yeah on that note, correct me if i'm wrong, but i think i already know a perfect way around this new 'corrupt' cd problem. all that need be accessed for a digital rip of the original bitstream is a digital stream of the music after a non-cdrom device has processed it. now alot of the newer devices don't give u access to the digital links but interestingly my 10 year old technics system (which definitely doesn not use cdrom technology) has a nice little optical out of the cd to the dsp unit, which could just as easily be plugged into a dat tape unit. so basically the riaa has made it 20% harder for me to rip a cd, and forced me to invest another $200 that i would have had as descretionary income to buy stuff, very possibly cds i like. and simutaneously, they managed to alienate thousands of people that use newer cd players... haha... i love their 'logic'
i'm still waiting for the mpaa to catch on to the riaa's reasoning... i just can't wait to pay 7 bucks to stare at a black screen in silence for 2 hours:)
Just incase anyone is interested, the DVD+RW specs are here.
Also, from the little I have read on zdnet it appears that DVD+RW is promising, being usable for video, data, etc. although not officially sanctioned by the DVD Forum (but with backers like HP, Phillips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson MM, Verbatim, and Yamaha who needs the damn DVD Forum;).
i seriously am beginning to doubt the intellegence
on
Rent A Downloadable Movie
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
of the movie studio's
i mean, seriously, do they employ/.'s Squadron of Attack Elephants?
ok... lets run down the options:
Movie Studio's Official Format:
Lifetime of file: 30 days
Watching period: 24 hours
File size: 500 MB
Encoding: Proprietary (in all likelyhood)
Interface: Most likely pretty useless and annoying
Availability: Some time after DVD release
Cost: Something
DivX:
Lifetime of file: Unlimited
Watching period: Unlimited
File size: 600MB-1200MB depending on quality desired
Encoding: DivX (mpeg-4)
Interface: Anything you want
Availability: At or Pre-DVD release
Cost: Nothing
Yeah, sure the new format is gonna be successful
(opinion brought to you in part by Scarcasm(tm))
Not to complain, as I personally think the Quake series kick some serious ass, but am I the only one that recalls Id saying that Q3 was going to be the last in the series, and that they were going on to work on Wolfenstein?
Doing RC4 or AES at 11 Mbps in software is no problem.
Neither is doing RC4 or AES or Triple-DES, etc. via hardware on the NIC. Just use a chipset with decent algorithm.
i'd guess that the poster doesn't have the chair set up correctly and therefore fidgets quite a bit, meaning extra wear on the clothes.
I would just like to address an overlooked issue regarding the cause of the so called clothes wear, if it can be so called.
The above poster assumes that the original complaint is valid, and that the chair is indeed the cause of the wear. I waste more time in my Aeron than you can shake a stick at, and I move about in it as well, never to notice any wear on my pants. This makes me wonder about what the hell the original poster's clothes were made out of. After all, the Aeron's mesh is plastic, and none of my nylon, cotton, etc. pants have become the victim of this plastic. So the clothes of the poster must have been softer and less durable than nylon, cotton or soft vinyly plastic... Damnit I thought we Slashdotters delt with the perils of dressing in newspaper long ago!
I just was thinking about the Code Red II and was wondering why a virus would be needed to cure them of the predicament they are in. It seems that because the virus itself opens up a backdoor which can be used to execute any command on the system, it would be possible to broadcast shutdown commands to the networks which the servers lie on. Since the virus itself is harbored in ram, it would be wiped with this. Sure it wouldn't patch the hole, but it would eliminate the threat.
Also, IANAL, but I would imagine your liability for this would be much less, as you have altered no authorized data on the server, but (in the spirit of all the great analogies on slashdot today) have just asked for the server to purge itself and it has kindly obliged.
South Island, but no sorry, try the extreme sports capital of NZ;) and no we don't get Mountain Dew here. We do however get Dr. Pepper imported from the States so go figure.
Thanks alot guys... never would have figured that out. In New Zealand we don't even have Mountain Dew, let alone Mountain Dew: Code Red. Just to qualify my lack of knowledge over this matter.;)
Thanks
Just curious about the "highly caffinated soft-drink" popular among programmers that Code Red was named after. My first guess was Coca-Cola but someone also pointed out that it could be Red Bull.
I'll stay with my original guess, due to the red cans and abundance of Coke wherever I see programmers. The only question is whether it qualifies as highly caffinated. On the other hand, Red Bull has its merit as well, being, well, "Red." However, I do debate whether or not Red Bull is highly popular, since its expensive as hell, and alot of the programmers I've met couldn't afford Red Bull on their non-existant saleries
Anyway... I'd be anxious to hear what insight the slashdot community can give on this matter.
*looks around table*
damn that reminds me... i gotta throw away some of these coke cans;)
Doesn't this tell us something about the current music distribution system thats in place? I mean, people have discovered that the original audio cd is not the best medium to store music on, that more freedom can be obtained through the use of mp3 compression, and high capacity digital medium storage. This is a revolution for music. All of a sudden record compaies are not restricted by finite combinations of music that are only fully enjoyed by a handful of people. They could revolutionize the community by creating programs which allow custom mixes to be made for a reasonable price, downloaded through their official servers while you sleep, and burned as soon as they finish downloading, garunteeing you the songs you want at a high quality of audio. Of course the program would also support just downloading the songs so you can throw them on your mp3cd, flash card, or micro hdd that plugs into your car stereo. The system would be all legal, and the majority of people would use it.
Welcome back to the real world. This new technology must be scared by definition, it is new. The age old distribution methods must be kept. When you want to use that music that you bought for your own purposes, the cd is only a license to use the data. When you use this license to hear the music to transfer it to a seperate medium, bang they think up a damanging solution. So these technophobes decide to prevent this, and since they can't legally stop it, they resort to impairing the ability of you to listen to that music, be it by limiting the readability of the data, or by making it harmful to certain audio systems under certain conditions. They are selling us impaired goods.
So I go out and buy a US$25 cd that just came out, run home, load it into my cd-rom to copy it to my car mp3 player, as I never use normal cd's anymore, and I can't even transfer this music to that medium. Instead I just bought a cd that might as well be used as a coaster, because only my old fashion 'Compact Disc' players can play it. Whats the end result of these kind of situations?
Record compainis fail to realize that the public can only be pushed so far, and when you restrict their freedom, regardless of what it is in relation to, the rebel. Also, they fail to realize that if the public becomes estranged from them, other distributions methods will become more and more appealing. Spending $20 for a cd that you can't use vs. Downloading for 20 minutes on your dsl modem to get the entire album. Hell the downloading option saves you $60 per hour... and you can actually listen to the music rather than just look at the pretty colors on the shiny disc.
Record compaies are failing to see the true issue with copyright infringment, it is the symptom of an antiquated disturibution method, and obsolete distrribution medium. The answer is not to restrict the freedom of use of the product your selling, but increase its appeal. The industry is going to have to meet a facet of reality that they have been detached from for so long. Record company, meet Commerce.
Commerce, meet Record company.
the/. effect caused a server in san francisco to fall over lowering the overall temperature of the room enought to cause the heating system to kick on. naturally, the heating system was hot water driven, and requiring the intake of additional water. this lowered the overall level of a californian lake causing a down-river pond to dry up. the ducks who's habitat included that pond were forced to fly away, creating a turbulence within the wind. this caused a monarch butterfly to flap its wings, thereby causing a tsunami off the coast of japan^H^H^H^H^H scotland which when colliding with the shore produced seismic tremors which converged, forming a standing wave, in the bedrock below loch ness. the kinetic energy of the vibrating surface caused the surface molecules to spontaneously rearragne into a disturbance which when viewed from approximately level, appeared to look remotely like a vague figure resembling a monster.
Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down.
We were making smores, using the excess heat generated by the improperly ventilated Cisco router, Saturday morning after finishing a 16 hour coding spree when all of a sudden CmdrTaco dropped his. The ohhh so gooey marshmello and yummy chocolate dripped into the air vents and all of a sudden the Cisco smoked and all the led's went out. Realizing there must be a fault, we promptly panacked and ran around the room screeming.
but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it
Our Cisco expert wasn't up to the task due to eating too many smores on a earlier coding break. Upon realizing this, we attempted to fix it ourselves by plugging it back in, but to no avail. We then called Cisco.
Props to Yazz, KurtG and Scott from Cisco for managing to help get us back online.
Those great guys from Cisco, upon hearing of our predicament, instructed us to apply a half sinewave duration, several hundered newton, force laterally on the Cisco box using our lower right appenditure. Upon asking them "What the fuck are you talking about?" they replied "Kick the damn thing." Using extreme precision, we followed out their instructions and kicked the shit out of the box. Amazingly the thing reset itself and began working as usual. We suspect that the cause was a software bug, or a chocolate induced short circuit.
I'd hate to see these guy's reactions when you tell them that their precious cd's that supply their $140,000 systems have remarkably poor sound reproduction compared to the real thing. Its not possible to get perfect sound out of a medium that is inferior to the original sound. Information regarding individual instrument output, placement, etc. is lost to a general mux'd signal of all the sound which is then sampled and digitized. They're fighting a battle that cannot be won under the terms they chose.
A good example of this is in a book written by a MIT professor, its called something like When Things Start to Think. Basically one of the chapters is regarding digitally produced sound of a stratevarius cello. The sound was not true, but a result of a supercomputer running modeling algorithms on the input of cellist Yo Yo Ma on purpose built sensors. Although it produced a unique sound, it was not as good as the real thing. The moral, a digitized model of the real thing cannot, with our current technology, be as good as the true thing.
If your really that picky about sound, give up, because short of kidnapping all the musical groups you want to hear and locking them in your basement between listenings, your never going to get what you want.
... i think this infringes on my patent of electro magnetic wave technology. while we're at it, i would also like to address the following entities:
the sun - bad! you are freely distributing my intellectual property, as well as deflamatory UV radiation! this must be halted immediately or i will be forced to take further steps.
the moon - ditto, you are an accessory to the above infringements, and if these actions are not stopped i will be forced to begin formentioned action
fire - do you really think that just by being famous for centuries, and aiding man to rise above the level of animals, you have the right to blatently produce electro magnetic waves? i think not. attached is a court order, ordering you to cease and dissist immeditely. thank you for your time.
thomas edison - sir, i find your recent invention, this so called 'light bulb', to be a implemention of the technology that i have patented and intentionally sat on until the market appears more favorable to accept it. therefore, i insist that you provide me with all technology regarding this device, and hand over all manufacturing facilities and stock to me.
the simpsons - yeah you know you had it comming. what give you the right to sit on my tv and emit electro magnetic radiation of any frequency at any time in the name of 'creativity'. obserd!
excellent
Some help please? (aka future tech support)
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 1
yes, tech support? i'm having a problem with your product. my phone jack isn't fitting into the sound card correctly.
thank you all for just recreating the age old problem of fitting a square peg in a round hole
An encrypted cell phone is all good and well but it will be hard to know the true value of the phone until the algorithm has been throughly examined. Personally I would much rather have a phone based on a widely known and exceptedly secure encryption system such as pgp. Also, if such a system were implemented, cross product support would be possible, as well as connection to other devices such as computers. Think: pgp ncryptd txt msgs dl-able 2 u r comp
in response to all the threads about how this technology is going to be a "deadend" lets not forget who we're dealing with here. this isn't some company from bumfuck, idaho, its Sony. Knowing their history collaborating with Phillips, among other companies, i would not be supprised to see multiple vendor dd-r/w drives out later this year. hell, even if no other companies back the technology originally, Sony could still push this technology hard enough to succeed, after all, if they sell the media for the same price, and the drive (ok, don't tell me that they can't sell media costing them 5 cents to make for the same price as 7 cent/disc media;), and the article states that the same laser technology is being employed, assumedly with a more accurate drive system, so the actual parts should be of similar cost for the drives) who's gonna choose a $1 650 MB disk over a $1 1.3 GB disk?
basically what i'm trying to say is that the 2.88 vs 1.44 MB floppy-drive-failure analogy brought up earlier isn't very valid for two reasons. first, the importance of floppy drives was dimishing at the time, with no real need to have a 2.88 MB boot disk vs a 1.44 MB boot disk (hey they do the same thing, its not like i care if one can almost hold a better program while the other can't). CD drives are used for storage, and the need for storage is constantly growing, scalability at a cost is the name of the game. if we were to draw any analogy it should be between 720KB and 1.44MB floppy drives. they were accepted because 720KB wasn't enough for proper boot disks under many circumstances. go look at that 725MB movie file thats sitting on your hd cause its 5 MB past the 700MB disk overburn limit and tell me you wouldn't like to have that 1.3 GB cd.
oh, plus, check the pic of this thing... its silver!!@(*#%!;)
ok, besides the obvious fact that this post insults most people's intelligence, i'm gonna reply to it (sorry... end flame~)
the reason that mars is the logical point to begin manned exploration of the solar system is that it is the closest planet to our own with a optimum travel time of 280-ish days. also, the distance from the sun is greater. this means that astronauts won't melt their undies while they're their working (ie. adequate operational temperatures).
awhile ago i recall seeing a article in SciAm that had to do with what it would take to terraform mars, and the time scale was approx 100 years(basically mars + atmosphere of greenhouse gases in correct proportions = livable environment assuming water is lying around somewhere (ie. polar ice caps)) if we were to take an agressive approach to the terraform. if we were to attempt such a thing on venus which has a radical atomosphere compared to our planet we would have problems because not only would we have to pump new gases into the atmousphere, but we would also have to pull quite a bit out (toxic fumes = bad). micro-organisms can deal with the atmousphere near the ground (forget what that layer is called) but not at greater height). on top of that is the previously mentioned problem with introducing foreign bacteria to a planet - its opens the doors for bad things to happen (ie. mutations - noone will want to go their if the environment induces a mutation resulting in a trait making a bacteria which cannot be controled by traditional methods (antibiotics) and are potentially harmful (ok, look down. see that atheletes foot? now think if your entire body was being attacked by something similar that we had no way of killing)).
anyway what i'm trying to say is that our timeframe for terraforming venus would be much greater than 100 years, and would requre X billion dollars of investment and technologies which we don't have.
another reason for going to mars is that it is synonomous (spelling? help!) with extra-planetory exploration. we've been saying we would go there ever since 1969 when man had conquered the moon. the only difference is back then we said we would have moonbases in a few decades and it would be easy to bunnyhop off them to mars, etc.
hm... i know i was going to say something else too. oh well, its gone
>Hello Koolance?
Yes? How can I help you?
>My computer isn't on
Ok, well just turn it on
>I've tried
What happened when you tried?
>I heard loud cackling and the power supply smoked
Uh oh. You don't say?
>Yeah I thought it was supposed to run quietly
Well it is quite now isn't it?
>Yeah but it isn't running
Sure... it is... your monitor must be... defective
>Oh. It worked fine earlier today though.
Um...
*clunk*
*dial tone*
*sigh*
When shall people learn that liquids and electricity don't mix?
Why must we always pack?
on
Quakecon...
·
· Score: 1
Pack your bags for Mesquite.
Seeing these type of games in the past, or more accurately, seeing these games pass me by, has brought me to wonder why in this age of the global internet, I can't walk down the street and join up with a few of my friends to compete in the New Zealand Q3 tournament, then jump the pacific on a low latency line (hm... 10000 miles max to Texas, @ speed of light = 40 ms lag + say 100% overhead for switching etc. = 80 ms lag = playable) and compete in a global championship.
Why is location still a binding factor in network activities, specificlly gaming, but I'm quite confident that I could think of other things with some time. Just because the population base of an area is not large enough to support these events doesn't mean that we couldn't still have say 100 people from the local area, linked up to 50 other groups of 100 people = 5050 people => Low Latency WAN Party. It would conserve the experience of a gaming party, as well as give the opportunity to many other people.
Anyway, hm... 12:30am on a Saturday night and I'm posting on/. Sad.
Ok, let me just get this straight.
In the version of its software released since the licensing agreement expired [April 22], Roxio directs users to an alternative music recognition database operated by an open-source group called Freedb.org, which Gracenote says illegally uses its database technology.
So... Gracenote is sueing Roxio for changing THEIR software, that THEY wrote, to use a different service provider, on the grounds that it was based on their 'Technology' (ie. Spec) which is openly available to anyone that wants it.
Well we really shouldn't be supprised should we?
Only thing i'm really scared about is that if this actually works, we might all end up using MSN because our nice windows o/s was written by microsoft and it would be illegal to use THEIR technology to use a ISP that they don't endorse.
Ok so where do we go bitch? hm... no forum on CDDB, how odd! Oh here we are, a nice little email address
One last thought... don't the music labels technically own the copyright to the song titles as well as the songs themselves? So should the RIAA be sueing Gracenote for maintaining and dissiminating a collection of copyrighted information to a user base?
nuff said
would work well
if watermarking could work well
without wasting wonderful quality
written with which
wakes worldly senses well
which in turn lets
wastful companies
widely welcome our money
without wilfully exchanging to us
that wonderful data in
its epiphany of width and depth
First of all, I don't have much time atm so sorry about how short this is.
I have the Aiwa CDC-MP3 (ordered from crutchfield for $299) in my 97 honda prelude. It truely kicks. Agreed, the flashing when you turn the volume knob (yes... only when you turn the volume knob, is kinda annoying at night (you can't see the blue illumination in the daytime) but everything else is pretty tight.
This unit is good unless your real picky about your audio... in which case go and wait for the 2nd gen to come out.
Oh, one other thing. There's a bug in the player that occasionally makes it show the ID3 song tag after the filename (in scroll filename mode). Now, I think this only happens if the ID3 tag is of a certain format, but if anyone figures out why this is for sure, tell me because it would be really useful to format them all like that with the filename being the artist and letting the id3 tag scroll after it to get a better display.
anyway... sorry this isn't quite as coherient nor clear as I would like it to be... but again i'm really rushed tonight:)
Slashdot Mirror
yeah on that note, correct me if i'm wrong, but i think i already know a perfect way around this new 'corrupt' cd problem. all that need be accessed for a digital rip of the original bitstream is a digital stream of the music after a non-cdrom device has processed it. now alot of the newer devices don't give u access to the digital links but interestingly my 10 year old technics system (which definitely doesn not use cdrom technology) has a nice little optical out of the cd to the dsp unit, which could just as easily be plugged into a dat tape unit. so basically the riaa has made it 20% harder for me to rip a cd, and forced me to invest another $200 that i would have had as descretionary income to buy stuff, very possibly cds i like. and simutaneously, they managed to alienate thousands of people that use newer cd players ... haha ... i love their 'logic'
... i just can't wait to pay 7 bucks to stare at a black screen in silence for 2 hours :)
i'm still waiting for the mpaa to catch on to the riaa's reasoning
Just incase anyone is interested, the DVD+RW specs are here.
;).
Also, from the little I have read on zdnet it appears that DVD+RW is promising, being usable for video, data, etc. although not officially sanctioned by the DVD Forum (but with backers like HP, Phillips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson MM, Verbatim, and Yamaha who needs the damn DVD Forum
of the movie studio's
/.'s Squadron of Attack Elephants?
... lets run down the options:
i mean, seriously, do they employ
ok
Movie Studio's Official Format:
Lifetime of file: 30 days
Watching period: 24 hours
File size: 500 MB
Encoding: Proprietary (in all likelyhood)
Interface: Most likely pretty useless and annoying
Availability: Some time after DVD release
Cost: Something
DivX:
Lifetime of file: Unlimited
Watching period: Unlimited
File size: 600MB-1200MB depending on quality desired
Encoding: DivX (mpeg-4)
Interface: Anything you want
Availability: At or Pre-DVD release
Cost: Nothing
Yeah, sure the new format is gonna be successful
(opinion brought to you in part by Scarcasm(tm))
Not to complain, as I personally think the Quake series kick some serious ass, but am I the only one that recalls Id saying that Q3 was going to be the last in the series, and that they were going on to work on Wolfenstein?
Doing RC4 or AES at 11 Mbps in software is no problem. Neither is doing RC4 or AES or Triple-DES, etc. via hardware on the NIC. Just use a chipset with decent algorithm.
i'd guess that the poster doesn't have the chair set up correctly and therefore fidgets quite a bit, meaning extra wear on the clothes. I would just like to address an overlooked issue regarding the cause of the so called clothes wear, if it can be so called. The above poster assumes that the original complaint is valid, and that the chair is indeed the cause of the wear. I waste more time in my Aeron than you can shake a stick at, and I move about in it as well, never to notice any wear on my pants. This makes me wonder about what the hell the original poster's clothes were made out of. After all, the Aeron's mesh is plastic, and none of my nylon, cotton, etc. pants have become the victim of this plastic. So the clothes of the poster must have been softer and less durable than nylon, cotton or soft vinyly plastic... Damnit I thought we Slashdotters delt with the perils of dressing in newspaper long ago!
I just was thinking about the Code Red II and was wondering why a virus would be needed to cure them of the predicament they are in. It seems that because the virus itself opens up a backdoor which can be used to execute any command on the system, it would be possible to broadcast shutdown commands to the networks which the servers lie on. Since the virus itself is harbored in ram, it would be wiped with this. Sure it wouldn't patch the hole, but it would eliminate the threat. Also, IANAL, but I would imagine your liability for this would be much less, as you have altered no authorized data on the server, but (in the spirit of all the great analogies on slashdot today) have just asked for the server to purge itself and it has kindly obliged.
South Island, but no sorry, try the extreme sports capital of NZ ;) and no we don't get Mountain Dew here. We do however get Dr. Pepper imported from the States so go figure.
Thanks alot guys ... never would have figured that out. In New Zealand we don't even have Mountain Dew, let alone Mountain Dew: Code Red. Just to qualify my lack of knowledge over this matter. ;)
Thanks
Just curious about the "highly caffinated soft-drink" popular among programmers that Code Red was named after. My first guess was Coca-Cola but someone also pointed out that it could be Red Bull. I'll stay with my original guess, due to the red cans and abundance of Coke wherever I see programmers. The only question is whether it qualifies as highly caffinated. On the other hand, Red Bull has its merit as well, being, well, "Red." However, I do debate whether or not Red Bull is highly popular, since its expensive as hell, and alot of the programmers I've met couldn't afford Red Bull on their non-existant saleries Anyway ... I'd be anxious to hear what insight the slashdot community can give on this matter.
*looks around table* ... i gotta throw away some of these coke cans ;)
damn that reminds me
Doesn't this tell us something about the current music distribution system thats in place? I mean, people have discovered that the original audio cd is not the best medium to store music on, that more freedom can be obtained through the use of mp3 compression, and high capacity digital medium storage. This is a revolution for music. All of a sudden record compaies are not restricted by finite combinations of music that are only fully enjoyed by a handful of people. They could revolutionize the community by creating programs which allow custom mixes to be made for a reasonable price, downloaded through their official servers while you sleep, and burned as soon as they finish downloading, garunteeing you the songs you want at a high quality of audio. Of course the program would also support just downloading the songs so you can throw them on your mp3cd, flash card, or micro hdd that plugs into your car stereo. The system would be all legal, and the majority of people would use it. ... and you can actually listen to the music rather than just look at the pretty colors on the shiny disc.
Welcome back to the real world. This new technology must be scared by definition, it is new. The age old distribution methods must be kept. When you want to use that music that you bought for your own purposes, the cd is only a license to use the data. When you use this license to hear the music to transfer it to a seperate medium, bang they think up a damanging solution. So these technophobes decide to prevent this, and since they can't legally stop it, they resort to impairing the ability of you to listen to that music, be it by limiting the readability of the data, or by making it harmful to certain audio systems under certain conditions. They are selling us impaired goods.
So I go out and buy a US$25 cd that just came out, run home, load it into my cd-rom to copy it to my car mp3 player, as I never use normal cd's anymore, and I can't even transfer this music to that medium. Instead I just bought a cd that might as well be used as a coaster, because only my old fashion 'Compact Disc' players can play it. Whats the end result of these kind of situations?
Record compainis fail to realize that the public can only be pushed so far, and when you restrict their freedom, regardless of what it is in relation to, the rebel. Also, they fail to realize that if the public becomes estranged from them, other distributions methods will become more and more appealing. Spending $20 for a cd that you can't use vs. Downloading for 20 minutes on your dsl modem to get the entire album. Hell the downloading option saves you $60 per hour
Record compaies are failing to see the true issue with copyright infringment, it is the symptom of an antiquated disturibution method, and obsolete distrribution medium. The answer is not to restrict the freedom of use of the product your selling, but increase its appeal. The industry is going to have to meet a facet of reality that they have been detached from for so long.
Record company, meet Commerce.
Commerce, meet Record company.
the /. effect caused a server in san francisco to fall over lowering the overall temperature of the room enought to cause the heating system to kick on. naturally, the heating system was hot water driven, and requiring the intake of additional water. this lowered the overall level of a californian lake causing a down-river pond to dry up. the ducks who's habitat included that pond were forced to fly away, creating a turbulence within the wind. this caused a monarch butterfly to flap its wings, thereby causing a tsunami off the coast of japan^H^H^H^H^H scotland which when colliding with the shore produced seismic tremors which converged, forming a standing wave, in the bedrock below loch ness. the kinetic energy of the vibrating surface caused the surface molecules to spontaneously rearragne into a disturbance which when viewed from approximately level, appeared to look remotely like a vague figure resembling a monster.
Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. We were making smores, using the excess heat generated by the improperly ventilated Cisco router, Saturday morning after finishing a 16 hour coding spree when all of a sudden CmdrTaco dropped his. The ohhh so gooey marshmello and yummy chocolate dripped into the air vents and all of a sudden the Cisco smoked and all the led's went out. Realizing there must be a fault, we promptly panacked and ran around the room screeming. but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it Our Cisco expert wasn't up to the task due to eating too many smores on a earlier coding break. Upon realizing this, we attempted to fix it ourselves by plugging it back in, but to no avail. We then called Cisco. Props to Yazz, KurtG and Scott from Cisco for managing to help get us back online. Those great guys from Cisco, upon hearing of our predicament, instructed us to apply a half sinewave duration, several hundered newton, force laterally on the Cisco box using our lower right appenditure. Upon asking them "What the fuck are you talking about?" they replied "Kick the damn thing." Using extreme precision, we followed out their instructions and kicked the shit out of the box. Amazingly the thing reset itself and began working as usual. We suspect that the cause was a software bug, or a chocolate induced short circuit.
I'd hate to see these guy's reactions when you tell them that their precious cd's that supply their $140,000 systems have remarkably poor sound reproduction compared to the real thing. Its not possible to get perfect sound out of a medium that is inferior to the original sound. Information regarding individual instrument output, placement, etc. is lost to a general mux'd signal of all the sound which is then sampled and digitized. They're fighting a battle that cannot be won under the terms they chose. A good example of this is in a book written by a MIT professor, its called something like When Things Start to Think. Basically one of the chapters is regarding digitally produced sound of a stratevarius cello. The sound was not true, but a result of a supercomputer running modeling algorithms on the input of cellist Yo Yo Ma on purpose built sensors. Although it produced a unique sound, it was not as good as the real thing. The moral, a digitized model of the real thing cannot, with our current technology, be as good as the true thing. If your really that picky about sound, give up, because short of kidnapping all the musical groups you want to hear and locking them in your basement between listenings, your never going to get what you want.
... i think this infringes on my patent of electro magnetic wave technology. while we're at it, i would also like to address the following entities: the sun - bad! you are freely distributing my intellectual property, as well as deflamatory UV radiation! this must be halted immediately or i will be forced to take further steps. the moon - ditto, you are an accessory to the above infringements, and if these actions are not stopped i will be forced to begin formentioned action fire - do you really think that just by being famous for centuries, and aiding man to rise above the level of animals, you have the right to blatently produce electro magnetic waves? i think not. attached is a court order, ordering you to cease and dissist immeditely. thank you for your time. thomas edison - sir, i find your recent invention, this so called 'light bulb', to be a implemention of the technology that i have patented and intentionally sat on until the market appears more favorable to accept it. therefore, i insist that you provide me with all technology regarding this device, and hand over all manufacturing facilities and stock to me. the simpsons - yeah you know you had it comming. what give you the right to sit on my tv and emit electro magnetic radiation of any frequency at any time in the name of 'creativity'. obserd! excellent
yes, tech support? i'm having a problem with your product. my phone jack isn't fitting into the sound card correctly.
;)
thank you all for just recreating the age old problem of fitting a square peg in a round hole
An encrypted cell phone is all good and well but it will be hard to know the true value of the phone until the algorithm has been throughly examined. Personally I would much rather have a phone based on a widely known and exceptedly secure encryption system such as pgp. Also, if such a system were implemented, cross product support would be possible, as well as connection to other devices such as computers. Think: pgp ncryptd txt msgs dl-able 2 u r comp
in response to all the threads about how this technology is going to be a "deadend" lets not forget who we're dealing with here. this isn't some company from bumfuck, idaho, its Sony. Knowing their history collaborating with Phillips, among other companies, i would not be supprised to see multiple vendor dd-r/w drives out later this year. hell, even if no other companies back the technology originally, Sony could still push this technology hard enough to succeed, after all, if they sell the media for the same price, and the drive (ok, don't tell me that they can't sell media costing them 5 cents to make for the same price as 7 cent/disc media ;), and the article states that the same laser technology is being employed, assumedly with a more accurate drive system, so the actual parts should be of similar cost for the drives) who's gonna choose a $1 650 MB disk over a $1 1.3 GB disk?
basically what i'm trying to say is that the 2.88 vs 1.44 MB floppy-drive-failure analogy brought up earlier isn't very valid for two reasons. first, the importance of floppy drives was dimishing at the time, with no real need to have a 2.88 MB boot disk vs a 1.44 MB boot disk (hey they do the same thing, its not like i care if one can almost hold a better program while the other can't). CD drives are used for storage, and the need for storage is constantly growing, scalability at a cost is the name of the game. if we were to draw any analogy it should be between 720KB and 1.44MB floppy drives. they were accepted because 720KB wasn't enough for proper boot disks under many circumstances. go look at that 725MB movie file thats sitting on your hd cause its 5 MB past the 700MB disk overburn limit and tell me you wouldn't like to have that 1.3 GB cd.
oh, plus, check the pic of this thing ... its silver!!@(*#%! ;)
ok, besides the obvious fact that this post insults most people's intelligence, i'm gonna reply to it (sorry ... end flame~)
the reason that mars is the logical point to begin manned exploration of the solar system is that it is the closest planet to our own with a optimum travel time of 280-ish days. also, the distance from the sun is greater. this means that astronauts won't melt their undies while they're their working (ie. adequate operational temperatures).
awhile ago i recall seeing a article in SciAm that had to do with what it would take to terraform mars, and the time scale was approx 100 years(basically mars + atmosphere of greenhouse gases in correct proportions = livable environment assuming water is lying around somewhere (ie. polar ice caps)) if we were to take an agressive approach to the terraform. if we were to attempt such a thing on venus which has a radical atomosphere compared to our planet we would have problems because not only would we have to pump new gases into the atmousphere, but we would also have to pull quite a bit out (toxic fumes = bad). micro-organisms can deal with the atmousphere near the ground (forget what that layer is called) but not at greater height). on top of that is the previously mentioned problem with introducing foreign bacteria to a planet - its opens the doors for bad things to happen (ie. mutations - noone will want to go their if the environment induces a mutation resulting in a trait making a bacteria which cannot be controled by traditional methods (antibiotics) and are potentially harmful (ok, look down. see that atheletes foot? now think if your entire body was being attacked by something similar that we had no way of killing)).
anyway what i'm trying to say is that our timeframe for terraforming venus would be much greater than 100 years, and would requre X billion dollars of investment and technologies which we don't have.
another reason for going to mars is that it is synonomous (spelling? help!) with extra-planetory exploration. we've been saying we would go there ever since 1969 when man had conquered the moon. the only difference is back then we said we would have moonbases in a few decades and it would be easy to bunnyhop off them to mars, etc.
hm ... i know i was going to say something else too. oh well, its gone
>Hello Koolance? ... it is ... your monitor must be ... defective ...
Yes? How can I help you?
>My computer isn't on
Ok, well just turn it on
>I've tried
What happened when you tried?
>I heard loud cackling and the power supply smoked
Uh oh. You don't say?
>Yeah I thought it was supposed to run quietly
Well it is quite now isn't it?
>Yeah but it isn't running
Sure
>Oh. It worked fine earlier today though.
Um
*clunk*
*dial tone* *sigh*
When shall people learn that liquids and electricity don't mix?
Pack your bags for Mesquite. Seeing these type of games in the past, or more accurately, seeing these games pass me by, has brought me to wonder why in this age of the global internet, I can't walk down the street and join up with a few of my friends to compete in the New Zealand Q3 tournament, then jump the pacific on a low latency line (hm ... 10000 miles max to Texas, @ speed of light = 40 ms lag + say 100% overhead for switching etc. = 80 ms lag = playable) and compete in a global championship.
Why is location still a binding factor in network activities, specificlly gaming, but I'm quite confident that I could think of other things with some time. Just because the population base of an area is not large enough to support these events doesn't mean that we couldn't still have say 100 people from the local area, linked up to 50 other groups of 100 people = 5050 people => Low Latency WAN Party. It would conserve the experience of a gaming party, as well as give the opportunity to many other people.
Anyway, hm ... 12:30am on a Saturday night and I'm posting on /. Sad.
Ok, let me just get this straight. In the version of its software released since the licensing agreement expired [April 22], Roxio directs users to an alternative music recognition database operated by an open-source group called Freedb.org, which Gracenote says illegally uses its database technology. So ... Gracenote is sueing Roxio for changing THEIR software, that THEY wrote, to use a different service provider, on the grounds that it was based on their 'Technology' (ie. Spec) which is openly available to anyone that wants it.
Well we really shouldn't be supprised should we?
Only thing i'm really scared about is that if this actually works, we might all end up using MSN because our nice windows o/s was written by microsoft and it would be illegal to use THEIR technology to use a ISP that they don't endorse.
Ok so where do we go bitch? hm ... no forum on CDDB, how odd! Oh here we are, a nice little email address
One last thought ... don't the music labels technically own the copyright to the song titles as well as the songs themselves? So should the RIAA be sueing Gracenote for maintaining and dissiminating a collection of copyrighted information to a user base?
nuff said
if watermarking could work well
without wasting wonderful quality
written with which
wakes worldly senses well
which in turn lets
wastful companies
widely welcome our money
without wilfully exchanging to us
that wonderful data in
its epiphany of width and depth
yeah ... right ;)
First of all, I don't have much time atm so sorry about how short this is.
... only when you turn the volume knob, is kinda annoying at night (you can't see the blue illumination in the daytime) but everything else is pretty tight.
... in which case go and wait for the 2nd gen to come out.
... sorry this isn't quite as coherient nor clear as I would like it to be ... but again i'm really rushed tonight :)
I have the Aiwa CDC-MP3 (ordered from crutchfield for $299) in my 97 honda prelude. It truely kicks. Agreed, the flashing when you turn the volume knob (yes
This unit is good unless your real picky about your audio
Oh, one other thing. There's a bug in the player that occasionally makes it show the ID3 song tag after the filename (in scroll filename mode). Now, I think this only happens if the ID3 tag is of a certain format, but if anyone figures out why this is for sure, tell me because it would be really useful to format them all like that with the filename being the artist and letting the id3 tag scroll after it to get a better display.
anyway
-jstockdale