It's now in Hardware Category of System Prefs. "CDs & DVDs" Icon.
So, by default, when I insert an audio CD, my PowerBook is set to launch iTunes. Is there some type of exploit or buffer overrun that is hijacking iTunes and telling it to install malware? I don't see how this is possible. iTunes will just read the audio data from the CD, as far as I know.
Could you please provide more information? Thanks.
intentionally and without authorization or with intent to injure or defraud alters any computer...
I think that's the problem right there. You can't prove intent to injure or defraud. They are trying to protect their intellectual property, and unless you can prove that they knowingly intended to damage your computer or cause you harm or rip you off in some way, the law you're talking about doesn't apply.
I was using a cranky old IMAP account on my web hosting provider which was proving to be a nuisance (and I had far from a gig of storage!).
For those of you that are wondering how to get mail from your IMAP or POP3 accounts into Gmail, I found a great way to do it with Fetchmail. These are the options I used:
Give this a try, it will prompt you for your IMAP password, then start copying away. BTW, the --keep flag tells it to keep all of your messages on your IMAP server, so it's not going to erase anything.
Some tips:
You may want to setup some Labels and Filters ahead of time on your GMail account so that you don't end up with 5000 messages in your inbox. For example messages that came from a domain name of my old employer get labelled with company name and archived automatically.
Messages will have all appropriate headers intact, however the timestamp that the messages are received will reflect the current time, rather than the original timestamp. There is no way around this because Google's SMTP servers automatically timestamp every incoming message.
There is no need to worry about MAIL FROM: headers being mangled like they would be if you forwarded them from a regular mail client. All MAIL FROM: headers will remain intact. Fetchmail only overwrites the RCPT TO: portion of the headers.
Let me know if you have any problems... Mine is currently chunking away on 850 out of 2867 messages... Gmail rocks!
Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations
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Gmail in the News
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· Score: 3, Informative
IANAL either, but...
First, I'm fairly certain that YOUR privacy ranks WAY higher than any company's supposed "right" to a profit.
This is simply not the case. When you agree to the terms of Google Mail, it specifically says that your email will be provided to any court if they are given a subpoena. Right to privacy be damned; if a court issues a subpoena, Google will pony up the data, rather than be found in contempt of court.
Thirdly, such a lawsuit would be a civil matter, and I doubt that you can just get a judge to sign over a subpoena to go searching though million of people's mail. This relates to point number one.
Yes, you can. In a civil matter, discovery allows both the plaintiff and defendant to subpoena corporate data and documents that apply to the case. If the case involved a dispute over adwords, the subpoena might very well include "the contents of all messages that triggered the customer's ads to appear." Google would have no choice but to comply.
For an example of this, look at the SCO vs. IBM case. This is a civil matter as well, and both SCO and IBM have been subpoenaing millions of documents and source code and probably emails from each other as well.
Having said all of that, I don't want you to think I'm paranoid or anything. I use Gmail every day now, and I don't really care if they read my email or not. The reason why is because email is going in plaintext over the wire every day and Carnivore is probably already reading everything I send and receive anyway. Who cares about Google reading my email? I'm much more worried about the FBI reading it and building a profile on me.
When it will be out of beta? when it will allow non-invite subscriptions? When they will consider "its ready"?
When you will speaking in proper english be?
Re:I did it before, and I'll do it again
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Gmail in the News
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· Score: 1
I've you'd like a Gmail account, send me an email at chrislamothe@gmail.com and as I get invites I'll hook you up.
Dude, you just put your real, unencrypted email address on a Slashdot story, in a mailto: link no less... Dear god, you better hope that Gmail's spam filters work better than Hotmail's or you're in for a world of hurt.
Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations
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Gmail in the News
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· Score: 3, Interesting
... and quickly had well over a dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to gmail-is-too-creepy.com:)
I too am a Gmail beta user, and I've been very pleased with the service. Setup my.forward file to send a copy to my Gmail box, and set my reply-to address to be my private email, and I'm all set. Now I can switch between Gmail and Mail.app on my Powerbook lickety split.
I wanted to bring up something else that I just came across that was kind of strange. I agree that the people freaking out over adwords is a little over the top, but I found this article that brings up a very interesting point:
"Moreover, like any e-mail provider, the text of your Gmail is stored and subject to subpoena. I can envision a situation where an advertiser, paying Google hundreds of thousands of dollars, claims that Google failed to "insert" its ads in relevant e-mails, or inserted a competitor's ads instead (or in addition to, or more prominently). In the course of the ensuing litigation, wouldn't both the ads themselves and the text of the messages into which they were inserted be relevant, and therefore discoverable? I can't imagine why not."
I generally believe Google is a good company, but this argument actually got me thinking.
MOD PARENT UP -- MODERATOR ABUSE
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Gmail in the News
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
I don't see how a post that is talking about giving Gmail accounts to troops overseas is off-topic in this discussion. Some moderators need to be smacked down.
"Your Bagle is ready. Would you like to see an add about Philly Cream Cheese?"
[CUE full motion video ad showing rich Philly cream cheese being spread on a steaming toasted bagle]
"Would you like to replicate Philly cream cheese for an additional 49 cents? Click Yes or No"
You click YES, meanwhile, millions of nano-bots go around re-arranging atoms to form philly cream cheese. 30 seconds later, cream cheese bagel emerges from the replicator/toaster.
Your wife walks in. "Something smells good," she says. "Let me have a bite."
As she takes a bite, a piercing alarm sounds from the toaster/replicator.
"DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT VIOLATION!!! You have exceeded the maximum number of authorized users for 'Toasted Bagel' and 'Philly Cream Cheese-like spread'."
And with that, a million more little nano-bots ooze forth from the replicator and turn the bagel into foul-smelling grey goo in the space of about 2 seconds.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but just because she uses a Mac doesn't mean she doesn't know anything about technology. Could be she knows a lot more than you and just keeps her mouth shut all the time... Mac users are pretty smart... That's why they use Macs...:-)
The second disc contains a high-resolution surround-sound version of the film in WMV9. It recommends up to 3GHZ and 512MB of RAM.
I got some 0.2 fps out of it! But damn, the still shots I saw were sweet (and to think, my 1024x768 resolution was still missing about half the detail). I cannot wait for HD-DVD. Imagine the Lord of the Rings trilogy or animation like Spirited Away/Finding Nemo.
I actually purchased this DVD and watched it on my P4 2.6 ghz. hooked up to a Sony HDTV. It looked pretty amazing, and no dropouts. I think the problem with the WMP9 codec is that they only optimized it for Intel P4 architecture, so any Athlon users had really terrible framerates.
The thing that really sucked is the sound output. My on-board soundcard on that machine is 5.1, but they're all 1/8" analog outs and sound like crap. The background hiss was almost unbearable. You really need a soundcard with an optical output that can do AC3 pass-through to get decent quality.
Even those people using an nForce2 chipset were complaining because of the quality loss involved in converting the AC3 audio to WAV internally, then having the nForce2 audio chipset re-compress (transcode) the audio back into AC3 and send it down the optical link. All the decompressing and recompressing is like taking your MP3s, burning them to audio CD, then re-ripping them as MP3s again. Of course the nForce2 folks couldn't get a good frame rate out of the package because of their Athlon chipset...
Overall, not a very good DVD release, but it worked on some small percentage of setups out there, and was good for a technology preview.
I fully agree, I don't think the artist gets 1 cent of allofmp3 downloads.
That's why I would gladly pay a few bucks more per album to support the artist (hence my 3.50 USD figure). At allofmp3 I normally pay about 1 USD per album (which I agree is too little), but they seem to be able to run a webstore+encoding+distribution business from it. The difference between the above amounts would be a fine amount to go to the artist (i.e. 2.00-2.50 USD).
Oh, I misunderstood you. I thought you were implying that on a 3.50 purchase at allofmp3.com, you could expect about 2.50 to go to the artists.
My question for you is this: How do propose getting the extra money to the artists? Do you just mail it to their fan club, or try to track them down in meatspace and give it to them personally? These questions bother me. I'd like to see someone implement a secure "virtual tip jar" and figure out how to actually disburse the funds to the real artists in question. That way, people that like allofmp3.com could get over their guilty conscience.:-)
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war.
I know, I know, I just replied twice to the same post, but I wanted to say one more thing. Did anyone notice how Dell and Sony are the two big proponents of Blu-Ray? Aren't they the same two companies that have been trying to foist DVD+R on us for years, when test after test has shown that DVD-R is more compatible with consumer DVD players, has more industry support, and has cheaper media? See a pattern here?
It seems like Sony only wants to support media formats that they provide. See Betamax, MiniDisk, ATRAC, Memory Stick, DVD+R, and now Blu-Ray for past examples.
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war.
My prediction is that Sony will lose this one, just like the VHS/Betamax format war. The problem with Blu-Ray is that not only does it require new players which only Sony will make initially (cha-ching!) and will cost an arm and a leg, it also requires all of the DVD manufacturers to invest in entirely new equipment to make the disks, which of course Sony will also provide (cha-ching! cha-ching!).
The HD-DVD 1.0 spec already has broader industry support because it does not require the retooling of existing manufacturing operations. Sure, the consumers will have to buy new players regardless, but there will be a lot of downward price pressure that comes from having many players in an open market.
So basically, we have the Betamax vs. VHS format war all over again. Sony has a technically better but much more expensive format that (surprise, surprise!) is designed to lock-in customers to Sony's proprietary players and discs and extract the most money possible from them. The other players are supporting a more open format that while not technically superior, is good enough to get the job done.
My prediction: HD-DVD wins hands down. There's no way Hollywood and the motion picture studios are going to re-tool all of their DVD manufacturing operations to support Blu-Ray when HD-DVD is good enough to satisfy consumers and cheap to boot.
My prediction is that these type of products will fail miserably. They are not useful as a PDA at all due to the fact that they run Windows XP. Read the following from the article:
Despite appearances, the Sony Vaio U50 and U70 are indeed Windows computers. They can run Windows software, and take as long to boot up or resume from standby as any notebook PC. So if you're looking for instant-on, quick access to data, and don't need to run Windows PC software on the device, consider notebook-like PDAs such as the Sharp Zaurus C860.
Can you imagine trying to get someone's contact info at a business meeting with one of these?
Let's see, open the lid, wait 5-10 seconds for Windows to wake up from standby mode.
If it's not booted, you're waiting 2-3 minutes to boot.
Now, enter your username and password to login to Windows.
Now, open Outlook by double-clicking it's icon.
Choose what folder you want the contact in (business/personal). Maybe you even have to establish a network connection to place the contact in a shared folder.
Now click "New Contact" and try to figure out a way to input their data without a keyboard!!! WTF, no keyboard for data input?!?!
Guess you'll be using Windows XP's on-screen keyboard to enter all their data, hunting and pecking with your stylus or fingers on the little tiny on-screen QWERTY keyboard. Better go to Start|Programs|Accessories|Accessibility|On-Screen Keyboard. 5 clicks later and you can actually type!
Type in contact name and phone number painfully slow while hunting and pecking on the on-screen keyboard.
Click save.
By this time you've probably wasted 5-10 minutes of your business associate's time and he's already handed you a business card or written his info down on a piece of paper and handed it to you. Not to mention he thinks you're a total wanker for using technology that just doesn't fit the purpose.
Compare all this with my Palm enabled Treo phone?
Open the flip.
Click the "New" button.
Type in their name and phone number and hit "Done."
Total time on the Palm enabled phone? 30 seconds or so.
So basically, this is just a smaller than average laptop. I still have to carry around a PDA, cellphone, and every other device I always had to carry. These devices might be popular in Japan where there is a demand for very tiny portable computers, but here in the US they will fail miserably.
It seems like they're trying to capture a small percentage of the already tiny PDA market, by marketing a device that doesn't even function as a PDA... Fucking brilliant. Someone ought to knock those Sony and OQO executives that greenlighted these products upside the head with a clue-by-four.
That leaves about 2.00-2.50 USD to the artist per album when I subtract the allofmp3 costs. I think that's fair (and a helluvalot more than most artists are getting now)
I would be extremely surprised if any of the allofMP3 fees go to the artists at all. Chances are they are paying fees to the RIAA or whatever the Russian equivelant of it is, but it's kinda like the CD-R taxes in other countries. The money goes to the record companies who don't share with the artists one cent.
Well, kudos to them for not making us Britains pay 99p a track, like I'm sure some other companies would. We still pay the highest price, but I'm getting used to being shafted out of every penny I own here anyway.
Its definitely troubling that the crash condition was consistent, but I am suspicious that it was simply an incompatibility between the benchmarking tool and the raid controller.
Sounds like a buggy product. There should be nothing that any benchmarking tool can do to cause hardware errors on a machine. Given a reliable product, it should be impossible for software to cause a hardware error.
Sounds like another situation where all of the overclockers will be saying "d00d! my 4x RAID0 setup is uber l33t! Look how fast it is!" Never minding the fact that every time they try to use it in a real world scenario it blue-screens on them.
This, my friends, is the number one reason why I switched to Apple after building countless numbers of PCs. The PC component manufacturers simply do not care whether or not there are bugs in their products. Many times these bugs don't even manifest themselves until you try using their RAID card with your exact Mobo, Video card, Network card, and memory card configuration.
Sometimes, these Mobo manufacturers even have incompatibility issues between the on-board components on their motherboards!. If they can't even test their equipment enough to know that doing an extreme amount of RAID activity while heavily utilizing the network card causes data corruption (just a hypothetical, but very possible case), then they honestly don't care about your data.
If anything you do on the computer, whether it's coding, making music, editing video, or whatever, matters to you, then you wouldn't be buying cheap PC components either.
My very 1st machine was an Acer 486/66 dx2 with 4 megs of ram and a 500 gig hd. I was about 12 at the time and the king of Dos:).
Wow, talk about making me feel old... My first IBM compatible machine (not counting the Osborne Executive (CP/M), or the Commodore 64) was a 286 that my parents bought when I was about 15. It had 1 MB of memory and ran at 12 mhz., with EGA graphics and a 40 MB (that's right, megabytes, not gigabytes) hard drive. I learned how to program in Pascal on that thing using Turbo Pascal... Good times.
Anyway, when I got into college I remember taking out a student loan for $2000 just so I could build myself a "dream machine" for my CS major. I built myself a 386-33, with a whopping 4 MB of RAM and (here's the kicker), a whopping 340 MB hard drive. I was running a BBS at the time and wanted a lot of space. Anyway, I remember the hard drive alone cost $900! But it was still going strong about 5 years later when I sold it.
I guess it's fun to think back and see how far hardware has come in such a short time. I also get a kick when I see all these modders and PC builders building custom machines, and then I think "man, I was building my own PCs back in 1992". Makes me feel kinda like an old fart, but truthfully, the Intel architecture has not really changed since then.
Living in Maryland, I can see the need for cameras everywhere in the downtown area of Baltimore (not so much the inner harbor.
Yeah, no shit. The inner harbor is about the safest place to walk around in Baltimore just because it's all touristy and filled with shops so it gets lots of police protection.
Just goes to show you the preferential police state system we have here in America, where if you're rich or a business owner you can expect protection from the law, but the poor and underprivileged can expect jack. You don't see them putting up cameras in project neighborhoods which actually could benefit from them.
Maybe you missed the news flash, but Sun also happens to have been a major contributor to SCO's legal war chest, and continues to be an antagonistic purveyor of anti-FOSS FUD.
Talk is cheap my friend. Would you care to show me proof that Sun is contributing money to SCO just so they can "go after" Linux? What, can't find any? That's because Sun has simply been a paying customer and nothing more. They purchased some drivers to try and make Solaris X86 work with more hardware.
Why not split the database into segments, like alphabetically into a,b,c,...,z customers, and then put each one on a separate PC with one master PC routing the calls? I bet it would be just as fast, if not faster than your monolithic system.
In fact, my brother and I have been talking about running large databases using inexpensive clusters of MySQL boxes where we split the database in exactly the manner you describe. A large company will never go for this though, because they are too used to the mainframe mentality.
When you think about it, those huge 64 processor Oracle DB servers really are a holdover from the "mainframe mentality." A lot of organizations believe that by consolidating many smaller servers into one bigger one, they are saving on TCO. I'm inclined to believe that the admin costs will be a lot lower on 1 big server than on 100 smaller ones, but the initial purchase price will be much higher.
I've been playing with MRTG a little lately...I wonder if you could have Apache or other processes provide info via SNMP and use or modify MRTG to provide more 3-d and 4-d (brightness like VisitorVille's lit/unlit buildings or color) 'graphs'?
You should look at a free product called Cacti. It uses RRDTool (from the maker of MRTG) to generate graphs of anything. Literally, anything you can script in Perl or Bash to return a variable when the script is run can be graphed. It's very powerful, and free too, which can't be beat.
No, I'm not the project developer, I just use it at work and find it quite a bit better than many commercial products that do the same thing.
Can't say it could happen to a more deserving company.
Wack yourself upside the head with a cluestick. In case you didn't know this, Sun has been licensing significant portions of System V code from AT&T, and now from SCO when they purchased it from AT&T, for decades now.
They have no say or control over what SCO does with their intellectual property. They are simply a customer, licensing Unix System V, just like every other commercial Unix vendor out there.
If you want to put every company that supports SCO on your little commie shit-list because they're funding the destruction of Linux, you might as well put IBM (AIX), HP (HP-UX), SGI (Irix) on there too.
Unless you've been drinking enough of the FOSS kool-aid to actually think that every commercial flavor of Unix is evil, evil!
Slashdot Mirror
It's now in Hardware Category of System Prefs. "CDs & DVDs" Icon.
So, by default, when I insert an audio CD, my PowerBook is set to launch iTunes. Is there some type of exploit or buffer overrun that is hijacking iTunes and telling it to install malware? I don't see how this is possible. iTunes will just read the audio data from the CD, as far as I know.
Could you please provide more information? Thanks.
intentionally and without authorization or with intent to injure or defraud alters any computer...
I think that's the problem right there. You can't prove intent to injure or defraud. They are trying to protect their intellectual property, and unless you can prove that they knowingly intended to damage your computer or cause you harm or rip you off in some way, the law you're talking about doesn't apply.
For those of you that are wondering how to get mail from your IMAP or POP3 accounts into Gmail, I found a great way to do it with Fetchmail. These are the options I used:
fetchmail --all --keep \
--smtphost gsmtp57.google.com,gsmtp171.google.com \
--smtpname yourmailbox@gmail.com \
--protocol IMAP or POP3 \
--user yourmailserverusername \
yourmailserverhostname
Give this a try, it will prompt you for your IMAP password, then start copying away. BTW, the --keep flag tells it to keep all of your messages on your IMAP server, so it's not going to erase anything.
Some tips:
You may want to setup some Labels and Filters ahead of time on your GMail account so that you don't end up with 5000 messages in your inbox. For example messages that came from a domain name of my old employer get labelled with company name and archived automatically.
Messages will have all appropriate headers intact, however the timestamp that the messages are received will reflect the current time, rather than the original timestamp. There is no way around this because Google's SMTP servers automatically timestamp every incoming message.
There is no need to worry about MAIL FROM: headers being mangled like they would be if you forwarded them from a regular mail client. All MAIL FROM: headers will remain intact. Fetchmail only overwrites the RCPT TO: portion of the headers.
Let me know if you have any problems... Mine is currently chunking away on 850 out of 2867 messages... Gmail rocks!
IANAL either, but...
First, I'm fairly certain that YOUR privacy ranks WAY higher than any company's supposed "right" to a profit.
This is simply not the case. When you agree to the terms of Google Mail, it specifically says that your email will be provided to any court if they are given a subpoena. Right to privacy be damned; if a court issues a subpoena, Google will pony up the data, rather than be found in contempt of court.
Thirdly, such a lawsuit would be a civil matter, and I doubt that you can just get a judge to sign over a subpoena to go searching though million of people's mail. This relates to point number one.
Yes, you can. In a civil matter, discovery allows both the plaintiff and defendant to subpoena corporate data and documents that apply to the case. If the case involved a dispute over adwords, the subpoena might very well include "the contents of all messages that triggered the customer's ads to appear." Google would have no choice but to comply.
For an example of this, look at the SCO vs. IBM case. This is a civil matter as well, and both SCO and IBM have been subpoenaing millions of documents and source code and probably emails from each other as well.
Having said all of that, I don't want you to think I'm paranoid or anything. I use Gmail every day now, and I don't really care if they read my email or not. The reason why is because email is going in plaintext over the wire every day and Carnivore is probably already reading everything I send and receive anyway. Who cares about Google reading my email? I'm much more worried about the FBI reading it and building a profile on me.
"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."
-- W., 2001
Wow... Where did you get that amazing quote? I'd like to know the source because that's one Bushism I've never heard before. Cool stuff.
When it will be out of beta? when it will allow non-invite subscriptions? When they will consider "its ready"?
When you will speaking in proper english be?
I've you'd like a Gmail account, send me an email at chrislamothe@gmail.com and as I get invites I'll hook you up.
Dude, you just put your real, unencrypted email address on a Slashdot story, in a mailto: link no less... Dear god, you better hope that Gmail's spam filters work better than Hotmail's or you're in for a world of hurt.
... and quickly had well over a dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to gmail-is-too-creepy.com :)
.forward file to send a copy to my Gmail box, and set my reply-to address to be my private email, and I'm all set. Now I can switch between Gmail and Mail.app on my Powerbook lickety split.
I too am a Gmail beta user, and I've been very pleased with the service. Setup my
I wanted to bring up something else that I just came across that was kind of strange. I agree that the people freaking out over adwords is a little over the top, but I found this article that brings up a very interesting point:
"Moreover, like any e-mail provider, the text of your Gmail is stored and subject to subpoena. I can envision a situation where an advertiser, paying Google hundreds of thousands of dollars, claims that Google failed to "insert" its ads in relevant e-mails, or inserted a competitor's ads instead (or in addition to, or more prominently). In the course of the ensuing litigation, wouldn't both the ads themselves and the text of the messages into which they were inserted be relevant, and therefore discoverable? I can't imagine why not."
I generally believe Google is a good company, but this argument actually got me thinking.
I don't see how a post that is talking about giving Gmail accounts to troops overseas is off-topic in this discussion. Some moderators need to be smacked down.
"Your Bagle is ready. Would you like to see an add about Philly Cream Cheese?"
[CUE full motion video ad showing rich Philly cream cheese being spread on a steaming toasted bagle]
"Would you like to replicate Philly cream cheese for an additional 49 cents? Click Yes or No"
You click YES, meanwhile, millions of nano-bots go around re-arranging atoms to form philly cream cheese. 30 seconds later, cream cheese bagel emerges from the replicator/toaster.
Your wife walks in. "Something smells good," she says. "Let me have a bite."
As she takes a bite, a piercing alarm sounds from the toaster/replicator.
"DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT VIOLATION!!! You have exceeded the maximum number of authorized users for 'Toasted Bagel' and 'Philly Cream Cheese-like spread'."
And with that, a million more little nano-bots ooze forth from the replicator and turn the bagel into foul-smelling grey goo in the space of about 2 seconds.
My non-techie gf (a mac-wielding artist!)
:-)
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but just because she uses a Mac doesn't mean she doesn't know anything about technology. Could be she knows a lot more than you and just keeps her mouth shut all the time... Mac users are pretty smart... That's why they use Macs...
The second disc contains a high-resolution surround-sound version of the film in WMV9. It recommends up to 3GHZ and 512MB of RAM.
I got some 0.2 fps out of it! But damn, the still shots I saw were sweet (and to think, my 1024x768 resolution was still missing about half the detail). I cannot wait for HD-DVD. Imagine the Lord of the Rings trilogy or animation like Spirited Away/Finding Nemo.
I actually purchased this DVD and watched it on my P4 2.6 ghz. hooked up to a Sony HDTV. It looked pretty amazing, and no dropouts. I think the problem with the WMP9 codec is that they only optimized it for Intel P4 architecture, so any Athlon users had really terrible framerates.
The thing that really sucked is the sound output. My on-board soundcard on that machine is 5.1, but they're all 1/8" analog outs and sound like crap. The background hiss was almost unbearable. You really need a soundcard with an optical output that can do AC3 pass-through to get decent quality.
Even those people using an nForce2 chipset were complaining because of the quality loss involved in converting the AC3 audio to WAV internally, then having the nForce2 audio chipset re-compress (transcode) the audio back into AC3 and send it down the optical link. All the decompressing and recompressing is like taking your MP3s, burning them to audio CD, then re-ripping them as MP3s again. Of course the nForce2 folks couldn't get a good frame rate out of the package because of their Athlon chipset...
Overall, not a very good DVD release, but it worked on some small percentage of setups out there, and was good for a technology preview.
I fully agree, I don't think the artist gets 1 cent of allofmp3 downloads.
:-)
That's why I would gladly pay a few bucks more per album to support the artist (hence my 3.50 USD figure). At allofmp3 I normally pay about 1 USD per album (which I agree is too little), but they seem to be able to run a webstore+encoding+distribution business from it. The difference between the above amounts would be a fine amount to go to the artist (i.e. 2.00-2.50 USD).
Oh, I misunderstood you. I thought you were implying that on a 3.50 purchase at allofmp3.com, you could expect about 2.50 to go to the artists.
My question for you is this: How do propose getting the extra money to the artists? Do you just mail it to their fan club, or try to track them down in meatspace and give it to them personally? These questions bother me. I'd like to see someone implement a secure "virtual tip jar" and figure out how to actually disburse the funds to the real artists in question. That way, people that like allofmp3.com could get over their guilty conscience.
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war.
I know, I know, I just replied twice to the same post, but I wanted to say one more thing. Did anyone notice how Dell and Sony are the two big proponents of Blu-Ray? Aren't they the same two companies that have been trying to foist DVD+R on us for years, when test after test has shown that DVD-R is more compatible with consumer DVD players, has more industry support, and has cheaper media? See a pattern here?
It seems like Sony only wants to support media formats that they provide. See Betamax, MiniDisk, ATRAC, Memory Stick, DVD+R, and now Blu-Ray for past examples.
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war.
My prediction is that Sony will lose this one, just like the VHS/Betamax format war. The problem with Blu-Ray is that not only does it require new players which only Sony will make initially (cha-ching!) and will cost an arm and a leg, it also requires all of the DVD manufacturers to invest in entirely new equipment to make the disks, which of course Sony will also provide (cha-ching! cha-ching!).
The HD-DVD 1.0 spec already has broader industry support because it does not require the retooling of existing manufacturing operations. Sure, the consumers will have to buy new players regardless, but there will be a lot of downward price pressure that comes from having many players in an open market.
So basically, we have the Betamax vs. VHS format war all over again. Sony has a technically better but much more expensive format that (surprise, surprise!) is designed to lock-in customers to Sony's proprietary players and discs and extract the most money possible from them. The other players are supporting a more open format that while not technically superior, is good enough to get the job done.
My prediction: HD-DVD wins hands down. There's no way Hollywood and the motion picture studios are going to re-tool all of their DVD manufacturing operations to support Blu-Ray when HD-DVD is good enough to satisfy consumers and cheap to boot.
Despite appearances, the Sony Vaio U50 and U70 are indeed Windows computers. They can run Windows software, and take as long to boot up or resume from standby as any notebook PC. So if you're looking for instant-on, quick access to data, and don't need to run Windows PC software on the device, consider notebook-like PDAs such as the Sharp Zaurus C860.
Can you imagine trying to get someone's contact info at a business meeting with one of these?
Let's see, open the lid, wait 5-10 seconds for Windows to wake up from standby mode.
If it's not booted, you're waiting 2-3 minutes to boot.
Now, enter your username and password to login to Windows.
Now, open Outlook by double-clicking it's icon.
Choose what folder you want the contact in (business/personal). Maybe you even have to establish a network connection to place the contact in a shared folder.
Now click "New Contact" and try to figure out a way to input their data without a keyboard!!! WTF, no keyboard for data input?!?!
Guess you'll be using Windows XP's on-screen keyboard to enter all their data, hunting and pecking with your stylus or fingers on the little tiny on-screen QWERTY keyboard. Better go to Start|Programs|Accessories|Accessibility|On-Screen Keyboard. 5 clicks later and you can actually type!
Type in contact name and phone number painfully slow while hunting and pecking on the on-screen keyboard.
Click save.
By this time you've probably wasted 5-10 minutes of your business associate's time and he's already handed you a business card or written his info down on a piece of paper and handed it to you. Not to mention he thinks you're a total wanker for using technology that just doesn't fit the purpose.
Compare all this with my Palm enabled Treo phone?
Open the flip.
Click the "New" button.
Type in their name and phone number and hit "Done."
Total time on the Palm enabled phone? 30 seconds or so.
So basically, this is just a smaller than average laptop. I still have to carry around a PDA, cellphone, and every other device I always had to carry. These devices might be popular in Japan where there is a demand for very tiny portable computers, but here in the US they will fail miserably.
It seems like they're trying to capture a small percentage of the already tiny PDA market, by marketing a device that doesn't even function as a PDA... Fucking brilliant. Someone ought to knock those Sony and OQO executives that greenlighted these products upside the head with a clue-by-four.
That leaves about 2.00-2.50 USD to the artist per album when I subtract the allofmp3 costs. I think that's fair (and a helluvalot more than most artists are getting now)
I would be extremely surprised if any of the allofMP3 fees go to the artists at all. Chances are they are paying fees to the RIAA or whatever the Russian equivelant of it is, but it's kinda like the CD-R taxes in other countries. The money goes to the record companies who don't share with the artists one cent.
Well, kudos to them for not making us Britains pay 99p a track, like I'm sure some other companies would.
We still pay the highest price, but I'm getting used to being shafted out of every penny I own here anyway.
RTFA, it's 79p in Britain, not 99p.
Its definitely troubling that the crash condition was consistent, but I am suspicious that it was simply an incompatibility between the benchmarking tool and the raid controller.
Sounds like a buggy product. There should be nothing that any benchmarking tool can do to cause hardware errors on a machine. Given a reliable product, it should be impossible for software to cause a hardware error.
Sounds like another situation where all of the overclockers will be saying "d00d! my 4x RAID0 setup is uber l33t! Look how fast it is!" Never minding the fact that every time they try to use it in a real world scenario it blue-screens on them.
This, my friends, is the number one reason why I switched to Apple after building countless numbers of PCs. The PC component manufacturers simply do not care whether or not there are bugs in their products. Many times these bugs don't even manifest themselves until you try using their RAID card with your exact Mobo, Video card, Network card, and memory card configuration.
Sometimes, these Mobo manufacturers even have incompatibility issues between the on-board components on their motherboards! . If they can't even test their equipment enough to know that doing an extreme amount of RAID activity while heavily utilizing the network card causes data corruption (just a hypothetical, but very possible case), then they honestly don't care about your data.
If anything you do on the computer, whether it's coding, making music, editing video, or whatever, matters to you, then you wouldn't be buying cheap PC components either.
My very 1st machine was an Acer 486/66 dx2 with 4 megs of ram and a 500 gig hd. I was about 12 at the time and the king of Dos :).
Wow, talk about making me feel old... My first IBM compatible machine (not counting the Osborne Executive (CP/M), or the Commodore 64) was a 286 that my parents bought when I was about 15. It had 1 MB of memory and ran at 12 mhz., with EGA graphics and a 40 MB (that's right, megabytes, not gigabytes) hard drive. I learned how to program in Pascal on that thing using Turbo Pascal... Good times.
Anyway, when I got into college I remember taking out a student loan for $2000 just so I could build myself a "dream machine" for my CS major. I built myself a 386-33, with a whopping 4 MB of RAM and (here's the kicker), a whopping 340 MB hard drive. I was running a BBS at the time and wanted a lot of space. Anyway, I remember the hard drive alone cost $900! But it was still going strong about 5 years later when I sold it.
I guess it's fun to think back and see how far hardware has come in such a short time. I also get a kick when I see all these modders and PC builders building custom machines, and then I think "man, I was building my own PCs back in 1992". Makes me feel kinda like an old fart, but truthfully, the Intel architecture has not really changed since then.
Living in Maryland, I can see the need for cameras everywhere in the downtown area of Baltimore (not so much the inner harbor.
Yeah, no shit. The inner harbor is about the safest place to walk around in Baltimore just because it's all touristy and filled with shops so it gets lots of police protection.
Just goes to show you the preferential police state system we have here in America, where if you're rich or a business owner you can expect protection from the law, but the poor and underprivileged can expect jack. You don't see them putting up cameras in project neighborhoods which actually could benefit from them.
Maybe you missed the news flash, but Sun also happens to have been a major contributor to SCO's legal war chest, and continues to be an antagonistic purveyor of anti-FOSS FUD.
Talk is cheap my friend. Would you care to show me proof that Sun is contributing money to SCO just so they can "go after" Linux? What, can't find any? That's because Sun has simply been a paying customer and nothing more. They purchased some drivers to try and make Solaris X86 work with more hardware.
Why not split the database into segments, like alphabetically into a,b,c,...,z customers, and then put each one on a separate PC with one master PC routing the calls? I bet it would be just as fast, if not faster than your monolithic system.
In fact, my brother and I have been talking about running large databases using inexpensive clusters of MySQL boxes where we split the database in exactly the manner you describe. A large company will never go for this though, because they are too used to the mainframe mentality.
When you think about it, those huge 64 processor Oracle DB servers really are a holdover from the "mainframe mentality." A lot of organizations believe that by consolidating many smaller servers into one bigger one, they are saving on TCO. I'm inclined to believe that the admin costs will be a lot lower on 1 big server than on 100 smaller ones, but the initial purchase price will be much higher.
I've been playing with MRTG a little lately...I wonder if you could have Apache or other processes provide info via SNMP and use or modify MRTG to provide more 3-d and 4-d (brightness like VisitorVille's lit/unlit buildings or color) 'graphs'?
You should look at a free product called Cacti. It uses RRDTool (from the maker of MRTG) to generate graphs of anything. Literally, anything you can script in Perl or Bash to return a variable when the script is run can be graphed. It's very powerful, and free too, which can't be beat.
No, I'm not the project developer, I just use it at work and find it quite a bit better than many commercial products that do the same thing.
You sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
Can't say it could happen to a more deserving company.
Wack yourself upside the head with a cluestick. In case you didn't know this, Sun has been licensing significant portions of System V code from AT&T, and now from SCO when they purchased it from AT&T, for decades now.
They have no say or control over what SCO does with their intellectual property. They are simply a customer, licensing Unix System V, just like every other commercial Unix vendor out there.
If you want to put every company that supports SCO on your little commie shit-list because they're funding the destruction of Linux, you might as well put IBM (AIX), HP (HP-UX), SGI (Irix) on there too.
Unless you've been drinking enough of the FOSS kool-aid to actually think that every commercial flavor of Unix is evil, evil!