Couple of problems. Blanking also happens between commercials, so the human has to be in the loop to end the commercial block. Compensation can be done by doing blank searching at intervals of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 59-60 seconds, as those are standard lengths for comercials, however even this is not an absolute.
One of the problems with this approach that I have seen lately is while watching CNN, I have seen several instances where a locally produced comercial is cut short with immediate (no noticable blank space) swap into already running production. This may be a problem at DirecTV, or with CNN, or some other center, however it is annoying, as well as very hard to detect automatically much less compensate for.
The other problem with human in the loop recording, is that often you are trying to record programs that, well, you ain't home to watch in the first place.
The real fix for this would be to have distributable track files for recordings. A varient of this may be available already, though the technology may need some work to make use of it. Back when I watched C-band sattelite, it was not unusual to get wildfeed listings on UseNet that would break down to the second when comercial blocks would begin and end. It would also break down when the local and national comercial segments were. The fix would be to be able to overlay this information as track/index information so that you could then make use of skip options you configure into your viewer to either watch or skip various comercial types as you see fit.
You may not be interested in any of the comercials, or you may be interested in who in your neighborhood is interested enough in this program to buy ad space, after all you might find other people in their place of business that you may like. Is this stretching things? For many people yes. I don't know about for everyone though.
Part of the problem would be getting copies of these schedule lists. For some shows the schedule is fixed enough that you could probably take last weeks schedule and apply it to this weeks show. I don't think it's a given though.
Perhaps a few years too late, but IP is a network protocol that can communicate with other editions of itself independent of the underlying physical network technology (802.3, 802.4, 802.5, 802.11, ppp, fddi, atm etc.)
Of course this could be said of SDLC, HDLC, X.25, but all of these tended to specify what hardware infrastructure would be used at some point or another. Once the OSI model was created, as well as people implementing IP on various platforms, the cat was out of the bag. All of this was happening prior to 1990, so dating it at 1994, or 2003 (as appears to be the case with the article in question) means that there is sufficient prior art to eliminate the effectiveness of this pattent.
TiVo does not do this. RePlay 4000 supposedly did this, though since neither I, nor anyone I know has a 4000, I don't know how well that works.
As I understand it, most of the programs out there use blank monitoring. Before and after a section of the program, there will be blank space of two or three frames that programs that try to remove commercials key on.
The problem is that unless one of these frames happens to concide with a keyframe in the mpeg stream, they are extreamly hard to find in that stream. As a result it is sometimes disasterously ineffective. It may very nicely catch the begining of the commercial block, but miss the end, and start the stream at the begining of the next commercial block.
I seem to recall a few years ago that in Japan, they had a work around on some VCRs that would monitor the audio stream. Since most commercials (at the time) were recorded in mono, and programs were in stereo, the VCRs would automatically pause when the audio stream went to mono, and resume when it went back to stereo.
The only thing that I am aware of that would make sense to try similar to that would be to monitor close captioning, as most locally produced commercials that I have seen do not have captions. It also seems to be hit or miss for nationally produced commercials.
I understand that there are these manufacturing byproducts of processing trees, called books. They seem to come in varying costs from a couple of dollars, through hundreds, or even thousands of dollars in rare incidents. I understand that the modern distributers like to get between $5 and $25 for a new one, and they don't ask you to pay that much again, should you decide to re-read the book.
Surely they are good enough for you, and you shouldn't be pushing these newfangled VCR's on people.
Something to remember about reverse engineering the IBM PC BIOS. When IBM created the BIOS they made all information about it available to the public. Including all instructions, the API, everything.
They did this because they were at the time working in response to an anti-competitive lawsuit against them.
One of the side benifits of doing this was that they believed they could earn licence fees from companies that tried to sell clones of the PC, because they could point at the publically available information and say that the clone used their code.
Compaq's end around to this was to take the API, which was not something IBM could licence, and have their own people (vetted so they had no information about the IBM BIOS code in the first place) write the underlying code to support that API. They then had another group go through the code, instruction by instruction, and compare it against the IBM code, and reject any functions that came too close to the code from IBM.
There was no encryption involved, so the reverse engineering would have eluded any anti-circumvention devices. That is not to say that if IBM were working under the internal ruleset they are today, that they would not have implemented some anti-circumvention devices in the code. After all when Epson can implement encryption of some sort in the chips they put on their printer cartridges, it isn't like there are many places where it can't be put.
As a result of the work Compaq did, Phoenix, AMI, Award, and a couple dozen other companies were also able to come up with their own implementations of the BIOS.
BSD, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows XP, all have support for IPv6 in their network stack. Current Cisco IOS supports IPv6.
There are some applications that go too far into the network stack to properly support IPv6, but those are applications.
The main stumbling block to IPv6 that I see right now is that very few network people in the US know how to use it. Outside of the US, both in Europe and Asia, IPv6 is being deployed fairly widely, as they do not have the IPv4 address space availabable and allocated to make use of it except in servers and routers.
As there are several gateways available, to allow IPv6 clients to access IPv4 servers, I suspect that the demand upone US providers to start supporting IPv6 devices is going to be long in comming.
With 10 devices in my house that support IP, (live at the moment, several others not currently powered up) I would exceed the available IP addresses my ISP account allows. As a result I am effectively forced to use NAT and private IP address space, even if my ISP would rather I did not. On top of that I don't want to keep a bunch of systems widely available to script kiddies. IPv6 would not solve that problem.
Then again, that's probably just all opinion on my part.
If the document says that this is copywritten material, then a printer or copier that can make a duplicate of that material is circumventing the instructions stating that to get a copy you must go to the copyright holder, or one of their representatives (bookstore for example).
I suspect that the CellPhone inclusion is the result of the fact that a CellPhone may be built to ignore any instructions in a ringtone file that say not to forward same ringtone to your friends. Since some ring tones are fragments of popular music, this would concern both the RIAA and the artists earning a living by creating ringtones. (the payback at $2.00 per instance is better than most music files at $1.00 per instance)
-Rusty
Re:Again with the cell phones, already.
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ring tones. They are delivered via SMS, and the potential exists to re-distribute them to your friends via SMS as well. At $2.00 per instance, they pay better than full length songs which various comercial download sites are trying to get $1.00 each for.
Nope, it will be time to remodle the basement again. Probably time to put in an x-10 outlet adapter to shut down the box when not needed, helping to keep that space cooler, and upgrade that hard drive. 120G sounds like quite a bit now, but then 10 years ago 80 Meg was quite a bit of space.
Actually, frequency does have something to do with range. Not proprotionally, but as it relates to the material in the environment. As 802.11b operates in the 2.1Ghz spectrum, which is the same frequency range that your microwave oven operates in, range is suseptable to environmental effects that many people do not think of.
A microwave oven generally works by oscilating the water mollecules in the food you are putting in their path. It is reasonable to assume then that as the amount of water in the air increases, you will see a loss of range on 802.11b, simply by virtue of the radio waves interacting with that water.
As 802.11a operates in the 5Ghz spectrum, (which is not a resonant frequency for water) it is susceptible to other elements and molecules that resonate at that frequency.
As a comparison point, IR is more likely to be affected by water in the atmosphere than UV is, but UV is strongly affected by the amount of O3, which seems to have little or no effect on IR.
If you can wire a plug to a electrical box in the basement, enclose the box beams after mounting this to the floor add an 802.11g interface with an 802.11g access point above it, (and add a bit more storage to the device) you could do set up a wired network with thin clients throughout your house, and never have to worry about anyone taking off with your systems.
Granted you would probably want to use the most recent and strongest varient of WEP, and if possible waveguide your area between the AP and the server to reduce attacks, but if you build it properly, they can set up everything they take from your house, and won't have a bootable system, and you can go to a swap meet or computer recycler and pick up enough hw to go back and wipe your server before they start tearing apart the finish of the house.
Since they have opted to disqualify anyone they wish, they may disqualify all applicants from when the story hit Slashdot to it's expiring from the most recent days. (two, three days?)
Don't know if you have noticed it, but the power company has not been sending out nearly as many meter readers as they have in the past. Rural Electric Co-ops have not needed to send out cards for the customer to write down the meter readings and send back either.
Why? Because the various electric companies have been replacing their meters with new meters that report back what the current reading is, over the electric lines themselves. Granted this does not require high bandwidth connectivity, but when you consider the number of meters involved, it is unlikely to be operating at 110 bps either.
In the US, no one gets 50hz power. We tend to get 60hz. (note this is the reason that TV's operate with a 30hz full screen re-fresh in the US, and a 25hz full screen re-fressh in most of the rest of the world.
CD lens cleaner. Looks like a cd with a brush mounted on it.
cotton swabs (q-tip type acceptable)
high proof alchohol (85-95% prefered, rubbing alcholol if possible, vodka if necessary)
Mostly to clean those hardware components that are unlikely to have been cleaned properly already. It's fine to have a rescue disk, but if the drive destroys it because of grime on the heads, or can't read the CD because of dust on the lens, it's won't do you a bit of good.
Also a can of wd-40, or unpreasurized can of fine machine oil to clean heads of dot matrix printers you may encounter.
Couple of notes, you may be able to find local alternatives to some of these things even in remote areas. Gun cleaning kits often have a variation of brake free which can be used to clean print heads. Unless you are at a place that does not have a bar within a mile, you will probably be able to find some high proof alchohol. You can create makeshift q-tips with thin sticks and a piece of cotton out of a first aid or even a makeup kit.
You may also want to build a custom live-cd out of the debian project, as most of the current live-cd's in the wild are going to be using kernel 2.4, where you may want to use 2.2, or even 2.0 for backwards compatability with earlier processors.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple of problems. Blanking also happens between commercials, so the human has to be in the loop to end the commercial block. Compensation can be done by doing blank searching at intervals of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 59-60 seconds, as those are standard lengths for comercials, however even this is not an absolute.
One of the problems with this approach that I have seen lately is while watching CNN, I have seen several instances where a locally produced comercial is cut short with immediate (no noticable blank space) swap into already running production. This may be a problem at DirecTV, or with CNN, or some other center, however it is annoying, as well as very hard to detect automatically much less compensate for.
The other problem with human in the loop recording, is that often you are trying to record programs that, well, you ain't home to watch in the first place.
The real fix for this would be to have distributable track files for recordings. A varient of this may be available already, though the technology may need some work to make use of it. Back when I watched C-band sattelite, it was not unusual to get wildfeed listings on UseNet that would break down to the second when comercial blocks would begin and end. It would also break down when the local and national comercial segments were. The fix would be to be able to overlay this information as track/index information so that you could then make use of skip options you configure into your viewer to either watch or skip various comercial types as you see fit.
You may not be interested in any of the comercials, or you may be interested in who in your neighborhood is interested enough in this program to buy ad space, after all you might find other people in their place of business that you may like. Is this stretching things? For many people yes. I don't know about for everyone though.
Part of the problem would be getting copies of these schedule lists. For some shows the schedule is fixed enough that you could probably take last weeks schedule and apply it to this weeks show. I don't think it's a given though.
-Rusty
Perhaps a few years too late, but IP is a network protocol that can communicate with other editions of itself independent of the underlying physical network technology (802.3, 802.4, 802.5, 802.11, ppp, fddi, atm etc.)
Of course this could be said of SDLC, HDLC, X.25, but all of these tended to specify what hardware infrastructure would be used at some point or another. Once the OSI model was created, as well as people implementing IP on various platforms, the cat was out of the bag. All of this was happening prior to 1990, so dating it at 1994, or 2003 (as appears to be the case with the article in question) means that there is sufficient prior art to eliminate the effectiveness of this pattent.
-Rusty
TiVo does not do this. RePlay 4000 supposedly did this, though since neither I, nor anyone I know has a 4000, I don't know how well that works.
As I understand it, most of the programs out there use blank monitoring. Before and after a section of the program, there will be blank space of two or three frames that programs that try to remove commercials key on.
The problem is that unless one of these frames happens to concide with a keyframe in the mpeg stream, they are extreamly hard to find in that stream. As a result it is sometimes disasterously ineffective. It may very nicely catch the begining of the commercial block, but miss the end, and start the stream at the begining of the next commercial block.
I seem to recall a few years ago that in Japan, they had a work around on some VCRs that would monitor the audio stream. Since most commercials (at the time) were recorded in mono, and programs were in stereo, the VCRs would automatically pause when the audio stream went to mono, and resume when it went back to stereo.
The only thing that I am aware of that would make sense to try similar to that would be to monitor close captioning, as most locally produced commercials that I have seen do not have captions. It also seems to be hit or miss for nationally produced commercials.
Good luck.
-Rusty
I understand that there are these manufacturing byproducts of processing trees, called books. They seem to come in varying costs from a couple of dollars, through hundreds, or even thousands of dollars in rare incidents. I understand that the modern distributers like to get between $5 and $25 for a new one, and they don't ask you to pay that much again, should you decide to re-read the book.
Surely they are good enough for you, and you shouldn't be pushing these newfangled VCR's on people.
-Rusty
You realize that this is the 46000 that passed through their spam filters without being identified as spam don't you?
I understand that it was a slow day so after counting them up that day, they still had time left to file a legal case.
They never were able to count the volume in earlier days.
I tend to suspect that this is the volume of spam messages a mid sized ISP (between 1 and 10 thousand subscribers) sees in the average hour.
I personally receive between 80 and 200 messages a day that popfile identifies as spam.
-Rusty
Something to remember about reverse engineering the IBM PC BIOS. When IBM created the BIOS they made all information about it available to the public. Including all instructions, the API, everything.
They did this because they were at the time working in response to an anti-competitive lawsuit against them.
One of the side benifits of doing this was that they believed they could earn licence fees from companies that tried to sell clones of the PC, because they could point at the publically available information and say that the clone used their code.
Compaq's end around to this was to take the API, which was not something IBM could licence, and have their own people (vetted so they had no information about the IBM BIOS code in the first place) write the underlying code to support that API. They then had another group go through the code, instruction by instruction, and compare it against the IBM code, and reject any functions that came too close to the code from IBM.
There was no encryption involved, so the reverse engineering would have eluded any anti-circumvention devices. That is not to say that if IBM were working under the internal ruleset they are today, that they would not have implemented some anti-circumvention devices in the code. After all when Epson can implement encryption of some sort in the chips they put on their printer cartridges, it isn't like there are many places where it can't be put.
As a result of the work Compaq did, Phoenix, AMI, Award, and a couple dozen other companies were also able to come up with their own implementations of the BIOS.
-Rusty
You missed:
Programs that write authentication keys to boot sectors of the hard disk, breaking boot loaders other than the Microsoft mbr.
another tla, DOA
-Rusty
But which half will be able to do anything about it? The Living, or the Dead?
-Rusty
What new equipment does not support IPv6?
BSD, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows XP, all have support for IPv6 in their network stack. Current Cisco IOS supports IPv6.
There are some applications that go too far into the network stack to properly support IPv6, but those are applications.
The main stumbling block to IPv6 that I see right now is that very few network people in the US know how to use it. Outside of the US, both in Europe and Asia, IPv6 is being deployed fairly widely, as they do not have the IPv4 address space availabable and allocated to make use of it except in servers and routers.
As there are several gateways available, to allow IPv6 clients to access IPv4 servers, I suspect that the demand upone US providers to start supporting IPv6 devices is going to be long in comming.
With 10 devices in my house that support IP, (live at the moment, several others not currently powered up) I would exceed the available IP addresses my ISP account allows. As a result I am effectively forced to use NAT and private IP address space, even if my ISP would rather I did not. On top of that I don't want to keep a bunch of systems widely available to script kiddies. IPv6 would not solve that problem.
Then again, that's probably just all opinion on my part.
-Rusty
If the document says that this is copywritten material, then a printer or copier that can make a duplicate of that material is circumventing the instructions stating that to get a copy you must go to the copyright holder, or one of their representatives (bookstore for example).
I suspect that the CellPhone inclusion is the result of the fact that a CellPhone may be built to ignore any instructions in a ringtone file that say not to forward same ringtone to your friends. Since some ring tones are fragments of popular music, this would concern both the RIAA and the artists earning a living by creating ringtones. (the payback at $2.00 per instance is better than most music files at $1.00 per instance)
-Rusty
Ring tones. They are delivered via SMS, and the potential exists to re-distribute them to your friends via SMS as well. At $2.00 per instance, they pay better than full length songs which various comercial download sites are trying to get $1.00 each for.
-Rusty
Nope, it will be time to remodle the basement again. Probably time to put in an x-10 outlet adapter to shut down the box when not needed, helping to keep that space cooler, and upgrade that hard drive. 120G sounds like quite a bit now, but then 10 years ago 80 Meg was quite a bit of space.
-Rusty
Yes. Linux allows you to mount an ISO image on your hard drive, which itself is a file. The same concept applies to encrypted file systems.
This is not limited to Linux. Using PGP-drive under Windows gives you the same capabilities.
-Rusty
Actually, frequency does have something to do with range. Not proprotionally, but as it relates to the material in the environment. As 802.11b operates in the 2.1Ghz spectrum, which is the same frequency range that your microwave oven operates in, range is suseptable to environmental effects that many people do not think of.
A microwave oven generally works by oscilating the water mollecules in the food you are putting in their path. It is reasonable to assume then that as the amount of water in the air increases, you will see a loss of range on 802.11b, simply by virtue of the radio waves interacting with that water.
As 802.11a operates in the 5Ghz spectrum, (which is not a resonant frequency for water) it is susceptible to other elements and molecules that resonate at that frequency.
As a comparison point, IR is more likely to be affected by water in the atmosphere than UV is, but UV is strongly affected by the amount of O3, which seems to have little or no effect on IR.
-Rusty
If you can wire a plug to a electrical box in the basement, enclose the box beams after mounting this to the floor add an 802.11g interface with an 802.11g access point above it, (and add a bit more storage to the device) you could do set up a wired network with thin clients throughout your house, and never have to worry about anyone taking off with your systems.
Granted you would probably want to use the most recent and strongest varient of WEP, and if possible waveguide your area between the AP and the server to reduce attacks, but if you build it properly, they can set up everything they take from your house, and won't have a bootable system, and you can go to a swap meet or computer recycler and pick up enough hw to go back and wipe your server before they start tearing apart the finish of the house.
That's if you are paranoid.
-Rusty
Since they have opted to disqualify anyone they wish, they may disqualify all applicants from when the story hit Slashdot to it's expiring from the most recent days. (two, three days?)
You may get your chance yet...
-Rusty
15 Gig
-Rusty
and express a compleat lack of interest in WMA.
-Rusty
Don't know if you have noticed it, but the power company has not been sending out nearly as many meter readers as they have in the past. Rural Electric Co-ops have not needed to send out cards for the customer to write down the meter readings and send back either.
Why? Because the various electric companies have been replacing their meters with new meters that report back what the current reading is, over the electric lines themselves. Granted this does not require high bandwidth connectivity, but when you consider the number of meters involved, it is unlikely to be operating at 110 bps either.
-Rusty
In the US, no one gets 50hz power. We tend to get 60hz. (note this is the reason that TV's operate with a 30hz full screen re-fresh in the US, and a 25hz full screen re-fressh in most of the rest of the world.
-Rusty
... that the only code they have not licenced from someone else is hellowor.asm so you?
statute of limitations exceeded I suspect.
Mostly to clean those hardware components that are unlikely to have been cleaned properly already. It's fine to have a rescue disk, but if the drive destroys it because of grime on the heads, or can't read the CD because of dust on the lens, it's won't do you a bit of good.
Also a can of wd-40, or unpreasurized can of fine machine oil to clean heads of dot matrix printers you may encounter.
Couple of notes, you may be able to find local alternatives to some of these things even in remote areas. Gun cleaning kits often have a variation of brake free which can be used to clean print heads. Unless you are at a place that does not have a bar within a mile, you will probably be able to find some high proof alchohol. You can create makeshift q-tips with thin sticks and a piece of cotton out of a first aid or even a makeup kit.
You may also want to build a custom live-cd out of the debian project, as most of the current live-cd's in the wild are going to be using kernel 2.4, where you may want to use 2.2, or even 2.0 for backwards compatability with earlier processors.
Just some ideas.
-Rusty
The business schools that are being funded by Microsoft, or the business schools that are being funded by the Open Source community?