I'm pretty sure that when Google indexes pages with known URL-shortening-links that it keeps track of both the shortened URL and the destination. They probably do this mainly for link tracking purposes, but if TinyURL ever shut down they could use this info to create a service that can keep TinyURL links working (probably just built into the Google Toolbar).
It's true that setting up backup is too complex for most "moms" - even if the software is easy to use, most don't know what they need to even back up. However, that's where "sons" (or other computer-savvy folks) come in - you know they'll call you when they lose the data. Why not spend 15 minutes setting them up with backup beforehand.
With easy and cheap options like Mozy or Jungle Disk you can set it up and they don't need to think about it again.
..and besides that, how many tech savvy folks, who probably have even more valuable info on their machines, don't bother with offsite backup?
Looking at the latest version of ACDSee I'd have to agree with you. They've gone to the dark side. The old versions rocked though. UltraEdit is interesting - it's clearly had a bit of feature bloat, but I wouldn't call it bloatware. That thing has a million options and features now, but they've done a great job of keeping the size small and the speed fast. The quality is still high too. While I probably won't use many of the newer features I find useful stuff all the time.
I think you mean Jungle Disk, which allows you to connect to Amazon S3 from your desktop, as well as do automatic backup.
At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is already priced better than Google - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance.
S3 is really a different service - you can store anything on it, whereas the Google storage can apparently only be used from Google apps (for now). The other advantage of using software like Jungle Disk with S3 is that your data is encrypted before even leaving your machine, and neither Amazon nor anyone else can access it.
The article description isn't very accurate - when they say "lines", they really mean "channels". Cable modems now operating on a single 6mhz "channel" on the cable line. DOCSIS3 lets the modem "bond" several channels to increase bandwidth. Only one physical cable is still required. This takes away from the # of channels available for TV, but as they move more of the channels off analog to digital (which fit multiple channels in a single 6mhz band) frequency space is being freed.
Remember that the Google founders have a different class of shares that count 10X as many votes per share as common shares. They can easily block any shareholder proposal they disagree with, although it certainly may look bad if there is heavy support for this.
Right - this was just a contract dispute between Kaleidoscope and the DVDCCA. Other DVD player manufacturers may have similar contracts, and could now build in DVD-ripping/storage, but you can be sure that the DVDCCA will be changing their contracts moving forward to eliminate this behavior in the future.
This is modded funny, but is actually true - there is a new method for assigning a proxy to decide at a later date if the code should be licensed under a later GPL version.
Jungle Disk is a cross-platform front-end for Amazon S3 that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. You only pay the Amazon fees ($0.15/gig/month). On Linux you can mount it directly using DavFS then backup using any software you want (rsync, etc). It supports encryption and caching as well.
Most copying done in libraries is likely covered under fair use (small portions of the overall piece, being used for research, discussion, and critique). I doubt you'll see many people making page-for-page copies of "The Da Vinci Code" - why bother when you can just borrow the book for free? If comparing a library copy machine to Grokster is the best argument that can be made it's no wonder Grokster was shut down. People complain about the RIAA going after a "technology" (P2P) but the bottom line is that they didn't sue "P2P" and they didn't shut down "P2P". They sued the creators of two products - Napster and Grokster that were both created for, and primarily used for, copyright infringment.
Yes.. it's stupid that they are trying to support their outdated biz model by suing the companies using the very technology they should be adopting.. blah blah.. but trying to compare Grokster to Xerox doesn't hold water. If anything we should be upset that the irresponsible management at Napster and Grokster that created and supported products primarily used for piracy that have since put all P2P technology in a poor light.
If 99.99% of the usage for Xerox machines was copyright infringment I suspect they would have been quickly outlawed or restricted. In practice, the vast majority of use was for reproduction of legit material. Had 99.99% of the Grokster usage been legit, I think you would have seen a different outcome to all this.
That's why the RIAA isn't going after FTP servers, HTTP servers, IM file transfer features, etc - those technologies were created for non-infringing uses and are predominantly used that way. Anyone that thinks Grokster was created for sharing of only public-domain content is smoking crack.
The "bidding against yourself" scenario only applies if your previous high-bid was between bid increments (per a previous poster's description of E-bay's policy).
That doesn't mean it makes sense, but it means that you can't keep bidding yourself up just by raising your bid. It only works once, and only if your previous bid wasn't an even increment. I'm sure they can make it work another way, but my guess is that other methods introduce other oddities, and they decided this was the best way to go.
Not sure what the big deal is. The other codecs that have already been selected are patent encumbered as well (http://www.mpegla.com).
Microsoft will likely have to submit to some kind of RAND licensing as part of the deal, which will probably still exclude free players, but last I checked there was no such think as a free MPEG4 patent license either (just plenty of unlicensed implementations).
That's actually one of the main purposes of patents. Instead of someone inventing something and everyone copying it and saying "good enough", patents give incentive to look for alternative implementations that may be better that the initial solution. The patent process then rewards that second inventor for their work by protecting their invention, and encourages the first guy to go back and look for something even better.
For those wondering if they are going to go after ReplayTV next - they already did a few years ago. However, ReplayTV (SonicBlue at the time) owned a few patents on PVR as well and counter-sued. They decided to dismiss claims rather than sue both companies into oblivion.
This product appears to use the same software/firmware as the Gateway Connected DVD player (which is retailing for $199 now).
I've got one, and it's really nice.
Pros:
-Fast user interface to navigate (compared to say, the LinkSys network box which is slow as dirt)
-Includes progressive scan DVD player (no DVI-out though)
-Supports all kinds of video formats (with the latest firmware update)
Cons:
-The streaming app is poor in many respects - for example, you can't easily run two instances on the same machine to seperate content into two servers (e.g. one for me, one for my wife). It would be nice of the architecture was more open
-It organizes files by ID3 tags (album, artist), not by folder structure on your hard drive. That means if your files aren't tagged well, the UI is useless, and if you have a lot of partial albums, it's a pain to navigate. Expect to retag your library if it isn't already done well.
-No support for building a play-list on the DVD player - you can only play a single album/artist, a single song, or an existing playlist - no way to build up a queue of songs/albums on the fly.
-No way to change the sorting within an album - it sorts by song title, not track number, and plays in sort order. In the latest software you can work-around this by having it display filenames (which usually include track numbers, thus sort correctly), but then the names are so long you typically can't see the actual song title.
One final feature I wish it had - live streaming of the audio output on the PC to the DVD player, so that (for example), I could fire up Rhapsody and listen to it in my living room.
Altogether a pretty cool product - hopefully they'll address some of these issues in future firmware/software updates. If not, I may end up reverse engineering the networking to see how difficult it would be to create an alternate player.
fyi - They are using ffmpeg for all the transcoding that is mentioned, so it probably wouldn't be too difficult to replicate that aspect.
You can read the official GameSpy response in the link at the top of this story, but the short of it is this: The "buffer overruns" you refer to are not the issue that brought this on. He published those and they were corrected by GameSpy quickly. However, when GameSpy wouldn't pay "consulting fees", instead of focusing on actual security issues, he quickly turned to hacking GameSpy servers and services, including publishing cracks for GameSpy software. Hardly the behavior of a "security researcher".
The bulk of his "research" consists of Game Cracks and Game Cheats / Exploits / CDKey Generators. In particular, the brute-force CDKey generators are particularly bad - they basically pound publisher CDKey validation servers with random keys as fast as possible, to try and find valid ones - creating a DOS attack in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that when Google indexes pages with known URL-shortening-links that it keeps track of both the shortened URL and the destination. They probably do this mainly for link tracking purposes, but if TinyURL ever shut down they could use this info to create a service that can keep TinyURL links working (probably just built into the Google Toolbar).
With easy and cheap options like Mozy or Jungle Disk you can set it up and they don't need to think about it again.
Looking at the latest version of ACDSee I'd have to agree with you. They've gone to the dark side. The old versions rocked though.
UltraEdit is interesting - it's clearly had a bit of feature bloat, but I wouldn't call it bloatware. That thing has a million options and features now, but they've done a great job of keeping the size small and the speed fast. The quality is still high too. While I probably won't use many of the newer features I find useful stuff all the time.
At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is already priced better than Google - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance.
S3 is really a different service - you can store anything on it, whereas the Google storage can apparently only be used from Google apps (for now). The other advantage of using software like Jungle Disk with S3 is that your data is encrypted before even leaving your machine, and neither Amazon nor anyone else can access it.
Solution: 1 bottle of white-out ($1.21)
The article description isn't very accurate - when they say "lines", they really mean "channels". Cable modems now operating on a single 6mhz "channel" on the cable line. DOCSIS3 lets the modem "bond" several channels to increase bandwidth. Only one physical cable is still required. This takes away from the # of channels available for TV, but as they move more of the channels off analog to digital (which fit multiple channels in a single 6mhz band) frequency space is being freed.
Remember that the Google founders have a different class of shares that count 10X as many votes per share as common shares. They can easily block any shareholder proposal they disagree with, although it certainly may look bad if there is heavy support for this.
Right - this was just a contract dispute between Kaleidoscope and the DVDCCA. Other DVD player manufacturers may have similar contracts, and could now build in DVD-ripping/storage, but you can be sure that the DVDCCA will be changing their contracts moving forward to eliminate this behavior in the future.
This is modded funny, but is actually true - there is a new method for assigning a proxy to decide at a later date if the code should be licensed under a later GPL version.
£425 in $ .... ..but will it at least make breakfast for you in the morning?
UK£ 425 = 834.19 US$
I actually saw the exact device you're looking for while browsing the Skymall catalog on a recent flight..
2 175854&c=
http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=10
Jungle Disk is a cross-platform front-end for Amazon S3 that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. You only pay the Amazon fees ($0.15/gig/month). On Linux you can mount it directly using DavFS then backup using any software you want (rsync, etc). It supports encryption and caching as well.
Most copying done in libraries is likely covered under fair use (small portions of the overall piece, being used for research, discussion, and critique). I doubt you'll see many people making page-for-page copies of "The Da Vinci Code" - why bother when you can just borrow the book for free?
If comparing a library copy machine to Grokster is the best argument that can be made it's no wonder Grokster was shut down. People complain about the RIAA going after a "technology" (P2P) but the bottom line is that they didn't sue "P2P" and they didn't shut down "P2P". They sued the creators of two products - Napster and Grokster that were both created for, and primarily used for, copyright infringment.
Yes.. it's stupid that they are trying to support their outdated biz model by suing the companies using the very technology they should be adopting.. blah blah.. but trying to compare Grokster to Xerox doesn't hold water.
If anything we should be upset that the irresponsible management at Napster and Grokster that created and supported products primarily used for piracy that have since put all P2P technology in a poor light.
If 99.99% of the usage for Xerox machines was copyright infringment I suspect they would have been quickly outlawed or restricted. In practice, the vast majority of use was for reproduction of legit material. Had 99.99% of the Grokster usage been legit, I think you would have seen a different outcome to all this.
That's why the RIAA isn't going after FTP servers, HTTP servers, IM file transfer features, etc - those technologies were created for non-infringing uses and are predominantly used that way. Anyone that thinks Grokster was created for sharing of only public-domain content is smoking crack.
That's because the code stage is handled in India.
Actually it's not clear if they are building anything new in Israel, as the Updated article mentions.
The "bidding against yourself" scenario only applies if your previous high-bid was between bid increments (per a previous poster's description of E-bay's policy).
That doesn't mean it makes sense, but it means that you can't keep bidding yourself up just by raising your bid. It only works once, and only if your previous bid wasn't an even increment. I'm sure they can make it work another way, but my guess is that other methods introduce other oddities, and they decided this was the best way to go.
Microsoft will likely have to submit to some kind of RAND licensing as part of the deal, which will probably still exclude free players, but last I checked there was no such think as a free MPEG4 patent license either (just plenty of unlicensed implementations).
Get your fresh cached copy here.
A new Doom 3 (Xbox) trailer came out yesterday. Looks like all new in-game footage. Get it at IGN or FilePlanet
That's actually one of the main purposes of patents. Instead of someone inventing something and everyone copying it and saying "good enough", patents give incentive to look for alternative implementations that may be better that the initial solution. The patent process then rewards that second inventor for their work by protecting their invention, and encourages the first guy to go back and look for something even better.
See here
Pros:
-Fast user interface to navigate (compared to say, the LinkSys network box which is slow as dirt)
-Includes progressive scan DVD player (no DVI-out though)
-Supports all kinds of video formats (with the latest firmware update)
Cons:
-The streaming app is poor in many respects - for example, you can't easily run two instances on the same machine to seperate content into two servers (e.g. one for me, one for my wife). It would be nice of the architecture was more open
-It organizes files by ID3 tags (album, artist), not by folder structure on your hard drive. That means if your files aren't tagged well, the UI is useless, and if you have a lot of partial albums, it's a pain to navigate. Expect to retag your library if it isn't already done well.
-No support for building a play-list on the DVD player - you can only play a single album/artist, a single song, or an existing playlist - no way to build up a queue of songs/albums on the fly.
-No way to change the sorting within an album - it sorts by song title, not track number, and plays in sort order. In the latest software you can work-around this by having it display filenames (which usually include track numbers, thus sort correctly), but then the names are so long you typically can't see the actual song title.
One final feature I wish it had - live streaming of the audio output on the PC to the DVD player, so that (for example), I could fire up Rhapsody and listen to it in my living room.
Altogether a pretty cool product - hopefully they'll address some of these issues in future firmware/software updates. If not, I may end up reverse engineering the networking to see how difficult it would be to create an alternate player.
fyi - They are using ffmpeg for all the transcoding that is mentioned, so it probably wouldn't be too difficult to replicate that aspect.
The bulk of his "research" consists of Game Cracks and Game Cheats / Exploits / CDKey Generators. In particular, the brute-force CDKey generators are particularly bad - they basically pound publisher CDKey validation servers with random keys as fast as possible, to try and find valid ones - creating a DOS attack in many cases.