I've heard that online file sharing has led to DVD's making it into the rental stores much sooner after the theatrical release than used to happen. That means people are getting to rent DVD's while the movie is still sort of fresh. The rental places can only benefit from that.
I've also heard that movie theaters are in far more trouble from video rentals than they could possibly be from file sharing. Who wants to go to some sticky-floor theater and eat overpriced greasy popcorn and pay $10 per person for tickets when you can rent a DVD and watch it on your home theater with your friends for less than the price of one ticket? Viewers are starting to figure that out.
These days I hardly ever go see big-release movies in the theater. I saw Spiderman and LOTR 1 and that's about it. Oh yeah, Attack of the Clones because a friend dragged me to the theater. I haven't seen LOTR 2 yet and I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I'm going to wait for a DVD rental.
If that puts another nail into the MPAA's coffin, I'm all for it.
I wonder if the divx video or Vorbis audio encoders could be ported to the PS2. They are heavy number crunching, cpu hungry programs. Oggenc runs faster than real time on a fast pc, but nowhere near as fast as a fast CD ripping drive. I don't think divx can run in real time even on the fastest pc's. A cluster of ps2's may be a cheap way to do a lot of cd-to-vorbis ripping or DVD to divx conversions in a hurry!
There were some rumors a while back that HP printer drivers inserted the printer serial number or some other identifier (like a Windows GUID) into color prints in a way that could be read back later by scanning with the right software, but wasn't visible just from looking at the print. Experiments and queries to HP were inconclusive. It doesn't seem to affect black and white printers.
Sort of related: HP now offers invisible ink for inkjet printers viewable only under UV or IR light, intended to print stuff like tracking barcode on financial documents without customers noticing them (so shred all your junk mail, not just stuff with visible account numbers, since you don't know what might be printed invisibly on it). Maybe that's another way they can surreptitiously tag the output of color printers. Your printer specs say the inkjet print head has 48 dots? Have you ever actually counted them? Maybe they'll add an unannounced 49th dot that squirts invisible ink on the paper, and a tiny amount of invisible ink in a secret chamber of every cartridge. Yeah! That's the real reason the govt wants to extend the DMCA ban third-party inkjet refills, so they can keep tracing printer output back to its source! Tinfoil hat time...:)
A bare bones Pentium 3 or Athlon box doesn't cost that much more than a PS2 and runs at maybe 1.5 ghz. I think it can do an SSE2 operation (like a 4 point MAC) in 2 cycles, or is it 1 cycle? Since the clock speed is 5x the PS2, the overall throughput should be at least as fast and maybe a lot faster.
The difference is for someone to examine serial numbers, you have to actually take the bills out of your wallet and let them look at them. RFID can be read from a distance of a few feet. So for example, walking through the archway of an airport or retail store would tell the reader the exact amount of cash you were carrying and the serial number of each bill. The privacy invasion is enormously larger.
No one with any sense buys a remove list. No one wants to mail a remove list. That's just idiotic.
Are you dreaming? Remove lists are precisely what spammers want to mail to, since it means the spam is reaching a real person. Why do you think spammers work so hard to bypass spam filters?
For $200 or so you can get a 1GB compact flash card, no magnetic field, no moving parts, size of a matchbook, get rid of that ethernet cable. You can get PCMCIA flash cards up to 4 GB or so but it starts getting pricy after a while.
I'm concerned with the specific case where they don't ask for the document in question. I'm thinking of a real case where this happened, that was settled before trial. Yes you're correct that the side that failed to ask for the document was not especially competent (in addition to being crooks). The question is how much their opponent is allowed to benefit from the incompetence.
That argument is nonsense. Everyone who's ever done any business has at one time or another made a deal that they regretted. And everyone has made business decisions (good or bad) based on assumptions that turned out to be wrong afterwards.
If SCO released formerly proprietary code under the GPL, that's because they wanted to do so. They may wish afterwards that they hadn't. That's just too bad. I bet Digital Research wishes they'd signed the IBM nondisclosure and sold CP-M to IBM for the PC, instead of letting Bill Gates sell MS-DOS to IBM instead.
There's no more "virality" caused by the GPL than there's "virality" if Coca Cola chooses to publish its secret formula in the newspaper, then tries after publication to make the formula secret again. It's irrelevant whether the executive who signed off on the publishing order somehow didn't know the formula was supposed to be secret.
Further, in SCO's case, the idea of "inadvertent" GPL'ing strains credulity. If they GPL'd some formerly proprietary code and put it into their Linux distro, they did it to sell more of the Linux distros. Post facto claims that it was really an accident should be viewed with skepticism.
The cure for a "viral" GPL is real simple. If you have code you don't want to release under the GPL, then don't release it that way.
I second the recommendation of Bransden and Joachain's book. It's maybe not suitable as an intro text if you know zero about the subject, but it gets into the nitty gritty of a lot of different areas better than other books I've looked at. If you can get through the whole book you'll really know a lot (say 1st year graduate level). The class I used it in (basic undergrad) covered only a few chapters.
It's not like they're going to hire a full time Klingon translator and pay him/her to sit around all day in case a Klingon-speaking nutcase checks into the mental hospital. The way these translation gigs work is you sign up, they do a little bit of checking of your credentials and then they put your name on a list of people who speak that language. On the occasion that your skill is needed, they call you, you translate (often over the phone, often for just a few minutes) and you get paid for the time spent. If they never get another Klingon speaking patient, you don't get called and they haven't really spent anything (maybe they call you once a year or so to make sure you're still available). If they do get such a patient they call you and pay a few hours (or maybe minutes) of your translation bill which is probably much less than the amount they'd have to pay some doctor or other health professional to find out what the heck is wrong with the poor loon without your help.
So stop freaking out--it's not draining megabucks of your taxes, it's just putting some more phone numbers in a file. It's a completely sensible thing to do if these "Klingon patient" incidents have hapened in the past.
Also, I can tell you, a friend of mine is a translator, and sadly they don't get paid very much.
Thanks for the correction about the Styx vs. Mig-17. I checked my original reference (an old Usenet post) and found I had mis-remembered what I saw, which was that the Styx was similar to the Mig-19 (not 17), if that helps. And that the $25K gets you an old airframe, not a ready-made Silkworm. But the idea is the same.
Re arms bazaar: I think you visit your local totalitarian hellhole and ask for directions. And it's cash only:).
I'm told you can buy Chinese Silkworm cruise missiles for $25K or so at your friendly arms bazaar. The Silkworm is basically a Mig-17 airframe with the pilot replaced by a guidance system. Man, this stuff is scary.
Some years ago I hacked up GNU tar to encrypt the tar file as it wrote it. It used the Blowfish algorithm with a key derived from a user-supplied passphrase. It was fast enough to keep my 500 kbyte/sec DDS-2 tape drive streaming when running on the 33 mhz 80486 that I had back then. If there's interest I may dig out the source and put it on my web site. These days though, it's probably simpler to use an external encryption program, since the performance penalty from the external program is more than made up by today's much faster cpu's (tape drives haven't gotten faster by nearly as much).
Why do vendors keep getting this same bonehead idea over and over? Gadgets like the Ipaq handheld PC and the Norelco and Braun electric shavers and maybe the iPod mp3 player and now this Neuros thing, where the battery is sealed inside the unit. If the battery goes flat you can't swap it out for a charged one--your device is unuseable without external power until you've spent hours charging it. If the battery craps out (stops holding a charge), which they all do after a year or two, you have to send the thing in for service.
Forget it! Imagine a cellular phone or or a camcorder with those kinds of limitations. Early laptops did have similar stupidity but the vendors wised up!
Really, even swappable proprietary batteries are a pain in the neck. It's best to stick with good old standard NiMH AA's, or (if you really need li ion), use a standard camcorder pack that's available from multiple vendors.
The Neuros player's features are kind of interesting but as a buyer, the battery issue kills my interest in it all by itself.
See Salon Table Talk. Anyone can read the Forums but you have to pay to post there. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion. Posting used to be free. When they started charging to post, regulars stayed around and trolls went away, so the quality of the forums got better. I don't know if that can be generalized, of course. The Salon boards have always had a particular dynamic and the pay-to-post model seems to fit it pretty well.
There are two types of RAM, static (SRAM) and dynamic (DRAM). SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) is a particular type of DRAM. SRAM is very fast and retains its contents with very little power (though it does need some), but you get less bits on a chip of a given size, so it's more expensive per MB than DRAM. DRAM is cheap bulk memory that needs a fair amount of power to keep refreshed.
Flash is something else entirely. It's not really RAM at all, in that you can't write it randomly (though you can read it randomly). It's maybe about as expensive as SRAM. Its claim to fame is that it needs no power at all to retain data. XD, CF, SD, and the other digital camera memory cards all use flash.
I see, you're talking about a RAM drive, not a flash drive. Flash refers to a specific type of memory which acts more like a disk than like ram. Yes, RAM drives are great if you can afford them and can keep them powered. I didn't realize they made them for laptops.
It's true that a flash drive has no seek latency. But it's reading transfer speed is slower than a HD (though still respectable) and its writing speed is quite slow (much slower than its reading speed). Also, flash memory wears out if you write to it too many times. "Too many" in modern parts means between 100k and 1 million writes--not a problem for something like a digicam, but for your swap partition or a busy part of a file system, it could be a real issue. Also, of course, there's the cost.
But if none of that bothers you, there are adapters you can get that let you put a PCMCIA or CF flash card into an ordinary IDE slot.
They are server drives intended for use in machine rooms spinning 24/7, not for home use where they get turned on and off frequently. They also probably run pretty hot and need plenty of cooling.
For reliable home use, get a SLOW-spinning drive, preferably one with fluid spindle bearings, since those seem less inclined to wear into a higher-friction mode (at least that's what I think is happening when non-FDB drives get noisy over time). Maybe even a laptop drive, since those run the coolest. Whatever you do, expect occasional failures, so backup frequently.
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I've also heard that movie theaters are in far more trouble from video rentals than they could possibly be from file sharing. Who wants to go to some sticky-floor theater and eat overpriced greasy popcorn and pay $10 per person for tickets when you can rent a DVD and watch it on your home theater with your friends for less than the price of one ticket? Viewers are starting to figure that out.
These days I hardly ever go see big-release movies in the theater. I saw Spiderman and LOTR 1 and that's about it. Oh yeah, Attack of the Clones because a friend dragged me to the theater. I haven't seen LOTR 2 yet and I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I'm going to wait for a DVD rental. If that puts another nail into the MPAA's coffin, I'm all for it.
I wonder if the divx video or Vorbis audio encoders could be ported to the PS2. They are heavy number crunching, cpu hungry programs. Oggenc runs faster than real time on a fast pc, but nowhere near as fast as a fast CD ripping drive. I don't think divx can run in real time even on the fastest pc's. A cluster of ps2's may be a cheap way to do a lot of cd-to-vorbis ripping or DVD to divx conversions in a hurry!
Sort of related: HP now offers invisible ink for inkjet printers viewable only under UV or IR light, intended to print stuff like tracking barcode on financial documents without customers noticing them (so shred all your junk mail, not just stuff with visible account numbers, since you don't know what might be printed invisibly on it). Maybe that's another way they can surreptitiously tag the output of color printers. Your printer specs say the inkjet print head has 48 dots? Have you ever actually counted them? Maybe they'll add an unannounced 49th dot that squirts invisible ink on the paper, and a tiny amount of invisible ink in a secret chamber of every cartridge. Yeah! That's the real reason the govt wants to extend the DMCA ban third-party inkjet refills, so they can keep tracing printer output back to its source! Tinfoil hat time... :)
A bare bones Pentium 3 or Athlon box doesn't cost that much more than a PS2 and runs at maybe 1.5 ghz. I think it can do an SSE2 operation (like a 4 point MAC) in 2 cycles, or is it 1 cycle? Since the clock speed is 5x the PS2, the overall throughput should be at least as fast and maybe a lot faster.
The difference is for someone to examine serial numbers, you have to actually take the bills out of your wallet and let them look at them. RFID can be read from a distance of a few feet. So for example, walking through the archway of an airport or retail store would tell the reader the exact amount of cash you were carrying and the serial number of each bill. The privacy invasion is enormously larger.
No one with any sense buys a remove list. No one wants to mail a remove list. That's just idiotic. Are you dreaming? Remove lists are precisely what spammers want to mail to, since it means the spam is reaching a real person. Why do you think spammers work so hard to bypass spam filters?
For $200 or so you can get a 1GB compact flash card, no magnetic field, no moving parts, size of a matchbook, get rid of that ethernet cable. You can get PCMCIA flash cards up to 4 GB or so but it starts getting pricy after a while.
I'm concerned with the specific case where they don't ask for the document in question. I'm thinking of a real case where this happened, that was settled before trial. Yes you're correct that the side that failed to ask for the document was not especially competent (in addition to being crooks). The question is how much their opponent is allowed to benefit from the incompetence.
That argument is nonsense. Everyone who's ever done any business has at one time or another made a deal that they regretted. And everyone has made business decisions (good or bad) based on assumptions that turned out to be wrong afterwards.
If SCO released formerly proprietary code under the GPL, that's because they wanted to do so. They may wish afterwards that they hadn't. That's just too bad. I bet Digital Research wishes they'd signed the IBM nondisclosure and sold CP-M to IBM for the PC, instead of letting Bill Gates sell MS-DOS to IBM instead.
There's no more "virality" caused by the GPL than there's "virality" if Coca Cola chooses to publish its secret formula in the newspaper, then tries after publication to make the formula secret again. It's irrelevant whether the executive who signed off on the publishing order somehow didn't know the formula was supposed to be secret.
Further, in SCO's case, the idea of "inadvertent" GPL'ing strains credulity. If they GPL'd some formerly proprietary code and put it into their Linux distro, they did it to sell more of the Linux distros. Post facto claims that it was really an accident should be viewed with skepticism.
The cure for a "viral" GPL is real simple. If you have code you don't want to release under the GPL, then don't release it that way.
I second the recommendation of Bransden and Joachain's book. It's maybe not suitable as an intro text if you know zero about the subject, but it gets into the nitty gritty of a lot of different areas better than other books I've looked at. If you can get through the whole book you'll really know a lot (say 1st year graduate level). The class I used it in (basic undergrad) covered only a few chapters.
and I think they have taken people to court over it.
It's not like they're going to hire a full time Klingon translator and pay him/her to sit around all day in case a Klingon-speaking nutcase checks into the mental hospital. The way these translation gigs work is you sign up, they do a little bit of checking of your credentials and then they put your name on a list of people who speak that language. On the occasion that your skill is needed, they call you, you translate (often over the phone, often for just a few minutes) and you get paid for the time spent. If they never get another Klingon speaking patient, you don't get called and they haven't really spent anything (maybe they call you once a year or so to make sure you're still available). If they do get such a patient they call you and pay a few hours (or maybe minutes) of your translation bill which is probably much less than the amount they'd have to pay some doctor or other health professional to find out what the heck is wrong with the poor loon without your help.
So stop freaking out--it's not draining megabucks of your taxes, it's just putting some more phone numbers in a file. It's a completely sensible thing to do if these "Klingon patient" incidents have hapened in the past.
Also, I can tell you, a friend of mine is a translator, and sadly they don't get paid very much.
Thanks for the correction about the Styx vs. Mig-17. I checked my original reference (an old Usenet post) and found I had mis-remembered what I saw, which was that the Styx was similar to the Mig-19 (not 17), if that helps. And that the $25K gets you an old airframe, not a ready-made Silkworm. But the idea is the same. Re arms bazaar: I think you visit your local totalitarian hellhole and ask for directions. And it's cash only :).
Let's encourage them. I'd love to see the MPAA convince some state to ban Tivo's. That will be the end of them, and good riddance.
I'm told you can buy Chinese Silkworm cruise missiles for $25K or so at your friendly arms bazaar. The Silkworm is basically a Mig-17 airframe with the pilot replaced by a guidance system. Man, this stuff is scary.
Some years ago I hacked up GNU tar to encrypt the tar file as it wrote it. It used the Blowfish algorithm with a key derived from a user-supplied passphrase. It was fast enough to keep my 500 kbyte/sec DDS-2 tape drive streaming when running on the 33 mhz 80486 that I had back then. If there's interest I may dig out the source and put it on my web site. These days though, it's probably simpler to use an external encryption program, since the performance penalty from the external program is more than made up by today's much faster cpu's (tape drives haven't gotten faster by nearly as much).
Forget it! Imagine a cellular phone or or a camcorder with those kinds of limitations. Early laptops did have similar stupidity but the vendors wised up!
Really, even swappable proprietary batteries are a pain in the neck. It's best to stick with good old standard NiMH AA's, or (if you really need li ion), use a standard camcorder pack that's available from multiple vendors.
The Neuros player's features are kind of interesting but as a buyer, the battery issue kills my interest in it all by itself.
From Yahoo Finance. Looks like there annual revenues are around $3 billion (with a B).
See Salon Table Talk. Anyone can read the Forums but you have to pay to post there. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion. Posting used to be free. When they started charging to post, regulars stayed around and trolls went away, so the quality of the forums got better. I don't know if that can be generalized, of course. The Salon boards have always had a particular dynamic and the pay-to-post model seems to fit it pretty well.
Flash is something else entirely. It's not really RAM at all, in that you can't write it randomly (though you can read it randomly). It's maybe about as expensive as SRAM. Its claim to fame is that it needs no power at all to retain data. XD, CF, SD, and the other digital camera memory cards all use flash.
I see, you're talking about a RAM drive, not a flash drive. Flash refers to a specific type of memory which acts more like a disk than like ram. Yes, RAM drives are great if you can afford them and can keep them powered. I didn't realize they made them for laptops.
But if none of that bothers you, there are adapters you can get that let you put a PCMCIA or CF flash card into an ordinary IDE slot.
For reliable home use, get a SLOW-spinning drive, preferably one with fluid spindle bearings, since those seem less inclined to wear into a higher-friction mode (at least that's what I think is happening when non-FDB drives get noisy over time). Maybe even a laptop drive, since those run the coolest. Whatever you do, expect occasional failures, so backup frequently.
What kind of cooling does the Sotec use? Does it run hot? Does it have any kind of fan?
How is the keyboard? What is the screen resolution? What kind of pointing device does it have?
If you have a URL with specs, pictures, etc. that would be great. Thanks.
Although it's not a real fast one. But it definitely is present.