I've been doing contract work for various companies for the past 5 years. I pay for my own health insurance, etc., which is fine by me -- I'm getting paid more than I would if I were an employee. The company I work for does not hire me as a contractor to get around taxes (my W-2 proxy agency certainly has to pay all the usual payroll taxes, and these costs are passed on to the company), and everyone is happy. Every company I've contracted for has tried to hire me full-time, but I've turned all of them down. (only 2-3 weeks of vacation a year does not cut it for me.)
These wannabe-employee contractors just ruin it for the rest of us. I have to put up with all sorts of bizarre requirements now because these lawsuits have made companies contractor-shy.
The only Baxter book I've read is _The Light of Other Days_, and I was left with an impression similar to the one you describe. (To be fair, this book was co-written by Arthur C. Clarke, and I'm not sure what each author contributed.)
The characters seemed bland, cardboard, and stereotyped. The basic concept of the book was interesting, though.
I'll probably give Baxter another shot, since people speak highly of him, and I wouldn't want to judge him with one data point.
The C64 itself did not come with schematics, but the invaluable and mandatory _C64 Programmer's Reference Guide_ provided a schematic. Mmmmmm, the C64PRG... that was one well-worn book when I was a kid.
In some cases involving multimedia hardware, it is in a hardware manufacturer's best interest to withhold information and support for open-source platforms. In the absence of free software support for their hardware, they can charge very large sums of money for driver software and support to consumer electronics manufacturers with deep pockets. (Open source platforms such as Linux and BSD are extremely popular in the consumer electronics world.)
3. Set resolution to 720x480x32bit. (if you use windows it'll be under "list all modes", you can double click to set it.)
4. Set flicker filter to 'none', overscan to maximum, refresh at 60hz.
Will this generate a 1:1 scanline mapping? I do have a Geforce card, although my experience has been that cranking up the overscan (with the linux nvtv utility) does not guarantee that every framebuffer line will correspond to an NTSC signal line on the tv-out output.
I bought a Phillips DVP642 DVD player a while back, and was rather disappointed. I've recorded a great deal of content with FFmpeg (with VBR mp3), and very little of it would play well on this box. I ended up getting rid of the box. (And I did upgrade the box to the latest firmware.)
My main annoyance with PC tv-out's (i.e. the one on my MythTV box) is that they don't provide 1:1 scanline mapping output of the video. In other words, the video card provides you with a framebuffer of arbitrary size (640x480, 800x600, etc.) and maps that into about 400 or so lines of NTSC output. In other words, it destructively scales the image and breaks the ability to show true interlaced content. It's possible to "overscan" the output, but this in no way guarantees a 1:1 scanline mapping. I do have a PVR350, which does have a proper 1:1 scanline mapping, but the last time I tried using it for general video output (i.e. playing MPEG4 files with mplayer), it was not fast enough to keep up. It's incredible for playing back MPEG2 content with the decoder, though.
If the LinkPlayer works well and has a proper, well-designed TV out, it may be worth looking into.
Didn't it seem *suspicious* to you that somebody had registered it minutes before?...
What was the site you used to check/register your new domain?
I didn't use a web site to check/register the domain. I used the command-line whois program to query the availability, and submitted a registration form to Network Solutions via email.
The people who registered my town's name seemed to have registered a ton of other city names as well. I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that Network Solutions could have been up to no good, but I doubt it. The Internet was a lot more innocent back in 1997.
Being able to download the technology powering the Google search engine must be the dream of every competing search engine. Maybe this will even result in a free software version which may replace 'locate' and 'htdig' on linux.
I think that sufficient open-source search technology already exists to build a reasonable desktop search application. All that's needed is enough motivated people to scrape together enough tuits to put the pieces together.
The Lucene search engine library is astoundingly fast, compared to other tools like htdig and mnogosearch. I've occasionally contemplated writing a Lucene-based desktop search application. This google desktop search program may greatly reduce my motivation for such a project, though.
I just sent "pizza.80203" to 46645 and I received the google results as two text message replies. I have a Motorola v60 phone with Verizon service. Maybe there's something weird with your phone?
Now it makes you wonder why Google registered gbrowser.com?
Because every business likes to keep its options open?
I think you're right on the money. I learned something important a long time ago:
If you ever think you may possibly want a domain name for some obscure reason at some unknown point in the future, then waste no time in registering it immediately. Even if you end up not using the domain, the $10 (or whatever) makes this a very minimal risk. You can always let it return to the pool of available domain names later, if you decide you definately don't need it.
I learned this the hard way -- back in 1997, I was thinking about registering the.com domain name of my town to make a web site, but I kept putting it off. When I finally got around to registering it, the registration failed because someone else had submitted a registration form for it minutes before I did. And the person who registered it lived hundreds of miles away, to boot!
I'm sure that even if some Google guys were just yapping about a browser over lunch, someone probably had the sense to register the domain... just in case.
I agree with another poster that this is not a very good review.
The author advises against the use of the coax input. I think it's obvious that anybody with a digital cable box or satellite recevier will be using s-video or composite inputs to this device. Those of us with analog cable or antenna (without a cable box) will use the coax input, of course.
Referring to component video as "aka RCA" is a bit confusing. Component video may use RCA plugs (I've never had a component setup; I'm just guessing), but so does composite video.
The device apparantly does not have video compression hardware onboard, and the reviewer regards this as a feature, because "most of today's PC video compression parts still need work." I, for one, would much rather have an onboard MPEG2 video encoder (an MPEG4 encoder would be even sweeter, but these don't seem to quite be commodity parts yet.) I'm not sure why the reviewer regards video encoding hardware to be sub-par, but I've had excellent results with my PVR350. Not perfect, but much better than dropping frames when my computer is too busy doing something else to service a capture interrupt (*). I was actually pretty disappointed to realize that the device's advertised "capture video in MPEG4 format" actually just meant that they would supply software for the encoding.
(* I suppose that since this is a USB device, raw video would be captured as a stream instead of via capture framebuffer interrupts, but I could still think of better things to do with my CPU cycles and USB bandwidth.)
This review of a review brought to you by: being awake at 4:30am!
Google has the resources to make their own instant messenging network. Google using jabber for an IM network would be great. It would be a lot easier to convert somebody to "Google Messenger" than "Jabber".
This is true! It would be great if Google decided to take on an IM project.
Google probably has their hands full these days, though, so it wouldn't hurt to have a contingency plan.
On the other hand if Jabber does get up to a reasonable population, enough to "threaten" Yahoo, and Yahoo did lock them out, then Yahoo's user count would be severely impacted to the point where all the people leaving it might make everyone remaining on, even less likely to stay.
Could be. Although Yahoo doesn't seem to be terribly worried about their users not being able to communicate with MSN and AIM users via the Yahoo IM.
This is true, but the other services only have one server each, and they don't seem to have a problem. I suspect what we really need are bigger servers, and for ISPs to give their clients Jabber servers! After all, ISPs give out email accounts.
This is the best solution, although I'm guessing a lot of ISPs would grumble at the idea of supporting yet another service, when there is no preexisting demand for it. Most ISPs have their hands full with just the basic services, and if anything would like to eliminate or outsource services. (NNTP, for example, is often a favorite service to try to outsource.)
However, I bet we could make Jabber a little sweeter by putting together an easy-to-install, easy-to-maintain, minimal-effort jabberd package. Such a package could be managed from a web interface, as well as provide a web interface for domain owners to manage their users. Simple integration with existing authentication schemes (UNIX passwd, LDAP, RADIUS, etc.) would be helpful, too. If such a package was trivially easy to install, had a near-zero maintenance burden, and offered a useful value-add service that the ISP could advertise, some just might go for it.
I should run this by my friends in the ISP business, and get their reactions...
[For the purposes of this discussion I will ignore Neos, a Jabber client which already provides audio and video chat, as you have also ignored it.]
I didn't know about Neos. I should check it out.
It's bad enough that idiot companies have made consumers think that video and voice chat are even in the category of IM. They're not!
Multimedia services are not message-based, but they are services that could benefit greatly from a message-based rendezvous protocol.
I don't think that just developing a Jabber client that can launch a teleconferencing program is good enough, though. Jabber client authors should agree on which teleconferencing standards to use, so users don't have to think about which specific client the other person is using.
That being said, integration with other applications to perform said features is a good idea. I'm currently playing around with Skype and I think it would be a trivial matter to hook it into Psi for the purpose of providing voice chat. The obvious advantage of using a single app for voice chat is that no matter where you fire it up from (via Jabber messages, email messages, links passed on IRC, etc.), it works the same way. Nobody should be reinventing the wheel, particularly when the axle to fit it onto the new chassis is so cheap.
The multimedia/teleconferencing components could be written as reusable components, which could be both embedded in the Jabber client and present as a standalone application, for the best of both worlds.
I've been using IM extensively for 13 years. Even before the term "instant messaging" was coined, there was the UNIX write(1) and talk(1) programs, MIT's Zephyr, Novell Netware's send.exe, etc. It is a shame that IM has developed as a collection of incompatible, proprietary networks, when the technology of not-so-instant-messaging (NSIM, more commonly known as "e-mail") has proven that a distributed, open system can work well. How can we win back IM?
Many of my fellow posters have suggested that the solution is for people to switch to Jabber. I agree that the solution should start with Jabber, but it's not as easy as asking everyone to please switch.
I'm going to try to identify the obstacles to a migration to open standards, and I hope that others will expand on this and maybe even offer some solutions.
Other posters have pointed out that the resource requirements of IM are trivial, and thus proprietary IM providers are actually providing very little. What they are forgetting is that the value is in the network. Having a network that has expanded to include millions of people is a valuable resource. Jabber does not have this established network. If Jabber does begin gaining ground, you can expect that Yahoo and the gang will declare war on the Jabber gateways' interoperability.
It is hard to bootstrap a distributed service, when so (relatively) few people are running Jabber servers. Convincing millions of people to sign up for accounts on a handful of public servers is a recipe for disaster. Unreliable servers, such as development testbed servers or hobbyist basement servers, will leave people with a bad impression of Jabber. (I've heard people complain that Jabber is unstable, and I tell them that it's not Jabber's fault -- my Jabber server is very stable!)
How do you convince ISPs to begin deploying Jabber servers as they would deploy mail servers? Is there any money to be made in deploying and operating a worldwide network of Jabber servers? If so, maybe some entrepreneur could come up with a clever idea for bootstrapping the network.
Jabber does not currently provide all the fancy bells and whistles that proprietary IM clients provide, such as audio/video chat. This is the easiest obstacle to overcome; we simply have to provide those features. SMOP -- Simple Matter Of Programming!
As some people have mentioned, it is possible that IM may evolve interoperability naturally, but I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. The final weapon of the proprietary IM providers will be to add crypto authentication to the protocol, with a key embedded into the clients. They would then have a solid legal recourse (DMCA) against "rogue" clients seeking interoperability. (Who knows, though... that could be a useful selling point for open standards!)
There... now that I've identified the problems, all that's left is for someone to provide the solutions.;)
Add all the MX records of your ISP's domain to your own MX records, but put them all at a much lower priority. I assume...
I would not recommend that. If your mail server goes down for any reason, your ISP's mail servers will begin receiving mail destined for your domain... and of course, bouncing them.
One of the worst things, though, about having a "catch all" address on a domain, is that you receive all the bounces from forged spam that's using your domain.
I get tons of bounces from spam to things like: jsdjfqwnc@[mydomain.com].
My primary mail domain is not configured to be catch-all, but I have a subdomain which is. In other words, I use addresses like newyorktimes@subdomain.mydomain.com, and I'm not bothered by dictionary attacks or forged mail bounces to jsdjfqwnc@mydomain.com.
Spammers don't know about that subdomain to dictionary attack it, and if they did, I could just remove that entire subdomain from the DNS without any serious inconvenience.
I think the parent poster is asking why these new DVD+R DL discs are only capable of storing 8.5GB (7.95 real GB?) of data, as opposed to the 9GB or so that we usually hear of "pressed" movie discs holding.
This was confusing me, too, but I found
this chart in the DVD FAQ which does seem to indicate that pressed dual layer DVDs are also limited to 7.95GB.
Can any DVD experts confirm that pressed dual layer discs have the same storage capacity as DVD+R DL discs?
There's nothing politically incorrect about the term "text adventure". The original poster was just being silly. I use the term "text adventure" all the time, to refer to this broad genre of games.
However, the term "interactive fiction" implies a much higher standard of quality, probably because Infocom popularized the term and their games were clearly more sophisticated than most others of the time. From the opening sequence to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it looks like Infocom was using the term "interactive fiction" at least as far back as 1984:
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Infocom interactive fiction - a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Release 59 / Serial number 851108
I'm sure there were some good non-Infocom games from the era, but I do recall quite a few really horrible games which had awful parsers and gameplay. You would type "TAKE THE STICK", and the game would reply "Sorry, I don't know what a 'the' is." I'd say that these games probably classify as text adventures, but are not up to the standards of Infocom's "interactive fiction".
(And, as another poster pointed out, not all interactive fiction games are adventures.)
Infocom's Z Machine bytecode interpreter was a truly awesome idea! It's great being able to play the same game on just about any platform. A few years ago, I played through the entirety of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a Palm Pilot while riding the bus back and forth between Boulder and Denver.
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I've been doing contract work for various companies for the past 5 years. I pay for my own health insurance, etc., which is fine by me -- I'm getting paid more than I would if I were an employee. The company I work for does not hire me as a contractor to get around taxes (my W-2 proxy agency certainly has to pay all the usual payroll taxes, and these costs are passed on to the company), and everyone is happy. Every company I've contracted for has tried to hire me full-time, but I've turned all of them down. (only 2-3 weeks of vacation a year does not cut it for me.)
These wannabe-employee contractors just ruin it for the rest of us. I have to put up with all sorts of bizarre requirements now because these lawsuits have made companies contractor-shy.
The characters seemed bland, cardboard, and stereotyped. The basic concept of the book was interesting, though.
I'll probably give Baxter another shot, since people speak highly of him, and I wouldn't want to judge him with one data point.
A good resource is Wi-Fi-FreeSpot. I, too, travel around the US a lot, and usually try to find free wi-fi. This site helps greatly.
The C64 itself did not come with schematics, but the invaluable and mandatory _C64 Programmer's Reference Guide_ provided a schematic. Mmmmmm, the C64PRG... that was one well-worn book when I was a kid.
I've personally seen this happen. :/
Will this generate a 1:1 scanline mapping? I do have a Geforce card, although my experience has been that cranking up the overscan (with the linux nvtv utility) does not guarantee that every framebuffer line will correspond to an NTSC signal line on the tv-out output.
My main annoyance with PC tv-out's (i.e. the one on my MythTV box) is that they don't provide 1:1 scanline mapping output of the video. In other words, the video card provides you with a framebuffer of arbitrary size (640x480, 800x600, etc.) and maps that into about 400 or so lines of NTSC output. In other words, it destructively scales the image and breaks the ability to show true interlaced content. It's possible to "overscan" the output, but this in no way guarantees a 1:1 scanline mapping. I do have a PVR350, which does have a proper 1:1 scanline mapping, but the last time I tried using it for general video output (i.e. playing MPEG4 files with mplayer), it was not fast enough to keep up. It's incredible for playing back MPEG2 content with the decoder, though.
If the LinkPlayer works well and has a proper, well-designed TV out, it may be worth looking into.
The people who registered my town's name seemed to have registered a ton of other city names as well. I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that Network Solutions could have been up to no good, but I doubt it. The Internet was a lot more innocent back in 1997.
The Lucene search engine library is astoundingly fast, compared to other tools like htdig and mnogosearch. I've occasionally contemplated writing a Lucene-based desktop search application. This google desktop search program may greatly reduce my motivation for such a project, though.
I just sent "pizza.80203" to 46645 and I received the google results as two text message replies. I have a Motorola v60 phone with Verizon service. Maybe there's something weird with your phone?
I think you're right on the money. I learned something important a long time ago:
If you ever think you may possibly want a domain name for some obscure reason at some unknown point in the future, then waste no time in registering it immediately. Even if you end up not using the domain, the $10 (or whatever) makes this a very minimal risk. You can always let it return to the pool of available domain names later, if you decide you definately don't need it.
I learned this the hard way -- back in 1997, I was thinking about registering the .com domain name of my town to make a web site, but I kept putting it off. When I finally got around to registering it, the registration failed because someone else had submitted a registration form for it minutes before I did. And the person who registered it lived hundreds of miles away, to boot!
I'm sure that even if some Google guys were just yapping about a browser over lunch, someone probably had the sense to register the domain... just in case.
The author advises against the use of the coax input. I think it's obvious that anybody with a digital cable box or satellite recevier will be using s-video or composite inputs to this device. Those of us with analog cable or antenna (without a cable box) will use the coax input, of course.
Referring to component video as "aka RCA" is a bit confusing. Component video may use RCA plugs (I've never had a component setup; I'm just guessing), but so does composite video.
The device apparantly does not have video compression hardware onboard, and the reviewer regards this as a feature, because "most of today's PC video compression parts still need work." I, for one, would much rather have an onboard MPEG2 video encoder (an MPEG4 encoder would be even sweeter, but these don't seem to quite be commodity parts yet.) I'm not sure why the reviewer regards video encoding hardware to be sub-par, but I've had excellent results with my PVR350. Not perfect, but much better than dropping frames when my computer is too busy doing something else to service a capture interrupt (*). I was actually pretty disappointed to realize that the device's advertised "capture video in MPEG4 format" actually just meant that they would supply software for the encoding.
(* I suppose that since this is a USB device, raw video would be captured as a stream instead of via capture framebuffer interrupts, but I could still think of better things to do with my CPU cycles and USB bandwidth.)
This review of a review brought to you by: being awake at 4:30am!
This is true! It would be great if Google decided to take on an IM project.
Google probably has their hands full these days, though, so it wouldn't hurt to have a contingency plan.
However, I bet we could make Jabber a little sweeter by putting together an easy-to-install, easy-to-maintain, minimal-effort jabberd package. Such a package could be managed from a web interface, as well as provide a web interface for domain owners to manage their users. Simple integration with existing authentication schemes (UNIX passwd, LDAP, RADIUS, etc.) would be helpful, too. If such a package was trivially easy to install, had a near-zero maintenance burden, and offered a useful value-add service that the ISP could advertise, some just might go for it.
I should run this by my friends in the ISP business, and get their reactions...
I didn't know about Neos. I should check it out. Multimedia services are not message-based, but they are services that could benefit greatly from a message-based rendezvous protocol.I don't think that just developing a Jabber client that can launch a teleconferencing program is good enough, though. Jabber client authors should agree on which teleconferencing standards to use, so users don't have to think about which specific client the other person is using.
The multimedia/teleconferencing components could be written as reusable components, which could be both embedded in the Jabber client and present as a standalone application, for the best of both worlds.Many of my fellow posters have suggested that the solution is for people to switch to Jabber. I agree that the solution should start with Jabber, but it's not as easy as asking everyone to please switch.
I'm going to try to identify the obstacles to a migration to open standards, and I hope that others will expand on this and maybe even offer some solutions.
How do you convince ISPs to begin deploying Jabber servers as they would deploy mail servers? Is there any money to be made in deploying and operating a worldwide network of Jabber servers? If so, maybe some entrepreneur could come up with a clever idea for bootstrapping the network.
As some people have mentioned, it is possible that IM may evolve interoperability naturally, but I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. The final weapon of the proprietary IM providers will be to add crypto authentication to the protocol, with a key embedded into the clients. They would then have a solid legal recourse (DMCA) against "rogue" clients seeking interoperability. (Who knows, though... that could be a useful selling point for open standards!)
There... now that I've identified the problems, all that's left is for someone to provide the solutions. ;)
Spammers don't know about that subdomain to dictionary attack it, and if they did, I could just remove that entire subdomain from the DNS without any serious inconvenience.
This was confusing me, too, but I found this chart in the DVD FAQ which does seem to indicate that pressed dual layer DVDs are also limited to 7.95GB.
Can any DVD experts confirm that pressed dual layer discs have the same storage capacity as DVD+R DL discs?
You can download CVSNT from this web site.
However, the term "interactive fiction" implies a much higher standard of quality, probably because Infocom popularized the term and their games were clearly more sophisticated than most others of the time. From the opening sequence to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it looks like Infocom was using the term "interactive fiction" at least as far back as 1984:
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Infocom interactive fiction - a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Release 59 / Serial number 851108
I'm sure there were some good non-Infocom games from the era, but I do recall quite a few really horrible games which had awful parsers and gameplay. You would type "TAKE THE STICK", and the game would reply "Sorry, I don't know what a 'the' is." I'd say that these games probably classify as text adventures, but are not up to the standards of Infocom's "interactive fiction".
(And, as another poster pointed out, not all interactive fiction games are adventures.)
Infocom's Z Machine bytecode interpreter was a truly awesome idea! It's great being able to play the same game on just about any platform. A few years ago, I played through the entirety of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a Palm Pilot while riding the bus back and forth between Boulder and Denver.
It can be done. I really like the size and feel of this Samsung i500 PalmOS phone.
Cool! I'll definately have to check that out, sometime.