I heard some years ago (in the late 1990s) that someone was still manufacturing Commodore 64s for sale in China (or possibly Latin America), where few people could afford modern computers. Anyone know anything about this?
If they're making C64s for mass use these days, how closely are they keeping to the original designs, and how many cheap-enough improvements have they added? Are they building them all on one chip, or using the original small-denomination RAM chips? Do they have any funky modern enhancements, like ZIP drives which pretend to be 1541s or integrated USB ports/IP stacks or whatever?
Didn't the Iraqi government buy up all the PlayStation 2s in some US cities a few Xmases ago, to use for missile guidance systems? (Or possibly to spoil US kids' Christmas, because Saddam's a meany.) Or is that more Kuwaiti-incubator-baby material?
In theory, he published code which affects American nationals (i.e. the movie companies, corporations being considered "persons" under law), and thus could be extradited. Norway won't hand him over, but he should be very careful about not catching any international flights which stop in US-controlled airports.
Lindows is not a general purpose Linux distribution. It's a cut-down version of Linux where everything runs as root (as not to confuse the poor user) with a (half-working) Windows emulator on top of it. In other words, partial compatibility with Windows with a little of the security and stability of Linux. Sounds dodgy whichever way you cut it.
Most shareholders are financial management portfolios guided solely by profit maximisation, and not interested in making sacrifices to fight against Darth Gates' empire. The profits they could reap from a MS buyout would convince them (especially next to the losses that MS could inflict by cutting off the oxygen supply of a defiant Macromedia). Even if the remainder were sworn Penguinhead Jedi, MS could buy Macromedia if they wanted.
A lot of the indie-label vinyl here in Australia is pressed in the Czech Republic (which is quite a long way away, when you think about it).
I suppose quality vinyl has become the sort of specialist market where there is only enough space in the world for a few producers, and it's more economical to press all the vinyl there and ship it across the world than to set up presses elsewhere.
Aside: I heard a while ago that there is only one guy in the world who knows how to repair vinyl-cutting lathes (or make new heads for them, or something of that nature), and he's in his 60s/70s/80s; when he dies, the implication was, that's it.
Re:If it played OGG...I might buy it.
on
New MP3 Portables
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· Score: 2
Don't hold your breath. Adding OGG (a new file format with no provision for DRM) would be waving a red flag to the RIAA, and just tempting them to sue. It could happen, of course, but would require a company with a lot of backbone and deep pockets, and would depend on not being killed by executives concerned about the liability.
It's like in Jeter's _Noir_; when a "crime" is difficult to prosecute, the only way of deterring it is to increase the penalties proportionately. By this logic, Jeter predicted that copyright violation would become a capital crime, and worse.
"Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams."
The Fritz chip could be used to also kill ad blocking software, preserving the "attention rights" of online advertisers.
With it, web pages would be encrypted with a DRM scheme. Only a trusted web browser, running under a trusted OS, verified with the Fritz chip, would be able to decrypt the content. The content metadata (which the browser would be obliged to enforce) could mandate that ads be loaded first, that third-party ad plug-ins are running (i.e., to display ads outside of the browser window), that the browser window is in "always on top" mode, or even that a specified piece of spyware is loaded and verifies that it can "phone home".
You do not own the intellectual property inside the CPU's microcode, the machine's BIOS or the OS. You have an implicit license to use it.
Already hardware devices are shipping with shrinkwrap license agreements; some Compaq machines, for example, do, and opening the packaging signifies acceptance even if you don't open any of the CDs that came with it. Depending on UCITA, the courts and the legislative clout of Hollywood, this may be used to enforce a "beneficial" copyright-protecting Microsoft OS monopoly on Intel/AMD hardware.
True, but weaker copyright laws help sell more mp3 players, CD burners, and so on. It's not clear (to me, anyway) which contributes more to the US economy and how changing copyright law will affect the relative balance of sales.
CD burners and MP3 players are typically manufactured in the Far East where labour costs are low; in many cases, the profits go to overseas electronics firms.
Copyrighted materials are typically manufactured in Los Angeles.
Therefore, content companies could exploit the mood of hyper-patriotism to push for laws reinforcing their business models at gunpoint. As for MP3 player manufacturers in Taiwan, it's just tough luck.
Unfortunately, when I tried Space.app, it wasn't good enough to be useful. For some reason (limitations of the OSX windowing model perhaps?) it allocates windows by application; i.e., all of an application's windows go in the same workspace. Given that on OSX, only one instance of any application is running at any time, this means, for example, that all your Terminal windows must be on the same desktop. This is not good enough.
The Australian federal government is currently controlled by the Liberal Party, which is sort of like the Republicans except without the Christian Coalition. I.e., a socially conservative, pro-corporate party. In addition, the Prime Minister loves Bush and would do anything for him, from unconditionally committing Australian troops to any U.S. military campaign to neglecting to raise agricultural trade issues when visiting the U.S. If the U.S. asked him to, he would push hard to indemnify MPAA/RIAA cracking/DoS attempts in Australia, under the guise of "protecting movie industry investment" or "harmonising computer crime laws".
The upper house is dominated by the Liberals, but they don't have a majority; the balance of power is held by the fashionably left-leaning Democrats, who would probably oppose a Bermanesque law here. Though if the Labor opposition (think like Tony Blair's mob in the UK) is persuaded to get behind it, the Democrats are irrelevant.
In 2007, a stealth bomber drops a laser-guided glide bomb on the Sealand platform, destroying it. The White House announces the successful destruction of a major terrorist cell/child pornography syndicate. As usual, FOXNews and CNN don't question the party line, though various lunatic fringe sites soon reveal that evidence of such activities was fabricated.
If you want a secure data haven, build it underground. Deep underground, out of reach of bunker-busting nukes. Or distribute it in orbit, as a network of millions of tiny, highly redundant satellites, so that killing them all without damaging "legitimate" satellites would be next to impossible. Or a global mesh network of nanobots, running a FreeNet-style protocol of some sort.
are proprietary. Saved important data on a hard disk 20 years ago? Hope you have an ST502 controller lying around.
Then again, how sure are you that the CD-Rs/DVD-Rs you burn today will be readable in 20 years' time? Don't CD-Rs deteriorate and become unreadable within a number of years? And will DVD-Rs be any better?
Back when I went to school (Melbourne High, FWIW), we had to take a sport activity. One activity briefly offered was Phasor Strike, i.e., laser-tag. Students would run around in a darkened room with backpacks shooting infrared beams at each other.
This was canned after a year or so after protests from parents. (The fact that a former student of the school made news by going postal and massacring some 7 people may have had something to do with it; OTOH, the mass murderer attended the school before Phasor Strike, and was a product of the culture of militarism in its cadet corps, which nothing was done about. *shrug*)
As for me? I took golf as a school sport. It was a decent excuse to have a leisurely stroll, rather than wrestling in mud with 10 other blokes or something equally unpleasant. Even at the cost of lugging a set of cheap, decrepit-looking golf clubs back and forth on the peak-hour train.
Player manufacturers can put in MP3 playback because the format is "grandfathered"; i.e., it was already in wide use before the RIAA took note of it. If they were to add support for OGG, they would be giving support to a new format which specifically precludes DRM, and would open themselves up to lawsuits. And believe me, the lawsuits would come thick and fast; the RIAA has a virtually bottomless budget to "put out fires" such as this, and would sue aggressively.
Liquid Audio cannot provide a Linux player, as an open-source kernel does not allow them to guarantee a secure audio path to the D-A converter, an important part of their agreement with the recording companies.
The downloads are in a proprietary format named LiquidAudio. It requires special LiquidAudio software to play it (i.e., probably won't work with your software/MP3 player). The software is not available for Linux, and will never be (as an open-source kernel cannot guarantee a secure audio path to the D-A converter). As such, while the format is freer than the rent-a-song service offered earlier, it is still too restricted. Sorry, not interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Though their "lines of bullshit" have a habit of turning out to be improbably true.
I heard some years ago (in the late 1990s) that someone was still manufacturing Commodore 64s for sale in China (or possibly Latin America), where few people could afford modern computers. Anyone know anything about this?
If they're making C64s for mass use these days, how closely are they keeping to the original designs, and how many cheap-enough improvements have they added? Are they building them all on one chip, or using the original small-denomination RAM chips? Do they have any funky modern enhancements, like ZIP drives which pretend to be 1541s or integrated USB ports/IP stacks or whatever?
Didn't the Iraqi government buy up all the PlayStation 2s in some US cities a few Xmases ago, to use for missile guidance systems? (Or possibly to spoil US kids' Christmas, because Saddam's a meany.) Or is that more Kuwaiti-incubator-baby material?
In theory, he published code which affects American nationals (i.e. the movie companies, corporations being considered "persons" under law), and thus could be extradited. Norway won't hand him over, but he should be very careful about not catching any international flights which stop in US-controlled airports.
Lindows is not a general purpose Linux distribution. It's a cut-down version of Linux where everything runs as root (as not to confuse the poor user) with a (half-working) Windows emulator on top of it. In other words, partial compatibility with Windows with a little of the security and stability of Linux. Sounds dodgy whichever way you cut it.
Most shareholders are financial management portfolios guided solely by profit maximisation, and not interested in making sacrifices to fight against Darth Gates' empire. The profits they could reap from a MS buyout would convince them (especially next to the losses that MS could inflict by cutting off the oxygen supply of a defiant Macromedia). Even if the remainder were sworn Penguinhead Jedi, MS could buy Macromedia if they wanted.
Actually, the Guardian is based in Manchester, not London. It's a bit further north.
A lot of the indie-label vinyl here in Australia is pressed in the Czech Republic (which is quite a long way away, when you think about it).
I suppose quality vinyl has become the sort of specialist market where there is only enough space in the world for a few producers, and it's more economical to press all the vinyl there and ship it across the world than to set up presses elsewhere.
Aside: I heard a while ago that there is only one guy in the world who knows how to repair vinyl-cutting lathes (or make new heads for them, or something of that nature), and he's in his 60s/70s/80s; when he dies, the implication was, that's it.
Don't hold your breath. Adding OGG (a new file format with no provision for DRM) would be waving a red flag to the RIAA, and just tempting them to sue.
It could happen, of course, but would require a company with a lot of backbone and deep pockets, and would depend on not being killed by executives concerned about the liability.
It's like in Jeter's _Noir_; when a "crime" is difficult to prosecute, the only way of deterring it is to increase the penalties proportionately. By this logic, Jeter predicted that copyright violation would become a capital crime, and worse.
"Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams."
US law applied worldwide; haven't you heard?
The Fritz chip could be used to also kill ad blocking software, preserving the "attention rights" of online advertisers.
With it, web pages would be encrypted with a DRM scheme. Only a trusted web browser, running under a trusted OS, verified with the Fritz chip, would be able to decrypt the content. The content metadata (which the browser would be obliged to enforce) could mandate that ads be loaded first, that third-party ad plug-ins are running (i.e., to display ads outside of the browser window), that the browser window is in "always on top" mode, or even that a specified piece of spyware is loaded and verifies that it can "phone home".
Welcome to the Digital Millennium folks.
You do not own the intellectual property inside the CPU's microcode, the machine's BIOS or the OS. You have an implicit license to use it.
Already hardware devices are shipping with shrinkwrap license agreements; some Compaq machines, for example, do, and opening the packaging signifies acceptance even if you don't open any of the CDs that came with it. Depending on UCITA, the courts and the legislative clout of Hollywood, this may be used to enforce a "beneficial" copyright-protecting Microsoft OS monopoly on Intel/AMD hardware.
True, but weaker copyright laws help sell more mp3 players, CD burners, and so on. It's not clear (to me, anyway) which contributes more to the US economy and how changing copyright law will affect the relative balance of sales.
CD burners and MP3 players are typically manufactured in the Far East where labour costs are low; in many cases, the profits go to overseas electronics firms.
Copyrighted materials are typically manufactured in Los Angeles.
Therefore, content companies could exploit the mood of hyper-patriotism to push for laws reinforcing their business models at gunpoint. As for MP3 player manufacturers in Taiwan, it's just tough luck.
And then we'll see a new generation of severely autistic children, the product of all those recessive autism genes combining.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2192611.stm
Unfortunately, when I tried Space.app, it wasn't good enough to be useful. For some reason (limitations of the OSX windowing model perhaps?) it allocates windows by application; i.e., all of an application's windows go in the same workspace. Given that on OSX, only one instance of any application is running at any time, this means, for example, that all your Terminal windows must be on the same desktop. This is not good enough.
Have any US citizens been successfully prosecuted under US laws for smoking marijuana in the Netherlands?
The Australian federal government is currently controlled by the Liberal Party, which is sort of like the Republicans except without the Christian Coalition. I.e., a socially conservative, pro-corporate party. In addition, the Prime Minister loves Bush and would do anything for him, from unconditionally committing Australian troops to any U.S. military campaign to neglecting to raise agricultural trade issues when visiting the U.S. If the U.S. asked him to, he would push hard to indemnify MPAA/RIAA cracking/DoS attempts in Australia, under the guise of "protecting movie industry investment" or "harmonising computer crime laws".
The upper house is dominated by the Liberals, but they don't have a majority; the balance of power is held by the fashionably left-leaning Democrats, who would probably oppose a Bermanesque law here. Though if the Labor opposition (think like Tony Blair's mob in the UK) is persuaded to get behind it, the Democrats are irrelevant.
In 2007, a stealth bomber drops a laser-guided glide bomb on the Sealand platform, destroying it. The White House announces the successful destruction of a major terrorist cell/child pornography syndicate. As usual, FOXNews and CNN don't question the party line, though various lunatic fringe sites soon reveal that evidence of such activities was fabricated.
If you want a secure data haven, build it underground. Deep underground, out of reach of bunker-busting nukes. Or distribute it in orbit, as a network of millions of tiny, highly redundant satellites, so that killing them all without damaging "legitimate" satellites would be next to impossible. Or a global mesh network of nanobots, running a FreeNet-style protocol of some sort.
are proprietary. Saved important data on a hard disk 20 years ago? Hope you have an ST502 controller lying around.
Then again, how sure are you that the CD-Rs/DVD-Rs you burn today will be readable in 20 years' time? Don't CD-Rs deteriorate and become unreadable within a number of years? And will DVD-Rs be any better?
Back when I went to school (Melbourne High, FWIW), we had to take a sport activity. One activity briefly offered was Phasor Strike, i.e., laser-tag. Students would run around in a darkened room with backpacks shooting infrared beams at each other.
This was canned after a year or so after protests from parents. (The fact that a former student of the school made news by going postal and massacring some 7 people may have had something to do with it; OTOH, the mass murderer attended the school before Phasor Strike, and was a product of the culture of militarism in its cadet corps, which nothing was done about. *shrug*)
As for me? I took golf as a school sport. It was a decent excuse to have a leisurely stroll, rather than wrestling in mud with 10 other blokes or something equally unpleasant. Even at the cost of lugging a set of cheap, decrepit-looking golf clubs back and forth on the peak-hour train.
Player manufacturers can put in MP3 playback because the format is "grandfathered"; i.e., it was already in wide use before the RIAA took note of it. If they were to add support for OGG, they would be giving support to a new format which specifically precludes DRM, and would open themselves up to lawsuits. And believe me, the lawsuits would come thick and fast; the RIAA has a virtually bottomless budget to "put out fires" such as this, and would sue aggressively.
Liquid Audio cannot provide a Linux player, as an open-source kernel does not allow them to guarantee a secure audio path to the D-A converter, an important part of their agreement with the recording companies.
The downloads are in a proprietary format named LiquidAudio. It requires special LiquidAudio software to play it (i.e., probably won't work with your software/MP3 player). The software is not available for Linux, and will never be (as an open-source kernel cannot guarantee a secure audio path to the D-A converter). As such, while the format is freer than the rent-a-song service offered earlier, it is still too restricted. Sorry, not interested.
Judaism hasn't elected a Pope, but it has recently merged with Hinduism, creating 900 million Hinjews. Or so the news reports say.