>Prepackaging songs they didn't like with songs they did like and not allowing previews pretty much put the finishing touches on their coffin.
It's hard to give previews. For a store to have previews, it would have to have a compressed copy on a server in their store on a huge hard disc. If you have a friend with that disc, borrow it to see what it is like. You can also buy used, some places in some countries rent. Borrowing is not illegal. Keeping a copy for yourself is though.
As for the "I only like one song on the disc" thing, I think that's a matter of personal taste. On nearly every disc I have, I like every song on them to varying degrees. I'm fine with paying full price for CDs like that. Often for many songs that play on the radio, singles are available.
Your comment on concert prices may be accurate, but you probably won't believe how much of that price goes toward paying for the hall for a night and city taxes, city taxes alone can easily exceed 20%. That is similar to the 50 cent production price of a CD to the 16$ final sale price. Most of that money goes to the retailer and distribution, and that cost is only the per-piece fabrication cost, it doesn't include mastering, design, audio engineering, corporate taxes and what measly amount the music group gets.
Sorry, international treaties exist. Get educated someday. The arrogance of the states has nothing to do with this. I am not trying to get flamebait points for this, so I am spelling out the truth below.
This is a modified post from what I made on another site concerning a similar issue.
For counties that have signed the Berne convention, it is illegal to _distribute_ unauthorized copies of copyrighted matierial.
It looks like mp3.com was doing something illegal by using the method described. I don't think this sets a precident by which MP3 files get criminalized.
Owning MP3s, MDs, tapes or burned CDs without owning a licenced copy of the original work has always been illegal. Owning duplicate copies while owning an original licenced copy (in same or different format) has always been legal. I don't think that will change.
The only issue here is distribution, as the site possibly had unlicenced copies of the audio sitting on their servers and even if it was licenced, they had no agreement with the licence owners to be allowed to 'beam' or 'stream' the data.
There is nothing new here with copyright law, it is simply that the technology to make, copy and use audio has changed.
Not without a description of its size, the connections it has on it and whether it has an externally accessible drive (floppy, zip or CD ROM) I would want to see a demonstration of this in action before I fork that much.
Yes, two of them were criminals, but if you have read ANYTHING from that series of stories, you'd know that high school is also about kids who abuse each other, and some kids crack under the pressure, go on a rampage, etc. Being different means you get put up to a 10x dose of extra abuse and humiliation. So they too were victims.
Actually, it's in the FAQ of Kuro5hin's site... The answer is effectively "yes". If it's in a FAQ, it isn't a state secret, actually the opposite. The posting rules are on the same page too.
Sorry if my original post looks confused, I had a great one but somehow it got butchered between my browser and slashdot's server.
I didn't like the mean-spiritedness of the original poster myself, and I personally thought that the person had a lot of nerve getting offended at a reply to a troll post as if the original troll post is hunky-dory. No one knew about the parental situation as it is until it was stated, so really it couldn't have been meant to be offensive, therefore it usually isn't worth the time being offended about it. No one really knows if that situation is even true, given the anonymity of AC's on Slashdot, it's easy to just say it even if it weren't true to fish an apology out of another poster.
>Since both of my parents have passed away, I find this truly offensiveSecondly, since your sign-in privacy statement stated that no part of the information I gave during signup would ever be made public, I have a strong case to bring a lawsuit against you now.ATTN: KURO5HIN.ORG DELETES POSTS
And? It's 'his' site (OK, I don't know the sex of the site owner).
I think you only need to sell about 10,000 DVDs to simply break-even on retail sales. One company is making money on volumes of about 1200 on direct sales.
What is with this obsession to overclock?
on
Cooling With Lasers
·
· Score: 1
Man, it's been out of hand ever since I've heard of it three years ago. So what if you can re-jumper the board to higher frequencies... It was rarely hard to do. Finding overclockable chips isn't that hard, as we all know certain lines of chips seem to handle it very well.
There are limitations on how well overclocking works and what percent faster real performance it gets you, as well as stability implications.
I'm not against overclocking, but making purchase decisions based on overclockability or having an obsession to see how fast you can get a YYY rated chip to go seems to be the wrong way to go about a computer hobby. I'll bet that the tinkering time to find the "perfect" frequency could be used to pay for a faster rated chip in the first place, well, except for the very recent chips.
Supposedly a batch of Dreamcasts were left out in the hot sun and got baked. I DO NOT think that would work well in the extremes of storage or flight. If you were a terrorist that needed pinpoint precision, this wouldn't work. If you didn't need precision, why the heck would you make a contraption that uses a PS2? There's much simpler ways to do it. On the other side, it probably isn't all that useful as a design and development platform yet, and you couldn't really use it to simulation system unless you also had the development kits too.
The Tenchi "Ultimate Edition" of the OVAs include 5.1, as well as Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll and Armitage III. There are a few more R1 releases that have it, but I forget what they all are.
I could have sworn the DVDs use 2.0 "surround", I didn't even play it with any special DSP mode other than just plain Pro-Logic. It really feels like I am IN the crowd, with sounds to the front, sides and rear.
Maybe there was an oversight in not encoding the surround into the VHS. That would be unfortunate.
In some instances, they kind of "unscrewed" it a little for US audiences, as supposedly there are many veiled hints of lesbianism and homosexuality they left out or omitted. Some depictions of nudity do exist in the original (although supposedly never in the transformation scene). I get this information from people on the lists that I subscribe to, I have yet to see any Sailor Moon. I never get cable or anything like that, so I don't even have a chance of seeing it. I think it's a typical "Magical Girl" show, meaning I won't like it. There are some "shoujo" shows or shows meant for girls & women that I do like, such as Fushigi Yuugi and Revolutionary Girl Utena, but my impression of Sailor Moon is that it's waaay to far off the cliff.
Lain looks AWESOME on DVD format, and when you play it back with a surround sound system it sounds fantastic, very immersive.
Thanks for putting out the full name of "Kare Kuno". I know that the Japanese like to give things shorthand names, but it took a long time for me to find that out, as well as the full name. Personally, I think the title "translation" "His and Her Circumstances" to be extremely stilted. I found one I like better: "He said, She said", it may not be totally literal, but I think it passes on the general idea much better.
Um, I think the point was that a formerly hugely influential man of the Christian Right or Moral Majority is now working for Microsoft, and the guy used to advise Bush on what ways he should blunder next. Maybe it isn't so bad after all....
All big companies hire lobbyists, this one is a different case, one that worked for the Moral Majority can't see anything immoral about Microsoft or what they do, especially considering they are giving him money.
If the question concerns CRT projection systems, burn-in is a possibility as the phosphors have to burn brighter to cover a larger area. Check your manual if you have a projector or projection TV, not the manual to the game console. If you have said type system, even heavily 3D based games may cause trouble if played for very long periods of time as even they still have on-screen displays to show your status bars, a little radar display or something like that.
If your manual is ambiguous, ask around, and if you are still wary, play on a different display or turn the brightness down some.
Also, did you suspect the individual was a troll prior to clicking on the link (sometimes I click on troll's links, just to see where they take me - but I am never suprised by where they go
I forgot to check the post rating, it was -1, I didn't notice. There was nothing about the link URL that made think there was something I'd rather not see.
You are right, no adult should be forced to have a filter on them, no government should make that choice for me. You have my agreement.
Why do we call these programs "filters"? Because they "clean" the internet.
A filter is simply a tool to selectively find or remove something. A word entered into a search engine acts as a filter to find the pages that have it, or if used with a minus sign, the pages that do not have it.
Honestly, no adult should be forced to use a filter, but I would use one IF it only kept the smut away from me, like the bait-and-switch sites. One time I accidentally followed a link made by a sub-troll on slashdot and well, I didn't really want to see that, it was disgusting, IMO it wasn't sexual (but the image centered on that end of the body) and I'm not even sure if it's anatomically possible, and it certainly wasn't a clinical image.
The problem is that most filters seem to categorize based on words, but it doesn't look for combinations of words to determine what context the word is used in. "Breast Cancer" is an often used example. Just having "breast" gets it filtered. It could be chicken breast for all it knows. It could search the page to see if it is using more clinical terms (semen) or more slang ones (cum). Many anime-related sites are blocked because they have the word 'nudity' in them, and even if you ask them to unblock them, they'll just say the page has nudity, even though there are no nekkid pictures, as if the person never even looked at the page. I honestly think a good perl scripting could do much better than what's done so far.
But the scariest thing is: when they polled 15,000 of their users, 83% agreed to let Verant search their HD as a precondition of playing the game!!!
Ask them to show you the poll, the questions and the possible answers, as well as the point spread. Maybe the question was worded in a way such that it tries to avoid the possibility of privacy infringement. Even if a company doesn't give my info to private parties, I don't want companies using my checking computer resources to suit their internal purposes.
Besides, what vested interest does a gaming company have to actively stomp out cheats like this? Persuing legal action against cheat software costs money. Does it cost more money than fixing the bugs in their own software?
I am also curious what they do to think that they can change the licencing whenever they want without telling you. At least that's my impression.
Note, I've never played this game. Now I'm glad I don't.
Alpha can do triple of x86 FP using only two FP units NOW at same clock (PIII has two that I know about, and SSE). If Intel can just add FP units to beat AXP, are you assuming that the AXP arch cannot?
The Itanic's larger FP register file should help quite a bit on its behalf, but the FP units are still fairly innefficient even if you don't consider the register limitation, hopefully doing away with the legacy crap will fix it.
Every architecture is going to be a moving target or die.
I do agree the AXP fabbers and designers need to get on the ball as the 21264 was about two YEARS late, but apparently there was a huge performance lead as it is.
Right now we can only characterize what is being produced, as for all we know, the performance of unannounced products could be lies, half truths or excessive wishful thinking.
1) Firewire was designed to replace SCSI - true 2) SCSI isn't plug & play - somewhat false.
SCSI for the most part doesn't 'hot swap' as nicely as Firewire, and SCSI for the most part doesn't have auto device IDs unless you consider SCAM - SCSI Configured AutoMatically - something I've seen even in ISA SCSI adaptors. So Firewire isn't that much of a quantum leam in those aspects, but hopefully the cables will be cheaper, they are more convenient.
Unfortunately, the only 'Firewire' drive devices I've seen are those that use IDE drives internally rather than offing that aspect of its circuitry.
On any Windows 9X / NT system with a SCSI adaptor installed, installing a new hard drive / zip / CDROM, it will automatically show up. With Macs, when you plug in a Zip, supposedly you do need to add the extension, which is goofy in my opinion.
3) The next home video interconnect standard is called HAVi - Home Audio Video interconnect (or interlink or something like that), which uses the IEEE1394 standard, the same connection that your digital camcorder uses. Pioneer has demonstrated some nice looking prototypes, as shown in either Home Theater magazine or maybe Popular Science, I forget.
If Intel's going to have it's chips in anything that will connect to a Digital TV (like the proposed X-box?), they are best off supporting IEE1394, but I suppose they'll just drag their feet until the X-box happens, but given its release time table, they would probably be significantly behind times as even the PS2 supposedly has IEEE1394 support _already_.
OK, I'll admit here that I should have admitted in my previous post... I was wrong, or at the very least aggrivated to extreme.
I DO get totally pissed off when a lawyer charges a full hour for a full 5 minutes worth of work, or even less, charge a client an hour for stepping into the office to ask if there was a change in the case, get a reply "I'll call when I hear something". Was that worth an hour? Another slashdotter said this happened to him, but he was smart enough to fire the guy. Is this common practice? Do you do this? Does anyone really earning their keep when they do this?
I still believe that the legal / judicial / political system is too fraught with the possibility of manipulation, as there are lawyers in all three areas, and even those in political office still part of a law office at home, so how tempting is it for a Senator to vote for a bill that might make it easier for his partners to make more money? It's still illegal, but making something illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. What happened at Chapaquiddick was illegal, but was that particular perpetrator ever fully investigated and charged? Wasn't he a lawyer? Was he a Senator at the time?
Slashdot Mirror
>Prepackaging songs they didn't like with songs they did like and not allowing previews pretty much put the finishing touches on their coffin.
It's hard to give previews. For a store to have previews, it would have to have a compressed copy on a server in their store on a huge hard disc. If you have a friend with that disc, borrow it to see what it is like. You can also buy used, some places in some countries rent. Borrowing is not illegal. Keeping a copy for yourself is though.
As for the "I only like one song on the disc" thing, I think that's a matter of personal taste. On nearly every disc I have, I like every song on them to varying degrees. I'm fine with paying full price for CDs like that. Often for many songs that play on the radio, singles are available.
Your comment on concert prices may be accurate, but you probably won't believe how much of that price goes toward paying for the hall for a night and city taxes, city taxes alone can easily exceed 20%. That is similar to the 50 cent production price of a CD to the 16$ final sale price. Most of that money goes to the retailer and distribution, and that cost is only the per-piece fabrication cost, it doesn't include mastering, design, audio engineering, corporate taxes and what measly amount the music group gets.
Sorry, international treaties exist. Get educated someday. The arrogance of the states has nothing to do with this. I am not trying to get flamebait points for this, so I am spelling out the truth below.
This is a modified post from what I made on another site concerning a similar issue.
For counties that have signed the Berne convention, it is illegal to _distribute_ unauthorized copies of copyrighted matierial.
If you don't believe me, check this link out:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overv
It's the text of the treaty. It doesn't list signatories, but both the US and the Russian Federation are:
http://www.wipo.org/eng/general/copyrght/bern.h
Your ability to get the cooperation may be stymied by slow courts and the fact that you have to somehow go over there to get some type of prosecution.
If this material is not copyrighted (I don't know the full issue of this case), then there's nothing to stand on. But I doubt it.
It looks like mp3.com was doing something illegal by using the method described. I don't think this sets a precident by which MP3 files get criminalized.
Owning MP3s, MDs, tapes or burned CDs without owning a licenced copy of the original work has always been illegal. Owning duplicate copies while owning an original licenced copy (in same or different format) has always been legal. I don't think that will change.
The only issue here is distribution, as the site possibly had unlicenced copies of the audio sitting on their servers and even if it was licenced, they had no agreement with the licence owners to be allowed to 'beam' or 'stream' the data.
There is nothing new here with copyright law, it is simply that the technology to make, copy and use audio has changed.
That's pretty similar to my system, I prefer to mentally divide by 100 or move the decimal place over two places.
Not without a description of its size, the connections it has on it and whether it has an externally accessible drive (floppy, zip or CD ROM) I would want to see a demonstration of this in action before I fork that much.
Yes, two of them were criminals, but if you have read ANYTHING from that series of stories, you'd know that high school is also about kids who abuse each other, and some kids crack under the pressure, go on a rampage, etc. Being different means you get put up to a 10x dose of extra abuse and humiliation. So they too were victims.
Actually, it's in the FAQ of Kuro5hin's site... The answer is effectively "yes". If it's in a FAQ, it isn't a state secret, actually the opposite. The posting rules are on the same page too.
Sorry if my original post looks confused, I had a great one but somehow it got butchered between my browser and slashdot's server.
I didn't like the mean-spiritedness of the original poster myself, and I personally thought that the person had a lot of nerve getting offended at a reply to a troll post as if the original troll post is hunky-dory. No one knew about the parental situation as it is until it was stated, so really it couldn't have been meant to be offensive, therefore it usually isn't worth the time being offended about it. No one really knows if that situation is even true, given the anonymity of AC's on Slashdot, it's easy to just say it even if it weren't true to fish an apology out of another poster.
>Since both of my parents have passed away, I find this truly offensiveSecondly, since your sign-in privacy statement stated that no part of the information I gave during signup would ever be made public, I have a strong case to bring a lawsuit against you now.ATTN: KURO5HIN.ORG DELETES POSTS
And? It's 'his' site (OK, I don't know the sex of the site owner).
I think you only need to sell about 10,000 DVDs to simply break-even on retail sales. One company is making money on volumes of about 1200 on direct sales.
Man, it's been out of hand ever since I've heard of it three years ago. So what if you can re-jumper the board to higher frequencies... It was rarely hard to do. Finding overclockable chips isn't that hard, as we all know certain lines of chips seem to handle it very well.
There are limitations on how well overclocking works and what percent faster real performance it gets you, as well as stability implications.
I'm not against overclocking, but making purchase decisions based on overclockability or having an obsession to see how fast you can get a YYY rated chip to go seems to be the wrong way to go about a computer hobby. I'll bet that the tinkering time to find the "perfect" frequency could be used to pay for a faster rated chip in the first place, well, except for the very recent chips.
Supposedly a batch of Dreamcasts were left out in the hot sun and got baked. I DO NOT think that would work well in the extremes of storage or flight. If you were a terrorist that needed pinpoint precision, this wouldn't work. If you didn't need precision, why the heck would you make a contraption that uses a PS2? There's much simpler ways to do it. On the other side, it probably isn't all that useful as a design and development platform yet, and you couldn't really use it to simulation system unless you also had the development kits too.
The Tenchi "Ultimate Edition" of the OVAs include 5.1, as well as Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll and Armitage III. There are a few more R1 releases that have it, but I forget what they all are.
I could have sworn the DVDs use 2.0 "surround", I didn't even play it with any special DSP mode other than just plain Pro-Logic. It really feels like I am IN the crowd, with sounds to the front, sides and rear.
Maybe there was an oversight in not encoding the surround into the VHS. That would be unfortunate.
In some instances, they kind of "unscrewed" it a little for US audiences, as supposedly there are many veiled hints of lesbianism and homosexuality they left out or omitted. Some depictions of nudity do exist in the original (although supposedly never in the transformation scene). I get this information from people on the lists that I subscribe to, I have yet to see any Sailor Moon. I never get cable or anything like that, so I don't even have a chance of seeing it. I think it's a typical "Magical Girl" show, meaning I won't like it. There are some "shoujo" shows or shows meant for girls & women that I do like, such as Fushigi Yuugi and Revolutionary Girl Utena, but my impression of Sailor Moon is that it's waaay to far off the cliff.
IMO Lain can be understood... Check out this link for more depth:
http://www.cjas.org/~leng/lain.htm
Lain looks AWESOME on DVD format, and when you play it back with a surround sound system it sounds fantastic, very immersive.
Thanks for putting out the full name of "Kare Kuno". I know that the Japanese like to give things shorthand names, but it took a long time for me to find that out, as well as the full name. Personally, I think the title "translation" "His and Her Circumstances" to be extremely stilted. I found one I like better: "He said, She said", it may not be totally literal, but I think it passes on the general idea much better.
can't wait for Captor Nikki! NOT
Lighten up, last I heard, it was being marketed under the name "Card Captor".
Um, I think the point was that a formerly hugely influential man of the Christian Right or Moral Majority is now working for Microsoft, and the guy used to advise Bush on what ways he should blunder next. Maybe it isn't so bad after all....
All big companies hire lobbyists, this one is a different case, one that worked for the Moral Majority can't see anything immoral about Microsoft or what they do, especially considering they are giving him money.
If the question concerns CRT projection systems, burn-in is a possibility as the phosphors have to burn brighter to cover a larger area. Check your manual if you have a projector or projection TV, not the manual to the game console. If you have said type system, even heavily 3D based games may cause trouble if played for very long periods of time as even they still have on-screen displays to show your status bars, a little radar display or something like that.
If your manual is ambiguous, ask around, and if you are still wary, play on a different display or turn the brightness down some.
LCD based projectors will not have this problem.
Also, did you suspect the individual was a troll prior to clicking on the link (sometimes I click on troll's links, just to see where they take me - but I am never suprised by where they go
I forgot to check the post rating, it was -1, I didn't notice. There was nothing about the link URL that made think there was something I'd rather not see.
You are right, no adult should be forced to have a filter on them, no government should make that choice for me. You have my agreement.
Why do we call these programs "filters"? Because they "clean" the internet.
A filter is simply a tool to selectively find or remove something. A word entered into a search engine acts as a filter to find the pages that have it, or if used with a minus sign, the pages that do not have it.
Honestly, no adult should be forced to use a filter, but I would use one IF it only kept the smut away from me, like the bait-and-switch sites. One time I accidentally followed a link made by a sub-troll on slashdot and well, I didn't really want to see that, it was disgusting, IMO it wasn't sexual (but the image centered on that end of the body) and I'm not even sure if it's anatomically possible, and it certainly wasn't a clinical image.
The problem is that most filters seem to categorize based on words, but it doesn't look for combinations of words to determine what context the word is used in. "Breast Cancer" is an often used example. Just having "breast" gets it filtered. It could be chicken breast for all it knows. It could search the page to see if it is using more clinical terms (semen) or more slang ones (cum). Many anime-related sites are blocked because they have the word 'nudity' in them, and even if you ask them to unblock them, they'll just say the page has nudity, even though there are no nekkid pictures, as if the person never even looked at the page. I honestly think a good perl scripting could do much better than what's done so far.
But the scariest thing is: when they polled 15,000 of their users, 83% agreed to let Verant search their HD as a precondition of playing the game!!!
Ask them to show you the poll, the questions and the possible answers, as well as the point spread. Maybe the question was worded in a way such that it tries to avoid the possibility of privacy infringement. Even if a company doesn't give my info to private parties, I don't want companies using my checking computer resources to suit their internal purposes.
Besides, what vested interest does a gaming company have to actively stomp out cheats like this? Persuing legal action against cheat software costs money. Does it cost more money than fixing the bugs in their own software?
I am also curious what they do to think that they can change the licencing whenever they want without telling you. At least that's my impression.
Note, I've never played this game. Now I'm glad I don't.
Alpha can do triple of x86 FP using only two FP units NOW at same clock (PIII has two that I know about, and SSE). If Intel can just add FP units to beat AXP, are you assuming that the AXP arch cannot?
The Itanic's larger FP register file should help quite a bit on its behalf, but the FP units are still fairly innefficient even if you don't consider the register limitation, hopefully doing away with the legacy crap will fix it.
Every architecture is going to be a moving target or die.
I do agree the AXP fabbers and designers need to get on the ball as the 21264 was about two YEARS late, but apparently there was a huge performance lead as it is.
Right now we can only characterize what is being produced, as for all we know, the performance of unannounced products could be lies, half truths or excessive wishful thinking.
1) Firewire was designed to replace SCSI - true
2) SCSI isn't plug & play - somewhat false.
SCSI for the most part doesn't 'hot swap' as nicely as Firewire, and SCSI for the most part doesn't have auto device IDs unless you consider SCAM - SCSI Configured AutoMatically - something I've seen even in ISA SCSI adaptors. So Firewire isn't that much of a quantum leam in those aspects, but hopefully the cables will be cheaper, they are more convenient.
Unfortunately, the only 'Firewire' drive devices I've seen are those that use IDE drives internally rather than offing that aspect of its circuitry.
On any Windows 9X / NT system with a SCSI adaptor installed, installing a new hard drive / zip / CDROM, it will automatically show up. With Macs, when you plug in a Zip, supposedly you do need to add the extension, which is goofy in my opinion.
3) The next home video interconnect standard is called HAVi - Home Audio Video interconnect (or interlink or something like that), which uses the IEEE1394 standard, the same connection that your digital camcorder uses. Pioneer has demonstrated some nice looking prototypes, as shown in either Home Theater magazine or maybe Popular Science, I forget.
If Intel's going to have it's chips in anything that will connect to a Digital TV (like the proposed X-box?), they are best off supporting IEE1394, but I suppose they'll just drag their feet until the X-box happens, but given its release time table, they would probably be significantly behind times as even the PS2 supposedly has IEEE1394 support _already_.
I don't think that you need to tell the victim that you're going to do it anyway. Give them a _little_ piece of mind. A little, but not too much.
OK, I'll admit here that I should have admitted in my previous post... I was wrong, or at the very least aggrivated to extreme.
I DO get totally pissed off when a lawyer charges a full hour for a full 5 minutes worth of work, or even less, charge a client an hour for stepping into the office to ask if there was a change in the case, get a reply "I'll call when I hear something". Was that worth an hour? Another slashdotter said this happened to him, but he was smart enough to fire the guy. Is this common practice? Do you do this? Does anyone really earning their keep when they do this?
I still believe that the legal / judicial / political system is too fraught with the possibility of manipulation, as there are lawyers in all three areas, and even those in political office still part of a law office at home, so how tempting is it for a Senator to vote for a bill that might make it easier for his partners to make more money? It's still illegal, but making something illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. What happened at Chapaquiddick was illegal, but was that particular perpetrator ever fully investigated and charged? Wasn't he a lawyer? Was he a Senator at the time?