Imagine it - you could go to the drive-thru window and your order would be right every time!
Now, looking at this, how far away are we going to be from a 100% robotic restraunt? Near where I live we have a gas station that has no employees - just pumps. You can use either credit cards or cash at it and the gas is usually $0.10 cheaper than if you go into a station with human employees.
So what is keeping, say, McDonald's from doing this same thing?
There are some differences between Bradbury's book and François Truffaut's 1966 film, namely that Clarisse makes it to the end of the film, but some of the performances are just down right scary.
Bee Duffell (the lady who played the Old Crone in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) is the lady who gets burned with her books. Cyril Cusack plays the fire captain and is most ruthless in his treatment of the young firemen who let their hair grow too long.
Oskar Werner is Montag and does a very very good job at playing the part.
Some of the scenes in the film just send chills down my spine, like when the van drives down the street announcing "Calling all Citizens. Wanted for murder, the criminal is alone and on foot. Let each one stand at his front door, look and listen." Damn powerful stuff.
Seeing the fire truck is almost comical - it is very surrealistic for some reason. I don't quite know why. Perhaps because that truck is just so damn red, or that the fire truck is not on it's way to put out a fire.
Just do yourself a favor and read the book and see the movie. You will love both of them.
I read this stuff. I read it again and again and again.
I am willing to bet these guys are audiophiles. No, not guys who like their music to sound good, but guys who spend $600 on a power cord and talk about "richer bass and higher highs because we have a $600 6 foot power cord running from the wall outlet to our amp - never mind the crappy wiring in the house, out on the poles, etc."
Yes, there may be some improvement in the execution of the processor... probably in the order of one or two instructions per second. In other words they can't claim it to be so.
It is like the folks who make the Splitfire spark plug and Slick 50 oil treatment. They claim "get a 15% increse in gas mileage!" Well, the thing they forget to mention is that your gas mileage varies by 15% all the time. It is based on weather, stop and go driving, etc. etc. etc.
So, these guys are spewing forth nothing but snake oil. Take my advise and ignore them, and instead of spending 1/2 hour grinding your Athlon, spend it doing something productive like watching TV or cleaning out your sock drawer.
Things like the fireworks factory are a very rare occurance. So rare in fact that I am willing to bet my salary for the next two years that you and 200 of your closest friends will not get blown up by an exploding fireworks warehouse.
Rare occurances, such as you describe, might seem like a good time to have such a database. But is having such a database the rest of the time a good idea? It might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but not me.
Earlier today I was sitting here thinking about some stuff and it dawned on me that I had never ever seen a "Windows to Linux" guide for newbies.
The two arguments I hear all the time are 1) There are no applications in Linux and 2) Linux is too hard.
Well, I can say with 100% conviction that neither of those are true. But, we all know that!
But nobody that I know of has ever written a document that says "This is a comparison of Windows to Linux." Something I had in mind:
W: to launch a program you double click it L: to launch a program you double click it
W: To get a listing of a directory, type dir L: To get a listing of a directory, type dir
W: To log out of the system, select Start|Logoff L: To log out of the system, type "logoff"
If you can show people that Linux IS as easy as Windows on the user level, a lot of the rest of the stuff will come easy. Another thing that REALLY needs to be done is to get away from some of these "must have a doctorate in comp sci" HOWTOs out there. Admit it, some of them are really horrid. Yeah, there is stuff that needs to be said, but does it need to be said in end user documentation? You and I might enjoy reading about how a serial port works or how a sound card turns electrical impulses into beautiful music, but for the average Joe, he just wants his damn modem to work or his mp3s to play.
Whitehouse.gov page about Bill, Hilary, Al and Tipper because it was named "couples.html"
Tons of pages about STDs
Tons of pages about gay rights
Tripod's "Ask the Doctor" pages about health and sexuality
Facts about sexual assault
Surfwatch also claimed *they* were the reason the CDA was overturned.
Google is a great place to look for Linux info. But let's now contemplate what kinds of stuff are going to be blocked based on Surfwatch's "everything about sex" stance.
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/editors/se x.html - the Simple editor for Debian package description.
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/base/libc6 .html - it is linked to from the above page
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/x11/xlib6g .html - it too is linked to from the above page
And those examples are from link number 4 when I did a search for "linux sex". There are 39,093 other possible pages.
If Google is trying to keep the search engine spammers out, then give me a reporting address or a reporting web page where I can plop a url in so they can do what *should* be done in the first place - block the search engine spammers from ever being there again.
And no, what I am saying has nothing to do with me wanting to censor. It has everything to do with wanting good results back that don't waste my time.
Unfortunately, I don't think Google is going to win if they implement this totally idiotic idea. I for one will never use them again if they do.
I am so damn mad at reading this that I could spit nails right now. I went outside and had a smoke so I could calm down and try to write something well reasoned and insightful. I hope I do.
I don't know if Andover wants to do battle and try to show that the DMCA is the fraud that it is - something that was written by a few companies to benefit themselves, but we all knew that - but I hope that they will. I have my checkbook out right now and am willing to make a donation to get this stupid ass law tossed.
I am therefore pleading with the powers that be at Slashdot and Andover to just tell Microsoft to go to hell. We the geek community need to stand up to bullying tactics. It does not matter if it is Microsoft, the RIAA, or Joe's Software Company. It is time to give the DMCA the finger. If we don't, we are giving in.
Last night, on All Things Considered they had a really wonderful story about the thing. Check it out (ya need Real Audio).
Basicly, the record companies pay for the ads that the stores run, but they will only pay for the ad if the store does not advertise a price below what the record company wants it to be sold at. Well, call it price fixing or whatever, but payola is payola.
The story also goes into MP3s and how people are really fed up with paying $17 for a crap CD with one good song on it.
Why shouldn't it be posted? The article itself states that there was a huge mixup and conflicting things being said by the original author (and there was, imho) but that things seem to have been straightened out. Not everyone reads other websites unless it is mentioned here, and you can bet your ass that things are going to get posted somewhere stating that this *is* a huge conspiracy.
This is a good story. It sets the record straight. It is no different than Sky and Telescope doing a report on "the really big moon" or "The Earth is in peril on 5/5/2000". They covered both in depth to put the real story out for the masses.
DirecTV is not going to give out how to decode stuff. The only way to do it is to record from the video out using a TV tuner card or some such.
S-Link stuff is sent serially, but trying to figure out what the signals are is going to be tough and probably not worth your time considering what the nirvis product does and the price.
Wonderful point - and I hope folks that are in the less than 1% crowd don't quit either! Even finding and fixing one line of code is a blessing.
Heck, as I sit here now I have found three lines of code I need to put in this program I am writing where I did not clean up my linked list. Argh! No wonder the original app has had a tendency to crash over the past 3 years.
Can't people come up with a better name than DivX? To me the name brings back awful memories of times past when a certain retailer tried to foist some pay per view scheme on the public. My skin crawls whenever I see that word, and I have to look closely to be sure of what the hell I am looking at is not what I think it is.
Having something up in space will mean it is not going be hearing all the crap from ground based transmitters - or a lot less of it anyway. Of course, being in the part of OZ they are in, I really don't think there is going to be much of a problem with that. It is pretty desolate there.
An example of this is the boundary around the telescope at Green Bank. I know Part 97 of the FCC rules states that you have to have permission to set up amateur radio beacons if you are near it (check the ARRL Website and do a search on 'Green Bank'). I am not sure about some of the other radio services. The reason is because of the interference generated by transmitters.
Radio receivers can cause lots of noise also if they are not properly designed, btw.
Okay, I can understand all the stuff about owning trademarks, but sheesh... gimme a break! I must have missed the original story, or else I plum forgot about it. As sad as it is for the folks getting the letters, it is funny.
I got such a letter a few years back when I was having a fight with Jones Intercable. They did not fix my cable to my satisfaction, then they never showed up when they were supposed to, so I set up the Jones Intercable Sucks website. I took their logo and modified it. It was pretty funny looking actually - if you never saw their logo it was kind of a movie marqee looking thing with a satellite dish.
Well, I made the satellite dish look like something you would find at the worst of junk yards, and I really messed the movie sign looking part up. It was quite a piece of work actually. I was proud.
Well, the site was up for like two weeks when I got this email from them demanding I take the image off there. I guess they did not appreciate my joke - but it was their own fault as far as I was concerned. They started it when they were giving crappy service. The image was truely a work of parody - nothing more, which I explained to them. They did not seem to understand.
Well, to show them some good will I did take the logo down, but I kept it just in case. They had the cable fixed a few days later. I dropped the cable completely six months later and went to Dish Network.
I am still proud of my "trademark infringement" because it sure as hell got their attention - especially when it showed up as one of the first ten documents when you did a search for Jones Intercable on almost all of the search engines. I think it was usually right below "Investor Relations" or something.
I got mine in July 1998. I love the thing. I just use to for normal run of the mill recording. Don't have anything on the tapes I would consider to be keepers, so I don't keep anything. That is what DVD is for.
I hate the look of a VHS tape. I think we all do. And since the entire reason I got a sat dish was to have a better picture than I had on cable, I decided on this unit.
There are some problems with it - the thing wont work with HDTV broadcasts. The bitstream that it can record is wide enough (19 Mb), but Dish says it won't work. It also likes to drop the signal on the hour/half hour marks sometimes. It also will not digitally record the audio only channels off of the dish.
It is cool though to put in a tape and see exactly what came down from the satellite at a later date - including the time/date stamp and the program information.
It does require JVC DVHS tapes to do the digital stuff (you can use a regular tape also, but you can't record digital). I have tried to use SVHS tapes in the machine in place of the DVHS, but have either not figured it out or it plain won't work. The DVHS tapes are priced about what a good SVHS tape costs, so there is really no price difference. Plus, since I am using this only to time shift shows and not for permanent storage, it really does not matter to me.
Also, up at my local Best Buy, I could swear they are running a Toshiba DVHS deck into the HDTV display. That thing has been there for at least a year.
As some of you so rightly pointed out, it would be tough and expensive to do. However, it *is* still possible to do - and if a publisher did this one time a year for say, Time Magazine, or once every few years for something like Wired, the economics would be a lot easier to deal with.
After reading everyone's comments to my post, I do agree with the fellow who suggested that it would most likely just be easier to make the user enter their identifying stuff themselves.
The problem as I really see it is that this contributes to a loss of privacy a lot better and faster than even Doubleclick.net could hope for. What a field day this is going to become for Madison Avenue.
All this stuff requires software to decode the barcodes. Has anyone considered what could be done with this?
Each hyperlink could very easily be traced back to a person. For example, the article mentions that Wired is thinking of using this system. Well, Wired wants (or wanted, I don't know for sure now because I dropped my subscription a long time ago) more money for a subscription for a business than from an individual because more people would be reading it.
So, along with the URL you imbed in this barcode, you also imbed a unique ID. Who's gonna know, right? Well, the software is gonna be closed source, I am sure, so who would know. Anyway, the software sees this and says "UID 4738925867 wants to go to slashdot.org from piece of software 583735". Well, I give my copy of Wired to my dad to read, he wants to go to the same url.
"UID 4738925867 wants to go to slashdot.org from piece of software 483902". A few days later I go to my mailbox and there is a bill in there from Wired magazine wanting me to now pay the business rate for a subscription.
Maybe I am just being a bit paranoid here, but after seeing the doubleclick thing, the stupid looking webpage cursor that tracks you thing, the TiVo thing, etc., I see no other reason for these "Great Convienences" that are being promised to us other than for marketers and ad execs to get their mits on yet more information about us.
This sounds like the stupidest thing I can think of.
Okay, so I have to have my webcam (windows only I am sure) hooked up then I have to hold the page up to the camera and hope that I have it focused properly and in the camera's view. Egads!
I remember back in the early 80s this one outfit had this barcode reader and "magazine" for the Atari 800 series of computers. You got your magazine, then swiped the barcode reader across everything, then you got to use the wonderful (ha!) software they wrote. But there was no way to save the software you just spent 20 minutes barcoding, so if you ever wanted to use the program again, you had to go through the same process. The thing sold for like $150 back then. I think the whole thing folded after a few months.
I only speak English. I tried to learn Spanish in High School, but was just not good at it. The only thing I can say in spanish is Mi casa es su gatto!
But, seriously, I think English will continue to be the dominant language for me. It is not that I am being a language-phobe. I would love to be able to read some other sites by not having to use the fish. I think the web will have English as its dominant language too.
English is the one language where new words are thrown in on a daily basis. New words are invented to describe an invention and we don't really think twice about it. It is the dominant language in science for that reason. It is very accepting.
Esperanto has already been tried - for years. When it was invented it was said that most ham radio operators would be using it by now because anyone anywhere could talk to one another. Well, that never happened. In fact, English is the usual language.
Programs used under GUIs must contain at least 10 icons shaped like characters from Jerry Lewis movies. Also, all software must insult the user as often as possible without them knowing it.
I send spam reports in about legit businesses just like I do with boiler room operations. I use Spamcop to filter my mail, and do the reporting. It makes it super easy to do.
Sometimes it is good to follow up your spam report to the CEO of the company, like I did with Insight - yep the mail order company. Their marketing drone decided that there were not enough people on the mailing list, so he resubscribed EVERYONE they had an email address for (even if you chose not to receive their junk mail when you purchased something from them). So, I wrote a letter to the CEO. The next morning he sent back a message and he was none too happy about it. Not sure what happened to the marketing guy, but from the tone of the CEO's message I would not be too surprised if the guy is now looking for another job.
Yes, there is a MD camera. There are a bunch of links, so I suggest checking out this page at minidisc.org.
Zip disks are a bit on the "too big" side, but there is the Iomega clik! - there is a thing to hook it up to digital cams, but I have have no idea what it does.
I do recall seeing a device that was a hard drive that would work with most cameras. The drive would hold 99 rolls of "film". You hooked up the camera, started the device up, and it would pull the pictures off. It did not work with all cameras, but it would work with most of them.
As for the Superdisk, have you ever used one? It is the slowest damn thing I have ever seen in my life.
First, I love my camera. It is an Olympus D600-L. I got the 16 meg SmartMedia upgrade last year, and this past year they came out with a 32 meg upgrade for it. One of these days I will actually send the camera in.
One thing I learned from owning a digi-cam is this: don't go off and buy a camera because of it's price. Buy it because of the features it has. And when you decide on a camera, look at it closely. Much like any other piece of hardware you buy, there is something better around the corner.
I don't mind the resolution. It does 640x480 very well, and does even better at 1280x960. The shots are beautiful, and do not give that CCD White like you normally see (that is, it does not look like a video image you get when you shoot something white in a high brightness setting.) I also like the fact that the camera is a real honest to goodness SLR. Viewfinders suck.
But, the things I hate are not being able to control the exposure, the shutter speed, and not being able to remove the lens. At first I did not think that would be a really big deal. Now I do. I am nowhere near a pro photographer, but I do have applications for the camera that would make it even more useful to me if it had those things.
Granted, if I spent $12K I could get one of those nifty Kodak cameras, or a Mamayia with a digital back on it, but well, $12K is a bit too steep. It would still be awesome to have though.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine it - you could go to the drive-thru window and your order would be right every time!
Now, looking at this, how far away are we going to be from a 100% robotic restraunt? Near where I live we have a gas station that has no employees - just pumps. You can use either credit cards or cash at it and the gas is usually $0.10 cheaper than if you go into a station with human employees.
So what is keeping, say, McDonald's from doing this same thing?
There are some differences between Bradbury's book and François Truffaut's 1966 film, namely that Clarisse makes it to the end of the film, but some of the performances are just down right scary.
Bee Duffell (the lady who played the Old Crone in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) is the lady who gets burned with her books. Cyril Cusack plays the fire captain and is most ruthless in his treatment of the young firemen who let their hair grow too long.
Oskar Werner is Montag and does a very very good job at playing the part.
Some of the scenes in the film just send chills down my spine, like when the van drives down the street announcing "Calling all Citizens. Wanted for murder, the criminal is alone and on foot. Let each one stand at his front door, look and listen." Damn powerful stuff.
Seeing the fire truck is almost comical - it is very surrealistic for some reason. I don't quite know why. Perhaps because that truck is just so damn red, or that the fire truck is not on it's way to put out a fire.
Just do yourself a favor and read the book and see the movie. You will love both of them.
I read this stuff. I read it again and again and again.
I am willing to bet these guys are audiophiles. No, not guys who like their music to sound good, but guys who spend $600 on a power cord and talk about "richer bass and higher highs because we have a $600 6 foot power cord running from the wall outlet to our amp - never mind the crappy wiring in the house, out on the poles, etc."
Yes, there may be some improvement in the execution of the processor... probably in the order of one or two instructions per second. In other words they can't claim it to be so.
It is like the folks who make the Splitfire spark plug and Slick 50 oil treatment. They claim "get a 15% increse in gas mileage!" Well, the thing they forget to mention is that your gas mileage varies by 15% all the time. It is based on weather, stop and go driving, etc. etc. etc.
So, these guys are spewing forth nothing but snake oil. Take my advise and ignore them, and instead of spending 1/2 hour grinding your Athlon, spend it doing something productive like watching TV or cleaning out your sock drawer.
Very true. However....
Things like the fireworks factory are a very rare occurance. So rare in fact that I am willing to bet my salary for the next two years that you and 200 of your closest friends will not get blown up by an exploding fireworks warehouse.
Rare occurances, such as you describe, might seem like a good time to have such a database. But is having such a database the rest of the time a good idea? It might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but not me.
Earlier today I was sitting here thinking about some stuff and it dawned on me that I had never ever seen a "Windows to Linux" guide for newbies.
The two arguments I hear all the time are 1) There are no applications in Linux and 2) Linux is too hard.
Well, I can say with 100% conviction that neither of those are true. But, we all know that!
But nobody that I know of has ever written a document that says "This is a comparison of Windows to Linux." Something I had in mind:
W: to launch a program you double click it
L: to launch a program you double click it
W: To get a listing of a directory, type dir
L: To get a listing of a directory, type dir
W: To log out of the system, select Start|Logoff
L: To log out of the system, type "logoff"
If you can show people that Linux IS as easy as Windows on the user level, a lot of the rest of the stuff will come easy. Another thing that REALLY needs to be done is to get away from some of these "must have a doctorate in comp sci" HOWTOs out there. Admit it, some of them are really horrid. Yeah, there is stuff that needs to be said, but does it need to be said in end user documentation? You and I might enjoy reading about how a serial port works or how a sound card turns electrical impulses into beautiful music, but for the average Joe, he just wants his damn modem to work or his mp3s to play.
According to Peacefire.org, Surfwatch has blocked:
Whitehouse.gov page about Bill, Hilary, Al and Tipper because it was named "couples.html"
Tons of pages about STDs
Tons of pages about gay rights
Tripod's "Ask the Doctor" pages about health and sexuality
Facts about sexual assault
Surfwatch also claimed *they* were the reason the CDA was overturned.
Google is a great place to look for Linux info. But let's now contemplate what kinds of stuff are going to be blocked based on Surfwatch's "everything about sex" stance.
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/editors/se x.html - the Simple editor for Debian package description.
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/base/libc6 .html - it is linked to from the above page
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/x11/xlib6g .html - it too is linked to from the above page
And those examples are from link number 4 when I did a search for "linux sex". There are 39,093 other possible pages.
If Google is trying to keep the search engine spammers out, then give me a reporting address or a reporting web page where I can plop a url in so they can do what *should* be done in the first place - block the search engine spammers from ever being there again.
And no, what I am saying has nothing to do with me wanting to censor. It has everything to do with wanting good results back that don't waste my time.
Unfortunately, I don't think Google is going to win if they implement this totally idiotic idea. I for one will never use them again if they do.
I am so damn mad at reading this that I could spit nails right now. I went outside and had a smoke so I could calm down and try to write something well reasoned and insightful. I hope I do.
I don't know if Andover wants to do battle and try to show that the DMCA is the fraud that it is - something that was written by a few companies to benefit themselves, but we all knew that - but I hope that they will. I have my checkbook out right now and am willing to make a donation to get this stupid ass law tossed.
I am therefore pleading with the powers that be at Slashdot and Andover to just tell Microsoft to go to hell. We the geek community need to stand up to bullying tactics. It does not matter if it is Microsoft, the RIAA, or Joe's Software Company. It is time to give the DMCA the finger. If we don't, we are giving in.
Last night, on All Things Considered they had a really wonderful story about the thing. Check it out (ya need Real Audio).
Basicly, the record companies pay for the ads that the stores run, but they will only pay for the ad if the store does not advertise a price below what the record company wants it to be sold at. Well, call it price fixing or whatever, but payola is payola.
The story also goes into MP3s and how people are really fed up with paying $17 for a crap CD with one good song on it.
Why shouldn't it be posted? The article itself states that there was a huge mixup and conflicting things being said by the original author (and there was, imho) but that things seem to have been straightened out. Not everyone reads other websites unless it is mentioned here, and you can bet your ass that things are going to get posted somewhere stating that this *is* a huge conspiracy.
This is a good story. It sets the record straight. It is no different than Sky and Telescope doing a report on "the really big moon" or "The Earth is in peril on 5/5/2000". They covered both in depth to put the real story out for the masses.
DirecTV is not going to give out how to decode stuff. The only way to do it is to record from the video out using a TV tuner card or some such.
S-Link stuff is sent serially, but trying to figure out what the signals are is going to be tough and probably not worth your time considering what the nirvis product does and the price.
Wonderful point - and I hope folks that are in the less than 1% crowd don't quit either! Even finding and fixing one line of code is a blessing.
Heck, as I sit here now I have found three lines of code I need to put in this program I am writing where I did not clean up my linked list. Argh! No wonder the original app has had a tendency to crash over the past 3 years.
The small stuff is as big as the big stuff.
Can't people come up with a better name than DivX? To me the name brings back awful memories of times past when a certain retailer tried to foist some pay per view scheme on the public. My skin crawls whenever I see that word, and I have to look closely to be sure of what the hell I am looking at is not what I think it is.
Check out the Slink-e. It will let you control S-Link, Control-A, Control-S and infrared stuff over an RS-232 port.
Having something up in space will mean it is not going be hearing all the crap from ground based transmitters - or a lot less of it anyway. Of course, being in the part of OZ they are in, I really don't think there is going to be much of a problem with that. It is pretty desolate there.
An example of this is the boundary around the telescope at Green Bank. I know Part 97 of the FCC rules states that you have to have permission to set up amateur radio beacons if you are near it (check the ARRL Website and do a search on 'Green Bank'). I am not sure about some of the other radio services. The reason is because of the interference generated by transmitters.
Radio receivers can cause lots of noise also if they are not properly designed, btw.
Okay, I can understand all the stuff about owning trademarks, but sheesh... gimme a break! I must have missed the original story, or else I plum forgot about it. As sad as it is for the folks getting the letters, it is funny.
I got such a letter a few years back when I was having a fight with Jones Intercable. They did not fix my cable to my satisfaction, then they never showed up when they were supposed to, so I set up the Jones Intercable Sucks website. I took their logo and modified it. It was pretty funny looking actually - if you never saw their logo it was kind of a movie marqee looking thing with a satellite dish.
Well, I made the satellite dish look like something you would find at the worst of junk yards, and I really messed the movie sign looking part up. It was quite a piece of work actually. I was proud.
Well, the site was up for like two weeks when I got this email from them demanding I take the image off there. I guess they did not appreciate my joke - but it was their own fault as far as I was concerned. They started it when they were giving crappy service. The image was truely a work of parody - nothing more, which I explained to them. They did not seem to understand.
Well, to show them some good will I did take the logo down, but I kept it just in case. They had the cable fixed a few days later. I dropped the cable completely six months later and went to Dish Network.
I am still proud of my "trademark infringement" because it sure as hell got their attention - especially when it showed up as one of the first ten documents when you did a search for Jones Intercable on almost all of the search engines. I think it was usually right below "Investor Relations" or something.
Some folks just have no sense of humor...
I got mine in July 1998. I love the thing. I just use to for normal run of the mill recording. Don't have anything on the tapes I would consider to be keepers, so I don't keep anything. That is what DVD is for.
I hate the look of a VHS tape. I think we all do. And since the entire reason I got a sat dish was to have a better picture than I had on cable, I decided on this unit.
There are some problems with it - the thing wont work with HDTV broadcasts. The bitstream that it can record is wide enough (19 Mb), but Dish says it won't work. It also likes to drop the signal on the hour/half hour marks sometimes. It also will not digitally record the audio only channels off of the dish.
It is cool though to put in a tape and see exactly what came down from the satellite at a later date - including the time/date stamp and the program information.
It does require JVC DVHS tapes to do the digital stuff (you can use a regular tape also, but you can't record digital). I have tried to use SVHS tapes in the machine in place of the DVHS, but have either not figured it out or it plain won't work. The DVHS tapes are priced about what a good SVHS tape costs, so there is really no price difference. Plus, since I am using this only to time shift shows and not for permanent storage, it really does not matter to me.
Also, up at my local Best Buy, I could swear they are running a Toshiba DVHS deck into the HDTV display. That thing has been there for at least a year.
As some of you so rightly pointed out, it would be tough and expensive to do. However, it *is* still possible to do - and if a publisher did this one time a year for say, Time Magazine, or once every few years for something like Wired, the economics would be a lot easier to deal with.
After reading everyone's comments to my post, I do agree with the fellow who suggested that it would most likely just be easier to make the user enter their identifying stuff themselves.
The problem as I really see it is that this contributes to a loss of privacy a lot better and faster than even Doubleclick.net could hope for. What a field day this is going to become for Madison Avenue.
All this stuff requires software to decode the barcodes. Has anyone considered what could be done with this?
Each hyperlink could very easily be traced back to a person. For example, the article mentions that Wired is thinking of using this system. Well, Wired wants (or wanted, I don't know for sure now because I dropped my subscription a long time ago) more money for a subscription for a business than from an individual because more people would be reading it.
So, along with the URL you imbed in this barcode, you also imbed a unique ID. Who's gonna know, right? Well, the software is gonna be closed source, I am sure, so who would know. Anyway, the software sees this and says "UID 4738925867 wants to go to slashdot.org from piece of software 583735". Well, I give my copy of Wired to my dad to read, he wants to go to the same url.
"UID 4738925867 wants to go to slashdot.org from piece of software 483902". A few days later I go to my mailbox and there is a bill in there from Wired magazine wanting me to now pay the business rate for a subscription.
Maybe I am just being a bit paranoid here, but after seeing the doubleclick thing, the stupid looking webpage cursor that tracks you thing, the TiVo thing, etc., I see no other reason for these "Great Convienences" that are being promised to us other than for marketers and ad execs to get their mits on yet more information about us.
This sounds like the stupidest thing I can think of.
Okay, so I have to have my webcam (windows only I am sure) hooked up then I have to hold the page up to the camera and hope that I have it focused properly and in the camera's view. Egads!
I remember back in the early 80s this one outfit had this barcode reader and "magazine" for the Atari 800 series of computers. You got your magazine, then swiped the barcode reader across everything, then you got to use the wonderful (ha!) software they wrote. But there was no way to save the software you just spent 20 minutes barcoding, so if you ever wanted to use the program again, you had to go through the same process. The thing sold for like $150 back then. I think the whole thing folded after a few months.
This thing sounds just as useful to me....
I only speak English. I tried to learn Spanish in High School, but was just not good at it. The only thing I can say in spanish is Mi casa es su gatto!
But, seriously, I think English will continue to be the dominant language for me. It is not that I am being a language-phobe. I would love to be able to read some other sites by not having to use the fish. I think the web will have English as its dominant language too.
English is the one language where new words are thrown in on a daily basis. New words are invented to describe an invention and we don't really think twice about it. It is the dominant language in science for that reason. It is very accepting.
Esperanto has already been tried - for years. When it was invented it was said that most ham radio operators would be using it by now because anyone anywhere could talk to one another. Well, that never happened. In fact, English is the usual language.
Programs used under GUIs must contain at least 10 icons shaped like characters from Jerry Lewis movies. Also, all software must insult the user as often as possible without them knowing it.
Most of the time I type in "tjiowm@gjiowm.com" as my email address, or something similar. It works like a charm.
I send spam reports in about legit businesses just like I do with boiler room operations. I use Spamcop to filter my mail, and do the reporting. It makes it super easy to do.
Sometimes it is good to follow up your spam report to the CEO of the company, like I did with Insight - yep the mail order company. Their marketing drone decided that there were not enough people on the mailing list, so he resubscribed EVERYONE they had an email address for (even if you chose not to receive their junk mail when you purchased something from them). So, I wrote a letter to the CEO. The next morning he sent back a message and he was none too happy about it. Not sure what happened to the marketing guy, but from the tone of the CEO's message I would not be too surprised if the guy is now looking for another job.
Yes, there is a MD camera. There are a bunch of links, so I suggest checking out this page at minidisc.org.
Zip disks are a bit on the "too big" side, but there is the Iomega clik! - there is a thing to hook it up to digital cams, but I have have no idea what it does.
I do recall seeing a device that was a hard drive that would work with most cameras. The drive would hold 99 rolls of "film". You hooked up the camera, started the device up, and it would pull the pictures off. It did not work with all cameras, but it would work with most of them.
As for the Superdisk, have you ever used one? It is the slowest damn thing I have ever seen in my life.
First, I love my camera. It is an Olympus D600-L. I got the 16 meg SmartMedia upgrade last year, and this past year they came out with a 32 meg upgrade for it. One of these days I will actually send the camera in.
One thing I learned from owning a digi-cam is this: don't go off and buy a camera because of it's price. Buy it because of the features it has. And when you decide on a camera, look at it closely. Much like any other piece of hardware you buy, there is something better around the corner.
I don't mind the resolution. It does 640x480 very well, and does even better at 1280x960. The shots are beautiful, and do not give that CCD White like you normally see (that is, it does not look like a video image you get when you shoot something white in a high brightness setting.) I also like the fact that the camera is a real honest to goodness SLR. Viewfinders suck.
But, the things I hate are not being able to control the exposure, the shutter speed, and not being able to remove the lens. At first I did not think that would be a really big deal. Now I do. I am nowhere near a pro photographer, but I do have applications for the camera that would make it even more useful to me if it had those things.
Granted, if I spent $12K I could get one of those nifty Kodak cameras, or a Mamayia with a digital back on it, but well, $12K is a bit too steep. It would still be awesome to have though.