One other thing... I will NEVER buy a song that is copy-protected in ANY way. I am not going to pay my hard-earned money for something that tells me what to do with it. For some explanation...
MP3s are an open standard. Anyone can download CDex w/ LAME for free and roll their own MP3s. A MP3 I download / make WILL work in my 4GB PJB-100. It WILL play on my laptop. It WILL go on my server's SMB fileshare so a Lansonic unit will play it. If I am somewhere else, it WILL work on another computer (IE, at office).
Most secure music is a closed standard. Need to pay lots of money to make them. Secure music I download PROBABLY WILL NOT work in my PJB-100 unless the manufacturer pays the RIAA More Money. It PROBABLY WILL NOT play on my laptop. If it does, I will have to 'check it out and back in' so I can only use it on one device at a time. It almost certainly WILL NOT go on my server's SMB share and play thru the Lansonic to my stereo. And if I am somewhere else it will definately NOT WORK.
Why would I pay money for something that is built to make my life difficult? I wouldnt. And neither will most people.
This whole copy protection scheme (as all others are) is pointless. You can make downloaded songs triple-encoded with different 4096-bit keys, require a hardware dongle that has to be kept locked in a safe that is welded to the computer, and this still isnt going to stop people from swapping pure good ol' american FREE MP3S!!. When I say free, I mean free of copy protection and other impurities. Not free of cost.
You can secure the secure stuff all you want and unless you can find a way to un-invent MP3, you're right back where you were.
If they want to stop 'piracy' (By this I mean people gaining posession of a song without paying) they should SELL MP3s. And I mean all of them. Every song by every artist. Available for download in MP3 for $10/month. I would get that in an instant. That $10/mo would get you a guranteed good rip with a good download speed would be worth it.
People dont use Napster because they dont want to pay any money. They use Napster because they dont want to have to go to a store, pay 100x what the CD is worth, and then find out they dont like it. If I could pay $10/mo for unlimited downloads IN UNSECURED MP3 FORMAT I would never use Napster/openNap/PowerNap/etc again.
Several of the planes I've been on have 12v car 'cigarette lighter' plugs between the seat cushions near the knee. Usually seats which have it are marked with a sticker on the label by the row number.
As for headphone jacks, I dont think you could get any real power out of those. Usually its a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack.
They never show R-rated movies on planes. Dont forget the screen can be seen by everyone, and usually the r-rating is for the video, not audio.
This is a great idea but they got one thing wrong.
First, it says you need to own a small ring that will hold the disc in place. Bad idea. I would just make the hold like a normal CD. Most players have a metal spindle with a magnetic free floating thing above it that will hold the CD down. The spindle spins, mag thing spins with it.
Or if you want to gurantee compatibility, then make a ring around the hole as thick as a normal CD. Use flexible plastic. It would work better.
Yes. IEEE 802.11b is a standard that all manufacturers are (supposed) to adhere to. Check out The official 802.11b (WiFi) site for a list of certified compatible hardware.
consume is one project going in London. Similar projects are in san fran, seattle, etc. I mean a directory of all the individual projects and then maybe a DB of all the nodes. I mean ALL of them.
IMHO, what is needed is a centralized directory of all efforts to set up free wLANs. People could see projects going in their neighborhood, or search for ones in cities they want to visit. That way a hotel could be booked close to a base station.
Think about it. You get questionably encoded songs, over unreliable connections that often stick at 'getting info', and half the time the ID3s arent there. However, napster is the best thats out there now. One can grab almost any song by any artist. And listen to it immediately. With no copy protection / nagscreens / etc. For free.
I will not pay money for Napster. Neither will most people. I will also NEVER PAY FOR SOMETHING COPY PROTECTED. Think about it. Would you pay for a car that would scan the speed limit signs and refuse to go faster? If it was 100% transparent to the user I might consider it. But it isnt. Under current DRM (digital rights management) implementations, files must be 'checked out' when downloading to portables, and you cant play it on the computer until you check it back in. Files copied from one directory to another go dead. Restoring from backups gives you dead files too. And most portables dont even support 'DRManaged' files.
I would pay $5-10 for a service that would let me download an unlimited number of high quality songs. This would include any song by any artist. These would be in MP3 or the format of my choosing. They would not expire or have any funny coding on them. They would be plain old unprotected MP3s. And I would love this.
This is what the RIAA should do. It represents all the record companies. So it can get licensing deals with all of them. IMHO this should be its purpose. Encryption exists to be hacked. SDMI will fail. We need ODMI-- Open Digital Music Initiative.
yes you can buy one.
I dont know in how long or if the guys that did this are going to start selling them.
But what you can do is hook up the DSS control port (really a serial port) to a box with a PPP server. Then with some software hacking it will use the PPP connection instead of dialing the modem.
hacking the tivo to not use a phone can also be done by making it use PPP over the serial (DSS control) port. Then a linux box w/ a PPP server and net access can be the gateway. This has been successfully done many times
Both the Sony and Philips use exactly the same hardware. The only difference between the two is the front panel design and the sony software will control a sony VCR with the 'transfer to tape' function. Other than that, the system is the same.
As many of you know, the TiVo runs linux. The guide data and software updates are usually downloaded in a nightly call to either a 1-800 number or a local UUnet access number.
What has been done is set up the 'DSS' port (also a serial port) to be a linux console. Another hack has made it redirect the 'nightly call' through the serial port as PPP instead of the modem. This way you can hook it up to a box with a PPP server and a cable modem, but you only get 115,200 bps.
This will allow the TiVo to connect to a network and get TiVo guide data without the serial port hack.
Currently, this will NOT let people download TiVo video data to the computer. It is stored in a proprietary format that has not been hacked yet.
Whatever support the Ethernet has in tivo, it is from hacking the backend linux part. The front end, the graphical shell that you see on the TV (its called myworld) has NO SUPPORT for this.
As for why TiVo never put Ethernet support in the thing, it was a corporate decision. TiVo has deals with a few major networks, including NBC. These nets hate having their stuff put on the internet minus ads. Ethernet would make this easier. Since the phone connection is toll free or local, they decided to go with a phone-only system. I dont blame them.
if I remember my HS Civics class... the EC can vote however the f*k they want. Could the 'gore' EC member vote for bush? what prevents this from happening?
im surprised nobody has thought of this yet... maybe someone has.
Start somewhere at the Equator. Plug a HUGE anchor in the ground. Put a large weight into orbit. Now connect a large tether from the anchor to the weight, and have the weight go up to a higher altitude. Attatch an elevator to the side of or around the cable.
What you get if you do it right:
The weight supports all the cable with centrifical (sp?) force. There isnt that much pull on the anchor.
The elevator, powered from Earth, is able to make the trip up. Once it gets out of the atmosphere it will stop a bit below the weight... IN ORBIT.
Cargo and personnell placed on the elevator will ARRIVE IN ORBIT IN SEVERAL HOURS. (without suffering any High G forces)
From what you say, I would guess that the ones using floppies dont know any better. I would suggest making a 'flyer' with instructions for saving files to the student's server drive. Start with some clipart of a broken floppy and a catchy headline like "When your floppy dies, your term paper dies with it. Save to your Net Storage drive and be protected." Then put instructions for saving to and reading from the net folder both at public terminals and at the dorm.
Put one at each public terminal. print lots, kids will probably take them back to the dorm.
This was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago... For multiple thousands of dollars you can get a fully wired climate controlled rotating workspace.
http://www.poetictech.com/aura/index.html
For those that want something more entertaining... you might try the Aurora chair. Probably really expensive though...
http://www.scifi.com/farscape/notes/aurorachair. html
this would be more expensive, but you might think of buying a bunch of those Web Appliances that you can hack and plug with a hard drive, net card and Linux. It would be expensive but you could have basic computer functions in almost every room. Put them together with an X-10 (lighting control) system and you're on your way to an automated home...
First, how would you power a IDE hard drive? It would take a LOT of juice. I suggest the PJB-100 player. It has a 4.86GB IBM laptop hard drive, and 10MB RAM so it only spins the drive about every ten minutes. With its rechargable lithium battery it gets 10 hours of playtime. Display shows ID3 info. I have one of these and I only have to charge it about once a week. I would be interested to see if anyone has had any luck replacing the drive with a bigger one... www.pjbox.com www.thinkgeek.com (they sell it too, $20 less)
www.edsci.com They sell scopes, camera stuff, and I think you can even buy a large TV from them for that purpose. Might be only in the catalog though... enjoy.
on that topic, ask the post office how much cheaper your mail would be if there wasnt so much junk mail floating around. the price would probably be the same (as with the ISP). But think about it. For the billions of junk mail delivered every day you need extra mail trucks, bigger/more delivery vans, more sorting capacity to handle the extra load, etc. This raises the required post office capacity. Although with email the effect is the same (more bandwidth, more capable email servers, etc, the cost is not nearly as great. I dont like spam. But I dont have a huge problem with it either. I prefer spam to junk mail. What I DO have a problem with is spam that pretends not to be spam. Spams with subjects like 'Re: That cool web site you told me about', 'Haven't seen you in a while', 'Hey, did you get the memo?'. Open a web email account and let it sit for a month. You will have nothing but spam if you dont tell anybody about it. At least 3 out of 5 spams will have fake subjects. This is what I hate about spammers. They're dishonest! I believe the solution is to have a 'spam' tag in email. Spammers would be allowed to spam as much as they wanted as long as every message had its spam tag flipped. Thus, the user can simply tell his email program 'autodelete all spam' and every new spam goes straight to the recycle bin. Then there needs to be something like spamrecycle.com. When people get un-tagged spam, they forward it to the recyclers. If enough people complain then I believe the spammer should have to pay at least $20 to each user they spammed. Obviously the payment would require some kind of central authority, but the basic idea would work. Spammers could spam away without fear of litigation and users wouldnt have to deal with it. The other good thing is ISPs could set their email servers to autoreject spam. Thus reducing customer cost.
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good point. IMHO another good idea would be for load-balanced servers to put one in suspend when there is low traffic
One other thing... I will NEVER buy a song that is copy-protected in ANY way. I am not going to pay my hard-earned money for something that tells me what to do with it. For some explanation...
MP3s are an open standard. Anyone can download CDex w/ LAME for free and roll their own MP3s. A MP3 I download / make WILL work in my 4GB PJB-100. It WILL play on my laptop. It WILL go on my server's SMB fileshare so a Lansonic unit will play it. If I am somewhere else, it WILL work on another computer (IE, at office).
Most secure music is a closed standard. Need to pay lots of money to make them. Secure music I download PROBABLY WILL NOT work in my PJB-100 unless the manufacturer pays the RIAA More Money. It PROBABLY WILL NOT play on my laptop. If it does, I will have to 'check it out and back in' so I can only use it on one device at a time. It almost certainly WILL NOT go on my server's SMB share and play thru the Lansonic to my stereo. And if I am somewhere else it will definately NOT WORK.
Why would I pay money for something that is built to make my life difficult? I wouldnt. And neither will most people.
This whole copy protection scheme (as all others are) is pointless. You can make downloaded songs triple-encoded with different 4096-bit keys, require a hardware dongle that has to be kept locked in a safe that is welded to the computer, and this still isnt going to stop people from swapping pure good ol' american FREE MP3S!!. When I say free, I mean free of copy protection and other impurities. Not free of cost.
You can secure the secure stuff all you want and unless you can find a way to un-invent MP3, you're right back where you were.
If they want to stop 'piracy' (By this I mean people gaining posession of a song without paying) they should SELL MP3s. And I mean all of them. Every song by every artist. Available for download in MP3 for $10/month. I would get that in an instant. That $10/mo would get you a guranteed good rip with a good download speed would be worth it.
People dont use Napster because they dont want to pay any money. They use Napster because they dont want to have to go to a store, pay 100x what the CD is worth, and then find out they dont like it. If I could pay $10/mo for unlimited downloads IN UNSECURED MP3 FORMAT I would never use Napster/openNap/PowerNap/etc again.
Several of the planes I've been on have 12v car 'cigarette lighter' plugs between the seat cushions near the knee. Usually seats which have it are marked with a sticker on the label by the row number.
As for headphone jacks, I dont think you could get any real power out of those. Usually its a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack.
They never show R-rated movies on planes. Dont forget the screen can be seen by everyone, and usually the r-rating is for the video, not audio.
check The MarketPro computer show There you can usually find people selling old computers by the pound.
This is a great idea but they got one thing wrong.
First, it says you need to own a small ring that will hold the disc in place. Bad idea. I would just make the hold like a normal CD. Most players have a metal spindle with a magnetic free floating thing above it that will hold the CD down. The spindle spins, mag thing spins with it.
Or if you want to gurantee compatibility, then make a ring around the hole as thick as a normal CD. Use flexible plastic. It would work better.
Yes. IEEE 802.11b is a standard that all manufacturers are (supposed) to adhere to. Check out The official 802.11b (WiFi) site for a list of certified compatible hardware.
consume is one project going in London. Similar projects are in san fran, seattle, etc. I mean a directory of all the individual projects and then maybe a DB of all the nodes. I mean ALL of them.
I need something that will lookup in topographical data.
Does anyone know of a website that will take two places and graph if they have line of sight?
what equipment are you using?
IMHO, what is needed is a centralized directory of all efforts to set up free wLANs. People could see projects going in their neighborhood, or search for ones in cities they want to visit. That way a hotel could be booked close to a base station.
Think about it. You get questionably encoded songs, over unreliable connections that often stick at 'getting info', and half the time the ID3s arent there. However, napster is the best thats out there now. One can grab almost any song by any artist. And listen to it immediately. With no copy protection / nagscreens / etc. For free.
I will not pay money for Napster. Neither will most people. I will also NEVER PAY FOR SOMETHING COPY PROTECTED. Think about it. Would you pay for a car that would scan the speed limit signs and refuse to go faster? If it was 100% transparent to the user I might consider it. But it isnt. Under current DRM (digital rights management) implementations, files must be 'checked out' when downloading to portables, and you cant play it on the computer until you check it back in. Files copied from one directory to another go dead. Restoring from backups gives you dead files too. And most portables dont even support 'DRManaged' files.
I would pay $5-10 for a service that would let me download an unlimited number of high quality songs. This would include any song by any artist. These would be in MP3 or the format of my choosing. They would not expire or have any funny coding on them. They would be plain old unprotected MP3s. And I would love this.
This is what the RIAA should do. It represents all the record companies. So it can get licensing deals with all of them. IMHO this should be its purpose. Encryption exists to be hacked. SDMI will fail. We need ODMI-- Open Digital Music Initiative.
yes you can buy one. I dont know in how long or if the guys that did this are going to start selling them. But what you can do is hook up the DSS control port (really a serial port) to a box with a PPP server. Then with some software hacking it will use the PPP connection instead of dialing the modem.
hacking the tivo to not use a phone can also be done by making it use PPP over the serial (DSS control) port. Then a linux box w/ a PPP server and net access can be the gateway. This has been successfully done many times
Both the Sony and Philips use exactly the same hardware. The only difference between the two is the front panel design and the sony software will control a sony VCR with the 'transfer to tape' function. Other than that, the system is the same.
As many of you know, the TiVo runs linux. The guide data and software updates are usually downloaded in a nightly call to either a 1-800 number or a local UUnet access number.
What has been done is set up the 'DSS' port (also a serial port) to be a linux console. Another hack has made it redirect the 'nightly call' through the serial port as PPP instead of the modem. This way you can hook it up to a box with a PPP server and a cable modem, but you only get 115,200 bps.
This will allow the TiVo to connect to a network and get TiVo guide data without the serial port hack.
Currently, this will NOT let people download TiVo video data to the computer. It is stored in a proprietary format that has not been hacked yet.
Whatever support the Ethernet has in tivo, it is from hacking the backend linux part. The front end, the graphical shell that you see on the TV (its called myworld) has NO SUPPORT for this.
As for why TiVo never put Ethernet support in the thing, it was a corporate decision. TiVo has deals with a few major networks, including NBC. These nets hate having their stuff put on the internet minus ads. Ethernet would make this easier. Since the phone connection is toll free or local, they decided to go with a phone-only system. I dont blame them.
if I remember my HS Civics class... the EC can vote however the f*k they want. Could the 'gore' EC member vote for bush? what prevents this from happening?
im surprised nobody has thought of this yet... maybe someone has.
Start somewhere at the Equator. Plug a HUGE anchor in the ground. Put a large weight into orbit. Now connect a large tether from the anchor to the weight, and have the weight go up to a higher altitude. Attatch an elevator to the side of or around the cable.
What you get if you do it right:
The weight supports all the cable with centrifical (sp?) force. There isnt that much pull on the anchor.
The elevator, powered from Earth, is able to make the trip up. Once it gets out of the atmosphere it will stop a bit below the weight... IN ORBIT.
Cargo and personnell placed on the elevator will ARRIVE IN ORBIT IN SEVERAL HOURS. (without suffering any High G forces)
Any ideas?
From what you say, I would guess that the ones using floppies dont know any better. I would suggest making a 'flyer' with instructions for saving files to the student's server drive. Start with some clipart of a broken floppy and a catchy headline like "When your floppy dies, your term paper dies with it. Save to your Net Storage drive and be protected." Then put instructions for saving to and reading from the net folder both at public terminals and at the dorm.
Put one at each public terminal. print lots, kids will probably take them back to the dorm.
This was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago... For multiple thousands of dollars you can get a fully wired climate controlled rotating workspace.
. html
http://www.poetictech.com/aura/index.html
For those that want something more entertaining... you might try the Aurora chair. Probably really expensive though...
http://www.scifi.com/farscape/notes/aurorachair
this would be more expensive, but you might think of buying a bunch of those Web Appliances that you can hack and plug with a hard drive, net card and Linux. It would be expensive but you could have basic computer functions in almost every room. Put them together with an X-10 (lighting control) system and you're on your way to an automated home...
First, how would you power a IDE hard drive? It would take a LOT of juice. I suggest the PJB-100 player. It has a 4.86GB IBM laptop hard drive, and 10MB RAM so it only spins the drive about every ten minutes. With its rechargable lithium battery it gets 10 hours of playtime. Display shows ID3 info. I have one of these and I only have to charge it about once a week. I would be interested to see if anyone has had any luck replacing the drive with a bigger one... www.pjbox.com www.thinkgeek.com (they sell it too, $20 less)
www.edsci.com They sell scopes, camera stuff, and I think you can even buy a large TV from them for that purpose. Might be only in the catalog though... enjoy.
on that topic, ask the post office how much cheaper your mail would be if there wasnt so much junk mail floating around. the price would probably be the same (as with the ISP). But think about it. For the billions of junk mail delivered every day you need extra mail trucks, bigger/more delivery vans, more sorting capacity to handle the extra load, etc. This raises the required post office capacity. Although with email the effect is the same (more bandwidth, more capable email servers, etc, the cost is not nearly as great. I dont like spam. But I dont have a huge problem with it either. I prefer spam to junk mail. What I DO have a problem with is spam that pretends not to be spam. Spams with subjects like 'Re: That cool web site you told me about', 'Haven't seen you in a while', 'Hey, did you get the memo?'. Open a web email account and let it sit for a month. You will have nothing but spam if you dont tell anybody about it. At least 3 out of 5 spams will have fake subjects. This is what I hate about spammers. They're dishonest! I believe the solution is to have a 'spam' tag in email. Spammers would be allowed to spam as much as they wanted as long as every message had its spam tag flipped. Thus, the user can simply tell his email program 'autodelete all spam' and every new spam goes straight to the recycle bin. Then there needs to be something like spamrecycle.com. When people get un-tagged spam, they forward it to the recyclers. If enough people complain then I believe the spammer should have to pay at least $20 to each user they spammed. Obviously the payment would require some kind of central authority, but the basic idea would work. Spammers could spam away without fear of litigation and users wouldnt have to deal with it. The other good thing is ISPs could set their email servers to autoreject spam. Thus reducing customer cost.