Believe it or not, Penn Jillette (yes, that Penn) used to write a column for PC Computing way back when it was a decent magazine. "I Heart My Dog's Head" is still a classic.
MyMusic.com sells Canadian CDs to American customers. You don't have to pay duties since they actually ship it from a New York address (my guess is they have a warehouse right at the border and truck CDs back and forth). It's not always cheaper than cheap-cds.com (who literally only make money off the shipping), but at $9.90 for most new releases, they're not bad either.
Wasn't there already a movie made of this? Or was it just one book?
There was an awful BBC miniseries based off the first book and parts of the second book. (Adams said it was actually based off the radio series, but that it also included the revised parts in the books.) A lot of video places bill it as a movie, but it's just a miniseries.
There was a story on/. a while back about this miniseries hitting DVD in the U.S., but you're better off pretending it didn't exist. The only parts I found funny were the foreword added by Douglas Adams (done in Star Wars giant-scrolling-letters-style where he declared that the proceeds from the sale of the video would, in fact, be donated to himself), and war between two civilizations being depicited as a video game, where after the narrator talks about coming to a truce and "evening the score" one civilization shoots the other's ship to literally even the score.
Sort of. Word has a feature called "fast saves" that only adds revisions on saves (think like GNU diff) rather than going through and rebuilding the file. This was enabled by default until some later Word service pack (2K SP1 IIRC). This is also one of the reasons DOC files tend to have hideously-bloated filesizes.
There's some other ways of getting weird extraneous data dumped into Office files -- see this Microsoft Knowledge Base document for more info. Fast saves are by far the worst culprit, though.
If you're really concerned about this sort of thing, the best thing to do (besides using a different office suite) is to pipe public documents through GNU strings first to make sure nothing conspicuous is embedded.
You don't really get 58K colors; that's from Palm counting colors you get when you dither, which doesn't really count. Only 4096 colors are actually available in hardware.
And yes, if I had bought an m130 for viewing photos, I'd be infuriated, because that's blatant false advertisement. At least they're doing the honorable thing, if a bit late.
Mozilla (and even Netscape 4.x) have this, to some extent. As long as the file is big enough to fit in your cache, it'll resume it.
The ability to pause and resume downloads more flexibly (like Opera's download manager -- which Mozilla's download manager is heavily inspired by -- does) is in the works (Bugzilla # anybody?) and will hopefully get added sooner or later.
It's based on a Cirrus Logic DSP (the model number escapes me) rather than a hardwired MP3 decoder. iRiver (the company that manufactures and writes the firmware for the MP3-CD players for Rio) says the hardware is not only capable of Ogg decoding, but they have a prototype firmware in the labs that already does it, and they hope to have it integrated into the release firmware in the next release or two.
They've been very good on delivering on their promises so far (and even giving you things you wouldn't expect -- the 5-CD memory was added in a firmware upgrade) so it's a good choice if you want to move to Ogg in the future.
I believe the point here is not that this one comment is a duplicate, but that this is a growing trend on our beloved Slashdot. A brief look at the comments today:
3 in one day does seem a bit extreme, at least to my way of thinking.
Perhaps the concept proposed by a previous poster (to help catch "duplicate" posts) might be a good idea.
(Note: no offense meant to the parent poster. I just find it funny that 5 of the 6 posts within my threshold are all complaining about redundancy.)
I can honestly say that they hired anyone that could effectively grip a mouse. It was sad, but maybe things have changed.
A couple of months ago, I was hired by a local company as a network consultant. They originally called Gateway and asked for a Gateway-recommended network guy, but they changed their minds once they called the guy Gateway recommended and he was literally too stoned to remember what day it was.
the source code for both NeoNapster and NeoAudio are posted on their download page, and both programs are licensed under the GPL. Even if this is ethically wrong, legally it's fine.
That said, it's still a nasty rip-off, and I hope people use CDex (a very fine piece of software, incidentally) instead.
Funny, I'm holding one in my hand right now that I bought in 1992.
Bingo. WD drives started really going downhill in the mid 90s. A good example of this is the fact that WD drives don't/didn't do proper CRC checks as part of the UDMA specs. (See Andre Hedrick's rantings on the linux-kernel list for more info.)
Incidentally, I've had nothing but trouble from every single WD drive I've bought since 1996. (Needless to say, I don't buy them anymore.) I'd be doubly wary of storing 200GB (!) of data on a WD drive.
You might want to check out the heir apparent to PBCK, Visual Pinball. It's not quite as easy to get a grasp on (for the really fun stuff you need to do some scripting) but it's much more powerful than PBCK. Plus, the price is right.
One of the more interesting projects done with VP is to recreate arcade pinball machines; you can even hook up a special embedded version of MAME to emulate the LED display.
In the case of PSX discs, they are intentionally burned with errors. Assuming your CD copier doesn't barf on the errors, your CD copying software will probably correct them for you. Then when the PSX boots, it reads the disc, finds no errors, and refuses to run the game.
It doesn't take a special drive to copy PSX discs -- just software that will do raw copies of CDs, a CD/DVD-ROM drive that can do raw reads, and a CD burner that can do raw writes (which is most of them nowadays). You don't need special media, either, aside from the fact that some PSX models have lasers that "like" the material of some CD-Rs better than others.
I'm not sure about the X-Box, but it probably has a similar copy-protection scheme. IIRC it also has the requirement that all software be digitally signed by Microsoft to try to stop unlicensed games. (To further discourage unlicensed game-making, legit X-Box DVDs are also burned "backwards" -- that is, instead of going from the inside of the disc to the outside it goes in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how, if at all, this affects copying, since I doubt a raw copy cares what direction it's being done in.)
The trick is, they're not in compliance with anything. Spam usually refers to Senate bill S.1618 or House bill HR 3133, neither of which was passed into law. They would have both required working opt-out addresses and legitimate headers, so virtually all spam wouldn't have been in compliance with it anyway.
Incidentally, setting your mail filters to delete all mail with "S.1618" in the body is a terrific spam filter, since no legitimate mail ever refers to it, and nearly all spam does.
Re:What I would really like
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
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· Score: 3, Informative
This actually happened with Q3Test; they released Mac first, then Linux, and finally Windows. Carmack wanted to go in order of least gamers to most in order to shake out the bugs before it hit a really wide audience.
I seriously doubt Apple or Red Hat's sales jumped much overnight over it. A few gaming sites with way too much money on their hands bought iMacs to try it out, but that's about it. Installing a new OS (or switching hardware platforms entirely!) is an awfully daunting task for a couple of weeks of early play.
Well, sort of, anyway. They don't go into much detail because of fear of people exploiting it, but it's some kind of buffer overflow (big surprise there) triggered by a malicious Gopher server.
The Etch-A-Sketch Animator 2000 even had a stylus, no less. But the screen wasn't touch-sensitive; the stylus area was a seperate pad, like on a notebook computer.
Expensive as hell (unless you got lucky and Target sent you a raincheck good for 50% off any toy in the store: note to Target, not a wise financial move giving an 8-year-old 50% off any one item he wants). But a cool little toy though.
However, would AOL Time Warner allow Nullsoft to do this?
They already have. Winamp 3 is available in public beta with the Ogg plugin, and the last few revisions of Winamp 2 ship with it too.
But knowing Nullsoft, it's probably less an issue of whether or not AOL/TW has allowed them to do it, and more of whether or not they know how to stop them from doing it.
John Stossel is probably a good person to contact, since he's a libertarian with primetime TV exposure. He also is very critical of government waste and intrusion, so this is the very kind of thing he might go after.
Roblimo mentions something about creating and editing pdf files, and appears to implie this is included in Word and Wordperfect. To my knowledge it is not, it requires the purchase of a $200 piece of software from Adobe.
Actually, this is one of my favorite comparisons between WordPerfect (my word processor of choice, though I haven't tried OO/SO 6.0 yet) and Word:
WordPerfect 9 added a feature that let you export.PDF files directly from WordPerfect, without needing any third-party software.
Word 2000 added a toolbar button that let you run Acrobat.
Of course, you can always just use PrintMon to set up a virtual printer that pipes PostScript directly to Ghostscript, which can automatically distill it to a.PDF for you. But that requires a good bit of software knowledge and some tweaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe it or not, Penn Jillette (yes, that Penn) used to write a column for PC Computing way back when it was a decent magazine. "I Heart My Dog's Head" is still a classic.
MyMusic.com sells Canadian CDs to American customers. You don't have to pay duties since they actually ship it from a New York address (my guess is they have a warehouse right at the border and truck CDs back and forth). It's not always cheaper than cheap-cds.com (who literally only make money off the shipping), but at $9.90 for most new releases, they're not bad either.
There was a story on /. a while back about this miniseries hitting DVD in the U.S., but you're better off pretending it didn't exist. The only parts I found funny were the foreword added by Douglas Adams (done in Star Wars giant-scrolling-letters-style where he declared that the proceeds from the sale of the video would, in fact, be donated to himself), and war between two civilizations being depicited as a video game, where after the narrator talks about coming to a truce and "evening the score" one civilization shoots the other's ship to literally even the score.
There's some other ways of getting weird extraneous data dumped into Office files -- see this Microsoft Knowledge Base document for more info. Fast saves are by far the worst culprit, though.
If you're really concerned about this sort of thing, the best thing to do (besides using a different office suite) is to pipe public documents through GNU strings first to make sure nothing conspicuous is embedded.
And yes, if I had bought an m130 for viewing photos, I'd be infuriated, because that's blatant false advertisement. At least they're doing the honorable thing, if a bit late.
The ability to pause and resume downloads more flexibly (like Opera's download manager -- which Mozilla's download manager is heavily inspired by -- does) is in the works (Bugzilla # anybody?) and will hopefully get added sooner or later.
They've been very good on delivering on their promises so far (and even giving you things you wouldn't expect -- the 5-CD memory was added in a firmware upgrade) so it's a good choice if you want to move to Ogg in the future.
3 in one day does seem a bit extreme, at least to my way of thinking.
Perhaps the concept proposed by a previous poster (to help catch "duplicate" posts) might be a good idea.
(Note: no offense meant to the parent poster. I just find it funny that 5 of the 6 posts within my threshold are all complaining about redundancy.)
In that case, I'm complaining to Download.com; I'm sure they'd be interested in knowing that they're pointing to an illegal download.
That said, it's still a nasty rip-off, and I hope people use CDex (a very fine piece of software, incidentally) instead.
Incidentally, I've had nothing but trouble from every single WD drive I've bought since 1996. (Needless to say, I don't buy them anymore.) I'd be doubly wary of storing 200GB (!) of data on a WD drive.
One of the more interesting projects done with VP is to recreate arcade pinball machines; you can even hook up a special embedded version of MAME to emulate the LED display.
It doesn't take a special drive to copy PSX discs -- just software that will do raw copies of CDs, a CD/DVD-ROM drive that can do raw reads, and a CD burner that can do raw writes (which is most of them nowadays). You don't need special media, either, aside from the fact that some PSX models have lasers that "like" the material of some CD-Rs better than others.
I'm not sure about the X-Box, but it probably has a similar copy-protection scheme. IIRC it also has the requirement that all software be digitally signed by Microsoft to try to stop unlicensed games. (To further discourage unlicensed game-making, legit X-Box DVDs are also burned "backwards" -- that is, instead of going from the inside of the disc to the outside it goes in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how, if at all, this affects copying, since I doubt a raw copy cares what direction it's being done in.)
Incidentally, setting your mail filters to delete all mail with "S.1618" in the body is a terrific spam filter, since no legitimate mail ever refers to it, and nearly all spam does.
I seriously doubt Apple or Red Hat's sales jumped much overnight over it. A few gaming sites with way too much money on their hands bought iMacs to try it out, but that's about it. Installing a new OS (or switching hardware platforms entirely!) is an awfully daunting task for a couple of weeks of early play.
1. Write open-source software
2. Find holes in MS software, publicize them frantically, and come to "an agreement"
3. Profit!
Well, sort of, anyway. They don't go into much detail because of fear of people exploiting it, but it's some kind of buffer overflow (big surprise there) triggered by a malicious Gopher server.
Expensive as hell (unless you got lucky and Target sent you a raincheck good for 50% off any toy in the store: note to Target, not a wise financial move giving an 8-year-old 50% off any one item he wants). But a cool little toy though.
Epson scanner: $100.
Epson scanner: $100.
Roll of duct tape: $2.
The look on your department head's face: priceless.
I suppose they park their cars over thermal vents overnight to power them?
But knowing Nullsoft, it's probably less an issue of whether or not AOL/TW has allowed them to do it, and more of whether or not they know how to stop them from doing it.
John Stossel is probably a good person to contact, since he's a libertarian with primetime TV exposure. He also is very critical of government waste and intrusion, so this is the very kind of thing he might go after.
Actually, this is one of my favorite comparisons between WordPerfect (my word processor of choice, though I haven't tried OO/SO 6.0 yet) and Word:
WordPerfect 9 added a feature that let you export .PDF files directly from WordPerfect, without needing any third-party software.
Word 2000 added a toolbar button that let you run Acrobat.
Of course, you can always just use PrintMon to set up a virtual printer that pipes PostScript directly to Ghostscript, which can automatically distill it to a .PDF for you. But that requires a good bit of software knowledge and some tweaking.