering at how this will take away everyone's privacy...well, hmm, maybe Scott "you have no privacy, get over it" McNealy is, but I don't think the other people are. Perhaps some sort of a compromise can be worked out.
Even if they were, would they? I work at a chain retail store that uses EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) tagging. Every one of those little mothers is supposed to be disabled or removed at the checkout stand. But the doors still go off a surprising number of times over the course of the day.
(What's really fun is when someone forgot to disable the tag built into a particular brand of shoe. So the poor fellow will set off every EAS scanner of every store he enters or exits until someone figures out why.)
Wired has a better article about this situation. It goes into more detail than the short blurb cited in this story.
...is do they have beer that's "free as in software"?
...I never metapad I didn't like.