I own three MD units (home, car, portable). I bought them years ago because I was utterly disgusted with the compact cassette and had sworn to myself to eliminate all tape-based media from my household.
Bad timing, as it turned out. I will not buy a MD unit again and am looking to get rid of my existing equipment and replace them with some kind of harddisk-based digital player. The concept of removable 74/80 min. discs looks terribly outdated today - compare it with the convenience of an iPod or similar device. No more juggling with discs in the car (and no, a MD-changer is _not_ a good solution), no more hassles with titling, no more SCMS or similar crapola issues, fast transfers from the PC which serves as my ripping station, thousands or hours of music at my fingertips, organized the way I want it.
I realize some of my gripes with MD (only single-speed transfers to MD) could be solved by buying newer gear (NetMD), but there are additional restrictions coming with it, and I'm not willing to spend even more money to get rid of some the screw-ups the designers made in my second-generation gear.
MD is not bad, but today I can have better. Oh, and the MD format is controlled by Sony - thanks, but no thanks.
"Have I mentioned it's going to run on Macintosh, Linux, and Windows and will not require a server? This is an ambitious goal, but we are convinced is possible to achieve using a cross-platform tool kit. (We are working with wxWindows/wxPython)."
> Apparently this Biddle guy doesn't know very much.
Well, he's the freakin' Product Unit Manager for Palladium according to this, so I'd expect that he'd be at least familiar with the basic feature set of the product he's responsible for, don't you agree? (btw, according to Steven Levy's article in Newsweek, Biddle used to run a paintball arena before he got to Microsoft...)
Note the doublespeak in the latter article: "This isn't just about solving problems, but expanding new realms of possibilities in the way people live and work with computers", says product manager Mario Juarez. - Excuse me? Expanding new realms of possibilities by limiting the freedom to do what I want with my computer? Yeah, right.
The famous German computer magazine, c't, actually featured a hardware accelerated null device, the "Hypertronics 82C997 ENUL" in their 4/95 issue (as an April fool's joke, of course).
The article is not available online unfortunately, but some of the amused reactions of their readers are here (in German), and you can even find a picture of the gizmo (note the photoshopped activity LED).
>Not a contradiction at all. Palladium AND software licensing products - as in, two different things, as in, one is not the other.
Then you can surely explain to me why one of the job ads referenced in the article says, quote, "Experience in anti-piracy, licensing, DRM, related technologies is extremely valuable and will be weighted accordingly."
Do you seriously believe licensing will not build on the Palladium key infrastructure?
"Biddle insisted that the impetus behind Palladium was solely to secure digital entertainment content and that he knew of no way that it could be used for the enforcement of software licensing."
Now, according to El Reg, Microsoft recently published a job ad for a position within the Palladium group which contained the following sentence:
"Our technology allows content providers, enterprises and consumers to control what others can do with their digital information, such as documents, music, video, ebooks, and software. Become a key leader, providing vision and industry leadership in developing DRM, Palladium and Software Licensing products and Trust Infrastructure Services."
WARNING: The site mentioned above contains copious amounts of PHB babble ("provide advanced skill sets based on our core focuses") as well as ActiveX controls. Clicking on the links above may damage your sanity, your system stability, or both.
Somewhere in the cosmos, [Veet Voojagig] said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to Biro life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended Biros made their way, slipping quietly through wormholes in Space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely Biroid lifestyle, responding to highly Biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the Biro equivalent of the good life.
> let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print
Ansel Adams and E. & C. Weston were masters of their art, pushing the technology available to them at the time to its limits and redefining the way we perceive it.
Digital photography will have to wait for its own Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, which will do the same to the art as John Coltrane or Miles Davis did to Jazz, or Michael Hedges did to acoustic guitar playing.
The depth of field is directly related to the size of the imaging sensor used. Look at some results from this google query for explanations.
While you can get excellent DOF separation for portrait photography with a 35mm SLR using a 100 mm lens at f 2.8, the same DOF with a digicam with a small CCD would require a (illusory) f 1.0, according to German c't magazine.
Ten years ago, a 1.1 GB image wouldn't have fit on my PCs harddisk. In a few years, consumer-grade mass storage technology will be well into the terabyte range, and 1.1 GB will not be considered huge anymore (assuming, of course, that we haven't blown the whole planet to smithereens by then). Technology is an amazing thing.
> I suspect that it will be a long time before medium or large format photography will have any digital equivalent
Well, if you have some spare cash to shell out (around 27'000 US$ - and that's just the camera back), there is this baby which looks like a serious contender in the medium format category and delivers whopping 510 MByte TIFFs in 16-Shot mode.
Just in case you're now thinking that the price is a little high: the Peltier element used to cool the imaging sensor and the Firewire port are included in the base price:-)
I concur. I'd rather gnaw both my legs off than install RealPlayer (or RealOne, as it's called nowadays) on any of my systems. It stomps all over your installation, phones home more than E.T. and is basically one of the most annoying pieces of software I had the dishonor to install.
Quoting from this page: Realnetworks practically invented spyware. They were sued for their privacy violations. They were sued again. Their spying drew the attention of the FTC. By now, the activities of RealDownload are well-known, as are those of RealJukebox. Would you trust a company with this record?
> The one thing that truly travels faster than light is monarchy.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
One second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of cesium-133 atoms in their ground state undisturbed by external fields.
Er, wouldn't it be easier to just buy a watch with a seconds hand?
:)
Finally a name that makes sense
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"Squishy" DRM - as in "the sound you hear when you step into something soft and stinking/slimy on the sidewalk"? Makes sense.
Bruce Schneier wrote about voting technologies in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the article is here. Interesting read, with good links at the end of the section.
My favorite quotation:
"Certainly Florida's antiquated voting technology is partially to blame, but newer technology wouldn't magically make the problems go away. It could even make things worse, by adding more translation layers between the voters and the vote counters and preventing recounts."
Think about the stranglehold Swisscom had (and still has, can you say "letzte Meile"?) on our telecom infrastructure.
And concerning stupid IP laws, Switzerland is rapidly catching up with the US. Non-RC2 DVD imports are forbidden by law since August 1 this year. We do not have a DMCA yet, but proposed changes to Swiss copyright law are at least equal to the DMCA, and as this paper implies, would make the possession or operation of a "codefree" DVD player illegal.
> Over here we think (at least 90% of the ppl i know) that america makes a lot of shit.
The 90% you cite might be a result of the type of people you know. There are enough US-bashers over here, but the attitude is IMO generally more positive that you depict it. Why is it so en vogue lately to rename companies to be called something like "Swiss Dairy Food" instead of "Emmy"? Why do we have "Chief Financial Officers" instead of "Financhefs"?
> Think about this, learn more of other places that are on this blue ball and you may see a bit clearer out of your eyes.
May I suggest we do the same over here instead of blindly bashing the US? Every nation has its share of problems, and neither Switzerland nor the USA are exceptions. Blind nationalism won't help solve any of those problems.
What about the AT-style connectors? I seem to recall that it was possible to hook them up backwards, and if you did, your motherboard would be fried.
Yep. The golden rule was "black to black" - the connector consisted of two jacks, and the two black wires had to be side-by-side, or you could kiss your mobo goodbye. Many people learned this rule the hard way. It's a good thing the two-part AT-style power connector went the way of the dodo.
Slashdot Mirror
I own three MD units (home, car, portable). I bought them years ago because I was utterly disgusted with the compact cassette and had sworn to myself to eliminate all tape-based media from my household.
Bad timing, as it turned out. I will not buy a MD unit again and am looking to get rid of my existing equipment and replace them with some kind of harddisk-based digital player. The concept of removable 74/80 min. discs looks terribly outdated today - compare it with the convenience of an iPod or similar device. No more juggling with discs in the car (and no, a MD-changer is _not_ a good solution), no more hassles with titling, no more SCMS or similar crapola issues, fast transfers from the PC which serves as my ripping station, thousands or hours of music at my fingertips, organized the way I want it.
I realize some of my gripes with MD (only single-speed transfers to MD) could be solved by buying newer gear (NetMD), but there are additional restrictions coming with it, and I'm not willing to spend even more money to get rid of some the screw-ups the designers made in my second-generation gear.
MD is not bad, but today I can have better. Oh, and the MD format is controlled by Sony - thanks, but no thanks.
Quoting from Mitch Kapor's weblog:
"Have I mentioned it's going to run on Macintosh, Linux, and Windows and will not require a server? This is an ambitious goal, but we are convinced is possible to achieve using a cross-platform tool kit. (We are working with wxWindows/wxPython)."
> Apparently this Biddle guy doesn't know very much.
Well, he's the freakin' Product Unit Manager for Palladium according to this, so I'd expect that he'd be at least familiar with the basic feature set of the product he's responsible for, don't you agree? (btw, according to Steven Levy's article in Newsweek, Biddle used to run a paintball arena before he got to Microsoft...)
Note the doublespeak in the latter article: "This isn't just about solving problems, but expanding new realms of possibilities in the way people live and work with computers", says product manager Mario Juarez. - Excuse me? Expanding new realms of possibilities by limiting the freedom to do what I want with my computer? Yeah, right.
Some information about the way NT handles timers can be found at Sysinternals, here and here (Quantums).
The famous German computer magazine, c't, actually featured a hardware accelerated null device, the "Hypertronics 82C997 ENUL" in their 4/95 issue (as an April fool's joke, of course).
The article is not available online unfortunately, but some of the amused reactions of their readers are here (in German), and you can even find a picture of the gizmo (note the photoshopped activity LED).
Quoting the AC above:
>Not a contradiction at all. Palladium AND software licensing products - as in, two different things, as in, one is not the other.
Then you can surely explain to me why one of the job ads referenced in the article says, quote, "Experience in anti-piracy, licensing, DRM, related technologies is extremely valuable and will be weighted accordingly."
Do you seriously believe licensing will not build on the Palladium key infrastructure?
From the article:
"Biddle insisted that the impetus behind Palladium was solely to secure digital entertainment content and that he knew of no way that it could be used for the enforcement of software licensing."
Now, according to El Reg, Microsoft recently published a job ad for a position within the Palladium group which contained the following sentence:
"Our technology allows content providers, enterprises and consumers to control what others can do with their digital information, such as documents, music, video, ebooks, and software. Become a key leader, providing vision and industry leadership in developing DRM, Palladium and Software Licensing products and Trust Infrastructure Services."
Contradiction city, I say.
>I wish someone would make a car that runs on these.
Well, there's this. The next step would be to make it run on AOL CDs.
Here's an image of a kick-ass beowulf cluster of these.
(rimshot)
$ strings ShowOffYourSkills.doc | less
Show Off Your Skills
Normal.dot
Katherine L. Trunkey
BTW, a Katherine Trunkey works for Redmond-based Ignia LLC, a company which seems to be quite heavily involved with Microsoft.
WARNING: The site mentioned above contains copious amounts of PHB babble ("provide advanced skill sets based on our core focuses") as well as ActiveX controls. Clicking on the links above may damage your sanity, your system stability, or both.
October 19, 2002 marks the 4th anniversary of the beginning of the United States vs. Microsoft case.
Happy anniversary.
> 1) Where do lost biro's go to
Somewhere in the cosmos, [Veet Voojagig] said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to Biro life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended Biros made their way, slipping quietly through wormholes in Space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely Biroid lifestyle, responding to highly Biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the Biro equivalent of the good life.
source
> let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print
Ansel Adams and E. & C. Weston were masters of their art, pushing the technology available to them at the time to its limits and redefining the way we perceive it.
Digital photography will have to wait for its own Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, which will do the same to the art as John Coltrane or Miles Davis did to Jazz, or Michael Hedges did to acoustic guitar playing.
The depth of field is directly related to the size of the imaging sensor used. Look at some results from this google query for explanations.
While you can get excellent DOF separation for portrait photography with a 35mm SLR using a 100 mm lens at f 2.8, the same DOF with a digicam with a small CCD would require a (illusory) f 1.0, according to German c't magazine.
> which comes to 1.1 GB in 48-bit RGB. Yikes!
Ten years ago, a 1.1 GB image wouldn't have fit on my PCs harddisk. In a few years, consumer-grade mass storage technology will be well into the terabyte range, and 1.1 GB will not be considered huge anymore (assuming, of course, that we haven't blown the whole planet to smithereens by then). Technology is an amazing thing.
> I suspect that it will be a long time before medium or large format photography will have any digital equivalent
:-)
Well, if you have some spare cash to shell out (around 27'000 US$ - and that's just the camera back), there is this baby which looks like a serious contender in the medium format category and delivers whopping 510 MByte TIFFs in 16-Shot mode.
Just in case you're now thinking that the price is a little high: the Peltier element used to cool the imaging sensor and the Firewire port are included in the base price
I concur. I'd rather gnaw both my legs off than install RealPlayer (or RealOne, as it's called nowadays) on any of my systems. It stomps all over your installation, phones home more than E.T. and is basically one of the most annoying pieces of software I had the dishonor to install.
Quoting from this page: Realnetworks practically invented spyware. They were sued for their privacy violations. They were sued again. Their spying drew the attention of the FTC. By now, the activities of RealDownload are well-known, as are those of RealJukebox. Would you trust a company with this record?
I don't.
- I know I'm going to get modded down for saying this, but... / There goes my karma, but...
- Is this news for nerds? Is this news that matters?
IMO slashcode should be modified to mod those whiners down 50 points automatically.> The one thing that truly travels faster than light is monarchy.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
Mostly Harmless, chapter 1 (italics mine)
Dan Bricklin has an interesting writeup on cell towers in his weblog, here, complete with some pictures.
Er, wouldn't it be easier to just buy a watch with a seconds hand?
"Squishy" DRM - as in "the sound you hear when you step into something soft and stinking/slimy on the sidewalk"? Makes sense.
Bruce Schneier wrote about voting technologies in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the article is here. Interesting read, with good links at the end of the section.
My favorite quotation:
"Certainly Florida's antiquated voting technology is partially to blame, but newer technology wouldn't magically make the problems go away. It could even make things worse, by adding more translation layers between the voters and the vote counters and preventing recounts."
OK, I'll bite.
Aren't you being a little too smug here?
Think about the stranglehold Swisscom had (and still has, can you say "letzte Meile"?) on our telecom infrastructure.
And concerning stupid IP laws, Switzerland is rapidly catching up with the US. Non-RC2 DVD imports are forbidden by law since August 1 this year. We do not have a DMCA yet, but proposed changes to Swiss copyright law are at least equal to the DMCA, and as this paper implies, would make the possession or operation of a "codefree" DVD player illegal.
> Over here we think (at least 90% of the ppl i know) that america makes a lot of shit.
The 90% you cite might be a result of the type of people you know. There are enough US-bashers over here, but the attitude is IMO generally more positive that you depict it. Why is it so en vogue lately to rename companies to be called something like "Swiss Dairy Food" instead of "Emmy"? Why do we have "Chief Financial Officers" instead of "Financhefs"?
> Think about this, learn more of other places that are on this blue ball and you may see a bit clearer out of your eyes.
May I suggest we do the same over here instead of blindly bashing the US? Every nation has its share of problems, and neither Switzerland nor the USA are exceptions. Blind nationalism won't help solve any of those problems.
Raymond (Zurich, Switzerland)
What about the AT-style connectors? I seem to recall that it was possible to hook them up backwards, and if you did, your motherboard would be fried.
Yep. The golden rule was "black to black" - the connector consisted of two jacks, and the two black wires had to be side-by-side, or you could kiss your mobo goodbye. Many people learned this rule the hard way. It's a good thing the two-part AT-style power connector went the way of the dodo.