But the wording from the FAQ still makes two things clear:
- They expect you to purchase the right to use more than one computer.
- The incompleteness of their phrasing leaves potential loopholes open. You're right about the FAQ writer seeming to be unaware of NAT, and because of that, the FAQ might even be usable to bolster any legal defense. "But your honor, their TOS only said I couldn't provide the service to other people, and the FAQ said I only had to pay if I wanted more than one IP address."
They say you can use multiple computers *if* you pay them money for extra IP addresses. They don't say you can use one IP addy from multiple machines, and they seem to imply you can't
Still, in my (admittedly quick) perusal of their service agreement I saw only wording indicating that you could not use a single connection to provide Internet access to multiple people. If you own all of the computers and only you use them, then this may be a loophole to get you off the hook, should they sue. (Though, of course, they'd still cut off service.)
Good question. The day this news was posted to Slashdot was the very day I went home from work and installed a new video card to create the nightmare scenario:
Red Hat 7.1
PNY Verto AGP vidcard (nVidia GeForce 2 MX400)
AMD Athlon 1200
Asus A7A-266 motherboard with ALi 1647 chipset (bad AGP problems)
The result? It's working like a dream so far.
To be fair I should point out that I've not tested the video card with anything more stressful than playing a few DVDs, and the longest I've had the computer turned on was about 4 hours.
One thing that confused me was that the documentation for the nVidia driver said it would automatically disable AGP if it detected the chipset I have on my motherboard, but the drivers output from X startup says it's running in 4x AGP mode. Curious, but not unpleasing as long as things keep running well.
The reason your argument fails is that we are not, as you claim, buying the right to play the DVD on approved players. We are in fact buying the DVD itself and, just like a book, we may use it in any way that does not infringe copyright. I.e. we may not distribute pure or modified copies to others, nor make such copies available in any way, and we may not put it on public performance for a fee. We can copy it for our own use, show it to our friends, modify it (did you ever write notes in a book?), draw on it with crayons, put Tinky-Winky stickers on it, and play it.
And we may play it on any device we have since (here's the kicker) there is no license agreement prohibiting us from doing otherwise. We've purchased that disc, and it's ours. For this very reason I expect that in the future we will see media formats be licensed much like software.
And let's not forget that 20 years from now we'll have "Fellowship of the Ring: Special Edition" with all the holographic effects that PJ really wanted to do originally.
"The idea is to let someone give a more personal gift," says RichFX CEO Tal Kerret.
So shopping online, sending someone an email, having that person "exchange" the gift through a web site, and eventually receive it in the mail is somehow more personal than carefully selecting an appropriate gift, getting together for a holiday meal, sitting around talking and laughing, giving the gift from your own hand, and watching the (hopefully) happy expression on the recipients face as the gift is opened.
I've seen a lot of comments so far from people worried that this technology could be used to track the spending habits of individuals, but nothing in the article suggests that the money would be linked to the individuals using it. In fact, the article says that the current tech wouldn't even have write capability, and that it would store the serial number of the bill, or some equivalent.
Yes, an external computer at a merchant could read that number and store it, but it would not be of any use to the merchant. If they don't have your ID info then there's no problem, and if they do have your ID already then they probably only care that you spent 35 euros, and the fact that this took the form of three 10 euro notes and one 5 euro note really won't interest them.
Also, tracking "your" money is even more useless, since as soon as you spend it, it's not yours any more and someone else is going to spend it.
Can this technology be abused? Yes it can. Any technology that gathers even small amounts of data into a high capacity, searchable database can be used to invade privacy, and for this reason I oppose the creation of non-anonymous money. This is certainly a first step. The governents could require all transactions to record the buyer's ID and the bank note ID's and forward that info to the government, but this would require building a massive new IT infrastructure that would dwarf anything in existence today. Even if they starting building such a thing today, it would be obsolete before it was even a fraction of the way complete. Besides, governments don't like spending money for such huge projects unless the payoff is equally huge.
NBC held auditions for band members and, shall we say, did not pick people based on their musical ability. The really amazing thing about the Monkees is that they actually managed to make a few decent songs that have lasted. "I'm a Believer" wasn't recently featured in "Shrek", and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" is one that I find myself humming and singing occasionally.
Re:It had nothing to do with Final Fantasy
on
More Final Fantasy Bits
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They didn't give Aki "another" eighth spirit. It was there all along, from the very beginning of the movie, which is why she was having the dreams in the first place. The phantom spirit within her had already been transformed and was trying to communicate with her through her dreams so that she would know what the phantoms were. The only reason the "spirit within" her was never discovered until the end is because the scanners were never turned on her. She was always the one operating the scanners, and she always had them turned away from herself. At the end of the movie, she was down in the crater when Dr. Sid scanned the area, and so the phantom spirit inside her was finally detected.
And I guess the movie could be considered "preachy" but then that's a very relative idea. If you're not a Christian, then the "Omen" movies are preachy. Heck, even "Spawn" is preachy. It does, after all, presuppose that Christian myth is true.
And as for "Aliens", it was a decent movie, but really it's just a decent shoot-em-up movie. It's not lame, but it's also not exactly what I'd call intellectually challenging.
Oh well. I guess it really was a case of a movie being marketed to an audience that expected and wanted something completely different.
Why did people not like Final Fantasy the movie?
on
More Final Fantasy Bits
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I very thoroughly enjoyed it, and bought the DVD (my first DVD, at that). The animation was superb, and the story was decent too. Certainly better that the majority of SF movies. Sure the characters were cut from card stock, but again, they were at least as good as the characters in the majority of movies SF, animated, or otherwise.
Did people not like the movie because of the theological/spiritual concepts involved? That's what a couple of people have told me.
Maybe people just aren't ready for animation that approaches (but not yet reaches) photographic quality. Seeing such life-like images but knowing that were not actual people may have made a lot of people uncomfortable. I know that I've at least seen a few invectives against "digital actors".
For the record I have never played any FF games, but I am an animation fan, and I am also a pagan, so the whole "Gaia" concept was quite familiar and comfortable for me.
That's interesting about the blue. Its not a color I like to use (again, too birght for me) but I wonder if the reason it tests well is because it's close to the frequency detected by the rods/cones (can't remember which) on the retina.
Maybe the specific color your dad recommended is at the center of the frequency response curve for the blue photopigment in the eye?
I'm genuinely curious what you might recommend changing on Slashdot? Except for the white backgrounds (see my post below) I've always considered Slashdot to be a model of good design. Apart, that is, from the hodge-podge of site links on the upper left (faq, code, awards, privacy, etc).
I sit in front of a computer all day at work, and often several hours at night, and if there's one thing I can't stand it's white backgrounds. This isn't just a Web page issue, of course, but is a general UI design issue.
White backgrounds may seem "obvious" to people, perhaps by comparison to a sheet of paper: black ink on white paper = black text on white background. The problem with this analogy is simply that paper doesn't glow, but a computer monitor does. If you turn the background white (or any bright color) then you are making every pixel on the screen light up and your user will find herself or himself staring into a light bulb.
Have you ever stared into a light bulb? It hurts your eyes doesn't it? Every night when I go home from work, my eyes are burning, even though I do as much as I can to minimize the effects: black desktop background image, change the colors in NTEmacs, etc. Unfortunately it isn't possible to do enough since most programs and web sites assume you have a light colored, if not actually white background. Change the background color and you may find yourself looking at black text on black background.
Which brings up another point: if you specify any one color on a web page, then you need to specify *all* of them, otherwise the user may see the black on black phenomenon and decide that your page is too difficult to bother with.
Oh wait! That won't happen because AOL-Time-Warner-CNN-Netscape is a member of MPAA.
Curses! Foiled again!
I'm another who doesn't understand the hype
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 1
I've only read the first one so far, and I did enjoy it very much. I would say that it is in the same class as The Hobbit, but I still don't understand the hype. Is the rest of child-oriented literature really so bad that Harry Potter and the Philosophers' Stone seems godlike by comparison?
Though it was the strong user groups that pushed HP into continuing development. When I left Bradmark in 1998 we were just releasing out latest upgrade to support the new index features that had been added to the IMAGE database system.
I worked for Bradmark, Inc. (http://www.bradmark.com) developing database repair and restructuring tools, and it was really interesting work. Sure the user interface was old, but the kind of code I was writing let me get down under the skin of the OS every now and then, and despite what most people here have been saying, MPE was a nice OS, and had features that I have yet to encounter on unix OSes.
File locking for one. I'm sorry, but the unix notion of locking a file is a joke. "I'll create this here lock file, and then other programs that see the lock will know not to open my file. I sure hope the other programs agree to play nice."
Give me a break. In MPE the locking mechanism is built into the file system, and is enforced by the OS. It is easy to build complex locks like "lock bytes 7643-8126 for exclusive write access" and then other programs can do whatever they want with the other parts of the file, and they can read the locked part, but only you can write. *Very* useful for databases.
Another thing the 3000s excel at is stability. I can honestly say that in the 4 years I worked at Bradmark, the only time our development machine ever had any instability was when we ran a beta version of the OS one time for some testing. I once saw an hp3000 ad that actually advertised their machines as having "99.999%" uptime. They had no worries about false advertising, because it wasn't false.
And on the rare occasions when something does go wrong, these machines are designed from the get go to recover gracefully without user intervention. In addition to their external UPS, each machine has an internal battery. This battery isn't for maintaining main power, rather it just maintains RAM, for up to 8 hours or more. When main power is restored the system does a self diagnostic, rolls back in disk IO that had been interrupted, reconnects to any dumb terminals (widely used when the 3000 was first designed), and restarts all programs! If you had a system where all users connect through terminals, then you could sit there and watch all of those terminals come back to life with their programs running exactly where they were when power failed.
Now that's reliability folks!
Someone I worked with told me his favorite 3000 war story: there was a brief power failure in his building during the middle of the day, but power came back on fairly quickly. At 5:00pm the 3000 sysadmins all made a point of walking by the computer room and saying things like "Gee did the power go out?" for the benefit of the Unix admins who were still checking their filesystems and trying to recover their machines.
Slashdot Mirror
So I'm out. :-) But at least I have the consolation of knowing that Hollywood is out too.
But the wording from the FAQ still makes two things clear:
- They expect you to purchase the right to use more than one computer.
- The incompleteness of their phrasing leaves potential loopholes open. You're right about the FAQ writer seeming to be unaware of NAT, and because of that, the FAQ might even be usable to bolster any legal defense. "But your honor, their TOS only said I couldn't provide the service to other people, and the FAQ said I only had to pay if I wanted more than one IP address."
They say you can use multiple computers *if* you pay them money for extra IP addresses. They don't say you can use one IP addy from multiple machines, and they seem to imply you can't
Still, in my (admittedly quick) perusal of their service agreement I saw only wording indicating that you could not use a single connection to provide Internet access to multiple people. If you own all of the computers and only you use them, then this may be a loophole to get you off the hook, should they sue. (Though, of course, they'd still cut off service.)
Good question. The day this news was posted to Slashdot was the very day I went home from work and installed a new video card to create the nightmare scenario:
Red Hat 7.1
PNY Verto AGP vidcard (nVidia GeForce 2 MX400)
AMD Athlon 1200
Asus A7A-266 motherboard with ALi 1647 chipset (bad AGP problems)
The result? It's working like a dream so far.
To be fair I should point out that I've not tested the video card with anything more stressful than playing a few DVDs, and the longest I've had the computer turned on was about 4 hours.
One thing that confused me was that the documentation for the nVidia driver said it would automatically disable AGP if it detected the chipset I have on my motherboard, but the drivers output from X startup says it's running in 4x AGP mode. Curious, but not unpleasing as long as things keep running well.
OK, I'll bite.
The reason your argument fails is that we are not, as you claim, buying the right to play the DVD on approved players. We are in fact buying the DVD itself and, just like a book, we may use it in any way that does not infringe copyright. I.e. we may not distribute pure or modified copies to others, nor make such copies available in any way, and we may not put it on public performance for a fee. We can copy it for our own use, show it to our friends, modify it (did you ever write notes in a book?), draw on it with crayons, put Tinky-Winky stickers on it, and play it.
And we may play it on any device we have since (here's the kicker) there is no license agreement prohibiting us from doing otherwise. We've purchased that disc, and it's ours. For this very reason I expect that in the future we will see media formats be licensed much like software.
This is either a great leap forward towards Star Trek technology, or someone in Apple's design department needs to be spanked.
And let's not forget that 20 years from now we'll have "Fellowship of the Ring: Special Edition" with all the holographic effects that PJ really wanted to do originally.
"The idea is to let someone give a more personal gift," says RichFX CEO Tal Kerret.
So shopping online, sending someone an email, having that person "exchange" the gift through a web site, and eventually receive it in the mail is somehow more personal than carefully selecting an appropriate gift, getting together for a holiday meal, sitting around talking and laughing, giving the gift from your own hand, and watching the (hopefully) happy expression on the recipients face as the gift is opened.
Did I wake up in the wrong Universe today?
I refuse to give ID when paying cash. That's why I haven't bought anything at radio shack for several years.
I've seen a lot of comments so far from people worried that this technology could be used to track the spending habits of individuals, but nothing in the article suggests that the money would be linked to the individuals using it. In fact, the article says that the current tech wouldn't even have write capability, and that it would store the serial number of the bill, or some equivalent.
Yes, an external computer at a merchant could read that number and store it, but it would not be of any use to the merchant. If they don't have your ID info then there's no problem, and if they do have your ID already then they probably only care that you spent 35 euros, and the fact that this took the form of three 10 euro notes and one 5 euro note really won't interest them.
Also, tracking "your" money is even more useless, since as soon as you spend it, it's not yours any more and someone else is going to spend it.
Can this technology be abused? Yes it can. Any technology that gathers even small amounts of data into a high capacity, searchable database can be used to invade privacy, and for this reason I oppose the creation of non-anonymous money. This is certainly a first step. The governents could require all transactions to record the buyer's ID and the bank note ID's and forward that info to the government, but this would require building a massive new IT infrastructure that would dwarf anything in existence today. Even if they starting building such a thing today, it would be obsolete before it was even a fraction of the way complete. Besides, governments don't like spending money for such huge projects unless the payoff is equally huge.
The sky's not falling yet folks.
Does anyone here remember the Monkees?
NBC held auditions for band members and, shall we say, did not pick people based on their musical ability. The really amazing thing about the Monkees is that they actually managed to make a few decent songs that have lasted. "I'm a Believer" wasn't recently featured in "Shrek", and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" is one that I find myself humming and singing occasionally.
They didn't give Aki "another" eighth spirit. It was there all along, from the very beginning of the movie, which is why she was having the dreams in the first place. The phantom spirit within her had already been transformed and was trying to communicate with her through her dreams so that she would know what the phantoms were. The only reason the "spirit within" her was never discovered until the end is because the scanners were never turned on her. She was always the one operating the scanners, and she always had them turned away from herself. At the end of the movie, she was down in the crater when Dr. Sid scanned the area, and so the phantom spirit inside her was finally detected.
And I guess the movie could be considered "preachy" but then that's a very relative idea. If you're not a Christian, then the "Omen" movies are preachy. Heck, even "Spawn" is preachy. It does, after all, presuppose that Christian myth is true.
And as for "Aliens", it was a decent movie, but really it's just a decent shoot-em-up movie. It's not lame, but it's also not exactly what I'd call intellectually challenging.
Oh well. I guess it really was a case of a movie being marketed to an audience that expected and wanted something completely different.
I very thoroughly enjoyed it, and bought the DVD (my first DVD, at that). The animation was superb, and the story was decent too. Certainly better that the majority of SF movies. Sure the characters were cut from card stock, but again, they were at least as good as the characters in the majority of movies SF, animated, or otherwise.
Did people not like the movie because of the theological/spiritual concepts involved? That's what a couple of people have told me.
Maybe people just aren't ready for animation that approaches (but not yet reaches) photographic quality. Seeing such life-like images but knowing that were not actual people may have made a lot of people uncomfortable. I know that I've at least seen a few invectives against "digital actors".
For the record I have never played any FF games, but I am an animation fan, and I am also a pagan, so the whole "Gaia" concept was quite familiar and comfortable for me.
Yeah, I've mostly had to accept the burning-eye color schemes too. but I still dream! :-)
That's interesting about the blue. Its not a color I like to use (again, too birght for me) but I wonder if the reason it tests well is because it's close to the frequency detected by the rods/cones (can't remember which) on the retina.
Maybe the specific color your dad recommended is at the center of the frequency response curve for the blue photopigment in the eye?
I can see that. My standard emacs colors are actually goldenrod on black. White and greys just don't work as well.
I'm genuinely curious what you might recommend changing on Slashdot? Except for the white backgrounds (see my post below) I've always considered Slashdot to be a model of good design. Apart, that is, from the hodge-podge of site links on the upper left (faq, code, awards, privacy, etc).
I sit in front of a computer all day at work, and often several hours at night, and if there's one thing I can't stand it's white backgrounds. This isn't just a Web page issue, of course, but is a general UI design issue.
White backgrounds may seem "obvious" to people, perhaps by comparison to a sheet of paper: black ink on white paper = black text on white background. The problem with this analogy is simply that paper doesn't glow, but a computer monitor does. If you turn the background white (or any bright color) then you are making every pixel on the screen light up and your user will find herself or himself staring into a light bulb.
Have you ever stared into a light bulb? It hurts your eyes doesn't it? Every night when I go home from work, my eyes are burning, even though I do as much as I can to minimize the effects: black desktop background image, change the colors in NTEmacs, etc. Unfortunately it isn't possible to do enough since most programs and web sites assume you have a light colored, if not actually white background. Change the background color and you may find yourself looking at black text on black background.
Which brings up another point: if you specify any one color on a web page, then you need to specify *all* of them, otherwise the user may see the black on black phenomenon and decide that your page is too difficult to bother with.
Whew!
Rant mode off.
Oh wait! That won't happen because AOL-Time-Warner-CNN-Netscape is a member of MPAA.
Curses! Foiled again!
I've only read the first one so far, and I did enjoy it very much. I would say that it is in the same class as The Hobbit, but I still don't understand the hype. Is the rest of child-oriented literature really so bad that Harry Potter and the Philosophers' Stone seems godlike by comparison?
So are they going to send the Sandmen to all the customer sites?
Though it was the strong user groups that pushed HP into continuing development. When I left Bradmark in 1998 we were just releasing out latest upgrade to support the new index features that had been added to the IMAGE database system.
In fact, I once saw someone swap a CPU board between a 3000 and a 9000. (Don't remember the exact models; low end though)
And if I recall correctly, the first PA-RISC computer that HP sold was an HP3000, as well.
I worked for Bradmark, Inc. (http://www.bradmark.com) developing database repair and restructuring tools, and it was really interesting work. Sure the user interface was old, but the kind of code I was writing let me get down under the skin of the OS every now and then, and despite what most people here have been saying, MPE was a nice OS, and had features that I have yet to encounter on unix OSes.
File locking for one. I'm sorry, but the unix notion of locking a file is a joke. "I'll create this here lock file, and then other programs that see the lock will know not to open my file. I sure hope the other programs agree to play nice."
Give me a break. In MPE the locking mechanism is built into the file system, and is enforced by the OS. It is easy to build complex locks like "lock bytes 7643-8126 for exclusive write access" and then other programs can do whatever they want with the other parts of the file, and they can read the locked part, but only you can write. *Very* useful for databases.
Another thing the 3000s excel at is stability. I can honestly say that in the 4 years I worked at Bradmark, the only time our development machine ever had any instability was when we ran a beta version of the OS one time for some testing. I once saw an hp3000 ad that actually advertised their machines as having "99.999%" uptime. They had no worries about false advertising, because it wasn't false.
And on the rare occasions when something does go wrong, these machines are designed from the get go to recover gracefully without user intervention. In addition to their external UPS, each machine has an internal battery. This battery isn't for maintaining main power, rather it just maintains RAM, for up to 8 hours or more. When main power is restored the system does a self diagnostic, rolls back in disk IO that had been interrupted, reconnects to any dumb terminals (widely used when the 3000 was first designed), and restarts all programs! If you had a system where all users connect through terminals, then you could sit there and watch all of those terminals come back to life with their programs running exactly where they were when power failed.
Now that's reliability folks!
Someone I worked with told me his favorite 3000 war story: there was a brief power failure in his building during the middle of the day, but power came back on fairly quickly. At 5:00pm the 3000 sysadmins all made a point of walking by the computer room and saying things like "Gee did the power go out?" for the benefit of the Unix admins who were still checking their filesystems and trying to recover their machines.
If you're out there Chris: "Hi!" *waves*
Are you sure that Sirius Cybernetics isn't behind this?