Even with the expensive DVD-R for Authoring format, you can't burn a CSS protected disc today, AFAICT.
As I understand it, that was the whole point of DVD-R for Authoring. They did let you burn CSS to Authoring discs ("authoring", after all, means making an exact image of what is going to be pressed at the factory), but they made sure that Authoring discs wouldn't be burnable in regular drives, and (for some reason I can't comprehend), Authoring drives wouldn't burn regular discs.
The original intent was that the only people with Authoring drives and using Authoring discs would be the few pros who needed them. And they would pay big bucks for what was esentially a drive with different firmware, and a blank disc made with different header info, further limiting use to pros only.
I have a red shield and X in my systray so I'm safe. I think it's a warning symbol for anyone trying to hack my box, like a medieaval coat of arms or something saying my computer is stronger than them.
To be specific, that would be Gules, a saltire couped argent.
It'll never happen as long as they insist upon charging people for every little thing they do to their phones. I love my iPod nano, and I have never bought anything from iTMS. I don't even have an iTMS account. While much of my stuff is (gasp!) downloads (mostly stuff from Japan that I can NOT get in an American music store), a lot of was ripped from my own CDs.
The purpose of iTMS is to sell iPods, not the other way around.
Just look at what's on your own MP3 player and imagine a greedy cell phone company making you pay them for the privilege of putting them there.
Note that I rarely use a cell phone anyhow, and the phone I do have is seconded to my mom's cell (since she's the one who wanted me to have a cell phone in the first place), so if I'm wrong in my perception of cell phone companies, then I'm wrong. But what I've been hearing about cell phone companies makes me think I'm pretty close to the mark.
It's probably plans to release mylo that prompted the crackdown on homebrew games and apps for the PSP. Now that there's little of the PSP's original promise left fulfilled, it's a struggling product.
"promise"? Really? Someone promised that you would be able to play homebrews on the PSP? That's news to Sony. Dreams, maybe, but not promise.
Not only that, but you can use it as a REAR VIEW MIRROR in Gran Turismo!!!
WOW! Where can I get a realistic rear view mirror mount accessory so that I don't have to hold it up with my left hand all the time?
Of course the one thing nobody mentions is that a real rear view mirror doesn't require you to refocus your eyes. I guess if you were playing it on a 20" widescreen LCD TV on a desk, and had the PSP next to the LCD TV, it wouldn't be so bad.
But it really doesn't matter to me, since I went to the "Lite" side a few months ago.
If they wouldn't try so damn hard to break homebrew apps, I bet people might buy more games. I know for a fact that before the ability to downgrade firmware, people wouldn't buy games because it required an update first.
Presumably they're doing that to prevent piracy, but why are they so worried when so many PSP games suck anyhow? The really sad part is that most of the games suck less after piracy because they load faster and use less battery when loaded from a flash card.
but the PSP cannot catch up to the DS as long as PSP owners look at DS owners and seem them getting a endless stream of innovative, engaging games that cost less.
So you're saying that the best hope Sony has is for Nintendo to churn out a bunch of sucky DS games? Makes sense to me.
I thought the main point of DVD-A was that it supported the higher bitrates needed for high-quality audio (the newer encryption is the #2 point). DVD Dolby Digital even at a high (for DVD video) rate isn't all that great for surround hi-fi. DTS is pretty decent since it can use a full-speed CD bitstream (1.5 megabits/sec?) on DVD, but that works just fine without getting DVD into the picture. (though they do leave off one or two of the high-order bits on CD-DTS to avoid blowing speakers out with maximum volume white noise when accidentally played on a regluar CD player)
There's a good reason why a lot of music DVDs have a PCM audio track. (which with a little work, by the way, can be ripped and converted to your favorite audio format)
Or are they actually using DVD-A and just calling it another name because of the "pre-ripped" tracks?
Maybe they'll be in a different protected AAC format, which iTunes will decrypt and generate an iPod-compatible AAC track serialized to your iTunes/iPod authorization keys. After all, IIRC that's pretty much what they do now, with your local copy of iTunes doing the final encryption. Of course what's to stop people from loaning out the disc to their cousin who rips his own encrypted AAC files?
After years of use, most vinyl records develop a single deep scratch that spirals from the outside towards the center. I find that rubber cement can fix it pretty easily. I did this to some of my old records a couple years ago and they sound much better now.
I've heard that your vinyl records will sound much "warmer" if you smash vacuum tubes into them.
What if someone were to announce their wiki vandalism on, say, local radio -- that is, to an audience of only 80,000 as opposed to 8 million -- would they still be caught?
Quick, lock down Howard Stern's Wikipedia entry! This is just the kind of stunt he would love to rip off!
The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell.
It might also have something to do with the younger generation being less interested in print media. It's hard to sell papers/newszines to people who would rather go to MySpace, YouTube, or watch The Daily Show.
In my own little world, there IS one gonzo journalist. His name is Matt Drudge. You can check his web site all week, then listen to him sum it all up Sunday evenings on his radio show.
The TI 99/4A had 15 colors, not 16, and pretty crappy ones at that. Zork was not a "re-incarnation" of Colossal Cave Adventure, it was a completely different game that just happened to be in the same genre. The TRS-80 Expansion Interface did not "include" the disk controller, it was an extra cost item. And when the hell did Franklin try to clone the Mac? Most glaring of all to me was saying that Radio Shack came out with the TRS-80 in 1971. It was 1977, get some bifocals already.
And they are clearly Commodore sympathizers, since they parenthetically refer to the TRS-80 as the "Trash-80" for no good reason, without giving the Commode-Door the same treatment.
Oh wait, this is 2old2play.com, where their definition of "old" is age 25-30.
Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned "PC gaming" didn't really happen until there were proper "Personal Computers" available commercially, which meant the second wave of micros in the late '70s (Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore), but I'll give some credit to the first micros (IMSAI, etc.) and the timesharing era. The best games before games became commercial were Super Star Trek (all you needed was 16K and a lot of time to type it in), and Adventure (which I got to play on 300 baud DecWriters using the timeshare that my high school had).
Apple is coming out with a previously unannounced, now leaked, new product, the Egg MacMuffin.
Maybe they should cool their laptops with an Egg MacMuffin Fan?
Disclaimer: my new 17" MacBook Pro actually seems to run cooler than my old 17" 1.33MHz G4. And the fan hardly ever comes on at all. Wth my old G4 I would somtimes set it to "reduced power" mode just to keep the fan from running.
...I just grab the wire that's attached to it and start pulling. I use a lighter plug charger which has an audio-out jack on the charger plug, and the cassette adapter plugs into that. Ergonomically, it's like using a wired remote, only the music is in the "remote" itself. It cost a bit more for this than the other cheapie brands that don't have an audio jack, but I had already been using an MP3 CD player for a few years and was never happy with two wires to the player constantly getting tangled.
And why has it taken car stereo manufacturers so long to put input jacks on the damn things anyhow? Mine is seven years old, and I'm not too aware of what the norm is now. For all I know, they still aren't including input jacks. Cassette adapters are an ugly workaround that shouldn't be necessary, and FM transmitters are usually too weak or imprecise.
What's wrong with a 7 year old computer anyhow? Stick enough RAM in an old Blue & White G3 and you can run the current OS X. That's equivalent to running XP on a 7 year old PC, only it's not slow as molasses.
There's a whole new dimension of fun when your file names include non-Roman characters, such as Japanese.
First of all, there is the matter of which encoding the file names are in. Lots of Japanese Windows installs and their utilities still use Shift-JIS for file names. OS X, on the other hand, uses Unicode, and typically expects UTF-8 for file names from programs. In fact, it not only expects it, it enforces it, returning an error when attempting to use a file name which is invalid UTF-8.
Many command utilities that deal with archive files utterly fail on OS X when given archives using Shift-JIS file names, and many others improperly translate it as 8-bit ISO Latin I. A few (such as the command line RAR archiver) are actually smart enough to make a system call to translate the file name from Shift-JIS to UTF-8.
And then there is the issue of Shift-JIS MP3 tags. If you open those with iTunes, not only do they get interpreted as ISO Latin I, but irreversably so if you do something that writes them back to the.mp3 file. (They get written back as a UTF-8 representation of the ISO Latin.) I've had luck in the past using a hex editor and SimpleText in Classic to convert them with much work, but I'm not sure what I'll do with the new Intel Macs that don't support Classic.
That's not Linux's problem, that's bash's problem. It wants to use the ! to represent something obscure that the few times I've looked it up, it was a "why the hell would I need that" kind of thing? It also has problems with other characters like square brackets. But at least it does the right thing when it comes to tab completion.
What annoys the hell out of me, though, is scp. You have to double-escape stuff because it apparently uses the cp utility on the remote machine as an unescaped shell command, rather than setting up the argument vector and starting cp directly. So whenever there is (say) a blank in a file or directory name, I have to backslash the blank and put double quotes around all or part of the file name. I use OS X, but I've taken to naming some directories in a unixy-style with nothing but lower-case letters and hyphens.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with the expensive DVD-R for Authoring format, you can't burn a CSS protected disc today, AFAICT.
As I understand it, that was the whole point of DVD-R for Authoring. They did let you burn CSS to Authoring discs ("authoring", after all, means making an exact image of what is going to be pressed at the factory), but they made sure that Authoring discs wouldn't be burnable in regular drives, and (for some reason I can't comprehend), Authoring drives wouldn't burn regular discs.
The original intent was that the only people with Authoring drives and using Authoring discs would be the few pros who needed them. And they would pay big bucks for what was esentially a drive with different firmware, and a blank disc made with different header info, further limiting use to pros only.
I have a red shield and X in my systray so I'm safe. I think it's a warning symbol for anyone trying to hack my box, like a medieaval coat of arms or something saying my computer is stronger than them.
To be specific, that would be Gules, a saltire couped argent.
It'll never happen as long as they insist upon charging people for every little thing they do to their phones. I love my iPod nano, and I have never bought anything from iTMS. I don't even have an iTMS account. While much of my stuff is (gasp!) downloads (mostly stuff from Japan that I can NOT get in an American music store), a lot of was ripped from my own CDs.
The purpose of iTMS is to sell iPods, not the other way around.
Just look at what's on your own MP3 player and imagine a greedy cell phone company making you pay them for the privilege of putting them there.
Note that I rarely use a cell phone anyhow, and the phone I do have is seconded to my mom's cell (since she's the one who wanted me to have a cell phone in the first place), so if I'm wrong in my perception of cell phone companies, then I'm wrong. But what I've been hearing about cell phone companies makes me think I'm pretty close to the mark.
It's probably plans to release mylo that prompted the crackdown on homebrew games and apps for the PSP. Now that there's little of the PSP's original promise left fulfilled, it's a struggling product.
"promise"? Really? Someone promised that you would be able to play homebrews on the PSP? That's news to Sony. Dreams, maybe, but not promise.
Not only that, but you can use it as a REAR VIEW MIRROR in Gran Turismo!!!
WOW! Where can I get a realistic rear view mirror mount accessory so that I don't have to hold it up with my left hand all the time?
Of course the one thing nobody mentions is that a real rear view mirror doesn't require you to refocus your eyes. I guess if you were playing it on a 20" widescreen LCD TV on a desk, and had the PSP next to the LCD TV, it wouldn't be so bad.
But it really doesn't matter to me, since I went to the "Lite" side a few months ago.
If they wouldn't try so damn hard to break homebrew apps, I bet people might buy more games. I know for a fact that before the ability to downgrade firmware, people wouldn't buy games because it required an update first.
Presumably they're doing that to prevent piracy, but why are they so worried when so many PSP games suck anyhow? The really sad part is that most of the games suck less after piracy because they load faster and use less battery when loaded from a flash card.
but the PSP cannot catch up to the DS as long as PSP owners look at DS owners and seem them getting a endless stream of innovative, engaging games that cost less.
So you're saying that the best hope Sony has is for Nintendo to churn out a bunch of sucky DS games? Makes sense to me.
I thought the main point of DVD-A was that it supported the higher bitrates needed for high-quality audio (the newer encryption is the #2 point). DVD Dolby Digital even at a high (for DVD video) rate isn't all that great for surround hi-fi. DTS is pretty decent since it can use a full-speed CD bitstream (1.5 megabits/sec?) on DVD, but that works just fine without getting DVD into the picture. (though they do leave off one or two of the high-order bits on CD-DTS to avoid blowing speakers out with maximum volume white noise when accidentally played on a regluar CD player)
There's a good reason why a lot of music DVDs have a PCM audio track. (which with a little work, by the way, can be ripped and converted to your favorite audio format)
Or are they actually using DVD-A and just calling it another name because of the "pre-ripped" tracks?
Maybe they'll be in a different protected AAC format, which iTunes will decrypt and generate an iPod-compatible AAC track serialized to your iTunes/iPod authorization keys. After all, IIRC that's pretty much what they do now, with your local copy of iTunes doing the final encryption. Of course what's to stop people from loaning out the disc to their cousin who rips his own encrypted AAC files?
After years of use, most vinyl records develop a single deep scratch that spirals from the outside towards the center. I find that rubber cement can fix it pretty easily. I did this to some of my old records a couple years ago and they sound much better now.
I've heard that your vinyl records will sound much "warmer" if you smash vacuum tubes into them.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/11/plusnet_em ail_fiasco/
I for one am saddened that yet another goddamn FPS won't be making it to the Wii.
Oh wait, no I'm not. You can go back to your playing with your X360 now.
What if someone were to announce their wiki vandalism on, say, local radio -- that is, to an audience of only 80,000 as opposed to 8 million -- would they still be caught?
Quick, lock down Howard Stern's Wikipedia entry! This is just the kind of stunt he would love to rip off!
The first thing to do is to read the extensive documentation on this subject.
If it's possible, the BOFH has already done it.
I don't have anything to add to this discussion, but I just wanted to let you all know that I'm buying a Nintendo Wii and not a PlayStation 3.
Don't worry, wii understand.
The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell.
It might also have something to do with the younger generation being less interested in print media. It's hard to sell papers/newszines to people who would rather go to MySpace, YouTube, or watch The Daily Show.
In my own little world, there IS one gonzo journalist. His name is Matt Drudge. You can check his web site all week, then listen to him sum it all up Sunday evenings on his radio show.
The TI 99/4A had 15 colors, not 16, and pretty crappy ones at that. Zork was not a "re-incarnation" of Colossal Cave Adventure, it was a completely different game that just happened to be in the same genre. The TRS-80 Expansion Interface did not "include" the disk controller, it was an extra cost item. And when the hell did Franklin try to clone the Mac? Most glaring of all to me was saying that Radio Shack came out with the TRS-80 in 1971. It was 1977, get some bifocals already.
And they are clearly Commodore sympathizers, since they parenthetically refer to the TRS-80 as the "Trash-80" for no good reason, without giving the Commode-Door the same treatment.
Oh wait, this is 2old2play.com, where their definition of "old" is age 25-30.
Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned "PC gaming" didn't really happen until there were proper "Personal Computers" available commercially, which meant the second wave of micros in the late '70s (Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore), but I'll give some credit to the first micros (IMSAI, etc.) and the timesharing era. The best games before games became commercial were Super Star Trek (all you needed was 16K and a lot of time to type it in), and Adventure (which I got to play on 300 baud DecWriters using the timeshare that my high school had).
See that little fan in the back? Put a little screwdriver in there and run the laptop for a few hours. I "smell" a Macbook Pro in your future!
It's all a matter of leveraging the broken windows theory.
Lots of home computer users own their computers to play games that aren't available for alternative OS's and which don't operate properly under WINE.
You mean like the alternative OS's from Sony and Nintendo?
Apple is coming out with a previously unannounced, now leaked, new product, the Egg MacMuffin.
Maybe they should cool their laptops with an Egg MacMuffin Fan?
Disclaimer: my new 17" MacBook Pro actually seems to run cooler than my old 17" 1.33MHz G4. And the fan hardly ever comes on at all. Wth my old G4 I would somtimes set it to "reduced power" mode just to keep the fan from running.
...I just grab the wire that's attached to it and start pulling. I use a lighter plug charger which has an audio-out jack on the charger plug, and the cassette adapter plugs into that. Ergonomically, it's like using a wired remote, only the music is in the "remote" itself. It cost a bit more for this than the other cheapie brands that don't have an audio jack, but I had already been using an MP3 CD player for a few years and was never happy with two wires to the player constantly getting tangled.
And why has it taken car stereo manufacturers so long to put input jacks on the damn things anyhow? Mine is seven years old, and I'm not too aware of what the norm is now. For all I know, they still aren't including input jacks. Cassette adapters are an ugly workaround that shouldn't be necessary, and FM transmitters are usually too weak or imprecise.
What's wrong with a 7 year old computer anyhow? Stick enough RAM in an old Blue & White G3 and you can run the current OS X. That's equivalent to running XP on a 7 year old PC, only it's not slow as molasses.
So Albert Einstein is actually human. For all these years, I thought he existed only in Apple's "Think Different" advertisements.
Oh yeah? Well I thought he was just this random guy that Slashdot used as the icon for their "science" section.
There's a whole new dimension of fun when your file names include non-Roman characters, such as Japanese.
First of all, there is the matter of which encoding the file names are in. Lots of Japanese Windows installs and their utilities still use Shift-JIS for file names. OS X, on the other hand, uses Unicode, and typically expects UTF-8 for file names from programs. In fact, it not only expects it, it enforces it, returning an error when attempting to use a file name which is invalid UTF-8.
Many command utilities that deal with archive files utterly fail on OS X when given archives using Shift-JIS file names, and many others improperly translate it as 8-bit ISO Latin I. A few (such as the command line RAR archiver) are actually smart enough to make a system call to translate the file name from Shift-JIS to UTF-8.
And then there is the issue of Shift-JIS MP3 tags. If you open those with iTunes, not only do they get interpreted as ISO Latin I, but irreversably so if you do something that writes them back to the .mp3 file. (They get written back as a UTF-8 representation of the ISO Latin.) I've had luck in the past using a hex editor and SimpleText in Classic to convert them with much work, but I'm not sure what I'll do with the new Intel Macs that don't support Classic.
That's not Linux's problem, that's bash's problem. It wants to use the ! to represent something obscure that the few times I've looked it up, it was a "why the hell would I need that" kind of thing? It also has problems with other characters like square brackets. But at least it does the right thing when it comes to tab completion.
What annoys the hell out of me, though, is scp. You have to double-escape stuff because it apparently uses the cp utility on the remote machine as an unescaped shell command, rather than setting up the argument vector and starting cp directly. So whenever there is (say) a blank in a file or directory name, I have to backslash the blank and put double quotes around all or part of the file name. I use OS X, but I've taken to naming some directories in a unixy-style with nothing but lower-case letters and hyphens.