The thing that has a lot of the anti-DRM people up in arms about Blu-Ray is how it will enable content companies to change the software on their player, and other evil things about that. However..
HD-DVD MUST allow you to make AT LEAST ONE COPY. This is something that current DVD's don't even let you do (legally.) For this reason alone, i am switching my support from Blu-Ray to HD-DVD (and I suggest that the consortium advertise this. say "blu-ray wont even let you do what you want with the content you own!"). Besides, if it can be shared at least once, theres nothing that says we can't create some software to let us copy it more than once...
Last year, UConn, my college, had a privacy breach where lots of SSN's were leaked. This year, they've made a committee to figure out ways in which they can remove SSN's from as many internal processes as possible.
Last year, a student's ID was their SSN. Now, it's an ID assigned by our peoplesoft system. If i forget my ID at, oh say, the campus book store *shudder*, they can't look it up w/ my social. Like I said, good things can sometimes come out of these events.
Google apparently has a system like this in their labs, and entered it into some national competetion, where it pwned everyone else. Apparently, the system learned how to translate to/from chinese extremely well, without any of the people working on the project knowing the language.
I live in the USA, and I use it all the time at my high school. Why? My high school thinks it prudent to block many sites such as hackaday.com and coxandorkum.com. I also used it when I was in china to bypass the great firewall to check my evil capitalist college email.
I think that if anyone is being blocked from visitng any site, anywhere, they should use this to show how stupid and ineffective filters are, especially in schools. Why bother to educate responsibility on the internet when you can force it on kids!
Sounds like a PR firm made the info page here...
on
Longhorn Beta Begins
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Reading this makes me want to punch myself in the face with all of the marketing-speak.
Avalon: new opportunities for developing exciting applications while reducing complexity
Indigo: radically simplifies how the next generation of connected systems will be built.
AERO: a new design philosophy that delivers a compelling user experience from the moment users start interacting with the computer to the moment they leave.
Compelling? I don't want my UI to be a driving force or something like that. I want it to be easy and simple. Exciting applications? When was the last time that Microsoft Excel got your blood pumping and you wanted to scream HELL YEA! THIS IS AWESOME!!
Catching up using eye candy?
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Okay, from what I see about this beta, Microsoft is using the eye candy just for that, to show everyone how aweseome Longhorn is because your titlebars are semi-transparent. OOO! I'm totally uprading because of that!
Looks like it will cause some nastyy readability problems. Apple uses eye candy in OS X for a reason! the windows suck down to the dock so you can see where they went. The active window has shadows to let you know its the active window. Users change with a cube flip because its easier on their brains. I'm afraid that this would do nothing but chew up processor resources with crap that I don't find useful. Expect a lot of eyecandy-disabling apps to come out very quickly.
Turned on my grandparents tv set the other day, and I found that there isnt much going on up in UHF, with the exception of PAX and the HSN. I say, move as many channels to VHF, and move any remaining UHF channels to the bottom of the spectrum, and free up the rest. I know that VHF may be filled in some densely populated areas, but I've never known a place with like 30 or 40 UHF channels.
Look, the thing that always amazes me is that people are very willing to learn how to drive a car well, learn what all the parts are in it and how to fix it, but when it comes to a computer, one would think that they would at least learn a bit about how to do simple fixing tasks on it. While you can partly blame some things on poor design and documentation, when it comes down to it people still have a responsibility to at least learn the basics about what the hell they are doing.
This whole CSS and IE7 issue has shown that MSFT is worried about the threat that projects like these pose. Even if Firefox has a lot of support, its installed user base is still very small. MSFT has 90% of the market, logically why should they care enough about that small 6% of market that won't use their product? If they thought that the fox doesn't pose a threat, then they wouldn't spend millions of dollars crafting a new browser, spending the time to make sure that it works on all different types of computers, etc. But this just proves that they do.
The DRM key is like entering the password to get into your router. It won't secure the data that you transfer, it just restricts access. I think that the Roxio software is just so people can do one-click recordings to DVD.
Looks from the initial poking around on the TiVO website, that the MPEG-2 files aren't DRMed, and that the key is only needed to authorize the connection to the tivo. If this is true then it should make an OS X client a lot easier to create.
Score one point for not copping out to DRM when it could have (yes I know that it wont let you transfer some things, but in exchange for non-drmed files?)
Look, the problem with these companies is that they are concentrating too much on physical design and low cost. They don't realize the fact that the reason why many people buy iPods, even if they cost more, is that they are much easier to install and use than their products. An iPod (on macs at least), there is only one step: Plug into firewire port. Thats it. No need to mess with drivers or install difficult mp3 players on your PC.
To be honest, I know that this is a great distro, but it doesn't need that much attention on slashdot. Seems like there have been 5 reviews already. If I wanted all of that info I would go to OS News.
To be honest, they are using technologies that have been in use in schools and many other places for a long time. It looks like most of what they are doing is letting everyone get a better look at the evidence by aiming a camera at it, and networking the court's stenographer. This kind of stuff isn't really newsworthy to me, as we've been using the same kind of technology at my high school for over four years.
However, at least they're providing a users manual for the thing. I've seen quite a few teachers waste time with technology that they don't know how to deal with, and IT people who dont feel like taking the time out to ensure that things are setup correctly in the first place.
Those apps were taken off of the Color Sidekick because they didnt have the licenses for them. Danger snapped up the first online forum devoted because they wanted an already active community so they could spread the word. People bitch about that phone all the time on that forum. people have gone on huge rants on various things, so I dont think that Danger is really trying to control all the things said about their phones.
actually, someone did write a screen scraper for windows. Sadly, it's no longer supported, and t-mobile tweaked the page slightly so that it no longer works.
Me. I'm a kid in high school without any need to access my 'corporate email'. I can, and will IM people wherever. The biggest thing, however, is the web browsing ability. I found my way to a party at this girl's house that i didnt know the address of, only her name. so i did a whitepages search, used mobile mapquest to get there.
Of course, on the way there, I remembered that I was at her house once fixing her dad's computer, and put her address in my cell phone. I could've scrolled to her name, clicked 'map this location' from the address book.
The Treo 300 is a good compeditor, and has some advantages over the Sidekick, such as thousands of apps. however, it doesnt have the backend proxy which compresses and reformats webpages so its a lot faster.
Gaming? I don't care for it. It sucks up battery life. If I want gaming, i'll get a GameBoy. More apps on a platform that was designed for gaming.
I use the terminal on my Sidekick. It rules so far, but there is a gotcha. If you type anything in, it takes about 3-5 seconds to echo. You can type things into a box and have it send all at once, but its a bit of a hassle. still really cool and ultra-useful if you're a sysadmin. restarting a server remotely in the middle of a movie is ultra-cool
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that has a lot of the anti-DRM people up in arms about Blu-Ray is how it will enable content companies to change the software on their player, and other evil things about that. However..
HD-DVD MUST allow you to make AT LEAST ONE COPY. This is something that current DVD's don't even let you do (legally.) For this reason alone, i am switching my support from Blu-Ray to HD-DVD (and I suggest that the consortium advertise this. say "blu-ray wont even let you do what you want with the content you own!"). Besides, if it can be shared at least once, theres nothing that says we can't create some software to let us copy it more than once...
It's called Steam. It's been done microsoft.
Tor anyone? Free and random, and no need to worry about some privacy policy.
Last year, UConn, my college, had a privacy breach where lots of SSN's were leaked. This year, they've made a committee to figure out ways in which they can remove SSN's from as many internal processes as possible.
Last year, a student's ID was their SSN. Now, it's an ID assigned by our peoplesoft system. If i forget my ID at, oh say, the campus book store *shudder*, they can't look it up w/ my social. Like I said, good things can sometimes come out of these events.
Google apparently has a system like this in their labs, and entered it into some national competetion, where it pwned everyone else. Apparently, the system learned how to translate to/from chinese extremely well, without any of the people working on the project knowing the language.
its called being accepted into college and getting a college email
I live in the USA, and I use it all the time at my high school. Why? My high school thinks it prudent to block many sites such as hackaday.com and coxandorkum.com. I also used it when I was in china to bypass the great firewall to check my evil capitalist college email.
I think that if anyone is being blocked from visitng any site, anywhere, they should use this to show how stupid and ineffective filters are, especially in schools. Why bother to educate responsibility on the internet when you can force it on kids!
Reading this makes me want to punch myself in the face with all of the marketing-speak.
Avalon: new opportunities for developing exciting applications while reducing complexity
Indigo: radically simplifies how the next generation of connected systems will be built.
AERO: a new design philosophy that delivers a compelling user experience from the moment users start interacting with the computer to the moment they leave.
Compelling? I don't want my UI to be a driving force or something like that. I want it to be easy and simple. Exciting applications? When was the last time that Microsoft Excel got your blood pumping and you wanted to scream HELL YEA! THIS IS AWESOME!!
Okay, from what I see about this beta, Microsoft is using the eye candy just for that, to show everyone how aweseome Longhorn is because your titlebars are semi-transparent. OOO! I'm totally uprading because of that!
Looks like it will cause some nastyy readability problems. Apple uses eye candy in OS X for a reason! the windows suck down to the dock so you can see where they went. The active window has shadows to let you know its the active window. Users change with a cube flip because its easier on their brains. I'm afraid that this would do nothing but chew up processor resources with crap that I don't find useful. Expect a lot of eyecandy-disabling apps to come out very quickly.
According to the detective: the company provided logs that he had been accessing CVS with his IBM Powerbook. 'nuff said.
Turned on my grandparents tv set the other day, and I found that there isnt much going on up in UHF, with the exception of PAX and the HSN. I say, move as many channels to VHF, and move any remaining UHF channels to the bottom of the spectrum, and free up the rest. I know that VHF may be filled in some densely populated areas, but I've never known a place with like 30 or 40 UHF channels.
Look, the thing that always amazes me is that people are very willing to learn how to drive a car well, learn what all the parts are in it and how to fix it, but when it comes to a computer, one would think that they would at least learn a bit about how to do simple fixing tasks on it. While you can partly blame some things on poor design and documentation, when it comes down to it people still have a responsibility to at least learn the basics about what the hell they are doing.
Funny, someone from Apple was a bit bored during one flight, so they fired up iChat AV and had a videoconference at 30,000 feet, and it was fine.
This whole CSS and IE7 issue has shown that MSFT is worried about the threat that projects like these pose. Even if Firefox has a lot of support, its installed user base is still very small. MSFT has 90% of the market, logically why should they care enough about that small 6% of market that won't use their product? If they thought that the fox doesn't pose a threat, then they wouldn't spend millions of dollars crafting a new browser, spending the time to make sure that it works on all different types of computers, etc. But this just proves that they do.
The DRM key is like entering the password to get into your router. It won't secure the data that you transfer, it just restricts access. I think that the Roxio software is just so people can do one-click recordings to DVD.
Looks from the initial poking around on the TiVO website, that the MPEG-2 files aren't DRMed, and that the key is only needed to authorize the connection to the tivo. If this is true then it should make an OS X client a lot easier to create.
Score one point for not copping out to DRM when it could have (yes I know that it wont let you transfer some things, but in exchange for non-drmed files?)
Look, the problem with these companies is that they are concentrating too much on physical design and low cost. They don't realize the fact that the reason why many people buy iPods, even if they cost more, is that they are much easier to install and use than their products. An iPod (on macs at least), there is only one step: Plug into firewire port. Thats it. No need to mess with drivers or install difficult mp3 players on your PC.
Mirror at http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/c8e667c8388471455 0446f30649107d6/index.html Mirrordot.
To be honest, I know that this is a great distro, but it doesn't need that much attention on slashdot. Seems like there have been 5 reviews already. If I wanted all of that info I would go to OS News.
To be honest, they are using technologies that have been in use in schools and many other places for a long time. It looks like most of what they are doing is letting everyone get a better look at the evidence by aiming a camera at it, and networking the court's stenographer. This kind of stuff isn't really newsworthy to me, as we've been using the same kind of technology at my high school for over four years.
However, at least they're providing a users manual for the thing. I've seen quite a few teachers waste time with technology that they don't know how to deal with, and IT people who dont feel like taking the time out to ensure that things are setup correctly in the first place.
Sounds kinda like someone paid Slashdot to put this on. Looks too much like a press release for my taste
Perhaps these corporations should get GMail
yea uuuhhh... no.
Those apps were taken off of the Color Sidekick because they didnt have the licenses for them. Danger snapped up the first online forum devoted because they wanted an already active community so they could spread the word. People bitch about that phone all the time on that forum. people have gone on huge rants on various things, so I dont think that Danger is really trying to control all the things said about their phones.
actually, someone did write a screen scraper for windows. Sadly, it's no longer supported, and t-mobile tweaked the page slightly so that it no longer works.
Who's it designed for?
Me. I'm a kid in high school without any need to access my 'corporate email'. I can, and will IM people wherever. The biggest thing, however, is the web browsing ability. I found my way to a party at this girl's house that i didnt know the address of, only her name. so i did a whitepages search, used mobile mapquest to get there.
Of course, on the way there, I remembered that I was at her house once fixing her dad's computer, and put her address in my cell phone. I could've scrolled to her name, clicked 'map this location' from the address book.
The Treo 300 is a good compeditor, and has some advantages over the Sidekick, such as thousands of apps. however, it doesnt have the backend proxy which compresses and reformats webpages so its a lot faster.
Gaming? I don't care for it. It sucks up battery life. If I want gaming, i'll get a GameBoy. More apps on a platform that was designed for gaming.
I use the terminal on my Sidekick. It rules so far, but there is a gotcha. If you type anything in, it takes about 3-5 seconds to echo. You can type things into a box and have it send all at once, but its a bit of a hassle. still really cool and ultra-useful if you're a sysadmin. restarting a server remotely in the middle of a movie is ultra-cool