My reply is late, but incase that was aimed my way, I use a hacked Epson printer that feeds directly off of rather large ink bottles situated beside the printer that I can open-up and top-off as needed.
Only if content producers choose to encode their products with DRM technologies. I don't think many people ripping DVDs for the net would do that, do you?
The MPAA will be filling their shorts over this one. But seeing as how DIVX is a totally legit compression codec, I don't think they'll be able to get rid of it either.
These guys will make an absolute FORTUNE selling this device. If it was available right now, I'd be looking for my wallet and ordering one before posting this comment.
As another poster said, hopefully it's easily flash-upgradable to support new codecs and such as they become available.
Why should I care about SCSI? I don't run a server, and I don't care if my applications and data take a couple extra seconds to load?
For the price of the equivilent SCSI system, I can get at the very least 5x the storage on an IDE system. That's plenty of storage AND redundancy.
Don't get me wrong, I used to run all SCSI in my Amiga, and for a while I had SCSI in my PC, but SCSI just can't compete with monster cheap IDE drives.
It's more likely calculating movements the same way an optical mouse is. Just storing direction and distance data by calculating the difference in pattern at a high sampling rate, so it should be able to store quite a lot of it.
Wonder if you could scan the paper in and print your own...
It's possible that the off-white colour is actually florescent or something and the pen might use a UV light source to track the movements.
Seems like the old inkjet / razorblades selling technique. Give them the technology (cheap?) then sell supplies. I won't buy-in to that type of technology.
Believe me, I know what it's like to be "the computer whiz", and I feel that since I've been gifted with something, I ought to share it. To do otherwise would be unjust.
Ya, everyone who knows me and has their computer blow up seems to feel the same way;P
Anyone tried playing back full-res (720x480) DIVX 5 from one of these? I'm curious if the transmeta CPU could handle it (and what the battery life would be).
Having an internal DVD-ROM, I assume it can at least play back regular DVD movies.
If I was going to get a laptop, I'd definately go for something like this. Regular laptops are too big and clunky.
That in Tom's article, there wasn't a question (answered anyway), by the manufacturers on how the failure rate changes between 1 year and 3 years.
Sure they gave low return numbers like 8 in 1000, but I'd really like to know how those numbers change toward the 3-year mark instead of just at the 1-year mark.
There was one luser that was posting on local newsgroups a while back and trying to get people to give him their dead harddrives for his "collection" so he could rip them apart "for parts". He would pay $5 or $10 per drive.
He always said that he needed drives made in the last 3 years from Seagate / Maxtor / WD.
Just buy an IDE RAID controller that supports mirroring, and stuff 2 cheap IDE drives on it. I did this for one of the people I work with after they had 2 drive failures in a year which toasted all of their tax returns.
Relatively cheap and painless. And less than $500.
Ever tried backing up 400gb+ on CDR? Not an easy task. Fortunately a lot of it could be reloaded, but then again it will take a long time to set everything up again if I have a drive failure.
With hard drives getting as big as they are now, even backing my stuff up on DVD-R is getting cumbersome.
That said, I do back up my critical files (email and the like) about every 6 months or so, but it'll still knock my system out for quite a while if I lose an IDE RAID stripe-set.
There are some other solutions, but they're in the $500-1000 range. Not saying it can't be done, but the cheapo "throw it on a CDR" is not a solution that works for everyone.
They've actually come out and admitted that most of the money they're making is going towards supporting their own infrastructure - paying for offices, heat, employees, legal fees, etc.
Very little (if any) is actually getting to ANY artist, composer or performer.
It's a big scam.
Import your CD-R media from the US and you won't pay any levy on it - Canada customs doesn't collect levies.
Service doesn't exist in Canada for either Sonic or Tivo yet:(. I want one, but it would do me no good to buy one. I know people have managed to hack them to make them work with Canadian channel listings, but that's not the point...
You'd think they'd want to sell more to a country that's under ice and snow and therefore inside watching TV for half the year...
Annoying, but true. People have been so brainwashed into "answering the phone before it stops ringing" that the phone seems to have priority over everything else.
The one that really irks me is when I'm the flesh and blood customer in a store and the clerk dealing with me runs off to answer the phone (and gets trapped into some 5 minute conversation with an idiot) when I'm the one who was there first.
Sorry folks, but if you have a living customer in your store, the person on the phone can call back later. I've called a couple of salespeople on this and it genuinely seemed to surprise them. Likewise, it generally surprises me when they ignore the phone to deal with me first.
I've done this for quite some time after getting flooded with telemarketer calls.
I have a message on my machine saying that ALL incoming calls are recorded and to leave a message. I keep it under 10 seconds so people don't have to wait through a long message.
People who REALLY want to get ahold of my quickly will call my cell phone (unlisted of course). Those who don't have my cell number are not my friends/colleagues, and can leave a message unless I feel like picking up (not likely).
I wonder if it means that the MPAA/RIAA would be buying senators to add DRM (digital restrictions mechanisms) to our bodies now...
All kidding aside though, I'd love for something like this to be available to get rid of my damn too-big keychain. Just being able to have something like a watch which would unlock a locked door, pay for a cola from a vending machine, or automatically pay at the pump when I take the nozzle out of the pump to fill up the car.
Of course SOME people will always pirate stuff to get it for free, but there IS a magic number when it comes to buying things where people will just buy an original rather than deal with the hassle of getting it "for free".
Take a real-life example that actually happened a week ago to a friend of mine:
She found some local electronics store that was selling a new CD she wanted for $5 on a short promotional special. Rather than deal with the hassle of trying to get all the tracks on kazaa, etc. She just dropped $5 and has a nice original CD.
If the CD was $15, she probably would've downloaded it.
Myself, I have all of the tools I need at home to duplicate DVDs (region-free DVD-ROM, software utilities, and a DVD-R drive).
I don't - the reason being the price of DVDs, which is usually reasonable value for the money. Why should I spend hours of time and effort ripping/re-encoding a DVD to make a copy when I can just throw down a $20 and have an original?
My time and effort is worth more than the cost of the DVD, so I just buy it.
So there we have it - at some magical price-point, people WILL buy stuff, if for no other reason than the amount of work it entails to get it elsewhere (and having an original "anything" is nice too).
I trust I need not even comment on software companies like Adobe or Microsoft that sell their products in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, then whine about piracy...
The assumption here of course is that there will be something so irresistable in future generations of Windows and PC hardware that will force people to upgrade even though all their rights are taken away.
Time will prove they are wrong. As soon as my right to do whatever I want with my own hardware declines, I'll stop buying new hardware (until it can be hacked to recover those rights).
I've been running VNC on Windows for quite some time and the built-in JAVA client is great for accessing from remote locations where I might not have a viewer.
That said, I've also paid for another bought another program called RAdmin. It's quite a bit faster than VNC (at least 3.3.3), uses fully encrypted data transfer for all connections, has built-in file transfer, remote shell, and remote shutdown/restart capabilities, and is very small and easy to install. They have a free 30 day evaluation which you might want to have a look at ($35 to buy). Just a very happy customer.
While I use VNC when I'm out of town and want to remote access my machine at work so I can get in from anywhere, when I'm connecting two of my own machines, I use RAdmin for the speed, security and features. Unfortunately RAdmin isn't cross-platform (or an open protocol), so it's somewhat more limited than VNC. Each has their uses.
"And while the iPod has a built-in anti-piracy mechanism that prevents music files from being copied from one computer to another, it has no such protections for software."
It stores music and files seperately, and it won't let you transfer your music out, just other software.
Slashdot Mirror
First a DiVX ;) compatible DVD player... Now a PVR that burns DVDs.
This is gonna be a bad season for "media companies" which can't learn how to take advantage of new media formats...
My reply is late, but incase that was aimed my way, I use a hacked Epson printer that feeds directly off of rather large ink bottles situated beside the printer that I can open-up and top-off as needed.
;P
No razor blades for me
Only if content producers choose to encode their products with DRM technologies. I don't think many people ripping DVDs for the net would do that, do you?
N.
The MPAA will be filling their shorts over this one. But seeing as how DIVX is a totally legit compression codec, I don't think they'll be able to get rid of it either.
These guys will make an absolute FORTUNE selling this device. If it was available right now, I'd be looking for my wallet and ordering one before posting this comment.
As another poster said, hopefully it's easily flash-upgradable to support new codecs and such as they become available.
Why should I care about SCSI? I don't run a server, and I don't care if my applications and data take a couple extra seconds to load?
For the price of the equivilent SCSI system, I can get at the very least 5x the storage on an IDE system. That's plenty of storage AND redundancy.
Don't get me wrong, I used to run all SCSI in my Amiga, and for a while I had SCSI in my PC, but SCSI just can't compete with monster cheap IDE drives.
$799 - Seagate Cheetah 73.4GB SCSI 10,000rpm
$575 - Seagate Cheetah 36.7GB SCSI 15,000rpm
$279 - Western Digital 120.0GB IDE
(cdn OEM prices)
Point.
It's more likely calculating movements the same way an optical mouse is. Just storing direction and distance data by calculating the difference in pattern at a high sampling rate, so it should be able to store quite a lot of it.
Wonder if you could scan the paper in and print your own...
It's possible that the off-white colour is actually florescent or something and the pen might use a UV light source to track the movements.
Seems like the old inkjet / razorblades selling technique. Give them the technology (cheap?) then sell supplies. I won't buy-in to that type of technology.
Ya, everyone who knows me and has their computer blow up seems to feel the same way
Anyone tried playing back full-res (720x480) DIVX 5 from one of these? I'm curious if the transmeta CPU could handle it (and what the battery life would be).
Having an internal DVD-ROM, I assume it can at least play back regular DVD movies.
If I was going to get a laptop, I'd definately go for something like this. Regular laptops are too big and clunky.
That in Tom's article, there wasn't a question (answered anyway), by the manufacturers on how the failure rate changes between 1 year and 3 years.
Sure they gave low return numbers like 8 in 1000, but I'd really like to know how those numbers change toward the 3-year mark instead of just at the 1-year mark.
There was one luser that was posting on local newsgroups a while back and trying to get people to give him their dead harddrives for his "collection" so he could rip them apart "for parts". He would pay $5 or $10 per drive.
:|
He always said that he needed drives made in the last 3 years from Seagate / Maxtor / WD.
Any bets on what he was up to?
Just buy an IDE RAID controller that supports mirroring, and stuff 2 cheap IDE drives on it. I did this for one of the people I work with after they had 2 drive failures in a year which toasted all of their tax returns.
Relatively cheap and painless. And less than $500.
Oh, there are excuses and reasons right now...
Ever tried backing up 400gb+ on CDR? Not an easy task. Fortunately a lot of it could be reloaded, but then again it will take a long time to set everything up again if I have a drive failure.
With hard drives getting as big as they are now, even backing my stuff up on DVD-R is getting cumbersome.
That said, I do back up my critical files (email and the like) about every 6 months or so, but it'll still knock my system out for quite a while if I lose an IDE RAID stripe-set.
There are some other solutions, but they're in the $500-1000 range. Not saying it can't be done, but the cheapo "throw it on a CDR" is not a solution that works for everyone.
Ah yes, the classic "It's expensive, therefore it must be good". Seperating fools from their money since the dawn of time...
The obvious solution here is to have it switch to read-only mode when the beta expires.
At least then people can still get at their data, presumably to move it to the full release version.
Hearing the words "inhibiting access" in the same line as "encrypted data" makes me not want to go anywhere near their product.
Hmm...
New from the makers of "BumFights" (once they get out of jail)...
"BumScience!"
They'll do that now - the replacement disk IS free... They just charge you $20 for shipping and handling...
They've actually come out and admitted that most of the money they're making is going towards supporting their own infrastructure - paying for offices, heat, employees, legal fees, etc.
Very little (if any) is actually getting to ANY artist, composer or performer.
It's a big scam.
Import your CD-R media from the US and you won't pay any levy on it - Canada customs doesn't collect levies.
Ya, well...
:(. I want one, but it would do me no good to buy one. I know people have managed to hack them to make them work with Canadian channel listings, but that's not the point...
Service doesn't exist in Canada for either Sonic or Tivo yet
You'd think they'd want to sell more to a country that's under ice and snow and therefore inside watching TV for half the year...
N.
Bit offtopic, but...
Annoying, but true. People have been so brainwashed into "answering the phone before it stops ringing" that the phone seems to have priority over everything else.
The one that really irks me is when I'm the flesh and blood customer in a store and the clerk dealing with me runs off to answer the phone (and gets trapped into some 5 minute conversation with an idiot) when I'm the one who was there first.
Sorry folks, but if you have a living customer in your store, the person on the phone can call back later. I've called a couple of salespeople on this and it genuinely seemed to surprise them. Likewise, it generally surprises me when they ignore the phone to deal with me first.
N.
I've done this for quite some time after getting flooded with telemarketer calls.
I have a message on my machine saying that ALL incoming calls are recorded and to leave a message. I keep it under 10 seconds so people don't have to wait through a long message.
People who REALLY want to get ahold of my quickly will call my cell phone (unlisted of course). Those who don't have my cell number are not my friends/colleagues, and can leave a message unless I feel like picking up (not likely).
I wonder if it means that the MPAA/RIAA would be buying senators to add DRM (digital restrictions mechanisms) to our bodies now...
All kidding aside though, I'd love for something like this to be available to get rid of my damn too-big keychain. Just being able to have something like a watch which would unlock a locked door, pay for a cola from a vending machine, or automatically pay at the pump when I take the nozzle out of the pump to fill up the car.
N.
Rather a broad judgement don't you think?
Of course SOME people will always pirate stuff to get it for free, but there IS a magic number when it comes to buying things where people will just buy an original rather than deal with the hassle of getting it "for free".
Take a real-life example that actually happened a week ago to a friend of mine:
She found some local electronics store that was selling a new CD she wanted for $5 on a short promotional special. Rather than deal with the hassle of trying to get all the tracks on kazaa, etc. She just dropped $5 and has a nice original CD.
If the CD was $15, she probably would've downloaded it.
Myself, I have all of the tools I need at home to duplicate DVDs (region-free DVD-ROM, software utilities, and a DVD-R drive).
I don't - the reason being the price of DVDs, which is usually reasonable value for the money. Why should I spend hours of time and effort ripping/re-encoding a DVD to make a copy when I can just throw down a $20 and have an original?
My time and effort is worth more than the cost of the DVD, so I just buy it.
So there we have it - at some magical price-point, people WILL buy stuff, if for no other reason than the amount of work it entails to get it elsewhere (and having an original "anything" is nice too).
I trust I need not even comment on software companies like Adobe or Microsoft that sell their products in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, then whine about piracy...
The assumption here of course is that there will be something so irresistable in future generations of Windows and PC hardware that will force people to upgrade even though all their rights are taken away.
Time will prove they are wrong. As soon as my right to do whatever I want with my own hardware declines, I'll stop buying new hardware (until it can be hacked to recover those rights).
I've been running VNC on Windows for quite some time and the built-in JAVA client is great for accessing from remote locations where I might not have a viewer.
That said, I've also paid for another bought another program called RAdmin. It's quite a bit faster than VNC (at least 3.3.3), uses fully encrypted data transfer for all connections, has built-in file transfer, remote shell, and remote shutdown/restart capabilities, and is very small and easy to install. They have a free 30 day evaluation which you might want to have a look at ($35 to buy). Just a very happy customer.
While I use VNC when I'm out of town and want to remote access my machine at work so I can get in from anywhere, when I'm connecting two of my own machines, I use RAdmin for the speed, security and features. Unfortunately RAdmin isn't cross-platform (or an open protocol), so it's somewhat more limited than VNC. Each has their uses.
I explain it like this (from your link BTW):
"And while the iPod has a built-in anti-piracy mechanism that prevents music files from being copied from one computer to another, it has no such protections for software."
It stores music and files seperately, and it won't let you transfer your music out, just other software.