I run a publishing company. On my web site I am going to place a policy statement about how the PDFs we sell won't ever have printing or text copying disabled, even though the DMCA makes all kinds of "fair use" restrictions legal. I'm not shouting on the soapbox, just doing my part to educate the public.
In this policy statement I wanted to link to a page describing what the DMCA is and why people should care about it. But believe it or not I could not find such a page. The only DMCA material I found was lengthy and tiresome, talking about Adobe and the Sklyarov case and blah blah blah... No one visiting my game company site is going to want to read pages like these:
The Anti-DMCA Site This is a terrible site. Right on the front page they ought to have a summary of their message, but there are just a load of links. Click on the Frequently Asked Questions link. There are no FAQs there, but there are FAQ links, one of which takes you to this FAQ page. Again, no one-pager on What is is and Why we should care. The closest thing is the What is the DMCA entry, which is a yawner, leading off with something about the World Intellectual Property Organization.
If anyone knows where I can find a well-written explanation of the DMCA that is suitable for the microscopic attention span of the typical web surfer, please post a link.
Joss Whedon gives them some great, witty dialogue and you find these people would be people that you'd actually want to be friends with.
I do not dispute that he is The Man, but the dialogue is one of the things I have a problem with. It's not bad... but it is all sort of the same.
Next time you watch one of his shows, try this...
Wait for a character to make some kind of wisecrack. Then, close your eyes and imagine any other character on the show saying the same thing.
Most of the time, you will find it fits pretty well. All of the characters on Buffy and Angel sound alike to a great degree, especially when they are cracking wise.
I realized this about a year ago, and now, like the reel change marks in a theater, I can't stop noticing it. If the actors weren't quality, it would be really glaring.
It's still great TV though... but I have to admit I am a bit worried about the turn Angel has taken lately. They NEED to get rid of that baby somehow. If they don't, well, the last ep is when Angel jumped the shark.
You didn't "get" the book then. The hobbits may seem meek and preoccupied with creature comforts, but over and over and over Tolkien emphasizes that they are the toughest guys around. They don't wield the biggest weapons, but the strength of the hobbit character is exactly WHY Frodo was chosen as Ringbearer, and his stength of will was shared by the other hobbits, especially Sam. (though he acts like country bumpkin most of the time, that I won't dispute)
Frodo survived an injury from a Ringwraith's blade, which was remarkable.
Pippin (maybe Merry, can't remember) even looked into some awful evil crystal ball thing in one of the books, and Gandalf said that such exposuse could have destroyed a lessed man; the hobbit recovered fully in time.
The hobbits weren't ineffective. They *saved the world*.
... and 3 months later the CC company charges YOU back.
You can't stop a charge like turning off a light switch. The CC company will keep up with the case, and if the merchant never admits culpability, you still get charged in the end.
The CC company as saviour idea seems to be a myth, practically speaking.
We all know the advantages of OSX--I mean, it's certainly the first time anyone has combined user-friendliness and good-design with the power of Unix (and a real Unix, at that).
True, but anyone who really believes OSX to be user-friendly never really got to know the classic MacOS line.
In terms of GUI usability OSX is about 10 years behind OS9.
I agree that overall OSX is a wonderful thing, but IMHO Apple made a serious error by not making it feel more like OS9 WRT the interface. Why is a customizable Apple menu denied to us and the dock forced on us? Why is the method for changing file ownership even MORE obfuscated than OS9? I could go on.
I could use all my Mac apps in Classic mode in OSX, but I still spend 99% of my time in OS9. Why? For the productivity apps I use, it just works BETTER. Easier to manage files and such. By a huge margin. Lots of that is due to years of experience, sure. But a lot of it is also the design of the system.
I do love having bash on my mac though, when I need it.
digital is only the medium. Like people never tire of pointing out, mp3s are digital; doesn't mean they sound better than my cdplayer over analogue line outs.
I am not saying "mp3 is better because it is digital." What I am saying is that if you are listening to sound from your computer, regardless of what kind of sound it is, you can use a digital output on the Live! card to let your expensive home theater system do the D-A conversion instead of whatever cheap part does that job on the Live! board. End result should be better sound than amplifying the Live's analog output.
The thing about the SB is that (or so I have heard), you can't turn off the sound effects processor, so even if you have digital sound, it will be digital sound with a hint (hence the muddiness?) of echo.
I have not heard that but it doesn't sound crazy. The Live! card I use now (to replace the MX300 I had that didn't work 100% in Win2k) definitely sounds a bit worse on simple playback tasks. I had assumed it was the Live's DAC but perhaps the problem runs deeper.
Re:Stay away from Creative Products: full of bugs
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 2
I had an Aureal 2 card too, the MX-300. However it has some "known issues" in Win2k... namely, the inputs not working. I tried every hack and workaround known but eventually I had to cave in and buy a cheapo Live! card.
(I use the sound inputs constantly becase my police scanner is hooked up to the computer. Much nicer than listening to its own speaker, and I can do touch-tone decoding or recording if I want to.)
Re:What's wrong with Live!?
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Many people with good enough stereos to care will have digital inputs anyway. Even the lowly Live! can output a digital stream for the people who want to listen to their games & MP3s on the home theater system.
God, yes, please. I have been wishing for this since the day I plugged in my Replay.
Replays and Tivos are so damn cool, but they take away time just as they give it back... because you will end up watching more TV with one in the house.
Re:For the diff you can get TiVo sub for life
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 2
I have a Replay and I think it only stores 1 week of guide date... and I have never cared. It seems to be enough.
If my dialin was clobbered for a week, a 2 week buffer would be great, but that's not going to happen.
Re:Your out of luck with Dish Network...
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 2
My ReplayTV 3030 works fine with my Dish 2700 IRD & Dish 500.
ReplayTV has no subscription fees. Look for a Panasonic Showstopper or a ReplayTV branded 3000 series unit. Sometimes you can even luck into one for about $100 new, or as a open box special at a retailer.
You'll get the guide information anyway, since there is no sub fee.
It must lock you into the Mac hardware platform, even though it is in desperate needs of larger user installed base.
Apple isn't in desperate need of anything. They have BILLIONS of dollars of cash and enough customers to stay in business pretty happily.
Would they like more? Of course. Who wouldn't? Are they on the ropes? No way.
"Apple Computer: Proudly going out of business for 20 years!"
Apple will lose money from its reduced hardware sales, but once OSX for x86 reaches a critical mass of user base, then it can ship OSX to the major PC providers like Dell or Compaq.
Apple will never, ever do this. When you buy Apple you aren't buying an OS, you are buying an experience -- hardware and all.
Have you ever looked closely at a Mac? You'll see that the CD-ROM's own front panel is covered up by a panel on the Mac's case. This prevents you from accessing whatever controls might be on the actual CD-ROM: play button, headphone jack, volume control. Why does Apple do this? To utterly control your hardware experience. If they kept the CD uncovered, the available controls would change when they changed CD-ROM vendors... sometimes the Play button might not be there; who knows.
A company that won't let you see the headphone jack on the Toshiba CD-ROM they bought that quarter CD-ROM isn't going to let you try and install OSX on some commodity hardware Frankenputer.
(not that I can talk too much sh!t about Frankenputers, I have 4 & 1 Mac too.)
Apple would likely prefer to pay license fees to its minority owner, Microsoft anyway than leave the industry anyway.
Microsoft bought $150M of non-voting Apple stock, which is a pittance to a company of Apple's size -- they have something like $4B in the bank and a hell of a lot of shares out there. I have read that MS even sold that stock off, so they have *no* investment in Apple. Calling them a minority owner is, well, just really wrong. Even when they owned some Apple stock they had no additional pull.
If you were humorously referring to the way that Apple caves in to Microsoft for other reasons, that's another story, but that is not how it came across.
I don't know the model number but it is a Philips 30 hour unit.
I haven't specifically tested the SVHS input because the digital cable boxes here don't have an SVHS out (cheap bastards). Now I'm curious though, I'll have to look into it.
You can find out pretty much everything about Tivo at this forum.
FWIW I have a ReplayTV 3030 and the SVHS i/o works fine, I use it with a Dish Network sat system.
I have a DSL line and I run a web server on it. I create web sites and serve them to the public. If I put news on one of my sites, am I a journalist?
If I report something in an online forum like this one, am I a journalist?
If I have a free GeoCities home page and I report something on it, am I a journalist?
If I write for a major corporation that puts my words down in ink on paper every day, distributing said paper around town, am I a journalist?
If a major corporation puts me on TV or radio to talk about things I have learned, am I a journalist?
This is a good ruling. But I am afraid that it will only apply to, say, abcnews.com and not drudgereport.com, or even smaller fish, like, say, me if I turn newshound.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know anything about tournaments, I just know what works for me.
They started with Amigas but eventually moved on.
With mouse tracking speed up high enough you almost never need to pick up the mouse. Certainly not during a circle strafe.
It takes a fair bit of getting used to that kind of speed though.
I run a publishing company. On my web site I am going to place a policy statement about how the PDFs we sell won't ever have printing or text copying disabled, even though the DMCA makes all kinds of "fair use" restrictions legal. I'm not shouting on the soapbox, just doing my part to educate the public.
In this policy statement I wanted to link to a page describing what the DMCA is and why people should care about it. But believe it or not I could not find such a page. The only DMCA material I found was lengthy and tiresome, talking about Adobe and the Sklyarov case and blah blah blah... No one visiting my game company site is going to want to read pages like these:
The EFF's US vs. Sklyarov FAQ Page
Long, doesn't get to the point, doesn't even provide a quick link to what The Point is.
The Anti-DMCA Site
This is a terrible site. Right on the front page they ought to have a summary of their message, but there are just a load of links. Click on the Frequently Asked Questions link. There are no FAQs there, but there are FAQ links, one of which takes you to this FAQ page. Again, no one-pager on What is is and Why we should care. The closest thing is the What is the DMCA entry, which is a yawner, leading off with something about the World Intellectual Property Organization.
If anyone knows where I can find a well-written explanation of the DMCA that is suitable for the microscopic attention span of the typical web surfer, please post a link.
Look closer. The Treos are also available with Graffiti.
Joss Whedon gives them some great, witty dialogue and you find these people would be people that you'd actually want to be friends with.
I do not dispute that he is The Man, but the dialogue is one of the things I have a problem with. It's not bad... but it is all sort of the same.
Next time you watch one of his shows, try this...
Wait for a character to make some kind of wisecrack. Then, close your eyes and imagine any other character on the show saying the same thing.
Most of the time, you will find it fits pretty well. All of the characters on Buffy and Angel sound alike to a great degree, especially when they are cracking wise.
I realized this about a year ago, and now, like the reel change marks in a theater, I can't stop noticing it. If the actors weren't quality, it would be really glaring.
It's still great TV though... but I have to admit I am a bit worried about the turn Angel has taken lately. They NEED to get rid of that baby somehow. If they don't, well, the last ep is when Angel jumped the shark.
Some day, your daughter will make a geeky boy very happy!
I hated the ineffectual little hobbits...
You didn't "get" the book then. The hobbits may seem meek and preoccupied with creature comforts, but over and over and over Tolkien emphasizes that they are the toughest guys around. They don't wield the biggest weapons, but the strength of the hobbit character is exactly WHY Frodo was chosen as Ringbearer, and his stength of will was shared by the other hobbits, especially Sam. (though he acts like country bumpkin most of the time, that I won't dispute)
Frodo survived an injury from a Ringwraith's blade, which was remarkable.
Pippin (maybe Merry, can't remember) even looked into some awful evil crystal ball thing in one of the books, and Gandalf said that such exposuse could have destroyed a lessed man; the hobbit recovered fully in time.
The hobbits weren't ineffective. They *saved the world*.
... and 3 months later the CC company charges YOU back.
You can't stop a charge like turning off a light switch. The CC company will keep up with the case, and if the merchant never admits culpability, you still get charged in the end.
The CC company as saviour idea seems to be a myth, practically speaking.
We all know the advantages of OSX--I mean, it's certainly the first time anyone has combined user-friendliness and good-design with the power of Unix (and a real Unix, at that).
True, but anyone who really believes OSX to be user-friendly never really got to know the classic MacOS line.
In terms of GUI usability OSX is about 10 years behind OS9.
I agree that overall OSX is a wonderful thing, but IMHO Apple made a serious error by not making it feel more like OS9 WRT the interface. Why is a customizable Apple menu denied to us and the dock forced on us? Why is the method for changing file ownership even MORE obfuscated than OS9? I could go on.
I could use all my Mac apps in Classic mode in OSX, but I still spend 99% of my time in OS9. Why? For the productivity apps I use, it just works BETTER. Easier to manage files and such. By a huge margin. Lots of that is due to years of experience, sure. But a lot of it is also the design of the system.
I do love having bash on my mac though, when I need it.
"We have ways of making you pronounce the letter 'O'."
digital is only the medium. Like people never tire of pointing out, mp3s are digital; doesn't mean they sound better than my cdplayer over analogue line outs.
I am not saying "mp3 is better because it is digital." What I am saying is that if you are listening to sound from your computer, regardless of what kind of sound it is, you can use a digital output on the Live! card to let your expensive home theater system do the D-A conversion instead of whatever cheap part does that job on the Live! board. End result should be better sound than amplifying the Live's analog output.
The thing about the SB is that (or so I have heard), you can't turn off the sound effects processor, so even if you have digital sound, it will be digital sound with a hint (hence the muddiness?) of echo.
I have not heard that but it doesn't sound crazy. The Live! card I use now (to replace the MX300 I had that didn't work 100% in Win2k) definitely sounds a bit worse on simple playback tasks. I had assumed it was the Live's DAC but perhaps the problem runs deeper.
I had an Aureal 2 card too, the MX-300. However it has some "known issues" in Win2k... namely, the inputs not working. I tried every hack and workaround known but eventually I had to cave in and buy a cheapo Live! card.
(I use the sound inputs constantly becase my police scanner is hooked up to the computer. Much nicer than listening to its own speaker, and I can do touch-tone decoding or recording if I want to.)
Many people with good enough stereos to care will have digital inputs anyway. Even the lowly Live! can output a digital stream for the people who want to listen to their games & MP3s on the home theater system.
AFAIK, it's pretty damn hard to upgrade the Replay TV's.
Not true. The procedure is the same... prep a drive with a boot disk, install drive.
God, yes, please. I have been wishing for this since the day I plugged in my Replay.
Replays and Tivos are so damn cool, but they take away time just as they give it back... because you will end up watching more TV with one in the house.
I have a Replay and I think it only stores 1 week of guide date... and I have never cared. It seems to be enough.
If my dialin was clobbered for a week, a 2 week buffer would be great, but that's not going to happen.
My ReplayTV 3030 works fine with my Dish 2700 IRD & Dish 500.
ReplayTV has no subscription fees. Look for a Panasonic Showstopper or a ReplayTV branded 3000 series unit. Sometimes you can even luck into one for about $100 new, or as a open box special at a retailer.
You'll get the guide information anyway, since there is no sub fee.
It must lock you into the Mac hardware platform, even though it is in desperate needs of larger user installed base.
Apple isn't in desperate need of anything. They have BILLIONS of dollars of cash and enough customers to stay in business pretty happily.
Would they like more? Of course. Who wouldn't? Are they on the ropes? No way.
"Apple Computer: Proudly going out of business for 20 years!"
Apple will lose money from its reduced hardware sales, but once OSX for x86 reaches a critical mass of user base, then it can ship OSX to the major PC providers like Dell or Compaq.
Apple will never, ever do this. When you buy Apple you aren't buying an OS, you are buying an experience -- hardware and all.
Have you ever looked closely at a Mac? You'll see that the CD-ROM's own front panel is covered up by a panel on the Mac's case. This prevents you from accessing whatever controls might be on the actual CD-ROM: play button, headphone jack, volume control. Why does Apple do this? To utterly control your hardware experience. If they kept the CD uncovered, the available controls would change when they changed CD-ROM vendors... sometimes the Play button might not be there; who knows.
A company that won't let you see the headphone jack on the Toshiba CD-ROM they bought that quarter CD-ROM isn't going to let you try and install OSX on some commodity hardware Frankenputer.
(not that I can talk too much sh!t about Frankenputers, I have 4 & 1 Mac too.)
Apple would likely prefer to pay license fees to its minority owner, Microsoft anyway than leave the industry anyway.
Microsoft bought $150M of non-voting Apple stock, which is a pittance to a company of Apple's size -- they have something like $4B in the bank and a hell of a lot of shares out there. I have read that MS even sold that stock off, so they have *no* investment in Apple. Calling them a minority owner is, well, just really wrong. Even when they owned some Apple stock they had no additional pull.
If you were humorously referring to the way that Apple caves in to Microsoft for other reasons, that's another story, but that is not how it came across.
I don't know the model number but it is a Philips 30 hour unit.
I haven't specifically tested the SVHS input because the digital cable boxes here don't have an SVHS out (cheap bastards). Now I'm curious though, I'll have to look into it.
You can find out pretty much everything about Tivo at this forum.
FWIW I have a ReplayTV 3030 and the SVHS i/o works fine, I use it with a Dish Network sat system.
I have heard that there is desirable software beyond that which is produced by Microsoft.
That $5 license doesn't do a student who wants a copy of Maya any good, does it?
I have a DSL line and I run a web server on it. I create web sites and serve them to the public. If I put news on one of my sites, am I a journalist?
If I report something in an online forum like this one, am I a journalist?
If I have a free GeoCities home page and I report something on it, am I a journalist?
If I write for a major corporation that puts my words down in ink on paper every day, distributing said paper around town, am I a journalist?
If a major corporation puts me on TV or radio to talk about things I have learned, am I a journalist?
This is a good ruling. But I am afraid that it will only apply to, say, abcnews.com and not drudgereport.com, or even smaller fish, like, say, me if I turn newshound.
The tvio has the svideo and video jacks on the back disabled. so you cannot get the quality signal
I just helped a friend set up his Tivo with ATT digital cable. His unit is using the RCA A/V input jacks with no problem.
I have never heard of a Tivo that disabled the S-video input either.
also, the TiVo block the PPV channels (it cant recieved the digital channels either, so anything on espn2 or mtv2 cannot be recorded.
All irrelevant if you use the A/V inputs, which do work, I assure you.
(It doesn't block PPV channels... it may not be able to decode them with its tuner but it doesn't do any kind of blocking.)