"It helps that most of the people Apple has been targeting with their service have at least one of the following qualities: rabid devotion to Apple no matter (so they'll buy it just to make Apple look good), rabid devotion to being as "hip" as possible (so they'll buy it just to make themselves look good). "
Are you trolling in an effort to try to get a bunch of people to post about how amazingly un-hip they are? I use a mac but I'm so totally unhip that I...
"Exactly - the old 90's mantra of trying to capture an emerging internet market in the early stages actually seems to hold some value here."
It's a good thing the RIAA didn't know about this back then (hell, they still don't know) or they would have gotten into bed with napster instead of suing them, and then we all would have been in a really nasty, sticky, DRM-filled situation.
"in high school, my chem teacher had us notch a modern penny to expose the zinc and dropped them in a beaker of acid that dissolved the zinc but not the copper (I forget what acid exactly). You could see little bubbles of gas forming as the acid ionized the zinc."
One word: Electroplating. Chemistry seems dumbed down more and more these days and you don't get to do the cool stuff anymore, but we had a very cool teacher who had us doing electroplating experiments. If I remember correctly, we had set up an aluminium plate as the anode and a loonie (canadian gold coloured $1 coin) as the cathode and then we coated the loonie with aluminium. It was cool to say the least. You get an authentic coin in a strange colour and you can make your friends wonder where it came from.
"Interesting bit of trivia: The old and new pennies sound very different when dropped onto a hard surface: the old ones have a bright ring; the new ones are considerably duller in tone. You can sort them by sound!"
Here's another one for the trivia column. You can sort 'old' and 'new' Canadian nickels using magnets. I think it was in ~1981 that the reduced the actual nickel content of Canadian 5 cent pieces so that you could no longer pick them up with magnets. What a shame.
And even another one: Supposedly the materials in a penny are worth more than one cent. So if you melted down a million dollars worth of pennies, you'd have more than a million dollars worth of metal. I don't know how the melting cost would work into this and whether it would still be economical to make money this way, but it's still interesting to know.
"I would agree completely, but for Apple's iTunes Music Store. Quite frankly it rocks. iTMS is an argument for *less* restrictions and *open* formats (i.e. AAC v. WMA)."
I wish I had a basis to agree or disagree with you on this one. I can only get 30 second previews until they make this thing available in Canada. I wonder which is higher priority for them: Making iTunes for Windows or making iTunes for outside the USA. I wonder which one would really give the greatest return on investment.
Apple's deal is quite sweet because even though there is DRM, you just download your tues, burn to CD-Rw, rip, encode to OGG at a slight quality loss and then you get your tunes that you legitimately purchased in a DRM-free format forever. Lather, rince, repeat.
"You know it just occurred to me... Maybe this is obvious to everyone, but once you buy something tied to Microsoft's DRM, they now lock you into a cycle of upgrading your OS, and if you don't, you risk losing all "your" purchased music."
Yes, that's the whole idea. It's also why they killed off IE for the mac. They want to tie you to services that require IE for Windows Longhorn. They proved that they can get away with antics like this when they 'won' the anti-trust case against the DOJ.
" Then again, there's the Apple Music Store model:
1. Design something whch works well;
2. Make a fair deal (with usually unfair people) and honor your agreement;
4. Treat those who use your service as valued customers and not like necessary evils;
5. Profit ?"
You forgot:
3. There is no step three!! There is no step three!!
Firstly, for those who don't know (and yes there are many who don't know even on slashdot,) macrovision is a (very poorly implemented and easily bypassed with the right gear) anti-copying technology the causes the picture to get darker and brighter all the time. On analogue media they play around with the luminance signal and on DVD it's just a macrovision bit that they turn on. You can get macrovision filters to clean this sort of thing up.
The last time I tried to use my iBook as a DVD player using the composite jack on an external TV, the same thing happenned. The Apple DVD player sent a macrovision signal out with the composite signal. Fortunately I happenned to have VLC which allowed me to properly play the DVD that I had bought within my own rights.
Alas, stories like this are considered by the industry to be collateral damage.
"Can you play US-bought CDs if you take them into Canada? Do the RIAA's distributors have any say in the matter?"
With physical CDs, you have to be more concerned with hemisphere as opposed to nation. If you take your US or Canadian purchased discs to Australia or vice versa, you will not be able to play them unless you get a converter.
This converter compensates for the fact that the Aussie discs are pressed such that the grooves go in the opposite direction of north american discs that thus they must spin 'backwards.' The converter is basically a mirror-like device that causes the disc to appear in mirror image to the laser, this causing your music to play forward instead of reverse. </joke>
"You wouldn't know from the phone system. You don't have to use international dialing to get Canada. Its just one more area code (or more accurately, several more). Go figure."
Looking at this listing, 23 of the area codes that don't require an international codes are from Canada. I am also seeing on this list some other countries as well: Anguilla, Antigua/Barbuda-Carib, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, 'other' Carribean Islands, Cayman Islands, CNMI-Mariana Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamacia, Montserrat, Peurto Rico, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent*, Trinidad and Tobago**, Turks & Caicos
*Extra points for you if you know who Tante Merle from St. Vincent is;-)
**My family's homeland.
" (a) the RIAA/MPAA is ripping off the artists anyway, so I should just steal it anyway and they both can burn for all I care;"
They are certainly ripping off the artists but it does not make getting unpaid or bootleg copies legal.
"(b) I'm not really 'stealing' it because it's still 'there' after I have taken it;"
You're not really stealing because copyright infringement != theft regardless of what the thought police try to coerce you into believing.
"(c) Music and movies suck nowadays anyway so I should be able to get them free;"
Even if it sucks, it is intellectual property and you've gotta pay the owner for it. The RIAA owns the music if its signed artists. If it sucks, why do you want to get it in the first place?!?
"(d) Everyone else is doing it, normal people who don't shoplift or anything, so it must be okay."
If the United States was a democratic country where the majority's word is law as opposed to a 'communist' state ruled by cartels and monopolies where people all play the same games under their rules, this would be true. Too bad it is not true. Whomever you vote for come January '05, the cartels that control what you see, hear, think and believe will not be thrown 'out of office.'
" (e) Because a consumer should have the right to do whatever they want with their property, including sharing it with"
According to the RIAA, you are only 'licensed' to hear the music when you buy the CD. The disc itself is your property but not the tracks. They say the music is not your property to begin with.
Of course this is a double standard because of your CD gets damaged or something, they want you to pay for another one in order to hear the music again, even though you already bought a 'license.' They have a mighty tasty cake and they are eating it too.
"Maybe the students wouldn't have so many questions if they actually listened and instead of posting questions and rating others."
Professors are not perfect people and what seems like totally obvious common sense to them may not come so easily to those who are learning it the first time.
Even if you listen intently, you won't understand everything all the time. This is why gaining a quick consensus on what was least understood while the professor is discussing it is important.
"If you want to discuss the lecture with people, wait until after it is finished"
If you wait until after the lecture, everything after the point where you did not understand will be gibberish in your brain. Then you have to find out about that one tiny thing, then you have to go back over the rest of the lecture to deduce what it means when the professor is not there. If you don't get to this by the start next lecture, then you'll be lost for that class too.
"Several lecturers I know have moved to providing their "lecture" online (e.g. hypertext document) and use the allocated lecture time for a follow up workshop, requiring the students to have already read and considered the "lecture" and to come along with some sort of academic response. Seems a far more effective use of teaching time to me, far more likely to be of value to students."
Agreed. I took a chemistry course like this several years ago. This course had reputation for being extremely difficult and you heard scary stories about it around the lunchroom table. The people who actually did the work before the lecture (including myself) did reasonably well (70-90%, and 80+ was a flippin' good mark for that class.) The people who fell behind on the readings were in a pit too deep to possibly climb out. They dropped, failed or barely squeaked by.
Of all the courses I have ever taken for anything, I think this chem one was the one where I learned the most. I liked the format because it really causes the information to stick in your head. Also, it weeds out the people who are not committed and really forces everyone else to actually learn. Four years later I was helping my brother learn the same stuff and I could correct or guide him on the material from memory because I remembered it.
"..an audio message to be volleyed nonstop to the telephone numbers listed in the... [email] spam messages.' "
Wasn't there an article some months ago about something simimlar happenning in china? 'Entrepreneurs' would illegally put up advertisements (i.e. posters) all over the place where you have to phone a number to get the product. (Typically these would be mobile phone numbers that were prepaid so there was no name on the account.)
The law enformenet officials would leave an endless loop of messages on tht moble's answering machine that they must turn themselves in and such. I doubt that they actually expected anyone to turn themselves in, but it made all those posters with the number on them useless and thus discouraged putting them up in the first place.
I wonder if this russian fellow was inspired by that action.
" Wouldn't it be possible to apply lookup tables to the individual stages of the algorithm, rather than just the whole pipeline. "
How would that help you? On the machine you're trying to crack, the stages of the md5 hash on the password are not stored. Only the result.
"Or maybe you could crank the algorithm in reverse and use lookup tables that way?"
The whole point of the one-way hashes like MD5 and SHA-1 are that you can't run them backwards. (Well you can, but it's computationally infeasable. They were designed that way.) This is the whole point of using them.
This is a science centre in Sudbury, Ontario and it's really an amazing place. Tonnes of live demonstrations, lots of interactivity, really interesting displays, etc. I've only been there once and it kicked ass. IMO it's even better than the Ontario Science Centre.
"MS is going to innovate in adding propietary extensions when and where they can. Get ready for IE7 to introduce amazing technologies for people to use that will just happen to need a Windows server at the other end.
This has been tried already but now they're clearly in a position to start levaraging this with the browser wars well and truly over."
You are exactly right. This is the real reason why they discontinued MSIE for Mac OS. They now want to illegally leverage their illegally obtained browser monopoly to illegally marginalise Linux and OS X. If there's one thing they learned from the anti trust trial, it's that they can get away with it.
It's the reverse of how they won the browser wars: This time they use a browser monopoly to marginalise operating systems. Brilliant.
"I though working with DVs ~215MB/min was bad enough... less than five minutes of footage per gig! Aaargh! High Density resolution is going to murder hard disks!;)"
Why aren't you capturing into HuffYUV compressed video? It's lossless and open source.
" The attack described in the article is dictionary attack, i.e. you take lots of [alphanumeric in the article] passwords, hash them, and compare your password hash with the huge database of hashes.
Switching to MD5 without salt would not stop this attack, since you don't have to do MD5 -> String convertion, just lots of String -> MD5 hash conversions, and these are very fast."
This is quite correct, and I failed to mention it in my original post. Thank you for adding it.
The 'strength' of MD5 becomes apparent here because it is rather difficult to remove the salt *after* the hashing takes place. Kind of like removing the salt from your omlette after you cook it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just turn off javascript or use a useragent spoofer. I saw their site just fine.
Are you trolling in an effort to try to get a bunch of people to post about how amazingly un-hip they are? I use a mac but I'm so totally unhip that I ...
It's a good thing the RIAA didn't know about this back then (hell, they still don't know) or they would have gotten into bed with napster instead of suing them, and then we all would have been in a really nasty, sticky, DRM-filled situation.
One word: Electroplating. Chemistry seems dumbed down more and more these days and you don't get to do the cool stuff anymore, but we had a very cool teacher who had us doing electroplating experiments. If I remember correctly, we had set up an aluminium plate as the anode and a loonie (canadian gold coloured $1 coin) as the cathode and then we coated the loonie with aluminium. It was cool to say the least. You get an authentic coin in a strange colour and you can make your friends wonder where it came from.
Here's another one for the trivia column. You can sort 'old' and 'new' Canadian nickels using magnets. I think it was in ~1981 that the reduced the actual nickel content of Canadian 5 cent pieces so that you could no longer pick them up with magnets. What a shame.
And even another one: Supposedly the materials in a penny are worth more than one cent. So if you melted down a million dollars worth of pennies, you'd have more than a million dollars worth of metal. I don't know how the melting cost would work into this and whether it would still be economical to make money this way, but it's still interesting to know.
I wish I had a basis to agree or disagree with you on this one. I can only get 30 second previews until they make this thing available in Canada. I wonder which is higher priority for them: Making iTunes for Windows or making iTunes for outside the USA. I wonder which one would really give the greatest return on investment.
Apple's deal is quite sweet because even though there is DRM, you just download your tues, burn to CD-Rw, rip, encode to OGG at a slight quality loss and then you get your tunes that you legitimately purchased in a DRM-free format forever. Lather, rince, repeat.
Yes, that's the whole idea. It's also why they killed off IE for the mac. They want to tie you to services that require IE for Windows Longhorn. They proved that they can get away with antics like this when they 'won' the anti-trust case against the DOJ.
-Any browser to download Kazaa."
Correct me if I'm wrong but can't you only run Kazaa from Windows (kazaa or kazaa lite) or MacOS (Neo) ? Is there linux support that I'm not aware of?
1. Design something whch works well;
2. Make a fair deal (with usually unfair people) and honor your agreement;
4. Treat those who use your service as valued customers and not like necessary evils;
5. Profit ?"
You forgot:
3. There is no step three!! There is no step three!!
I hear you.
Firstly, for those who don't know (and yes there are many who don't know even on slashdot,) macrovision is a (very poorly implemented and easily bypassed with the right gear) anti-copying technology the causes the picture to get darker and brighter all the time. On analogue media they play around with the luminance signal and on DVD it's just a macrovision bit that they turn on. You can get macrovision filters to clean this sort of thing up.
The last time I tried to use my iBook as a DVD player using the composite jack on an external TV, the same thing happenned. The Apple DVD player sent a macrovision signal out with the composite signal. Fortunately I happenned to have VLC which allowed me to properly play the DVD that I had bought within my own rights.
Alas, stories like this are considered by the industry to be collateral damage.
Thinking was not performed on their end. Basically they just had some sort of DB that followed a flow chart.
He clicked 'channels not working' and the DB assumes that all channels are not working. In this case, bad cabling is a possible cause.
I would blame the people who made the troubleshooting db as opposed to the guy on the phone. He was just doing what a flawed system told him to do.
With physical CDs, you have to be more concerned with hemisphere as opposed to nation. If you take your US or Canadian purchased discs to Australia or vice versa, you will not be able to play them unless you get a converter.
This converter compensates for the fact that the Aussie discs are pressed such that the grooves go in the opposite direction of north american discs that thus they must spin 'backwards.' The converter is basically a mirror-like device that causes the disc to appear in mirror image to the laser, this causing your music to play forward instead of reverse. </joke>
Looking at this listing, 23 of the area codes that don't require an international codes are from Canada. I am also seeing on this list some other countries as well: Anguilla, Antigua/Barbuda-Carib, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, 'other' Carribean Islands, Cayman Islands, CNMI-Mariana Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamacia, Montserrat, Peurto Rico, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent*, Trinidad and Tobago**, Turks & Caicos
*Extra points for you if you know who Tante Merle from St. Vincent is ;-)
**My family's homeland.
They are certainly ripping off the artists but it does not make getting unpaid or bootleg copies legal. "(b) I'm not really 'stealing' it because it's still 'there' after I have taken it;"
You're not really stealing because copyright infringement != theft regardless of what the thought police try to coerce you into believing.
"(c) Music and movies suck nowadays anyway so I should be able to get them free;"
Even if it sucks, it is intellectual property and you've gotta pay the owner for it. The RIAA owns the music if its signed artists. If it sucks, why do you want to get it in the first place?!?
"(d) Everyone else is doing it, normal people who don't shoplift or anything, so it must be okay."
If the United States was a democratic country where the majority's word is law as opposed to a 'communist' state ruled by cartels and monopolies where people all play the same games under their rules, this would be true. Too bad it is not true. Whomever you vote for come January '05, the cartels that control what you see, hear, think and believe will not be thrown 'out of office.'
According to the RIAA, you are only 'licensed' to hear the music when you buy the CD. The disc itself is your property but not the tracks. They say the music is not your property to begin with.
Of course this is a double standard because of your CD gets damaged or something, they want you to pay for another one in order to hear the music again, even though you already bought a 'license.' They have a mighty tasty cake and they are eating it too.
Professors are not perfect people and what seems like totally obvious common sense to them may not come so easily to those who are learning it the first time.
Even if you listen intently, you won't understand everything all the time. This is why gaining a quick consensus on what was least understood while the professor is discussing it is important.
"If you want to discuss the lecture with people, wait until after it is finished"
If you wait until after the lecture, everything after the point where you did not understand will be gibberish in your brain. Then you have to find out about that one tiny thing, then you have to go back over the rest of the lecture to deduce what it means when the professor is not there. If you don't get to this by the start next lecture, then you'll be lost for that class too.
Agreed. I took a chemistry course like this several years ago. This course had reputation for being extremely difficult and you heard scary stories about it around the lunchroom table. The people who actually did the work before the lecture (including myself) did reasonably well (70-90%, and 80+ was a flippin' good mark for that class.) The people who fell behind on the readings were in a pit too deep to possibly climb out. They dropped, failed or barely squeaked by.
Of all the courses I have ever taken for anything, I think this chem one was the one where I learned the most. I liked the format because it really causes the information to stick in your head. Also, it weeds out the people who are not committed and really forces everyone else to actually learn. Four years later I was helping my brother learn the same stuff and I could correct or guide him on the material from memory because I remembered it.
Wasn't there an article some months ago about something simimlar happenning in china? 'Entrepreneurs' would illegally put up advertisements (i.e. posters) all over the place where you have to phone a number to get the product. (Typically these would be mobile phone numbers that were prepaid so there was no name on the account.)
The law enformenet officials would leave an endless loop of messages on tht moble's answering machine that they must turn themselves in and such. I doubt that they actually expected anyone to turn themselves in, but it made all those posters with the number on them useless and thus discouraged putting them up in the first place.
I wonder if this russian fellow was inspired by that action.
Please let me be the first one to have said that ...
How would that help you? On the machine you're trying to crack, the stages of the md5 hash on the password are not stored. Only the result.
"Or maybe you could crank the algorithm in reverse and use lookup tables that way?"
The whole point of the one-way hashes like MD5 and SHA-1 are that you can't run them backwards. (Well you can, but it's computationally infeasable. They were designed that way.) This is the whole point of using them.
This is a science centre in Sudbury, Ontario and it's really an amazing place. Tonnes of live demonstrations, lots of interactivity, really interesting displays, etc. I've only been there once and it kicked ass. IMO it's even better than the Ontario Science Centre.
You are exactly right. This is the real reason why they discontinued MSIE for Mac OS. They now want to illegally leverage their illegally obtained browser monopoly to illegally marginalise Linux and OS X. If there's one thing they learned from the anti trust trial, it's that they can get away with it.
It's the reverse of how they won the browser wars: This time they use a browser monopoly to marginalise operating systems. Brilliant.
Longhorns are no match for the large cats that hunt them down and kill them.
Why aren't you capturing into HuffYUV compressed video? It's lossless and open source.
This is quite correct, and I failed to mention it in my original post. Thank you for adding it.
The 'strength' of MD5 becomes apparent here because it is rather difficult to remove the salt *after* the hashing takes place. Kind of like removing the salt from your omlette after you cook it.