Interesting - is this encoded in the vertical blanking interval in a proprietary fashion (ala actimates) or is standard closed-captioning?
To be honest, I don't know how they do it. For the longest time I thought it was done by audio levels too, then the technology was explained to me, but I could'nt tell you what it is.
Actually, modern commericals are broadcast with side (unseen) data. This is used so advertisers can verify their commercials were actually played, as opposed to the olden days, when they had to litearly pay somebody to sit and watch TV all day and manualy record when the advertisers commericals were aired. Automated commercial skipping in VCRs simply look for that, and stop the recording mechinism.
So, Netscape is beccomming more bloated, and the emphisis seems to be on putting all sorts of bundled software in it that I don't want or need, as well as making it more 'user freindly', instead of producing a clean efficent code. And it's doing all this while compeating with another browser that is availble for download for free.
Does Microsoft have a clone ray?
Re:Here's mine...
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
How would that work? Large companies (like Microsoft) do, and should have a right to protect their work (although we should change the limits of that control).
A a large software package is the result of hundreds, if not thousands of coders. If a company cannot own that copywrite, who gets control? The company president? What if he or she dies?
What if a rock band wants to protect their work? Does the band have to sit down and decide who gets to control the copywrite?
I like where you're going with this, I just don't see a single owner as being feasible when so much media today is the product of a collaboration of so many.
Re:Best Jon Katz ever!
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
It is...
But after I was done, it seemed to have the tone of the 'frustrated guy trying to deal with these tech types' that would have been better received by Arizona Highways or the AARP newsletter.
But at least it made sense.
Re:What are you so scared of?
on
USB Remote Control
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree with you. I actually want my viewing habits to be tracked. But I don't want them to have that linked to my name.
As long as they just know my age, my zip code, my sex, and my occupational field, I'm happy.
The advantages of this are twofold:
1. I get better targeted advertising towards me
2. Programming that I like is less likely to be cancled.
If every slashdot reader, arguably a pretty sweet demographic (mid twenties, professional, with disposable income), allowed their viewing habits to be tracked in the aggrigate, Futurama would never be cancled.
And there will be more. It's easy to attack people who trade mp3s, because for the most part those are just college students and geeks.
But got to the average Joe and Jane American who spent $300-$1000 on something they consider to be as benign as a VCR, and call them theifs... It's going to piss them off.
Just wait until this story hits prime time CNN... oh, wait, never mind.
The simple truth is, bacteria mutates faster then we do. It's taken us thousands of years to figure out how to stop certian strains of bacteria only to find other ones mutate and pose a problem.
As another poster pointed out, bacteria do not mutate to 'kill', they mutate to survive (I have a hard time thinking of bacteria with an agenda), and if that means killing a host orginizsm that supports them, so be it (hey, who ever said bacteria are smart?)
If there is basic life on mars, heck, I'd be a little worried if we did'nt take some precautions to make sure it does'nt get released in the general population.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the beggining of the space program, did'nt NASA decontominate astronauts when they returned from orbit because they thought there might be a chance of bacteria?
It would be like buying a car, and after you sign all the papers for the loan, and you have given him your money for the downpayment...
The dealer pulls you're new car around the frount and tells you the keys are in the glove box. You open it up to find an evelope that reads 'By breaking the seal on this evelope, you agree to the following opperating agreement', filled with a few pages of very small print.
And, if you disagree, the dealer won't take the car back.
I was being a little flippant there... but it sure as heck feels that the game companies go out of their way to make sure you can't update your game (in some cases, making the game playable) if you have a pirated copy.
What really burns me is how so many games now require you to put the CD in just to play it. I keep all my CDs on a shelf, and I don't want to have to walk accross the room to find the CD, put it in the drive, just to play my favorate game. I want to be able to just start it up and go.
So I go and download the CD cracks. I own the game, I own the right to play it, I simply don't want to have to go through the process of finding and putting in the CD.
So I put the crack on it. Then, foolishly, I download the patch, only to find it won't run right anymore, and have to go through the whole thing again until I get too fed up and buy a new one.
If I spent more time playing games, that would really start to anger me.
There are a few advantages of building the computers yourself, but it's not something I would do in your shoes.
Consider first the labor costs. Even assuming you can ghost your software and buy exact matching hardware, you're still looking at 2-3 hours per machine in the actual hardware construction/testing phase. Depending on what you could be making billing out to clients (again, depends on what kind of business your in, and your position in the company), you may loose your cost savings.
Second is system hardware management. You know for a fact that a solid system from Dell or another giant will most likely have every component working together and all the neccescary drivers functioning right out of the box. Most of the time off the shelf components play nice these days, but you never know.
And, of course, there is the licensing issues. If you plan on migrating your current software licenses to the new machines, make sure they all work ok.
I watched TPM in the LA area when it was released. I came in being a film snob sure that digital would never replace a reel.
I left wondering when the theatres would get around to making this standard. The picture quality was as good or better then 35mm, and the lack of artifacts in the projection was great.
If you use a pirated version, half the time you're having problems like, "I need the latest 1.09 patch for such and such bug/feature but it breaks my 1.07 pirated no-cd version".
So all the bugs that are in games in the first release are'nt due to bad coding, poor QA, and market forces rushing to get games out in time; They are really copy-protection elements. I never thought of it that way, but gosh, it makes sense.
Linux is not piracy, just like Windows is not piracy. But copying Linux is piracy.
"Did you pay for that young man?" 'No! It's free! I got it off the Intenet' "Get in the truck, you're going downtown" 'But I did'nt do anything' "Yeah right, Pirate."
It's funny. The best jobs I've had (and the worst) have nothing to do with how much money I made or the number of benifits... and everything to do with how I was treated as a human being, if I was allowed the tools and resources to do my job, if I was reconized for my accomplishments, and let known that I was a valuable part of the orginization, I would typically not be unhappy at the company.
Then there are the places where I hated the envrionment. Management carried unrealistic expectations, and refused to give us the tools (responsibility) needed to reach the goals they set. I've never stolen from or willfully damaged company property, but I knew others who did, and understood why they did that.
It seems that naming your employees as your primary security risk, and taking severe actions against them is throwing oil on the fire. With an attitude of 'We don't trust you, and we are going to assume you've done something wrong' is going to do nothing but make the borderline employees even more pissed off and likely to do something damaging.
I don't think anyone starts a new job with the exepectation of being bitter, lazy, or vindictive. It takes months to years of abuse by a company before they get that way.
I go to great pains to make sure all the software on all of my companies computer is legal, and paid for. And, if a law enforcement agency had somehow gotten a suspicious that we were breaking the law, I would have no problem cooporating with them.
But the BSA is not law enforcement. It bugs the heck out of me that they can do what they do. If they sent us a letter, the first thing I'd do is write up a proposal with an estimate of hours billing rate for them to sign before we would do business with them, another private business.
Granted, we are not a big company, they would probably ignore my proposal, and we don't have the money or the resources to fight them in court, so chances are I'd end up having to comply. But it really chaps my hide that a private orginization, with no real authority, can go around enforcing the law.
What somebody really should do is start an orginzation called 'Citizens for a drug free workplace', contact the BSA, and say that there is quite a bit of suspicion that BSA executives are in possession of, and regular uses of crack. You have one month to get off the crack, because then we're going into your offices, disrupting your business, and piss testing every one of your employees. While we have no legal right to do this, we're going to do it anyways or you're going down.
It seems to me that the structure of a European city would make it more difficult to build any sort of light rail system, tram, monorail or whatever. They just plain do not have the room! But build them they do, because they make sense!
Yes, you have less room. But you also have density, which allows you to travel much shorter distances. When I've been in Europe, (and American East Coast Cities), you have things like grociers and shops you can walk to. We have no such luxery in the southwest. Everything is far away, accessable only by car, meaning any sort of light rail solution is a tough sell.
We don't have urban sprawl, we have suburbian sprawl. In most of these cities out here, 95% of the town is single story suburbia.
It's just a logistical problem. Most of the offices I've worked at are large, low buildings surrounded by a sea of parking lots. Telling a city planner, and a voter base that they should spend several million dollars to run a line out serve 100 people is just impossible, considering most of them will probably stick with thier cars.
Also, like I mentioned in my original post, most North American cities did have streetcars, and quite extensive systems too, before they were killed off in the '50's.
This was the biggest mistake we made over here. A conspiracy theorist will tell you (with a lot of truth to his argument), that these were bought up and killed by automobile interests. Most of the growth we've experienced in the southwest has happened since the 1950s, and our cities have been designed around cars. Not transit. Not people, but cars.
...and once again, I will ask: Why a monorail, instead of the proven technology used worldwide for all sorts of mass transit. Why reinvent the wheel when good, simple technology exists?
Theres no easy answer to that. In heavy trafficed corridors, an above (or below) ground solution is required. The only reason a city like Las Vegas might go with a monorail over a standard elevated train is asthetics. You have to remember, this is a city that lives off making out-of-towners happy. It is, at it's core, a disneyland for adults.
Re:Existing system works - why change?
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 2
Which company is this? And what does it cost? This sounds like a perfect solution.
Cities in the American south west are nothing like cities in Europe (or many in Canada, for that matter). It's an entirly different ball game.
These are cities designed nearly from day one to revolve around the car. We made it cheap, easy, and nearly impossible to put the sort of transit system you have in Europian cities into practice. Everything is too spread out, and too congested with traffic because we have to travle longer distances.
In the case of Las Vegas, a monorail is simply the best fit for the situation along a corridor mostly travled by tourists. Your European transit solutions simply would'nt work in this situation.
Incidently, there are moterized trollies (not on rails) you can take up and down the strip for $1.50. I've used them. But you could triple the number of these, and you'd still have the same amount of congestion we see today.
My first response was Yes! As somebody who goes to Las Vegas several times a year, and cringes while sitting in cabs as the meter keeps running at stoplights, I was happy to see finally a nice transit system that stays out of the way of traffic.
Then I saw the route map.
1/2 the strip is not accessed by it. It starts at the MGM grand. And, most problematic, it does'nt go to the airport.
If I was designing this, it would run up the strip to the Sahara, turn right to the convention center, then head north to downtown.
I can't help to think that those cab drivers I hate so much had something to do with this assinine design.
Simply put, for quite some time now there has been a lack of big movies that "everyone" goes to see. This is not exactly a bad thing, it just shows that movies are differently targeted.
I think video causes a lot of that. 20 years ago, if everyone was talking about a movie, you'd go see it. Today, it's common to hear 'Well, I'll check it out when it comes to video'.
I remember going to see movies three or four times while it was in the theatre, because a good movie could stick around for over 6 months. That rarely happens anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting - is this encoded in the vertical blanking interval in a proprietary fashion (ala actimates) or is standard closed-captioning?
To be honest, I don't know how they do it. For the longest time I thought it was done by audio levels too, then the technology was explained to me, but I could'nt tell you what it is.
Actually, modern commericals are broadcast with side (unseen) data. This is used so advertisers can verify their commercials were actually played, as opposed to the olden days, when they had to litearly pay somebody to sit and watch TV all day and manualy record when the advertisers commericals were aired. Automated commercial skipping in VCRs simply look for that, and stop the recording mechinism.
=
So, Netscape is beccomming more bloated, and the emphisis seems to be on putting all sorts of bundled software in it that I don't want or need, as well as making it more 'user freindly', instead of producing a clean efficent code. And it's doing all this while compeating with another browser that is availble for download for free.
Does Microsoft have a clone ray?
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
How would that work? Large companies (like Microsoft) do, and should have a right to protect their work (although we should change the limits of that control).
A a large software package is the result of hundreds, if not thousands of coders. If a company cannot own that copywrite, who gets control? The company president? What if he or she dies?
What if a rock band wants to protect their work? Does the band have to sit down and decide who gets to control the copywrite?
I like where you're going with this, I just don't see a single owner as being feasible when so much media today is the product of a collaboration of so many.
It is...
But after I was done, it seemed to have the tone of the 'frustrated guy trying to deal with these tech types' that would have been better received by Arizona Highways or the AARP newsletter.
But at least it made sense.
I agree with you. I actually want my viewing habits to be tracked. But I don't want them to have that linked to my name.
As long as they just know my age, my zip code, my sex, and my occupational field, I'm happy.
The advantages of this are twofold:
1. I get better targeted advertising towards me
2. Programming that I like is less likely to be cancled.
If every slashdot reader, arguably a pretty sweet demographic (mid twenties, professional, with disposable income), allowed their viewing habits to be tracked in the aggrigate, Futurama would never be cancled.
===
There are already 4+ pages of pissed off people..
And there will be more. It's easy to attack people who trade mp3s, because for the most part those are just college students and geeks.
But got to the average Joe and Jane American who spent $300-$1000 on something they consider to be as benign as a VCR, and call them theifs... It's going to piss them off.
Just wait until this story hits prime time CNN... oh, wait, never mind.
The simple truth is, bacteria mutates faster then we do. It's taken us thousands of years to figure out how to stop certian strains of bacteria only to find other ones mutate and pose a problem.
As another poster pointed out, bacteria do not mutate to 'kill', they mutate to survive (I have a hard time thinking of bacteria with an agenda), and if that means killing a host orginizsm that supports them, so be it (hey, who ever said bacteria are smart?)
If there is basic life on mars, heck, I'd be a little worried if we did'nt take some precautions to make sure it does'nt get released in the general population.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the beggining of the space program, did'nt NASA decontominate astronauts when they returned from orbit because they thought there might be a chance of bacteria?
It would be like buying a car, and after you sign all the papers for the loan, and you have given him your money for the downpayment...
The dealer pulls you're new car around the frount and tells you the keys are in the glove box. You open it up to find an evelope that reads 'By breaking the seal on this evelope, you agree to the following opperating agreement', filled with a few pages of very small print.
And, if you disagree, the dealer won't take the car back.
Well, it would'nt be that hard.
For example, if there is a MS EULA, all the text can be loaded in, and after the computer hums and twirls for a few seconds, it spits this out:
"You're fucked."
You think you were bad...
//e)
]10 ? "Hi I am Max Headroom. What is your name?" A$
]20 Print "Hello, " A$ "Do you like Automan too?"
]30 Goto 10
I was a terrible geek in the most pathetic way. And I don't even know if I'm quote basic properly anymore (I had a
--
What's so dang funny?
Seriously. As much as I dislike big companies, at least their shit WORKS.
Dell is a good example of a good company. I disllike a lot of their polcies, and their pricing, but I order a desktop from them, and everything is OK.
Have you tried to buy for a small to mid size office?
I was being a little flippant there... but it sure as heck feels that the game companies go out of their way to make sure you can't update your game (in some cases, making the game playable) if you have a pirated copy.
What really burns me is how so many games now require you to put the CD in just to play it. I keep all my CDs on a shelf, and I don't want to have to walk accross the room to find the CD, put it in the drive, just to play my favorate game. I want to be able to just start it up and go.
So I go and download the CD cracks. I own the game, I own the right to play it, I simply don't want to have to go through the process of finding and putting in the CD.
So I put the crack on it. Then, foolishly, I download the patch, only to find it won't run right anymore, and have to go through the whole thing again until I get too fed up and buy a new one.
If I spent more time playing games, that would really start to anger me.
There are a few advantages of building the computers yourself, but it's not something I would do in your shoes.
Consider first the labor costs. Even assuming you can ghost your software and buy exact matching hardware, you're still looking at 2-3 hours per machine in the actual hardware construction/testing phase. Depending on what you could be making billing out to clients (again, depends on what kind of business your in, and your position in the company), you may loose your cost savings.
Second is system hardware management. You know for a fact that a solid system from Dell or another giant will most likely have every component working together and all the neccescary drivers functioning right out of the box. Most of the time off the shelf components play nice these days, but you never know.
And, of course, there is the licensing issues. If you plan on migrating your current software licenses to the new machines, make sure they all work ok.
Just a few things to think about.
I watched TPM in the LA area when it was released. I came in being a film snob sure that digital would never replace a reel.
I left wondering when the theatres would get around to making this standard. The picture quality was as good or better then 35mm, and the lack of artifacts in the projection was great.
If you use a pirated version, half the time you're having problems like, "I need the latest 1.09 patch for such and such bug/feature but it breaks my 1.07 pirated no-cd version".
So all the bugs that are in games in the first release are'nt due to bad coding, poor QA, and market forces rushing to get games out in time; They are really copy-protection elements. I never thought of it that way, but gosh, it makes sense.
So, in other words
Linux is not piracy, just like Windows is not piracy. But copying Linux is piracy.
"Did you pay for that young man?"
'No! It's free! I got it off the Intenet'
"Get in the truck, you're going downtown"
'But I did'nt do anything'
"Yeah right, Pirate."
Ahh content, the last resort of the doomed hardware manufacturer.
It's funny. The best jobs I've had (and the worst) have nothing to do with how much money I made or the number of benifits... and everything to do with how I was treated as a human being, if I was allowed the tools and resources to do my job, if I was reconized for my accomplishments, and let known that I was a valuable part of the orginization, I would typically not be unhappy at the company.
Then there are the places where I hated the envrionment. Management carried unrealistic expectations, and refused to give us the tools (responsibility) needed to reach the goals they set. I've never stolen from or willfully damaged company property, but I knew others who did, and understood why they did that.
It seems that naming your employees as your primary security risk, and taking severe actions against them is throwing oil on the fire. With an attitude of 'We don't trust you, and we are going to assume you've done something wrong' is going to do nothing but make the borderline employees even more pissed off and likely to do something damaging.
I don't think anyone starts a new job with the exepectation of being bitter, lazy, or vindictive. It takes months to years of abuse by a company before they get that way.
I go to great pains to make sure all the software on all of my companies computer is legal, and paid for. And, if a law enforcement agency had somehow gotten a suspicious that we were breaking the law, I would have no problem cooporating with them.
But the BSA is not law enforcement. It bugs the heck out of me that they can do what they do. If they sent us a letter, the first thing I'd do is write up a proposal with an estimate of hours billing rate for them to sign before we would do business with them, another private business.
Granted, we are not a big company, they would probably ignore my proposal, and we don't have the money or the resources to fight them in court, so chances are I'd end up having to comply. But it really chaps my hide that a private orginization, with no real authority, can go around enforcing the law.
What somebody really should do is start an orginzation called 'Citizens for a drug free workplace', contact the BSA, and say that there is quite a bit of suspicion that BSA executives are in possession of, and regular uses of crack. You have one month to get off the crack, because then we're going into your offices, disrupting your business, and piss testing every one of your employees. While we have no legal right to do this, we're going to do it anyways or you're going down.
It seems to me that the structure of a European city would make it more difficult to build any sort of light rail system, tram, monorail or whatever. They just plain do not have the room! But build them they do, because they make sense!
...and once again, I will ask: Why a monorail, instead of the proven technology used worldwide for all sorts of mass transit. Why reinvent the wheel when good, simple technology exists?
Yes, you have less room. But you also have density, which allows you to travel much shorter distances. When I've been in Europe, (and American East Coast Cities), you have things like grociers and shops you can walk to. We have no such luxery in the southwest. Everything is far away, accessable only by car, meaning any sort of light rail solution is a tough sell.
We don't have urban sprawl, we have suburbian sprawl. In most of these cities out here, 95% of the town is single story suburbia.
It's just a logistical problem. Most of the offices I've worked at are large, low buildings surrounded by a sea of parking lots. Telling a city planner, and a voter base that they should spend several million dollars to run a line out serve 100 people is just impossible, considering most of them will probably stick with thier cars.
Also, like I mentioned in my original post, most North American cities did have streetcars, and quite extensive systems too, before they were killed off in the '50's.
This was the biggest mistake we made over here. A conspiracy theorist will tell you (with a lot of truth to his argument), that these were bought up and killed by automobile interests. Most of the growth we've experienced in the southwest has happened since the 1950s, and our cities have been designed around cars. Not transit. Not people, but cars.
Theres no easy answer to that. In heavy trafficed corridors, an above (or below) ground solution is required. The only reason a city like Las Vegas might go with a monorail over a standard elevated train is asthetics. You have to remember, this is a city that lives off making out-of-towners happy. It is, at it's core, a disneyland for adults.
Which company is this? And what does it cost? This sounds like a perfect solution.
Cities in the American south west are nothing like cities in Europe (or many in Canada, for that matter). It's an entirly different ball game.
These are cities designed nearly from day one to revolve around the car. We made it cheap, easy, and nearly impossible to put the sort of transit system you have in Europian cities into practice. Everything is too spread out, and too congested with traffic because we have to travle longer distances.
In the case of Las Vegas, a monorail is simply the best fit for the situation along a corridor mostly travled by tourists. Your European transit solutions simply would'nt work in this situation.
Incidently, there are moterized trollies (not on rails) you can take up and down the strip for $1.50. I've used them. But you could triple the number of these, and you'd still have the same amount of congestion we see today.
My first response was Yes! As somebody who goes to Las Vegas several times a year, and cringes while sitting in cabs as the meter keeps running at stoplights, I was happy to see finally a nice transit system that stays out of the way of traffic.
Then I saw the route map.
1/2 the strip is not accessed by it. It starts at the MGM grand. And, most problematic, it does'nt go to the airport.
If I was designing this, it would run up the strip to the Sahara, turn right to the convention center, then head north to downtown.
I can't help to think that those cab drivers I hate so much had something to do with this assinine design.
Simply put, for quite some time now there has been a lack of big movies that "everyone" goes to see. This is not exactly a bad thing, it just shows that movies are differently targeted.
I think video causes a lot of that. 20 years ago, if everyone was talking about a movie, you'd go see it. Today, it's common to hear 'Well, I'll check it out when it comes to video'.
I remember going to see movies three or four times while it was in the theatre, because a good movie could stick around for over 6 months. That rarely happens anymore.