$200-$500 for a 19" CRT? That seems a bit expensive; from what I have seen, you should't have to pay more than $300, and some can be had for less than $200. Is there a particular reason the ones you buy cost more? Do they have special interfaces, are they more ruggedized? Have better performance?
This whole situation shows that the Beatles work has an additional value as a source for sampling, remixing, etc., as demonstrated by the demand for the Grey Album. If EMI were to roll over and let DJ Danger Mouse sample the White Album for free, why would any artist in the future who wants to use elements of the Beatles work both to pay EMI for it?
IMO, there is a clear and straightforward reason why EMI should be pursuing action against DJ Danger Mouse, since the value of the Beatles' body of work extends beyond simple the album sales.
There are some issues with Sun's licensing for the Java JDK and JRE that make it difficult to include in a free software distribution. Debian has an informative Java FAQ that specifically outlines Java licensing concerns that make it impossible for them to include Java in the main distribution. This includes both items that Debian has philosophical issues with as well as more concrete terms that set strict limits on distributing Sun's Java products.
Basically, Sun makes it hard for free software & open source distributions to include Java, which makes it an additional hassle for the user to install and use. As a result, Java use in the open source community is probably much lower than it could be.
There'd be little point to this, since it even the most oblivious users would tell a difference when they don't see the Windows logo when they boot and they can't find Word.
Now, a more plausible thing would be to install Cygwin. The user won't see any difference but suddenly their computer has become a lot more useful of a platform from which to launch attacks.
Do you know anything about BitTorrent? Each piece of the file is identified by a hash stored in the.torrent file, and is verified before being uploaded to others. As long as you grab your.torrent from a reputable source, you should have nothing to worry about.
Interesting idea. It would give Microsoft a large measure of control over the user's system. It could make modchips and playing pirated games very difficult, since as soon as you want to load a saved game, MS is all over your system, checking your system bios and verifying the copyright protection on your game. One thing wrong and MS can shutdown your system remotely.
This sounds like something MS would be interested in, honestly...
Full Throttle was a great game, one of the last great LucasArts 2D adventure games. Pity it was so short. Still, it was a lot of fun. Great cinematic style, too. I hope the Gone Jackels got a good boost from that game, they really did a great job. What's the point of cruising the highway on a motorcycle without a kick ass soundtrack?
Jet Set Radio Future also had a very nice soundtrack. Sure, it's "just" a collection of singles, but they were well chosen and fit in well with the whole style and attitude of the game.
One nice touch is that they made special segues between each song, so they flow naturally into one another. It's not just a crossfade, but more like something a real DJ would do, sampling an element of the ending song and mixing it into the beat of the new song.
Interesting side note. Before programs like AVIpreview and DivFix were out, I noticed that you could play some incomplete files in the "preview" pane of the file properties panel in Windows 98. These same files wouldn't work in Media Player. I didn't realize it at the time, but yep, turns out it's the same avi container problem. Anyway, that was a handy trick I found before there other solutions available.
While there probably isn't a be-all-end-all codec pack for your specific OS
Actually, there is -- for Windows at least. But I've tried it before, and installing every possibly codec, most of which you never use, only makes things worse, not better. I find it better to ignore the all-in-one packages and just get the codecs from the proper sources. So grab xvid and divx and ac3filter--that'll cover most of it--and then grab other ones as you need them.
what web resources are useful for people who need to find a codec (even an obscure one) before they can play their media files?
Which is where AVIcodec comes in. What it does is show you what audio and video codecs are used by your media files. So when you find a file that doesn't work properly, it'll let you know what to look for. Google is normally enough after that, but RareWares is a good place to find some of the more obscure codecs.
Agreed. It's pretty lousy in 768x1024 as well (that's not a typo; portrait mode is actually quite nice for some uses), big horizontal stripes of wasted space above and below.
It's actually kind of sad how many pages turn out worse in portrait mode; you'd think it'd naturally be a better orientation. So many sites, though, now rely on sidebars and such that you end up with either a lot of skinny columns or horizontal scrollbars.
This is a BIG problem, the/. search is basically useless. I've had cases where I could remember 3-4 words in the title of the story but I still couldn't manage to get/. to find it.
clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation
But what does that mean? Putting "[AD]" in the subject title? Adding a "is-spam: true" header? Ending the message with "BTW, this is spam"? Some of them? All of them? Any could be could be considered a valid indentification but the vast variety of methods and phrasings could make it very difficult to actually filter out based on these "clear" identifications.
When you're talking about something small, an extra inch is a big deal. And if you look at volume, the Volt is 3.2 times as large. It's not the same at all.
Have you actually seen all of these? Sure, there's some dreck (isn't there always?), but some of them have been quite well received (ratings from Rotten Tomatoes):
even though the technology has advanced significantly since Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the odds are not always on the side of brute computational power.
Actually, Fritz has less brute computational power than Deep Blue. Fritz runs on standard PCs; in this case, a quad 2.8 GHz Xeon. Deep Blue ran on custom hardware, with 32 RS/6000 CPUs with 256 custom VLSI "chess processors". It was estimated to evaluate 100,000,000 positions per second.
The point is, Fritz is not a bigger number cruncher; it's better because it's "smarter", which to say, it has a better ability to judge the value of each position and to choose which avenues to explore.
It's a tad bigger, but perhaps you're thinking of a Toshiba Libretto? There were a few models out by 1998 with Pentium processors that should have been able to handle Starcraft.
I mean look at the Game Boy. The first took 4 AAs and lasted 4-6 hours.
Where are you getting this from? I had an original Game Boy and the battery life was great. We're talking about battery changes on the order of weeks; sure, that's not constant usage, but you figure an hour or two a day and that's maybe a few dozen hours.
This Usenet thread backs me up on that, with one person saying 30-40 and another saying 30. This one also says 30 hours
What's to stop an advertising company from installing a little box in Times Square or any other heavy traffic and then selling message time on it? What are you going to do, punch the box?
I rarely use Yahoo!'s directory, but I do use other service of theirs, like Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Yellow Pages, and Yahoo! Maps a few times every week, mostly because they keep a sane and crap-free interface that loads quickly and gives good results.
Hold on though; it sounds silly at first, but nowadays many stations stick a dynamic banner on the bottom of the screen that has nothing to do with the show that's on. The "New TNN" (now Spike) used to have a banner on the bottom of the screen during all the shows. My local stations will sometimes put a news scroll over the program when there's a weather emergency, such a tornado watch.
I don't think anyway is afraid of people confusing the main (animated) part of the screen for news, just the text scroll.
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It irks me too that the combination Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machines now charge .50 per play - why is it double the price to play an old game??
I don't know; maybe inflation? Ms. Pac-Man came out in 1981, over 20 years ago. With inflation, 50 cents is nearly spot on the same price.
$200-$500 for a 19" CRT? That seems a bit expensive; from what I have seen, you should't have to pay more than $300, and some can be had for less than $200. Is there a particular reason the ones you buy cost more? Do they have special interfaces, are they more ruggedized? Have better performance?
This whole situation shows that the Beatles work has an additional value as a source for sampling, remixing, etc., as demonstrated by the demand for the Grey Album. If EMI were to roll over and let DJ Danger Mouse sample the White Album for free, why would any artist in the future who wants to use elements of the Beatles work both to pay EMI for it?
IMO, there is a clear and straightforward reason why EMI should be pursuing action against DJ Danger Mouse, since the value of the Beatles' body of work extends beyond simple the album sales.
There are some issues with Sun's licensing for the Java JDK and JRE that make it difficult to include in a free software distribution. Debian has an informative Java FAQ that specifically outlines Java licensing concerns that make it impossible for them to include Java in the main distribution. This includes both items that Debian has philosophical issues with as well as more concrete terms that set strict limits on distributing Sun's Java products.
Basically, Sun makes it hard for free software & open source distributions to include Java, which makes it an additional hassle for the user to install and use. As a result, Java use in the open source community is probably much lower than it could be.
There'd be little point to this, since it even the most oblivious users would tell a difference when they don't see the Windows logo when they boot and they can't find Word.
Now, a more plausible thing would be to install Cygwin. The user won't see any difference but suddenly their computer has become a lot more useful of a platform from which to launch attacks.
Do you know anything about BitTorrent? Each piece of the file is identified by a hash stored in the .torrent file, and is verified before being uploaded to others. As long as you grab your .torrent from a reputable source, you should have nothing to worry about.
Interesting idea. It would give Microsoft a large measure of control over the user's system. It could make modchips and playing pirated games very difficult, since as soon as you want to load a saved game, MS is all over your system, checking your system bios and verifying the copyright protection on your game. One thing wrong and MS can shutdown your system remotely.
This sounds like something MS would be interested in, honestly...
Sounds interesting. I found some videos taken with it here.
You mean these? RTFA.
Full Throttle was a great game, one of the last great LucasArts 2D adventure games. Pity it was so short. Still, it was a lot of fun. Great cinematic style, too. I hope the Gone Jackels got a good boost from that game, they really did a great job. What's the point of cruising the highway on a motorcycle without a kick ass soundtrack?
Jet Set Radio Future also had a very nice soundtrack. Sure, it's "just" a collection of singles, but they were well chosen and fit in well with the whole style and attitude of the game.
One nice touch is that they made special segues between each song, so they flow naturally into one another. It's not just a crossfade, but more like something a real DJ would do, sampling an element of the ending song and mixing it into the beat of the new song.
TyStudio is a decent package for extracting video off your TiVo. Comes with a neat little GUI and everything.
Excellent post, I agree with most of that.
Interesting side note. Before programs like AVIpreview and DivFix were out, I noticed that you could play some incomplete files in the "preview" pane of the file properties panel in Windows 98. These same files wouldn't work in Media Player. I didn't realize it at the time, but yep, turns out it's the same avi container problem. Anyway, that was a handy trick I found before there other solutions available.
While there probably isn't a be-all-end-all codec pack for your specific OS
Actually, there is -- for Windows at least. But I've tried it before, and installing every possibly codec, most of which you never use, only makes things worse, not better. I find it better to ignore the all-in-one packages and just get the codecs from the proper sources. So grab xvid and divx and ac3filter--that'll cover most of it--and then grab other ones as you need them.
what web resources are useful for people who need to find a codec (even an obscure one) before they can play their media files?
Which is where AVIcodec comes in. What it does is show you what audio and video codecs are used by your media files. So when you find a file that doesn't work properly, it'll let you know what to look for. Google is normally enough after that, but RareWares is a good place to find some of the more obscure codecs.
Agreed. It's pretty lousy in 768x1024 as well (that's not a typo; portrait mode is actually quite nice for some uses), big horizontal stripes of wasted space above and below.
It's actually kind of sad how many pages turn out worse in portrait mode; you'd think it'd naturally be a better orientation. So many sites, though, now rely on sidebars and such that you end up with either a lot of skinny columns or horizontal scrollbars.
This is a BIG problem, the /. search is basically useless. I've had cases where I could remember 3-4 words in the title of the story but I still couldn't manage to get /. to find it.
From the text of the bill, the mail must provide
But what does that mean? Putting "[AD]" in the subject title? Adding a "is-spam: true" header? Ending the message with "BTW, this is spam"? Some of them? All of them? Any could be could be considered a valid indentification but the vast variety of methods and phrasings could make it very difficult to actually filter out based on these "clear" identifications.
When you're talking about something small, an extra inch is a big deal. And if you look at volume, the Volt is 3.2 times as large. It's not the same at all.
Have you actually seen all of these? Sure, there's some dreck (isn't there always?), but some of them have been quite well received (ratings from Rotten Tomatoes):
Elf: 83%
Master and Commander: 86%
Tupac: Resurrection: 82%
Mystic River: 87%
Methinks you paint with too broad a brush.
even though the technology has advanced significantly since Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the odds are not always on the side of brute computational power.
Actually, Fritz has less brute computational power than Deep Blue. Fritz runs on standard PCs; in this case, a quad 2.8 GHz Xeon. Deep Blue ran on custom hardware, with 32 RS/6000 CPUs with 256 custom VLSI "chess processors". It was estimated to evaluate 100,000,000 positions per second.
The point is, Fritz is not a bigger number cruncher; it's better because it's "smarter", which to say, it has a better ability to judge the value of each position and to choose which avenues to explore.
It's a tad bigger, but perhaps you're thinking of a Toshiba Libretto? There were a few models out by 1998 with Pentium processors that should have been able to handle Starcraft.
I mean look at the Game Boy. The first took 4 AAs and lasted 4-6 hours.
Where are you getting this from? I had an original Game Boy and the battery life was great. We're talking about battery changes on the order of weeks; sure, that's not constant usage, but you figure an hour or two a day and that's maybe a few dozen hours.
This Usenet thread backs me up on that, with one person saying 30-40 and another saying 30. This one also says 30 hours
What's to stop an advertising company from installing a little box in Times Square or any other heavy traffic and then selling message time on it? What are you going to do, punch the box?
Good point.
I rarely use Yahoo!'s directory, but I do use other service of theirs, like Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Yellow Pages, and Yahoo! Maps a few times every week, mostly because they keep a sane and crap-free interface that loads quickly and gives good results.
Hold on though; it sounds silly at first, but nowadays many stations stick a dynamic banner on the bottom of the screen that has nothing to do with the show that's on. The "New TNN" (now Spike) used to have a banner on the bottom of the screen during all the shows. My local stations will sometimes put a news scroll over the program when there's a weather emergency, such a tornado watch.
I don't think anyway is afraid of people confusing the main (animated) part of the screen for news, just the text scroll.