Someone who gets their XBox modded isn't causing inherent damage to the system.
Depends on your definition of "damage". Microsoft would certainly argue that by changing the behavior of the firmware, you've damaged the machine's ability to do certain things.
That would be 100 e-mails for a penny. Spamming would then be unprofitable
Wouldn't. Don't you know? Spammers are just ROLLING in pennies!
I'd bet it costs a spammer more now to run a campaign than $1 per 10,000, given all the hassle of getting their account cancelled and so forth.
The effect of micropayments would only be to legitimize unsolicited commercial email. If the sender is paying for it, then it would be unfair to restrict what the sender is allowed to say in those messages.
It wouldn't be fare (sic) to buy a box of corn flakes and take it home, and put is (sic) in your Plexstor (sic) 24x corn copier and make all you want and never by (sic) corn flakes again...
No, it wouldn't. But that's not the primary issue here.
Imagine you buy a box of cornflakes and the serving suggestion says "pour milk over this". You're lactose intolerant, so instead of dairy milk you only drink soy milk.
When you get home and pour the soymilk over the cornflakes, an undocumented chemical reaction between the soymilk and a compound in the cornflakes causes the entire bowlful to turn into an unpalatable bitter swill. You can't return the cornflakes to the store because the box is opened.
I think we can look forward to the same with the music industry.
You mean Microsoft will develop a product roughly similar as the music industry, bundle it with their version of the film industry, and sell the "MS Media" suite together for half the price of a regular CD or DVD?
Slashdot would have a fit trying to figure out whether that would be good or bad.
BMI? You mean Broadcast Music, Inc., one of the licensing bodies that ensures composers and songwriters actually get royalties for public performances of the music they have written?
Slashdot editors, you need to EDIT. That means correcting anything in a submission that is factually incorrect.
Simply pasting in some text and putting italics tags around it doesn't count as editing.
I bought a "Polystation III 8800-in-1" from a guy on the street for $25 a while ago, and just as I expected it was a knockoff of the nearly-20-year-old Famicom console (the Japanese version of our NES). It's a cheap-feeling copy of the PSOne console design, with Atari-style joystick ports and and extremely realistic-looking light gun.
And the 8,800 built in games were actually the same 16 or so games over and over again, with various insignificant hexedits providing the standard variation (ooh, I can start on 1-2 in SMB!).
I've also seen Famicom clones designed to look (sort of) like Xboxen and PS2's. The guy selling them wanted $59 each, so I passed.
It also has a Famicom cartridge port where you'd put the CD on a real PSOne. I wandered all over Manhattan's Chinatown trying to find some bootleg carts to try it with, or at least an NES-to-Famicom adapter so I could play the games I own on it, but sadly came up with very little. Few places had gaming systems at all, mostly the knockoff-N64-controller hardware. Only one place I went to had pirate software, and it was multicarts for the GB Advance.
I guarantee you that's actually Yet Another 8-Bit Nintendo Clone. Every "multicart built into an N64 controller" I've seen has been one, plus the presence of "Milk & Nuts" on the game list seems to be a giveaway.
Besides, what kind of platform that runs MAME would run on hardware that fits inside that small a form factor?
It's not a video RCA cable. It's composite audio/video. It plugs into those hateful TV/game switchboxes that we all had hanging off of the antenna screws on the backs of our TV sets throughout the 1980's.
I had several of them chained together at one point. One for the 2600, one for the NES, one for the TRS-80...
I think this is attributable to the filesystems each OS uses.
On Windows, moving files to a different location on the same volume is quick -- some updates to the file allocation table, the actual data stays where it is, voila. Moving to a different volume is sloooow -- the data has to be copied off the source volume, across the IDE bus, and onto the target volume, and then the source has to be dereferenced.
It's been years since I've worked with MacOS filesystems -- does OSX's system still have separate data and resource forks for everything on the disk?
The same multi-monitor support that's been there since Windows 98SE. (or was it Windows 98?)
It was 98 first edition. I've been running a dual-head on a Win98 box for years -- the primary display is an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro AGP driving a 17" KDS Avitron. The secondary is a cheap ATI Charger PCI card I got for $15, driving an old fixed-frequency 18" HP Workstation display that I found in a dumpster (with the aid of a sync-on-green adaptor and a VGA-to-RGB-coax cable).
The drawbacks are that 3D acceleration only works on the primary display, as do the TV- and Video-in features. And the PCI video card obviously doesn't perform as well as the AGP, even at lower color depths (the two displays are independently variable, which is nice).
But having a big secondary desktop to shuffle less complex windows to, like IM Buddy Lists or telnet sessions, is definitely useful. I only wish I could use the larger display as my primary, but given that PCs aren't even supposed to be able to drive this particular piece of hardware, I guess I can't complain.
Yes, I'm sure J. Random Slashdotter like yourself knows more about computers than a man with a Doctorate in Computer Science and decades of experience in the field.
He may be a visionary, or he may be a loony, I don't know which. But his credentials are beyond reproach, at least by the likes of all but a handful of/. denizens.
The flaw in your example is that if you want to modify the closed-source commercial HTML to PDF converter so that there's a watermark on every page, and the product doesn't already support it, you're SOL.
To compare the costs of open and closed source solutions for a problem, the solutions have to have exactly the same features. Any differences have to be factored into the perceived value of that solution.
It's so that they can make people afraid of going to jail for violating the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA.
I will print out and eat an entire JonKatz post if the RIAA or any of its member companies EVER goes after an individual for violating DMCA anti-circumvention measures. It would be public opinion suicide.
Given that the average person has no idea what the DMCA is or how it affects then, I'd have to say using it to wage a campaign of intimidation isn't going to be effective...
Shouldn't we just have something like this: <htmlarea></htmlarea>?
Is that in the XHTML spec? If not, then the answer is NO.
It ain't Mozilla Team's job to extend the standards to include WYSIWYG text entry and CSS-based rotation of bitmapped graphics. Propose it to the W3C, and if anyone besides you thinks it's sufficiently useful it might become a standard.
We already survived one browser-feature arms race, and it resulted in a morass of cross-browser incompatibilities. Please don't try to start another.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who gets their XBox modded isn't causing inherent damage to the system.
Depends on your definition of "damage". Microsoft would certainly argue that by changing the behavior of the firmware, you've damaged the machine's ability to do certain things.
I see Dean Kaman's helicopter every so often as he commutes to and from work...
Maybe he should develop a personal helicopter that everyone can use to get to and from work like he does...!
Elitist prick.
That would be 100 e-mails for a penny. Spamming would then be unprofitable
Wouldn't. Don't you know? Spammers are just ROLLING in pennies!
I'd bet it costs a spammer more now to run a campaign than $1 per 10,000, given all the hassle of getting their account cancelled and so forth.
The effect of micropayments would only be to legitimize unsolicited commercial email. If the sender is paying for it, then it would be unfair to restrict what the sender is allowed to say in those messages.
Ooh, a T1! I can get the same download speed as I used to with my uncapped cable modem, for only hundreds of dollars a month!
Sign me up! I'll just call up Worldcom and order a... what? bankrupt?
Nevermind.
Hey, it's the same "Videophones are the next big thing" hype that we've been hearing since the 1950s! But this time, it's got a cellular twist.
I'm not buying it. The hype, or the video wristwatch.
It wouldn't be fare (sic) to buy a box of corn flakes and take it home, and put is (sic) in your Plexstor (sic) 24x corn copier and make all you want and never by (sic) corn flakes again...
No, it wouldn't. But that's not the primary issue here.
Imagine you buy a box of cornflakes and the serving suggestion says "pour milk over this". You're lactose intolerant, so instead of dairy milk you only drink soy milk.
When you get home and pour the soymilk over the cornflakes, an undocumented chemical reaction between the soymilk and a compound in the cornflakes causes the entire bowlful to turn into an unpalatable bitter swill. You can't return the cornflakes to the store because the box is opened.
I think we can look forward to the same with the music industry.
You mean Microsoft will develop a product roughly similar as the music industry, bundle it with their version of the film industry, and sell the "MS Media" suite together for half the price of a regular CD or DVD?
Slashdot would have a fit trying to figure out whether that would be good or bad.
BMI? You mean Broadcast Music, Inc., one of the licensing bodies that ensures composers and songwriters actually get royalties for public performances of the music they have written?
Slashdot editors, you need to EDIT. That means correcting anything in a submission that is factually incorrect.
Simply pasting in some text and putting italics tags around it doesn't count as editing.
I bought a "Polystation III 8800-in-1" from a guy on the street for $25 a while ago, and just as I expected it was a knockoff of the nearly-20-year-old Famicom console (the Japanese version of our NES). It's a cheap-feeling copy of the PSOne console design, with Atari-style joystick ports and and extremely realistic-looking light gun.
And the 8,800 built in games were actually the same 16 or so games over and over again, with various insignificant hexedits providing the standard variation (ooh, I can start on 1-2 in SMB!).
I've also seen Famicom clones designed to look (sort of) like Xboxen and PS2's. The guy selling them wanted $59 each, so I passed.
It also has a Famicom cartridge port where you'd put the CD on a real PSOne. I wandered all over Manhattan's Chinatown trying to find some bootleg carts to try it with, or at least an NES-to-Famicom adapter so I could play the games I own on it, but sadly came up with very little. Few places had gaming systems at all, mostly the knockoff-N64-controller hardware. Only one place I went to had pirate software, and it was multicarts for the GB Advance.
I guarantee you that's actually Yet Another 8-Bit Nintendo Clone. Every "multicart built into an N64 controller" I've seen has been one, plus the presence of "Milk & Nuts" on the game list seems to be a giveaway.
Besides, what kind of platform that runs MAME would run on hardware that fits inside that small a form factor?
It's not a video RCA cable. It's composite audio/video. It plugs into those hateful TV/game switchboxes that we all had hanging off of the antenna screws on the backs of our TV sets throughout the 1980's.
I had several of them chained together at one point. One for the 2600, one for the NES, one for the TRS-80...
I think this is attributable to the filesystems each OS uses.
On Windows, moving files to a different location on the same volume is quick -- some updates to the file allocation table, the actual data stays where it is, voila. Moving to a different volume is sloooow -- the data has to be copied off the source volume, across the IDE bus, and onto the target volume, and then the source has to be dereferenced.
It's been years since I've worked with MacOS filesystems -- does OSX's system still have separate data and resource forks for everything on the disk?
The same multi-monitor support that's been there since Windows 98SE. (or was it Windows 98?)
It was 98 first edition. I've been running a dual-head on a Win98 box for years -- the primary display is an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro AGP driving a 17" KDS Avitron. The secondary is a cheap ATI Charger PCI card I got for $15, driving an old fixed-frequency 18" HP Workstation display that I found in a dumpster (with the aid of a sync-on-green adaptor and a VGA-to-RGB-coax cable).
The drawbacks are that 3D acceleration only works on the primary display, as do the TV- and Video-in features. And the PCI video card obviously doesn't perform as well as the AGP, even at lower color depths (the two displays are independently variable, which is nice).
But having a big secondary desktop to shuffle less complex windows to, like IM Buddy Lists or telnet sessions, is definitely useful. I only wish I could use the larger display as my primary, but given that PCs aren't even supposed to be able to drive this particular piece of hardware, I guess I can't complain.
The first and final nail in MS's coffin.
This guy seems to know very little about nothing.
/. denizens.
Yes, I'm sure J. Random Slashdotter like yourself knows more about computers than a man with a Doctorate in Computer Science and decades of experience in the field.
He may be a visionary, or he may be a loony, I don't know which. But his credentials are beyond reproach, at least by the likes of all but a handful of
What do you expect from a coder named "Jet[h]ro"?
The flaw in your example is that if you want to modify the closed-source commercial HTML to PDF converter so that there's a watermark on every page, and the product doesn't already support it, you're SOL.
To compare the costs of open and closed source solutions for a problem, the solutions have to have exactly the same features. Any differences have to be factored into the perceived value of that solution.
Just because brute-force is an inelegant method of breaking encryption doesn't mean it isn't valid.
I mean, say most teenagers have a joe-job at maybe $6.00 an hour. To buy a CD, they have to
work two hours flipping burgers or delivering papers.
Closer to 3 of 4 hours, once income taxes are taken out and sales taxes are added in.
$15.00 CD's * Angry customers who leave = $0.
The problem is, the general trends don't show that customers are angry and leaving...
It's so that they can make people afraid of going to jail for violating the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA.
I will print out and eat an entire JonKatz post if the RIAA or any of its member companies EVER goes after an individual for violating DMCA anti-circumvention measures. It would be public opinion suicide.
Given that the average person has no idea what the DMCA is or how it affects then, I'd have to say using it to wage a campaign of intimidation isn't going to be effective...
Very few consumer-grade sound cards are "completely digital"...
Shouldn't we just have something like this: <htmlarea></htmlarea>?
Is that in the XHTML spec? If not, then the answer is NO.
It ain't Mozilla Team's job to extend the standards to include WYSIWYG text entry and CSS-based rotation of bitmapped graphics. Propose it to the W3C, and if anyone besides you thinks it's sufficiently useful it might become a standard.
We already survived one browser-feature arms race, and it resulted in a morass of cross-browser incompatibilities. Please don't try to start another.
So was it originally written in German, and translated via Babelfish, or...?
is a damned idiot.
The Buzz Aldrin punch video is clearly fake. Notice how the number on the column behind them is MIRROR-IMAGED?
Buzz Aldrin never walked on the face of the Earth!