I'm interested in scanning old books for the Gutenberg project. Using a flatbed scanner is a pain in the neck (have to keep turning the book over to turn pages) and it's bad for the book to have to keep squashing the spine down flat. There's a machine called a "planetary scanner" for scanning books, used in library conversations departments, that looks like an overhead projector (the scanning head points downward at the book) and costs about $12K. I've used one and it's a huge thing (fills a desk and takes two people to move) and very slow (you're lucky if you can do 3 pages a minute with it).
This camera sounds like a great alternative. 3000 by 4000 pixel resolution means 400 dpi for a 10" text area (two pages of a book) and you need that resolution for good OCR'ing. The camera is portable--just bring a typewriter page holder to prop up the original, and fast: click! (turn page) click! (turn page) click!.
If I get the cash together I could imagine buying one just to use for stuff like this.
The EOS-1DS has a single CCD sensor. There was a rumor circulating for a while that it had two sensors, like an old and unsuccessful Minolta DSLR did a while back. The rumor turned out to be incorrect.
That plugs between your VCR and your TV set. Most of the time the box does nothing and just passes the signal through. But if you want to watch a "cleaned up" movie, you play the movie on your VCR and enter the movie title (or catalog number) into the box when you start the tape. The box just passes the movie through, except at certain times that are programmed into it, it mutes the sound and blanks the video for as long as the scene takes. It instead shows some text on the screen saying that the scene is being blanked because that's what the viewer wanted. When the "offensive" part is over, the screen goes back to normal.
How can anyone call that any kind of infringement? Is it infringement to close your eyes during parts of a movie you don't like? Editing stuff on the tape is just an easier way to do that.
MAI Software was the ridiculous decision that by loading a program from disk to RAM in order to run it, you're making a temporary copy, and therefore need further permission (in the form of agreeing to an obnoxious EULA) before you can run a program you buy.
Clean Flicks is presumably copying the original film in the course of making its edit. If they win this case, it shows that such temporary copies aren't infringement after all. That could get rid of the MAI ruling, which would in turn make a lot of awful EULA's unenforceable.
People are in a huff about Clean Flicks because what's being edited is sex and violence, which gets one side yelling "smut!" and the other side "censorship!". But really, if it's what the viewer wants to watch, cutting the sex scenes out of doesn't seem worse than cutting Jar Jar Binks out of Star Wars 1. Best of all (but probably not feasible) would be if the edited movie was delivered as an edit list on the same media (e.g. DVD) as the unedited original, so the viewer would always be able to choose which version s/he wanted to watch. The edit list would just tell the player to automatically skip parts of the movie, if the user enables it.
and add a USB d/a converter like the Edirol UA-1A (www.edirol.com). The USB converter will give much better audio than the laptop's built-in sound card.
What about a player with a good headphone amp?
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I like using full sized, over-the-ear headphones (Sony MDR-V6) instead of those awful earbuds or flimsy Walkman-style headphones. I notice that the headphone jack on my laptop can't really produce enough output to drive these phones at normal listening volume. My stereo receiver can drive them easily. Do any of the portable music players have reasonably powerful amplifiers? Of course I still don't want to buy one til they support Vorbis.
USB 1.1 is fast enough for the memory size. It takes only a few minutes to transfer 128MB.
128MB is enough for around 2 hours of music, so I could see using a 128MB player like I use my cassette walkman (yeah, I'm a dinosaur). If I want to listen to music at school or something, I take the walkman and pick out a cassette or two from my collection on the way out of the house. Choosing a cassette takes just a few seconds. If instead I had to download 128MB at Firewire speed (say 20 seconds) I could tolerate it. But spending several minutes waiting for something to happen that would normally be spontaneous is awful. They really should put an SD slot in the player. It wouldn't make it much bigger, and would allow fast swapping of music. It would also allow storing much more--SD cards are available up to 512 MB, though those still cost a lot.
What I really want is an iPod device that plays Vorbis, has a hard disk and firewire port, and has some internal flash (say 64MB) or an SD slot. It should allow transfering (automatically even) music between the HD and flash. So I could pick out a bunch of tracks on the menu and start listening to them. The player would copy the tracks from HD to flash at high speed while simultaneously playing the audio at normal speed. After a few seconds or a minute, the tracks would all be in flash and the HD would then spin down, keeping the power consumption to the level of a purely flash-based unit. I guess they could even do that with RAM instead of flash, but then it would have to be reloaded if I powered the unit down.
is at Buddy Weiserman's site. The complete, extensive email exchange with photos is shown there. He actually got the scammer to travel to another country and run around flapping his arms like a chicken! "Buddy Weiserman"'s name was of course inspired by Budweiser beer, but the scammer didn't figure that out either.
for dealing with this responsibly--assuming, of course, that the violations weren't intentional.
The/. post seems to have an overtone of "because of the GPL we lost a nice piece of software". But I think that's inappropriate way to look at it. Rather,
I hope that after taking stock of the situation, Epson decides to release the source code for those programs per the terms of the GPL. That's what the GPL is trying to promote and incentivize. If we miss out on a few possibly-useful proprietary programs as a result, I can live with that.
I looked at the table of contents for the system programming manual and don't see any features for supporting self-virtualization beyond what's in the Pentium etc. I wonder what kinds of hoops it will take to make something like Plex86 virtualize the 86-64. I wish they'd add some hardware virtualization features since with these big processors, running multiple 'partitions' becomes more and more important.
I also notice that cycle counts aren't specified for the fancier arithmetic instructions like MUL and the multimedia instructions. Those make a big difference in the performance of graphics and signal processing applications including audio compression and so forth. So I guess we'll have to wait to see benchmarks.
I played with Ogg a few months ago when it was still a late beta. It sounded fine sonically, but its encoder was several times slower CPU-wise than the LAME mp3 encoder. That was a pain--my cd drive rips audio at a wimpy 6x or so, and LAME could keep up with it easily while OGG couldn't. Ogg ran at maybe 3x on my 750 mhz PIII. Of course a fast Athlon would help, but if I got one I'd also get a CD drive that could rip at 40x. So encoding speed matters, if you want to archive a large CD collection (the alternative is rip to disk and then batch-encode for days on end, but that takes a lot of disk space).
Maybe the current encoder is faster, or can be made faster. If not, Ogg has a nontrivial disadvantage that hasn't gotten discussed much.
many years ago. Easier to find than gummy bear compound. Just spread glue on fingerprint, let it dry, and peel it off. You may have to wet it a little bit with water before applying, if it's too gooey.
Perhaps you just want to contact them to discuss something (a settlement, strange packets coming out of their network, what have you - and yes I know, Verisign has nothing to do with IP assignment but I'm discussing the principle here).
You don't need their physical address for that. Just send email to postmaster@(the domain name), per the internet standard. Or if there's a web site at the domain name, use whatever contact info is provided there (email address, web form, etc.).
Or the registrar itself could forward messages for you after collecting a small fee (the fee would keep spammers away).
If the domain holder doesn't respond, they probably don't want to hear from you and even having the WHOIS info won't get you anywhere without a lawsuit, so there's no point in the registrar giving it to you.
A computer on the internet is not really different than a fancy telephone on the phone network. Phone companies have supported unlisted numbers for as long as phones have existed, and it isn't that big a deal.
Perhaps you'd like to know where they're located so you can assess the feasibility of legal action before going to the expense.
The way that works is you file against a John Doe in some court having jurisdiction over the registrar, then subpoena the domain holder's info. That involves submitting some forms to the court and paying a small filing fee. It's not like starting a DoJ vs. Microsoft case with thousands of lawyers.
One important aspect of this is the domain holder now knows who YOU are and that you're trying to obtain their info. That's different from WHOIS, where you can get people's info without their being informed. But there's no reason to support that kind of stalking feature. If you want someone else's info, you should be willing to supply your own info to them. You got a problem with that?
There's no reason public WHOIS info is needed. You could have private contact info just like you can have unlisted phone numbers. The Tonga (.to) NIC keeps user contact info confidential and doesn't run a WhOIS. However, if you need to take action against a.to domain holder, you can get the info from the registrar by serving a properly issued subpoena from a court having jurisdiction (Tonga's DNS is in California, so you can use either a Tongan court or a California court).
Why do you need any more "accountability" than that? If you want to take legal action against someone, you have to go to court. If you don't want to go to court, what you want the address for is extralegal action, such as spamming or stalking. There's no reason any registrar should assist in anything like that.
What RFC says that domains need valid WHOIS info? That's especially for the snail addresses and phone numbers, though I don't remember any requirement of any WHOIS info at all. Tonga (.to), for example, refuses to run a WHOIS server. ICANN isn't happy but Tonga has stood its ground. If you want the contact info for a.to domain, you have to file a subpoena for it. They consider user privacy more important than the wishes of spammers. Good on 'em, I say.
I can't see anyone paying $400 for a 16 MB flash card unless it included some kind of software license. As for $400 being 1/3 the list price, that's unpersuasive. Paying 1/3 the list price for an older piece of equipment that was heavily discounted to begin with doesn't sound like that great a deal.
Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand what all the ranting about piracy is about. Could someone explain, nice and simple for those of us who are slow on the uptake, exactly what is getting pirated here? If the answer is "Cisco software", exactly where is it coming from and precisely where does the infringement take place?
I read the linked page as how to build a PIX-like firewall by slapping some PC parts together and adding a legally-acquired Cisco flash card containing the software. Am I confused about the nature of the flash card? I saw it as something like noticing you could buy Macintosh roms out of an Apple repair parts catalog, and then writing a page saying "Build your own Macintosh clone by putting some standard hardware together and adding Mac roms that you buy from Apple". Sure, you've possibly annoyed Apple by avoiding paying a lot more for a real Mac, but as long as you get the roms legally, where is the piracy? You're not copying the roms, you're getting legitimate ones. They're even still legitimate if you get them on a secondary market like from a trashed motherboard.
If all you want to do is run an OS from a flash disk on a PC, you can get a 16 MB CF card for under $20 and a CF to IDE adapter for another $20 or so. So I figured that the $400 for the PIX flash card has to mostly be going towards acquiring the software legally. Am I misreading the article?
I haven't looked at the code of either E2 or LJ, but have visited and played with both. They are both painfully slow, to the point where the software really seems to be doing something it doesn't need to do. LJ's main competition is diaryland.com, which is also free, is at least as powerful, has a bigger user population and more traffic, and yet the site is much more responsive.
Any comparison of software like this should really talk about performance and not just installation and administration ease. Any idea if these systems can be sped up, and what else is out there?
is "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower. It's actually about Freeman Dyson (the "starship" refers to the Orion project) and George Dyson (who at the time was living in the Alaska wilderness). It's not really a techie book about specific impulses or engineering history, but a good read about these two very interesting people.
Is there such thing as a Quicktime viewer with source code, that runs under Linux? I have mplayer installed but it only knows about mpeg and avi.
Yeah, I know there's a closed-source viewer available from Apple, but I won't run stuff without source.
To compel them to comply with GPL, you will have to get the court to agree with the implied licence. That's harder, though if they really have documents from Sigma admitting that they were aware of the GPL terms you might have a shot.
That doesn't make any sense. The license spelled out in the GPL is the only thing giving anyone permission to copy the code in the first place. Without the GPL, copying the code is a copyright infringement pure and simple.
Will they consider it enforceable if the licence says "use this code without my permission and you must give away all the source code to everything you bundled with it"? Also in doubt.
If Sigma hasn't agreed to such a license, then of course the license terms are not enforceable. But if Sigma doesn't agree to the license, then while copying the code isn't a license violation, it is a copyright infringement.
Your point that Xvid should register the copyright to be able to claim statutory damages is very important. I hope they're aware of that and have registered the copyright already. If not, they should register it right away.
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This camera sounds like a great alternative. 3000 by 4000 pixel resolution means 400 dpi for a 10" text area (two pages of a book) and you need that resolution for good OCR'ing. The camera is portable--just bring a typewriter page holder to prop up the original, and fast: click! (turn page) click! (turn page) click!.
If I get the cash together I could imagine buying one just to use for stuff like this.
Got confused for a sec.
The EOS-1DS has a single CCD sensor. There was a rumor circulating for a while that it had two sensors, like an old and unsuccessful Minolta DSLR did a while back. The rumor turned out to be incorrect.
How can anyone call that any kind of infringement? Is it infringement to close your eyes during parts of a movie you don't like? Editing stuff on the tape is just an easier way to do that.
I thought you couldn't do that, because the splice would mess up the spinning head. So I figured the editing involved temporary copying.
Clean Flicks is presumably copying the original film in the course of making its edit. If they win this case, it shows that such temporary copies aren't infringement after all. That could get rid of the MAI ruling, which would in turn make a lot of awful EULA's unenforceable.
I am supporting Clean Flicks on this one.
People are in a huff about Clean Flicks because what's being edited is sex and violence, which gets one side yelling "smut!" and the other side "censorship!". But really, if it's what the viewer wants to watch, cutting the sex scenes out of doesn't seem worse than cutting Jar Jar Binks out of Star Wars 1. Best of all (but probably not feasible) would be if the edited movie was delivered as an edit list on the same media (e.g. DVD) as the unedited original, so the viewer would always be able to choose which version s/he wanted to watch. The edit list would just tell the player to automatically skip parts of the movie, if the user enables it.
and add a USB d/a converter like the Edirol UA-1A (www.edirol.com). The USB converter will give much better audio than the laptop's built-in sound card.
I like using full sized, over-the-ear headphones (Sony MDR-V6) instead of those awful earbuds or flimsy Walkman-style headphones. I notice that the headphone jack on my laptop can't really produce enough output to drive these phones at normal listening volume. My stereo receiver can drive them easily. Do any of the portable music players have reasonably powerful amplifiers? Of course I still don't want to buy one til they support Vorbis.
128MB is enough for around 2 hours of music, so I could see using a 128MB player like I use my cassette walkman (yeah, I'm a dinosaur). If I want to listen to music at school or something, I take the walkman and pick out a cassette or two from my collection on the way out of the house. Choosing a cassette takes just a few seconds. If instead I had to download 128MB at Firewire speed (say 20 seconds) I could tolerate it. But spending several minutes waiting for something to happen that would normally be spontaneous is awful. They really should put an SD slot in the player. It wouldn't make it much bigger, and would allow fast swapping of music. It would also allow storing much more--SD cards are available up to 512 MB, though those still cost a lot.
What I really want is an iPod device that plays Vorbis, has a hard disk and firewire port, and has some internal flash (say 64MB) or an SD slot. It should allow transfering (automatically even) music between the HD and flash. So I could pick out a bunch of tracks on the menu and start listening to them. The player would copy the tracks from HD to flash at high speed while simultaneously playing the audio at normal speed. After a few seconds or a minute, the tracks would all be in flash and the HD would then spin down, keeping the power consumption to the level of a purely flash-based unit. I guess they could even do that with RAM instead of flash, but then it would have to be reloaded if I powered the unit down.
is at Buddy Weiserman's site. The complete, extensive email exchange with photos is shown there. He actually got the scammer to travel to another country and run around flapping his arms like a chicken! "Buddy Weiserman"'s name was of course inspired by Budweiser beer, but the scammer didn't figure that out either.
for dealing with this responsibly--assuming, of course, that the violations weren't intentional. The /. post seems to have an overtone of "because of the GPL we lost a nice piece of software". But I think that's inappropriate way to look at it. Rather,
I hope that after taking stock of the situation, Epson decides to release the source code for those programs per the terms of the GPL. That's what the GPL is trying to promote and incentivize. If we miss out on a few possibly-useful proprietary programs as a result, I can live with that.
I also notice that cycle counts aren't specified for the fancier arithmetic instructions like MUL and the multimedia instructions. Those make a big difference in the performance of graphics and signal processing applications including audio compression and so forth. So I guess we'll have to wait to see benchmarks.
Maybe the current encoder is faster, or can be made faster. If not, Ogg has a nontrivial disadvantage that hasn't gotten discussed much.
many years ago. Easier to find than gummy bear compound. Just spread glue on fingerprint, let it dry, and peel it off. You may have to wet it a little bit with water before applying, if it's too gooey.
A computer on the internet is not really different than a fancy telephone on the phone network. Phone companies have supported unlisted numbers for as long as phones have existed, and it isn't that big a deal.
The way that works is you file against a John Doe in some court having jurisdiction over the registrar, then subpoena the domain holder's info. That involves submitting some forms to the court and paying a small filing fee. It's not like starting a DoJ vs. Microsoft case with thousands of lawyers.One important aspect of this is the domain holder now knows who YOU are and that you're trying to obtain their info. That's different from WHOIS, where you can get people's info without their being informed. But there's no reason to support that kind of stalking feature. If you want someone else's info, you should be willing to supply your own info to them. You got a problem with that?
Why do you need any more "accountability" than that? If you want to take legal action against someone, you have to go to court. If you don't want to go to court, what you want the address for is extralegal action, such as spamming or stalking. There's no reason any registrar should assist in anything like that.
What RFC says that domains need valid WHOIS info? That's especially for the snail addresses and phone numbers, though I don't remember any requirement of any WHOIS info at all. Tonga (.to), for example, refuses to run a WHOIS server. ICANN isn't happy but Tonga has stood its ground. If you want the contact info for a .to domain, you have to file a subpoena for it. They consider user privacy more important than the wishes of spammers. Good on 'em, I say.
I can't see anyone paying $400 for a 16 MB flash card unless it included some kind of software license. As for $400 being 1/3 the list price, that's unpersuasive. Paying 1/3 the list price for an older piece of equipment that was heavily discounted to begin with doesn't sound like that great a deal.
Anyway, for e2 and livejournal, that wasn't the nature of the slowness that I notice.
Is there some reason e2 doesn't use InnoDB?
I read the linked page as how to build a PIX-like firewall by slapping some PC parts together and adding a legally-acquired Cisco flash card containing the software. Am I confused about the nature of the flash card? I saw it as something like noticing you could buy Macintosh roms out of an Apple repair parts catalog, and then writing a page saying "Build your own Macintosh clone by putting some standard hardware together and adding Mac roms that you buy from Apple". Sure, you've possibly annoyed Apple by avoiding paying a lot more for a real Mac, but as long as you get the roms legally, where is the piracy? You're not copying the roms, you're getting legitimate ones. They're even still legitimate if you get them on a secondary market like from a trashed motherboard.
If all you want to do is run an OS from a flash disk on a PC, you can get a 16 MB CF card for under $20 and a CF to IDE adapter for another $20 or so. So I figured that the $400 for the PIX flash card has to mostly be going towards acquiring the software legally. Am I misreading the article?
Any comparison of software like this should really talk about performance and not just installation and administration ease. Any idea if these systems can be sped up, and what else is out there?
is "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower. It's actually about Freeman Dyson (the "starship" refers to the Orion project) and George Dyson (who at the time was living in the Alaska wilderness). It's not really a techie book about specific impulses or engineering history, but a good read about these two very interesting people.
Is there such thing as a Quicktime viewer with source code, that runs under Linux? I have mplayer installed but it only knows about mpeg and avi. Yeah, I know there's a closed-source viewer available from Apple, but I won't run stuff without source.
That doesn't make any sense. The license spelled out in the GPL is the only thing giving anyone permission to copy the code in the first place. Without the GPL, copying the code is a copyright infringement pure and simple.
Will they consider it enforceable if the licence says "use this code without my permission and you must give away all the source code to everything you bundled with it"? Also in doubt.
If Sigma hasn't agreed to such a license, then of course the license terms are not enforceable. But if Sigma doesn't agree to the license, then while copying the code isn't a license violation, it is a copyright infringement.
Your point that Xvid should register the copyright to be able to claim statutory damages is very important. I hope they're aware of that and have registered the copyright already. If not, they should register it right away.