Being a baffled Foreigner to American Humor and Customs, I won't presume to know for absolutely certain if the previous poster was very serious or not when suggesting that the gubmink dun pulled a fast one on the world for 30 years with the old Art Bell chestnut, THE MOON HOAX.
If you listen to these people, Human Space Travel is impossible on account of astronauts getting microwaved in the Very Deadly Van Allen Belts.
Further, the lunar laser ranging reflectors placed on the lunar surface by astronauts on the six manned landings are fictious (albeit used every day by astronomers (no doubt "in on it") gauging the Earth-Moon distance), and the returned moon rocks from the same missions, studied in universities and research institutions all over the world (Including former adversaries China and the Soviet Union and East Bloc countries during the cold war) - are fake.
You getting the picture? According to the Art Bell people with tinfoil hats, all those research institutions, observatories and science labs worldwide are "In On It", and have for thirty years been faithfully colluding with the United States gubmink, to flawlessly stage and engineer this grand deception. Not to mention that the hundreds of thousands of people who built the Apollo project and the giant moon vehicles in the 1960s are all no doubt gubermink stooges.
Please visit this site for a solid debunking of all such speculation:
True; CC is useful, but teletext TVs (99% of modern PAL units) have equivalent functionality where the teletext subtitle overlays only the bottom part of the picture for closed captioning, using a black bar and oversize teletext lettering. In practical use it's the exact same as CC, though CC is probably easier to use: On teletext TVs you have to choose (by punching in a 3-digit code) the correct teletext 'page' which carries the subtitles.
Interestingly, perhaps, there are on many TV channels here a teletext page which blanks out the portion of the screen where ordinary superimposed subtitles appear. This is perhaps a service to those who feel subtitles disrupts the visual aspects of a movie.
If you would like to know more about teletext (BBC ceefax,) look here:
Really. When Best Buy and Circuit City have nothing but cheap shit on the shelves in the consumer entertainment department it's because that's exactly what people are willing to pay for. There used to be a middle range of devices, usually retailing just a little above the cheap stuff.
These mid range units could generally be relied upon to perform well, have extra useful features, and lasted longer. As an example I had a Sony Hi8 camcorder from circa 1990 - a fabulous machine : Great optics, great mechanics, great sound, manual controls for everything, audio overdub functions, nice damped zoom control, it had the works. (It got stolen after 4 years, but by then it still worked as new.)
Sure it cost a bit more than the discount units available at the time, but in use you could certainly feel where those extra dollars went. It was also a lot cheaper than the high end pro video gear. All in all it was a nice compromise.
Nowadays the mid range is mostly gone - how could it be any different? The consumers buy the cheapest shit they can find, with everything automatic. You can't find camcorders with manual controls unless you go to the 'prosumer level' which is a relatively new high-strata tier with prices ranging close to that of pro gear. (Sony VX2000, Canon GL-1, XL-1, etc.)
It's my impression that the mid range market shrank in America as quality-oblivious people decided the budget units performed 'well enough', and simply picked which-ever nice-looking unit had the lowest price tag with a comparable feature set. The incentive to improve quality became less significant than the incentive to reduce price.
A circuit board in a black box is not just a circuit board in a black box, but who's to know if the thing works okay for a couple of months before it starts to die little by little?
There have been digital radio tuners for almost twenty years. Why do you think they still sell clock radios and boomboxes with mechanical turn-knob tuners?
The Japanese in particular, but also Europeans have been more quality conscious than Americans, and the mid-range segment still exists there. For example, the Europeans have for many years had an affordable mid-range 16:9 widescreen TV option with digital framedobler and picture stabilization, which is available to Americans only if they go all the way and buy the high-priced High Def sets.
For twenty years(!) Europeans have had digital ceefax teletype color text overlays on their TVs which lets users lookup program listings, news and weather information and much more from their remote controls. It's virtually indispensable even if it's low tech and looks like early 80s console game graphics, but Americans have never had anything as functional or useful of the kind until the advent of the digital cable box, Tivo, etc.
Europeans have NICAM digital near-CD-quality stereo audio to go with the PAL (*) TV picture, which by the way has higher resolution and much better colors than the Japanese/American NTSC format. Most American mom&pop&joe sixpack consumers get their stereo audio in crap quality from an analog audio carrier in the NTSC format. The new digital cable boxes improve the situation; but many many households still use 1980s or even 1970s technology, upon which they base their quality and performance expectations.
European electronics consumers have preferred direct two-way audio/video cables (SCART) to connect their VCRs and TVs in order to obtain the better picture afforded by not having the picture components squished together and lose quality by being re-modulated and de-modulated for the aerial connection: In the six years I stayed in the U.S., in the many different homes I visited, I saw most American home consumers connect their VCRs and even DVD players to the TV through aerial jacks.
Where I lived (Fairfax, VA) I had a nice home entertainment system setup. 120 channels of crap on TV to choose from, but the cable system employed analog UHF multiplexing technology from the 1970s (two stiff coaxials snaking from the wall to a decoder box with, I shit you not, fake wooden sides!) - The picture always had ghosts and noise and looked awful. The colors were washed out and the effective horizontal picture resolution was maybe 200 pixels. One day the picture looked so bad that I called in a cable guy to fix it. He probably thought I was some kind of euronazi crank because he said it looked just like everyone else's signal and nobody's complaining. With performance expectations as low as these, it's no wonder American consumer electronics are all basically worth exactly what you pay for.
Americans: If you want good stuff, smuggle some stuff home from Japan. Suffer the premium rates. They use mostly the same standards as you do, but their shit is -much- better, has more features, lasts longer.
Also, come visit Europe sometime, check out the cool shit we got you ain't got: 100hz TV picture steady as a rock, broadcast TV over aerial looking close to DVD quality; RDS car radios which continously retunes your receiver to the closest carrier broadcasting the program you're listening to, and your CD player pausing automatically for urgent traffic announcements; Ubiquitous, standardized GSM cellphones with SMS and always-on GPRS data services...
(*) By the way, pay no attention to the French with regards to home electronics. They're weird and speak French and use SECAM which sucks.:)
What a strange comment. Perhaps it is that you do not normally operate a mobile phone? You will find that most mobile phone users do not actually 'start dialing' very often; they find the contact they want from their directory, and press dial[talk].
This is practical core telephony functionality which all handset makers [should] work hard to implement properly. Simple ergonomics; besides, a function used so often that if implemented poorly, it would annoy the user so much they would likely switch handset brands. It is also the very procedure which, according to several reviewers, proved impossible(!) to accomplish with the SPV, thus DEFEATING THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE OUTLOOK CONTACT INTEGRATION:
Although the SPV handset succesfully synchronized with Outlook and thus held in its memory a copy of all the contacts the user had on their desktop, the user could not just on the SPV find a contact and press talk. Doing so produced, according to Simon Perry's article, a continuous dead-line tone.
All the other tacked on [non]functionality is basically irrelevant, you don't buy a cellphone to take great pictures, BUT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE A F-ING PHONE CALL FROM A F-ING PHONE.
The backgrounds and the various vehicles were CG in Tron; everything else, esp. the characters and the "glow" suits (made mostly of foam latex iirc) were illuminated and colorized with mechanical animation masking techniques -- each on-screen frame with glow suit characters and CG background were laboriously composited on animation stands with handmade (!) opague stencils and different colored gels for the "glow" layers. Thus, TRON, while deservedly acclaimed for its spectacular CG pioneering efforts, did not as such really venture into CG character animaton.
Pixar's TIN TOY wasn't until 1988, and before that there really hadn't been anything remotely credible in the way of CG animated human (or truly realistic animal) characters, flexing skin and kinetic joints with tension, etc. Can you think of anything appearing before 1988 which had actual computer animated humans in it?
By the way, Indiglo is not meant to be 'always on' - it becomes a dim, dull greyish color after a couple months.:)
I'd have been somewhat impressed if someone had made a breadboard LED clock with big bold BOMB numerals and put that behind the ubiquitous "windows" that me-too modders carve in their PCs.
But these days glowing red LED clock numerals probably leads to incidents with frightened maintenance workers calling the FBI. At least in the U.S.:)
Very cool project - and thanks for documenting it as you went. I gave away my SX64 in spring when moving overseas, otherwise I should be tempted to try something similar. Would an internal wi-fi card work behind one of the plastic panels? That way you could save one of the 9-pin control ports for a joystick.
It's a type of transparent screen filters with properties like microscopic vertical blinds. When affixed to the front of any backlit image, the filter restricts the viewing angle to a few degrees. From any other angle than almost perpendicular, the screen appears completely dark. The moving subway ads have the same type of screen filters attached, which means that the frame only becomes visible when it is nearly perpendicular to the train window, and it rapidly flickers out of sight as you move past it.
The persistance of vision means the eye is tricked into seeing these brief glimpses of each frame as a continous motion picture sequence, although the blank inter-frame interval is presumably much longer than that of normal television, and the framerate is presumably lower.
Technology aside, ads do get ever more obnoxious and intrusive, on the net and off the net. Other posts in this thread have briefly touched on future ad-blanking augmented reality applications, and I believe there will be a market for such things as we move ever closer to the nightmare situation of animated, personalized, intrusive ads everywhere, as depicted beautifully in Minority Report.
One day every inner-city billboard will be plastered with animated ads, as the cost of printing flexible, brught polymer displays will plummet in the next decade.
I have an external firewire version of the Pioneer A04 drive, and I'm reasonably satisfied with its reliability and performance.
However, it's pretty difficult finding compatible media that it can use without making a fuss. The blank DVD-R discs sold from the website firewiredirect.com works like a charm and the drive burns them at full speed and the discs can be read in near anything else.
Other brands of DVD-R discs don't work near as well, and sometimes take twice as long to burn. Nero reports zero buffer allocation for seconds at a time when I'm not using the 'good' brand, and occasionally those discs don't read in any other drive than the A04.
My point, in short, is to be sure you find a supplier of 'good' media for your DVD burner and buy a few samples of different kinds to determine which works best for you. The different brands have different shades of purple colors, the more reddish purple kind works best for my drive.
D-VHS was never intended as a serious consumer tape format. Other than the fact that it is CURRENTLY the only available HD purchase/rental media, it is nothing but a perverse frankenstein reanimation of yesteryear's linear-access mechanical magnetic tape formats with all the disadvantages of inevitable mechanical wear and physical deterioration, and the lame absence of random access play. It seems like a transitional and ultimately short lived technology like Philips' DCC cassettes and Sony's Digital-8 tapes.
D-VHS offers no substantial value to the user at all in terms of convenience and longevity, and in this enlightened age with widely available random-access technology such as DVD and PVR video decks, who wants to go back to 'please remember to rewind your tape before returning it' ???
Linear access magnetic tapes should at this point in time be relegated to high capacity bulk data backup and professional digital broadcast video formats.
It's more like some kind of experiment to see how many suckers are out there who are willing to pay greedy studios for some kind of frankenstein reanimated tape format and buy it again once the HD-DVDs arrive in one shape or another.
The technology of course exists today for the studios to put a HD movie on a disc the same size as a CD/DVD, but given 1) the ease by which the CSS "copy protection" of the DVD format was broken, and 2) the apparently almost indefinite lifespan of these discs (I have several audio CDs stamped nearly 20 years ago that are playing just fine!), it may be that they feel it is too much of a gamble at present to release a HD-DVD format until they've "tested" the new copy protection scheme on a short lived limited adoption expensive tape format they can take out of circulation should it be proken and the surviving copies will expire eventually like all tapes does in the end.
Another thought: Considering that tapes are "printed" with some kind of bulk linear recording technology, I wold be not at all surprised to learn that Hollyweird is printing digital serial numbers on those D-VHS tapes for tracking them. After all, a high bandwidth HD copy of a movie must be considered a 'valuable' item since a 'dishonest person' (or video enthusiast!) with the right equipment could theoretically create very good quality copies of the movie in any format desired by scaling down to regular broadcast formats.
Consider that even DVD isn't all that - the bandwidth is quite low, and there's many MPEG2 compression artifacts readily visible on a good TV / projector - such as "ringing" around titles and edges. From a HD master such a 'dishonest person' (or video enthusiast) could re-encode a title to a different format perhaps superior to the DVD MPEG2 encoding, and play it back using their computer on a conventional television or projector at substantially better quality than that afforded by conventional DVDs. Just a thought.
So you don't like the commercial, proprietary nature of Tivo, and the SonicBlue device is too expensive. I often wonder why there's so little in between - I could do just fine with a simpler feature set that included just basic harddisk recording, preferably PVR for timeshifting, but I require no online program guide and I want no forced online software updates sucking down corporate trojan payloads of questionable value altering the behavior and feature set of "my" device. I'd just as soon build something myself. While researching DIY PVR projects, I stumbled across this patent record which seems to cover the entire PVR field.
It's just like the game console industry. I hate loss leader products. Why not sell things at their true cost and peripherals at THEIR true cost.
I don't know why we've let the printer industry get away with corrupting the marketplace so. It appears to be at a point now where everybody is doing it, so if one honest manufacturer started shifting the cost of manufacture of the printer back into the sale price of the unit itself, and perhaps introduced a simple inexpensive refill kit with little ink bottles for each print head, that line of printers would appear "expensive" compared to the rest of the closed systems where the up-front cost appears more agreeable, and so they would not sell as many units and probably fall back in line with the rest of the dirtbags quickly.
This is almost certainly just "capitalism at work", but it seems difficult to defend the sordid practice because no real competition appears to take place that benefits the consumer.
The deceptively low printer unit price is bait to lure the consumer into purchasing the absolutely necessary and ridiculously overpriced refills, which is the real product being sold. It's neither fair nor honest. A printer should be just a printer, not a computerized robbery device designed to hit honest people up for money whenever the dirty printer manufacturer feels like it.
I grew up in 70s in the barren plains of a little backwards socialist country where we had no cable and only a dingy aerial on the roof which on a good day could fetch us all of three channels, two of which were Swedish, and all of them state controlled and paid for with TV 'license' fees, sort of a television tax you pay in those countries (even today) if you own a receiver.
They didn't even broadcast 24/7, if you can imagine. No sir. From midnight until 9am there was just static, no transmission. Then from 9am until noon they broadcast test signals. Then from noon until around 4pm they broadcast a programming guide for the afternoon and evening, starting with children's shows before the evening news and then a handful of shows, some of which were imported from US, UK and Germany.
Things are quite different now with about a hundred channels of programming to choose from, but the thing is - those state controlled TV stations didn't SUCK and don't suck today either. You paid your television tax (~$10/mo), which paid for programming. So there were no ads on TV. Which was really nice! We got yesteryear's seasons of Hill Street Blues, Muppet Show, M*A*S*H and other fine US TV productions, but each of them airing as complete shows where the commercial fades faded right back up again.
Commercials came much later when cable and competition challenging the state television monopoly began to arrive, and I quickly grew to despise commercials and recognize them for the psychological assault, calculated rape on one's sensibilities that they are. Today I can't stand them and I find ways to avoid being exposed to them. I don't have a Tivo, but then I also don't even have cable anymore. PVR devices seems like a sensible idea and I hope things like that will remain legal for purchase. Except for the time delay trick and smart scheduling tricks, a PVR doesn't do anything a VCR couldn't do, and they've been legal for decades so I don't see what the fuss is about.
The way the media corporations embrace legal and legislative action to fix their own stupid mistakes and thuggish business practices, are utterly disgusting. They whine and moan and seek to criminalize their own customers. Why don't they just give us better programming? And what exactly do you pay for with the $40/month basic cable (no premium programming) hookup fees if not content? I think the media circus is just too fucking greedy. How many households have cable in the US? 150 million? If each of those pays $40 per month for a hookup that's six billion dollars. Every month. Where do those money go? In a year that's SEVENTY TWO BILLION DOLLARS. Some of that obviously has to go to maintain the cable network and broadcast infrastructure, but that should still leave EVERY YEAR at least a several dozen BILLION dollars to the media conglomerates (of which there's only a handful remaining) for them to produce shit to toss at the tube. And that's BEFORE the revenue from those godawful commercials.
I hate commercials. If I'm watching something and I'm "engrossed" by it - my brain and attention is tuned to the reality of that production - and without warning the reality is replaced with that of the commercial. It's like rape, a deceitful intrusion and a breach of trust. At the very least they should fade to black like they did in the old days which permitted one's sensibilities to put the shields up and reject the bucket of shit about to be flung at you... the commercials... can't stand them. THey tell lies, they induce fear and uncertainty, they're vulgar and noisy, and they are scientifically designed to maximize their potential for damage. Damage, in the sense of your own sensibilities being "succesfully" replaced with those intended by the people who planted that commercial.
I'm just saying, if there was any kind of common sense in this crazy nation they'd find a way to MAKE DO with the cable fees. The system is utterly retarded today. Do you know what the real currency in network programming is? It's YOU. You and your eyeballs and your credit are what's being traded and sold in those hollywood boardrooms. The programming is just BAIT to lure you to watch the commercials. The BAIT is just crap, produced and evaluated purely in terms of how well it captivates you so when the split-second break from programming to commercial happens you'll hang around like a good consumer and be exposed to the commercials, have that bucket of shit flung at you, endure that so you won't miss the return of the show after the commercial.
Aesthetic values? Quality programming? Fuck that, welcome to reality! Toss another fucking Survivor show on. Hmmm bait not working, try making it a little bit more lurid! We already did temptation island. Funny: Russia is taking the logical consequence America would have probably followed if not for the hypocritical prudence of broadcast regulations: Reportedly there's a popular news show in Moscow where the hosts are naked chicks.
There's so little on TV worth watching it's completely ridiculous how the new digital cable systems have so many channels. They all SUCK. Sure, some of them have a few okay shows - but nothing seems to ever be created purely for the sake of an artistic vision, a director's worthy pursuit or the quality of the production alone.
And news coverage? Do you trust ABC? FOX? MSNBC? CNN? I don't. It is well known that ABC has been suppressing and certainly not investigatively pusuing bad stories about their corporate parent Disney. The dominating U.S. "headline news" format with "news" cut to digestible and under-analyzed minuscule, context-divorced soundbytes to fit within commercial blocks and not offend corporate parents and associates, is laughable. You want the real news, tune to NPR or BBC world news. I'd trust a news network that answered to no commercial interests and had only one responsibility - to produce and investigate the news, glitzy animated infobars, tacky gimmicks and stunt casting be damned. 60 minutes used to be like that. Commercials ruin everything.
Do you like PBS and NPR? I do. I just hate the fact that they have to beg for bread on the table. Why am I not paying for PBS with my cable fees? I -wish- there was a thing like radio/TV tax here.
Really! Think about it. Have capitalist indoctrination taught you that only cut throat competition between networks to lure eyeballs with lewd and mean bait can produce "worthy" programming? Imagine if there was a pool of money available, maybe a couple hundred millions of dollars gathered for programming from the TV viewers and radio listeners of the nation, and there was a national network "making do" with that, filling the airwaves with programming paid for with those money. If they didn't answer to commercial interests. If their only mandate was to produce the best they could and cater to as many diverse interests as possible within that budget. I think they could do a LOT. I never felt 'deprieved' growing up in that tiny country where the entire nation's socialist TV tax budget was perhaps a few million dollars altogether, the programming produced for those sums I have fond memories of even today, genuinely good things were made for little money and the multi million dollar glitzy hollywood turds aren't all that.
I'm among other things a GUI developer and graphics designer. I've used many kinds of monitors but since 2000 I've done virtually all my work on LCD screens since now that I'm nearing 30 my eyes are slightly less good than they used to be, and the flatter a screen is the less stress on the eye muscles to refocus as you're looking at different portions of the screen.
On traditional spherical or cylindrical (classic Trinitron) profile CRT monitors, the corners are 'deeper' in the eye's field of view than the middle, which requires of the eyes constant readjustment when looking from center to the edge of the screen.
Aside from that, the LCD doesn't flicker and the new ones have virtually no cursor trails at all.
There's only two real downsides to TFT LCD - one is that the colors in some cases are less bright than the phosphors on pro monitors like Sony's high-end screens. However, there's supposed to be some new types out using RGB LEDs for backlighting, improving the gamut and color accuracy tremendously. The other is that the pixel size is fixed, which means that all screen resolutions other than full will look slightly fuzzy.
I hope in a few years there will be concave cylindrical or even spherical profile displays using perhaps OLEDs. Remember the cylindrical screens the kids are playin games on in the movie TOYS? The benefit to 'hollow' or wraparound displays is that the eye distance to the screen is even for the entire FOV, which should yield much greater clarity and reduce eye strain. I'd imagine such displays being popular with most people. For movie playback, a wraparound display might also make for a more immersive impression. A concave cylinder profile is therefore good and will quite likely exist some day. A spherical display would be better, but I could see some difficulties in manufacturing such a display since the inside of a spherical surface is difficult to "print" a circuit on. It might also look goofy, like some mutated blob of 1960s "organic" tech design.:)
Except for the fact this blob isn't yellow, I think this must be how Douglas Adams envisioned the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
Why don't this guy spraypaint it shiny brown like a giant freshly laid turd?
I'm at a loss for understanding what made him do this. What a wreck. Not only would it be nearly impossible to fix or upgrade anything, the case seems as much impractical as it is an eyesore. Happily it seems to have been mostly put together as a joke, and the $40 pricetag is agreeable.
Re. casemods, was it ever a good idea to strip these machines down and removing the shielding in order to install big plexiglass windows? I'm sure there was a good reason why we wanted the cases to shield against RF interference. Cutting big holes in the cases or omitting them entirely seems like a questionable practice to me.
Interesting idea. I thought about recording a commentary track for some of the movies I like and have researched and watched enough times to have something to say about. Then I heard a recording of my less than perfectly modulated voice and decided to forget about it!
However, there's apparently only one track on this site - I listened to the Groundhog Day track and it's certainly not bad. The guy admits he doesn't have filler commentary for every scene on the screen and the microphone rattle in the beginning reveals a limited amount of preparation, so for what it's worth it's certainly a nice first try. I been to Punxsutawney couple times, and love Groundhog Day the Movie, so it was rather interesting to listen to the guy's comments.
I think perhaps though it was premature to feature this site on slashdot - don't you think you should have waited until there was a few more tracks on there? As it is, it looks like a thousand people are gonna download the same track - it would have made a better impression if you had let it mature a bit. All the same, it would be nice to see more things like this. It's a good and creative way to 'share' stuff without pirating.:)
...great article, written in 100% pure Marketeese!
Gee & Gosh, the Wonders of Behavior Tracking. Don't you envy those cool futuristic wireless Japanese cyberconsumers? I pray that some day somebody would Profile my Consumer Product Consumption Patterns so that I never again would feel unentertained.
All the time my wireless telephone would call me and on its little color television screen there would magically appear targeted 3D joy-consumer-grams keeping me Informed of Newly Released and Upcoming Derivative Entertainment Products scientifically cloned and distilled in the Hollywood labs from Stuff that Average Consumers within my Profiled Demographic Group had been Profiled to determine they would probably Like to purchase.
Because it's always Great to Consume Entertainment Content Exactly Like The Stuff You've Consumed Already. You fucking worthless foodtube.
Fuck that.
Not a single paragraph was spent in that article addressing privacy concerns, but it must be assumed that the matter-of-factly business rationalization of computerized obsessive stalking is that only troglodytes, communists and paranoid perverts with Something To Hide would worry about privacy anyway.
I hate the future. I hate you. Death is too good for marketeers.
02/27/2006 Sacramento, CA
Corporate Revenue Service agents today
apprehended a 28-year old male consumer-citizen (Mr. Adam Jones - credit ID 104-2349-1803) and seized
from his apartment (688 Maple st / Apt 404D) a substantial cache of more than 500 illegally imported Eurasian computer harddrives and approximately 150 DVD burners all lacking content protection (safety) mechanisms federally mandated under the SSSCA American Antiterrorist Patriot Consumer-Citizen Act of 2002.
These so-called "open" harddrives and burners are sought by Unpatriotic communist/liberal/terrorist "open source" hackers who use them in unregistered computers for storing atomic bomb secrets, unaccountable open source operating systems, Terrorist plots, child pornography and worst of all, illegal and unprotected duplicates of cherished corporate intellectual property works such as Britney Spears music CDs and Tom Green movies.
"Open" drives and systems also lack federally mandated tracking and monitoring devices which precludes corporate and federal agents from remotely conducting weekly lawful spot checks for DMCA/SSSCA/patriotic compliance among our consumer-citizens. Without such tracking devices the corporate government also cannot accurately profile thought/behavior patterns of consumer-citizens, which precludes targeted patrotic advertisements.
Corporate Government analysts have scientifically determined that consumer-citizens who aren't sufficiently exposed to targeted commercials, actually consume less corporate products, which as the Corporate General eloquently explained in a speech last week is "basically the same as helping the Terrorists," and is the beginning of a slippery slope that can lead to unpatriotic-liberal-communist-Terrorist deviant anti-consumerist mentalities. (As an example,
Mr. Jones here owned an automobile more than two years old!)
Additionally, at Mr. Jones' property a small cache of contraband liberal-communist anticonsumerist propaganda materials were found and destroyed, as well as a highly illegal time shifting device used ny Terrorists to steal content from entertainment networks and watch it later without adequate exposure to Patriotic Advertisements.
Mr. Jones was detained without incident and now awaits sentencing in the dungeouns beneath the local McSentence corporate law center. If as expected Mr. Jones is succesfully convicted of SSSCA violations he may face up to 20 years in the AOL-Toyota-Boeing-CocaCola corporate prison of California. Serves the bastard right!
Excerpt from The Truth Journal, published by the Information Corporation (a subsidiary of America's Consolidated Entertainment, Legislation and Communications Corporation). Copyright in perpetuity, The Corporation.
Even if the unholy sandwich of Mickysoft, RIAA, their lobbyists and corrupt legislators together succeed in planting an obnoxious content protection "feature" the next version of windoze, the sheer momentum of open (or at least widely available) software based on DivX and mp3 codecs would preclude the media borg from controlling anything but the most docile and technologically illiterate foodtubes ("consumers" in the word's truest sense.)
All it takes is one decrypted copy of any work and it can enter circulation and receive worldwide distribution within a few hours.
All these proposed measures would mean is mere inconvenience. You might have to be a little bit discriminating when assembling your basic free media platform. It could well be that next generation MPAA conforming DVD drives for computers would work only on protected platforms with some kind of advanced encrypted digital stream not even meant for crackable software to decode, but some kind of protected playback device inside the video circuitry of the computer working only with an overlay hardware render surface that can't be "read" from memory. In that case if you really wanted to be able to "backup" your legally purchased DVDs and you know, use them for creative purposes, you'd just have to search and find an old-spec DVD drive from the free world of China, (the irony!) or wait a little while before somebody with one such drive would rip and mpeg4 it for you. I don't see how you should possibly feel guilty for obtaining such a ripped copy, since you own the original disc.
Your computer is being sabotaged by evil corporations and industries used to getting their way by sheer legal brute force. These shady alliances desire to see your computer crippled so that instead of serving your needs it would become a media delivery outlet serving the industry needs. It would refuse to obey your commands. You would be denied your already existing ability to view and use content on your terms. Your proper response as a free thinking person should therefore be to reclaim your control of the
machine, obliterate all roadblocks placed in
your path and help others preserve their
freedoms as well.
Commercial applications already exist
on
Think And Click
·
· Score: 2, Informative
These guys have had a commercially available
brain actuated mouse cursor gizmo out for years.
The hope for Palm to survive as a viable platform seems to diminish day by day. There is no evidence of ongoing innovation from this company. What did they DO all this time? Who killed their R&D department? On what did they squander their once-decisive market lead? Did it take that much engineering effort to release the lifestyle celebrity branded palms, the slightly differently colored cases and the dinky proprietary memory cards?
I am on my 3rd Palm now - a worn and dented IIIc, and it looks like it will be the last. I just don't think I'll see any viable upgrade path from this corporation. Will I have to make the switch to the evil Empire's devices? Those Ipaq's sure look a lot more like what the futurists would have me believe I should be expecting from handheld devices. I mean, slick and silver, color, high resolution, audio and video enabled. Palm's devices still look like mid 1990s tech, complete with chunky lo-fi 160x160 pixel displays which are FINE for embedded use in cellphones and what have you, but please PLEASE I want some contemporary technology!
Palm keeps disappointing. Not a sliver of innovation is evident in this device. It would have been of modest interest if it had come out some three years ago. The service price structure seems completely out of whack with reality. I receive 100 k worth of spam email HEADERS alone in a few days. And why doesn't it have 802.11b instead anyway? That's all the wireless connectivity I need and want. And a higher resolution screen? 240x320 or even just 240x240x15bit is fine(So I can make some slightly more serious GPS field mapping apps that don't look like Vic 20 games), 16 megs default memory, and a flash card reader for mp3s, and a stereo sound system and a headphone jack? Gimme all that and call it PalmX and I'd put in five hunnert bucks easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a baffled Foreigner to American Humor and Customs, I won't presume to know for absolutely certain if the previous poster was very serious or not when suggesting that the gubmink dun pulled a fast one on the world for 30 years with the old Art Bell chestnut, THE MOON HOAX.
o rg/
If you listen to these people, Human Space Travel is impossible on account of astronauts getting microwaved in the Very Deadly Van Allen Belts.
Further, the lunar laser ranging reflectors placed on the lunar surface by astronauts on the six manned landings are fictious (albeit used every day by astronomers (no doubt "in on it") gauging the Earth-Moon distance), and the returned moon rocks from the same missions, studied in universities and research institutions all over the world (Including former adversaries China and the Soviet Union and East Bloc countries during the cold war) - are fake.
You getting the picture? According to the Art Bell people with tinfoil hats, all those research institutions, observatories and science labs worldwide are "In On It", and have for thirty years been faithfully colluding with the United States gubmink, to flawlessly stage and engineer this grand deception. Not to mention that the hundreds of thousands of people who built the Apollo project and the giant moon vehicles in the 1960s are all no doubt gubermink stooges.
Please visit this site for a solid debunking of all such speculation:
http://www.clavius.org/
More good stuff to unclutter minds:
http://www.badastronomy.com/
http://www.randi.
http://www.nasastooge.fsnet.co.uk/
Regds.
True; CC is useful, but teletext TVs (99% of modern PAL units) have equivalent functionality where the teletext subtitle overlays only the bottom part of the picture for closed captioning, using a black bar and oversize teletext lettering. In practical use it's the exact same as CC, though CC is probably easier to use: On teletext TVs you have to choose (by punching in a 3-digit code) the correct teletext 'page' which carries the subtitles.
e rs /Bbcceefx.html
Interestingly, perhaps, there are on many TV channels here a teletext page which blanks out the portion of the screen where ordinary superimposed subtitles appear. This is perhaps a service to those who feel subtitles disrupts the visual aspects of a movie.
If you would like to know more about teletext (BBC ceefax,) look here:
http://www.vaxxine.com/master-control/BBC/chapt
Really. When Best Buy and Circuit City have nothing but cheap shit on the shelves in the consumer entertainment department it's because that's exactly what people are willing to pay for. There used to be a middle range of devices, usually retailing just a little above the cheap stuff.
:)
These mid range units could generally be relied upon to perform well, have extra useful features, and lasted longer. As an example I had a Sony Hi8 camcorder from circa 1990 - a fabulous machine : Great optics, great mechanics, great sound, manual controls for everything, audio overdub functions, nice damped zoom control, it had the works. (It got stolen after 4 years, but by then it still worked as new.)
Sure it cost a bit more than the discount units available at the time, but in use you could certainly feel where those extra dollars went. It was also a lot cheaper than the high end pro video gear. All in all it was a nice compromise.
Nowadays the mid range is mostly gone - how could it be any different? The consumers buy the cheapest shit they can find, with everything automatic. You can't find camcorders with manual controls unless you go to the 'prosumer level' which is a relatively new high-strata tier with prices ranging close to that of pro gear. (Sony VX2000, Canon GL-1, XL-1, etc.)
It's my impression that the mid range market shrank in America as quality-oblivious people decided the budget units performed 'well enough', and simply picked which-ever nice-looking unit had the lowest price tag with a comparable feature set. The incentive to improve quality became less significant than the incentive to reduce price.
A circuit board in a black box is not just a circuit board in a black box, but who's to know if the thing works okay for a couple of months before it starts to die little by little?
There have been digital radio tuners for almost twenty years. Why do you think they still sell clock radios and boomboxes with mechanical turn-knob tuners?
The Japanese in particular, but also Europeans have been more quality conscious than Americans, and the mid-range segment still exists there. For example, the Europeans have for many years had an affordable mid-range 16:9 widescreen TV option with digital framedobler and picture stabilization, which is available to Americans only if they go all the way and buy the high-priced High Def sets.
For twenty years(!) Europeans have had digital ceefax teletype color text overlays on their TVs which lets users lookup program listings, news and weather information and much more from their remote controls. It's virtually indispensable even if it's low tech and looks like early 80s console game graphics, but Americans have never had anything as functional or useful of the kind until the advent of the digital cable box, Tivo, etc.
Europeans have NICAM digital near-CD-quality stereo audio to go with the PAL (*) TV picture, which by the way has higher resolution and much better colors than the Japanese/American NTSC format. Most American mom&pop&joe sixpack consumers get their stereo audio in crap quality from an analog audio carrier in the NTSC format. The new digital cable boxes improve the situation; but many many households still use 1980s or even 1970s technology, upon which they base their quality and performance expectations.
European electronics consumers have preferred direct two-way audio/video cables (SCART) to connect their VCRs and TVs in order to obtain the better picture afforded by not having the picture components squished together and lose quality by being re-modulated and de-modulated for the aerial connection: In the six years I stayed in the U.S., in the many different homes I visited, I saw most American home consumers connect their VCRs and even DVD players to the TV through aerial jacks.
Where I lived (Fairfax, VA) I had a nice home entertainment system setup. 120 channels of crap on TV to choose from, but the cable system employed analog UHF multiplexing technology from the 1970s (two stiff coaxials snaking from the wall to a decoder box with, I shit you not, fake wooden sides!) - The picture always had ghosts and noise and looked awful. The colors were washed out and the effective horizontal picture resolution was maybe 200 pixels. One day the picture looked so bad that I called in a cable guy to fix it. He probably thought I was some kind of euronazi crank because he said it looked just like everyone else's signal and nobody's complaining. With performance expectations as low as these, it's no wonder American consumer electronics are all basically worth exactly what you pay for.
Americans: If you want good stuff, smuggle some stuff home from Japan. Suffer the premium rates. They use mostly the same standards as you do, but their shit is -much- better, has more features, lasts longer.
Also, come visit Europe sometime, check out the cool shit we got you ain't got: 100hz TV picture steady as a rock, broadcast TV over aerial looking close to DVD quality; RDS car radios which continously retunes your receiver to the closest carrier broadcasting the program you're listening to, and your CD player pausing automatically for urgent traffic announcements; Ubiquitous, standardized GSM cellphones with SMS and always-on GPRS data services...
(*) By the way, pay no attention to the French with regards to home electronics. They're weird and speak French and use SECAM which sucks.
About Sen to Chihiro : Fixing Sen , with review, sample images and SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS!
"What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly."
:)
I love the little comments after slashdot story submissions.
This is practical core telephony functionality which all handset makers [should] work hard to implement properly. Simple ergonomics; besides, a function used so often that if implemented poorly, it would annoy the user so much they would likely switch handset brands. It is also the very procedure which, according to several reviewers, proved impossible(!) to accomplish with the SPV, thus DEFEATING THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE OUTLOOK CONTACT INTEGRATION:
Although the SPV handset succesfully synchronized with Outlook and thus held in its memory a copy of all the contacts the user had on their desktop, the user could not just on the SPV find a contact and press talk. Doing so produced, according to Simon Perry's article, a continuous dead-line tone.
All the other tacked on [non]functionality is basically irrelevant, you don't buy a cellphone to take great pictures, BUT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE A F-ING PHONE CALL FROM A F-ING PHONE.
The backgrounds and the various vehicles were CG in Tron; everything else, esp. the characters and the "glow" suits (made mostly of foam latex iirc) were illuminated and colorized with mechanical animation masking techniques -- each on-screen frame with glow suit characters and CG background were laboriously composited on animation stands with handmade (!) opague stencils and different colored gels for the "glow" layers. Thus, TRON, while deservedly acclaimed for its spectacular CG pioneering efforts, did not as such really venture into CG character animaton.
Pixar's TIN TOY wasn't until 1988, and before that there really hadn't been anything remotely credible in the way of CG animated human (or truly realistic animal) characters, flexing skin and kinetic joints with tension, etc. Can you think of anything appearing before 1988 which had actual computer animated humans in it?
A prefab clock put in a bezel. Fabulous.
:)
:)
By the way, Indiglo is not meant to be 'always on' - it becomes a dim, dull greyish color after a couple months.
I'd have been somewhat impressed if someone had made a breadboard LED clock with big bold BOMB numerals and put that behind the ubiquitous "windows" that me-too modders carve in their PCs.
But these days glowing red LED clock numerals probably leads to incidents with frightened maintenance workers calling the FBI. At least in the U.S.
Very cool project - and thanks for documenting it as you went. I gave away my SX64 in spring when moving overseas, otherwise I should be tempted to try something similar. Would an internal wi-fi card work behind one of the plastic panels? That way you could save one of the 9-pin control ports for a joystick.
To the poster of "Global Thermohaline Circulation": Thank-you for a factual entry adding value to the forum.
It's a type of transparent screen filters with properties like microscopic vertical blinds. When affixed to the front of any backlit image, the filter restricts the viewing angle to a few degrees. From any other angle than almost perpendicular, the screen appears completely dark. The moving subway ads have the same type of screen filters attached, which means that the frame only becomes visible when it is nearly perpendicular to the train window, and it rapidly flickers out of sight as you move past it.
The persistance of vision means the eye is tricked into seeing these brief glimpses of each frame as a continous motion picture sequence, although the blank inter-frame interval is presumably much longer than that of normal television, and the framerate is presumably lower.
Technology aside, ads do get ever more obnoxious and intrusive, on the net and off the net. Other posts in this thread have briefly touched on future ad-blanking augmented reality applications, and I believe there will be a market for such things as we move ever closer to the nightmare situation of animated, personalized, intrusive ads everywhere, as depicted beautifully in Minority Report.
One day every inner-city billboard will be plastered with animated ads, as the cost of printing flexible, brught polymer displays will plummet in the next decade.
I have an external firewire version of the Pioneer A04 drive, and I'm reasonably satisfied with its reliability and performance.
However, it's pretty difficult finding compatible media that it can use without making a fuss. The blank DVD-R discs sold from the website firewiredirect.com works like a charm and the drive burns them at full speed and the discs can be read in near anything else.
Other brands of DVD-R discs don't work near as well, and sometimes take twice as long to burn. Nero reports zero buffer allocation for seconds at a time when I'm not using the 'good' brand,
and occasionally those discs don't read in any other drive than the A04.
My point, in short, is to be sure you find a supplier of 'good' media for your DVD burner and buy a few samples of different kinds to determine which works best for you. The different brands have different shades of purple colors, the more reddish purple kind works best for my drive.
Let this retarded concept die. Do not buy!
D-VHS was never intended as a serious consumer tape format. Other than the fact that it is CURRENTLY the only available HD purchase/rental media, it is nothing but a perverse frankenstein reanimation of yesteryear's linear-access mechanical magnetic tape formats with all the disadvantages of inevitable mechanical wear and physical deterioration, and the lame absence of random access play. It seems like a transitional and ultimately short lived technology like Philips' DCC cassettes and Sony's
Digital-8 tapes.
D-VHS offers no substantial value to the user at all in terms of convenience and longevity, and in this enlightened age with widely available random-access technology such as DVD and PVR video decks, who wants to go back to 'please remember to rewind your tape before returning it' ???
Linear access magnetic tapes should at this point in time be relegated to high capacity bulk data backup and professional digital broadcast video formats.
It's more like some kind of experiment to see how many suckers are out there who are willing to pay greedy studios for some kind of frankenstein reanimated tape format and buy it again once the HD-DVDs arrive in one shape or another.
The technology of course exists today for the studios to put a HD movie on a disc the same size as a CD/DVD, but given 1) the ease by which the CSS "copy protection" of the DVD format was broken, and 2) the apparently almost indefinite lifespan of these discs (I have several audio CDs stamped nearly 20 years ago that are playing just fine!), it may be that they feel it is too much of a gamble at present to release a HD-DVD format until they've "tested" the new copy protection scheme on a short lived limited adoption expensive tape format they can take out of circulation should it be proken and the surviving copies will expire eventually like all tapes does in the end.
Another thought: Considering that tapes are "printed" with some kind of bulk linear recording technology, I wold be not at all surprised to learn that Hollyweird is printing digital serial numbers on those D-VHS tapes for tracking them. After all, a high bandwidth HD copy of a movie must be considered a 'valuable' item since a 'dishonest person' (or video enthusiast!) with the right equipment could theoretically create very good quality copies of the movie in any format desired by scaling down to regular broadcast formats.
Consider that even DVD isn't all that - the bandwidth is quite low, and there's many MPEG2 compression artifacts readily visible on a good TV / projector - such as "ringing" around titles and edges. From a HD master such a 'dishonest person' (or video enthusiast) could re-encode a title to a different format perhaps superior to the DVD MPEG2 encoding, and play it back using their computer on a conventional television or projector at substantially better quality than that afforded by conventional DVDs. Just a thought.
So you don't like the commercial, proprietary nature of Tivo, and the SonicBlue device is too expensive. I often wonder why there's so little in between - I could do just fine with a simpler feature set that included just basic harddisk recording, preferably PVR for timeshifting, but I require no online program guide and I want no forced online software updates sucking down corporate trojan payloads of questionable value altering the behavior and feature set of "my" device. I'd just as soon build something myself. While researching DIY PVR projects, I stumbled across this patent record which seems to cover the entire PVR field.
http://www.gotuit.com/patents/desc_pause.html
Cars are expensive, gasoline isn't.
It's just like the game console industry. I hate loss leader products. Why not sell things at their true cost and peripherals at THEIR true cost.
I don't know why we've let the printer industry get away with corrupting the marketplace so. It appears to be at a point now where everybody is doing it, so if one honest manufacturer started shifting the cost of manufacture of the printer back into the sale price of the unit itself, and perhaps introduced a simple inexpensive refill kit with little ink bottles for each print head, that line of printers would appear "expensive" compared to the rest of the closed systems where the up-front cost appears more agreeable, and so they would not sell as many units and probably fall back in line with the rest of the dirtbags quickly.
This is almost certainly just "capitalism at work", but it seems difficult to defend the sordid practice because no real competition appears to take place that benefits the consumer.
The deceptively low printer unit price is bait to lure the consumer into purchasing the absolutely necessary and ridiculously overpriced refills, which is the real product being sold. It's neither fair nor honest. A printer should be just a printer, not a computerized robbery device designed to hit honest people up for money whenever the dirty printer manufacturer feels like it.
I grew up in 70s in the barren plains of a little backwards socialist country where we had no cable and only a dingy aerial on the roof which on a good day could fetch us all of three channels, two of which were Swedish, and all of them state controlled and paid for with TV 'license' fees, sort of a television tax you pay in those countries (even today) if you own a receiver.
... can't stand them. THey tell lies, they induce fear and uncertainty, they're vulgar and noisy, and they are scientifically designed to maximize their potential for damage. Damage, in the sense of your own sensibilities being "succesfully" replaced with those intended by the people who planted that commercial.
They didn't even broadcast 24/7, if you can imagine. No sir. From midnight until 9am there was just static, no transmission. Then from 9am until noon they broadcast test signals. Then from noon until around 4pm they broadcast a programming guide for the afternoon and evening, starting with children's shows before the evening news and then a handful of shows, some of which were imported from US, UK and Germany.
Things are quite different now with about a hundred channels of programming to choose from, but the thing is - those state controlled TV stations didn't SUCK and don't suck today either. You paid your television tax (~$10/mo), which paid for programming. So there were no ads on TV. Which was really nice! We got yesteryear's seasons of Hill Street Blues, Muppet Show, M*A*S*H and other fine US TV productions, but each of them airing as complete shows where the commercial fades faded right back up again.
Commercials came much later when cable and competition challenging the state television monopoly began to arrive, and I quickly grew to despise commercials and recognize them for the psychological assault, calculated rape on one's sensibilities that they are. Today I can't stand them and I find ways to avoid being exposed to them. I don't have a Tivo, but then I also don't even have cable anymore. PVR devices seems like a sensible idea and I hope things like that will remain legal for purchase. Except for the time delay trick and smart scheduling tricks, a PVR doesn't do anything a VCR couldn't do, and they've been legal for decades so I don't see what the fuss is about.
The way the media corporations embrace legal and legislative action to fix their own stupid mistakes and thuggish business practices, are utterly disgusting. They whine and moan and seek to criminalize their own customers. Why don't they just give us better programming? And what exactly do you pay for with the $40/month basic cable (no premium programming) hookup fees if not content? I think the media circus is just too fucking greedy. How many households have cable in the US? 150 million? If each of those pays $40 per month for a hookup that's six billion dollars. Every month. Where do those money go? In a year that's SEVENTY TWO BILLION DOLLARS. Some of that obviously has to go to maintain the cable network and broadcast infrastructure, but that should still leave EVERY YEAR at least a several dozen BILLION dollars to the media conglomerates (of which there's only a handful remaining) for them to produce shit to toss at the tube. And that's BEFORE the revenue from those godawful commercials.
I hate commercials. If I'm watching something and I'm "engrossed" by it - my brain and attention is tuned to the reality of that production - and without warning the reality is replaced with that of the commercial. It's like rape, a deceitful intrusion and a breach of trust. At the very least they should fade to black like they did in the old days which permitted one's sensibilities to put the shields up and reject the bucket of shit about to be flung at you... the commercials
I'm just saying, if there was any kind of common sense in this crazy nation they'd find a way to MAKE DO with the cable fees. The system is utterly retarded today. Do you know what the real currency in network programming is? It's YOU. You and your eyeballs and your credit are what's being traded and sold in those hollywood boardrooms. The programming is just BAIT to lure you to watch the commercials. The BAIT is just crap, produced and evaluated purely in terms of how well it captivates you so when the split-second break from programming to commercial happens you'll hang around like a good consumer and be exposed to the commercials, have that bucket of shit flung at you, endure that so you won't miss the return of the show after the commercial.
Aesthetic values? Quality programming? Fuck that, welcome to reality! Toss another fucking Survivor show on. Hmmm bait not working, try making it a little bit more lurid! We already did temptation island. Funny: Russia is taking the logical consequence America would have probably followed if not for the hypocritical prudence of broadcast regulations: Reportedly there's a popular news show in Moscow where the hosts are naked chicks.
There's so little on TV worth watching it's completely ridiculous how the new digital cable systems have so many channels. They all SUCK. Sure, some of them have a few okay shows - but nothing seems to ever be created purely for the sake of an artistic vision, a director's worthy pursuit or the quality of the production alone.
And news coverage? Do you trust ABC? FOX? MSNBC? CNN? I don't. It is well known that ABC has been suppressing and certainly not investigatively pusuing bad stories about their corporate parent Disney. The dominating U.S. "headline news" format with "news" cut to digestible and under-analyzed minuscule, context-divorced soundbytes to fit within commercial blocks and not offend corporate parents and associates, is laughable. You want the real news, tune to NPR or BBC world news. I'd trust a news network that answered to no commercial interests and had only one responsibility - to produce and investigate the news, glitzy animated infobars, tacky gimmicks and stunt casting be damned. 60 minutes used to be like that. Commercials ruin everything.
Do you like PBS and NPR? I do. I just hate the fact that they have to beg for bread on the table. Why am I not paying for PBS with my cable fees? I -wish- there was a thing like radio/TV tax here.
Really! Think about it. Have capitalist indoctrination taught you that only cut throat competition between networks to lure eyeballs with lewd and mean bait can produce "worthy" programming? Imagine if there was a pool of money available, maybe a couple hundred millions of dollars gathered for programming from the TV viewers and radio listeners of the nation, and
there was a national network "making do" with that, filling the airwaves with programming paid for with those money. If they didn't answer to commercial interests. If their only mandate was to produce the best they could and cater to as many diverse interests as possible within that budget. I think they could do a LOT. I never felt 'deprieved' growing up in that tiny country where the entire nation's socialist TV tax budget was perhaps a few million dollars altogether, the programming produced for those sums I have fond memories of even today, genuinely good things were made for little money and the multi million dollar glitzy hollywood turds aren't all that.
I'm among other things a GUI developer and graphics designer. I've used many kinds of monitors but since 2000 I've done virtually all my work on LCD screens since now that I'm nearing 30 my eyes are slightly less good than they used to be, and the flatter a screen is the less stress on the eye muscles to refocus as you're looking at different portions of the screen.
:)
On traditional spherical or cylindrical (classic Trinitron) profile CRT monitors, the corners are 'deeper' in the eye's field of view than the middle, which requires of the eyes constant readjustment when looking from center to the edge of the screen.
Aside from that, the LCD doesn't flicker and the new ones have virtually no cursor trails at all.
There's only two real downsides to TFT LCD - one is that the colors in some cases are less bright than the phosphors on pro monitors like Sony's high-end screens. However, there's supposed to be some new types out using RGB LEDs for backlighting, improving the gamut and color accuracy tremendously. The other is that the pixel size is fixed, which means that all screen resolutions other than full will look slightly fuzzy.
I hope in a few years there will be concave cylindrical or even spherical profile displays using perhaps OLEDs. Remember the cylindrical screens the kids are playin games on in the movie TOYS? The benefit to 'hollow' or wraparound displays is that the eye distance to the screen is even for the entire FOV, which should yield much greater clarity and reduce eye strain. I'd imagine such displays being popular with most people. For movie playback, a wraparound display might also make for a more immersive impression. A concave cylinder profile is therefore good and will quite likely exist some day. A spherical display would be better, but I could see some difficulties in manufacturing such a display since the inside of a spherical surface is difficult to "print" a circuit on. It might also look goofy, like some mutated blob of 1960s "organic" tech design.
Except for the fact this blob isn't yellow, I think this must be how Douglas Adams envisioned the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
Why don't this guy spraypaint it shiny brown like a giant freshly laid turd?
I'm at a loss for understanding what made him do this. What a wreck. Not only would it be nearly impossible to fix or upgrade anything, the case seems as much impractical as it is an eyesore. Happily it seems to have been mostly put together as a joke, and the $40 pricetag is agreeable.
Re. casemods, was it ever a good idea to strip these machines down and removing the shielding in order to install big plexiglass windows? I'm sure there was a good reason why we wanted the cases to shield against RF interference. Cutting big holes in the cases or omitting them entirely seems like a questionable practice to me.
However, there's apparently only one track on this site - I listened to the Groundhog Day track and it's certainly not bad. The guy admits he doesn't have filler commentary for every scene on the screen and the microphone rattle in the beginning reveals a limited amount of preparation, so for what it's worth it's certainly a nice first try. I been to Punxsutawney couple times, and love Groundhog Day the Movie, so it was rather interesting to listen to the guy's comments.
I think perhaps though it was premature to feature this site on slashdot - don't you think you should have waited until there was a few more tracks on there? As it is, it looks like a thousand people are gonna download the same track - it would have made a better impression if you had let it mature a bit. All the same, it would be nice to see more things like this. It's a good and creative way to 'share' stuff without pirating. :)
mod up! :)
Ronja 10mbit sounds really damn cool. Hobby project for summer!
Gee & Gosh, the Wonders of Behavior Tracking. Don't you envy those cool futuristic wireless Japanese cyberconsumers? I pray that some day somebody would Profile my Consumer Product Consumption Patterns so that I never again would feel unentertained.
All the time my wireless telephone would call me and on its little color television screen there would magically appear targeted 3D joy-consumer-grams keeping me Informed of Newly Released and Upcoming Derivative Entertainment Products scientifically cloned and distilled in the Hollywood labs from Stuff that Average Consumers within my Profiled Demographic Group had been Profiled to determine they would probably Like to purchase.
Because it's always Great to Consume Entertainment Content Exactly Like The Stuff You've Consumed Already. You fucking worthless foodtube.
Fuck that.
Not a single paragraph was spent in that article addressing privacy concerns, but it must be assumed that the matter-of-factly business rationalization of computerized obsessive stalking is that only troglodytes, communists and paranoid perverts with Something To Hide would worry about privacy anyway.
I hate the future. I hate you. Death is too good for marketeers.
Corporate Revenue Service agents today apprehended a 28-year old male consumer-citizen (Mr. Adam Jones - credit ID 104-2349-1803) and seized from his apartment (688 Maple st / Apt 404D) a substantial cache of more than 500 illegally imported Eurasian computer harddrives and approximately 150 DVD burners all lacking content protection (safety) mechanisms federally mandated under the SSSCA American Antiterrorist Patriot Consumer-Citizen Act of 2002.
These so-called "open" harddrives and burners are sought by Unpatriotic communist/liberal/terrorist "open source" hackers who use them in unregistered computers for storing atomic bomb secrets, unaccountable open source operating systems, Terrorist plots, child pornography and worst of all, illegal and unprotected duplicates of cherished corporate intellectual property works such as Britney Spears music CDs and Tom Green movies.
"Open" drives and systems also lack federally mandated tracking and monitoring devices which precludes corporate and federal agents from remotely conducting weekly lawful spot checks for DMCA/SSSCA/patriotic compliance among our consumer-citizens. Without such tracking devices the corporate government also cannot accurately profile thought/behavior patterns of consumer-citizens, which precludes targeted patrotic advertisements.
Corporate Government analysts have scientifically determined that consumer-citizens who aren't sufficiently exposed to targeted commercials, actually consume less corporate products, which as the Corporate General eloquently explained in a speech last week is "basically the same as helping the Terrorists," and is the beginning of a slippery slope that can lead to unpatriotic-liberal-communist-Terrorist deviant anti-consumerist mentalities. (As an example, Mr. Jones here owned an automobile more than two years old!)
Additionally, at Mr. Jones' property a small cache of contraband liberal-communist anticonsumerist propaganda materials were found and destroyed, as well as a highly illegal time shifting device used ny Terrorists to steal content from entertainment networks and watch it later without adequate exposure to Patriotic Advertisements.
Mr. Jones was detained without incident and now awaits sentencing in the dungeouns beneath the local McSentence corporate law center. If as expected Mr. Jones is succesfully convicted of SSSCA violations he may face up to 20 years in the AOL-Toyota-Boeing-CocaCola corporate prison of California. Serves the bastard right!
Excerpt from The Truth Journal, published by the Information Corporation (a subsidiary of America's Consolidated Entertainment, Legislation and Communications Corporation). Copyright in perpetuity, The Corporation.
All it takes is one decrypted copy of any work and it can enter circulation and receive worldwide distribution within a few hours. All these proposed measures would mean is mere inconvenience. You might have to be a little bit discriminating when assembling your basic free media platform. It could well be that next generation MPAA conforming DVD drives for computers would work only on protected platforms with some kind of advanced encrypted digital stream not even meant for crackable software to decode, but some kind of protected playback device inside the video circuitry of the computer working only with an overlay hardware render surface that can't be "read" from memory. In that case if you really wanted to be able to "backup" your legally purchased DVDs and you know, use them for creative purposes, you'd just have to search and find an old-spec DVD drive from the free world of China, (the irony!) or wait a little while before somebody with one such drive would rip and mpeg4 it for you. I don't see how you should possibly feel guilty for obtaining such a ripped copy, since you own the original disc.
Your computer is being sabotaged by evil corporations and industries used to getting their way by sheer legal brute force. These shady alliances desire to see your computer crippled so that instead of serving your needs it would become a media delivery outlet serving the industry needs. It would refuse to obey your commands. You would be denied your already existing ability to view and use content on your terms. Your proper response as a free thinking person should therefore be to reclaim your control of the machine, obliterate all roadblocks placed in your path and help others preserve their freedoms as well.
These guys have had a commercially available
brain actuated mouse cursor gizmo out for years.
http://www.brainfingers.com/cyberlink.htm
The hope for Palm to survive as a viable platform seems to diminish day by day. There is no evidence of ongoing innovation from this company. What did they DO all this time? Who killed their R&D department? On what did they squander their once-decisive market lead? Did it take that much engineering effort to release the lifestyle celebrity branded palms, the slightly differently colored cases and the dinky proprietary memory cards?
I am on my 3rd Palm now - a worn and dented IIIc, and it looks like it will be the last. I just don't think I'll see any viable upgrade path from this corporation. Will I have to make the switch to the evil Empire's devices? Those Ipaq's sure look a lot more like what the futurists would have me believe I should be expecting from handheld devices. I mean, slick and silver, color, high resolution, audio and video enabled. Palm's devices still look like mid 1990s tech, complete with chunky lo-fi 160x160 pixel displays which are FINE for embedded use in cellphones and what have you, but please PLEASE I want some contemporary technology!
Palm keeps disappointing. Not a sliver of innovation is evident in this device. It would have been of modest interest if it had come out some three years ago. The service price structure seems completely out of whack with reality. I receive 100 k worth of spam email HEADERS alone in a few days. And why doesn't it have 802.11b instead anyway? That's all the wireless connectivity I need and want. And a higher resolution screen? 240x320 or even just 240x240x15bit is fine(So I can make some slightly more serious GPS field mapping apps that don't look like Vic 20 games), 16 megs default memory, and a flash card reader for mp3s, and a stereo sound system and a headphone jack? Gimme all that and call it PalmX and I'd put in five hunnert bucks easy.