Anytime, anywhere someone decides they need a 'computer' sound, they use the very (to me) familiar warble of a Seagate 30 Meg RLL Hard Drive doing heavy disk access. The sound was fairly distinctive, and somewhat soothing as a background noise.
I hear it in computer games all the time, in ads, in movies, and in TV shows. For old style mainframes that are spinning tape drives, and for futuristic computers on shows like Andromada. I laugh whenever I notice it.
Despite hearing it everywhere, I'd like to find a good sample of it. I'm not sure what for, it just seems like a handy sound to keep around. I wish I'd had good recording equipment back when I had one of the drives around!
I agree, but see the original point also. How long would it take to port iTunes to any Unix/Linux machine other than OS X? OS X is unix, but it's fairly far away from the *nix norm.
And I have come to expect full source for Unix apps, so that I can try that port myself if I want. I know that's not always true, but it's still in my head that way. They have released some of the key libraries, which is really cool. But I don't see them releasing source to iTunes itself any time soon.
From the readme that came with 4.2 (not a full change long).
What's new in iTunes 4.2
iTunes 4.2 allows you to sign in and buy music from the iTunes Music Store using either your AOL or Apple Account, view the iTunes Music Store in a separate window, and includes a number of performance improvements.
In addition, I've noticed that it's now really hard to get it into the mini-player mode. I was flipping back and forth between mini and full views via a quick mouse operation. Now it takes a menu operation, or a keyboard shortcut. Since everything else I'm doing with it is mouse driven, that's more awkward that in was.
The old mechanism was so natural, I'm not even sure what it was. It just happened when I wanted it too. Oh... they had changed the behavior of the maximize button. That's bad, especially from a company that's driven the contecept of strict UI guidlines, but I liked it anyway.
When I first got my hands on a Sparc workstation, I played with voice over the network (basically network catting from/dev/au to/dev/au). It worked 'okay' for not much effort, and was a lot of fun.
I started trying to contact the phone company to find out how much latency their network had (just dialed 0 and started asking). I kept getting bounced up the chain until I finally got a manager that said the information was classified. It was funny, because I couldn't decide if she meant "I don't known and don't want to find out" or if she really thought that it should be a secret.
Since I described what I had done with the computers and said I was trying to compare to the real phone network, they may have really been afraid of the competition.
My question is (if this really caught on) how quick would anyone be to turn it off?
I mean, would you black out the eastern seaboard just because some idiot with a Cesna was about to get fried? If it was a flock of geese?
Maybe with multiple transmitters aimed at different reception sites you could just switch transmission paths. That would even allow downtime for maintainance, and a workaround for really bad weather.
Another source (not often mentioned) is having domains registered that refer to your address in their contact info. I don't have solid numbers, but I suspect that this leads to at least 100 of the 1000 spams I get a day.
Eowyn's role in these movies represents what I hate about Hollywood.
In the books she was a minor character. I don't think she had a single line until the end of the series when she has some long talks with Frodo after the ring is destroyed.
Hollywood felt that the story just wasn't good enough without a love story (LOTR not a good enough story???), so her character took over other parts, and new content was created for her. New content created from nothing when they are having to chop out so much due to time constraints????
There was even pressure to make her part of the fellowship that the director and cast resisted.
Everytime she's on screen I get pissed. Really pissed. It was bad enough in the first one, but in Two Towers they fabricated a long extended sequence that both detracted and distracted from the real story, just so that two of them could invent an excuse for the two of them to have some face time together. I almost walked out. I really want a version with her gone.
Our sense of self-importance is pumped up in lots of subtle ways. The selection of news items for broadcast is one of them. Another is that globes are not often used when teaching geography. More importantly, they are never used on TV.
The projections used often make the US bigger than anything else on the planet. Additional blowups are often used to draw the users attention to whatever is considered important. Obviously, the US is usually the most important.
I've even (once) run across a globe that had the size of the US distorted to be larger. I found that to be really bizzare.
PS: I don't think this is a conspiracy. Just the way things tend to work out in US culture.
I know that it's fairly simple to serve songs from a linux machine to iTunes through Rendevous.
Are there any clients for the Apple Rendevous music protocol (I have no idea what the protocol's name is).
This seems like a fairly decent way to share music around in the house between multiple servers and clients. I already have a Linux machine in the TV/Stereo mix, and music is played via NFS.
It seems like Rendevous would allow for more flexible and dynamic combinations of stuff. For example, when a friend comes over with a laptop. He can just share music to the main stereo, with no hassle about permissions to copy files, etc.
Your statement rests on the assumption that all users who then bought that software would keep it to themselves, and not give it away to others.
This might work for one or two people... but after a very short time, someone would share that software out.
Um.. doesn't RedHat operate under this exact constraint? And make money? Perhaps not as much as MS is used too.... and without as much control.
On a side note, I'd be happy to see the state stay on Windows, but move away from Office. Get those documents into a known format, and the state is in a much safer situation over all..
The important argument that you've made is that it's wrong to objectify people, and that pornography always objectifies people, so it's wrong.
This to me is a very real moral argument, and one that I struggle with. This problem is that pornography is not the only way that we objectify people in our society. In fact, our society (in particular the economy) is based on the objectification of many of the people that we deal with every day.
A waitress takes our order, and brings us food for money. I like that, and find it useful. I'm willing to pay for it, and pay more if they do a good job. That doesn't mean I want to know her, or connect with her on a personal level. In fact, she'd probably get pretty nervious and unhappy if I really tried to do so. That waitress is a means to and end (the delivery of food). Not really a person.
When I take my car to the shop, I probably won't even meet the mechanic that will fix it. I don't know or want to know their name, that their first grandkid was born last week, or anything else. I want my car fixed. I don't wish the person ill, in fact, I am hoping that they are good at their job, and will profit from it. But I only care about that in a vague impersonal way.
Actors and actresses are the same way. Even through people think they know them, and think they want too. My experience is that they don't really. All of the off screen interest and news is just another part of the show. The people behind the show don't matter, just the entertainment.
Pornography objectifies people for a purpose, and that is troubling. But I don't think that gives any moral stigma to it that doesn't apply to all of these other situations that we all take for granted.
I remember touring the mainframe facility when I first got to colledge. More than anything, I was stunned, confused, impressed because the HDs (cabinet sized) had fold out keyboards on them.
Still to this day, I don't know exactly what the keyboards could be used for. It was an IBM 30x0 something or other. I do remember that it ran the 360 instruction architecture, but that doesn't narrow things down much.
I'm not sure if I was more impressed at the very strange cool factor of having keyboards on the hard drives, or the waste implied when the operator room (which held the drives) was full of dumb terminals already.
I fiddled with this a while back, but hit a stumbling block because it was hard to transcode a DVD to a more efficient video encoding format without losing information.
It's not that hard to rip a DVD and maintain all information, and not that hard to transcode into an DivX AVI or some such, but with no Menus or extras (and only a single audio track, etc).
What I want is to build a HD based video jukebox based on my purchased DVDs at high quality with all associated data still there. Currently this is about 100 disks, and I'd like to manage playback from a really small box next to the TV. This probably means only a single drive (of the 200G+ variety).
Can anybody make suggestions about which tools to use? Gentoo Linux is the preferred plateform.
By high quality, I mean good enough that I can't tell the difference from the source disk on a decent TV. I understand that there is always some degredation when moving from one lossy encoding scheme to another.
Only if you live in Europe. Unlike the US, they have standards for receiver boxes, so people can make generic boxes for any service.
Dish and DirecTV have proprietary delivery mechanisms and lock out all receiver equipment that they haven't agreed too. And they exert that control in great detail.
Of course, that makes it easier for their tech support people....
And the majority of cost is for phone time not for the data that is downloads (ignoring the cost of software upgrades).
If everyone used home network connections to dial in, the monthly fee could drop by quite a bit. That's why some of the other boxes out there (some versions of Replay) required a broadband connection to function.
It's AMAZING how much it costs to provide a local dial in number throughout most of the US.
I'm pretty sure that it's REALLY hard to get water that's pure enough to stop conducting. Standard disstilled isn't good enough.
Re:Because it's not illegal if you have permission
on
Get Paid To Crack?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, hacking something you own, or for which you have permission to hack is probably NOT legal, since you are bypassing something that could be construed as a copyright protection mechanism. I doubt that prosecution is an issue here, but....
DMCA is not your friend. Like many laws, I really wish it was being enforced really strictly. That would cause them to go away quickly.
If I read that chart correctly, then they think they own Mac OS X as well. And yet, they are failing to protect their IP by failing to protect their rights.
I wonder why Apple hasn't been attacked. I mean via FUD since that's about all that most of their attacks have added up too.
Seems that if you are going to attack everyone in the known universe without any decent rational, then it's unfair to leave Apple out of it.
SCO stock is currently at 19.60. And the financial news that I get through my stock ticker only covers Darl's statements. Nothing from any other sources.
Personally, I expect it to keep climbing until the other shoe drops. And that looks like it might be the one and only goal. I wonder if the financial news reporting agencies can get burned over this?
For that matter, does anyone know how to get non-SCO generated news reported someplace like Yahoo's financial services?
It wasn't until reading this letter that I realized that Open Source is, and always will be, more vulnerable to IP related legal abuse that closed source. Given the murky and dangerous status of IP law (at least in the US), this is a bad thing.
It should have been obvious that publically reviewable code can be proven to be infringing on a copyright or patent more easily than code which is kept secret.
On the other hand, Open Source is more secure from these lawsuits. It's very hard to extract money by suing OS creators. So most people won't bother unless they are trying to shutdown an OS project to protect their own products.
Will we see a continuous stream of these attacks on OS? I'm not worried about bogus claims, like those from SCO, so much as I'm worried about legally valid claims of infringement of software patents. Software patents may be bogus, but currently they are legally binding.
What if some judge decides to block distribution of RedHat until after all code infringing on MS's Start menu patents (putting it at bottom left, or whatever) has been removed?
Slashdot Mirror
Anytime, anywhere someone decides they need a 'computer' sound, they use the very (to me) familiar warble of a Seagate 30 Meg RLL Hard Drive doing heavy disk access. The sound was fairly distinctive, and somewhat soothing as a background noise.
I hear it in computer games all the time, in ads, in movies, and in TV shows. For old style mainframes that are spinning tape drives, and for futuristic computers on shows like Andromada. I laugh whenever I notice it.
Despite hearing it everywhere, I'd like to find a good sample of it. I'm not sure what for, it just seems like a handy sound to keep around. I wish I'd had good recording equipment back when I had one of the drives around!
I agree, but see the original point also. How long would it take to port iTunes to any Unix/Linux machine other than OS X? OS X is unix, but it's fairly far away from the *nix norm.
And I have come to expect full source for Unix apps, so that I can try that port myself if I want. I know that's not always true, but it's still in my head that way. They have released some of the key libraries, which is really cool. But I don't see them releasing source to iTunes itself any time soon.
What's new in iTunes 4.2
iTunes 4.2 allows you to sign in and buy music from the iTunes Music Store using either your AOL or Apple Account, view the iTunes Music Store in a separate window, and includes a number of performance improvements.
In addition, I've noticed that it's now really hard to get it into the mini-player mode. I was flipping back and forth between mini and full views via a quick mouse operation. Now it takes a menu operation, or a keyboard shortcut. Since everything else I'm doing with it is mouse driven, that's more awkward that in was.
The old mechanism was so natural, I'm not even sure what it was. It just happened when I wanted it too. Oh... they had changed the behavior of the maximize button. That's bad, especially from a company that's driven the contecept of strict UI guidlines, but I liked it anyway.
When I first got my hands on a Sparc workstation, I played with voice over the network (basically network catting from /dev/au to /dev/au). It worked 'okay' for not much effort, and was a lot of fun.
I started trying to contact the phone company to find out how much latency their network had (just dialed 0 and started asking). I kept getting bounced up the chain until I finally got a manager that said the information was classified. It was funny, because I couldn't decide if she meant "I don't known and don't want to find out" or if she really thought that it should be a secret.
Since I described what I had done with the computers and said I was trying to compare to the real phone network, they may have really been afraid of the competition.
My question is (if this really caught on) how quick would anyone be to turn it off?
I mean, would you black out the eastern seaboard just because some idiot with a Cesna was about to get fried? If it was a flock of geese?
Maybe with multiple transmitters aimed at different reception sites you could just switch transmission paths. That would even allow downtime for maintainance, and a workaround for really bad weather.
Another source (not often mentioned) is having domains registered that refer to your address in their contact info. I don't have solid numbers, but I suspect that this leads to at least 100 of the 1000 spams I get a day.
You are absolutely right. More Eowyn is perfectly cool by me.
I just saw an excuse to rant and went for it.
Eowyn's role in these movies represents what I hate about Hollywood.
In the books she was a minor character. I don't think she had a single line until the end of the series when she has some long talks with Frodo after the ring is destroyed.
Hollywood felt that the story just wasn't good enough without a love story (LOTR not a good enough story???), so her character took over other parts, and new content was created for her. New content created from nothing when they are having to chop out so much due to time constraints????
There was even pressure to make her part of the fellowship that the director and cast resisted.
Everytime she's on screen I get pissed. Really pissed. It was bad enough in the first one, but in Two Towers they fabricated a long extended sequence that both detracted and distracted from the real story, just so that two of them could invent an excuse for the two of them to have some face time together. I almost walked out. I really want a version with her gone.
Being a US citizen, I think I can comment.
Our sense of self-importance is pumped up in lots of subtle ways. The selection of news items for broadcast is one of them. Another is that globes are not often used when teaching geography. More importantly, they are never used on TV.
The projections used often make the US bigger than anything else on the planet. Additional blowups are often used to draw the users attention to whatever is considered important. Obviously, the US is usually the most important.
I've even (once) run across a globe that had the size of the US distorted to be larger. I found that to be really bizzare.
PS: I don't think this is a conspiracy. Just the way things tend to work out in US culture.
I know that it's fairly simple to serve songs from a linux machine to iTunes through Rendevous.
Are there any clients for the Apple Rendevous music protocol (I have no idea what the protocol's name is).
This seems like a fairly decent way to share music around in the house between multiple servers and clients. I already have a Linux machine in the TV/Stereo mix, and music is played via NFS.
It seems like Rendevous would allow for more flexible and dynamic combinations of stuff. For example, when a friend comes over with a laptop. He can just share music to the main stereo, with no hassle about permissions to copy files, etc.
Um.. doesn't RedHat operate under this exact constraint? And make money? Perhaps not as much as MS is used too.... and without as much control.
On a side note, I'd be happy to see the state stay on Windows, but move away from Office. Get those documents into a known format, and the state is in a much safer situation over all..
The important argument that you've made is that it's wrong to objectify people, and that pornography always objectifies people, so it's wrong.
This to me is a very real moral argument, and one that I struggle with. This problem is that pornography is not the only way that we objectify people in our society. In fact, our society (in particular the economy) is based on the objectification of many of the people that we deal with every day.
A waitress takes our order, and brings us food for money. I like that, and find it useful. I'm willing to pay for it, and pay more if they do a good job. That doesn't mean I want to know her, or connect with her on a personal level. In fact, she'd probably get pretty nervious and unhappy if I really tried to do so. That waitress is a means to and end (the delivery of food). Not really a person.
When I take my car to the shop, I probably won't even meet the mechanic that will fix it. I don't know or want to know their name, that their first grandkid was born last week, or anything else. I want my car fixed. I don't wish the person ill, in fact, I am hoping that they are good at their job, and will profit from it. But I only care about that in a vague impersonal way.
Actors and actresses are the same way. Even through people think they know them, and think they want too. My experience is that they don't really. All of the off screen interest and news is just another part of the show. The people behind the show don't matter, just the entertainment.
Pornography objectifies people for a purpose, and that is troubling. But I don't think that gives any moral stigma to it that doesn't apply to all of these other situations that we all take for granted.
I remember touring the mainframe facility when I first got to colledge. More than anything, I was stunned, confused, impressed because the HDs (cabinet sized) had fold out keyboards on them.
Still to this day, I don't know exactly what the keyboards could be used for. It was an IBM 30x0 something or other. I do remember that it ran the 360 instruction architecture, but that doesn't narrow things down much.
I'm not sure if I was more impressed at the very strange cool factor of having keyboards on the hard drives, or the waste implied when the operator room (which held the drives) was full of dumb terminals already.
That was my first thought exactly.
I fiddled with this a while back, but hit a stumbling block because it was hard to transcode a DVD to a more efficient video encoding format without losing information.
It's not that hard to rip a DVD and maintain all information, and not that hard to transcode into an DivX AVI or some such, but with no Menus or extras (and only a single audio track, etc).
What I want is to build a HD based video jukebox based on my purchased DVDs at high quality with all associated data still there. Currently this is about 100 disks, and I'd like to manage playback from a really small box next to the TV. This probably means only a single drive (of the 200G+ variety).
Can anybody make suggestions about which tools to use? Gentoo Linux is the preferred plateform.
By high quality, I mean good enough that I can't tell the difference from the source disk on a decent TV. I understand that there is always some degredation when moving from one lossy encoding scheme to another.
Only if you live in Europe. Unlike the US, they have standards for receiver boxes, so people can make generic boxes for any service.
Dish and DirecTV have proprietary delivery mechanisms and lock out all receiver equipment that they haven't agreed too. And they exert that control in great detail.
Of course, that makes it easier for their tech support people....
And the majority of cost is for phone time not for the data that is downloads (ignoring the cost of software upgrades).
If everyone used home network connections to dial in, the monthly fee could drop by quite a bit. That's why some of the other boxes out there (some versions of Replay) required a broadband connection to function.
It's AMAZING how much it costs to provide a local dial in number throughout most of the US.
Magnatune (which I found from Slashdot) allows you to try everything before you buy.
http://www.magnatune.com/
I'm pretty sure that it's REALLY hard to get water that's pure enough to stop conducting. Standard disstilled isn't good enough.
Actually, hacking something you own, or for which you have permission to hack is probably NOT legal, since you are bypassing something that could be construed as a copyright protection mechanism. I doubt that prosecution is an issue here, but....
DMCA is not your friend. Like many laws, I really wish it was being enforced really strictly. That would cause them to go away quickly.
If I read that chart correctly, then they think they own Mac OS X as well. And yet, they are failing to protect their IP by failing to protect their rights.
I wonder why Apple hasn't been attacked. I mean via FUD since that's about all that most of their attacks have added up too.
Seems that if you are going to attack everyone in the known universe without any decent rational, then it's unfair to leave Apple out of it.
Hum....
Would it also make Outlook, Word, and Windows illegal? After all, they are the tools most commonly used to write viruses...
Google has always been rumored to be heavily based on Python. I'm surpised they wouldn't want to use it for the contest.
;>
Of course, it would put everyone who didn't use Python at a disadvantage....
Yahoo News
Personally, I expect it to keep climbing until the other shoe drops. And that looks like it might be the one and only goal. I wonder if the financial news reporting agencies can get burned over this?
For that matter, does anyone know how to get non-SCO generated news reported someplace like Yahoo's financial services?
It wasn't until reading this letter that I realized that Open Source is, and always will be, more vulnerable to IP related legal abuse that closed source. Given the murky and dangerous status of IP law (at least in the US), this is a bad thing.
It should have been obvious that publically reviewable code can be proven to be infringing on a copyright or patent more easily than code which is kept secret.
On the other hand, Open Source is more secure from these lawsuits. It's very hard to extract money by suing OS creators. So most people won't bother unless they are trying to shutdown an OS project to protect their own products.
Will we see a continuous stream of these attacks on OS? I'm not worried about bogus claims, like those from SCO, so much as I'm worried about legally valid claims of infringement of software patents. Software patents may be bogus, but currently they are legally binding.
What if some judge decides to block distribution of RedHat until after all code infringing on MS's Start menu patents (putting it at bottom left, or whatever) has been removed?
That was NOT something I needed to see.
Can someone please mod appropriatly?