Has anyone else noticed that CDDB [.com] does the same thing? Any program that gets CD information from CDDB, which includes Music Match Jukebox and older betas of Exact Audio Copy [a great program would require an e-mail address before you could automatically download title and track information for CDs that you would insert? Someone should be checking out their privacy statments, because that would let them garner the same information.
Data Aggregation. Gracenote CDDB collects aggregate statistics on which music and artists are most commonly identified by users with the Gracenote CDDB Service. ("Aggregate statistics" means "group statistics" such as the Gracenote Digital Top Ten, not individual statistics about your personal use of the service.) Besides posting these statistics for you and other fans to enjoy, Gracenote CDDB may publish or share this aggregate information with other companies. This aggregate data, by its nature, will not reveal the identity of our users. We also use aggregate data to help us improve our servers and other components of the Gracenote CDDB Service.
It doesn't now, but if an investor comes along with a big suitcase of cash, I wonder if their privacy policy would change overnight?
When I get spam, I report it on spamcop. It is a free service [with pay options, please pay and keep it going!] that will analyze your e-mail and headers looking for legitimate source IPs, open relays and websites mentioned in the spam and then look up the e-mail addresses to send anonymous reports on your behalf. You can also sign up for spam-free e-mail and buy a paid subscription to spamcop reporting. I can't say whether it has worked or not, but I feel better knowing open relays are being noted and that sysadmins are being notified! Link.
Here's something from a little project I have worked on myself recently. My project was to create images that seem to be made from random colors but in fact make an image because the value (I) is the same.
It is done by converting the pixels, with a simple RGB->Greyscale formula I found on the net. I do this by converting the pixels from 3 bytes R,G,B to one byte using a simple proportion of the three bytes, yielding I. The formula is
i=floor(.3*r+.59*g+.11*b)
Then I pick random R,G,B values until those values, when converted have the same I of the source pixels. This makes for some interesting looking images.
What you could do to see if two colors are going to be very visible ontop of eachother is convert those two colors to the I value and see how far apart they are. This should work, just play around with how far apart they should be and you'll be fine.
You can remove the mshtml.dll if you buy the full version.
They are also releasing a free version that removes the core components, because this version was in response to those who said that removing the rendering engine was going too far, however people complained so the next version will remove everything [like it originally did].
It is possible to remove Internet Explorer completely from most windows operating systems. Take a look at IEradicator. I have used 98lite with very good success in installing a stripped down version of windows 98 on my mother's old computer.
Here is a quote from their website about IEradicator: "IEradicator is tiny, script that uses the Windows setup engine to surgically remove Internet Explorer versions 3 through 6.0 from Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000(sr1)." You can download it from the company's website for free. It used to remove the entire HTML rendering engine but their current version leaves this in. If you want, you can buy the full version which will remove that too, effectively completely removing internet explorer from windows.
I live with two roommates who attended waldorf from grade K-8 and know a couple of people who went all the way from K-12. They are some of the most creative, artistic minded people that I have ever met. They don't have any weird spiritual beliefs and they aren't racist either. Maybe the man who created waldorf schools had some of these views, but that was just a reflection of the times that he lived in. Carl Jung also was a racist, but anyone who is a Jungian Psychoanalyist shouldn't be discredited because they might be racist too. The Waldorf school, while it does have some 'weird' color based painting exercises, is far from a horrible occult brainwashing education that is raising a secret army of fourth reichers. They have created a system in which kids learn to embrace more than just the 3 R's and they come out with a more rounded character that isn't just worried about what kind of job they'll get. My public high school experience was always tainted with the Job Skills/Getting into college aspect and we never engaged in any true learning or creativity. Some kids had a bad run of it at waldorf schools, so did a lot of kids in my high school, but that doesn't mean we're going to be scrapping the system any time soon.
If you create an image and you don't want other people linking to it without context, then you need to learn about HTTP. If you are too stupid, then you should pay someone to do it for you. The simple solution is a script or web server hack that checks the HTTP headers for a referrer and denies all requests for images without a referrer pointing somewhere on your site.
Here, from the HTTP 1.1 RFC, the section on referrers. Any browser worth it's spit should provide the correct Referrer header.
14.36 Referer
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify,
for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from
which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the
header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a
server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest,
logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped
links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be
sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have
its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.
Referer: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/Overview.h tml
If the field value is a relative URI, it SHOULD be interpreted
relative to the Request-URI. The URI MUST NOT include a fragment. See
section 15.1.3 for security considerations.
As a technology inclined DVD renter, ripping everything I buy with the excellent all-in-one program package, GKnot, I have run into one big problem. Alot of the DVDs I rent from my local independant video rental store (When you rent a video from Blockbuster and it says "This film has been edited to fit your screen", it should also read "This film has been edited to fit our mormon ideologies".)are scratched beyond belief! My pathetic PC DVD-ROM and PS2 DVD player have to skip entire chapters to get past some of the bigger scratches. This plays hell with ripping DVDs, because I have yet to find an EAC for DVDs. I think this new technology will not only save me a buck or two but also allow me those pristine, skip-free rips of all of my favorite movies!
Having a video card with TV-out and a couple of cords from radio shack later, I can play any of the movies I have ripped in full screen glory! The only thing we really need to take DVD pirating to the average consumer is DivX;-) codec endowed DVD players. Then I can burn all of my DivX for anyone and not have to worry about the troublesome conversion from DivX->VCD or SVCD which always seems to run into problems.
I will vehemently support any method of getting me pristine copies of first-run DVDs for less!
Well, if you think about it, open source might pay better. If the government office you're working for is saving money on XP licenses and MS SQL licenses, etc and instead decides to go with Linux and PostgreSQL or something of that akin, then they would have more money in their budget.
Of course, they wouldn't just hand the money over to the employees in the form of inflated paycheck, but I bet they could spend that surplus on other things which would make their job/life alot easier!
If intel conveniently places their cellular network chip on every board they produce, I wonder how conveniently they can partner/setup their own service provider across the USA and make it very convenient for people to use their service and very inconvenient to try and use a third party service?
Also, is this going to be one of those cell phone technologies that we never see in USA and only europe?
The important thing to note is that Rogers Cable is paying per byte. So in order to cover the "warez kiddies" or people who like to have their own usenet feed on their terrabyte array, they would have to charge up to 200KByte/s * 60s * 60 min * 24 hours * 30 days a month, which is a _little_ bit higher than you're paying now. Check out some CO-OP ISPs and see how much their users pay for 128/128... in the upwards of $1500 US a month!
The Cable Company, to better serve the average user who only downloads a gig or less, they can charge him the normal rate and then charge the _real_ reason they are losing money more because they are downloading upwards of 10 gigs a month.
Telocity DSL had this 1Gig/month cap on my 1024kbit ADSL but never implemented it, wonder why they lost alot of money and got bought out? [I hope it wasn't just due to my pureiso ftp!]
This is a main hurdle towards widespread use of Ogg Vorbis, support on a wide variety of non-computer platforms. There are CD-MP3 players made by most all manufacturers [read: DVD players that also play MP3 CDs] and portable CD-MP3/Nomad players also don't support Ogg. When it is supported by major manufacturers on hardware devices, Ogg will have a much more legitimate stand in the future of music.
That, and when major MP3 releasing groups [pirate groups] start offering their rips in Ogg format, the kids will begin using it and demanding it in their portable players.
Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller.
Is that an invalid comparison or what? Why not compare a VBR mp3 to a VBR Ogg.
MP3 is the winner because it came first. There are no CD Ogg players, no DVD players that play CDs of Ogg files, no portable Ogg players to speak of, no hardware Ogg! Unfortunately, until some compression codec comes out with a notciably [to the general public] better quality/bitrate then maybe you will see some changes.
I highly doubt you can tell the difference in audio quality on your jukebox, what with the inferior hardware and all.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, their privacy policies state otherwise:
It doesn't now, but if an investor comes along with a big suitcase of cash, I wonder if their privacy policy would change overnight?
adam
When I get spam, I report it on spamcop. It is a free service [with pay options, please pay and keep it going!] that will analyze your e-mail and headers looking for legitimate source IPs, open relays and websites mentioned in the spam and then look up the e-mail addresses to send anonymous reports on your behalf. You can also sign up for spam-free e-mail and buy a paid subscription to spamcop reporting. I can't say whether it has worked or not, but I feel better knowing open relays are being noted and that sysadmins are being notified! Link.
adam.
It is done by converting the pixels, with a simple RGB->Greyscale formula I found on the net. I do this by converting the pixels from 3 bytes R,G,B to one byte using a simple proportion of the three bytes, yielding I. The formula is Then I pick random R,G,B values until those values, when converted have the same I of the source pixels. This makes for some interesting looking images.
What you could do to see if two colors are going to be very visible ontop of eachother is convert those two colors to the I value and see how far apart they are. This should work, just play around with how far apart they should be and you'll be fine.
Good luck,
Adam
You can remove the mshtml.dll if you buy the full version.
They are also releasing a free version that removes the core components, because this version was in response to those who said that removing the rendering engine was going too far, however people complained so the next version will remove everything [like it originally did].
adam
It is possible to remove Internet Explorer completely from most windows operating systems. Take a look at IEradicator. I have used 98lite with very good success in installing a stripped down version of windows 98 on my mother's old computer.
Here is a quote from their website about IEradicator: "IEradicator is tiny, script that uses the Windows setup engine to surgically remove Internet Explorer versions 3 through 6.0 from Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000(sr1)."
You can download it from the company's website for free. It used to remove the entire HTML rendering engine but their current version leaves this in. If you want, you can buy the full version which will remove that too, effectively completely removing internet explorer from windows.
Adam
I live with two roommates who attended waldorf from grade K-8 and know a couple of people who went all the way from K-12. They are some of the most creative, artistic minded people that I have ever met. They don't have any weird spiritual beliefs and they aren't racist either. Maybe the man who created waldorf schools had some of these views, but that was just a reflection of the times that he lived in. Carl Jung also was a racist, but anyone who is a Jungian Psychoanalyist shouldn't be discredited because they might be racist too. The Waldorf school, while it does have some 'weird' color based painting exercises, is far from a horrible occult brainwashing education that is raising a secret army of fourth reichers. They have created a system in which kids learn to embrace more than just the 3 R's and they come out with a more rounded character that isn't just worried about what kind of job they'll get. My public high school experience was always tainted with the Job Skills/Getting into college aspect and we never engaged in any true learning or creativity. Some kids had a bad run of it at waldorf schools, so did a lot of kids in my high school, but that doesn't mean we're going to be scrapping the system any time soon.
adam
I don't think any major browser [read opera, ie, netscape, mozilla] will be programmed to automatically fake referrers. why would they?!
adam
If you create an image and you don't want other people linking to it without context, then you need to learn about HTTP. If you are too stupid, then you should pay someone to do it for you. The simple solution is a script or web server hack that checks the HTTP headers for a referrer and denies all requests for images without a referrer pointing somewhere on your site.
h tml
Here, from the HTTP 1.1 RFC, the section on referrers. Any browser worth it's spit should provide the correct Referrer header.
14.36 Referer
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify,
for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from
which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the
header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a
server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest,
logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped
links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be
sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have
its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.
Referer = "Referer" ":" ( absoluteURI | relativeURI )
Example:
Referer: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/Overview.
If the field value is a relative URI, it SHOULD be interpreted
relative to the Request-URI. The URI MUST NOT include a fragment. See
section 15.1.3 for security considerations.
As a technology inclined DVD renter, ripping everything I buy with the excellent all-in-one program package, GKnot, I have run into one big problem. Alot of the DVDs I rent from my local independant video rental store (When you rent a video from Blockbuster and it says "This film has been edited to fit your screen", it should also read "This film has been edited to fit our mormon ideologies".)are scratched beyond belief! My pathetic PC DVD-ROM and PS2 DVD player have to skip entire chapters to get past some of the bigger scratches. This plays hell with ripping DVDs, because I have yet to find an EAC for DVDs. I think this new technology will not only save me a buck or two but also allow me those pristine, skip-free rips of all of my favorite movies! ;-) codec endowed DVD players. Then I can burn all of my DivX for anyone and not have to worry about the troublesome conversion from DivX->VCD or SVCD which always seems to run into problems.
Having a video card with TV-out and a couple of cords from radio shack later, I can play any of the movies I have ripped in full screen glory! The only thing we really need to take DVD pirating to the average consumer is DivX
I will vehemently support any method of getting me pristine copies of first-run DVDs for less!
Adam
Well, if you think about it, open source might pay better. If the government office you're working for is saving money on XP licenses and MS SQL licenses, etc and instead decides to go with Linux and PostgreSQL or something of that akin, then they would have more money in their budget.
Of course, they wouldn't just hand the money over to the employees in the form of inflated paycheck, but I bet they could spend that surplus on other things which would make their job/life alot easier!
Here is a link to an introduction to Moscow SML implementation, which has alot of good beginner info. And here is a link to SML .NET info, which is what you'll need to use to code SML apps for windows.
If intel conveniently places their cellular network chip on every board they produce, I wonder how conveniently they can partner/setup their own service provider across the USA and make it very convenient for people to use their service and very inconvenient to try and use a third party service?
Also, is this going to be one of those cell phone technologies that we never see in USA and only europe?
adam
The important thing to note is that Rogers Cable is paying per byte. So in order to cover the "warez kiddies" or people who like to have their own usenet feed on their terrabyte array, they would have to charge up to 200KByte/s * 60s * 60 min * 24 hours * 30 days a month, which is a _little_ bit higher than you're paying now. Check out some CO-OP ISPs and see how much their users pay for 128/128... in the upwards of $1500 US a month!
The Cable Company, to better serve the average user who only downloads a gig or less, they can charge him the normal rate and then charge the _real_ reason they are losing money more because they are downloading upwards of 10 gigs a month.
Telocity DSL had this 1Gig/month cap on my 1024kbit ADSL but never implemented it, wonder why they lost alot of money and got bought out? [I hope it wasn't just due to my pureiso ftp!]
Adam
This is a main hurdle towards widespread use of Ogg Vorbis, support on a wide variety of non-computer platforms. There are CD-MP3 players made by most all manufacturers [read: DVD players that also play MP3 CDs] and portable CD-MP3/Nomad players also don't support Ogg. When it is supported by major manufacturers on hardware devices, Ogg will have a much more legitimate stand in the future of music.
That, and when major MP3 releasing groups [pirate groups] start offering their rips in Ogg format, the kids will begin using it and demanding it in their portable players.
--adam
I metamod as I see fit!
Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller.
Is that an invalid comparison or what? Why not compare a VBR mp3 to a VBR Ogg.
MP3 is the winner because it came first. There are no CD Ogg players, no DVD players that play CDs of Ogg files, no portable Ogg players to speak of, no hardware Ogg! Unfortunately, until some compression codec comes out with a notciably [to the general public] better quality/bitrate then maybe you will see some changes.
I highly doubt you can tell the difference in audio quality on your jukebox, what with the inferior hardware and all.