"If easily fabricated evidence such as this can get someone in jail"
It's called "logging." And what "fabricated evidence?" Your entire argument is based on your assumption that the only thing the RIAA has to go on in the IP and your assumption that it's all a court need. Whereas that's never actually been the case.
The ISP also would probably have logs of your activity at that time. I know my University can determine what's being transfered over the networks if it has a reason to care. I could run Etereal on my own network and track everything anyone on my network is doing.
If someone uploads pirated stuff to my server and some company comes along and threatens to sue me, I can pull up my logs and get the exact time the files were uploaded and what IP did it. The company can then go to the ISP for that IP at that time which the ISP can reduce to a single account and verify they were indeed uploading the pirated files to my server at that time.
Since Windows easily has more than 50% of the mass market, this won't be a problem. If you happen to fall into the 50% of the population that does vote and doesn't have access to a Windows box (hint: see local library) you're probably a Linux zealot. And being a Linux zealot means you're a communist. So really, you shouldn't be voting anyway.
I think our government has made an excellent decision.
The extra bloat in Visual Basic is forced into my projects wether I use it or not.
C++ on the other hand can have all the extra stuff it wants and it doesn't affect my project. If I don't wan to use templates or whatever, I don't have to. And the compiler won't force me to include anything.
Whining about C++ having too many features is like bitching that Baskin Robbins has too many flavors. Nobody is forcing you to buy them.
I run free anonymous FTP off my server because I can. Occasionally someone asks me if I worry about someone filling up my HD and crashing my server in the process.
Then I point out it takes around 8 hours to back up the 80GB drive over a 100Mbit LAN. I have a 640Kbit downstream connection. It would take a month to fill the entire drive.
I had someone connected to my server for 14 hours uploading a pirated game. I let him finish. Opened up the zip file and replaced everything in it with a single text file with the person's IP and log entries showing their attempt to pirate software.
I've often burned stuff to CD rather than upload it to my server over the net. Even for relativly small sites like my own, it's far more efficient. It's never an emergency situation where the files have to be there "this second" anyway.
It's not surprising that big companies don't waste their bandwidth that customers need and just transfer physical media instead where possible.
They know pretty well how fast it was going by looking at the time from the break to the hit on the video. They can then figure out the distance it traveled in that time and with basic math get a good idea of how fast it was going.
It was only a few frames and it's quite a distance from where it came off of to the wing.
There's very little speculation about how fast it was going.
"Some people are just trying to sell their art, and the less they can charge, the better exposure they will get."
Actually not really. There's a point where it's too cheap. And when it comes to micropayments, the less you charge the more of a hassle it is to pay. So not only is it a hassle but it's so cheap people begin to wonder if it's cheap because it's crap. And if it's crap, it's not worth the hassle.
The guy should put out some free comics first and then in a year or two when he gets popular, worry about charging for books. As it is, he has no audience. This is just a publicity stunt to try to aquire one. I don't sell comics. And what I do sell, I waited two years to start charging for and only did because my bandwidth was being sucked dry. I looked through my logs and figured out what most people wanted and then started charging a small fee to get it.
Sluggy, RealLife and Sinfest are all huge and don't charge a cent. They have other ways to make money.
Contrary to what you may think, an on-line comic doesn't take much bandwidth at all. By the time it does, you'll have an audience and a huge number of comics to compile into collections to sell to cover the costs.
"To read the whole thing will cost you 75 cents. That's a good price for a comic book"
That's a good price for a comic book that the police department would end up just giving away to kids. If it's really a quality piece of work, the guy should charge more than a dollar and less than $5.
"Third, you obviously didn't read the BitPass site very carefully. There are no extra fees for the buyer."
You're right. They charge the undisclosed fee(s) to the seller. That's a big giant red flag. Even PayPal (which I've never had a problem with. It's not a bank, don't treat it like one.) makes their fee schedule easy to find.
That's *only* 800,000 users (the world is a big place) and one more pointless middleman selling people Disney Dollars.
Micropayments turn web-masters into beggers. Is your site that barren that people are more likely to spend a quarter and never come back?
Is it not concievable to you that you have at least $1 worth of merchandise you can sell up front to the customer instead of trying to scrape pennies at a time? Are you putting a gumball machine on-line or what?
If customers are very likely to buy at least $1 worth of merchandise then why not sell it to them up front and give them some free stuff to look at to help encourage the sell?
If you have a $1 worth of merchandise then you don't need Disney Dollars like e-gold. You can give the middle man the middle finger and go straight through PayPal or whatever you want.
Micropayment systems are just breeding potential con-men who turn real money into fools gold and then demand a cut of real money for you to get it back. When CC companies lower their fees then I'll lower my minimum price and offer smaller minimum quanities of my product.
I refuse to make Joe User jump through hoops just so they can spend a quarter and force myself to have to pay Joe Loan Shark AND PayPal for the ability to allow Joe User to do such a thing.
I actually had a dollar bill mailed to me from France from someone who wanted an account at my site. Another sent a $1 bill from New York.
$0.25 per strip is rediculous. I charge $1.00 to get 30 days of access to anything on my site. $2 for 120, and $5 for 365. I use PayPal to handle on-line transactions.
Sluggy.com has his comics set up in "books." What would make sense (and be easier for all involved) is to charge X dollars for access to a "book" for Y amount of time.
The idea isn't to make money off the comics per se but to recoup the costs of bandwidth. If Joe user wants to pay X dollars and downloads the whole book in Y time then whoop. It's not costing the author bandwidth for the person to view it any more. It shouldn't concern the author that the person who paid once is getting "free" unlimited viewings. It's a book. You wouldn't keep paying the bookstore after you already paid for the book once.
Better to charge a fair price ($5-$15) for a quanity of comics (at least one story line or a few dozen strips whichever is greater) than to make people dick around with quarters.
Micropayments are a nice concept but it's far less of a hassle for all involved to sell things in bulk.
A kid is far more likely to send you $5 in the mail for a comic book worth of comics than to beg his parents for a quarter. The idea is that the fewer channels one has to go through to spend the money, the more likely they are to spend it. Kids would rather not have to explain why they need a "special" quarter. It's a hassle to them and it's a hassle to the parents.
People are also more likely to go through hoops to spend large sums of money than for small quantities of money. I'm not going to drive to Wal-Mart to buy a gumball even though "it's only a quarter." But if I want a DVD then I'll drive even further to get to Best Buy. That's the complete opposite of the micropayment model where the less you're trying to pay the more difficult it is.
Most people would also rather avoid buying "Disney Dollars." They'd rather spend real cash for a real product. Micropayment places don't allow $0.25 transactions. They allows a deposit of tens of dollars (with fees attached on top of that) which $0.25 transactions can be taken from. Which means even though Tommy only needs a special quarter daddy is really giving him a twenty. Daddy would have no problem tossing Tommy a quarter but daddy is going to have to think about that 20. What are the odds daddy can then withdraw $19.75 back out without any fees on top of the quarter he gave Tommy? Zero. One way or another those fees are comming out of your pocket and the company is going to take an additional hit for their own pocket for offering you the service.
The whole business model is currently flawed. Stop playing games and just sell in bulk. If you can't charge at least $1 for it, it's not worth selling on-line. It's that simple. Until credit card fees drop, that's just the reasonable limit. Sell at least $1 worth of product or nothing.
Don't use remote administration. Your system is then only as secure as your password.
Use a router. Never put your system right on the wire no matter what OS you're using.
Block all ports that you don't need the whole world to see.
Don't run services that use OS accounts. The accounts used to log into the FTP, SMTP, and POP3 servers on my server have absolutly nothing to do with the accounts used to log into Windows.
It'll be interesting to see how many lame attempts are made to haxx0r my server considering it's running Windows 2000 and hasn't been patched since January (oooooops. Did I say that?).
However for the mass market that demands a little more, Linux still falls short.
See what's dumb is that when someone says "Windows" they aren't talking about the kernel. Yet when you try to talk to a Linux zealot about Linux that's all they think about.
Who cares what the "kernel" can do if the user doesn't have an easy intuitive way to access those features. Maybe you've heard of such a thing. It's called a "User Interface."
Until Linux gets a real one of those that's mass market friendly, Linux isn't going to be ready for anything.
Obviously Linux has no real road map or it'd be "finished" and ready for the mass market already. It's not. MS accomplished in 8 years (refering to the parent post which you obviously missed) which Linux has failed to come close to accomplishing in 12-13 (again, referencing the parent post which you obviously missed).
Windows has been "finished" (as in finished all the function goals defined in the road map and ready for the mass market) since Windows 3.0 and that was long long ago.
"Very few people at Microsoft have the ability to look at all the code"
Who cares? Why waste time looking at code which has no relevance to what you're doing?
"It has been shown time and again that a programmer is orders of magnitude more efficient when they are deeply interested in what they are doing"
I guess MS workers are just more interested in what they're doing then. How else do you explain Linux having been around fot 50% more time and not being even close to done?
"Secondly, MS hires programmers and stick them where they are needed. This does not necessarily mean they are placed where their talents lie, and their interest is rarely taken into account."
I guess you must have been hired by them at one time then.
"But, happy trolling!"
Projection isn't healthy.
"I have to accomplish real work with my Linux box, work that can't be done on an XP box."
Care to enlighten us on what that work is? My guess is a server environment where a fully functioning, mass mass market ready OS isn't needed.
In 8 years MS has dominated the market with their OS. Windows 98 is still perfectly usable. It's been 12-13 years for Linux and it's far from done.
I'd love to sit around and wait for Linux to get done but I've got work to do now.
The great thing about closed source is that it has a clear road map that the developers have to follow and the developers get paid. As a result things get done far faster than in the Open Source model where it's not really clear what's needed and few are really dedicated to putting 8+ hour days in on their part all year for x years.
"Many eyes" is a joke when talking about MS. Bill Gates probably has more people working on Windows than there are people working on Linux. And if he needed "more eyes" he'd hire them.
When's the last time Nintendo released a system that could officially support Linux? When's the last time Nintendo released a console that used a common storage method like CD roms?
What's that? Never? So why isn't Slashdot bitching about that constantly?
Apparently hackers are so pathetic these days they have to force the system to cater to them rather than them catering to the system. But of course, this only applies to MS. Standards vary based on popularity of the company.
"I can't code in the XBox's language so I'm going to whine to MS until the XBox understands my language."
Nobody is required to make products "user servicable." Nobody is required to make it easy or even possible.
What's funny is that I can just see Linux zealots repeatedly smashing their faces on the glass trying to get to the food below.
"It's so close! The XBox is just a PC, if I could only get past this one thing!"
Unless the industry manages to put DRM on the RCA outs (making most every TV obsolete in the process), they can copy protect to their hearts content.
A WinTV Go ($50) can do 30fps with 640x480 resolution on a 1.2Ghz machine with little trouble given the proper compression. If you want to retain more than just stereo sound it just takes putting more money into the capture card.
Same with CDs. If I can hear it, I can record it. Worst case scenerio I will only beable to do 1x and record from the line in instead of trying to do it digitally.
They should just give it up and spend money on making better products. I have no problem buying movies I like. I just wait until they're under $20 for the DVD unless I really liked the movie.
"It seems that the DSL bandwidth over 2 copper wires has reached the point of not being able to significantly increase the capacity at anything approaching Moore's law"
What they need to do is send all the bits equal to 1 on one line and all the bits equal to 0 on the other.
The amount they could compress the data would be astounding.
That's what happens when you learn syntax instead of concepts.
I've have no problem picking up any language even after spending 8 years with QuickBASIC.
Java was rough the first semester only because of the OO part. Now OO is all I do. The last project I did in QB was over a year ago which was simply to test out some CONCEPTS before recreating the project in C++ with DirectX. It was 90 lines of QB and 3000 lines of C++/DirectX. That's why QB is an excellent beginner language.
You just can't get hung up on syntax or you're screwed no matter what language you start with.
I run Windows 2000 on a Gateway P200 with 96MB of ram. Runs just fine.
98 runs great on my P133 32MB laptop.
I have XP Pro running great on a PIII 933 with 128MB of ram.
But it's great to tell people it takes a fast system to run Windows. It helps encourage people to upgrade or buy a brand spanking new system. Good for the economy.
Ben
Oh. You mean like a Mac?
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Seriously. MS comming out with a proprietary PC has nothing to do with being a monopoly.
Unless they prevent me from building my own systems and running whatever I want on them, there's not an issue.
I wouldn't be shocked if MS came out with a WindowsPC. If they can put together a good PC at a good price, great for them.
Everything that has happened in The Matrix has happened for a reason. This idea of "purpose" is laid down thick in "Reloaded." Cause and effect. The most pointless scene in all of Matrix: Reloaded was the love scene. It was painfully out of place. It may just be a red haring. It may have just been a poor attempt at selling tickets. My theory is that it will play a role in the final Matrix. I'm hoping it won't be a blatant rip off of Star Wars where everyone though Anakin was "The One" while it turns out it was his son and Anakin actually ends up being evil. I believe there will be a baby however the purpose of that baby may simply be to leave room for another trilogy. Or it may play a role in breaking free of what is really controlling everyone.
-----------
After writing that I believe the Matrix is playing with the snake which eats it's own tale theme. Neo is either his own father or the son of God who will destroy his father and who's son will be destined to one day destroy him. This plays with the standard Greek storyline that Gods would bear children destined to destroy them so they would devise ways to keep their children from learning their destiny in an effort to maintain their control.
Either way, I believe Neo is both responsible for the enslavement of mankind and the source of it's freedom.
The prophecy is the control which keeps Neo on this circular path. Now that he has love he may otherthrow "God" but choose not to become greedy and seek more power resulting in the circle going around one more time.
We may either see that Neo raises his son to love his father thus breaking the cycle or that there is no free will and we learn WHY the choices were made that keep the circle going. It's a matter of considering what point the authors are trying to make.
In Red Dwarf it was simply accepted that Lister was his own father and that nothing can change destiny. That may be the case with The Matrix as well. Either way it would be a satisfactory conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
"If easily fabricated evidence such as this can get someone in jail"
It's called "logging." And what "fabricated evidence?" Your entire argument is based on your assumption that the only thing the RIAA has to go on in the IP and your assumption that it's all a court need. Whereas that's never actually been the case.
The ISP also would probably have logs of your activity at that time. I know my University can determine what's being transfered over the networks if it has a reason to care. I could run Etereal on my own network and track everything anyone on my network is doing.
If someone uploads pirated stuff to my server and some company comes along and threatens to sue me, I can pull up my logs and get the exact time the files were uploaded and what IP did it. The company can then go to the ISP for that IP at that time which the ISP can reduce to a single account and verify they were indeed uploading the pirated files to my server at that time.
Ben
This feature will come in handy in Florida.
Ben
Since Windows easily has more than 50% of the mass market, this won't be a problem. If you happen to fall into the 50% of the population that does vote and doesn't have access to a Windows box (hint: see local library) you're probably a Linux zealot. And being a Linux zealot means you're a communist. So really, you shouldn't be voting anyway.
I think our government has made an excellent decision.
Ben
So don't use them.
The idea of a language shouldn't be to force people to code the way you think they should code.
Ben
The extra bloat in Visual Basic is forced into my projects wether I use it or not.
C++ on the other hand can have all the extra stuff it wants and it doesn't affect my project. If I don't wan to use templates or whatever, I don't have to. And the compiler won't force me to include anything.
Whining about C++ having too many features is like bitching that Baskin Robbins has too many flavors. Nobody is forcing you to buy them.
Ben
I run free anonymous FTP off my server because I can. Occasionally someone asks me if I worry about someone filling up my HD and crashing my server in the process.
Then I point out it takes around 8 hours to back up the 80GB drive over a 100Mbit LAN. I have a 640Kbit downstream connection. It would take a month to fill the entire drive.
I had someone connected to my server for 14 hours uploading a pirated game. I let him finish. Opened up the zip file and replaced everything in it with a single text file with the person's IP and log entries showing their attempt to pirate software.
I've often burned stuff to CD rather than upload it to my server over the net. Even for relativly small sites like my own, it's far more efficient. It's never an emergency situation where the files have to be there "this second" anyway.
It's not surprising that big companies don't waste their bandwidth that customers need and just transfer physical media instead where possible.
Ben
They know pretty well how fast it was going by looking at the time from the break to the hit on the video. They can then figure out the distance it traveled in that time and with basic math get a good idea of how fast it was going.
It was only a few frames and it's quite a distance from where it came off of to the wing.
There's very little speculation about how fast it was going.
Ben
Being a fan doesn't make you immune from the law. Fans who steal aren't fans worth having.
Ben
"Some people are just trying to sell their art, and the less they can charge, the better exposure they will get."
Actually not really. There's a point where it's too cheap. And when it comes to micropayments, the less you charge the more of a hassle it is to pay. So not only is it a hassle but it's so cheap people begin to wonder if it's cheap because it's crap. And if it's crap, it's not worth the hassle.
The guy should put out some free comics first and then in a year or two when he gets popular, worry about charging for books. As it is, he has no audience. This is just a publicity stunt to try to aquire one. I don't sell comics. And what I do sell, I waited two years to start charging for and only did because my bandwidth was being sucked dry. I looked through my logs and figured out what most people wanted and then started charging a small fee to get it.
Sluggy, RealLife and Sinfest are all huge and don't charge a cent. They have other ways to make money.
Contrary to what you may think, an on-line comic doesn't take much bandwidth at all. By the time it does, you'll have an audience and a huge number of comics to compile into collections to sell to cover the costs.
"To read the whole thing will cost you 75 cents. That's a good price for a comic book"
That's a good price for a comic book that the police department would end up just giving away to kids. If it's really a quality piece of work, the guy should charge more than a dollar and less than $5.
"Third, you obviously didn't read the BitPass site very carefully. There are no extra fees for the buyer."
You're right. They charge the undisclosed fee(s) to the seller. That's a big giant red flag. Even PayPal (which I've never had a problem with. It's not a bank, don't treat it like one.) makes their fee schedule easy to find.
Ben
That's *only* 800,000 users (the world is a big place) and one more pointless middleman selling people Disney Dollars.
Micropayments turn web-masters into beggers. Is your site that barren that people are more likely to spend a quarter and never come back?
Is it not concievable to you that you have at least $1 worth of merchandise you can sell up front to the customer instead of trying to scrape pennies at a time? Are you putting a gumball machine on-line or what?
If customers are very likely to buy at least $1 worth of merchandise then why not sell it to them up front and give them some free stuff to look at to help encourage the sell?
If you have a $1 worth of merchandise then you don't need Disney Dollars like e-gold. You can give the middle man the middle finger and go straight through PayPal or whatever you want.
Micropayment systems are just breeding potential con-men who turn real money into fools gold and then demand a cut of real money for you to get it back. When CC companies lower their fees then I'll lower my minimum price and offer smaller minimum quanities of my product.
I refuse to make Joe User jump through hoops just so they can spend a quarter and force myself to have to pay Joe Loan Shark AND PayPal for the ability to allow Joe User to do such a thing.
It makes absolutly no sense.
Ben
I actually had a dollar bill mailed to me from France from someone who wanted an account at my site. Another sent a $1 bill from New York.
$0.25 per strip is rediculous. I charge $1.00 to get 30 days of access to anything on my site. $2 for 120, and $5 for 365. I use PayPal to handle on-line transactions.
Sluggy.com has his comics set up in "books." What would make sense (and be easier for all involved) is to charge X dollars for access to a "book" for Y amount of time.
The idea isn't to make money off the comics per se but to recoup the costs of bandwidth. If Joe user wants to pay X dollars and downloads the whole book in Y time then whoop. It's not costing the author bandwidth for the person to view it any more. It shouldn't concern the author that the person who paid once is getting "free" unlimited viewings. It's a book. You wouldn't keep paying the bookstore after you already paid for the book once.
Better to charge a fair price ($5-$15) for a quanity of comics (at least one story line or a few dozen strips whichever is greater) than to make people dick around with quarters.
Micropayments are a nice concept but it's far less of a hassle for all involved to sell things in bulk.
A kid is far more likely to send you $5 in the mail for a comic book worth of comics than to beg his parents for a quarter. The idea is that the fewer channels one has to go through to spend the money, the more likely they are to spend it. Kids would rather not have to explain why they need a "special" quarter. It's a hassle to them and it's a hassle to the parents.
People are also more likely to go through hoops to spend large sums of money than for small quantities of money. I'm not going to drive to Wal-Mart to buy a gumball even though "it's only a quarter." But if I want a DVD then I'll drive even further to get to Best Buy. That's the complete opposite of the micropayment model where the less you're trying to pay the more difficult it is.
Most people would also rather avoid buying "Disney Dollars." They'd rather spend real cash for a real product. Micropayment places don't allow $0.25 transactions. They allows a deposit of tens of dollars (with fees attached on top of that) which $0.25 transactions can be taken from. Which means even though Tommy only needs a special quarter daddy is really giving him a twenty. Daddy would have no problem tossing Tommy a quarter but daddy is going to have to think about that 20. What are the odds daddy can then withdraw $19.75 back out without any fees on top of the quarter he gave Tommy? Zero. One way or another those fees are comming out of your pocket and the company is going to take an additional hit for their own pocket for offering you the service.
The whole business model is currently flawed. Stop playing games and just sell in bulk. If you can't charge at least $1 for it, it's not worth selling on-line. It's that simple. Until credit card fees drop, that's just the reasonable limit. Sell at least $1 worth of product or nothing.
Ben
How to lock down a server:
Don't use remote administration. Your system is then only as secure as your password.
Use a router. Never put your system right on the wire no matter what OS you're using.
Block all ports that you don't need the whole world to see.
Don't run services that use OS accounts. The accounts used to log into the FTP, SMTP, and POP3 servers on my server have absolutly nothing to do with the accounts used to log into Windows.
It'll be interesting to see how many lame attempts are made to haxx0r my server considering it's running Windows 2000 and hasn't been patched since January (oooooops. Did I say that?).
Ben
Wow, Linux can make pretty pictures.
However for the mass market that demands a little more, Linux still falls short.
See what's dumb is that when someone says "Windows" they aren't talking about the kernel. Yet when you try to talk to a Linux zealot about Linux that's all they think about.
Who cares what the "kernel" can do if the user doesn't have an easy intuitive way to access those features. Maybe you've heard of such a thing. It's called a "User Interface."
Until Linux gets a real one of those that's mass market friendly, Linux isn't going to be ready for anything.
Ben
Obviously Linux has no real road map or it'd be "finished" and ready for the mass market already. It's not. MS accomplished in 8 years (refering to the parent post which you obviously missed) which Linux has failed to come close to accomplishing in 12-13 (again, referencing the parent post which you obviously missed).
Windows has been "finished" (as in finished all the function goals defined in the road map and ready for the mass market) since Windows 3.0 and that was long long ago.
"Very few people at Microsoft have the ability to look at all the code"
Who cares? Why waste time looking at code which has no relevance to what you're doing?
"It has been shown time and again that a programmer is orders of magnitude more efficient when they are deeply interested in what they are doing"
I guess MS workers are just more interested in what they're doing then. How else do you explain Linux having been around fot 50% more time and not being even close to done?
"Secondly, MS hires programmers and stick them where they are needed. This does not necessarily mean they are placed where their talents lie, and their interest is rarely taken into account."
I guess you must have been hired by them at one time then.
"But, happy trolling!"
Projection isn't healthy.
"I have to accomplish real work with my Linux box, work that can't be done on an XP box."
Care to enlighten us on what that work is? My guess is a server environment where a fully functioning, mass mass market ready OS isn't needed.
Ben
In 8 years MS has dominated the market with their OS. Windows 98 is still perfectly usable. It's been 12-13 years for Linux and it's far from done.
I'd love to sit around and wait for Linux to get done but I've got work to do now.
The great thing about closed source is that it has a clear road map that the developers have to follow and the developers get paid. As a result things get done far faster than in the Open Source model where it's not really clear what's needed and few are really dedicated to putting 8+ hour days in on their part all year for x years.
"Many eyes" is a joke when talking about MS. Bill Gates probably has more people working on Windows than there are people working on Linux. And if he needed "more eyes" he'd hire them.
Ben
When's the last time Nintendo released a system that could officially support Linux? When's the last time Nintendo released a console that used a common storage method like CD roms?
What's that? Never? So why isn't Slashdot bitching about that constantly?
Apparently hackers are so pathetic these days they have to force the system to cater to them rather than them catering to the system. But of course, this only applies to MS. Standards vary based on popularity of the company.
"I can't code in the XBox's language so I'm going to whine to MS until the XBox understands my language."
Nobody is required to make products "user servicable." Nobody is required to make it easy or even possible.
What's funny is that I can just see Linux zealots repeatedly smashing their faces on the glass trying to get to the food below.
"It's so close! The XBox is just a PC, if I could only get past this one thing!"
Give it up.
Ben
An installer for a Linux product!
Ben
Unless the industry manages to put DRM on the RCA outs (making most every TV obsolete in the process), they can copy protect to their hearts content.
A WinTV Go ($50) can do 30fps with 640x480 resolution on a 1.2Ghz machine with little trouble given the proper compression. If you want to retain more than just stereo sound it just takes putting more money into the capture card.
Same with CDs. If I can hear it, I can record it. Worst case scenerio I will only beable to do 1x and record from the line in instead of trying to do it digitally.
They should just give it up and spend money on making better products. I have no problem buying movies I like. I just wait until they're under $20 for the DVD unless I really liked the movie.
Ben
"It seems that the DSL bandwidth over 2 copper wires has reached the point of not being able to significantly increase the capacity at anything approaching Moore's law"
What they need to do is send all the bits equal to 1 on one line and all the bits equal to 0 on the other.
The amount they could compress the data would be astounding.
Ben
Why not use it?
Ben
That's what happens when you learn syntax instead of concepts.
I've have no problem picking up any language even after spending 8 years with QuickBASIC.
Java was rough the first semester only because of the OO part. Now OO is all I do. The last project I did in QB was over a year ago which was simply to test out some CONCEPTS before recreating the project in C++ with DirectX. It was 90 lines of QB and 3000 lines of C++/DirectX. That's why QB is an excellent beginner language.
You just can't get hung up on syntax or you're screwed no matter what language you start with.
Ben
It's called a Social Security Number, birth records, finger printing ect.
Ben
I run Windows 2000 on a Gateway P200 with 96MB of ram. Runs just fine.
98 runs great on my P133 32MB laptop.
I have XP Pro running great on a PIII 933 with 128MB of ram.
But it's great to tell people it takes a fast system to run Windows. It helps encourage people to upgrade or buy a brand spanking new system. Good for the economy.
Ben
Seriously. MS comming out with a proprietary PC has nothing to do with being a monopoly.
Unless they prevent me from building my own systems and running whatever I want on them, there's not an issue.
I wouldn't be shocked if MS came out with a WindowsPC. If they can put together a good PC at a good price, great for them.
Ben
From a larger analysis of the movie at
http://www.icarusindie.com
Everything that has happened in The Matrix has happened for a reason. This idea of "purpose" is laid down thick in "Reloaded." Cause and effect. The most pointless scene in all of Matrix: Reloaded was the love scene. It was painfully out of place. It may just be a red haring. It may have just been a poor attempt at selling tickets. My theory is that it will play a role in the final Matrix. I'm hoping it won't be a blatant rip off of Star Wars where everyone though Anakin was "The One" while it turns out it was his son and Anakin actually ends up being evil. I believe there will be a baby however the purpose of that baby may simply be to leave room for another trilogy. Or it may play a role in breaking free of what is really controlling everyone.
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After writing that I believe the Matrix is playing with the snake which eats it's own tale theme. Neo is either his own father or the son of God who will destroy his father and who's son will be destined to one day destroy him. This plays with the standard Greek storyline that Gods would bear children destined to destroy them so they would devise ways to keep their children from learning their destiny in an effort to maintain their control.
Either way, I believe Neo is both responsible for the enslavement of mankind and the source of it's freedom.
The prophecy is the control which keeps Neo on this circular path. Now that he has love he may otherthrow "God" but choose not to become greedy and seek more power resulting in the circle going around one more time.
We may either see that Neo raises his son to love his father thus breaking the cycle or that there is no free will and we learn WHY the choices were made that keep the circle going. It's a matter of considering what point the authors are trying to make.
In Red Dwarf it was simply accepted that Lister was his own father and that nothing can change destiny. That may be the case with The Matrix as well. Either way it would be a satisfactory conclusion.
Ben