Thanks for that. Now if I ever go to Google and they've added an "I'm feeling exceptionally unlucky!" button, I'm selling my modem and becoming a forest ranger.
...Probably something like, "Sending this song failed for an unspecified reason. (Error 0x8000001237)"
I don't care two shits for Microsoft, but a semi-"solution" to this BS for their publicity would be to use the error message as an opportunity to out the responsible parties.
"Sorry, UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP has set the No-Squirt Bit for this song. Transfer aborted!"
(There's an obvious joke to be made somewhere about Zunes giving you Squirts, but let's not go there...)
People will call them...well, whatever it is they call them, and the terms all mean more or less the same thing. When I post in my Wordpress blog, I select some categories for the post. When it x-posts them into livejournal, they are marked by these labels. But when my friends read the RSS feed, they sort by the tags so they don't have to read 10 pages of me geeking out about electronics...
If you have a bad experience in Australia and decide to purge the entire "Australia" labeltag, what happens to Jack Wilton? Does the file get deleted (because it't taglabelled Australia), or remain intact (because it has more taglabels besides Australia)? If the former, does anything else labeltagged "Jack Wilton" get deleted? If the latter, does the ("Jack Wilton", "Australia") picture filed under Jack Wilton become a broken link?
Good points. Beyond that, since there was no digital home recording to speak of in '80s, could "analog" not be argued as just the '80s term for lossy? When you get down to it, a typical mp3 encoding (128kbps) is throwing away 9/10 of the information. "Digital" reproduction has long ago ceased to mean "perfect" (just listen to the ~16Kb/s XM traffic channel for instance, even when you're not under a tunnel).
It kind of reminds me of the audiophiles who balk at line-in recordings from a CD due to "losing the high frequencies in the analog copper" or "clock jitter in the cd player", then proceed to encode their (full-digital-read-off-the-CD-with-a-very-big-magn ifying-glass) audio into mp3. You're not getting a perfect reproduction of the source; far from it.
On the other hand, these *real* men and women had lofty goals of exploring strange new worlds and furthering the human base of scientific knowledge. They might be less than receptive to the idea of risking their asses to run up and hit the reset switch on a bricked piece of spy equipment.:-)
I wouldn't say he's entirely averse to multicore developement on machines with crazy memory architectures. Didn't the blurb just mention releasing a game for the Nintendo DS?
Nah, based on my limited experience with Mythbusters, they'll quietly run the test, take 45 minutes to explain (and re-explain, with dupe footage) what can be satisfactorily explained in 30 seconds, then use the evaporated trap as an excuse to gratuitously drop a match down and see how big an explosion they can get from the sewer gas.
Seriously, the last Mythbusters I watched (a pilot falling from an airplane survives by falling into the shockwave of an exploding terrorist bomb in a train station) featured 45 minutes of repetitive prep, and ended with... "and on the last day, we botched the experiment. But here's footage of a big explosion!"
In all honesty, it's a hard thing to nail down. If I work in a donut factory, there is SOMEONE, even if that person isn't me, who knows how much that donut costs to make, including materials, equipment, labor, shipping, and pesticides. When it comes to things like music, art, etc., how DO you quantify the cost of the artists' talents, the labels' marketing efforts, the RIAA's... something... etc.
Well, that makes it easy - it's in the artist's contract. The cost of the artist's talents is what the artist agreed to sell them for. No different from making a hamburger; the only important numbers are the buying price (agreed compensation minus cumulative expenses) and the selling price, even if some animal-rights whacko argues that the cow was worth far more than $3/lb, if only someone had trained it as a movie extra instead of taking it to the meat factory...
The content has to be degraded UNLESS the rendering device (e.g. your HD projector) correctly answers an HDCP cryptographic challenge and agrees to play by the system/content's rules.
One of the onerous 'features' I'm surprised the author just barely touches on is the Revocation List. Say you buy yourself that top-shelf Samshiba (fictional electronics company) HD plasma screen. Later, a disgruntled employee leaks Samshiba's master keys, or a weakness is found in their chipset's HDCP implementation. Samshiba is now added to the certificate revocation list. Any disc manufactured includes the most recent CRL, so playing any disc released after that date will permanently brick your display according to the standard (or at least cripple it to low-def, even if you then pop in an older movie that "used to work fine before"). Since the additions to the CRL have now permanently propagated to your player (also according to the standard), it will also brick any other Samshiba display you attach to it (no matter if you're playing an old movie).
This has been said a zillion times before, but the article is referring to what's more commonly known as a "rogue anti-spyware" company, who puts out a 3rd-rate "spyware removal" program simply because there's money in it (some consist of nothing more than a grep for certain "bad" filenames!), then tricks old grannies with fake Windows error popups saying they're infected, but for $49.99 this nice product can make it all better.
These are the same companies responsible for those "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!!" ("Your house is broadcasting a street address!!", yadayada) ads your grandparents keep falling for. I say this is a good start, but the state should sic a few more of them.
Whoa - I just had this crazy idea. My household is paying about $50 a month for basic cable TV, and this is just for the cables / infrastructure to *deliver* the content. What if, and this is a crazy idea, there were some way to do away with all that and broadcast television content wirelessly? Sure, it would cost more initially for RF transmitters and so on, but the delivery company could save all that cost on maintaining the cables. After 10 years or so, the delivery cost for the wireless channels could well be competitive with that of the wired infrastructure. I'd move to wireless in a heartbeat if I only had to pay $30 a month for it, even if I had to stick unsightly dipole antennae on my rooftop for the privilege.
(All kidding aside, the original promise of CTV *was* that it would subsidize commercial-free content. Parallels to ISPs are a non-sequitur.)
CompactFlash in-dash mp3 player - yeah, you can get off-the-shelf CF players cheap these days, but mine's 100% homebrew, made mostly from spare parts left over from a handheld data logger project.
Temperature & Humidity-controlling terrarium - for growing highland Nepenthes, certain orchids, other plants with very specific requirements. Since the writeup, it's gone to microcontroller Peltier heating/cooling and an ultrasonic mist generator instead of aquarium pump for humidity.
PS2 Rez Trance Vibrator - as popularized by the well-known GameGirlAdvance article. They're no longer in production, so I reverse-engineered someone's reverse-engineering and (forward-engineered?) made my own.
The TrashAmp - subwoofer and amplifier built entirely out of things found curbside on trash night.
In college, I made a VCR internet-ready. Some friends and I had started sort of an underground newspaper, and as it gained popularity there was talk of running our own pirate TV programming over the dorm cable network. One of the group had access to the hub room where the coax feed to the dorms was generated (mainly from satellite tuners) and assigned to channels. Our programming was to take over the useless "information channel" (scrolling text marquees for events that had already come and gone, etc.) after midnight with prerecorded student-created shows and B movies. I had a shitload of classes that semester though and couldn't stay up past midnight every night to start playback, so I wired together some transistor drivers from the VCR buttons to the parallel port of an old 486, so that it could be remotely controlled via ethernet by a script.
It's so that when you're off in the next room making a sandwich while waiting for that endless post-BSOD reboot, it notifies you when your computer's (almost...) ready to use again.
I figured the/. crowd would get a kick out of my jack-o-lantern this year. The realistic lighting is powered by a bundle of six RGB LEDs, each individually controlled by its own tiny PIC10F200 microcontroller - so technically my pumpkin is pulling 6 MIPS right now:-P (The 'flickering' pseudorandom table is generated with the blue channel all 0s, and the green limited to about 3/4 the intensity of the current red value so that it can only produce a flame yellow and not a sickly green...)
I'm surprised not to see any detection method that looks at data stuffed into the Vertical Blank Interval, the 25 lines or so "above" the top of the screen (on CRTs, this gave time for the beam to sweep back from the bottom-right to the top-left of the screen). This includes closed-caption data (line 21), V-chip flags, and often a time reference that set-top boxes can use to set their clocks.
I haven't really watched TV in a couple years, but when I did, often the show would be captioned but the commercials wouldn't, or the show would use the TEXT1 field... Many advertisers are generally wusses who can't deal with controversy, so I'd imagine a lot of commercials would be rated all-audiences even if played on a 'mature' show (assuming they bother including v-chip data at all). (Actually, a previous poster suggested a method to apply something similar to Bayesian spam filtering using commercials' caption text.)
Even without a Bayesian commercial database, it seems like comparing the use/nonuse of fields here could be used as another method to help differentiate between video segments from different sources.
So, wait. Webmasters are ignoring XHTML, so they're going to roll out yet another dialect of HTML that forgoes the advantages of XHTML, but slowly becomes XHTML-like, and expect everyone to suddenly flock to it?
Sure, as a webmaster, I can follow XHTML rules for any new page or script I write - for someone who already writes correct HTML, the nuances are not substantial. Tell a webmaster about the existence of the </p> tag and you're a third of the way there. But do they really expect I'm going to go back and rewrite all those pages I wrote back in '99? Where does the W3C get off remotely invalidating something that was correct when people wrote it, and expecting them to "fix" it? As long as browsers will correctly render old HTML, old HTML will persist.
Slashdot Mirror
They have the new security team escort the current security team out of the building for NOT ACTING like a TEAM.
Can he call up a friend and ask them to Google something, and read back the results?
Thanks for that. Now if I ever go to Google and they've added an "I'm feeling exceptionally unlucky!" button, I'm selling my modem and becoming a forest ranger.
...Probably something like, "Sending this song failed for an unspecified reason. (Error 0x8000001237)"
I don't care two shits for Microsoft, but a semi-"solution" to this BS for their publicity would be to use the error message as an opportunity to out the responsible parties.
"Sorry, UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP has set the No-Squirt Bit for this song. Transfer aborted!"
(There's an obvious joke to be made somewhere about Zunes giving you Squirts, but let's not go there...)
People will call them...well, whatever it is they call them, and the terms all mean more or less the same thing. When I post in my Wordpress blog, I select some categories for the post. When it x-posts them into livejournal, they are marked by these labels. But when my friends read the RSS feed, they sort by the tags so they don't have to read 10 pages of me geeking out about electronics...
If you have a bad experience in Australia and decide to purge the entire "Australia" labeltag, what happens to Jack Wilton? Does the file get deleted (because it't taglabelled Australia), or remain intact (because it has more taglabels besides Australia)? If the former, does anything else labeltagged "Jack Wilton" get deleted? If the latter, does the ("Jack Wilton", "Australia") picture filed under Jack Wilton become a broken link?
Good points. Beyond that, since there was no digital home recording to speak of in '80s, could "analog" not be argued as just the '80s term for lossy? When you get down to it, a typical mp3 encoding (128kbps) is throwing away 9/10 of the information. "Digital" reproduction has long ago ceased to mean "perfect" (just listen to the ~16Kb/s XM traffic channel for instance, even when you're not under a tunnel).
n ifying-glass) audio into mp3. You're not getting a perfect reproduction of the source; far from it.
It kind of reminds me of the audiophiles who balk at line-in recordings from a CD due to "losing the high frequencies in the analog copper" or "clock jitter in the cd player", then proceed to encode their (full-digital-read-off-the-CD-with-a-very-big-mag
On the other hand, these *real* men and women had lofty goals of exploring strange new worlds and furthering the human base of scientific knowledge. They might be less than receptive to the idea of risking their asses to run up and hit the reset switch on a bricked piece of spy equipment. :-)
I wouldn't say he's entirely averse to multicore developement on machines with crazy memory architectures. Didn't the blurb just mention releasing a game for the Nintendo DS?
Nah, based on my limited experience with Mythbusters, they'll quietly run the test, take 45 minutes to explain (and re-explain, with dupe footage) what can be satisfactorily explained in 30 seconds, then use the evaporated trap as an excuse to gratuitously drop a match down and see how big an explosion they can get from the sewer gas.
Seriously, the last Mythbusters I watched (a pilot falling from an airplane survives by falling into the shockwave of an exploding terrorist bomb in a train station) featured 45 minutes of repetitive prep, and ended with... "and on the last day, we botched the experiment. But here's footage of a big explosion!"
Can we request that story submittors (and failing that, Editors) properly dereference all TLAs, FLAs, and other nLAs?
In all honesty, it's a hard thing to nail down. If I work in a donut factory, there is SOMEONE, even if that person isn't me, who knows how much that donut costs to make, including materials, equipment, labor, shipping, and pesticides. When it comes to things like music, art, etc., how DO you quantify the cost of the artists' talents, the labels' marketing efforts, the RIAA's... something... etc.
Well, that makes it easy - it's in the artist's contract. The cost of the artist's talents is what the artist agreed to sell them for. No different from making a hamburger; the only important numbers are the buying price (agreed compensation minus cumulative expenses) and the selling price, even if some animal-rights whacko argues that the cow was worth far more than $3/lb, if only someone had trained it as a movie extra instead of taking it to the meat factory...
There will need to be a 'wii keyboard' or remote attachment.
A Wiiboard?
*ducks*
The content has to be degraded UNLESS the rendering device (e.g. your HD projector) correctly answers an HDCP cryptographic challenge and agrees to play by the system/content's rules.
a l_Content_Protection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Bandwidth_Digit
One of the onerous 'features' I'm surprised the author just barely touches on is the Revocation List. Say you buy yourself that top-shelf Samshiba (fictional electronics company) HD plasma screen. Later, a disgruntled employee leaks Samshiba's master keys, or a weakness is found in their chipset's HDCP implementation. Samshiba is now added to the certificate revocation list. Any disc manufactured includes the most recent CRL, so playing any disc released after that date will permanently brick your display according to the standard (or at least cripple it to low-def, even if you then pop in an older movie that "used to work fine before"). Since the additions to the CRL have now permanently propagated to your player (also according to the standard), it will also brick any other Samshiba display you attach to it (no matter if you're playing an old movie).
Cool. Does that mean that if I set up a SHITLOAD of photon detectors in front of a really bright light, I can live longer?
Universe now moving at 0.997 ticks/tick...
This has been said a zillion times before, but the article is referring to what's more commonly known as a "rogue anti-spyware" company, who puts out a 3rd-rate "spyware removal" program simply because there's money in it (some consist of nothing more than a grep for certain "bad" filenames!), then tricks old grannies with fake Windows error popups saying they're infected, but for $49.99 this nice product can make it all better.
These are the same companies responsible for those "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!!" ("Your house is broadcasting a street address!!", yadayada) ads your grandparents keep falling for. I say this is a good start, but the state should sic a few more of them.
Whoa - I just had this crazy idea. My household is paying about $50 a month for basic cable TV, and this is just for the cables / infrastructure to *deliver* the content. What if, and this is a crazy idea, there were some way to do away with all that and broadcast television content wirelessly? Sure, it would cost more initially for RF transmitters and so on, but the delivery company could save all that cost on maintaining the cables. After 10 years or so, the delivery cost for the wireless channels could well be competitive with that of the wired infrastructure. I'd move to wireless in a heartbeat if I only had to pay $30 a month for it, even if I had to stick unsightly dipole antennae on my rooftop for the privilege.
(All kidding aside, the original promise of CTV *was* that it would subsidize commercial-free content. Parallels to ISPs are a non-sequitur.)
I've gotten up to a few fun projects this year.
CompactFlash in-dash mp3 player - yeah, you can get off-the-shelf CF players cheap these days, but mine's 100% homebrew, made mostly from spare parts left over from a handheld data logger project.
Temperature & Humidity-controlling terrarium - for growing highland Nepenthes, certain orchids, other plants with very specific requirements. Since the writeup, it's gone to microcontroller Peltier heating/cooling and an ultrasonic mist generator instead of aquarium pump for humidity.
PS2 Rez Trance Vibrator - as popularized by the well-known GameGirlAdvance article. They're no longer in production, so I reverse-engineered someone's reverse-engineering and (forward-engineered?) made my own.
The TrashAmp - subwoofer and amplifier built entirely out of things found curbside on trash night.
In college, I made a VCR internet-ready. Some friends and I had started sort of an underground newspaper, and as it gained popularity there was talk of running our own pirate TV programming over the dorm cable network. One of the group had access to the hub room where the coax feed to the dorms was generated (mainly from satellite tuners) and assigned to channels. Our programming was to take over the useless "information channel" (scrolling text marquees for events that had already come and gone, etc.) after midnight with prerecorded student-created shows and B movies. I had a shitload of classes that semester though and couldn't stay up past midnight every night to start playback, so I wired together some transistor drivers from the VCR buttons to the parallel port of an old 486, so that it could be remotely controlled via ethernet by a script.
It's so that when you're off in the next room making a sandwich while waiting for that endless post-BSOD reboot, it notifies you when your computer's (almost...) ready to use again.
What does a metal fork matter? The heatsink is made of a solid piece of... metal...
I figured the /. crowd would get a kick out of my jack-o-lantern this year. The realistic lighting is powered by a bundle of six RGB LEDs, each individually controlled by its own tiny PIC10F200 microcontroller - so technically my pumpkin is pulling 6 MIPS right now :-P (The 'flickering' pseudorandom table is generated with the blue channel all 0s, and the green limited to about 3/4 the intensity of the current red value so that it can only produce a flame yellow and not a sickly green...)
I'm surprised not to see any detection method that looks at data stuffed into the Vertical Blank Interval, the 25 lines or so "above" the top of the screen (on CRTs, this gave time for the beam to sweep back from the bottom-right to the top-left of the screen). This includes closed-caption data (line 21), V-chip flags, and often a time reference that set-top boxes can use to set their clocks.
I haven't really watched TV in a couple years, but when I did, often the show would be captioned but the commercials wouldn't, or the show would use the TEXT1 field... Many advertisers are generally wusses who can't deal with controversy, so I'd imagine a lot of commercials would be rated all-audiences even if played on a 'mature' show (assuming they bother including v-chip data at all). (Actually, a previous poster suggested a method to apply something similar to Bayesian spam filtering using commercials' caption text.)
Even without a Bayesian commercial database, it seems like comparing the use/nonuse of fields here could be used as another method to help differentiate between video segments from different sources.
Can't get pregnant if you can't get laid...
Not 10, 20?! Truly ahead of their time.
So, wait. Webmasters are ignoring XHTML, so they're going to roll out yet another dialect of HTML that forgoes the advantages of XHTML, but slowly becomes XHTML-like, and expect everyone to suddenly flock to it?
Sure, as a webmaster, I can follow XHTML rules for any new page or script I write - for someone who already writes correct HTML, the nuances are not substantial. Tell a webmaster about the existence of the </p> tag and you're a third of the way there. But do they really expect I'm going to go back and rewrite all those pages I wrote back in '99? Where does the W3C get off remotely invalidating something that was correct when people wrote it, and expecting them to "fix" it? As long as browsers will correctly render old HTML, old HTML will persist.