Top X Things You Can Do With Your DIVX Disks
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 2
1) Add them onto the Holy AOL 30-Day Trial CD Necklace.
2) Coasters.
3) Frisbees.
4) Put one on your head and pronounce yourself the DIVX Angel. (4b: Join the circus)
5) Goes great with cabbage!
6) Amaze your dim friends by telling them that the disk will explode 48 hours after they watch it. 48 hours later, tell them the trigger must have activated but that there was some problem in the ignition system.
7) Keep them above your bed, so the first thing you do in the morning is giggle about the incredible stupidity of DIVX.
8) Label 52 of them differently and start playing DIVX poker at school. Guaranteed to befuddle just about everyone.
I especially liked the part of this article that went:
"Professor Shapiro is hopeful that someday soon the technology will exist to build his idea on the cellular level he envisions."
Um, I can build a cardboard box and say that if i put stuff that hasn't been invented yet into it, it'll be a time machine (that I have no proof will work). Can I present it at MIT next?
One cannot (successfully, I suppose) copyright or trademark the term "automobile". In object-oriented computer terms, it's an object, not an instance of that object. The metaphor is a rather good one, as each automobile contains the same basic parts (tires, engine, hood, chassis, brakes, etc.) but the flavor of these parts vary significantly. It is this specific flavor, the je ne sais quoi if you will, that can be trademarks.
By this logic, it makes absolutely no sense for the term "Open Source" to be trademark-able. Open Source refers to a way of thinking; a business convention; a computer software methodology. It does not refer to any specific piece of software in particular. Not Linux, not anything.
It's even worse for "Open Source" to be trademarked than "automobile" since we can at least close our eyes and see an automobile. We can see what a generic one looks like and what the term "automobile" represents. You cannot close your eyes and imagine what a piece of Open Source software looks like.
I think the author isn't implying what you think he is--but it's his fault for being incredibly unclear. I think he means that the public market will be dominated by Red Hat, and this makes perfect sense. It's the only Linux company that's going public; therefore they are the only representitives of Linux in the public market. Why the author chose to phrase it quite that way is beyond me.
Biologically, a virus is a microscopic organism that reproduces (in layman's terms, I'm not a bio person:) ) by invading host cells an restructuring the cell's DNA to essentially "make" it a virus. These converted virii then go and find other non-infected cells to invade.
Biologically, a worm is a macroscopic organism that crawls slowly along the ground, eating any food it happens to smell nearby--at a much slower rate.
In the computer world, a worm, as the author correctly surmises, is self-propelling, that is, a program sent within the attachment can then send itself along without any action by the person who receives it.
In the computer world, virii have been (as the author again correctly surmises), software codes that infect computers by attaching themselves to documents or programs that are passed along.
It seems to me we have our definitions reversed. A computer worm is much closer to a "self-propelling" object than a computer virus, and a computer virus is much slower (with a geometric, not exponential expansion rate) than it's worm counterpart.
The reason Hurley was written out is that Austin Powers decided to spoof/mimic the James Bond movies by having a different female lead in every one of the movies. Since Austin Powers had just married Hurley at the end of AP I, they needed a way to clear the path for the new lead.
Besides, it was damn funny:)
Keeping my fingers crossed
on
Digital VCRs
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· Score: 3
I recall a VCR that came out sometime from 1990-1994 that was able to cut out commercials while it recorded: Watching the tape later, you'd get a blue screen for about 3 seconds and then it would jump back to normal programming. It was a terrific innovation, and I was seriously considering picking one up.
It got sued almost immediately, by about 50 different companies or organizations. It never went into mass production, and the company that designed it was never heard from again.
This is the last thing that advertisers want to see--it takes away their ability to force feed commercials (which is how TV stations get the large majority of their revenue) down the viewers' throats. They hit the designers, and they hit them hard.
I'm hoping and praying that the same sort of thing doesn't happen here, because it's the first step in going to digital VCR boxes and the like.
My main problem with Austin Powers II was that it just used many of the jokes from the first one, blatantly spoofing itself.
Now, a LOT of comedy sequels do this. Austin II actually did a good job of it. The jokes got a good reaction the first time around, and they got a good reaction the second time around too. But for me, the jokes in the first movie elicited laughs and knee-slapping, and the same jokes in the second elicited a smile and a nod at the references. It's almost like they said, "We know it's still funny, so here it is again!
Even one of the new jokes, the clipped penis references when looking up at the spaceship in the sky, was "sequeled" so to speak. The first time they had the sequence, it was hilarious. The second time, twenty minutes later, it got a lot less open laughter.
On the upside, there were two aspects that really stood out and made this movie worth seeing. The first was Scott Evil. Seth Green is one of the most talented and hard-working young actors out there, and the chemistry between him and Mike Meyers is golden. I laughed straight through the Jerry Springer bit at the beginning. The second shining beacon of light was Mini Me. Mike Meyers knows how to create characters. Wayne, Garth, Dr. Evil, Austin Powers...and now Mini Me. Even if he's not playing them, his interaction with characters he thought up is nearly flawless. I'm an avid fan of professional wrestling, and the fight scene with Austin and Mini Me gave away Verne Troyer (Mini Me) as someone with definite training in the squared circle. Midget wrestlers--seemingly by convention--are always masked, so now I'm wondering which one(s) he has been.
I imagine that if you haven't seen the original, Austin Powers II would be just as funny for you as the first one was for the rest of us. And for the rest of us who have seen it, it's just a notch or two below. But not by much:)
You know what, I'm TOTALLY sick of seeing/. commenters correct the lies that Micro$oft proports on their pages. You need not look at 5 comments to this article alone to get the idea. Instead, let's do something CONSTRUCTIVE with all this criticism!:)
(Why do I have the power to do this? Because Barney says everyone's special in his or her own special way, and I'm invoking my privledge as a Special Person. That'll teach you to ask why. Feh!)
The next time you feel like correcting something that M$ claims and that's blatantly false, do so. THEN, email it directly to M$! If we had one day where EVERYONE from/. did this, they'd get hundreds upon hundreds of emails.
Then, everything would start changing. The wheels would be in motion. M$ would realize the error of their ways and become Tibetian monks to pray for forgiveness!
1) If you send the guy who shares the cubicle with you an email that routes through Guam, do international long distance postage rates apply?
2) You've set foot in four states at the same time (Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah)? Feh! I can do all fifty, AND have it legally accurate in a court of law.
3) You can tell your live-in girlfriend that having a long-distance relationship is too taxing for you.
4) You can be tax exempt for subscription fees for porn sites under "Business Expenses" because it passed through your corporate server.
5) Open up a telnet connection to a server in Cambodia, leave it active, and declare your bedroom to be an official embassy!
This puts the fear of death into me. If you recall, major releases of M$ Windows seem to be initiated AFTER someone goes, "Holy shit, what am I going to do with all this hard drive space?!" Windows 3.1 et al came along as people were bathing in the luxury of DOS with an "excessive" 100 MB or so. And a few years later, as 800 MB drives were becoming commonplace, here comes Windows 95 to chew up an eighth or so of that.
I can see all the M$ engineers scrambling furiously for their (overclocked???) PalmPilots to call meetings together to figure out how to devise a Windows that'll eat up 50 gigabytes or so of hard drive space.
The thing that scares me most of all is that I think, if they were really motivated to, they could probably find a way to do it, too.
Top 5 Reasons to Overclock Your Palm Pilot
on
Overclock Your Palm
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· Score: 3
1) You'll be put on the promotion fast track once your employers realize that you're taking memos 10% faster than everyone else.
2) You'll have an extra 2 seconds a day to pursue leisure activities, such as overclocking your coffeemaker.
3) Since your PalmPilot will be overheated, you can stick it down your pants to prevent shrinkage before dates.
4) Or, you can put a cooling fan on it and impress your friends by making your Palm Pilot more bulky then your desktop computer.
"Our editors are not responsible, all we do is print words on paper. Our authors are responsible for their content."
The difference is that the editors of a magazine get to review every article that gets published (as a matter-of-fact) before the magazine ever hits the newsstands. With websites and newsgroups, however, libellous articles could be posted without the ISP's knowledge. They might catch it later, but it could be a while.
An ISP might be better construed as a bulletin board at the local supermarket. Anyone can sneak up and put a sign that says "Bill Gates sucks goat droppings". The supermarket manager will catch it, but not before it's been up for at least a few hours. And probably not before it gathers a crowd or someone complains about it.
From a legal standpoint, the cases might be identical, but from a logical perspective (something the law rarely is:D ) I see enormous differences between the two.
If the ISP had some sort of disclaimer upon signing up for service, such as:
"By using this ISP, I agree to take full personal responsibility for any obscene or libellous material I post within it's domain. In the case that the material personally posted by myself or a dependent is libellous and is pursued by the authorities, I hereby relieve the ISP of all responsibility for these actions."
I'm a yankee myself, but I'd be interested as to how the English law would deal with that.
I realized the implications of the other file extensions after I posted. However, it's interesting that CNN decided to *ignore* the meanings of those file extensions and focus exclusively on your favorite package and mine, M$ Office. I'm wondering if they just forgot or figured that their audience was too stupid to know what programming was.
I don't know what time the virus hit, but as of 4:30 PM the Lockheed Martin systems were still up (I work for them in the EIS department). There is a good chance that it caused a shutdown; the way the office systems are set up, it basically forces you to use Win98 or NT with Outlook. Getting a remote dial-up number and password for the mail server is a pain and a half--it takes about 3 weeks of clearance and your l/p changes dynamically every couple of _minutes_. Don't ask me how this works, I know almost nothing about it. So basically, the maxim is "use windows or fuck off".
Suddenly, I'm laughing a lot less about the virus.
"The worm then searches the local file drive for the following file types and deletes them:.c,.cpp,.asm,.doc,.sls, and.ptp, thereby deleting Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files."
Okay. Whoever wrote this has a GREAT sense of humor. Besides the fact that it purports itself via address-book resends, much like the Melissa virus, it destroys files associated with M$ Office. It's not fatal; it's not going to crash your OS, it's not going to reformat your hard drive. It just deletes M$ Office files.
Legality be damned, this guy is doing us all a favor:)
Wholeheartedly, WHOPPINGLY ironic that I get moderated for flamebait for a posting a comment that generated 10 sincere, intelligent replies to my query.
As I understand it from the description on the home page for this product, it:
A) Is totally independent from your computer.
B) Requires headphones or speakers.
C) Requires a CD-MP3, with no recording/encoding capabilities.
D) Is moderately priced.
Therefore, on my scorecard, the main use for this product is to play MP3s in your first-floor living room when your computer is in the third floor bedroom.
BUT
If you already...1) Have the MP3s (and have therefore already encoded your songs into MP3 format and burned them onto a CD), and 2) Have the speakers you want to listen to the MP3s on...then it wouldn't it probably be less expensive just to buy some cheap extension cords and converters, and then run speakers from your computer down to the first-floor? I have the same sort of thing done with my stereo in my house, and I don't think it cost more than $75-100.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Add them onto the Holy AOL 30-Day Trial CD Necklace.
2) Coasters.
3) Frisbees.
4) Put one on your head and pronounce yourself the DIVX Angel. (4b: Join the circus)
5) Goes great with cabbage!
6) Amaze your dim friends by telling them that the disk will explode 48 hours after they watch it. 48 hours later, tell them the trigger must have activated but that there was some problem in the ignition system.
7) Keep them above your bed, so the first thing you do in the morning is giggle about the incredible stupidity of DIVX.
8) Label 52 of them differently and start playing DIVX poker at school. Guaranteed to befuddle just about everyone.
I especially liked the part of this article that went:
"Professor Shapiro is hopeful that someday soon the technology will exist to build his idea on the cellular level he envisions."
Um, I can build a cardboard box and say that if i put stuff that hasn't been invented yet into it, it'll be a time machine (that I have no proof will work). Can I present it at MIT next?
1) "May all your segmentation faults be benign"
2) "That'll be 20 Hail Marys and 5 lines of assembly code"
3) "Thou shall not covet thy cubicle neighbor's video card"
4) "And God shall smite thee by sending a power surge through your CPU"
5) "God is compassionate, my child...everyone is tempted by the Fruit of the Tree of Microsoft once or twice"
6) "And Apple begat Macintosh, Macintosh begat the PowerMac, and PowerMac begat iMac..."
7) "And on the Seventh Day, Torvald created Linux. And Torvald saw that it was good.
test
One cannot (successfully, I suppose) copyright or trademark the term "automobile". In object-oriented computer terms, it's an object, not an instance of that object. The metaphor is a rather good one, as each automobile contains the same basic parts (tires, engine, hood, chassis, brakes, etc.) but the flavor of these parts vary significantly. It is this specific flavor, the je ne sais quoi if you will, that can be trademarks.
By this logic, it makes absolutely no sense for the term "Open Source" to be trademark-able. Open Source refers to a way of thinking; a business convention; a computer software methodology. It does not refer to any specific piece of software in particular. Not Linux, not anything.
It's even worse for "Open Source" to be trademarked than "automobile" since we can at least close our eyes and see an automobile. We can see what a generic one looks like and what the term "automobile" represents. You cannot close your eyes and imagine what a piece of Open Source software looks like.
I think the author isn't implying what you think he is--but it's his fault for being incredibly unclear. I think he means that the public market will be dominated by Red Hat, and this makes perfect sense. It's the only Linux company that's going public; therefore they are the only representitives of Linux in the public market. Why the author chose to phrase it quite that way is beyond me.
:)
Of course, this means absolutely nothing
Biologically, a virus is a microscopic organism that reproduces (in layman's terms, I'm not a bio person :) ) by invading host cells an restructuring the cell's DNA to essentially "make" it a virus. These converted virii then go and find other non-infected cells to invade.
Biologically, a worm is a macroscopic organism that crawls slowly along the ground, eating any food it happens to smell nearby--at a much slower rate.
In the computer world, a worm, as the author correctly surmises, is self-propelling, that is, a program sent within the attachment can then send itself along without any action by the person who receives it.
In the computer world, virii have been (as the author again correctly surmises), software codes that infect computers by attaching themselves to documents or programs that are passed along.
It seems to me we have our definitions reversed. A computer worm is much closer to a "self-propelling" object than a computer virus, and a computer virus is much slower (with a geometric, not exponential expansion rate) than it's worm counterpart.
Also, remember that Linux is still Unix.
Funny, JP, I always thought Linux was based on Minix, not Unix. Silly me.
The reason Hurley was written out is that Austin Powers decided to spoof/mimic the James Bond movies by having a different female lead in every one of the movies. Since Austin Powers had just married Hurley at the end of AP I, they needed a way to clear the path for the new lead.
:)
Besides, it was damn funny
I recall a VCR that came out sometime from 1990-1994 that was able to cut out commercials while it recorded: Watching the tape later, you'd get a blue screen for about 3 seconds and then it would jump back to normal programming. It was a terrific innovation, and I was seriously considering picking one up.
It got sued almost immediately, by about 50 different companies or organizations. It never went into mass production, and the company that designed it was never heard from again.
This is the last thing that advertisers want to see--it takes away their ability to force feed commercials (which is how TV stations get the large majority of their revenue) down the viewers' throats. They hit the designers, and they hit them hard.
I'm hoping and praying that the same sort of thing doesn't happen here, because it's the first step in going to digital VCR boxes and the like.
My main problem with Austin Powers II was that it just used many of the jokes from the first one, blatantly spoofing itself.
:)
Now, a LOT of comedy sequels do this. Austin II actually did a good job of it. The jokes got a good reaction the first time around, and they got a good reaction the second time around too. But for me, the jokes in the first movie elicited laughs and knee-slapping, and the same jokes in the second elicited a smile and a nod at the references. It's almost like they said, "We know it's still funny, so here it is again!
Even one of the new jokes, the clipped penis references when looking up at the spaceship in the sky, was "sequeled" so to speak. The first time they had the sequence, it was hilarious. The second time, twenty minutes later, it got a lot less open laughter.
On the upside, there were two aspects that really stood out and made this movie worth seeing. The first was Scott Evil. Seth Green is one of the most talented and hard-working young actors out there, and the chemistry between him and Mike Meyers is golden. I laughed straight through the Jerry Springer bit at the beginning. The second shining beacon of light was Mini Me. Mike Meyers knows how to create characters. Wayne, Garth, Dr. Evil, Austin Powers...and now Mini Me. Even if he's not playing them, his interaction with characters he thought up is nearly flawless. I'm an avid fan of professional wrestling, and the fight scene with Austin and Mini Me gave away Verne Troyer (Mini Me) as someone with definite training in the squared circle. Midget wrestlers--seemingly by convention--are always masked, so now I'm wondering which one(s) he has been.
I imagine that if you haven't seen the original, Austin Powers II would be just as funny for you as the first one was for the rest of us. And for the rest of us who have seen it, it's just a notch or two below. But not by much
Cya later, Bones. We're gonna miss you.
1) I'm an engineer, not a Microsoft coder.
2) It's a blue screen error, Jim.
3) Don't let them do anything that takes you out of the Captain's chair of your cubicle.
4) I must go home. Not to Earth...to Root.
5) Well, I'll be damned! I finally got the last line of code in.
6) Damn you and your FORTRAN logic, Spock.
7) I don't know much about Winbbles, except that it's born bloated and just gets slower with age.
8) I'm dying, Jim. I've been infected with the Michaelangelo virus. I want to live out my last days in this big hollow place known as Las Vegas.
You know what, I'm TOTALLY sick of seeing /. commenters correct the lies that Micro$oft proports on their pages. You need not look at 5 comments to this article alone to get the idea. Instead, let's do something CONSTRUCTIVE with all this criticism! :)
/. did this, they'd get hundreds upon hundreds of emails.
I'm declaring tomorrow Constructive M$ Bashing Day!
(Why do I have the power to do this? Because Barney says everyone's special in his or her own special way, and I'm invoking my privledge as a Special Person. That'll teach you to ask why. Feh!)
The next time you feel like correcting something that M$ claims and that's blatantly false, do so. THEN, email it directly to M$! If we had one day where EVERYONE from
Then, everything would start changing. The wheels would be in motion. M$ would realize the error of their ways and become Tibetian monks to pray for forgiveness!
We can make a difference, dammit! Can't we??
1) If you send the guy who shares the cubicle with you an email that routes through Guam, do international long distance postage rates apply?
2) You've set foot in four states at the same time (Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah)? Feh! I can do all fifty, AND have it legally accurate in a court of law.
3) You can tell your live-in girlfriend that having a long-distance relationship is too taxing for you.
4) You can be tax exempt for subscription fees for porn sites under "Business Expenses" because it passed through your corporate server.
5) Open up a telnet connection to a server in Cambodia, leave it active, and declare your bedroom to be an official embassy!
My reactions to this article as I was reading it, in chronological order
1) Confusion
2) Disbelief
3) Anger
4) Pain, as I smacked myself on the forehead when I realized it was from TheOnion.com.
This puts the fear of death into me. If you recall, major releases of M$ Windows seem to be initiated AFTER someone goes, "Holy shit, what am I going to do with all this hard drive space?!" Windows 3.1 et al came along as people were bathing in the luxury of DOS with an "excessive" 100 MB or so. And a few years later, as 800 MB drives were becoming commonplace, here comes Windows 95 to chew up an eighth or so of that.
I can see all the M$ engineers scrambling furiously for their (overclocked???) PalmPilots to call meetings together to figure out how to devise a Windows that'll eat up 50 gigabytes or so of hard drive space.
The thing that scares me most of all is that I think, if they were really motivated to, they could probably find a way to do it, too.
1) You'll be put on the promotion fast track once your employers realize that you're taking memos 10% faster than everyone else.
2) You'll have an extra 2 seconds a day to pursue leisure activities, such as overclocking your coffeemaker.
3) Since your PalmPilot will be overheated, you can stick it down your pants to prevent shrinkage before dates.
4) Or, you can put a cooling fan on it and impress your friends by making your Palm Pilot more bulky then your desktop computer.
5) It's a sure babe magnet.
"Our editors are not responsible, all we do is print words on paper. Our authors are responsible for their content."
:D ) I see enormous differences between the two.
The difference is that the editors of a magazine get to review every article that gets published (as a matter-of-fact) before the magazine ever hits the newsstands. With websites and newsgroups, however, libellous articles could be posted without the ISP's knowledge. They might catch it later, but it could be a while.
An ISP might be better construed as a bulletin board at the local supermarket. Anyone can sneak up and put a sign that says "Bill Gates sucks goat droppings". The supermarket manager will catch it, but not before it's been up for at least a few hours. And probably not before it gathers a crowd or someone complains about it.
From a legal standpoint, the cases might be identical, but from a logical perspective (something the law rarely is
If the ISP had some sort of disclaimer upon signing up for service, such as:
"By using this ISP, I agree to take full personal responsibility for any obscene or libellous material I post within it's domain. In the case that the material personally posted by myself or a dependent is libellous and is pursued by the authorities, I hereby relieve the ISP of all responsibility for these actions."
I'm a yankee myself, but I'd be interested as to how the English law would deal with that.
I realized the implications of the other file extensions after I posted. However, it's interesting that CNN decided to *ignore* the meanings of those file extensions and focus exclusively on your favorite package and mine, M$ Office. I'm wondering if they just forgot or figured that their audience was too stupid to know what programming was.
I don't know what time the virus hit, but as of 4:30 PM the Lockheed Martin systems were still up (I work for them in the EIS department). There is a good chance that it caused a shutdown; the way the office systems are set up, it basically forces you to use Win98 or NT with Outlook. Getting a remote dial-up number and password for the mail server is a pain and a half--it takes about 3 weeks of clearance and your l/p changes dynamically every couple of _minutes_. Don't ask me how this works, I know almost nothing about it. So basically, the maxim is "use windows or fuck off".
Suddenly, I'm laughing a lot less about the virus.
"The worm then searches the local file drive for the following file types and deletes them: .c, .cpp, .asm, .doc, .sls, and .ptp, thereby deleting Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files."
:)
Okay. Whoever wrote this has a GREAT sense of humor. Besides the fact that it purports itself via address-book resends, much like the Melissa virus, it destroys files associated with M$ Office. It's not fatal; it's not going to crash your OS, it's not going to reformat your hard drive. It just deletes M$ Office files.
Legality be damned, this guy is doing us all a favor
See! See! I'm providing a service! Help, help, I'm being repressed!
*thud*
Wholeheartedly, WHOPPINGLY ironic that I get moderated for flamebait for a posting a comment that generated 10 sincere, intelligent replies to my query.
As I understand it from the description on the home page for this product, it:
A) Is totally independent from your computer.
B) Requires headphones or speakers.
C) Requires a CD-MP3, with no recording/encoding capabilities.
D) Is moderately priced.
Therefore, on my scorecard, the main use for this product is to play MP3s in your first-floor living room when your computer is in the third floor bedroom.
BUT
If you already...1) Have the MP3s (and have therefore already encoded your songs into MP3 format and burned them onto a CD), and 2) Have the speakers you want to listen to the MP3s on...then it wouldn't it probably be less expensive just to buy some cheap extension cords and converters, and then run speakers from your computer down to the first-floor? I have the same sort of thing done with my stereo in my house, and I don't think it cost more than $75-100.