OEM deals? Certainly. Bootloader restrictions? Maybe on Compaqs? Or early Intel Apples? I'd never encountered a system at the time that wouldn't boot BeOS R5 i386.
No... BeOS was the only thing that would let me use my P3-450 to play 25 MP3s at once... backwards. That OS was the closest thing I've used to actually getting all the performance out of my PC... and 11 years later, I'm still looking back on it wondering why we don't have anything else like it...
While that's a rational and logical conclusion, I'm finding that in SOME cases, the mic-in is also line-in. On many contemporary Dells I've seen, you can run a line output, even at a fairly loud level, into the front panel mic-in, or the only mic-in on a laptop, and it sounds clear and not overmodulated at all. I was hesitant to do it at first, but now I regularly plug my iPod into my work PC at a level a few times what I'd use for headphones, and the PC takes it just fine. I even enabled mic boost in Windows to no ill effect. So I think the included line inputs aren't neccessarily dying out, just mutating.
(Though for any kind of serious use, I find all integrated sound cards and many aftermarket ones are just crap... so much noise.)
There are a lot of assumptions tying FOSS to various ideals and greater concepts where it's not really deserving. It's already been proven that even with the Internet, opening your source code doesn't mean "someone knowledgeable will fix it" or that more contributors means fewer bugs and exploits, or that they will be seen to in a timely way.
That doesn't mean it's the wrong way for everything either, but... it is what it is in each case, and no more than that. Also, on a big project, making everything a democracy would just stall it indefinitely.
I agree. While the patent is quite specific on how it's done, the process itself is inevitable the moment you no longer use a strictly linear recording medium. I wonder if MythTV will also be nailed for this? (I've only used EchoStar receivers, but I assume Myth must have this feature too as it's really basic...)
Brilliant... so now we can play demos, get a mistaken impression of what the game is like, and then decide that they're not worth buying when otherwise we would have bought the game after enjoying the demo!
If a Nazi group is English, not German, they would simply be "National Socialists." They were originally known as such anyway; it's not a rebrand. Rather than try to force them to use an outdated nickname, we should simply educate people what this mundane sounding political movement is really based in. It is a shame though since socialism itself is not a nationalistic genocidal movement, but communism has taken a bad rap in North America for too long...
Ads used to be additions (long banners.) Then they graduated to interruptions (banners everywhere.) Now they're just another class of attacks (popups, popunders, auto-streaming video, FUI, interstitials, auto-changing browser homepage, installing toolbars, etc.) Any sensible user protects their computer from attacks.
I understand ads help a site out. If I use a site a lot, I'll even click a banner once in a while and click around a little before closing the window to register a clickthrough. If false links or FUIs lead me off site, too bad. I will block your ads, and maybe even blacklist your advertisers in my HOSTS file. If the article is buried in so many ads across the top, and cascading down both sides, doing everything short of prying my eyes open and shoving banners into it... tough - I will block them without remorse.
The fastest way to get me to block an ad though is to use Flash. The instant I see a video starting to stream where it shouldn't, it's blocked, and if that also blocks part of the real site, I will file tech support requests for the site not working and let them figure it out. They should be glad I don't bill them for my wasted bandwidth, or interference with the operation of my PC as its resources pool into showing me crap I don't care about. This is inexcusable and any time it happens, I lose all sympathy for the site owners - I don't care if they're starving and the site's about to go dark; there's at least one very good reason for that.
True, but that was a boycott of all Sony for a third party solution bought by the Sony-BMG music label... So to do the equivalent here, people would have to start boycotting Energizer, Schick, Playtex, Purina, and every brand that ever in some way was related to Energizer since Sony is basically a self-contained keiretsu of many compartmentalized companies.
Well, with existing tech, I have some shirts I got a few years ago with a nanomaterial coating based on small hairs - if you're splashed with a little water, it will bead up and roll off. It washes normally though because once detergent is added it soaks in with no problem.
All of the laptop screens I've disassembled have included the LCD panel, lighting tube, backlight reflector and diffusor assembly in one main assembly, so it may just be a matter of opening the case around the screen, popping a couple of cables off and swapping it.
I didn't know about some of those things - like photographer name and compass direction. I was thinking geotagging on GPS phones. So you upload your pics to Flickr or a photo storage site for phones, cops get a warrant to search the server which, of course, doesn't use per-user crypto. The cops run a simple off the shelf harvest tool to identify faces...
Now they know everyone who has been on anyone's photo on the server, where they were, at what times, with who, who their friends' friends are, where they habitually go, times and places of people who happened to be caught in the pics accidentally, etc.
I was actually thinking that if they can make it work, we won't be able to opt out. After all, most providers don't offer unlimited data - so if you go out and can't help it when strangers hop onto your AP and surf the net through your phone, racking up data charges? It's just money in the carriers' pockets.
I agree. The world is full of resources. Take an excerpt if necessary - take a hundred - and cite them, ideally in a standard style like AP. If you just use them and pretend they're yours... it IS just plagiarism, is not an issue of "sampling" and new media culture, and the derivative piece should not be given credit itself.
Yeah... it's one thing to play a riff or two from a song, and another to take a direct 1:1 recording of part of it and use it to make your song, with no authorization or approval from the original artist. That was considered ripping off even before the idea of intellectual property rights spiraled out of control.
When I was in high school a decade and change ago, the internet connection simply filtered through a proxy that removed unapproved sites. There was no getting around that without finding out where the server was, breaking into the room, breaking into the server, and removing the filter software. So it really doesn't matter what they use to access it.
Yes. Google doesn't make much effort to hide the fact that they can shut your phone down or remove apps from it remotely, so there's no surprised outrage.
That's cool for them, and it may trickle down to us eventually. For now it sounds too advanced to actually happen, so I'll start looking for it after we get those 5TB holographic optical discs that should be available about 5 years after 1999.
One warning - full-page PDF is usually technically legible, but not comfortably. Zoomed in, it upscales the text and breaks the formatting, killing any vector-based diagrams. Rasters like photos still stay visible. The only workaround for this, or PDFs that are just book pages scanned as graphics, is to hold "zoom" and have it rotate to landscape mode to read it a little bigger.
Don't know about upper size limits for book files - I have tried ~40MB PDFs heavy on graphics, and it seems fine.
I like the Sony readers. MP3 playback means nothing to me in a book reader - which is good since it has no way of sorting them. I specifically DO NOT want wireless connectivity of any kind. It's a waste of battery life for convenience that doesn't even make sense - I have 4GB of books loaded on my PRS-505; even if most are comics, I'm not going to run out of books in under a YEAR, much less need one in the next 5 minutes. Color touch screens are equally or more useless - just show me the book. I don't mind if the menu takes a second to draw each update; I have shortcut keys and it buffers them well, so I can just go *press press press* and wait a sec for it to do what I asked. It does TXT, and many other formats like PDF, LRF, EPUB, etc. Using the third party app "Calibre" I can manage the books easily and tag them all for quick retrieval. If you're one of those sensitive souls who feels wronged and raped for using a Memory Stick that cost $5 more than a no-name SD card... you can use an SD card. It's thin. It's light. It's solidly built. You can get a nice leather cover for it, and it will magnetically hold shut gently. You can leave it on for a week on the same page, no problem... you can charge it by PSP type chargers, or USB mini-B.
I started taking care with my online info about 12 years ago. I've only posted my photo once since then, and operate under the assumption that if I post something to the internet, everything from same pseudonym is known by someone, or will be, so if I post my name one place, my hometown in another, my job in another, I assume someone could add them up.
Sadly though, the war is won in the minds of the people. Quite literally, a story about citywide CCTV will come up and if I speak against it, I'll have kids around 20 and younger saying "the only reason you'd mind this is if you have something to hide! It's public, so there's no expectation of privacy, so it's ok to have cameras everywhere all the time!" They never seem to get that A) That's more like an immortal never-sleeping policeman waiting outside your home, following you everywhere, and then parking himself and waiting when you go back inside. B) Anyone with a net connection can find hundreds or thousands of cases of police abuse of citizens, even if you only count surveillance cases.
My big conspiracy theory is still that privacy was accidentally surrendered. Everyone has cel phones. Everyone's phone has a camera. EXIF data saves the time a photo was taken. More cam-phone pics are being hosted on servers or uploaded to social sites instead of on the camera. More phones are incorporating GPS receivers and geotagging pics. Off the shelf software can identify people's faces. Even without the PATRIOT act, search warrants are seldom declined. SO, WHEN YOU PUT ALL OF THAT TOGETHER... with current, non-theoretical technology in use today, if someone gets a warrant so search a photo host or a Facebook server, assuming the pics are geotagged, they can run a few scripts and know - Whose pics are on the server - Where you were - When you were there - Who you were with - With enough pics, what your habits are, and who you tend to associate with - Who's a friend of a friend - Who took photos of police (illegal in many places in the Western world now!)
All without installing a single camera or deciding to follow a single person - because the camera is in each of our hands.
Sounds pretty nice as long as it doesn't commercialize things that are already free. I like it because you wouldn't think about each individual transaction since you pay a flat rate.
Exactly... if you program something for the iPhone, and Apple approves it, it's on the store. On the big 3 consoles, even if you're an amateur studio who gets their game published on there, you're still semi-pro - I guess a bit less so on XBLA since they're pretty open.
I wouldn't be surprised if the raw number of developers was even 10x higher on iPhone - it's somewhere between computer and console in terms of available software. Now if companies like Capcom, Konami, Square-Enix, Sega, Namco, etc started dropping their other projects in favour of the iPhone, then it would be a story.
It's an unofficial prerelease version of the OS - they already make it very clear you shouldn't use it for anything really important, and that it would expire at a fixed time. It's not news - not even on Slashdot. in April, and in more detail in May last year.
Slashdot Mirror
OEM deals? Certainly. Bootloader restrictions? Maybe on Compaqs? Or early Intel Apples? I'd never encountered a system at the time that wouldn't boot BeOS R5 i386.
No... BeOS was the only thing that would let me use my P3-450 to play 25 MP3s at once... backwards. That OS was the closest thing I've used to actually getting all the performance out of my PC... and 11 years later, I'm still looking back on it wondering why we don't have anything else like it...
While that's a rational and logical conclusion, I'm finding that in SOME cases, the mic-in is also line-in. On many contemporary Dells I've seen, you can run a line output, even at a fairly loud level, into the front panel mic-in, or the only mic-in on a laptop, and it sounds clear and not overmodulated at all. I was hesitant to do it at first, but now I regularly plug my iPod into my work PC at a level a few times what I'd use for headphones, and the PC takes it just fine. I even enabled mic boost in Windows to no ill effect. So I think the included line inputs aren't neccessarily dying out, just mutating.
(Though for any kind of serious use, I find all integrated sound cards and many aftermarket ones are just crap... so much noise.)
There are a lot of assumptions tying FOSS to various ideals and greater concepts where it's not really deserving. It's already been proven that even with the Internet, opening your source code doesn't mean "someone knowledgeable will fix it" or that more contributors means fewer bugs and exploits, or that they will be seen to in a timely way.
That doesn't mean it's the wrong way for everything either, but... it is what it is in each case, and no more than that. Also, on a big project, making everything a democracy would just stall it indefinitely.
I agree. While the patent is quite specific on how it's done, the process itself is inevitable the moment you no longer use a strictly linear recording medium. I wonder if MythTV will also be nailed for this? (I've only used EchoStar receivers, but I assume Myth must have this feature too as it's really basic...)
Brilliant... so now we can play demos, get a mistaken impression of what the game is like, and then decide that they're not worth buying when otherwise we would have bought the game after enjoying the demo!
If a Nazi group is English, not German, they would simply be "National Socialists." They were originally known as such anyway; it's not a rebrand.
Rather than try to force them to use an outdated nickname, we should simply educate people what this mundane sounding political movement is really based in. It is a shame though since socialism itself is not a nationalistic genocidal movement, but communism has taken a bad rap in North America for too long...
Ads used to be additions (long banners.) Then they graduated to interruptions (banners everywhere.)
Now they're just another class of attacks (popups, popunders, auto-streaming video, FUI, interstitials, auto-changing browser homepage, installing toolbars, etc.)
Any sensible user protects their computer from attacks.
I understand ads help a site out. If I use a site a lot, I'll even click a banner once in a while and click around a little before closing the window to register a clickthrough.
If false links or FUIs lead me off site, too bad. I will block your ads, and maybe even blacklist your advertisers in my HOSTS file.
If the article is buried in so many ads across the top, and cascading down both sides, doing everything short of prying my eyes open and shoving banners into it... tough - I will block them without remorse.
The fastest way to get me to block an ad though is to use Flash. The instant I see a video starting to stream where it shouldn't, it's blocked, and if that also blocks part of the real site, I will file tech support requests for the site not working and let them figure it out. They should be glad I don't bill them for my wasted bandwidth, or interference with the operation of my PC as its resources pool into showing me crap I don't care about. This is inexcusable and any time it happens, I lose all sympathy for the site owners - I don't care if they're starving and the site's about to go dark; there's at least one very good reason for that.
True, but that was a boycott of all Sony for a third party solution bought by the Sony-BMG music label...
So to do the equivalent here, people would have to start boycotting Energizer, Schick, Playtex, Purina, and every brand that ever in some way was related to Energizer since Sony is basically a self-contained keiretsu of many compartmentalized companies.
Well, with existing tech, I have some shirts I got a few years ago with a nanomaterial coating based on small hairs - if you're splashed with a little water, it will bead up and roll off. It washes normally though because once detergent is added it soaks in with no problem.
All of the laptop screens I've disassembled have included the LCD panel, lighting tube, backlight reflector and diffusor assembly in one main assembly, so it may just be a matter of opening the case around the screen, popping a couple of cables off and swapping it.
Even today, I posted my EXIF rant on /.
I didn't know about some of those things - like photographer name and compass direction. I was thinking geotagging on GPS phones. So you upload your pics to Flickr or a photo storage site for phones, cops get a warrant to search the server which, of course, doesn't use per-user crypto. The cops run a simple off the shelf harvest tool to identify faces...
Now they know everyone who has been on anyone's photo on the server, where they were, at what times, with who, who their friends' friends are, where they habitually go, times and places of people who happened to be caught in the pics accidentally, etc.
I was actually thinking that if they can make it work, we won't be able to opt out. After all, most providers don't offer unlimited data - so if you go out and can't help it when strangers hop onto your AP and surf the net through your phone, racking up data charges? It's just money in the carriers' pockets.
I agree. The world is full of resources. Take an excerpt if necessary - take a hundred - and cite them, ideally in a standard style like AP. If you just use them and pretend they're yours... it IS just plagiarism, is not an issue of "sampling" and new media culture, and the derivative piece should not be given credit itself.
Yeah... it's one thing to play a riff or two from a song, and another to take a direct 1:1 recording of part of it and use it to make your song, with no authorization or approval from the original artist. That was considered ripping off even before the idea of intellectual property rights spiraled out of control.
When I was in high school a decade and change ago, the internet connection simply filtered through a proxy that removed unapproved sites. There was no getting around that without finding out where the server was, breaking into the room, breaking into the server, and removing the filter software. So it really doesn't matter what they use to access it.
Yes. Google doesn't make much effort to hide the fact that they can shut your phone down or remove apps from it remotely, so there's no surprised outrage.
That's cool for them, and it may trickle down to us eventually. For now it sounds too advanced to actually happen, so I'll start looking for it after we get those 5TB holographic optical discs that should be available about 5 years after 1999.
One warning - full-page PDF is usually technically legible, but not comfortably. Zoomed in, it upscales the text and breaks the formatting, killing any vector-based diagrams. Rasters like photos still stay visible. The only workaround for this, or PDFs that are just book pages scanned as graphics, is to hold "zoom" and have it rotate to landscape mode to read it a little bigger.
Don't know about upper size limits for book files - I have tried ~40MB PDFs heavy on graphics, and it seems fine.
I like the Sony readers. MP3 playback means nothing to me in a book reader - which is good since it has no way of sorting them. I specifically DO NOT want wireless connectivity of any kind. It's a waste of battery life for convenience that doesn't even make sense - I have 4GB of books loaded on my PRS-505; even if most are comics, I'm not going to run out of books in under a YEAR, much less need one in the next 5 minutes. Color touch screens are equally or more useless - just show me the book. I don't mind if the menu takes a second to draw each update; I have shortcut keys and it buffers them well, so I can just go *press press press* and wait a sec for it to do what I asked.
It does TXT, and many other formats like PDF, LRF, EPUB, etc. Using the third party app "Calibre" I can manage the books easily and tag them all for quick retrieval.
If you're one of those sensitive souls who feels wronged and raped for using a Memory Stick that cost $5 more than a no-name SD card... you can use an SD card.
It's thin. It's light. It's solidly built. You can get a nice leather cover for it, and it will magnetically hold shut gently. You can leave it on for a week on the same page, no problem... you can charge it by PSP type chargers, or USB mini-B.
I started taking care with my online info about 12 years ago. I've only posted my photo once since then, and operate under the assumption that if I post something to the internet, everything from same pseudonym is known by someone, or will be, so if I post my name one place, my hometown in another, my job in another, I assume someone could add them up.
Sadly though, the war is won in the minds of the people. Quite literally, a story about citywide CCTV will come up and if I speak against it, I'll have kids around 20 and younger saying "the only reason you'd mind this is if you have something to hide! It's public, so there's no expectation of privacy, so it's ok to have cameras everywhere all the time!" They never seem to get that
A) That's more like an immortal never-sleeping policeman waiting outside your home, following you everywhere, and then parking himself and waiting when you go back inside.
B) Anyone with a net connection can find hundreds or thousands of cases of police abuse of citizens, even if you only count surveillance cases.
My big conspiracy theory is still that privacy was accidentally surrendered. Everyone has cel phones. Everyone's phone has a camera. EXIF data saves the time a photo was taken. More cam-phone pics are being hosted on servers or uploaded to social sites instead of on the camera. More phones are incorporating GPS receivers and geotagging pics. Off the shelf software can identify people's faces. Even without the PATRIOT act, search warrants are seldom declined. SO, WHEN YOU PUT ALL OF THAT TOGETHER... with current, non-theoretical technology in use today, if someone gets a warrant so search a photo host or a Facebook server, assuming the pics are geotagged, they can run a few scripts and know
- Whose pics are on the server
- Where you were
- When you were there
- Who you were with
- With enough pics, what your habits are, and who you tend to associate with
- Who's a friend of a friend
- Who took photos of police (illegal in many places in the Western world now!)
All without installing a single camera or deciding to follow a single person - because the camera is in each of our hands.
Sounds pretty nice as long as it doesn't commercialize things that are already free. I like it because you wouldn't think about each individual transaction since you pay a flat rate.
Exactly... if you program something for the iPhone, and Apple approves it, it's on the store. On the big 3 consoles, even if you're an amateur studio who gets their game published on there, you're still semi-pro - I guess a bit less so on XBLA since they're pretty open.
I wouldn't be surprised if the raw number of developers was even 10x higher on iPhone - it's somewhere between computer and console in terms of available software. Now if companies like Capcom, Konami, Square-Enix, Sega, Namco, etc started dropping their other projects in favour of the iPhone, then it would be a story.
It's an unofficial prerelease version of the OS - they already make it very clear you shouldn't use it for anything really important, and that it would expire at a fixed time. It's not news - not even on Slashdot. in April, and in more detail in May last year.