I'm saddened by the fact that this thing will probably come under some extreme environmental protest simply because it contains the words "nuclear" or "reactor".
Not to mention that the reactor is probably sturdy enough to survive an liftoff abort destruct, or falling back to Earth. These things aren't engineered to be large radation hazards.
Besides, nuclear material goes up on a lot of spacecraft and the world hasn't ended yet.
Do you want reliable telephone service? Even if there is a power failure?
Hmm... I have plenty of battery backup. Past that, I have a generator. And failing that, I still have a POTS line the DSL lives on. Then there's cell phones... but I don't think I need to talk to people on the phone that badly. If something bad enough happens that kills my power and other utilities for over 24 hours, there's probably better things to worry about than some phone service.
considering that he mentions that because of the availability of broadband as being one of the methods that allows this to happen, I doubt that they will continue to cater to the 56k realmedia format.
Perhaps not realmedia, but considering the size of an archive of this nature, you can't fault them for choosing 56k.
Yeah but it requires you buy a HDTV tuner with Firewire output. So you are essentially purchasing the same thing as a ATSC tuner board and plugging it into a PC with firewire output. You can do all you describe on a PC with windows already. So that's nothing new. What is new is the broadcast protection flag and how it will be finally implemented. I personally wouldn't spend a whole lot of cash on hardware HD tuners with digital interfaces - one might find them not to be 'HDTV Ready' when the specs are finally ratified and implemented.
Well, I have a Mits 511 series, and it came with FireWire jacks. Cost to add recording capabilities to the TV: free. And that was basically my goal.
In my playing with the Mits set and transport streams, I did stumble across the broadcast protection flag. Basically, it just flashed a message up on screen saying "recording prohibited" or something of that nature.
The goal of the broadcast protection flag is to prevent any recording, and it's been there since the beginning. All someone has to do is switch it on with their broadcasts and nobody can record it. They just haven't done that yet.
You don't have to buy anything if you get a set (or tuner) with FireWire. Any Mitsubishi HD integrated (including promise module upgraded) set or the Samsung 165 STB will do, since they have built-in controllers. The WalMart special HDTV probably won't cut it.
Like I said, this isn't for everyone. But with I got the Mits 511 I knew it had FireWire and what it was capable of doing, but I haven't tried to exploit it until recently. But if you have FireWire access to your tuner, and a computer laying around, you get a free HD recorder.
This is pretty neat, but it appears to fall short of being able to just capture the ATSC stream and play it back unmodified to the TV.
Not everyone needs mad power hardware or cards to decode the MPEG2 stream and output it. Some HD tuners, like those included in the Mitsubishi HD sets, have FireWire jacks that are capable of feeding the transport stream to something (typically a D-VHS deck) and accepting a transport stream back from a device.
Apple has released a sample application with their FireWire SDK for MacOS X called VirtualDVHS that I've been playing with. My notes on it are here. The FireWire enabled tuner does all the work, including sending start/stop commands to the device, and on Mits sets, timer recordings.
It's a great little program, and since it's a SDK, you get all the source code for it and the FireWire drivers. The TV's remote control works (commands sent via the FireWire interface) and here's the best part: it works on a dead slow stock CPU G3 266. This computer can't even play simple QuickTime movies properly, yet it works like a charm because all it does is capture and stream back the MPEG2 transport stream. The tuner's decoder does all the hard work.
Okay, so it isn't a PVR with nifty features and whatnot, nor will it work if you don't have a tuner with FireWire jacks. But I don't care too much about the PVR features for the moment because there isn't enough OTA HD programming yet. All I need it to do is time shift a few programs each week when I'll have to be at work, or busy with school, or whatnot.
VirtualDVHS may be a ghetto program, but it gives you a glimpse of what you can do with MPEG2 streams. No special ATSC cards required. And hey, you get the source: make it do more of what you want and tell people about it, or write your own.
Okay... so it costs time and money to clean these random virus outbreaks from Windows machines. So did the last big virus problem before this, and the one before it, and so on.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why do businesses and consumers put up with this stuff?
1) I don't think the built-in SCSI is supported (I couldn't get it to recognize a SCSI scanner). I haven't tried the floppy.
Built in SCSI works. I'm using an old G3 266 as a Retrospect backup server hooked to a poor man's autoloader (three tape drives I got off eBay) and it's booting off a SCSI hard drive.
The built in floppy is not supported; OS X does not come with a driver for it. If you really need the internal floppy, and don't want to spend money on a USB floppy drive (and USB card, as the beige G3 does not have USB) you can try this. I don't know if it works because I don't use floppies.
You can still download the player codec for free, no adware. The *encoder* has been ad-supported for a while I think. They just shuffled the links around.
Too bad your post can't be moved to the top. You're 100% correct; they just changed some links.
Of course, someone panics and posts a story saying it's all adware now. If only they looked at the big fat link that said "Download the DivX codec (no cost)".
And what brand and model are these "desktop quality" IDE drives? Or does a drive become desktop-quality just because it has an IDE board on the bottom instead of a SCSI board?
Last I saw, they were Western Digital drives. Any WD fans here? Not me.
I wonder if Dreamworks will ever come up with some original concepts for their animated films.
Well, I personally thought all of the Dreamworks films listed (With the exception of Monsters Inc. and Shrek since the two concepts had nothing in common) were way better than any of the films Disney released.
And still, for some reason, you don't see Linux having the influence that one thinks it should. I mean... low maintenance OS, dead stable, (insert pro-Linux reason here), etc.
People seem to like to use the word because it sounds cool, or makes them sound smart, or because they heard their friend say it. Like "who will think of the children?" or "what would Jesus do?" They probably have no idea what they're saying about except that they heard it on TV once.
That's the problem, it doesn't matter to the decision makers. No support is a big deal breaker, even if the downtime for the system in querstion is once in never.
There is no answer to the question until some big name breaks out the Linux support.
Yates gave the example of an installation of 50 DHCP servers running Linux, which was set up several years ago, and for which the technical support is tenuous. "The people who set them up have gone on to other projects," he said. "People are terrified about what the support would be like if something went wrong."
I think that pretty much sums it up. Too many people thing computer = Windows and don't know how to use anything else. So if the Linux server (God forbid) breaks, who will be around to fix it?
And no, whatever monkey was assigned to look after the box after the guys who were l33t enough to set the whole thing up is probably not going to research the problem. He was probably hired to look at the pretty light and call whatever vendor's tech support when the light went out.
That, and if something does go wrong, there's someone else to blame.
Funny thing I've been reading about these posts are people comparing this kind of crime (if you call it that) to murder, stealing your car, etc. The difference is one is intellectual property and one is not, and thus treated differently under the law.
On a different note, conspiracy to commit murder or being an accessory to a murder even if you didn't commit the crime still makes you a criminal under the law.
And what's this about "if it's on my property I have a right to see it" stupidity? There was a police helicoper flying over my house yesterday. Does that mean I can shoot it down for violating my personal airspace? I don't think so. Yes, you have a right to pick up that signal. Nobody is stopping you from doing that. The question is do you have the rights to view its contents?
In the case of DBS, no, you do not have the right. You haven't been granted that right by the controlling body of that signal. Don't like it? Too bad; start your own DBS company and do things the way you want to do them.
Why does everyone think the world owes them everything and everything should be free? Sorry guys, we don't live in that world yet.
I suppose there is some justification for this - I personally do not trust the US government or most US corporations, and I'm sure I'm not the only one out there. RFID tags could be interpreted as microminiaturized radio collars, by the (vast majority of) Americans who are not too techno-savvy, and most people fear what they don't understand. You don't put a radio collar on something unless you want to watch where it goes and what it does.
Forget the goverment and corporations... what if someone gets some black market scanner and starts watching you? What you buy, what you like, and so on to use for some nefarious purpose? It could bring stalking to a whole new level.
On the flipside, what if the same technology being used to stalk you was used by the police to catch your stalker? Two sides to the same coin. It's all about how it's used.
Leave it to anything like this to bring the "conspiracy theory my privacy is being violated the man is watching me" comments.
I hate to break it to you guys, but guess what? You're already being watched! Do you have a credit card? A bank account? Do you have an account on/. with an email address? Did you pay for your internet connection using your credit card to post using your/. account?
Your purchases can already be tracked. My cell phone bill can track me too, and let's not get started on the possibility of using a cell phone in operation to place someone within the certain range of a cell site, let alone GPS enabled cell phones.
YOU ARE NOT ANONYMOUS. Somebody knows.
If someone, say the police, wanted to track you down, they could. That isn't anything new at all. For cryin' out loud, what do you people really expect in a world of technology?
And for that matter... privacy means "freedom from unauthorized intrusion." What happens when that intrustion is authorized? Say you buy a knife with an RFID tag and go stabbing people with it. My knife has an RFID tag, but I'm not killing anyone with it, so I don't care. The guy with the tagged knife will probably care, because then he might get caught. The RIFD tags in my shoes could track Mr. Knifer, and me too, but nobody really cares where I'm going.
Every technology can be used and abused, like the knife. I can make dinner with it or kill you with it. It's a matter of controlling its authorized use. Even then, no matter what anyone does, someone will find a way to abuse it. The only solution to that, dear readers, is to disavow civilization and live in caves.
Okay, now I'm not aware of what was on the site beyond what the letter on the site and the/. story say, however...
In today's litigation happy world, why even risk having ROM images available? Such things are just begging for trouble. The cease and desist letter sounds like some copy of the game itself (beyond tech manuals) was available.
If it was just tech manuals, then yeah, it's stupid. For ROM images, whoever put them there is stupid. It doesn't matter what we think about the software in question, if it's still protected by copyright, then you invite the wrath of lawyers.
Once you get on enough opt-in lists, you get so much spam from legitimate servers that RBLs don't work anymore.
The big difference being that one can usually get themselves removed from a legitimate mailing list. The "enlarge your equipment 500 times while pleasing her for hours" spams typically aren't opt-in. (If they are, perhaps one should consider a change in the websites one frequents.)
Seems to me that you've got a user problem. If you're on an opt-in list, chances are good that you did it yourself.
Look at today's children's cartoons and you'll find nothing like Wimpy. Instead, you'll see obviously gay characters like Spongebob Squarepants, who epitomizes and glorifies chronic laziness and disrespect for authority.
Why is everything gay these days? Something like this is on TV and you suddenly get a group going "oh that's just so *gay* can't you see it?"
I dunno about you guys, but I don't go around looking for and assuming gay themes everywhere I turn. It's like that annoying guy in alt.tv.stargate-sg1 who keeps asking if the character Jonas is gay. Who really cares? Does it make the world better to have confirmed gay characters in TV shows?
Everything is frickin' assumed to be "gay" it's becoming so retarded. Did I miss the boat that said everything is supposed to be gay?
Is it any surprise that generation Xers grow up with no work ethic and a feeling of entitlement, when they have been indoctrinated with this kind of skewed moral framework?
Maybe if kids grow up sitting on their ass and watching TV all day. Go outside and ride a bike.
~Seth, who is typing the word "gay" too much today
Slashdot Mirror
I'm saddened by the fact that this thing will probably come under some extreme environmental protest simply because it contains the words "nuclear" or "reactor".
Not to mention that the reactor is probably sturdy enough to survive an liftoff abort destruct, or falling back to Earth. These things aren't engineered to be large radation hazards.
Besides, nuclear material goes up on a lot of spacecraft and the world hasn't ended yet.
Do you want reliable telephone service? Even if there is a power failure?
Hmm... I have plenty of battery backup. Past that, I have a generator. And failing that, I still have a POTS line the DSL lives on. Then there's cell phones... but I don't think I need to talk to people on the phone that badly. If something bad enough happens that kills my power and other utilities for over 24 hours, there's probably better things to worry about than some phone service.
considering that he mentions that because of the availability of broadband as being one of the methods that allows this to happen, I doubt that they will continue to cater to the 56k realmedia format.
Perhaps not realmedia, but considering the size of an archive of this nature, you can't fault them for choosing 56k.
Yeah but it requires you buy a HDTV tuner with Firewire output. So you are essentially purchasing the same thing as a ATSC tuner board and plugging it into a PC with firewire output. You can do all you describe on a PC with windows already. So that's nothing new. What is new is the broadcast protection flag and how it will be finally implemented. I personally wouldn't spend a whole lot of cash on hardware HD tuners with digital interfaces - one might find them not to be 'HDTV Ready' when the specs are finally ratified and implemented.
Well, I have a Mits 511 series, and it came with FireWire jacks. Cost to add recording capabilities to the TV: free. And that was basically my goal.
In my playing with the Mits set and transport streams, I did stumble across the broadcast protection flag. Basically, it just flashed a message up on screen saying "recording prohibited" or something of that nature.
The goal of the broadcast protection flag is to prevent any recording, and it's been there since the beginning. All someone has to do is switch it on with their broadcasts and nobody can record it. They just haven't done that yet.
You don't have to buy anything if you get a set (or tuner) with FireWire. Any Mitsubishi HD integrated (including promise module upgraded) set or the Samsung 165 STB will do, since they have built-in controllers. The WalMart special HDTV probably won't cut it.
Like I said, this isn't for everyone. But with I got the Mits 511 I knew it had FireWire and what it was capable of doing, but I haven't tried to exploit it until recently. But if you have FireWire access to your tuner, and a computer laying around, you get a free HD recorder.
This is pretty neat, but it appears to fall short of being able to just capture the ATSC stream and play it back unmodified to the TV.
Not everyone needs mad power hardware or cards to decode the MPEG2 stream and output it. Some HD tuners, like those included in the Mitsubishi HD sets, have FireWire jacks that are capable of feeding the transport stream to something (typically a D-VHS deck) and accepting a transport stream back from a device.
Apple has released a sample application with their FireWire SDK for MacOS X called VirtualDVHS that I've been playing with. My notes on it are here. The FireWire enabled tuner does all the work, including sending start/stop commands to the device, and on Mits sets, timer recordings.
It's a great little program, and since it's a SDK, you get all the source code for it and the FireWire drivers. The TV's remote control works (commands sent via the FireWire interface) and here's the best part: it works on a dead slow stock CPU G3 266. This computer can't even play simple QuickTime movies properly, yet it works like a charm because all it does is capture and stream back the MPEG2 transport stream. The tuner's decoder does all the hard work.
Okay, so it isn't a PVR with nifty features and whatnot, nor will it work if you don't have a tuner with FireWire jacks. But I don't care too much about the PVR features for the moment because there isn't enough OTA HD programming yet. All I need it to do is time shift a few programs each week when I'll have to be at work, or busy with school, or whatnot.
VirtualDVHS may be a ghetto program, but it gives you a glimpse of what you can do with MPEG2 streams. No special ATSC cards required. And hey, you get the source: make it do more of what you want and tell people about it, or write your own.
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior[not audentor} ito.- Virgil.
Dammit... i blame the keyboard.
Okay... so it costs time and money to clean these random virus outbreaks from Windows machines. So did the last big virus problem before this, and the one before it, and so on.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why do businesses and consumers put up with this stuff?
1) I don't think the built-in SCSI is supported (I couldn't get it to recognize a SCSI scanner). I haven't tried the floppy.
Built in SCSI works. I'm using an old G3 266 as a Retrospect backup server hooked to a poor man's autoloader (three tape drives I got off eBay) and it's booting off a SCSI hard drive.
The built in floppy is not supported; OS X does not come with a driver for it. If you really need the internal floppy, and don't want to spend money on a USB floppy drive (and USB card, as the beige G3 does not have USB) you can try this. I don't know if it works because I don't use floppies.
You can still download the player codec for free, no adware. The *encoder* has been ad-supported for a while I think. They just shuffled the links around.
Too bad your post can't be moved to the top. You're 100% correct; they just changed some links.
Of course, someone panics and posts a story saying it's all adware now. If only they looked at the big fat link that said "Download the DivX codec (no cost)".
Hooray for reading!
It's just x86 version. Where are Linux/PPC, Linux/SPARC and all other Linux versions?
p
Mac OS, that is. Works on 8.6 or higher, including X. There is no Linux/PPC version AFAIK.
http://www.divx.com/divx/system_requirements.ph
And what brand and model are these "desktop quality" IDE drives? Or does a drive become desktop-quality just because it has an IDE board on the bottom instead of a SCSI board?
Last I saw, they were Western Digital drives. Any WD fans here? Not me.
I wonder if Dreamworks will ever come up with some original concepts for their animated films.
Well, I personally thought all of the Dreamworks films listed (With the exception of Monsters Inc. and Shrek since the two concepts had nothing in common) were way better than any of the films Disney released.
Or is it just me?
And still, for some reason, you don't see Linux having the influence that one thinks it should. I mean... low maintenance OS, dead stable, (insert pro-Linux reason here), etc.
Why is that? I don't have an answer.
People seem to like to use the word because it sounds cool, or makes them sound smart, or because they heard their friend say it. Like "who will think of the children?" or "what would Jesus do?" They probably have no idea what they're saying about except that they heard it on TV once.
Isn't it ironic?
The real solution to stop piracy is to drop the prices on software, music, and movies to a reasonable amount.
I disagree, to a point. I think the real solution is to stop trying to sell mindless drivel. Until then, they aren't getting my money.
That's the problem, it doesn't matter to the decision makers. No support is a big deal breaker, even if the downtime for the system in querstion is once in never.
There is no answer to the question until some big name breaks out the Linux support.
From the article:
Yates gave the example of an installation of 50 DHCP servers running Linux, which was set up several years ago, and for which the technical support is tenuous. "The people who set them up have gone on to other projects," he said. "People are terrified about what the support would be like if something went wrong."
I think that pretty much sums it up. Too many people thing computer = Windows and don't know how to use anything else. So if the Linux server (God forbid) breaks, who will be around to fix it?
And no, whatever monkey was assigned to look after the box after the guys who were l33t enough to set the whole thing up is probably not going to research the problem. He was probably hired to look at the pretty light and call whatever vendor's tech support when the light went out.
That, and if something does go wrong, there's someone else to blame.
Funny thing I've been reading about these posts are people comparing this kind of crime (if you call it that) to murder, stealing your car, etc. The difference is one is intellectual property and one is not, and thus treated differently under the law.
On a different note, conspiracy to commit murder or being an accessory to a murder even if you didn't commit the crime still makes you a criminal under the law.
And what's this about "if it's on my property I have a right to see it" stupidity? There was a police helicoper flying over my house yesterday. Does that mean I can shoot it down for violating my personal airspace? I don't think so. Yes, you have a right to pick up that signal. Nobody is stopping you from doing that. The question is do you have the rights to view its contents?
In the case of DBS, no, you do not have the right. You haven't been granted that right by the controlling body of that signal. Don't like it? Too bad; start your own DBS company and do things the way you want to do them.
Why does everyone think the world owes them everything and everything should be free? Sorry guys, we don't live in that world yet.
I suppose there is some justification for this - I personally do not trust the US government or most US corporations, and I'm sure I'm not the only one out there. RFID tags could be interpreted as microminiaturized radio collars, by the (vast majority of) Americans who are not too techno-savvy, and most people fear what they don't understand. You don't put a radio collar on something unless you want to watch where it goes and what it does.
Forget the goverment and corporations... what if someone gets some black market scanner and starts watching you? What you buy, what you like, and so on to use for some nefarious purpose? It could bring stalking to a whole new level.
On the flipside, what if the same technology being used to stalk you was used by the police to catch your stalker? Two sides to the same coin. It's all about how it's used.
Leave it to anything like this to bring the "conspiracy theory my privacy is being violated the man is watching me" comments.
/. with an email address? Did you pay for your internet connection using your credit card to post using your /. account?
I hate to break it to you guys, but guess what? You're already being watched! Do you have a credit card? A bank account? Do you have an account on
Your purchases can already be tracked. My cell phone bill can track me too, and let's not get started on the possibility of using a cell phone in operation to place someone within the certain range of a cell site, let alone GPS enabled cell phones.
YOU ARE NOT ANONYMOUS. Somebody knows.
If someone, say the police, wanted to track you down, they could. That isn't anything new at all. For cryin' out loud, what do you people really expect in a world of technology?
And for that matter... privacy means "freedom from unauthorized intrusion." What happens when that intrustion is authorized? Say you buy a knife with an RFID tag and go stabbing people with it. My knife has an RFID tag, but I'm not killing anyone with it, so I don't care. The guy with the tagged knife will probably care, because then he might get caught. The RIFD tags in my shoes could track Mr. Knifer, and me too, but nobody really cares where I'm going.
Every technology can be used and abused, like the knife. I can make dinner with it or kill you with it. It's a matter of controlling its authorized use. Even then, no matter what anyone does, someone will find a way to abuse it. The only solution to that, dear readers, is to disavow civilization and live in caves.
Then make the ENTIRE album good, not one ot two songs worthy of listening to and the rest crappy worthless filler. That's the real problem.
If your album sucks ass, except for a couple of songs, no way am I going to buy the whole thing. I'll just pick up what I like and avoid the rest.
Okay, now I'm not aware of what was on the site beyond what the letter on the site and the /. story say, however...
In today's litigation happy world, why even risk having ROM images available? Such things are just begging for trouble. The cease and desist letter sounds like some copy of the game itself (beyond tech manuals) was available.
If it was just tech manuals, then yeah, it's stupid. For ROM images, whoever put them there is stupid. It doesn't matter what we think about the software in question, if it's still protected by copyright, then you invite the wrath of lawyers.
Once you get on enough opt-in lists, you get so much spam from legitimate servers that RBLs don't work anymore.
The big difference being that one can usually get themselves removed from a legitimate mailing list. The "enlarge your equipment 500 times while pleasing her for hours" spams typically aren't opt-in. (If they are, perhaps one should consider a change in the websites one frequents.)
Seems to me that you've got a user problem. If you're on an opt-in list, chances are good that you did it yourself.
now, it's right back offline, due to the slashdot effect.
Look at today's children's cartoons and you'll find nothing like Wimpy. Instead, you'll see obviously gay characters like Spongebob Squarepants, who epitomizes and glorifies chronic laziness and disrespect for authority.
Why is everything gay these days? Something like this is on TV and you suddenly get a group going "oh that's just so *gay* can't you see it?"
I dunno about you guys, but I don't go around looking for and assuming gay themes everywhere I turn. It's like that annoying guy in alt.tv.stargate-sg1 who keeps asking if the character Jonas is gay. Who really cares? Does it make the world better to have confirmed gay characters in TV shows?
Everything is frickin' assumed to be "gay" it's becoming so retarded. Did I miss the boat that said everything is supposed to be gay?
Is it any surprise that generation Xers grow up with no work ethic and a feeling of entitlement, when they have been indoctrinated with this kind of skewed moral framework?
Maybe if kids grow up sitting on their ass and watching TV all day. Go outside and ride a bike.
~Seth, who is typing the word "gay" too much today