Hope it's better than the transmitter in my Garmin. Less than one meter, direct line-of-sight (through the windshield glass) to the radio's antenna -- and the signal's still too weak to tune in half the time, even when there's no other tunable station on the frequency.
Happens in hardware, too. I've worked for more than one company which sold the exact same hardware in multiple versions at different price points. Well, almost the exact same hardware. There was something simple like a resistor block which told the firmware which model it was, and the firmware would disable features accordingly. Aside from that resistor block and the model number painted on the case, everything else was the same. In one case the firmware simply configured the CPU to insert extra wait-states into memory access to make the cheap model run more slowly than the expensive model.
For reasons I don't even pretend to understand, the marketing guys think that doing this is a good thing.
If case any one reading this likes HHGTG and hasn't read Adam's Dirk Gently novels I can only recommend to get them and read them.
Huh. I would recommend getting them and burying them deep underground to protect anyone else from accidentally reading them. You could burn them, but most places have strict ordinances against burning trash. Really, they're not good. IMnsHO, of course.
Unless you have a corded telephone you can't really get great sound quality even over a landline.
Big, heavy, rotary Western Electric phone for the win, baby! Not only does it sound great, it's great fun to watch the kids' friends try to figure out how to dial the phone using an actual dial.
Wow, that's really amazing. Neither the article nor the actual CentMail website has a single shred of technical information on how this will actually be implemented. I'm sure it has something to do with the evil bit.
If the books were public domain, they could be redistributed as proprietary works under another's name. Instead, these books are essentially GPL'd (again, assuming they're all licensed similarly).
So, I guess that anything created as a result of knowledge gained from these books must also be licensed under the GPL. Brilliant! In another generation everything will be open-source!
(Yes, I know the difference between the GPL and the CC licenses. It's a joke. Lighten up.)
Keep it up. My son is now 11, and at this point I don't think he'd believe me if I told him "water is wet" or "fire is hot". He fully expects anything out of my mouth to have been cribbed directly from Calvin's dad.
But the Amiga error message should have been a hand. The Guru Meditation was cool and all that, but an image of a hand with the middle finger extended would be so inappropriately appropriate!
Unfortunately that format is not wholly digital. There are a big analog components known as the "artwork" and "liner notes". They contain all sorts of juicy metadata that is hard to find elsewhere, such as lyrics, photos of something other than the front cover, documentation on who played which instruments on a given piece, who actually wrote the song, etc. None of that is included digitally on a CD. Even standard metadata like the track title and performer aren't included digitally on most CDs. You have to scrape those off some web site like CDDB or MusicBrainz.
I would really love to see some sort of standard format for album metadata. Yeah, you can dump all the audio tracks in a directory, and tag them with a good amount of metadata. But once you get beyond the few fields defined by ID3 everything goes to hell. You end up with a lot of poorly structured data stored ad-hoc in the comments fields.
Ideally I'd like to see a standarized XML file in addition to the tracks. The XML file gives all the metadata for each track, plus any additional metadata for the album as a whole. (Artwork, production notes, whatever.) The XML file could link to other files in the directory for data which can't be conveniently stored as plain text (jpg, pdf, videos, etc.) Nesting should be possible, to support multi-volume releases. Put everything in a directory tree with the XML file chock full o' metadata, and zip the thing up. There's your album. Open the zip to get at the individual parts.
Notice that I haven't mentioned anything about DRM, codecs, or even the type of media involved. This idea could be extended to any collection of media files, from plain-text books to music to photos to audio/video/photo/text multimedia extravaganzas. The important thing is that the vast majority of fields are defined in some standard somewhere, to keep the amount of ad-hocery to a minimum.
This isn't rocket science, but it's a wheel that keeps getting reinvented by every "library manager" program out there, whether you're talking about a library of books, music, or photos. None of the programs can share any but the most basic metadata, which is a shame. Unfortunately my needs as a consumer don't entirely line up with the needs of the producers. I want an open, flexible format that any device can read. They want DRM and lock-in. My dream isn't going to come true until it's implemented by someone with a big enough market share to make it worthwhile for all the little guys to support it as well. I'm not going to hold my breath.
I say this: get rid of TLD's altogether, or allow anyone any TLD.
I'm mostly in favor of this, except I think we need to keep country code TLDs and make them mandatory for all domains. It would be nice to do away with them, but ccTLDs are the only real way to resolve disputes.
Let's say there's some disagreement between a large international restaurant chain and a small Scottish sheep farmer over the rights to the TLD ".mcdonalds". Are domains handed out first-come-first-served? Do existing trademarks carry more weight than family names? In what jurisdiction is this settled?
Now let's say that the restaurateur wants a net presence in every country. In order to do this they need to register in every country: mcdonalds.us, mcdonalds.es, mcdonalds.ru, etc. The farmer probably only wants the local address, mcdonalds.uk. It's clear what courts have jurisdiction over that dispute. So let's say the UK courts decide in favor of the traditional family name over the impersonal megacorp. The farmer gets "mcdonalds.uk", and the restaurant must go with something like ".mcdonalds-burgers.uk". Then the farmer's son goes abroad to continue the family business in New Zealand. He wants to get "mcdonalds.nz", but the restaurant already owns it. The New Zealand courts decide that the restaurant has a stronger claim, and the farmer's son has to settle for ".mcdonalds-sheep.nz".
The US is larger, and may want to keep the subdivisions ".com.us", ".edu.us", ".gov.us", etc. They can enforce that if they wish. Canada may decree that all registrants of ".ca" subdomains must be Canadian citizens. And small countries like Tuvalu can continue to make money selling space in the ".tv" domain to all comers.
So get rid of everything except the country codes, and I'll be happy.
Everyone knows it is utterly stupid to rely on a barcode as an access code for a company, build, or secured facility.
Not everyone. A couple years ago I worked at a place that used barcoded cards as entrance badges. Swipe the card through the scanner and you're in. It looked like a mag stripe -- the barcode was printed black-on-black, with inks that reflected differently in the infrared. But it was just a 1-D barcode. And yes, it was trivial to use an ordinary flatbed scanner and crank up the contrast in Photoshop to view the barcode. Print it out on a laser printer and the copy would work just as well as the original.
Granted, this was at a place that made barcode printers, including badge printers, and it was a matter of eating our own dog food. But although we made the printers, the overall badge-scanning system was made by an outside vendor and we weren't their only customer. So obviously someone could be convinced it was a good idea.
And actually it's not much worse than an ordinary metal key. If you have physical access to an ordinary key you can photocopy it, and create a workable duplicate from the photocopy. It just takes equipment not normally found in every office and public library in the country.
In fact, I thought the demo was broken or slashdotted because all I got was a loading screen and a constant stream of 'loading...' 'waiting...' messages in my status bar. Then I realized that Privoxy was throwing itself on that grenade for me. Didn't even have to write any new rules.
We are dealing with a high school kid who owns a kindle and was using it for school. While it is possible that kid actually earned the $500 to buy it himself, I'm probably not alone in finding that unlikely.
Why is that unlikely? High school kids have been known to have jobs, after all. I myself earned the $1500 necessary to buy an Apple//e system my senior year in high school, some 25 years ago. I had friends who bought cars. Cheap, worn-out cars, to be sure, but they still ran.
But either way, it doesn't matter. The Kindle is his, and contained his own work. He believes that Amazon willfully destroyed that work, and he's willing make an effort to get recompensed. Good for him! He's probably tilting at windmills, of course, but I applaud his effort.
Would a kid really care enough to do so? Why not? One of my classmates ran for mayor during his senior year. Not as a joke, either. It was a sincere attempt to fix problems he saw in the town and he put a lot of effort into it. He lost, but it was a credible campaign. I have no problem at all believing that a high school kid would feel wronged by Amazon and would make the effort to seek justice.
I do the same thing: Buy older games released for under $5 on Steam or Impulse or GoG. There's a lot of great stuff out there that I haven't played yet. And my hardware is several years out of date, so I can't run anything new anyway.
Reminds me of one of my friend's ex-girlfriend. She claimed she was allergic to chicken and that just the fact that chicken touched her steak would make her sick. She also claimed this was psychological because it had happened to her before. She went in the house and of course, I proceeded to rub a big fat piece of chicken all over her steak, on both sides. My friend laughed. She never got sick. We never told her about it, so it's a safe bet to assume she still thinks she's allergic to chicken.
My dad tried doing the same thing to my wife. She claimed to be allergic to most dairy products. Not because of lactose; she was fine with fresh dairy. Rather, it was the mold or bacteria that causes the stuff to go bad. She couldn't drink milk near the end of its "sell by" date, she couldn't eat most cheeses, etc. My dad was skeptical, so he mixed a spoonful of sour cream, not enough to taste, into the big bowl of mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner.
And you know what? My wife said the potatoes tasted funny. He insisted they were just potatoes. She had another bite, then got up and ran to the bathroom. She spent the evening being violently ill. You know what? She really is extremely sensitive to "spoiled" dairy. It's not just all in her head. I've seen this happen to her other times when she really didn't know or even suspect something was wrong with the food. (There was an incident where the whipped cream on a dessert turned out to be crème fraîche. Neither of us had even heard of crème fraîche before then.) In her case it's a real, repeatable physiological response which can be demonstrated in a double-blind test.
While it's good to be skeptical, it's not cool to mess with someone's food. Especially at Thanksgiving.
On the other hand, until I see the wi-fi guy pass a double-blind test I'm not going to believe a word of what he says.
I utterly despise that movie, just for the record.
I never liked it on a small screen. Then I saw it in a proper theater. It makes a huge difference! It's a completely different movie. To appreciate it, you really need the immersion that a dark room, huge screen, and a good sound system can provide.
To bring it back to video games, normally I don't think eye-popping graphics are necessary for a good game. If 2001 was a video game, however, it would be an otherwise pretty lame game that was absolutely brilliant on a high-end system. It would be one of those rare games in which the excellent graphics and sound actually do make up for the crummy game mechanics.
Slashdot Mirror
And I, for one, am still waiting for the Batman/Porky Pig The Brave And The Bold team-up issue! Come on, Time-Warner, where's the fan service?
Torrent?
Hope it's better than the transmitter in my Garmin. Less than one meter, direct line-of-sight (through the windshield glass) to the radio's antenna -- and the signal's still too weak to tune in half the time, even when there's no other tunable station on the frequency.
Or maybe FOSS should be more like PETA and run ads featuring naked chicks.
Besides what's wrong with PETA? I, for one, am a Person who enjoys Eating Tasty Animals.
Happens in hardware, too. I've worked for more than one company which sold the exact same hardware in multiple versions at different price points. Well, almost the exact same hardware. There was something simple like a resistor block which told the firmware which model it was, and the firmware would disable features accordingly. Aside from that resistor block and the model number painted on the case, everything else was the same. In one case the firmware simply configured the CPU to insert extra wait-states into memory access to make the cheap model run more slowly than the expensive model.
For reasons I don't even pretend to understand, the marketing guys think that doing this is a good thing.
Huh. I would recommend getting them and burying them deep underground to protect anyone else from accidentally reading them. You could burn them, but most places have strict ordinances against burning trash. Really, they're not good. IMnsHO, of course.
Because my fax machine doesn't plug into my cellphone.
Yeah, fax is old tech, but it's amazing how many places (mostly medical or financial) still want a fax instead of email.
Big, heavy, rotary Western Electric phone for the win, baby! Not only does it sound great, it's great fun to watch the kids' friends try to figure out how to dial the phone using an actual dial.
"I'm a homicidal maniac- they look just like everyone else."
Wow, that's really amazing. Neither the article nor the actual CentMail website has a single shred of technical information on how this will actually be implemented. I'm sure it has something to do with the evil bit.
So, I guess that anything created as a result of knowledge gained from these books must also be licensed under the GPL. Brilliant! In another generation everything will be open-source!
(Yes, I know the difference between the GPL and the CC licenses. It's a joke. Lighten up.)
Right. Because Wikipedia has well-known reliability. "Un-".
Keep it up. My son is now 11, and at this point I don't think he'd believe me if I told him "water is wet" or "fire is hot". He fully expects anything out of my mouth to have been cribbed directly from Calvin's dad.
And I try not to disappoint. :-)
But the Amiga error message should have been a hand. The Guru Meditation was cool and all that, but an image of a hand with the middle finger extended would be so inappropriately appropriate!
It's proven by the program that conforms to it. Duh!
Yeah, sex offenders really need to stick to the anti-social networks.
Unfortunately that format is not wholly digital. There are a big analog components known as the "artwork" and "liner notes". They contain all sorts of juicy metadata that is hard to find elsewhere, such as lyrics, photos of something other than the front cover, documentation on who played which instruments on a given piece, who actually wrote the song, etc. None of that is included digitally on a CD. Even standard metadata like the track title and performer aren't included digitally on most CDs. You have to scrape those off some web site like CDDB or MusicBrainz.
I would really love to see some sort of standard format for album metadata. Yeah, you can dump all the audio tracks in a directory, and tag them with a good amount of metadata. But once you get beyond the few fields defined by ID3 everything goes to hell. You end up with a lot of poorly structured data stored ad-hoc in the comments fields.
Ideally I'd like to see a standarized XML file in addition to the tracks. The XML file gives all the metadata for each track, plus any additional metadata for the album as a whole. (Artwork, production notes, whatever.) The XML file could link to other files in the directory for data which can't be conveniently stored as plain text (jpg, pdf, videos, etc.) Nesting should be possible, to support multi-volume releases. Put everything in a directory tree with the XML file chock full o' metadata, and zip the thing up. There's your album. Open the zip to get at the individual parts.
Notice that I haven't mentioned anything about DRM, codecs, or even the type of media involved. This idea could be extended to any collection of media files, from plain-text books to music to photos to audio/video/photo/text multimedia extravaganzas. The important thing is that the vast majority of fields are defined in some standard somewhere, to keep the amount of ad-hocery to a minimum.
This isn't rocket science, but it's a wheel that keeps getting reinvented by every "library manager" program out there, whether you're talking about a library of books, music, or photos. None of the programs can share any but the most basic metadata, which is a shame. Unfortunately my needs as a consumer don't entirely line up with the needs of the producers. I want an open, flexible format that any device can read. They want DRM and lock-in. My dream isn't going to come true until it's implemented by someone with a big enough market share to make it worthwhile for all the little guys to support it as well. I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'm mostly in favor of this, except I think we need to keep country code TLDs and make them mandatory for all domains. It would be nice to do away with them, but ccTLDs are the only real way to resolve disputes.
Let's say there's some disagreement between a large international restaurant chain and a small Scottish sheep farmer over the rights to the TLD ".mcdonalds". Are domains handed out first-come-first-served? Do existing trademarks carry more weight than family names? In what jurisdiction is this settled?
Now let's say that the restaurateur wants a net presence in every country. In order to do this they need to register in every country: mcdonalds.us, mcdonalds.es, mcdonalds.ru, etc. The farmer probably only wants the local address, mcdonalds.uk. It's clear what courts have jurisdiction over that dispute. So let's say the UK courts decide in favor of the traditional family name over the impersonal megacorp. The farmer gets "mcdonalds.uk", and the restaurant must go with something like ".mcdonalds-burgers.uk". Then the farmer's son goes abroad to continue the family business in New Zealand. He wants to get "mcdonalds.nz", but the restaurant already owns it. The New Zealand courts decide that the restaurant has a stronger claim, and the farmer's son has to settle for ".mcdonalds-sheep.nz".
The US is larger, and may want to keep the subdivisions ".com.us", ".edu.us", ".gov.us", etc. They can enforce that if they wish. Canada may decree that all registrants of ".ca" subdomains must be Canadian citizens. And small countries like Tuvalu can continue to make money selling space in the ".tv" domain to all comers.
So get rid of everything except the country codes, and I'll be happy.
Not everyone. A couple years ago I worked at a place that used barcoded cards as entrance badges. Swipe the card through the scanner and you're in. It looked like a mag stripe -- the barcode was printed black-on-black, with inks that reflected differently in the infrared. But it was just a 1-D barcode. And yes, it was trivial to use an ordinary flatbed scanner and crank up the contrast in Photoshop to view the barcode. Print it out on a laser printer and the copy would work just as well as the original.
Granted, this was at a place that made barcode printers, including badge printers, and it was a matter of eating our own dog food. But although we made the printers, the overall badge-scanning system was made by an outside vendor and we weren't their only customer. So obviously someone could be convinced it was a good idea.
And actually it's not much worse than an ordinary metal key. If you have physical access to an ordinary key you can photocopy it, and create a workable duplicate from the photocopy. It just takes equipment not normally found in every office and public library in the country.
In fact, I thought the demo was broken or slashdotted because all I got was a loading screen and a constant stream of 'loading...' 'waiting...' messages in my status bar. Then I realized that Privoxy was throwing itself on that grenade for me. Didn't even have to write any new rules.
Why is that unlikely? High school kids have been known to have jobs, after all. I myself earned the $1500 necessary to buy an Apple //e system my senior year in high school, some 25 years ago. I had friends who bought cars. Cheap, worn-out cars, to be sure, but they still ran.
But either way, it doesn't matter. The Kindle is his, and contained his own work. He believes that Amazon willfully destroyed that work, and he's willing make an effort to get recompensed. Good for him! He's probably tilting at windmills, of course, but I applaud his effort.
Would a kid really care enough to do so? Why not? One of my classmates ran for mayor during his senior year. Not as a joke, either. It was a sincere attempt to fix problems he saw in the town and he put a lot of effort into it. He lost, but it was a credible campaign. I have no problem at all believing that a high school kid would feel wronged by Amazon and would make the effort to seek justice.
Probably just pining for the fjords.
I do the same thing: Buy older games released for under $5 on Steam or Impulse or GoG. There's a lot of great stuff out there that I haven't played yet. And my hardware is several years out of date, so I can't run anything new anyway.
My dad tried doing the same thing to my wife. She claimed to be allergic to most dairy products. Not because of lactose; she was fine with fresh dairy. Rather, it was the mold or bacteria that causes the stuff to go bad. She couldn't drink milk near the end of its "sell by" date, she couldn't eat most cheeses, etc. My dad was skeptical, so he mixed a spoonful of sour cream, not enough to taste, into the big bowl of mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner.
And you know what? My wife said the potatoes tasted funny. He insisted they were just potatoes. She had another bite, then got up and ran to the bathroom. She spent the evening being violently ill. You know what? She really is extremely sensitive to "spoiled" dairy. It's not just all in her head. I've seen this happen to her other times when she really didn't know or even suspect something was wrong with the food. (There was an incident where the whipped cream on a dessert turned out to be crème fraîche. Neither of us had even heard of crème fraîche before then.) In her case it's a real, repeatable physiological response which can be demonstrated in a double-blind test.
While it's good to be skeptical, it's not cool to mess with someone's food. Especially at Thanksgiving.
On the other hand, until I see the wi-fi guy pass a double-blind test I'm not going to believe a word of what he says.
I never liked it on a small screen. Then I saw it in a proper theater. It makes a huge difference! It's a completely different movie. To appreciate it, you really need the immersion that a dark room, huge screen, and a good sound system can provide.
To bring it back to video games, normally I don't think eye-popping graphics are necessary for a good game. If 2001 was a video game, however, it would be an otherwise pretty lame game that was absolutely brilliant on a high-end system. It would be one of those rare games in which the excellent graphics and sound actually do make up for the crummy game mechanics.