Your DVD player has a zoom feature (most do, anyways). USE IT! That way we both win
That's what I do when find that 2/3 of my 29" TV's screen is doing nothing and the action looks like it's being viewed on a 19" set.
Of course if you're ripping (I mean "backing up") your DVDs onto SVCD then you really need to crop the image before encoding. Widescreen and SVCD or VCD formats really don't work. Zooming an SVCD produces *real* bad pixelation.
Maybe it's because I cut words for a living but I *hate* it when I see people abusing the English language like this.
The word "unique" is an absolute, not a relative adjective. Something is either unique or it's not, you can't have "slightly, moderately, or very" unique!
Call me pedantic but I call it sloppy coding to misuse words like this;-)
Do the owners of the music lose it after you steal it? if not, it's not stealing.
Maybe not -- but if you deprive them of the income they might otherwise have earned by way of sales -- there's a case to argue that piracy is a theft of money even if it's not the theft of music itself.
The problem we face here is that until recently, the only way the market could express its dissatisfaction with the quality or price of a product was not to buy it.
Thanks to P2P networks, digital duplication and the like, that same market can now voice its dissatisfaction by not buying the products concerned -- but using them anyway.
One could argue therefore that the industry is losing no money because those who pirate this stuff would not have bought it anyway.
I hope the RIAA has thought this whole thing through very carefully.
What are they going to do if, once they've killed all the pirates, sales don't improve?
Surely there'd be at least a moral case for the pirates to say that they were falsely blamed for the industry's woes and file a class-action defamation suit:-)
To the RIAA -- beware of what you wish for, you may find it's not what you want.
An interesting debate arose from a story I wrote earlier this week in which I published screenshots from a spammer's mailboxes.
One reader complained that this was "hacking" and that it was an unjustifiable action.
In response to that complaint I asked my readers (part-way down the page) whether there was any difference between a spammer trespassing on someone's mailbox with their crap and someone trespassing on the spammer's mailbox to expose their mis-deeds.
Gathering by the responses it appears that the rule of "do unto others" can reasonably applied to spammers and their mailboxes.
Today's Aardvark Daily shows exactly why spam is the problem it is -- there are too many stupid people out there who believe they can get something for nothing.
Check out just how lame the spammer in question is and how, in his world, the word "free" has a whole different meaning to the one most people have.
Despite his blatant misrepresentations and the fact that he's promoting his scam via spam, this guy has got people queuing up to hand over their "stupidity tax".
What's worse though is that the spammer is so lame he's effectively exposing the credit card details of *all* those who sign up. You even get to look inside his two email accounts because he doesn't have a clue about choosing sensible passwords.
We're quick to blame spammers for the problem but maybe the truth is that the tide of spam is driven more by the stupid and greedy people who respond to these "too good to be true" emails.
Mind you, if there were just a couple of crime families runinng the spamming business it might be easier to block all those messages -- and any new wannabe-spammers would probably get whacked very early in their careers:-)
Instead of dicking around with post-offices in space, why doesn't Russia offer to put a wireless webserver into space and sell access?
Just think -- budding entrepreneurs could buy space on the server and upload copies of popular movies or music which people could then download for a small annual subscription using a regular satellite disk and PC card.
How would the RIAA/MPAA kill that bird I wonder?
Does the DMCA reach that far above the earth's surface?:-)
I was a Sony fan for a long time. Their video/VCR gear was always solid, functional and of exceptional quality.
In the past few years however they've really dropped the ball.
Their consumer-level camcorders are suffering the same rampant "featuritus" that their VCRs do and they've sacrificed good, solid reliable functionality for an incredible array of bells and whistles that really fill out a sales brochure but which your average user finds as useful as tits on a bull.
A couple of months ago I wanted a new top-end consumer camcorder (3CCD) and did a fairly comprehensive analysis of what was on the market.
Sony's offering was the DCRTRV950 which would have done the job, but thanks to the fact that they've loaded it up with "fluff" like Bluetooth and a myriad of other gee-whiz "features", it is very pricey for the basic functionality it delivers.
By comparison, Panasonic's MX500 is a brilliant camera. It has 3CCDs and all the really important high-end consumer functionality such as manual focus, zebra stripes, 3megapixel stills, etc. Just about the only feature I won't be using is the direct to MPEG recording that allows you to create MPEG files directly onto the memory card (but I'm sure many others will find this handy)
Here in New Zealand, the Sony DCRTRV950 is priced at around NZ$6K and even Sony's single CCD DCTRV50 has a list price of NZ$4299.
By comparison, the 3CCD Panasonic MX500 cost me under $3K, which meant I could afford some nice accessories to go with it.
Picture quality wise, the Sony and Panasonic offerings are very close -- the Sony having slightly better low-light performance -- but the difference is nowhere near worth paying double the price for.
I'm extraordinarily happy with my Panansonic's attitude of providing good, solid, basic functions at an affordable price.
So long as Sony continue down the path of placing more emphasis on sizzle than steak they won't see me buying any of their products anytime soon.
Perhaps I'm missing something here but how does this differ from a story with the headline:
Liquor Store Robbers Face Possible Jail Term
If these guys did actually break the law, and if the maximum penalty is jail, then this is no different to thousands of other cases before the courts -- except perhaps that the law involves the protection of intellectual property.
One of the big factors affecting the success of a home-made Tivo-like device is your choice of video capture/tuner card.
I've done the research and produced a project website for a digital PVR project which tested both dumb and smart capture cards.
Unfortunately there's no clear winner and such a comparison goes to show that life is always full of compromises.
However, after many months, I have to say that I've grown accustomed to the power and convenience of a smart tuner/capture card with onboard MPEG encoding.
The Hauppauge PVR250/350 are just brilliant if you want to use your PC like a VCR. There's a review and comparison with the Pinnacle PCTVpro card on my site.
I was going to (and still will a little later) explore all the Linux and open source options for a PVR but the reality was (last time I looked), many of these projects are very much in their infancy and are hardly a "turnkey" solution to matching a Tivo.
But can you attach it to a fricken shark's fricken head?
Re:The FTC now says they can regulate spam
on
FTC vs Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Note what the FTC is saying. They don't even have to prove that the business being advertised by spam paid the spammer. If someone benefitted from the spam, the beneficiary is liable...
This is going to bring spamming on behalf of legitimate businesses to a screeching halt
It could also see a lot of bonafide and ethical businesses brought to their knees thanks to Joe-jobs launched by less ethical competitors.
I am so pleased to hear that most spammers get their target addresses from the web because I've been running my PAYBACK PAGE for some time now and it's nice to know it must be working.
Let those who live by the spam, die by the spam I say!
A note for neophytes: Never assume that the "from" address in a spam is valid or actually belongs to the spammer. Always go to the website being promoted and find some form of contact address there (often hidden in an HTML reference to a formmail script).
Then add em to your payback page and enjoy!
Check your server logs and if you're site's anything like mine, you'll find that the spammers' addresses are being harvested several times a day.
No, it's not nostalgia until you've reached daisy wheel
Daisy wheel schmazy wheel!
My first printer was one of those *really* old ones that used silver (metalized) paper and a little wire stylus that swept across the paper as it passed through the print-gate.
Ah... the smell of fresh ozone in the moring!
And let's not forget band printers. Those babies could sure belt-along (no pun intended) and made a real noise.
Way-back I used to use dot-matrix printers. They were great because they just kept chugging along, spewing out reems of ugly dotty print and making lots of noise.
When the ribbons started running out you could even give them a squirt of WD40 to help the ink on the outer margins wick its way back into the printing area -- and they'd print like (near) new again for a few more weeks.
The cost of a new ribbon (which lasted several boxes of paper -- about 5,000 pages of program listings) was around 5% of the printer price so they were very cheap to run.
Then came the laser printers.
Much higher quality, much faster but a little harder on the pocket.
These days however, inkjets rule. Every computer store you go into has row upon row of these evil devices -- each with their little laminated samples of photo-quality printing attached.
When they're new, these printers do a great job. They're quiet, the quality is superb and they're pretty fast -- considering the previous two statements.
However -- thanks to big high resolution screens and better development tools I find that I seldom need to print program a listing and virtually all of my correspondence is done by email -- without a drop of ink being used.
This means that I might not fire up my inkjet printer for weeks or even months at a time.
But when I do -- the bloody thing is almost always suffering from clogged nozzles -- requiring (at best) a cleaning cycle (which wastes $$$ worth of ink) or, in the case of an Epson, the total junking of the printer.
So what's the answer for low-volume, very intermittent printer user?
The cost of a laser is hard to amortize over a hundred or so pages a year, inkjets hardly last a single cartridge of ink before clogging up, and dot-matrix printers are not only rare as hen's teeth but they're still noisy, slow and produce ugly print.
I think the issue of "nett value" has to be considered when deciding if something qualifies as spam/junk-mail.
For instance -- if someone sends me an unsolicited piece of junkmail printed on crapy, cheap paper and promoting some product or service in which I'm not the least bit interested then it's spam.
However, if that same person sent me the same piece of junkmail, printed in water-soluble ink on the back of a $100 note then I think it would simply be a very clever marketing technique.
In the first instance the communication contains absolutely *no* value to me. In the second, the nett value is $100 less the value of the time required to wash off the water-soluble ink.
The same goes with online spam.
One of the most effective methods I've ever used is to promote my products or services in the.sig of my newsgroup postings.
So long as the posting contains a positive contribution to the thread concerned then the fact that I include two-lines of "pitch" still means that the whole thing represents an acceptable level of "nett value" to the reader.
The big problem is that your average spammer is a thief. They only want to take and not give anything in return. The "nett value" of most spam is decidedly negative -- and that's why people hate it.
It also says a lot about any vendor that would start picking your pocket (by spamming you) before you've even bought anything from them.
Sales made by spammers are just a way of fining the terminally stupid I guess.
You might want to see if you can pick up an old X-Y plotter somewhere and use that as the basis of a DIY design.
Replace the pen with a high-speed cutter and then you can interface to the plotter quite simply through the RS232 port or whatever the plotter supports.
Oh dear... the recording industry simply never learns do they?
If they force copy-protection on us then I think they're quickly going to find:
1. lots of people bitching and returning disks because they won't play in there car player or on their DVD.
2. unskilled people being *forced* to download their MP3 rips from the Net rather than buying a CD and ripping tracks themselves for use on their MP3 players and computers.
3. *no* change in the rate of serious piracy because serious pirates just laugh at the stupid copy protection schemes being used (audio patch cord and decent soundcard anyone?)
And how stupid will the recording industry look if their CD sales figures don't immediately soar to new heights as a result of this copy protection?
If sales levels remain basically unchanged then they're going to have to admit that either:
a) people weren't pirating much anyway
or
b) their copyprotection doesn't work.
But you've got to feel sorry for an industry that has already shot off both its feet but keeps reloading and blasting away in vain, right?
I don't think this is going to solve spaming. (You can fake your email, etc.) It will only add to the people who sue everything
Yeah, but don't forget that spammers usually want to sell you something and in order to do that they have to include some form of contact address or phone number in their spam.
Tracking down the people behind the products or services being promoted should be pretty straight forward -- proving that it wasn't a joe-job however could be a whole lot harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Your DVD player has a zoom feature (most do, anyways). USE IT! That way we both win
:-)
That's what I do when find that 2/3 of my 29" TV's screen is doing nothing and the action looks like it's being viewed on a 19" set.
Of course if you're ripping (I mean "backing up") your DVDs onto SVCD then you really need to crop the image before encoding. Widescreen and SVCD or VCD formats really don't work. Zooming an SVCD produces *real* bad pixelation.
Ahem... "so I've heard"
Shares in the Acme Novelty company have risen 23 percent.
Unfortunately, this means not listening to some of my favorite bands anymore, but I believe they can be replaced.
Why can't you listen to your favourite bands?
Remember this story from Aardvark last year?
How can the RIAA claim theft if they're giving their product away like that?
It's where I get *all* of my music these days.
This is definately a very unique device
;-)
Maybe it's because I cut words for a living but I *hate* it when I see people abusing the English language like this.
The word "unique" is an absolute, not a relative adjective. Something is either unique or it's not, you can't have "slightly, moderately, or very" unique!
Call me pedantic but I call it sloppy coding to misuse words like this
Do the owners of the music lose it after you steal it? if not, it's not stealing.
:-)
Maybe not -- but if you deprive them of the income they might otherwise have earned by way of sales -- there's a case to argue that piracy is a theft of money even if it's not the theft of music itself.
The problem we face here is that until recently, the only way the market could express its dissatisfaction with the quality or price of a product was not to buy it.
Thanks to P2P networks, digital duplication and the like, that same market can now voice its dissatisfaction by not buying the products concerned -- but using them anyway.
One could argue therefore that the industry is losing no money because those who pirate this stuff would not have bought it anyway.
I hope the RIAA has thought this whole thing through very carefully.
What are they going to do if, once they've killed all the pirates, sales don't improve?
Surely there'd be at least a moral case for the pirates to say that they were falsely blamed for the industry's woes and file a class-action defamation suit
To the RIAA -- beware of what you wish for, you may find it's not what you want.
An interesting debate arose from a story I wrote earlier this week in which I published screenshots from a spammer's mailboxes.
One reader complained that this was "hacking" and that it was an unjustifiable action.
In response to that complaint I asked my readers (part-way down the page) whether there was any difference between a spammer trespassing on someone's mailbox with their crap and someone trespassing on the spammer's mailbox to expose their mis-deeds.
Gathering by the responses it appears that the rule of "do unto others" can reasonably applied to spammers and their mailboxes.
You said:
:-)
That being said the ionic breeze uses the *best* technology for air cleaning, but the lack of a fan makes it completley useless
followed later by:
no I don't work for them, I'm just a fan
Hmmm... I see potential for a link-up here
Today's Aardvark Daily shows exactly why spam is the problem it is -- there are too many stupid people out there who believe they can get something for nothing.
Check out just how lame the spammer in question is and how, in his world, the word "free" has a whole different meaning to the one most people have.
Despite his blatant misrepresentations and the fact that he's promoting his scam via spam, this guy has got people queuing up to hand over their "stupidity tax".
What's worse though is that the spammer is so lame he's effectively exposing the credit card details of *all* those who sign up. You even get to look inside his two email accounts because he doesn't have a clue about choosing sensible passwords.
We're quick to blame spammers for the problem but maybe the truth is that the tide of spam is driven more by the stupid and greedy people who respond to these "too good to be true" emails.
Uh-oh, I can see it now.
:-)
Organized crime moves in on the spam business.
Mind you, if there were just a couple of crime families runinng the spamming business it might be easier to block all those messages -- and any new wannabe-spammers would probably get whacked very early in their careers
Instead of dicking around with post-offices in space, why doesn't Russia offer to put a wireless webserver into space and sell access?
:-)
Just think -- budding entrepreneurs could buy space on the server and upload copies of popular movies or music which people could then download for a small annual subscription using a regular satellite disk and PC card.
How would the RIAA/MPAA kill that bird I wonder?
Does the DMCA reach that far above the earth's surface?
I was a Sony fan for a long time. Their video/VCR gear was always solid, functional and of exceptional quality.
In the past few years however they've really dropped the ball.
Their consumer-level camcorders are suffering the same rampant "featuritus" that their VCRs do and they've sacrificed good, solid reliable functionality for an incredible array of bells and whistles that really fill out a sales brochure but which your average user finds as useful as tits on a bull.
A couple of months ago I wanted a new top-end consumer camcorder (3CCD) and did a fairly comprehensive analysis of what was on the market.
Sony's offering was the DCRTRV950 which would have done the job, but thanks to the fact that they've loaded it up with "fluff" like Bluetooth and a myriad of other gee-whiz "features", it is very pricey for the basic functionality it delivers.
By comparison, Panasonic's MX500 is a brilliant camera. It has 3CCDs and all the really important high-end consumer functionality such as manual focus, zebra stripes, 3megapixel stills, etc. Just about the only feature I won't be using is the direct to MPEG recording that allows you to create MPEG files directly onto the memory card (but I'm sure many others will find this handy)
Here in New Zealand, the Sony DCRTRV950 is priced at around NZ$6K and even Sony's single CCD DCTRV50 has a list price of NZ$4299.
By comparison, the 3CCD Panasonic MX500 cost me under $3K, which meant I could afford some nice accessories to go with it.
Picture quality wise, the Sony and Panasonic offerings are very close -- the Sony having slightly better low-light performance -- but the difference is nowhere near worth paying double the price for.
I'm extraordinarily happy with my Panansonic's attitude of providing good, solid, basic functions at an affordable price.
So long as Sony continue down the path of placing more emphasis on sizzle than steak they won't see me buying any of their products anytime soon.
Perhaps I'm missing something here but how does this differ from a story with the headline:
Liquor Store Robbers Face Possible Jail Term
If these guys did actually break the law, and if the maximum penalty is jail, then this is no different to thousands of other cases before the courts -- except perhaps that the law involves the protection of intellectual property.
Move along people, there's nothing to see here.
One of the big factors affecting the success of a home-made Tivo-like device is your choice of video capture/tuner card.
I've done the research and produced a project website for a digital PVR project which tested both dumb and smart capture cards.
Unfortunately there's no clear winner and such a comparison goes to show that life is always full of compromises.
However, after many months, I have to say that I've grown accustomed to the power and convenience of a smart tuner/capture card with onboard MPEG encoding.
The Hauppauge PVR250/350 are just brilliant if you want to use your PC like a VCR. There's a review and comparison with the Pinnacle PCTVpro card on my site.
I was going to (and still will a little later) explore all the Linux and open source options for a PVR but the reality was (last time I looked), many of these projects are very much in their infancy and are hardly a "turnkey" solution to matching a Tivo.
But can you attach it to a fricken shark's fricken head?
Note what the FTC is saying. They don't even have to prove that the business being advertised by spam paid the spammer. If someone benefitted from the spam, the beneficiary is liable...
This is going to bring spamming on behalf of legitimate businesses to a screeching halt
It could also see a lot of bonafide and ethical businesses brought to their knees thanks to Joe-jobs launched by less ethical competitors.
I am so pleased to hear that most spammers get their target addresses from the web because I've been running my PAYBACK PAGE for some time now and it's nice to know it must be working.
Let those who live by the spam, die by the spam I say!
A note for neophytes: Never assume that the "from" address in a spam is valid or actually belongs to the spammer. Always go to the website being promoted and find some form of contact address there (often hidden in an HTML reference to a formmail script).
Then add em to your payback page and enjoy!
Check your server logs and if you're site's anything like mine, you'll find that the spammers' addresses are being harvested several times a day.
Whoopee!
No, it's not nostalgia until you've reached daisy wheel
Daisy wheel schmazy wheel!
My first printer was one of those *really* old ones that used silver (metalized) paper and a little wire stylus that swept across the paper as it passed through the print-gate.
Ah... the smell of fresh ozone in the moring!
And let's not forget band printers. Those babies could sure belt-along (no pun intended) and made a real noise.
Way-back I used to use dot-matrix printers. They were great because they just kept chugging along, spewing out reems of ugly dotty print and making lots of noise.
When the ribbons started running out you could even give them a squirt of WD40 to help the ink on the outer margins wick its way back into the printing area -- and they'd print like (near) new again for a few more weeks.
The cost of a new ribbon (which lasted several boxes of paper -- about 5,000 pages of program listings) was around 5% of the printer price so they were very cheap to run.
Then came the laser printers.
Much higher quality, much faster but a little harder on the pocket.
These days however, inkjets rule. Every computer store you go into has row upon row of these evil devices -- each with their little laminated samples of photo-quality printing attached.
When they're new, these printers do a great job. They're quiet, the quality is superb and they're pretty fast -- considering the previous two statements.
However -- thanks to big high resolution screens and better development tools I find that I seldom need to print program a listing and virtually all of my correspondence is done by email -- without a drop of ink being used.
This means that I might not fire up my inkjet printer for weeks or even months at a time.
But when I do -- the bloody thing is almost always suffering from clogged nozzles -- requiring (at best) a cleaning cycle (which wastes $$$ worth of ink) or, in the case of an Epson, the total junking of the printer.
So what's the answer for low-volume, very intermittent printer user?
The cost of a laser is hard to amortize over a hundred or so pages a year, inkjets hardly last a single cartridge of ink before clogging up, and dot-matrix printers are not only rare as hen's teeth but they're still noisy, slow and produce ugly print.
Anyone got any ideas.
Today's Aardvark Daily has plenty to say on this ISP's new Service Terms too and raises some other very interesting (coincidental) issues.
I think the issue of "nett value" has to be considered when deciding if something qualifies as spam/junk-mail.
.sig of my newsgroup postings.
For instance -- if someone sends me an unsolicited piece of junkmail printed on crapy, cheap paper and promoting some product or service in which I'm not the least bit interested then it's spam.
However, if that same person sent me the same piece of junkmail, printed in water-soluble ink on the back of a $100 note then I think it would simply be a very clever marketing technique.
In the first instance the communication contains absolutely *no* value to me. In the second, the nett value is $100 less the value of the time required to wash off the water-soluble ink.
The same goes with online spam.
One of the most effective methods I've ever used is to promote my products or services in the
So long as the posting contains a positive contribution to the thread concerned then the fact that I include two-lines of "pitch" still means that the whole thing represents an acceptable level of "nett value" to the reader.
The big problem is that your average spammer is a thief. They only want to take and not give anything in return. The "nett value" of most spam is decidedly negative -- and that's why people hate it.
It also says a lot about any vendor that would start picking your pocket (by spamming you) before you've even bought anything from them.
Sales made by spammers are just a way of fining the terminally stupid I guess.
When it comes to intellectual property, let he who lives by the lawyer, die by the lawyer!
You might want to see if you can pick up an old X-Y plotter somewhere and use that as the basis of a DIY design.
Replace the pen with a high-speed cutter and then you can interface to the plotter quite simply through the RS232 port or whatever the plotter supports.
Here's a plotter on eBay that might be a good starting point.
Oh dear... the recording industry simply never learns do they?
If they force copy-protection on us then I think they're quickly going to find:
1. lots of people bitching and returning disks because they won't play in there car player or on their DVD.
2. unskilled people being *forced* to download their MP3 rips from the Net rather than buying a CD and ripping tracks themselves for use on their MP3 players and computers.
3. *no* change in the rate of serious piracy because serious pirates just laugh at the stupid copy protection schemes being used (audio patch cord and decent soundcard anyone?)
And how stupid will the recording industry look if their CD sales figures don't immediately soar to new heights as a result of this copy protection?
If sales levels remain basically unchanged then they're going to have to admit that either:
a) people weren't pirating much anyway
or
b) their copyprotection doesn't work.
But you've got to feel sorry for an industry that has already shot off both its feet but keeps reloading and blasting away in vain, right?
I don't think this is going to solve spaming. (You can fake your email, etc.) It will only add to the people who sue everything
Yeah, but don't forget that spammers usually want to sell you something and in order to do that they have to include some form of contact address or phone number in their spam.
Tracking down the people behind the products or services being promoted should be pretty straight forward -- proving that it wasn't a joe-job however could be a whole lot harder.
In no particular order, my top movies (including a few sleepers) are:
:-)
A Clockwork Orange
Harold and Maude
Tremors
The Blues Brothers
And what about all those cool TV programmes from my childhood and mispent youth that seem to have vanished into the ether...
The Prisoner
UFO
Captain Pugwash
Clutch Cargo
Diver Dan
Bring em all back I say!