You mean like the one that was running Half Life 2 with a prescott chip on the ATI stand at IDF, or the one that they handed me when they read my name tag?
I was at IDF (covering it for the INQ if you care), and I talked extensively to the PCCard people. There are two form factors, the rectangular one, and the wider one. Both have the same connector, one just has a wider end. The wide version will accept cards in the narrow form factor, and there is a neat mechanical guide that will just let you slip a narrow card into a wide hole. Very slick.
The whole point of this is to bring a PCI Express slot to laptops. The USB functionality is rather stupid and unnecessary, most likely as a bridge technology to keep costs low at first.
As for the size being a 'joke', keep in mind that intel and a lot of box builders plan to have this slot in the front of every SFF computer that ships in about a year. The larger slot works well there.
When I read about the first round of suits, I was waiting for something like this to happen, and it didn't. When I read about the second round, and it did, I wasn't suprised. Either way, I felt I had to rant, and this came out:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11493
For the famously sarcasm impared here, this is meant as a joke, I hope you find some humor in it.
Damn, I write for The Inquirer. With the stories I can drool out in just over 20 minutes, I can retire to my own island. Time to fire up Open Office, and think up inflamatory headlines:). They do pay by the hit right?
I disagree. I have tried everything from PC joysticks, joypads, force feedback to the X-Arcade setup, and nothing feels right. I have the experience with the games to know the difference, and on the two-stick games, it isn't 'right' to me.
As for the space, I have room for 6 more before I have to re-do the basement stairs for more room:).
I couldn't have said it better myself. I have 6 machines and counting, and play them all the time. Emulators are off in 'feel', and if you like games, it is like a bad controller, just not worth it.
"For every revolutionary game (think Robotron, tempest, bosconian, pacman) there were many others that we remember fondly only because we have other memories associated with them (like summers growing up, friends etc. etc.)"
As someone who has 2.5 of those games (Robotron, Tempest, and a Ms. Pacman, the.5) in my living room, I can say definitively that they are indeed as much fun as you remember them to be.
I have a snotload of modern PCs sitting around, a PS2, XBox and GC, with just about every worthwhile game either available to me here or upon request (I write for an IT web site).
I also have a Tempest, Robotron 2084, Gauntlet II, Xevious, Ms. Pacman, and Smash TV.
The new games, those that are worth opening the shrink-wrap on, a suprisingly small number, get boring really quickly, and that is by design. Read the content restrictions for Sony, MS and Nintendo for a real eye-opener, they mandate that games lose their appeal. Gameplay has become secondary to eye candy.
When we want to have fun in this house, there is nothing like an hour long Smash TV session, or seeing if you can get to the yellow boards on Tempest. 20+ years later, these games are still fun. How many PS1 games are worth the $5 you can pick them up for?
Better hope your home address isn't easy to find you'll find him dangling from the roof tied up in Cat-5 cable and a line of geeks wating to woo you.;)
By woo, I assume you mean have them stand in the corner, facing away from her, with their knees almost touching, trembling with fear, making low moaning noises that sound like 'Woooooooo'. That I'd buy.
What are you saying, Xerox didn't invent those, App^h^h^h MS did! Just ask their PR department, they'll set you straight, and send you a free copy of 'MS History v3.0 - This time we got it right'.
Nah, he just ran out of puppies to step on, so he had to find something else satisfying. Torture is illegal in the US (without proper camaign contributions), ecological destruction is so '80s, and sex is taboo, so what was left? Yup, the RIAA, and if he writes a large enough puppy supply into his contract, he can stay at this job for years!
-Charlie
(yes once again, this is humor, something that does not carry in print)
You are close. It may be the property of MS, but applying the phrase 'intellectual' to the MS Windows UI stretches credibility to the breaking point. I wonder if there is any case law to challenge them on false use of intellect? Any lawyers out there know?
-Charlie
(Yes, for the sarcasm impared, this was meant as humor)
Wow, the one person who gets the point, and currently they are modded to 0. I don't know if I should be encouraged by the response to my article, or saddened.
Speaking of maturity, posting my mail in an thinly veiled attempt to get people to flame me is _OH_ so cool. You wouldn't look quite so stupid if it wasn't posted at the top of the article in the first place. I would hope that anyone pissed off enough to flame me would have read the article in the frist place, and fired off a volley from there.
Getting back to the story, the main reason 'we' are losing the war is that no one is actually doing a damn thing, they just sit on their couches, eating cheetos, masturbating to baywatch, while their rights are being eroded. What have you done to prevent this? I did point that part out in the origional article mind you. Have you written an non-form letter, not e-mail mind you, to your congressperson lately? Attended a meeting or a rally? Thought not.
According to word, my writing style is not quite at the 17 year old level, but I am trying. Thanks for the criticism. I can only be gratefull you didn't have anything reasonably intelligent to pick on me about, but marginal cheap shots will do for now.
As for the research bit, it wasn't meant to be complete, just throwing out ideas for someone who is a much better programmer than me to run with. As I mentioned earlier, have you contributed to the debate, or are you just moving your lips while you read what is happening to the world around you.
Overall, go back to your GI Joe reruns. When you can contribute, even in a small way, please come back.
Yeah, but if it is legal, you won't have to defend it, you can most likely get it thrown out. Remember, this is an excercise in obeying the letter of the law, not the spirit. The letter is what is enforced, much to the chagrin of people trying to do the right thing, but getting constantly screwed for it.
If you have a clever lawyer when setting something like this up, and you do your homework, you should be untouchable. Using the law to do wrong is a time honored tradition in the US, just look at our government. When was the last time you heard Bush say Enron, or Chaney say Haliburon?
You missed the point entirely. When you listen to it, it downloads the song to your cache, where you can pull it out, and have an MP3 with a simple file rename. You should never have to 'listen' to a song more than once unless you are somewhere south of decomposing monkey on the IQ scale. That really really lessens the bandwidth usage.
As for the person dropping off, does kazaa crash when a single source out of the 12 you are sucking a file from logs off? Get the idea now?
When I wrote the article, I was trying to get a discussion going, and hopefully plant a seed or 12. If a loophole got exploited, all the better.
Hey, at least it wasn't as bad as the other math I screwed up in that article. Luckily for me, only several hundred people are mailing me about it. Oh wait, it has only been up for about 4 hours.:(
As regular reader of/. for years now, I did know how crappy the search function is. In fact, I used it to get the CARP link. Now if you want shitty search engines, look at the one on the Inq, it won't even let you search the author field. I use google to find my own articles.
I meant do not herd above the arctic circle. Ambiguous wording, sorry, it won't happen again. Well, I write like shit, so it will happen again. If this kind of englishish offends you, please don't read the Inq, or at least my articles on it:).
That is basically the point. The RIAA would think it is theft, but it most likely technically lives up to the letter of the law. The hope was that any brain dead monkey could go in, copy the files, and have an MP3 collection from it. *THAT* would be illegal though, but the company has nothing to do with it, and frowns on cache tampering, just look, it is in their terms of use.:)
The way it was worded, it also sets up a folder that contains an 'encrypted' cache of songs, ostensibly to ease bandwidth. This encryption involves changing the last letter of the filename. How long do you think it will take people to come out with a one button, highly illegal, program that loots this cache, providing you with an easy way to legally download lots of MP3s at 7 cents per hundred. If it takes 5 minutes, I will personally e-mail the authors and deride them for being so damn slow.
There are other benefits also, but the two you pointed out are some of the better ones. I was aiming to screw them with their own rules. Go nuts people.
In the link you provided, very good by the way, it says:
"If you want to do something different than what I described above; for example, if you want to let users choose the songs to download, or you want to archive dj sets, or you want to allow the world at large to collaboratively dj by voting on what song to play next, or anything at all interactive that actually takes advantage of the power of the internet: well... you're fucked. When you go into that world, you are out of the ``compulsory license'' territory, and must negotiate with all of the copyright holders individually, which is prohibitively complicated, since there are so many of them."
In other ways, it describes how the RIAA basically outlaws anything other than the most basic webcasting, and crushes anything resembling free thought. Not so, you are thinking inside the box again.
As I wrote one of the first people to send me such a link, there is a way around it, a creative, bent way, but a way. Think about this for a minute. When you sign up for the service, you are a listner, one who can only tune in to channels that professional DJs create, no preannouncement, you get what you get.
Now, when you want, you can click on a handy button, provide a few details, and the service will hire you as a.... wait for it... professional DJ! They will even pay you $1 per year to make it legal. Then you can be a DJ, make your own radio show, and do it as a legal employee of the company. That should follow the use terms, or can probably be made to.
The whole point of the article was to make people think, and sadly very very few of them, judging from the letters I am getting are. There is a loophole that you can drive a truck through, and no one sees it. If they see it, they won't bend anymore rules, or at the very least literally interpret rules.
I am sad to say, I expected better of the slashdot crowd. There are a few of you out there who can see the big picture, I know, there is at least one story a day here about people who do. What I am hoping for is that someone picks up my idea and runs with it.
All you need to do is set up a company to take the rules that they set up literally. It doesn't matter if every person on the service is a DJ, and you only ever listen to your own station. Things like preannouncement can be gotten around by looking at your playlist editor. Duh.
This kind of thought is necessary to screw people with the laws very they are looking to break you with. Don't see a rule, set up a roadblock for youself, run into it, and go home, use your brain.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my article, I was going to post it to Karma whore. Anyone have any questions?
-Charlie
You mean like the one that was running Half Life 2 with a prescott chip on the ATI stand at IDF, or the one that they handed me when they read my name tag?
-Charlie
I was at IDF (covering it for the INQ if you care), and I talked extensively to the PCCard people. There are two form factors, the rectangular one, and the wider one. Both have the same connector, one just has a wider end. The wide version will accept cards in the narrow form factor, and there is a neat mechanical guide that will just let you slip a narrow card into a wide hole. Very slick.
The whole point of this is to bring a PCI Express slot to laptops. The USB functionality is rather stupid and unnecessary, most likely as a bridge technology to keep costs low at first.
As for the size being a 'joke', keep in mind that intel and a lot of box builders plan to have this slot in the front of every SFF computer that ships in about a year. The larger slot works well there.
-Charlie
When I read about the first round of suits, I was waiting for something like this to happen, and it didn't. When I read about the second round, and it did, I wasn't suprised. Either way, I felt I had to rant, and this came out:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11493
For the famously sarcasm impared here, this is meant as a joke, I hope you find some humor in it.
-Charlie
>Please don't abbreviate "you" and "your" as "u" and "ur."
K.
-Charlie
Damn, I write for The Inquirer. With the stories I can drool out in just over 20 minutes, I can retire to my own island. Time to fire up Open Office, and think up inflamatory headlines :). They do pay by the hit right?
-Charlie
I disagree. I have tried everything from PC joysticks, joypads, force feedback to the X-Arcade setup, and nothing feels right. I have the experience with the games to know the difference, and on the two-stick games, it isn't 'right' to me.
:).
As for the space, I have room for 6 more before I have to re-do the basement stairs for more room
-Charlie
I couldn't have said it better myself. I have 6 machines and counting, and play them all the time. Emulators are off in 'feel', and if you like games, it is like a bad controller, just not worth it.
-Charlie
"For every revolutionary game (think Robotron, tempest, bosconian, pacman) there were many others that we remember fondly only because we have other memories associated with them (like summers growing up, friends etc. etc.)"
.5) in my living room, I can say definitively that they are indeed as much fun as you remember them to be.
As someone who has 2.5 of those games (Robotron, Tempest, and a Ms. Pacman, the
-Charlie
I have a snotload of modern PCs sitting around, a PS2, XBox and GC, with just about every worthwhile game either available to me here or upon request (I write for an IT web site).
I also have a Tempest, Robotron 2084, Gauntlet II, Xevious, Ms. Pacman, and Smash TV.
The new games, those that are worth opening the shrink-wrap on, a suprisingly small number, get boring really quickly, and that is by design. Read the content restrictions for Sony, MS and Nintendo for a real eye-opener, they mandate that games lose their appeal. Gameplay has become secondary to eye candy.
When we want to have fun in this house, there is nothing like an hour long Smash TV session, or seeing if you can get to the yellow boards on Tempest. 20+ years later, these games are still fun. How many PS1 games are worth the $5 you can pick them up for?
-Charlie
Better hope your home address isn't easy to find you'll find him dangling from the roof tied up in Cat-5 cable and a line of geeks wating to woo you. ;)
By woo, I assume you mean have them stand in the corner, facing away from her, with their knees almost touching, trembling with fear, making low moaning noises that sound like 'Woooooooo'. That I'd buy.
-Charlie
What are you saying, Xerox didn't invent those, App^h^h^h MS did! Just ask their PR department, they'll set you straight, and send you a free copy of 'MS History v3.0 - This time we got it right'.
-Charlie
(Yes, once again, sarcasm, I do know my history).
Nah, he just ran out of puppies to step on, so he had to find something else satisfying. Torture is illegal in the US (without proper camaign contributions), ecological destruction is so '80s, and sex is taboo, so what was left? Yup, the RIAA, and if he writes a large enough puppy supply into his contract, he can stay at this job for years!
-Charlie
(yes once again, this is humor, something that does not carry in print)
You are close. It may be the property of MS, but applying the phrase 'intellectual' to the MS Windows UI stretches credibility to the breaking point. I wonder if there is any case law to challenge them on false use of intellect? Any lawyers out there know?
-Charlie
(Yes, for the sarcasm impared, this was meant as humor)
Wow, the one person who gets the point, and currently they are modded to 0. I don't know if I should be encouraged by the response to my article, or saddened.
-Charlie
Speaking of maturity, posting my mail in an thinly veiled attempt to get people to flame me is _OH_ so cool. You wouldn't look quite so stupid if it wasn't posted at the top of the article in the first place. I would hope that anyone pissed off enough to flame me would have read the article in the frist place, and fired off a volley from there.
Getting back to the story, the main reason 'we' are losing the war is that no one is actually doing a damn thing, they just sit on their couches, eating cheetos, masturbating to baywatch, while their rights are being eroded. What have you done to prevent this? I did point that part out in the origional article mind you. Have you written an non-form letter, not e-mail mind you, to your congressperson lately? Attended a meeting or a rally? Thought not.
According to word, my writing style is not quite at the 17 year old level, but I am trying. Thanks for the criticism. I can only be gratefull you didn't have anything reasonably intelligent to pick on me about, but marginal cheap shots will do for now.
As for the research bit, it wasn't meant to be complete, just throwing out ideas for someone who is a much better programmer than me to run with. As I mentioned earlier, have you contributed to the debate, or are you just moving your lips while you read what is happening to the world around you.
Overall, go back to your GI Joe reruns. When you can contribute, even in a small way, please come back.
-Charlie
Yeah, but if it is legal, you won't have to defend it, you can most likely get it thrown out. Remember, this is an excercise in obeying the letter of the law, not the spirit. The letter is what is enforced, much to the chagrin of people trying to do the right thing, but getting constantly screwed for it.
If you have a clever lawyer when setting something like this up, and you do your homework, you should be untouchable. Using the law to do wrong is a time honored tradition in the US, just look at our government. When was the last time you heard Bush say Enron, or Chaney say Haliburon?
-Charlie
You missed the point entirely. When you listen to it, it downloads the song to your cache, where you can pull it out, and have an MP3 with a simple file rename. You should never have to 'listen' to a song more than once unless you are somewhere south of decomposing monkey on the IQ scale. That really really lessens the bandwidth usage.
As for the person dropping off, does kazaa crash when a single source out of the 12 you are sucking a file from logs off? Get the idea now?
When I wrote the article, I was trying to get a discussion going, and hopefully plant a seed or 12. If a loophole got exploited, all the better.
-Charlie
Actually, I wasn't paid for it.
-Charlie
Hey, at least it wasn't as bad as the other math I screwed up in that article. Luckily for me, only several hundred people are mailing me about it. Oh wait, it has only been up for about 4 hours. :(
-Charlie (the articles author)
As regular reader of /. for years now, I did know how crappy the search function is. In fact, I used it to get the CARP link. Now if you want shitty search engines, look at the one on the Inq, it won't even let you search the author field. I use google to find my own articles.
-Charlie (the articles author)
I meant do not herd above the arctic circle. Ambiguous wording, sorry, it won't happen again. Well, I write like shit, so it will happen again. If this kind of englishish offends you, please don't read the Inq, or at least my articles on it :).
-Charlie
That is basically the point. The RIAA would think it is theft, but it most likely technically lives up to the letter of the law. The hope was that any brain dead monkey could go in, copy the files, and have an MP3 collection from it. *THAT* would be illegal though, but the company has nothing to do with it, and frowns on cache tampering, just look, it is in their terms of use. :)
-Charlie (The articles author)
The way it was worded, it also sets up a folder that contains an 'encrypted' cache of songs, ostensibly to ease bandwidth. This encryption involves changing the last letter of the filename. How long do you think it will take people to come out with a one button, highly illegal, program that loots this cache, providing you with an easy way to legally download lots of MP3s at 7 cents per hundred. If it takes 5 minutes, I will personally e-mail the authors and deride them for being so damn slow.
There are other benefits also, but the two you pointed out are some of the better ones. I was aiming to screw them with their own rules. Go nuts people.
-Charlie
In the link you provided, very good by the way, it says:
.... wait for it ... professional DJ! They will even pay you $1 per year to make it legal. Then you can be a DJ, make your own radio show, and do it as a legal employee of the company. That should follow the use terms, or can probably be made to.
"If you want to do something different than what I described above; for example, if you want to let users choose the songs to download, or you want to archive dj sets, or you want to allow the world at large to collaboratively dj by voting on what song to play next, or anything at all interactive that actually takes advantage of the power of the internet: well... you're fucked. When you go into that world, you are out of the ``compulsory license'' territory, and must negotiate with all of the copyright holders individually, which is prohibitively complicated, since there are so many of them."
In other ways, it describes how the RIAA basically outlaws anything other than the most basic webcasting, and crushes anything resembling free thought. Not so, you are thinking inside the box again.
As I wrote one of the first people to send me such a link, there is a way around it, a creative, bent way, but a way. Think about this for a minute. When you sign up for the service, you are a listner, one who can only tune in to channels that professional DJs create, no preannouncement, you get what you get.
Now, when you want, you can click on a handy button, provide a few details, and the service will hire you as a
The whole point of the article was to make people think, and sadly very very few of them, judging from the letters I am getting are. There is a loophole that you can drive a truck through, and no one sees it. If they see it, they won't bend anymore rules, or at the very least literally interpret rules.
I am sad to say, I expected better of the slashdot crowd. There are a few of you out there who can see the big picture, I know, there is at least one story a day here about people who do. What I am hoping for is that someone picks up my idea and runs with it.
All you need to do is set up a company to take the rules that they set up literally. It doesn't matter if every person on the service is a DJ, and you only ever listen to your own station. Things like preannouncement can be gotten around by looking at your playlist editor. Duh.
This kind of thought is necessary to screw people with the laws very they are looking to break you with. Don't see a rule, set up a roadblock for youself, run into it, and go home, use your brain.
-Charlie (Yeah, I wrote the article)