I setup an emulator on my son's system so he could play some old 2600 games on his system because I was reminising to him about the games I used to play when I was his age. Well, my son who only has played on new glitzy photorealistic games thinks the old games are just as cool as the new ones.
Yeah 90-95% of the games then stink like they do now, but there are some classics that he loves playing now that he's discovered them like pacman, ms pacman, dig-dug, asteroids and galaxians are cool. I agree that Adventure, Pitfall & Pitfall II suck, we both burned out playing them in about 10 minutes. Even if the graphics suck the play was awsome and addictive on some of them.
He's now after me to get my old C-64s setup so he can play Archon, Moon Patrol and all the other games I have laying around for that system. Really good games never go out of style.
I do have one major problem with the C-64 games and even some of the early IBM PC games. The issue I have is that most all of them are copy protected and now that the disks are getting 15-17 years old they damage easily and are loosing their data from bit rot. But because of the DMCA I *CAN NOT* legally make copies of them because making working copies requires bypassing the copy protection. So I am now, under law, a felon if I try to backup the games to try to preserve them for mine & my family's use. The law sucks and needs to be gotten rid of or modified to allow for this!
Well, I dislike both types of junk mail. Though I will agree that the traditional junk mail is less annoying than the electronic version.
At one time I used to call 800 numbers given in spam mail from pay phones just to cost the people that do it money. Unfortuneatly the number of junk mailers including 800 numbers for me has gone from 1 in 3 to about 1 in 15-20. The only reason I can figure out for this is mainly an increase in "scam mail" and not the people actually trying to conduct "legitimate" buisness via spam. So I don't bother anymore.
Frankly I would not mind being able to run "corporate" applications on something other than a Wintel box for a change. Frankly I see alot of advantages to OS-X taking off...
We have an OS from a company with a firm foot hold in the desktop market to keep M$ honest.
It's still *nix underneath so you can run all your perl and shell scripts if you want.
It should be easy to port Linux apps over to it including GNOME & KDE
It's robust and stable OS and joe user really deserves that.
It's not avaiable for x86 platform so poses no immediate threat to linux.
Getting people used to using something besides Windows opens them up to other possiblities.
Hopefully this will raise the bar for GNOME & KDE developers to build something better than the mess they have now.
Other good things I can't think of...
MacOS-X is something we should be hopping succeeds... choice is good!
CPRM does not have anything to do with chipset on the motherboard. It's a command set extenstion to that ATA standard and hence only needs to be in the Hard Drive and in the Software that uses it. This software can be the OS, part of the application that's running fromt the HD, or some other application in the case of movie/sound files it would be the player.
The whole idea behide it is to make it so that the data/program if coppied off to another hard drive is non functional by some means. The main way this would be accomplished would be for the application it's self to check the hidden data or the OS to verify it with the hidden data and possibly decrypt the application as it's loaded. For media files it would be the player or the OS that would verify the file was from this hard drive and decript it at play time from information stored in the hidden sectors.
The chipset has absolutely nothing to do with this scheme from what I can tell and just deals with the HD and software. So the best place to stop this BS is with the HD vendors.
Frankly I've been very disappointed with computer technology we have now.
I started out in computers back in 1978 playing with a 8080A based system
running at 1.5Mhz with 32KB of RAM and I was writing programs that were
more intelligent than BOB or any of the current drek created by M$.
My first home was an Ohio Scientific and they were playing around in
'82 or so with a system for PHBs to run queries on their business systems
such as "what are our sales for may in california" and it would figure
out and query their sales database and give the person the information.
I remember during the early 80s how computers would get smart enough and
would be able to understand plain english and provide useful responses... heck there were even hobbyists that had their houses wired up and had
some primitive voice & computer controlled.
This brings us back to the original topic... we have computer horsepower
coming out of our behind compared to the late 70's and early 80's but really
as far as useful AI to help make computers really easy to use we just have
pretty user interfaces but no voice recognition and AI in the OS.
I would love to see the following:
Good Voice I/O... we pretty much have that.
Fairly flexible AI framework using classical Heuristics and Neural Net
support.
Ability for home computers to control and talk to my furnace, lights, TV,
VCR, CD player, etc
The system to use AI to figure out what I like and to notify me of the
slashdot (and other sources) stories that I may find interesting.
The system to automatically record shows I like and clip out the commercials
Suggest new shows I may find interesting.
Lots of other things... turning off & on lights, controlling the temperature.
Automatically answering the phone and fielding all those stupid telemarketer
calls!
Reminding me of all the appointments and things I should keep track of.
Alot of the pieces are there, but there is no integrated system which is
voice operated that pulls them all together. Heck on the drive to
work it should take notes for me and read me my e-mail and any interesting
news articles it has found. I find driving to and from work is the
most useless time... listen to the radio and you just get stupid DJs trying
to be funny in the morning, and not any crap worth listening to on the
way home most the time.
As I've been telling my friends all along, the Micro$oft break-up should have been a three-way one along the following lines:
Operating systems - Windows 9x, WinNT and CE (or whatever they call it now)
Applications - Office, SQL Server, Exchange, Games Division, etc.
Internet Division - IIS, Hotmail, MSN, etc
The Break-up as it was proposed by the justice department never made sense. That's why Judge Jackson sent the initial proposal back to the Justice department hoping that it would be a three way plan like he suggested.
I remember Juno from when all they were was a free e-mail service. They required you to use a special client that displayed adds at the top of the message window if I remember correctly. Probably a bit if prior art there, though thank god did not "pop-up".
I head that the fastest growing profession in the USA is the leagal profession. One wonders were things have gone wrong.
- subsolar
BTW I would love to do some beating with a Clue by Four... just don't want to be sued myself!
Well the question I have is who the heck will setup an online letter writing campaign and print out all the submissions and then mail them to the head of the T13 commitee?
Heck I would do it excrept for the following:
1. Somebody needs to write a boilerplate letter, and I don't feel I'm skilled enough to come up with a good one.
2. I probably only get one or two submissions
3. I get slashdoted and get thousands of submissions and it costs $$ to mail them all.
Any supp interest in doing this? if somebody does #1 I would be willing to pony up some $$ to mail the submissions (first 500-1000 anyways). Follow the link to my site here and send an e-mail to link at the bottom if there if your interested in helping.
Well idiot, because of the different video formats NTSC/PAL/SECAM in different parts of the world. Buying a translator is not exactly cheap, and can reduce the quality of the picture further from the current barely acceptable qualtiy of mass transfer printed tapes.
You must only have lived in the US/Canada where NTSC is the only thing you've seen! I have frends in the UK that I have gotten tapes for so they can tranlated to PAL.
I would also like to slap the moderator for moderating this idiot up!!
For example, Apple has completely re-written Display Postscript and created Quartz to be Adobe-free(to avoid paying licencing fees) for Mac OS X. No patent infringement there. Furthermore, there have been third-party GPL'd Postscript interpreters for years; maybe a decade at this point. The other file format examples that you provide are equally impossible.
As for Apple Computer, I would consider them stupid not to have so called *defensive* pattents for their implementation of display postscipt. Adobe has lots of patents dealing with Postscript, and I imagine that almost all of them would be applicable to a third party implementation of a Postscript interpreter. I did not look for these, but trust me they are out there.
Sun doesn't have anything to do with JavaScript; you'd think that/.ers could figure that out after 5 years. Nothing in Java is patentable (it's a language and a spec for a class library), so submarine patents are unlikely. There are multiple sources for JVMs (both Sun and IBM make JVMs for Win32 and Linux), so if Sun starts to charge, people will stop using it.
HP charging for it's printer drivers (apart from the cost of the printer) is crazy. What would you do with a printer without a printer driver?
Maybe it does not make sense right now, but the upgrades to your palm are nolonger free... expect the driver that comes with the printer to be free, but an updated driver unless it comes from the OS provider to be a paid for.
/. charging is, I would bet, quite likely within 5 years. As VC money dries up, companies are going to need to find some other way to pay for providing content (and such).
What content do they provide themselves?? It looks to be *WE* provide the content... except for Jon Katz, and I would not pay for that!!
The answer is to force all spammers to use a service the Direct Marketing Association's Email Perferences service
http://www.e-mps.org/. Of course the more disreputable ones are never going to use a service like that... screw all that I guess.
Of course the real problem is the stupid idiots that respond to all the wonderful opporunaties they receive via e-mail. If just one idiot in a thousand responds that's more than plenty to keep the spam flowing.
One trick I've considered is to raise their cost of operation by mining all the spam I get from my hotmail account for 800 numbers and calling them from pay phones and wasting as much of their time as possible.
I've got one, how about yahoo having the US representative file suit in the WTO that the french are unreasonably restricting trade. It's worked for american cheese. LOL
Ok, I will agree that it's possible, but the normal public has not heard of the movie except for the past couple months.
So if the guy has some ties to the movie industry, or it was announced in one of trade rags then it's likely that he heard about it and registered the domain to thumb his nose at the studio.
Judging from WIPO's rulings before they probably will find the comments on the site indicate that he registered the site in "bad faith" and so will yank it. Frankly, it's a right to tell the world that somebody/something sucks (including me). I can take criticism, though apparently most companies can't.
Well it looks to me like it was registered long before the movie was announces, and since the name is not trademarked, I would think they don't have a change. Of course there is no justice in the world, and they (dreamworks) will probably win by greasing a few pockets.
Like many companies before, their marketing department forgot to register the domain when they decided on the name.
The WHOIS info follows:
Registrant:
Grantics (BAGGERVANCE-DOM)
P.O. Box 3853
McLean, VA 22103
US
Domain Name: baggervance.com
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Karlin, Grant (GK1170) grant@TECHIE.COM
Key Design Group
8 Okland Dr.
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
518.583.7611
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Bukres, Abdel-hadi (AB4783) support@CHEAPESTHOSTING.COM
Xcellweb
PO Box 897
beaverton, OR 97075
503-574-4417 (FAX) 503-629-1884
Record last updated on 06-Oct-2000.
Record expires on 11-Dec-2000.
Record created on 11-Dec-1998.
Database last updated on 6-Nov-2000 06:03:01 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
WEBBER.XCELLWEB.COM 206.58.39.236
WEBBER2.XCELLWEB.COM 206.58.39.237
I was going to go there, but was turned away instantly with a cold sholder by them requiring a cookie. Of course this lead to an instant rant to the webmaser@mindstorms.lego.com about respecting peoples right to not have each and every move tracked.
I think I'll join in with the mis-information compaign.
Correction, only Trademarks must be defended. Patent's don't have to be, they can be defended selectivly. Just look at the Sperry/Unisys LZW patent that they conviently did not defent for the first 5 years of the web till it was everyplace and now are extorting $5000 out of web site operators as a form of protection money.
Another place to checkout with cdindex.org their services is better since it support CD collections better with support for different author & copyright information for each song. It's also XML based (nice buzz word), entries go though a verification stage, and it supports OGG Vorbis & MP3 "signature" lookup to automatically attach information to MP3s. The only player I'm aware of right now that supports it is freeamp.org but I imagine that others could if it was not for the exclusive licence.
Also it's supported by a major online music provider e-Music.com so I think it actually has a chance of sticking arount.
Hmmm, shame we can't make a new version of the GPL lincence that says that the US movie studios and companies doing contract work for them can't use GPL software.
Problem is that the GPL currently gives them the right to use the older version of the licence, though I suppose the option of using the current one or any newer one could be taken out.
Of course we are only shooting ourselves in the foot, we want LINUX and other GPLed software to be used (even if by assholes).
subsolar
Re:Making a point of law with computer code.
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
·
· Score: 2
You should look at: http://www.verkkotieto.com/~lm/c2txt2c/ this was refrenced it the trail as being used to convert the blowfish encryption algorythm to english so that it could be "exported" and then converted back to "C".
I've been reading the transcripts for the whole trial and the expressive speech argument seems to be the only thing that has phased Judge Kaplan truely. I also agree with previous posters that both sides have seemed to be very inept durning the trial and the judge has been frankly very irritated with that.
That's interesting, I've noticed the same thing from some web sites also. From what I've been able to tell they all run MS IIS on Windows NT.
So anybody know is there an ASP command to pull that information? And why the heck would the *need* it? I would call it a privacy violation, should we sick the FTC on them?
Ah, but it will be. Say in 30 years you want to do some research on the Y2K histeria of the turn of the century. While there will be plenty of books to read through, a major factor in spreading the word about Y2K was the Web. However, these web sites are already mostly gone from the Web today. Fortunately, the Internet Archive may have already preserved them for future study.
One thing I find personally irritating is the total lack of history on the web. There are tons of sites that did have interesting content that have totally disappeard and will never be seen again. Personally I find this one of the sadest parts of the web that you can't find out that a site that disappeard contained. In the age of the old centralized ftp archives like oak, and big BBSs like Exec-PC files had a sort of indefinite life. Now when somebodys page disappears that used to host a cool little utility it may very well be gone forever if somebody else did not mirror it. One example I use often is HomeSite 1.2 which was a freeware web page editor published by Nick Bradbury but was bought out by Allaire.
On the darker side the lack of history on the web makes for easy revisionist history. A company or organization can just delete or change a document and then say basically "We never said such a thing, or took that stance" when they get called on some issue. One such issue would be the RIAA's claim that any extraction of audio data from a CD on a PC is a violation of copyright laws since PC & PC Mass storage vendors don't pay them any royalties. This is pure BS as was proved in them loosing their case with Diamond MM. You won't find that document on their site anymore because they will never admit that they were WRONG.
I do have a copy of the page that thankfully was archived by GOOGLE when it was indexed before they removed it. This is the scariest thing about the web... the easy of anybody revising their own history at a later date to make it fit whatever they see fit since there is never any physical evidence.
subSolar
Re:Trying to Stop a Flood with a Bucket and a Towe
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
One thing that is very dangerous that the WinAmp crowd is enabling is their player now allows you to convert MP3s, WAV, MOD, and others WinAmp supports to Microsoft's WMA, but won't convert a WMA file to MP3. This streanghtens a non-open standard at the expense of several well supported open ones.
Of course the winamp crew is now being controlled by mainstream corporate america... I wonder if they noticed that sucking sound as they lost their souls when the signed the contract??
subsolar
Re:Trying to Stop a Flood with a Bucket and a Towe
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
MP3s can't be play limited as far as I know, but winamp plays other formats that can be like liquidaudio, WMA (Microsoft's windows media architecture), MJuice, and others that do have copyright controls and follow the SDMI guidelines.
There is also work on a format called MP4 that is an enhancement to MP3 in that it allows files to be encrypted and allow copyright controls as to who can play the file.
Though on pricipal I stay away from such systems since I don't like technologies that limits my rights to access music I own. I can make perfect digital copies of my CDs and play them on any digital device I have, any system that replaces CDs for me will have to allow the same. It does not look like audio DVDs will be it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah 90-95% of the games then stink like they do now, but there are some classics that he loves playing now that he's discovered them like pacman, ms pacman, dig-dug, asteroids and galaxians are cool. I agree that Adventure, Pitfall & Pitfall II suck, we both burned out playing them in about 10 minutes. Even if the graphics suck the play was awsome and addictive on some of them.
He's now after me to get my old C-64s setup so he can play Archon, Moon Patrol and all the other games I have laying around for that system. Really good games never go out of style.
I do have one major problem with the C-64 games and even some of the early IBM PC games. The issue I have is that most all of them are copy protected and now that the disks are getting 15-17 years old they damage easily and are loosing their data from bit rot. But because of the DMCA I *CAN NOT* legally make copies of them because making working copies requires bypassing the copy protection. So I am now, under law, a felon if I try to backup the games to try to preserve them for mine & my family's use. The law sucks and needs to be gotten rid of or modified to allow for this!
- subsolar
At one time I used to call 800 numbers given in spam mail from pay phones just to cost the people that do it money. Unfortuneatly the number of junk mailers including 800 numbers for me has gone from 1 in 3 to about 1 in 15-20. The only reason I can figure out for this is mainly an increase in "scam mail" and not the people actually trying to conduct "legitimate" buisness via spam. So I don't bother anymore.
- subsolar
- We have an OS from a company with a firm foot hold in the desktop market to keep M$ honest.
- It's still *nix underneath so you can run all your perl and shell scripts if you want.
- It should be easy to port Linux apps over to it including GNOME & KDE
- It's robust and stable OS and joe user really deserves that.
- It's not avaiable for x86 platform so poses no immediate threat to linux.
- Getting people used to using something besides Windows opens them up to other possiblities.
- Hopefully this will raise the bar for GNOME & KDE developers to build something better than the mess they have now.
- Other good things I can't think of...
MacOS-X is something we should be hopping succeeds- subsolar
- subsolar
The whole idea behide it is to make it so that the data/program if coppied off to another hard drive is non functional by some means. The main way this would be accomplished would be for the application it's self to check the hidden data or the OS to verify it with the hidden data and possibly decrypt the application as it's loaded. For media files it would be the player or the OS that would verify the file was from this hard drive and decript it at play time from information stored in the hidden sectors.
The chipset has absolutely nothing to do with this scheme from what I can tell and just deals with the HD and software. So the best place to stop this BS is with the HD vendors.
- subsolar
My first home was an Ohio Scientific and they were playing around in '82 or so with a system for PHBs to run queries on their business systems such as "what are our sales for may in california" and it would figure out and query their sales database and give the person the information. I remember during the early 80s how computers would get smart enough and would be able to understand plain english and provide useful responses ... heck there were even hobbyists that had their houses wired up and had
some primitive voice & computer controlled.
This brings us back to the original topic ... we have computer horsepower
coming out of our behind compared to the late 70's and early 80's but really
as far as useful AI to help make computers really easy to use we just have
pretty user interfaces but no voice recognition and AI in the OS.
I would love to see the following:
-
Good Voice I/O
... we pretty much have that.
-
Fairly flexible AI framework using classical Heuristics and Neural Net
support.
-
Ability for home computers to control and talk to my furnace, lights, TV,
VCR, CD player, etc
-
The system to use AI to figure out what I like and to notify me of the
slashdot (and other sources) stories that I may find interesting.
-
The system to automatically record shows I like and clip out the commercials
-
Suggest new shows I may find interesting.
-
Lots of other things
... turning off & on lights, controlling the temperature.
-
Automatically answering the phone and fielding all those stupid telemarketer
calls!
-
Reminding me of all the appointments and things I should keep track of.
Alot of the pieces are there, but there is no integrated system which is voice operated that pulls them all together. Heck on the drive to work it should take notes for me and read me my e-mail and any interesting news articles it has found. I find driving to and from work is the most useless time- subsolar
- Operating systems - Windows 9x, WinNT and CE (or whatever they call it now)
- Applications - Office, SQL Server, Exchange, Games Division, etc.
- Internet Division - IIS, Hotmail, MSN, etc
The Break-up as it was proposed by the justice department never made sense. That's why Judge Jackson sent the initial proposal back to the Justice department hoping that it would be a three way plan like he suggested.- subsolar
I head that the fastest growing profession in the USA is the leagal profession. One wonders were things have gone wrong.
- subsolar
BTW I would love to do some beating with a Clue by Four ... just don't want to be sued myself!
Heck I would do it excrept for the following:
1. Somebody needs to write a boilerplate letter, and I don't feel I'm skilled enough to come up with a good one.
2. I probably only get one or two submissions
3. I get slashdoted and get thousands of submissions and it costs $$ to mail them all.
Any supp interest in doing this? if somebody does #1 I would be willing to pony up some $$ to mail the submissions (first 500-1000 anyways). Follow the link to my site here and send an e-mail to link at the bottom if there if your interested in helping.
- subsolar
Though they are a new low!!
- subsolar
You must only have lived in the US/Canada where NTSC is the only thing you've seen! I have frends in the UK that I have gotten tapes for so they can tranlated to PAL.
I would also like to slap the moderator for moderating this idiot up!!
FLAME HO!!!
- subsolar
6,141,794 System and method for synchronizing access to shared variables in a virtual machine in a digital computer system
6,026,485 Instruction folding for a stack-based machine
5,899,990 Java -to-Database Connectivity Server Maybe it does not make sense right now, but the upgrades to your palm are nolonger free
- subsolar
Of course the real problem is the stupid idiots that respond to all the wonderful opporunaties they receive via e-mail. If just one idiot in a thousand responds that's more than plenty to keep the spam flowing.
One trick I've considered is to raise their cost of operation by mining all the spam I get from my hotmail account for 800 numbers and calling them from pay phones and wasting as much of their time as possible.
subsolar
So if the guy has some ties to the movie industry, or it was announced in one of trade rags then it's likely that he heard about it and registered the domain to thumb his nose at the studio.
Judging from WIPO's rulings before they probably will find the comments on the site indicate that he registered the site in "bad faith" and so will yank it. Frankly, it's a right to tell the world that somebody/something sucks (including me). I can take criticism, though apparently most companies can't.
- subsolar
Like many companies before, their marketing department forgot to register the domain when they decided on the name.
The WHOIS info follows:
Registrant:
Grantics (BAGGERVANCE-DOM)
P.O. Box 3853
McLean, VA 22103
US
Domain Name: baggervance.com
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Karlin, Grant (GK1170) grant@TECHIE.COM
Key Design Group
8 Okland Dr.
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
518.583.7611
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Bukres, Abdel-hadi (AB4783) support@CHEAPESTHOSTING.COM
Xcellweb
PO Box 897
beaverton, OR 97075
503-574-4417 (FAX) 503-629-1884
Record last updated on 06-Oct-2000.
Record expires on 11-Dec-2000.
Record created on 11-Dec-1998.
Database last updated on 6-Nov-2000 06:03:01 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
WEBBER.XCELLWEB.COM 206.58.39.236
WEBBER2.XCELLWEB.COM 206.58.39.237
- subsolar
I think I'll join in with the mis-information compaign.
subsolar
subsolar
Also it's supported by a major online music provider e-Music.com so I think it actually has a chance of sticking arount.
subsolar
Problem is that the GPL currently gives them the right to use the older version of the licence, though I suppose the option of using the current one or any newer one could be taken out.
Of course we are only shooting ourselves in the foot, we want LINUX and other GPLed software to be used (even if by assholes).
subsolar
I've been reading the transcripts for the whole trial and the expressive speech argument seems to be the only thing that has phased Judge Kaplan truely. I also agree with previous posters that both sides have seemed to be very inept durning the trial and the judge has been frankly very irritated with that.
subsolar
So anybody know is there an ASP command to pull that information? And why the heck would the *need* it? I would call it a privacy violation, should we sick the FTC on them?
subsolar
One thing I find personally irritating is the total lack of history on the web. There are tons of sites that did have interesting content that have totally disappeard and will never be seen again. Personally I find this one of the sadest parts of the web that you can't find out that a site that disappeard contained. In the age of the old centralized ftp archives like oak, and big BBSs like Exec-PC files had a sort of indefinite life. Now when somebodys page disappears that used to host a cool little utility it may very well be gone forever if somebody else did not mirror it. One example I use often is HomeSite 1.2 which was a freeware web page editor published by Nick Bradbury but was bought out by Allaire.
On the darker side the lack of history on the web makes for easy revisionist history. A company or organization can just delete or change a document and then say basically "We never said such a thing, or took that stance" when they get called on some issue. One such issue would be the RIAA's claim that any extraction of audio data from a CD on a PC is a violation of copyright laws since PC & PC Mass storage vendors don't pay them any royalties. This is pure BS as was proved in them loosing their case with Diamond MM. You won't find that document on their site anymore because they will never admit that they were WRONG.
I do have a copy of the page that thankfully was archived by GOOGLE when it was indexed before they removed it. This is the scariest thing about the web ... the easy of anybody revising their own history at a later date to make it fit whatever they see fit since there is never any physical evidence.
subSolar
Of course the winamp crew is now being controlled by mainstream corporate america ... I wonder if they noticed that sucking sound as they lost their souls when the signed the contract??
subsolar
There is also work on a format called MP4 that is an enhancement to MP3 in that it allows files to be encrypted and allow copyright controls as to who can play the file.
Though on pricipal I stay away from such systems since I don't like technologies that limits my rights to access music I own. I can make perfect digital copies of my CDs and play them on any digital device I have, any system that replaces CDs for me will have to allow the same. It does not look like audio DVDs will be it for me.
subsolar