This exists belive it or not. M.E.S.S has XT/286 emulators... but don't have VGA, just CGA.
The "VM" software like VMWARE doesn't come close to emulating anything useful for old games, it's designed to emulate the existing computer with a crappy video card.
Windows NT however does have a built in "DOS" emulator that works pretty well. You can even use VDMsound to make things that use a sound card work?
Trade off? Yes there is... Still no VESA supported video modes (640x480x16 ot 320x200 or 320x240 256 color modes) But it's sufficient for all the pre-vesa games except some whacky Origin "386 enhaced" games with their own memory manager (U7 has an engine rewrite project, U8 has a hack/patch to make it work on Windows.) Hell even U9 needs a crack to work on Windows 2000 or XP. (CDilla EXE-wrapper protection does not work on Windows NT.)
BS AMD - Athlon, Duron Chipsets from VIA, ALi, SiS,nVidia and AMD Intel - Celeron, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Xeon, Itanium Chipsets from Intel, VIA, ALi, SiS, maybe even ATI and nVidia in the future VIA makes the M3 that you can plug in a Pentium III socket 370 board.
Tranmeta even makes processors that run on existing IA32 architechure.
You can use Windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, QNX, and millions of other software applications.
You can also port most Unix applications between other unix flavors.
You can also port Unix apps to PowerPC Linux and MacOS X
Nope, selling items online is probably already patented.
Though a less generalized form would be "Selling merchandise or service through an electronic means." Guess what, Pay-Per-View on Sattelite TV/cable, telephone "shop at home", and using your credit card at all would be covered.
See technically banks have been "wiring" money to places long before 1980's, the entire idea of buying something through an electronic means could even apply to vending machines...
I think software patents should start requiring actual source code to prove that it indeed works, then maybe the perpetual-motion machines of the software world would die (that's compressing totally random data.) Then people could only patent working things, not generizations or absurdities.
You do realize that in the USA you can get legal descramblers for the C-Band/Ku-Band channels. In Canada, where it's grey-market you can for about 1200$/yr get every single channel (All the movie channels, all the specialty channels, all the porn channels, etc) Basically everything.
They have been moving from VideoCipher II+ to Digicipher II, and you can get those boxes too, but I don't know what the price is.
The point is, that as long as there are networks still broadcasting on C-Band/Ku-band in the clear, anyone with a BUD can get those channels in-the-clear.
Last year when I still had the BUD, UPN was moving to Digital encryption. That still means that anyone with a digital descrambler can pick it up.
Anyone recall the "Video Toaster Flyer" ? A lot more complicated version of this. (www.newtek.com)
The original Video Toaster didn't capture video, it was only a effects/transition device.
The flyer was the NLE tool (Non-Linear-Editing).
Any equipment equiped with mpeg-encoding hardware could also do this. Sometimes even ones without the hardware can do it (600Mhz x86 processor required to encode and playback in software at the same time.)
IMO, the TiVo is not a bad idea, but I think the purpose of the patent is to get the drop on other TiVo clones (Microsofts specifically, Isn't the Xbox going to be able to do this as well?) which is what patents are for.
However, Videocards equiped with TV-tuners have been able to do this for a long time already. The ATI All in Wonder 128 was the first one to have direct to mpeg encoding, but the original All in Wonder let you record things and watch other recorded things at the same time anyways.
Why don't we take a few concepts we already have, and apply it to the Home Entertainment System?
Take your standard gigabit ethernet or firewire, give it a switch(as opposed to a Hub), and connect all the A/V devices to it, or if you run out of plugs on the switch, buy a bigger one, or just buy another one.
This way anyone who buys a A/V device, can hook it up anywhere there is a A/V plug, and magically all it's services are available to the A/V network, and all the A/V services already on the network are available to that device.
So take something simple: An A/V network listening station (headphones and a "remote") is plugged in or activated by wireless. There is a "Audio Center" located on the A/V network, which contains months worth of audio in Ogg Vorbis format, so now the listener can just play that audio. Now if say a DVD drive was plugged into the network, now that listener can also listen to DVD-Audio,CD-Audio, DVD-Movies, and anything else audio related on that. Now add a Digital Cable Tuner, now that listener can listen to audio from any of the channels, plus now can access cable-internet and listen to any streaming audio broadcasts.
Make sense?
Now if any one of those devices kill themselves somehow, you just replace that one part, instead of having to replace everything.
Convergence is a big mistake, look at those junky i810 systems with integrated video, audio network and modem. Any one of those componets die, you junk the entire machine.
Back to the story...
Now say we have a "watching" station, that features a monitor and surround speakers, now it can access any of the A/V network devices and watch video from any video source, and listen to audio from any audio source. So say a Digital Sattelite reciever was added, now you have the ability to watch movies from any of the channels on the sattelite dish, or listen to audio from any channel, etc.
The idea here, is that to include only the minimum functionaliy in any one device, no duplication. This would keep costs down, since a "DVD" device only needs to have a DVD-ROM and a interface to the A/V network, no controls, maybe an eject button, but that's it. That DVD-ROM would be able to play anything(CD-Audio,VCD,CD-Data,DVD-Audio,DVD-Video, DVD-data) since the actual mpeg decompression would take place on the recieving end in software. There could be a "processor" black box that does nothing but process data like mpeg1/mpeg-2/ogg-vorbis/mpeg-4/descrabling. Hell, you should even be able to play games on the A/V network, just plug a game controller in and off you go.(Providing there was either a processor box or "game box")
You lower the cost by only putting in the functionality you want, and nothing you get would include additional bells and whistles.
So if you want to make a "CD Player", you just plug a listening station and a cd-unit together and that's it.
One of the PITA's found with existing home entertainment units is the duplication of features. A DVD player can completely replace a CD-player. But a Digital Cable Box and a DVD player have decompression circuits and analog to digital converters that increased the price of both of them. If you only use one or the other at the same time, you don't need the duplication.
Now look at the bigger picture... say you have listening stations everywhere in your house and outside... say you wanted to listen to the same thing in every room. Now you can, you just take your remote and set each listening station to the same "data broadcast", and that's it, every room has the same data going to it.
Now to make things as simple as possible for consumers, you only have one cable(wired) or no cable (wireless), so you just plug into any switch and that's it. Any legacy interfaces would have their own connectors for the legacy interface in addition to the single a/v network interface.
Say you want to plug your computer into the a/v network, now you have access to everything on the a/v network, plus the ability to utilize any "black boxes" to expand your processing capability. Why stop there? If you have two computers on the A/V network, and one is just sitting idle, the other computer can make use of that computers processing power too. Forget having to upgrade your "computer", just buy a faster one and leave the old one on the network. You wouldn't have to buy any new drives because they would already be on the a/v network.
Speaking of drives, why even have large hard drives in your computer? you can have nice big external drives anywhere on the A/V network, and they can store anything. Your computer could get away with any size drive, and if it needs more space it just queries the a/v network for place to put things.
Am I being way to optimistic or what? I've love to see something like that happen, but I bet you it wouldn't happen (especially if Microsoft had anything to do with it, they'd want to integrate as many bells and whistles into every box that they can, and duplicate functionality so they can wring more money out of you)
Summarize: Take the existing switching network concept, and stick single-purpose devices on it, each device has only one real pupose (DVD-ROM's read discs, they don't do any mpeg decompression, they don't have any analog outputs,etc) and any device can talk to any other device.
Yes I'm aware that firewire could theoretically do this, but I bet you the bandwidth is not wide enough to do this kind of thing.
And best of all... no drivers, everything just works. Maybe if you had an internet device, you could peridocially look for firmware updates or something.
My house has some reverse engineering done to it (in part because the stupid cable companies concept of "multi-outlet" service was nothing more than a 3-way splitter.) I have Cat-5 that is screwed up, so it's running only 10mbit.
But the better setup was in fact where I used to work (Stupid fools quit talking to me, hope your business goes down the crapper.) Between their house (which is circa 1898's) and their shop/garage (which is circa 1998) they had several ethernet cables between the buildings, several coax cables for sattellite, video and audio(to hell with cable) and all the internet stuff was run through initially sygate on windows 95, but was then changed to Linux with IPChains/IPMasq. Eventually they were able to get a pseudo-high speed connection from a company in the next valley. The valley we are in is only serviced by 10mbit. There is no Cable or xDSL here. The best thing there was was using the phone companies ISP since the local ISP's didn't give good connect rates.
We used to play LAN games, bring more computers over to play 4-6 player games. Eventually the idiots decided to act like corporate robots(complete with an idiot that knows nothing about computers acting as middle-management) and quit doing that and it all fell apart.
So, It's possible.
I'd like to build a house from scratch (maybe even sell it after) where the entire building would be wired with whatever the best wiring is at the time(10-gigabit capable ethernet fiber anyone?) Maybe even figure out how to make the computers more electronicly efficient, do we really need 120ACvolt->12,5,3.3,2DC volt conversion, master UPS/DC power provider or something like that.
(Oops, there I go again giving away free ideas. -_^)
Hmm, howabout designing the software on your computer, compiling, testing, etc. Then encrypt it and run a ftp or something on your computer. Then goto a "public" terminal and move your software from your computer, to the terminal, decrypt it, and then upload it to wherever. For extra security you can then create a virus on the spot to trash the terminal in a few minutes after the next user sits down. ^_^
Windows9X machines are good candidates, you don't even need to log in, just hit cancel.
As for BBS's, If I recall correctly, phone companies keep logs, all they have to do is get the log from the phone company and figure out who was connected long enough to transfer the file.
So tell me, If I've had a comptuer since I was 8 years old, and when I went to college for a few months they were teaching stuff I knew from back when I was 8, why should I sit through this class and have them take credit for what I knew about when I was 8?
I can learn faster by purchasing the books and reading them faster. The Java course, the pace was so slow that by the end of the course the most we were supposed to be able to program was a little zork-like game in text-mode java.
I live in Canada BC (Americans that is the country north of you, the western-most provience)
I was looking at CS degees from UBC and the first thing I noticed was that the first year is spent not learning anything about computers at all. The Second year has all the introductory courses... That's right, by the end of the second year you only have to know how to turn the computer on and use a word processor.
Now that was a little too generalized, but the point is that why should I be wasting my time and money to get nothing in return? I do not, and have never cared about "making big bucks" because I will prefer a less-stressful line of work so I don't wind up being one of the "I hate my job but I get lots of money" people.
Now point number 2. Having looked at the Jobs in Canada and the Jobs in the USA, it appears that the Jobs in Canada are either more challanging, or they only want overqualified people to do what people off the street can do. I've seen job postings (Canada) where they want a CS degree to do word processing and spreadsheets, but I have also seen ones that want you to know every single programming language, protocol, and piece of hardware out there. Compared to the American jobs where a CS degree gets you more specific jobs instead of the broad jobs ones in Canada. (The typical job I've seen in Canada has CS degree and about 30 requirements, where as the American ones are CS degree and about 10 requirements.)
As for communication skills, people never talked to me through out (Grade1-12)school, college will not change that? It didn't in the 5 months I was there. I'm not a party person, I do my best communication through text not speech.
I think someone I was on IRC with the other day said it best "School teaches you not to think" , and I think he is right. Schools teach students that there is only a certain way to solve a problem. This has been proven by the fact that the Questions on the exams wanted the text-book answer, giving my definition instead of the text book produced "the wrong answer", even though it was the same answer. (Personally, If a school is supposedly teaching a computer-related program, WHY are we still using paper tests?)
I could go out and get A+ certification right now. I could have done it when I was 13 had it been around at that time (Maybe it was.) I could probally go and get all the Microsoft certifications, BUT all the jobs listed want the CS Degree more frequently then any certification at all.
Someone else said that a Degree is nothing more than a warrenty for the employer. Just because something has a warrenty doesn't mean that they won't screw up or do anything wrong.
Sorry for being cynical, but I'd rather work for nothing, Spend as much time needed to solve the problem so I do not have to go back and fix it. It would be a perfect, except that without any money you can't buy food, clothing or shelter.
I might be the kind of person that would rather have something work all the time, instead of going back to fix it. (Anyone notice that certain brands of computers need to be fixed a lot?) The last 10 or so computers I've serviced(while not working for someone) , the previous time I serviced them was a year apart. In between those two time periods they have had no problems at all. Compare this to when I was working for someone, I was told "Just fix it as fast as possible" which resulted in this one i820 computer having to be fixed a dozen times within two months, each time reinstalling the OS. (For those who don't know, the i820 MTH problem resulted in a recall of these boards, howver that was not the problem in this case, Intel's INF update utility was resulting in the problem (that wouldn't appear till an hour later, making it difficult to pinpoint the problem.) Intel (weeks later) released a INF update utility that didn't produce the registry corruption problem.)
You might also call it the "right-side up" type of cable.
IEEE1394 card + IEEE 6pin to 4pin cable + DV video camera with 4pin connector.
If you look at the size of the 6pin end, it's twice the height of a USB (rectangle one)
the 4 pin one, however is about 1/4 it's size. Portable electronics that don't need to be driven by external power, can easily put the connector in a accessable place then.
I'm still waiting for a Fibre Optic cable (2.4Gbit/sec = 300MegaBytes per second, or 6X faster than Firewire.) to just replace EVERYTHING that comes outside the computer.
(think about it, get a pair or two of Fibre cables, and you are already faster than computers Expansion Bus's)
I want to see every house connected to the Internet via High-speed Fibre... then we can get rid of conventional Telephones, and Cable and replace it with a Peer to Peer and Client Server Audio/Video uni and multicasts.
(After all, current "CABLE" wastes 95% of it's bandwidth)
IMO, the entire system fails to learn from it's past and is doomed to repeat it...
Patents encourage monopolies, Photocopiers encourage copying of books (Really, people do this... don't know why, it costs them more.) , Audio tapes encourage audio piracy, Video tapes encourage movie piracy.
If you look at history you'll see that every attempt to KILL a technology because it causes copyright infringement has generally failed.
In the Digital realm, Copies are perfect and (or near perfect with MP3) the copies sound like the originals. Same with DVD, someone with way to much time on their hands can decode a DVD disc (rip) and re-encode it to Divx,RealMedia,Microsoft Streaming Format, or any other video codec. and it produces a rather "VHS-quality or worse copy" of which the only exception tends to be the DVD2VCD ripping which produces mpegs that (on non s-video hardware) look close enough to the original DVD's video
Oh, and don't forget Software piracy, Nobody has done anything to stop it, and all attempts to prevent people from copying software results in people "fixing" it and copying it anyways.
(I'm surprised the companies even BOTHER to use Macrovision VHS, Macrovision DVD,Macrovision PayTV(Sat/Cable) or Macrovision for CD-ROM, since It's easily defeated with either inexpensive hardware (VHS/DVD/PayTV, 50$ video stabilizer) or the software with free software that just emulates whatever is missing.)
oi, I'm ranting again... back on topic.
I want to know when some company is going to produce 2 or 4 hour recordable media for DTV/DV/D8... MiniDV is 1hr, D8 is 1 hour(120min normal Hi8 tape) DV-normal is 40minutes...
I like Sony Hardware... but this kind of makes them have a bad light.
IIRC, under copyright law you have to do everything in your power to protect your copyright or you lose it. (or maybe that was trademarks)
At any rate, I might start reconsidering recommending Sony hardware.
As far as I'm concerned, Napster can die a horrible death, but it will just span more clones that are better,faster, someone will eventully figure out how to prevent people from leeching and not contributing. (Anyone ever think of making use of a kind of cookie that keeps tabs on how many times someone downloads/uploads/aborts uploads, and being able to see those stats... think about it... if they aren't going to share (Lots of upload aborts, few successful uploads) or are not stable... no point in dealing with them then. Kinda reminds be of the WLT(win loss tie) scores in Starcraft battle.net)
Woo look, another idea I should have kept for myself... I must need sleep.
(Seriously though... adding something like that to gnutella would give people sufficient warning that people are just leeching and not helping)
Although there is no support for the Radeon in Linux yet, the AIW Radeon (Assuming you need the TV tuner... with Digital CABLE, Digital Sattelite, it's pretty much a useless expense, get the ViVo model instead)
ATI Radeion is HDTV capable... but you will have to get an OEM version with that support which I assume isn't released yet.
Just to mess with everyones minds....
Anyone notice how Intel and Microsoft are pushing Win-Soundchips? (They happen to be called AC97 codecs using AMR or CMR headers)
I do hope that these atrocities go away, I want what the N-Cube is going to have... 3D sound that has it's own RAM dammit!
(minor rant: If 3D Video can use memory to store textures and graphics data, why can't a sound card use it's own memory(if it had any) to store samples, music, midi's,etc? It seems anti-productive to make these stupid AC97 codecs that use the CPU. Look how long it took for Video cards to move from 2D to 2D accelerated to 3D to 3D with T&L, Take a clue from the consoles.)
As far as recording HDTV goes... Wouldn't it make more sense to "download" the mpeg2 data to something... to play back later? (not LIVE recording, but just going "save this"... Live broadcasts (sports/news) might need a mpeg-2 stream download) I have yet to see anything other than the COMBO DVHS/DirectTV system in the states that can record digital and playback digital.
Though the entire problem would be easier resolved if software would quit being patented... I'm sure some whacko who makes the first "MPEG-2 TV downloader" is going to patent it and screw everyone over. "Method for storage of MPEG-2 Digital broadcasts with no loss..."
(I'm still waiting for when we quit using 120v - to - 12volt DC blocks and just start using DC for all our low-voltage devices.... imagine, no more power cubes to cause house fires... no more switching power supplies in computers with stupid fans that break.... 120/240V will still be around for those high-power devices (Air Conditioner,heaters,stove,microwave, etc) I just propose getting rid of the stupid cubes... after all how much energy do those things waste... not to mention all the 120v to whatever conversions... (I can count at least 50 things in my house that are just simply wasting power))
Free idea, (see above) I'd like to see someone actually do that (It's possible... might involve voiding a lot of warrenties though ^_^)
ok... enough babble
I have a SB Live Value (the version with the Coax/minijack digital out) and you can hook it up to a AC3 decoder via the COAX type connector all you have to do is buy or make a mono-minijack to single RCA connector. That's it. No fancy stuff here. You just make a S/PDIF(minijack) to S/PDIF(minijack), IIRC center-pin to center-pin.
You DO however have to make sure your sound card has that feature first of all (Some Aureal A3D and AC97 Codec's have them... not many but some do)
Check out Turtle Beach's site for the Aureal cards... Also I think (but not sure) Cirrus Logic makes a AC97 chipset (I can hear the EWW's right now) that is used in a pretty nifty sound card by VideoLogic that has multiple AC97 codecs for doing multi-speaker (surround... I forget now) But I do recall it mentioning something about offloading MP3 decoding to the sound card (Forget the typical AC97 "winmodem" style sound card)
I think it's actually a requirement for AC97 codec designers to have that option, I remember a C-Media chip (used in the BookPC's) that in the manual for the BookPC it mentioned optical out or something. (I don't have it anymore)
Though in the C-Media Windows driver it's there (S/PDIF out)
I think the SBLIVE by default is set Digital out always on, and has an option to disable the analog instead.
(DON'T BE FOOLED, THE OLD BOXED SBLIVE DOES NOT HAVE THE DIGITAL OUT. IF IN DOUBT, GET THE X-GAMER MODEL. It's exactly the same except has gold plated connectors and an Digital CD connector)
BTW... if anyone missed it, there is (in windows 2000 at least) an option to use DIGITAL audio mode... It works on IDE drives (and SCSI with less reliabiliy) but tends to skip easier. You can use this instead or if you have more than 1 CD drive and only 1 CD-Audio cable. (Like I do)
It would be very difficult to create checksums of every single known song in the world, and every single MP3 variation of it (44.1khz 128kbit 3minutes long, versus 44.1khz 192kbit 3minutes long) Plus the fact that no two encoders work alike. If a "checksum" were to be put in place, the NAPSTER client software would have to do the Ripping, Encoding and Watermark/ID3 tag as so anyone else who rips the same song will have the same "id" tag.
Then the Napster service would have to "only allow stuff ripped with our software" and then people will crack that.
On the plus side, if the Napster software did have a high-quality rip/encoder, and marked stuff, there wouldn't be any more "fake" mp3's, since the CD it's ripped from could be looked up in the CDDB first.
Now look what happens with that, people who didn't publish their works with a record company, can't put their songs on Napster by their own free will, since they can't prove they made it...
Face it, if you want to see uncensored,undedited,90% correctly translated anime you might as well trade for fansubs or download them off usenet/irc/gnutella/etc. American cartoons with the exception of the stuff Fox Shows on sunday night tend to be G-rated and boring as they recycle plot lines and then try to sell them as "new" stuff under a different name... example, Looney Toons ->Tiny Toons -> Pinky and the Brain... Same stuff, different name. The only big improvements (applies to Anime and American cartoons) that's been introduced and actually used is Color and Computer animation. Stereo? I've yet to see any tv show make use of Stereo or Surround sound. Surround seems to only exist in movies. Look at the quality increases in the Simpsons and the futurama... same recycled jokes, a larger jump in Animation quality. Look at the quality increases in Anime, (Have to love Japanese for being early adopters of everything) that was around almost 10 years before americans cartoons used them. The next step might be getting rid of hand-drawing altogether and just doing everything in the computer (like Reboot) Though there is some cases where computer animation with anime/cartoons just goes too far and doesn't enhance it. (3D that neither looks realistic and is sluggish/choppy to the point of asking "why bother?" (Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country was an example of use of 3D but boring stories, likewise Voltron the 3rd Dimension was even worse (Smooth animation, no attempts at all to syncronize speech, boring stories)) If you think about it, American and Japanese animation just keep playing off each other, but Japanese are not afraid to show everything (be it violence,nudity,suggestive behavior.) Anyone who thinks Dragon Ball Z was a good dubbed anime should get their head examined. (It was edited for violence big time, however the translation was changed so nobody ever "died" they just went "to another dimension") Likewise 95% of all Anime get's butchered if it's destination is TV (Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing, Pokemon, DBZ, to name a few), if it's destination is home video/DVD, there might be an option to view dub/sub versions on the same disc (Warning, if a SUBTITLED version (*thwaps* Disney) is not availible, it is highly likely that that anime has been butchered to a point where they could not put both audio tracks on the same disc because they've done something to mess it up.) Fox pushes the "family" rating (I don't know what the simpsons is rated in the USA, but in Canada it's TV14) there are some attempts to push it further (South Park) but if you want to stop taking what the networks are feeding you and get what you really want, just go and buy the DVD/VHS tape/Fansub, and then quit complaining. (BTW, I prefer the Usenet method since this area is practically devoid of Anime and DVD's)
In my opinion, if Napster is shut down it will just spawn more Napster clones.
Let's bring up an issue here, which would you rather do: Buy a CD of someone you never heard of on the off-chance you might like it, Buy a CD because you heard a song on the radio/TV, only to find that that 1 song is good and the rest are horrid, Download that 1 song off the net instead because you heard about it from the radio/tv/a friend to see if you like it and then consider buying the CD.
Personally since I don't buy CD's (How do you go about ordering out of print Japanese CD's anyways?) I have to get them in MP3 format to begin with, that's the only reason I know what they sound like.
As for American CD's.. I have 2, bought like in 1995 and 1997, by my sister since she actually listens to CD's... she has over 100 of them. She actually downloads mp3's to see if she likes them before she goes and buys the CD from columbia house or the local CD store. No use buying a CD if you find you don't really like it... you can't return them either.
Can you imagine the problem that would exist if there were CD-rental shops in North America? (Rent, go home copy it/mp3 it, return to store)How about bootleg companies... goto Brazil, Goto China, you can find just about everything in bootleg cheaper format. (I've seen these bootlegs, they are stupidly inferior in production quality, a lot of them are green-tinted CD-R types.)
I've successfully install Windows 95(B/C revision) to a bootable CD, I had a friend do it with a zip disk.
What I'd like to be able to do is take "my configuration" of my computer on a disk and take it to work or school so I have my own set-up and the UI arranged the way I want.
What would be neat would be to be able to take your root file system out and just have it "work" in any computer you plugged it into, or flip it around and be able to hot-plug an OS. (Put your OS disk in and magically have Linux instead of Windows.) I'd like to be able to try out new versions of operating systems without having to make space on my hard drive to install them to and then screw up the file system if I don't like it.
How many of you wish you could customize that plain UI? (Windows/Linux/MacOS/whatever) so you have the same UI as you do at home?
I'd love to be able to do that, or hot-swap different UI's (Here's your chance you censorshipware lovers, Make your kids a UI disk so they don't screw up YOUR lovely settings hehehe.)
Though to get back to the original idea about being able to stick an entire working linux filesystem on a bootable media, It's an excellect concept, but doesn't have much of a practical use.
One potential use I see is being able to take "your computer" places without taking the entire thing OR, if a company had a pile of laptops, and "User Disks" to boot the things off of so employees could just use any laptop at will (or even any workstation in a building)
Another form of cheating that get's overlooked is cheating by the people who are running or created the game.
Anyone remember when BBS's were popular? How you could log into a BBS Door game and play it for maybe a maximum of an hour? Ever play one where the SysOp played too? Not very fun if everyone picks on the SysOp, because the SysOp would turn around and just cheat to restore balance to their favor.
The same goes for MUD's, The people running it might just be as guilty of cheating as the people playing it.
There is no such thing as a cheat-proof game. The closest Online Games come to being cheat proof is when it's Client-Server and nobody has access to the server. The second part is that the "Client" has to only process I/O from the server (Person moved from x,y to X,Y and got hit by a frog.) and not store any data on the user's end. Now the problem with these set-ups is that there has to be checks in place to prevent multiple accounts or multiple users. (Anyone play Utopia or Earth 2025? Worst case of Client Server cheating I've ever seen, reason being that the only multiple account check is the uniqie email address the authorization code was sent to.)
Of course that could be blamed on the fact there are too many free email systems out there for people to abuse.
The worst examples of cheating always occur in peer-to-peer and client-server systems that the client has to do calculations to send back to the server.
A type of cheating I haven't seen too much, but realized people do this (and not just to games!) is to create macros or bots so they don't have to play the game themselves.
The "Adbar make free money" system has been the latest target of cheating with people creating emulators and macros to cheat them.(Look it up, they exist, Alladvantage being the biggest target) And to make more free money out of them here comes the muliple accounts that they use for referer's, so when they do their X hours on whatever ad system, they load up the next account and do the X hours again.
Just about every aspect of cheating in games can be applied to cheating other software, be it cheating the Ad-paid software, to cheating stupid software from wasting your bandwidth (Do you know how many programs waste your bandwidth? *cough*Real*cough*Player*cough*)
In my opinion, if people are going to create cheats for online games, the people who create the games should be looking out for these cheats and what they do to the game. (Lot's of cheats rely on over-writing some part of the game's memory with different values) Save-game cheats being the easiest way for the novice to cheat(all you need is a hex-editor), to the more complicated using a debugger and changing memory values to cheat.
Again I come back to the point where game developers should not "use" any data calculated on the client side since it could be cheated easily.
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This exists belive it or not. M.E.S.S has XT/286 emulators... but don't have VGA, just CGA.
The "VM" software like VMWARE doesn't come close to emulating anything useful for old games, it's designed to emulate the existing computer with a crappy video card.
Windows NT however does have a built in "DOS" emulator that works pretty well. You can even use VDMsound to make things that use a sound card work?
Trade off? Yes there is... Still no VESA supported video modes (640x480x16 ot 320x200 or 320x240 256 color modes) But it's sufficient for all the pre-vesa games except some whacky Origin "386 enhaced" games with their own memory manager (U7 has an engine rewrite project, U8 has a hack/patch to make it work on Windows.)
Hell even U9 needs a crack to work on Windows 2000 or XP. (CDilla EXE-wrapper protection does not work on Windows NT.)
BS
AMD - Athlon, Duron
Chipsets from VIA, ALi, SiS,nVidia and AMD
Intel - Celeron, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Xeon, Itanium
Chipsets from Intel, VIA, ALi, SiS, maybe even ATI and nVidia in the future
VIA makes the M3 that you can plug in a Pentium III socket 370 board.
Tranmeta even makes processors that run on existing IA32 architechure.
You can use Windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, QNX, and millions of other software applications.
You can also port most Unix applications between other unix flavors.
You can also port Unix apps to PowerPC Linux and MacOS X
Nope, selling items online is probably already patented.
Though a less generalized form would be "Selling merchandise or service through an electronic means." Guess what, Pay-Per-View on Sattelite TV/cable, telephone "shop at home", and using your credit card at all would be covered.
See technically banks have been "wiring" money to places long before 1980's, the entire idea of buying something through an electronic means could even apply to vending machines...
I think software patents should start requiring actual source code to prove that it indeed works, then maybe the perpetual-motion machines of the software world would die (that's compressing totally random data.) Then people could only patent working things, not generizations or absurdities.
You do realize that in the USA you can get legal descramblers for the C-Band/Ku-Band channels. In Canada, where it's grey-market you can for about 1200$/yr get every single channel (All the movie channels, all the specialty channels, all the porn channels, etc) Basically everything.
They have been moving from VideoCipher II+ to Digicipher II, and you can get those boxes too, but I don't know what the price is.
The point is, that as long as there are networks still broadcasting on C-Band/Ku-band in the clear, anyone with a BUD can get those channels in-the-clear.
Last year when I still had the BUD, UPN was moving to Digital encryption. That still means that anyone with a digital descrambler can pick it up.
Anyone recall the "Video Toaster Flyer" ? A lot more complicated version of this. (www.newtek.com)
The original Video Toaster didn't capture video, it was only a effects/transition device.
The flyer was the NLE tool (Non-Linear-Editing).
Any equipment equiped with mpeg-encoding hardware could also do this. Sometimes even ones without the hardware can do it (600Mhz x86 processor required to encode and playback in software at the same time.)
IMO, the TiVo is not a bad idea, but I think the purpose of the patent is to get the drop on other TiVo clones (Microsofts specifically, Isn't the Xbox going to be able to do this as well?) which is what patents are for.
However, Videocards equiped with TV-tuners have been able to do this for a long time already. The ATI All in Wonder 128 was the first one to have direct to mpeg encoding, but the original All in Wonder let you record things and watch other recorded things at the same time anyways.
Why don't we take a few concepts we already have, and apply it to the Home Entertainment System?
, DVD-data) since the actual mpeg decompression would take place on the recieving end in software. There could be a "processor" black box that does nothing but process data like mpeg1/mpeg-2/ogg-vorbis/mpeg-4/descrabling. Hell, you should even be able to play games on the A/V network, just plug a game controller in and off you go.(Providing there was either a processor box or "game box")
Take your standard gigabit ethernet or firewire, give it a switch(as opposed to a Hub), and connect all the A/V devices to it, or if you run out of plugs on the switch, buy a bigger one, or just buy another one.
This way anyone who buys a A/V device, can hook it up anywhere there is a A/V plug, and magically all it's services are available to the A/V network, and all the A/V services already on the network are available to that device.
So take something simple: An A/V network listening station (headphones and a "remote") is plugged in or activated by wireless. There is a "Audio Center" located on the A/V network, which contains months worth of audio in Ogg Vorbis format, so now the listener can just play that audio. Now if say a DVD drive was plugged into the network, now that listener can also listen to DVD-Audio,CD-Audio, DVD-Movies, and anything else audio related on that. Now add a Digital Cable Tuner, now that listener can listen to audio from any of the channels, plus now can access cable-internet and listen to any streaming audio broadcasts.
Make sense?
Now if any one of those devices kill themselves somehow, you just replace that one part, instead of having to replace everything.
Convergence is a big mistake, look at those junky i810 systems with integrated video, audio network and modem. Any one of those componets die, you junk the entire machine.
Back to the story...
Now say we have a "watching" station, that features a monitor and surround speakers, now it can access any of the A/V network devices and watch video from any video source, and listen to audio from any audio source. So say a Digital Sattelite reciever was added, now you have the ability to watch movies from any of the channels on the sattelite dish, or listen to audio from any channel, etc.
The idea here, is that to include only the minimum functionaliy in any one device, no duplication. This would keep costs down, since a "DVD" device only needs to have a DVD-ROM and a interface to the A/V network, no controls, maybe an eject button, but that's it. That DVD-ROM would be able to play anything(CD-Audio,VCD,CD-Data,DVD-Audio,DVD-Video
You lower the cost by only putting in the functionality you want, and nothing you get would include additional bells and whistles.
So if you want to make a "CD Player", you just plug a listening station and a cd-unit together and that's it.
One of the PITA's found with existing home entertainment units is the duplication of features. A DVD player can completely replace a CD-player. But a Digital Cable Box and a DVD player have decompression circuits and analog to digital converters that increased the price of both of them. If you only use one or the other at the same time, you don't need the duplication.
Now look at the bigger picture... say you have listening stations everywhere in your house and outside... say you wanted to listen to the same thing in every room. Now you can, you just take your remote and set each listening station to the same "data broadcast", and that's it, every room has the same data going to it.
Now to make things as simple as possible for consumers, you only have one cable(wired) or no cable (wireless), so you just plug into any switch and that's it. Any legacy interfaces would have their own connectors for the legacy interface in addition to the single a/v network interface.
Say you want to plug your computer into the a/v network, now you have access to everything on the a/v network, plus the ability to utilize any "black boxes" to expand your processing capability. Why stop there? If you have two computers on the A/V network, and one is just sitting idle, the other computer can make use of that computers processing power too. Forget having to upgrade your "computer", just buy a faster one and leave the old one on the network. You wouldn't have to buy any new drives because they would already be on the a/v network.
Speaking of drives, why even have large hard drives in your computer? you can have nice big external drives anywhere on the A/V network, and they can store anything. Your computer could get away with any size drive, and if it needs more space it just queries the a/v network for place to put things.
Am I being way to optimistic or what? I've love to see something like that happen, but I bet you it wouldn't happen (especially if Microsoft had anything to do with it, they'd want to integrate as many bells and whistles into every box that they can, and duplicate functionality so they can wring more money out of you)
Summarize: Take the existing switching network concept, and stick single-purpose devices on it, each device has only one real pupose (DVD-ROM's read discs, they don't do any mpeg decompression, they don't have any analog outputs,etc) and any device can talk to any other device.
Yes I'm aware that firewire could theoretically do this, but I bet you the bandwidth is not wide enough to do this kind of thing.
And best of all... no drivers, everything just works. Maybe if you had an internet device, you could peridocially look for firmware updates or something.
My house has some reverse engineering done to it (in part because the stupid cable companies concept of "multi-outlet" service was nothing more than a 3-way splitter.) I have Cat-5 that is screwed up, so it's running only 10mbit.
But the better setup was in fact where I used to work (Stupid fools quit talking to me, hope your business goes down the crapper.) Between their house (which is circa 1898's) and their shop/garage (which is circa 1998) they had several ethernet cables between the buildings, several coax cables for sattellite, video and audio(to hell with cable) and all the internet stuff was run through initially sygate on windows 95, but was then changed to Linux with IPChains/IPMasq. Eventually they were able to get a pseudo-high speed connection from a company in the next valley. The valley we are in is only serviced by 10mbit. There is no Cable or xDSL here. The best thing there was was using the phone companies ISP since the local ISP's didn't give good connect rates.
We used to play LAN games, bring more computers over to play 4-6 player games. Eventually the idiots decided to act like corporate robots(complete with an idiot that knows nothing about computers acting as middle-management) and quit doing that and it all fell apart.
So, It's possible.
I'd like to build a house from scratch (maybe even sell it after) where the entire building would be wired with whatever the best wiring is at the time(10-gigabit capable ethernet fiber anyone?) Maybe even figure out how to make the computers more electronicly efficient, do we really need 120ACvolt->12,5,3.3,2DC volt conversion, master UPS/DC power provider or something like that.
(Oops, there I go again giving away free ideas. -_^)
Why doesn't someone print the source code on t-shirts or something and sell them as a novelty item, better yet, commentless ASM code.
I see it now, people being arrested on the street for wearing DeCSS source code T-shirts.
Could make it a work of art by coloring the letters too.
Hmm, howabout designing the software on your computer, compiling, testing, etc. Then encrypt it and run a ftp or something on your computer. Then goto a "public" terminal and move your software from your computer, to the terminal, decrypt it, and then upload it to wherever. For extra security you can then create a virus on the spot to trash the terminal in a few minutes after the next user sits down. ^_^
Windows9X machines are good candidates, you don't even need to log in, just hit cancel.
As for BBS's, If I recall correctly, phone companies keep logs, all they have to do is get the log from the phone company and figure out who was connected long enough to transfer the file.
So tell me, If I've had a comptuer since I was 8 years old, and when I went to college for a few months they were teaching stuff I knew from back when I was 8, why should I sit through this class and have them take credit for what I knew about when I was 8?
I can learn faster by purchasing the books and reading them faster. The Java course, the pace was so slow that by the end of the course the most we were supposed to be able to program was a little zork-like game in text-mode java.
I live in Canada BC (Americans that is the country north of you, the western-most provience)
I was looking at CS degees from UBC and the first thing I noticed was that the first year is spent not learning anything about computers at all. The Second year has all the introductory courses... That's right, by the end of the second year you only have to know how to turn the computer on and use a word processor.
Now that was a little too generalized, but the point is that why should I be wasting my time and money to get nothing in return? I do not, and have never cared about "making big bucks" because I will prefer a less-stressful line of work so I don't wind up being one of the "I hate my job but I get lots of money" people.
Now point number 2. Having looked at the Jobs in Canada and the Jobs in the USA, it appears that the Jobs in Canada are either more challanging, or they only want overqualified people to do what people off the street can do. I've seen job postings (Canada) where they want a CS degree to do word processing and spreadsheets, but I have also seen ones that want you to know every single programming language, protocol, and piece of hardware out there. Compared to the American jobs where a CS degree gets you more specific jobs instead of the broad jobs ones in Canada. (The typical job I've seen in Canada has CS degree and about 30 requirements, where as the American ones are CS degree and about 10 requirements.)
As for communication skills, people never talked to me through out (Grade1-12)school, college will not change that? It didn't in the 5 months I was there. I'm not a party person, I do my best communication through text not speech.
I think someone I was on IRC with the other day said it best "School teaches you not to think" , and I think he is right. Schools teach students that there is only a certain way to solve a problem. This has been proven by the fact that the Questions on the exams wanted the text-book answer, giving my definition instead of the text book produced "the wrong answer", even though it was the same answer. (Personally, If a school is supposedly teaching a computer-related program, WHY are we still using paper tests?)
I could go out and get A+ certification right now. I could have done it when I was 13 had it been around at that time (Maybe it was.) I could probally go and get all the Microsoft certifications, BUT all the jobs listed want the CS Degree more frequently then any certification at all.
Someone else said that a Degree is nothing more than a warrenty for the employer. Just because something has a warrenty doesn't mean that they won't screw up or do anything wrong.
Sorry for being cynical, but I'd rather work for nothing, Spend as much time needed to solve the problem so I do not have to go back and fix it. It would be a perfect, except that without any money you can't buy food, clothing or shelter.
I might be the kind of person that would rather have something work all the time, instead of going back to fix it. (Anyone notice that certain brands of computers need to be fixed a lot?) The last 10 or so computers I've serviced(while not working for someone) , the previous time I serviced them was a year apart. In between those two time periods they have had no problems at all. Compare this to when I was working for someone, I was told "Just fix it as fast as possible" which resulted in this one i820 computer having to be fixed a dozen times within two months, each time reinstalling the OS. (For those who don't know, the i820 MTH problem resulted in a recall of these boards, howver that was not the problem in this case, Intel's INF update utility was resulting in the problem (that wouldn't appear till an hour later, making it difficult to pinpoint the problem.) Intel (weeks later) released a INF update utility that didn't produce the registry corruption problem.)
You might also call it the "right-side up" type of cable.
IEEE1394 card + IEEE 6pin to 4pin cable + DV video camera with 4pin connector.
If you look at the size of the 6pin end, it's twice the height of a USB (rectangle one)
the 4 pin one, however is about 1/4 it's size. Portable electronics that don't need to be driven by external power, can easily put the connector in a accessable place then.
I'm still waiting for a Fibre Optic cable (2.4Gbit/sec = 300MegaBytes per second, or 6X faster than Firewire.) to just replace EVERYTHING that comes outside the computer.
(think about it, get a pair or two of Fibre cables, and you are already faster than computers Expansion Bus's)
I want to see every house connected to the Internet via High-speed Fibre... then we can get rid of conventional Telephones, and Cable and replace it with a Peer to Peer and Client Server Audio/Video uni and multicasts.
(After all, current "CABLE" wastes 95% of it's bandwidth)
Sounds just like microsoft.
... MiniDV is 1hr, D8 is 1 hour(120min normal Hi8 tape) DV-normal is 40minutes...
IMO, the entire system fails to learn from it's past and is doomed to repeat it...
Patents encourage monopolies, Photocopiers encourage copying of books (Really, people do this... don't know why, it costs them more.) , Audio tapes encourage audio piracy, Video tapes encourage movie piracy.
If you look at history you'll see that every attempt to KILL a technology because it causes copyright infringement has generally failed.
In the Digital realm, Copies are perfect and (or near perfect with MP3) the copies sound like the originals. Same with DVD, someone with way to much time on their hands can decode a DVD disc (rip) and re-encode it to Divx,RealMedia,Microsoft Streaming Format, or any other video codec. and it produces a rather "VHS-quality or worse copy" of which the only exception tends to be the DVD2VCD ripping which produces mpegs that (on non s-video hardware) look close enough to the original DVD's video
Oh, and don't forget Software piracy, Nobody has done anything to stop it, and all attempts to prevent people from copying software results in people "fixing" it and copying it anyways.
(I'm surprised the companies even BOTHER to use Macrovision VHS, Macrovision DVD,Macrovision PayTV(Sat/Cable) or Macrovision for CD-ROM, since It's easily defeated with either inexpensive hardware (VHS/DVD/PayTV, 50$ video stabilizer) or the software with free software that just emulates whatever is missing.)
oi, I'm ranting again... back on topic.
I want to know when some company is going to produce 2 or 4 hour recordable media for DTV/DV/D8
I like Sony Hardware... but this kind of makes them have a bad light.
IIRC, under copyright law you have to do everything in your power to protect your copyright or you lose it. (or maybe that was trademarks)
At any rate, I might start reconsidering recommending Sony hardware.
As far as I'm concerned, Napster can die a horrible death, but it will just span more clones that are better,faster, someone will eventully figure out how to prevent people from leeching and not contributing. (Anyone ever think of making use of a kind of cookie that keeps tabs on how many times someone downloads/uploads/aborts uploads, and being able to see those stats... think about it... if they aren't going to share (Lots of upload aborts, few successful uploads) or are not stable... no point in dealing with them then. Kinda reminds be of the WLT(win loss tie) scores in Starcraft battle.net)
Woo look, another idea I should have kept for myself... I must need sleep.
(Seriously though... adding something like that to gnutella would give people sufficient warning that people are just leeching and not helping)
I really should remember to hit the "text" button -_-;;;
Although there is no support for the Radeon in Linux yet, the AIW Radeon (Assuming you need the TV tuner... with Digital CABLE, Digital Sattelite, it's pretty much a useless expense, get the ViVo model instead) ATI Radeion is HDTV capable... but you will have to get an OEM version with that support which I assume isn't released yet. Just to mess with everyones minds.... Anyone notice how Intel and Microsoft are pushing Win-Soundchips? (They happen to be called AC97 codecs using AMR or CMR headers) I do hope that these atrocities go away, I want what the N-Cube is going to have... 3D sound that has it's own RAM dammit! (minor rant: If 3D Video can use memory to store textures and graphics data, why can't a sound card use it's own memory(if it had any) to store samples, music, midi's,etc? It seems anti-productive to make these stupid AC97 codecs that use the CPU. Look how long it took for Video cards to move from 2D to 2D accelerated to 3D to 3D with T&L, Take a clue from the consoles.) As far as recording HDTV goes... Wouldn't it make more sense to "download" the mpeg2 data to something... to play back later? (not LIVE recording, but just going "save this"... Live broadcasts (sports/news) might need a mpeg-2 stream download) I have yet to see anything other than the COMBO DVHS/DirectTV system in the states that can record digital and playback digital. Though the entire problem would be easier resolved if software would quit being patented... I'm sure some whacko who makes the first "MPEG-2 TV downloader" is going to patent it and screw everyone over. "Method for storage of MPEG-2 Digital broadcasts with no loss..." (I'm still waiting for when we quit using 120v - to - 12volt DC blocks and just start using DC for all our low-voltage devices.... imagine, no more power cubes to cause house fires... no more switching power supplies in computers with stupid fans that break.... 120/240V will still be around for those high-power devices (Air Conditioner,heaters,stove,microwave, etc) I just propose getting rid of the stupid cubes... after all how much energy do those things waste... not to mention all the 120v to whatever conversions... (I can count at least 50 things in my house that are just simply wasting power)) Free idea, (see above) I'd like to see someone actually do that (It's possible... might involve voiding a lot of warrenties though ^_^) ok... enough babble
I have a SB Live Value (the version with the Coax/minijack digital out) and you can hook it up to a AC3 decoder via the COAX type connector all you have to do is buy or make a mono-minijack to single RCA connector. That's it. No fancy stuff here. You just make a S/PDIF(minijack) to S/PDIF(minijack), IIRC center-pin to center-pin.
You DO however have to make sure your sound card has that feature first of all (Some Aureal A3D and AC97 Codec's have them... not many but some do)
Check out Turtle Beach's site for the Aureal cards... Also I think (but not sure) Cirrus Logic makes a AC97 chipset (I can hear the EWW's right now) that is used in a pretty nifty sound card by VideoLogic that has multiple AC97 codecs for doing multi-speaker (surround... I forget now) But I do recall it mentioning something about offloading MP3 decoding to the sound card (Forget the typical AC97 "winmodem" style sound card)
I think it's actually a requirement for AC97 codec designers to have that option, I remember a C-Media chip (used in the BookPC's) that in the manual for the BookPC it mentioned optical out or something. (I don't have it anymore)
Though in the C-Media Windows driver it's there (S/PDIF out)
I think the SBLIVE by default is set Digital out always on, and has an option to disable the analog instead.
(DON'T BE FOOLED, THE OLD BOXED SBLIVE DOES NOT HAVE THE DIGITAL OUT. IF IN DOUBT, GET THE X-GAMER MODEL. It's exactly the same except has gold plated connectors and an Digital CD connector)
BTW... if anyone missed it, there is (in windows 2000 at least) an option to use DIGITAL audio mode... It works on IDE drives (and SCSI with less reliabiliy) but tends to skip easier. You can use this instead or if you have more than 1 CD drive and only 1 CD-Audio cable. (Like I do)
Ja ne.
It would be very difficult to create checksums of every single known song in the world, and every single MP3 variation of it (44.1khz 128kbit 3minutes long, versus 44.1khz 192kbit 3minutes long) Plus the fact that no two encoders work alike. If a "checksum" were to be put in place, the NAPSTER client software would have to do the Ripping, Encoding and Watermark/ID3 tag as so anyone else who rips the same song will have the same "id" tag.
Then the Napster service would have to "only allow stuff ripped with our software" and then people will crack that.
On the plus side, if the Napster software did have a high-quality rip/encoder, and marked stuff, there wouldn't be any more "fake" mp3's, since the CD it's ripped from could be looked up in the CDDB first.
Now look what happens with that, people who didn't publish their works with a record company, can't put their songs on Napster by their own free will, since they can't prove they made it...
Every solution presents a new set of problems.
Face it, if you want to see uncensored,undedited,90% correctly translated anime you might as well trade for fansubs or download them off usenet/irc/gnutella/etc. American cartoons with the exception of the stuff Fox Shows on sunday night tend to be G-rated and boring as they recycle plot lines and then try to sell them as "new" stuff under a different name ... example, Looney Toons ->Tiny Toons -> Pinky and the Brain... Same stuff, different name. The only big improvements (applies to Anime and American cartoons) that's been introduced and actually used is Color and Computer animation. Stereo? I've yet to see any tv show make use of Stereo or Surround sound. Surround seems to only exist in movies. Look at the quality increases in the Simpsons and the futurama... same recycled jokes, a larger jump in Animation quality. Look at the quality increases in Anime, (Have to love Japanese for being early adopters of everything) that was around almost 10 years before americans cartoons used them. The next step might be getting rid of hand-drawing altogether and just doing everything in the computer (like Reboot) Though there is some cases where computer animation with anime/cartoons just goes too far and doesn't enhance it. (3D that neither looks realistic and is sluggish/choppy to the point of asking "why bother?" (Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country was an example of use of 3D but boring stories, likewise Voltron the 3rd Dimension was even worse (Smooth animation, no attempts at all to syncronize speech, boring stories)) If you think about it, American and Japanese animation just keep playing off each other, but Japanese are not afraid to show everything (be it violence,nudity,suggestive behavior.) Anyone who thinks Dragon Ball Z was a good dubbed anime should get their head examined. (It was edited for violence big time, however the translation was changed so nobody ever "died" they just went "to another dimension") Likewise 95% of all Anime get's butchered if it's destination is TV (Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing, Pokemon, DBZ, to name a few), if it's destination is home video/DVD, there might be an option to view dub/sub versions on the same disc (Warning, if a SUBTITLED version (*thwaps* Disney) is not availible, it is highly likely that that anime has been butchered to a point where they could not put both audio tracks on the same disc because they've done something to mess it up.) Fox pushes the "family" rating (I don't know what the simpsons is rated in the USA, but in Canada it's TV14) there are some attempts to push it further (South Park) but if you want to stop taking what the networks are feeding you and get what you really want, just go and buy the DVD/VHS tape/Fansub, and then quit complaining. (BTW, I prefer the Usenet method since this area is practically devoid of Anime and DVD's)
In my opinion, if Napster is shut down it will just spawn more Napster clones.
.. I have 2, bought like in 1995 and 1997, by my sister since she actually listens to CD's ... she has over 100 of them. She actually downloads mp3's to see if she likes them before she goes and buys the CD from columbia house or the local CD store. No use buying a CD if you find you don't really like it... you can't return them either.
Let's bring up an issue here, which would you rather do: Buy a CD of someone you never heard of on the off-chance you might like it, Buy a CD because you heard a song on the radio/TV, only to find that that 1 song is good and the rest are horrid, Download that 1 song off the net instead because you heard about it from the radio/tv/a friend to see if you like it and then consider buying the CD.
Personally since I don't buy CD's (How do you go about ordering out of print Japanese CD's anyways?) I have to get them in MP3 format to begin with, that's the only reason I know what they sound like.
As for American CD's
Can you imagine the problem that would exist if there were CD-rental shops in North America? (Rent, go home copy it/mp3 it, return to store)How about bootleg companies... goto Brazil, Goto China, you can find just about everything in bootleg cheaper format. (I've seen these bootlegs, they are stupidly inferior in production quality, a lot of them are green-tinted CD-R types.)
I've successfully install Windows 95(B/C revision) to a bootable CD, I had a friend do it with a zip disk.
What I'd like to be able to do is take "my configuration" of my computer on a disk and take it to work or school so I have my own set-up and the UI arranged the way I want.
What would be neat would be to be able to take your root file system out and just have it "work" in any computer you plugged it into, or flip it around and be able to hot-plug an OS. (Put your OS disk in and magically have Linux instead of Windows.) I'd like to be able to try out new versions of operating systems without having to make space on my hard drive to install them to and then screw up the file system if I don't like it.
How many of you wish you could customize that plain UI? (Windows/Linux/MacOS/whatever) so you have the same UI as you do at home?
I'd love to be able to do that, or hot-swap different UI's (Here's your chance you censorshipware lovers, Make your kids a UI disk so they don't screw up YOUR lovely settings hehehe.)
Though to get back to the original idea about being able to stick an entire working linux filesystem on a bootable media, It's an excellect concept, but doesn't have much of a practical use.
One potential use I see is being able to take "your computer" places without taking the entire thing OR, if a company had a pile of laptops, and "User Disks" to boot the things off of so employees could just use any laptop at will (or even any workstation in a building)
Another form of cheating that get's overlooked is cheating by the people who are running or created the game.
Anyone remember when BBS's were popular? How you could log into a BBS Door game and play it for maybe a maximum of an hour? Ever play one where the SysOp played too? Not very fun if everyone picks on the SysOp, because the SysOp would turn around and just cheat to restore balance to their favor.
The same goes for MUD's, The people running it might just be as guilty of cheating as the people playing it.
There is no such thing as a cheat-proof game. The closest Online Games come to being cheat proof is when it's Client-Server and nobody has access to the server. The second part is that the "Client" has to only process I/O from the server (Person moved from x,y to X,Y and got hit by a frog.) and not store any data on the user's end. Now the problem with these set-ups is that there has to be checks in place to prevent multiple accounts or multiple users. (Anyone play Utopia or Earth 2025? Worst case of Client Server cheating I've ever seen, reason being that the only multiple account check is the uniqie email address the authorization code was sent to.)
Of course that could be blamed on the fact there are too many free email systems out there for people to abuse.
The worst examples of cheating always occur in peer-to-peer and client-server systems that the client has to do calculations to send back to the server.
A type of cheating I haven't seen too much, but realized people do this (and not just to games!) is to create macros or bots so they don't have to play the game themselves.
The "Adbar make free money" system has been the latest target of cheating with people creating emulators and macros to cheat them.(Look it up, they exist, Alladvantage being the biggest target) And to make more free money out of them here comes the muliple accounts that they use for referer's, so when they do their X hours on whatever ad system, they load up the next account and do the X hours again.
Just about every aspect of cheating in games can be applied to cheating other software, be it cheating the Ad-paid software, to cheating stupid software from wasting your bandwidth (Do you know how many programs waste your bandwidth? *cough*Real*cough*Player*cough*)
In my opinion, if people are going to create cheats for online games, the people who create the games should be looking out for these cheats and what they do to the game. (Lot's of cheats rely on over-writing some part of the game's memory with different values) Save-game cheats
being the easiest way for the novice to cheat(all you need is a hex-editor), to the more complicated using a debugger and changing memory values to cheat.
Again I come back to the point where game developers should not "use" any data calculated on the client side since it could be cheated easily.
Anyways I think this message is long enough.