Next, Molson will be going after people using a red maple leaf on their flags - clearly an infringement upon their brand...
I mean, as a Canadian, aren't you just a bit offended that a word so closely tied to your identity has been usurped by a corporation for its own gains?
One of their slogans seems to be I am Canadian. (Forgive me for being unfamiliar with their marketing - we don't drink much Molson here...) Can you legally even say that aloud anymore without infringing upon their trademarks?
Not being Canadian, I won't try to tell you how you should feel, but I'm just a bit curious. (Maybe it's such a good beer that Canadians don't mind - I honestly don't know...)
I wound up quitting my local LUG, along with a half dozen, others over this very issue - People were getting slammed on the mailing list for asking "Isn't there a better way?" in regards to systems administration.
80 years ago, you had to be a mechanic to own and use a car - it was a simple necessity, but of course, now, you don't have to be.
Unix is just leaving that state now - BSD, in fact just got air conditioning, power windows, cup holders and automatic transmission in the form of OSX, while us Linux people are left in our garages on Saturday, tinkering with our jalopies...
Back when the whole LUG thing happened, I posted a couple of articles on my website outlining my feelings - I'd summarize it more, but the whole issue leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Yet still, I used Linux long before I joined the LUG and their elitism outlined only some faults of some prominent and vocal members of the community, not the kernel itself.
I still use linux as my primary OS at home, at work, on my servers, on my laptops and all of the other random boxes cluttering up my apartment. (Though I do have one iMac loaded with OS X...)
A couple of weeks ago a friend and I picked up a scan converter in Akihabara for 9000 yen. (about $75) (It plugs into any vga monitor port and converts to a video signal.) Now of course this is not a good solution for someone looking to do actual work on a TV, but for people considering getting a video card with TV out for watching movies and playing games, (which is why I am reading this article,) it has some definite advantages:
Works with the video card you now own.
You can swap it easily to your laptop.
Linux *will* work with no configuration issues.
Works with DOS or non-X modes.
Fine for presentations such as powerpoint. (the original purpose of these devices, IIRC.)
No drivers to ever install.
Pal or NTSC
Does not support Macrovision - make VCR copies of DVDs that you own. (Keep the kids from scratching up DVDs that they watch.)
Will not be obsolete when your video card is.
For movies and games, it worked. remarkably well - better, in fact than the TV -out on my Guillemot card which only works in Windows. (Plus, my card supports Macrovision, which means that I cannot 'back up' my DVDs to tape.) This would be perfect for someone wanting to convert an old box into a low-cost networked video player and MP3 player - Winamp in 'double-size' mode would be perfectly usable on any decent TV. Someone had suggested one of these to me a while back and I thought it a stupid idea - I assumed that integrated video-out on an expensive card *must* be better. I was wrong. Hope this is useful to someone...
Not unless they have a mobile link to a freeCDDB-type database for the titles - Who wants 2000 songs all unlabled?
Plus, once you rip them in the car, I doubt it would ever be possible to move them indoors.
Now what would be really cool is an in-car MP3 web server with wireless 802.xx networking in a kind of open mode. Stuck in traffic? Download the songs in the car next to yours!
"Officer, honest! I wasn't drag racing him - I was just trying to finish my Procul Harum download, but the light changed!"
If I send you a 'deep link' to a NYT article and you are not registered, you get the login page - if you log in, you get the article. All you have to do is check the cookie. (You could also have 'required content' set cookies that must be matched as well.)
If you know the Fark photoshop contests, people photoshop an image and then try to host it somewhere that has good bandwidth, like the sites that host eBay auction pictures - many of these sites have wised up and no longer allow the picture to be called from a fark.com web page. You can do the same thing with a text document or a script as well.
If you put a document on the web and make it accessible through the use of a(n) URL, anyone can use that URL to access it.
Of course you can use referrer technology to block how people get to your document, but these people seem to lack the ability to do things like that.
What if I bookmark a 'deep link'? What about Google?
Personally, I think that the term "deep link" is a misleading term - each document is equally accessible from outside, well except for a few bytes in the length of the URL.
Desiring an iPod, I went out and bought OsX for my virtually-unused iMac. I had a version of Os 9.something that was a bit too old. I haven't regretted either purchase in the least - they are both top-quality products.
The Happy Hacking Keyboard is about the best new keyboard I've found. Good feel, no extra keys, remarkably small, but keys as big as an old IBM. From their site: - NO CAPS LOCK KEY - NO WINDOWS KEY - CTRL Key is in Right Position - Full Size Key Pitch
They don't have any of those cutesy 'Shop on the Web' buttons that link you to long-dead dotcoms or even seperate number pad or arrow keys - this is a keyboard perfect for serious text editing. (Dare I say it? A real man's keyboard!)
If you've ever used one, you probably know what I'm talking about...
Actually, it is not unusual to see a honeydew melon priced at $500 in gift shops in Ginza - The other day, I saw one of those cube-shaped watermelons in Shibuya for about a hundred bucks. $15 apples are not uncommon, too. Of course, nobody buys them to take home and eat - they are gifts for very special occasions. One reason for the idea of fruit as a valued gift is that they have a very limited lifespan - they are consumables. If you give somebody a vase or a picture frame, then visit them 6 months later, you will expect to see it somewhere around their house. Not so with an apple or a melon. People don't have the space for useless crap here the way they do in America. (Though people often reserve some space in their house for useless old crap from grandparents...) If you think about it, it's not so different than other countries - I've seen $1500 bottles of wine, which are basically just bottles of old grape juice.
Do like Ramanujan and pick up an old copy of Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics by G. S. Carr - it will be almost impossible to find but could be worth it.;-)
Poor and almost uneducated, Ramanujan used that one book to teach himself and became on of the world's greatest mathematical minds. An outsider, he began corresponding with mathematicians at Oxford. They eventually brought him to England where the food killed him, I think.
The link is to a pretty good background on him - I think it's pretty inspiring to anyone about to undertake what you are - Here's a bit from the site:
In 1911 Ramanujan approached the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society for advice on a job. After this he was appointed to his first job, a temporary post in the Accountant General's Office in Madras. It was then suggested that he approach Ramachandra Rao who was a Collector at Nellore. Ramachandra Rao was a founder member of the Indian Mathematical Society who had helped start the mathematics library. He writes in [30]:- A short uncouth figure, stout, unshaven, not over clean, with one conspicuous feature-shining eyes- walked in with a frayed notebook under his arm. He was miserably poor.... He opened his book and began to explain some of his discoveries. I saw quite at once that there was something out of the way; but my knowledge did not permit me to judge whether he talked sense or nonsense.... I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted a pittance to live on so that he might pursue his researches.
Yes, this is the same guy who gets a mention in 'Good Will Hunting' - Back in high school in the early '80s, my math teacher had his picture above the blackboard and began each year by telling us about him - His personal hero.
Gallery works seamlessly as a PostNuke module as well - Themes and user authentication carry over from the parent PostNuke site right into the gallery. It works well in standalone mode, but I recommend taking an extra 10 minutes and setting up Postnuke first.
Cheers, Jim in Tokyo Feel free to poke around my own PostNuke/Gallery site (Gallery link on the left):
What you'll also want to make sure of is the paper - it should be a PH-neutral archival-quality paper. On top of that, not all dye sub printing is archival - check into what museums use.
Museums are in the business of making things last - they will be your best resource for this type of work. As for digitally-stored files, don't trust any one medium. If you insist on putting irreplacable images on a twenty-cent CDRom, do yourself a favor and burn a couple - then also copy them to a hard disk. Personally, I'd love to see a good system for printing the images out as machine-readable codes onto archival-quality paper in something like IBM's glyph format - I've seen 500 year old paper that was showed absolutely no signs of degradation - any longer than that and I think I've fulfilled my responsibility to posterity. (Not that my photos are any good.)
One word of warning, a lesson learned the hard way: Do not use Zip disks for stuff you care about - I recently lost all of the pictures I took from a helecopter of the World Trade Center two years ago to a Zip disk that died the "click of death".
As for old family albums, I have been working on scanning my girlfriend's family albums and it's amazing how much detail we've been able to get out of these pictures that were often the size of a couple of postage stamps. We've been making a slide show and putting it on video tape for family members to watch on their TVs as well - great for older members of the family. An online gallery that allows comments (I have one at http://mmdc.net) is a good tool for gathering "Who's that guy on the left?" type of information.
The next stage is to remove the originals from the dangerous albums that they are in (the so-called "Magic" type albums with the sticky sheet and the plastic over them - they are probably the most damaging.) and place them in albums that won't accellerate their demise.
Search on Google for dealers in archival supplies, like Light Impressions. You'll find a lot of information and resources online.
Also, when dealing with really old black and white photos such as albumen prints and sometimes incorrectly-developed silver prints, if the image has faded away, it can often be brought back through chemical means - talk to a restorer, or at least, don't throw them away.
I've got it running from a Linux box right now - IIRC, I had to add a bunch of perl modules, but that wasn't a big deal. I never bothered with the Java applet, as the CGI front end works well, maybe that was the hangup. Other than that, it seemed to be just a collection of the standard command-line mp3 utilities. I also tried Darwin Streaming Server, but that didn't do the bitrate stuff either.
Check out Webplay. You can set up variable-bitrate streams from your home to your office - then you have no incriminating files left on your office's disks. For instance, you can listen at 48k during the week during high net usage times or at native bitrates at night or on the weekends. Even with my iPod, it seems that the song I want to hear is always at home on my server - this solves it nicely.
Moments ago, I posted a story on my website to the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit on LOC.gov. I clicked submit and then jumped to Slashdot to check the headlines - Imagine my surprise when I see this link. I feel like monkey #100 right now...
I've been thinking lately that the way to get around this is to not actually stream the music - just publish a playlist. Ever listen to a radio station and hear (and enjoy) some forgotten track from a CD that you already own? It could work like that - a recipe, rather than a meal.
The players can already do this - Xmms/winamp can have playlists that have varied sources - the 'Broadcaster' just gives the directions and lets an intelligent client decide the source for the songs.
If the song is already in your collection, play from there, otherwise choose a source that fits your bandwidth/ethical restrictions. (Gnutella, kazaa, your friend's server, whatever.)
Freely-available songs could be streamed/cached, as well as talk or dare I say it, commercials. If a song can't be found, perhaps a list of alternatives could be provided.
If I have a VPN connection to a close friend's music collection, I could use those and nobody could stop me and I know that some of my friend's private collections are a lot better than what shows up on the p2p services.
My own site is a PostNuke site that automatically publishes an RDF for the news on the site - many 'blogs also do this - It would be absolutely trivial to also publish a "recipe" of my ideal music playlist with localized start times as a linkable RDF.
Just a thought - Cheers, Jim in Tokyo
(If it's possible to GPL an idea in a slashdot post, I just did...)
Are a lot of sites doing this now? I just started seeing announcements of Fark parties - I think it's a neat idea, especially for people in other countries. (Just as long as that goatse guy doesn't show up...)
You probably can't do *your* work from home, but if you are my neighbor using these lights, you may be denying me the ability to telecommute.
I still think that if you introduce a technology that uses a shared public resource such as public bandwidth, you have a responsibility to not trash the resource for others. (Kind of like not organizing a football game in an area of a park where people happen to be having picnics.) Sure, it may be legal, but it's rude.
I'd guess also, that if your neighbors *do* get 'wired' in the next few years, the best way would be using this technology. Wireless NICs will be incredibly cheap in the next few years, while retrofitting apartment buildings with LAN cable will never be.
Do you think these bulbs would be allowed if they interfered at all with television signals, no matter how well they conserve energy? Doubtful.
(I cycle to work myself, but only use flourescents in the summer, when I start to notice that the halogens are making it warmer in my place. Awful things, those...)
About the server, yes, I am one of those 'uptime' boasters - (294 days - Woohoo.) but I specifically chose a machine with pretty low power consumption, plus, where I live, the power comes from nuclear, not oil or coal.
Still, if my neighbor's porch light starts to interfere with my por^H^H^H downloading, I'm going to buy an air rifle...
Slashdot Mirror
Next, Molson will be going after people using a red maple leaf on their flags - clearly an infringement upon their brand...
I mean, as a Canadian, aren't you just a bit offended that a word so closely tied to your identity has been usurped by a corporation for its own gains?
One of their slogans seems to be I am Canadian. (Forgive me for being unfamiliar with their marketing - we don't drink much Molson here...)
Can you legally even say that aloud anymore without infringing upon their trademarks?
Not being Canadian, I won't try to tell you how you should feel, but I'm just a bit curious.
(Maybe it's such a good beer that Canadians don't mind - I honestly don't know...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I wound up quitting my local LUG, along with a half dozen, others over this very issue - People were getting slammed on the mailing list for asking "Isn't there a better way?" in regards to systems administration.
80 years ago, you had to be a mechanic to own and use a car - it was a simple necessity, but of course, now, you don't have to be.
Unix is just leaving that state now - BSD, in fact just got air conditioning, power windows, cup holders and automatic transmission in the form of OSX, while us Linux people are left in our garages on Saturday, tinkering with our jalopies...
Back when the whole LUG thing happened, I posted a couple of articles on my website outlining my feelings - I'd summarize it more, but the whole issue leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Yet still, I used Linux long before I joined the LUG and their elitism outlined only some faults of some prominent and vocal members of the community, not the kernel itself.
I still use linux as my primary OS at home, at work, on my servers, on my laptops and all of the other random boxes cluttering up my apartment. (Though I do have one iMac loaded with OS X...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
(It plugs into any vga monitor port and converts to a video signal.)
Now of course this is not a good solution for someone looking to do actual work on a TV, but for people considering getting a video card with TV out for watching movies and playing games, (which is why I am reading this article,) it has some definite advantages:
- Works with the video card you now own.
- You can swap it easily to your laptop.
- Linux *will* work with no configuration issues.
- Works with DOS or non-X modes.
- Fine for presentations such as powerpoint. (the original purpose of these devices, IIRC.)
- No drivers to ever install.
- Pal or NTSC
- Does not support Macrovision - make VCR copies of DVDs that you own. (Keep the kids from scratching up DVDs that they watch.)
- Will not be obsolete when your video card is.
For movies and games, it worked.remarkably well - better, in fact than the TV -out on my Guillemot card which only works in Windows. (Plus, my card supports Macrovision, which means that I cannot 'back up' my DVDs to tape.)
This would be perfect for someone wanting to convert an old box into a low-cost networked video player and MP3 player - Winamp in 'double-size' mode would be perfectly usable on any decent TV.
Someone had suggested one of these to me a while back and I thought it a stupid idea - I assumed that integrated video-out on an expensive card *must* be better.
I was wrong.
Hope this is useful to someone...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I saw someone selling a little FM transmitter for iPods so you can just play it over your radio.
I can't find the link - anyone? anyone? Beuller?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Doubles as a cup holder?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Not unless they have a mobile link to a freeCDDB-type database for the titles -
Who wants 2000 songs all unlabled?
Plus, once you rip them in the car, I doubt it would ever be possible to move them indoors.
Now what would be really cool is an in-car MP3 web server with wireless 802.xx networking in a kind of open mode. Stuck in traffic? Download the songs in the car next to yours!
"Officer, honest! I wasn't drag racing him - I was just trying to finish my Procul Harum download, but the light changed!"
No *that* would be cool...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
If I send you a 'deep link' to a NYT article and you are not registered, you get the login page - if you log in, you get the article.
.
All you have to do is check the cookie. (You could also have 'required content' set cookies that must be matched as well.)
If you know the Fark photoshop contests, people photoshop an image and then try to host it somewhere that has good bandwidth, like the sites that host eBay auction pictures - many of these sites have wised up and no longer allow the picture to be called from a fark.com web page.
You can do the same thing with a text document or a script as well
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
If you put a document on the web and make it accessible through the use of a(n) URL, anyone can use that URL to access it.
Of course you can use referrer technology to block how people get to your document, but these people seem to lack the ability to do things like that.
What if I bookmark a 'deep link'? What about Google?
Personally, I think that the term "deep link" is a misleading term - each document is equally accessible from outside, well except for a few bytes in the length of the URL.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Desiring an iPod, I went out and bought OsX for my virtually-unused iMac. I had a version of Os 9.something that was a bit too old.
I haven't regretted either purchase in the least - they are both top-quality products.
Now I'm looking seriously at their servers...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Windows users say the darnest things...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
(Curerently 317 days uptime so far with Linux)
Small enter, big pipes
I think there's a lubricant you can get that will help with that...
(sorry.)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
The Happy Hacking Keyboard is about the best new keyboard I've found. Good feel, no extra keys, remarkably small, but keys as big as an old IBM.
From their site:
- NO CAPS LOCK KEY
- NO WINDOWS KEY
- CTRL Key is in Right Position
- Full Size Key Pitch
They don't have any of those cutesy 'Shop on the Web' buttons that link you to long-dead dotcoms or even seperate number pad or arrow keys - this is a keyboard perfect for serious text editing. (Dare I say it? A real man's keyboard!)
If you've ever used one, you probably know what I'm talking about...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Gah! I forgot about that - very true.
Actually, it is not unusual to see a honeydew melon priced at $500 in gift shops in Ginza -
The other day, I saw one of those cube-shaped watermelons in Shibuya for about a hundred bucks.
$15 apples are not uncommon, too.
Of course, nobody buys them to take home and eat - they are gifts for very special occasions.
One reason for the idea of fruit as a valued gift is that they have a very limited lifespan - they are consumables. If you give somebody a vase or a picture frame, then visit them 6 months later, you will expect to see it somewhere around their house. Not so with an apple or a melon. People don't have the space for useless crap here the way they do in America. (Though people often reserve some space in their house for useless old crap from grandparents...)
If you think about it, it's not so different than other countries - I've seen $1500 bottles of wine, which are basically just bottles of old grape juice.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Poor and almost uneducated, Ramanujan used that one book to teach himself and became on of the world's greatest mathematical minds. An outsider, he began corresponding with mathematicians at Oxford. They eventually brought him to England where the food killed him, I think.
The link is to a pretty good background on him - I think it's pretty inspiring to anyone about to undertake what you are - Here's a bit from the site:
Yes, this is the same guy who gets a mention in 'Good Will Hunting' - Back in high school in the early '80s, my math teacher had his picture above the blackboard and began each year by telling us about him - His personal hero.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Gallery works seamlessly as a PostNuke module as well - Themes and user authentication carry over from the parent PostNuke site right into the gallery.
It works well in standalone mode, but I recommend taking an extra 10 minutes and setting up Postnuke first.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Feel free to poke around my own PostNuke/Gallery site (Gallery link on the left):
What you'll also want to make sure of is the paper - it should be a PH-neutral archival-quality paper.
On top of that, not all dye sub printing is archival - check into what museums use.
Museums are in the business of making things last - they will be your best resource for this type of work.
As for digitally-stored files, don't trust any one medium. If you insist on putting irreplacable images on a twenty-cent CDRom, do yourself a favor and burn a couple - then also copy them to a hard disk. Personally, I'd love to see a good system for printing the images out as machine-readable codes onto archival-quality paper in something like IBM's glyph format - I've seen 500 year old paper that was showed absolutely no signs of degradation - any longer than that and I think I've fulfilled my responsibility to posterity. (Not that my photos are any good.)
One word of warning, a lesson learned the hard way: Do not use Zip disks for stuff you care about - I recently lost all of the pictures I took from a helecopter of the World Trade Center two years ago to a Zip disk that died the "click of death".
As for old family albums, I have been working on scanning my girlfriend's family albums and it's amazing how much detail we've been able to get out of these pictures that were often the size of a couple of postage stamps. We've been making a slide show and putting it on video tape for family members to watch on their TVs as well - great for older members of the family. An online gallery that allows comments (I have one at http://mmdc.net) is a good tool for gathering "Who's that guy on the left?" type of information.
The next stage is to remove the originals from the dangerous albums that they are in (the so-called "Magic" type albums with the sticky sheet and the plastic over them - they are probably the most damaging.) and place them in albums that won't accellerate their demise.
Search on Google for dealers in archival supplies, like Light Impressions. You'll find a lot of information and resources online.
Also, when dealing with really old black and white photos such as albumen prints and sometimes incorrectly-developed silver prints, if the image has faded away, it can often be brought back through chemical means - talk to a restorer, or at least, don't throw them away.
Hope this helps -
Jim in Tokyo
I've got it running from a Linux box right now - IIRC, I had to add a bunch of perl modules, but that wasn't a big deal. I never bothered with the Java applet, as the CGI front end works well, maybe that was the hangup.
Other than that, it seemed to be just a collection of the standard command-line mp3 utilities.
I also tried Darwin Streaming Server, but that didn't do the bitrate stuff either.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Check out Webplay.
You can set up variable-bitrate streams from your home to your office - then you have no incriminating files left on your office's disks.
For instance, you can listen at 48k during the week during high net usage times or at native bitrates at night or on the weekends.
Even with my iPod, it seems that the song I want to hear is always at home on my server - this solves it nicely.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Moments ago, I posted a story on my website to the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit on LOC.gov. I clicked submit and then jumped to Slashdot to check the headlines - Imagine my surprise when I see this link.
I feel like monkey #100 right now...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
(Time to burn a point or 10...)
Never having seen Google Sets before, I typed in:
Cmdr Taco
Hemos
It expanded it to:
Predicted Items
Hemos
Cmdr Taco
The Andover brunette
The blonde masseuse
CmdrTaco
Mel Gibson
Martha Stewart
The me redhead
Purple Bikini Girl
I'd love to know how it came up with those results...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I've been thinking lately that the way to get around this is to not actually stream the music - just publish a playlist. Ever listen to a radio station and hear (and enjoy) some forgotten track from a CD that you already own? It could work like that - a recipe, rather than a meal.
The players can already do this - Xmms/winamp can have playlists that have varied sources - the 'Broadcaster' just gives the directions and lets an intelligent client decide the source for the songs.
If the song is already in your collection, play from there, otherwise choose a source that fits your bandwidth/ethical restrictions. (Gnutella, kazaa, your friend's server, whatever.)
Freely-available songs could be streamed/cached, as well as talk or dare I say it, commercials. If a song can't be found, perhaps a list of alternatives could be provided.
If I have a VPN connection to a close friend's music collection, I could use those and nobody could stop me and I know that some of my friend's private collections are a lot better than what shows up on the p2p services.
My own site is a PostNuke site that automatically publishes an RDF for the news on the site - many 'blogs also do this - It would be absolutely trivial to also publish a "recipe" of my ideal music playlist with localized start times as a linkable RDF.
Just a thought -
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
(If it's possible to GPL an idea in a slashdot post, I just did...)
Are a lot of sites doing this now?
I just started seeing announcements of Fark parties - I think it's a neat idea, especially for people in other countries.
(Just as long as that goatse guy doesn't show up...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
You probably can't do *your* work from home, but if you are my neighbor using these lights, you may be denying me the ability to telecommute.
I still think that if you introduce a technology that uses a shared public resource such as public bandwidth, you have a responsibility to not trash the resource for others. (Kind of like not organizing a football game in an area of a park where people happen to be having picnics.) Sure, it may be legal, but it's rude.
I'd guess also, that if your neighbors *do* get 'wired' in the next few years, the best way would be using this technology. Wireless NICs will be incredibly cheap in the next few years, while retrofitting apartment buildings with LAN cable will never be.
Do you think these bulbs would be allowed if they interfered at all with television signals, no matter how well they conserve energy? Doubtful.
(I cycle to work myself, but only use flourescents in the summer, when I start to notice that the halogens are making it warmer in my place. Awful things, those...)
About the server, yes, I am one of those 'uptime' boasters - (294 days - Woohoo.) but I specifically chose a machine with pretty low power consumption, plus, where I live, the power comes from nuclear, not oil or coal.
Still, if my neighbor's porch light starts to interfere with my por^H^H^H downloading, I'm going to buy an air rifle...