... there's no way I'm gonna dump this kind of cash on a device like this if they're going to cut off what would be its biggest convenience -- autoripping MP3s off of the CDs I play in my stereo so that I can play them at my computer later.
Not to mention playing them on the portable MP3 player that you bought but can't rip songs for because of "copy protection" on the Sony CD's. What was the brand name on that useless MP3 player again? Oh Yea, Sony!
Apparently it's OK for Sony to do this, but if you were to start a company and make a similar device, Sony would be one of the first companies lining up to sue you for violating the laws they bought. Does anyone else see a problem with this?
Why buy this expensive CD player with a hard drive, when Sony is one of the very same companies that is busy putting things on the CD to keep them from being read in this way? It will likely be unable to read Sony CD's if they have their way. And even if it can, do you want to support a system where it's OK for a Sony CD player to rip Sony CD's, but no other brand of CD player or your own computer can? Will you buy one of each brand CD player for each music company that publishes CD's? Get a clue people, Sony should get the word loud and clear that people are going to stop buying all of their products until they stop screwing with the redbook standards to screw the consumer. Unless this happens their copy protection games will continue.
Still insanely easy to do if you make enough transparent objects and raise the number of times a ray can split as it passes through such items (try setting max_trace_level to 100 from it's very low "normal" value.) I had a scene of different colored glass slabs that just didn't look right with the default value. Looks great with max_trace_level at 100, but rendering about 100 small frames for animation took a month on a Pentium 166. It still bogs down my AMD, a large still of the same model can take days.
There's a dedicated news server at news.povray.org (files there do not post to Usenet and your regular news server). Point your favorite news reading application there and download the groups, there are groups for exactly this, posting still renderings, animations, and plenty of technical discussion groups. I've seen some fantastic ray tracings posted here.
I remember long (in this industry) ago when Microsoft embraced OpenGL as a standard. That was shortly before they decided to destroy it and put DirectX in it's place, making it harder for developers to port their applications to other platforms. They went so far as to release a buggy OpenGL DLL, and stamp it with the same version numbers as a working revision of the OpenGL library. Just an honest mistake as they explained it when caught. Yea, right.
One has to ask, what does the name OpenGL imply? If they (or a company they bought IP from) did develop IP and contribute it to OpenGL, then, while they might still have a patent on some expression of an idea, I would expect that they can't go very far on controlling what they contributed to an OpenGL standards group.
Would people use or even install software that claimed the right to disable any other software it felt like that they paid good money for on their own system?
Would people use software that was known to crash regularly, costing them time and money and making them do the same work over?
Would people buy new versions of software when it was known to be extremely bloated, take much more resources than previous versions, and contain megabytes of dead useless code?
I submit that your expectation of the wisdom of the buying public has no basis in fact.
You're missing the point. The spiral is actually in the other direction. Unless the duplicator motor goes backward the result will be different. Very different if the reader doesn't go backwards as well, as the media can't even be read properly in the normal direction of rotation. Remember, this isn't concentric tracks, this is a spiral of data.
Back as a little kid I had the required chemistry set. There was a warning in the book that came with it: Never ever eat anything that you make with the chemistry set. Did no one else learn this important lesson as a child?
OK, there is the band issue. That brings up another question, I thought I had seen a US advertisement that some cell phone offering required a tripple band (or perhaps a tripple mode) phone. If we don't use 1800 mhz, what were they talking about? But even if the phone is on the right band, does that mean that the protocols used to pass these pictures from one phone to another would pass cleanly through the clular network? It seems to me (a complete outsider) that what one can build into a celular phone is greatly limited by the underlying network, unless there is a well defined low level protocol that this information can travel on top of. I'm trying to understand the basics of celular communication at a level that would allow things like this camera phone, as well as services like GM's On-Star and phones incorporating GPS devices to play well with other equipment.
Fine, they added a camera to a phone. What I want to know is, with the mumbo-jumbo of different technologies we have deployed in the US, and lots of competing wireless telcos doing different things, will this phone easily integrate with all or most of them, a few of them, or (as I fear) none at all? Perhaps a more general question would be how can a non-industry insider keep up with the basic technology used in cell phones so that I would not have even bothered to ask this question?
Ain't this the same Sony that is busy doing things to CD's to keep people from ripping them to a hard drive? And we should be glad that we are being allowed to pay the $1500 for a car device that will be unable to operate as intended because of the things they are doing to the CD's used in it?
Pre-Internet I used a program that would make a quick long distance call to the naval observatory over the modem to set the clock. When I first got Internet access I started using a program called Atomic Clock, but over the years fewer and fewer time servers seemed to support the protocol it used, and eventually the very few I could find were obviously in need of some attention to their clocks themselves, they were drastically off. I'm currently using a little program for the PC called NTPC. I've had to occasionally track down a new time server when the predefined ones became unavailable, but otherwise it works fine.
Can the M$ time sync for XP be disabled, or is this just another way for them to impose Bill's vision on us all?
Thanks, I thought someone might do it but had yet to see it. I really like Antec cases too, my current case is an Inwin that I've come to hate, but I built a friend a system and we chose an Antec with a 350 watt power supply. The case is a joy to work on, but the supply does lack the feature you pointed out.
Unfortunately, they insisted on using WinXP, and despite hours spent on the MSI website and calls to their tech support, we can't get the MSI supplied mother board monitor software to work reliably for any user that logs into XP, and even when it randomly does work it seems to be shut off when the user logs out. Bummer, but that's progress Microsoft style.
Many, if not all, newer motherboards have temperature sensing (a must for the Athlon chip).
Some even have extra inputs available if you want to add extra temperature sensors.
Perhaps more applicable in this case is that these boards also offer inputs for fan speed sensing when used with an appropriate fan (generally the ones with 3 wires and a small tach sensor built in). Unfortunately, I have yet to see a power supply that comes with such a fan and provides the sensor feedback to go back to the motherboard. (I'm not saying they don't make them, just in my limited experience I haven't seen any.) If you could find the right size fan with the speed sensor you should be able to install it in the power supply and route it to the MB though. If there was enough demand voiced I expect the sensor would start showing up, but manufacturers would have to know that some people we basing case purchases on this feature.
This doesn't help older systems like this Tiger system much, but the issue has been addressed. There also have been available for quite some time temperature sensors that you installed in the case and they would sound an alarm when a critical temperature was reached. Several years ago I had a programmer build some watchdog timers for some critical systems with PIC chips and we decided to add a Dallas temperature sensor. By tapping on the reset button a few times you could get it to beep the internal case temperature back to you.(Obviously, you didn't reset the computer - the watchdog took over the MB reset input so it could reboot the system if it detected a failure. A long press of the reset could still reset the system through the PIC chip.)
This is reasonably timely for me, just yesterday I started getting alarms that my CPU fan was erratically slowing down. So far CPU temp looks good, but I'm going to have to replace the fan (if I can find an available fan of the right size with a speed sensor) or the whole heat sink assembly. I do have another 12 volt fan with the right hole pattern, but it lacks the speed sensor and is much thicker. Maybe I could find some really long metal screws and stack both fans above the heat sink, count on the new one to cool the CPU, but the old one to help and to continue to monitor the RPM and airflow. Any thoughts?
Too many times someone without a good background in this area thinks they have done something impressive, when they have really left wide open holes. Clearly we are not being given enough information here to prove this is the case, but the important thing is that we are not being given enough information to evaluate it either way. The article makes some vague claims but they are pretty lame:
"Since you don't know what any of the
values are mathematically, [a hacker] can't
solve it," says Robert E. Kauffman, who is
a senior research chemist at Dayton and
Jason Kauffman's father. Robert Kauffman
formed a partnership with his son and the
university to patent the idea. The
Kauffmans are reluctant to go into more
detail about the idea because it's in the
patenting process.
Cryptography based on a hacker "not knowing" something can be in for quite a surprise. And there is not even a hint here that this technique is based on a mathematically sound formula that is "hard" to solve. Perhaps this guy is on to something, but this attempt to talk about it but at the same time claim they can't talk about it yet leads me to believe this is more of an exercise in hype or ego than anything scientific. Cartoon cryptography might turn out to be a fitting term for it.
There is a major benefit to this approach that was not mentioned: Once the Swedish post office starts making that 19 cents per piece of spam, the Swedish government will look twice at all the spammers who are sending UCE directly without paying. While I certainly wouldn't want the government to stick it's nose so far into e-mail that any e-mail was taxed (and I expect this would be the final result), this should lead to some serious anti-spam laws with teeth in them. If done here in the U.S., and followed up with anti-(direct)-spam laws and serious enforcement, I'm certain it would significantly decrease the amount of spam sent to me each day.
I personally hope I never have a 10,000 rpm drive. Rotational speed isn't the only factor, a higher rotational speed gets you more power usage, more heat and more noise. At these speeds you have to consider what stress on the media does to the recording surface, as well. A greater data density, on the other hand, can improve transfer rates while giving you a lower RPM, along with the lower power and noise that go with it. New head technology is promising us much greater data density (remember the recent/. article on terabyte drives?) I would much rather see the manufacturers focus on an approach that continues to improve data density than working on increasing rotational speed.
There are some state laws, and there have been some national laws proposed (which the spammers like to quote as if they were passed claiming that their spam complies and is therefor legal), but I don't believe there is any passed national law. While there could still be problems with international spam, most spam needs to identify the benefactor in some way for it to pay off, an 800#, a web site to visit or an e-mail address. These terrorists can be tracked down, if the government was just willing to put some teeth into a law to protect us. There is a clear federal law against junk faxes (which some have claimed might apply to spam, but from the wording it is not clear enough that it does) with clear and stiff penalties, if we had the same for spam it would help a lot.
It's just like Micro$oft; get caught, even loose a trial, and as your "punishment" you promise not to do it again. Then, of course, it's business as usual. I've lost track of how many times M$ has done this. Pretty much the entire record industry, as their punishment two years ago when they were caught in predatory practices, agreed to stop doing what they were doing, which was going to lead to lower prices. See how much they have come down?
A careful read of their TOS leads me to believe they had reason to expect this would happen. (Isn't that the implication you get from reading it?) If they knew or believed it would happen they may not be able to worm out of responsibility based on a disclaimer.
We can't get our gub'mint to outlaw spam, but they can spend their time telling search engines how to do business! Sure, I think this info should be disclosed too, but on a priority basis there are a lot of other things I would rather see the effort spent on, and I'm not sure what legal basis they have to tell a site how to present links.
As long as the site isn't outright claiming that they don't bias searches based on 'ad revenue' (payola), I don't see that they have done anything wrong in doing it. Could be an unwise move to do it if there is a public backlash, but it doesn't strike me as anything that tax paid "public servants" need to stick their nose in.
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My grammer was a nice old lady, leave her out of this!
Not to mention playing them on the portable MP3 player that you bought but can't rip songs for because of "copy protection" on the Sony CD's. What was the brand name on that useless MP3 player again? Oh Yea, Sony!
Apparently it's OK for Sony to do this, but if you were to start a company and make a similar device, Sony would be one of the first companies lining up to sue you for violating the laws they bought. Does anyone else see a problem with this?
Why buy this expensive CD player with a hard drive, when Sony is one of the very same companies that is busy putting things on the CD to keep them from being read in this way? It will likely be unable to read Sony CD's if they have their way. And even if it can, do you want to support a system where it's OK for a Sony CD player to rip Sony CD's, but no other brand of CD player or your own computer can? Will you buy one of each brand CD player for each music company that publishes CD's? Get a clue people, Sony should get the word loud and clear that people are going to stop buying all of their products until they stop screwing with the redbook standards to screw the consumer. Unless this happens their copy protection games will continue.
That seems to have posted everything I didn't care about and left out the main point: So what is new in Povray 3.5?
Still insanely easy to do if you make enough transparent objects and raise the number of times a ray can split as it passes through such items (try setting max_trace_level to 100 from it's very low "normal" value.) I had a scene of different colored glass slabs that just didn't look right with the default value. Looks great with max_trace_level at 100, but rendering about 100 small frames for animation took a month on a Pentium 166. It still bogs down my AMD, a large still of the same model can take days.
There's a dedicated news server at news.povray.org (files there do not post to Usenet and your regular news server). Point your favorite news reading application there and download the groups, there are groups for exactly this, posting still renderings, animations, and plenty of technical discussion groups. I've seen some fantastic ray tracings posted here.
One has to ask, what does the name OpenGL imply? If they (or a company they bought IP from) did develop IP and contribute it to OpenGL, then, while they might still have a patent on some expression of an idea, I would expect that they can't go very far on controlling what they contributed to an OpenGL standards group.
Would people use software that was known to crash regularly, costing them time and money and making them do the same work over?
Would people buy new versions of software when it was known to be extremely bloated, take much more resources than previous versions, and contain megabytes of dead useless code?
I submit that your expectation of the wisdom of the buying public has no basis in fact.
You're missing the point. The spiral is actually in the other direction. Unless the duplicator motor goes backward the result will be different. Very different if the reader doesn't go backwards as well, as the media can't even be read properly in the normal direction of rotation. Remember, this isn't concentric tracks, this is a spiral of data.
Back as a little kid I had the required chemistry set. There was a warning in the book that came with it: Never ever eat anything that you make with the chemistry set. Did no one else learn this important lesson as a child?
OK, there is the band issue. That brings up another question, I thought I had seen a US advertisement that some cell phone offering required a tripple band (or perhaps a tripple mode) phone. If we don't use 1800 mhz, what were they talking about? But even if the phone is on the right band, does that mean that the protocols used to pass these pictures from one phone to another would pass cleanly through the clular network? It seems to me (a complete outsider) that what one can build into a celular phone is greatly limited by the underlying network, unless there is a well defined low level protocol that this information can travel on top of. I'm trying to understand the basics of celular communication at a level that would allow things like this camera phone, as well as services like GM's On-Star and phones incorporating GPS devices to play well with other equipment.
Fine, they added a camera to a phone. What I want to know is, with the mumbo-jumbo of different technologies we have deployed in the US, and lots of competing wireless telcos doing different things, will this phone easily integrate with all or most of them, a few of them, or (as I fear) none at all? Perhaps a more general question would be how can a non-industry insider keep up with the basic technology used in cell phones so that I would not have even bothered to ask this question?
Ain't this the same Sony that is busy doing things to CD's to keep people from ripping them to a hard drive? And we should be glad that we are being allowed to pay the $1500 for a car device that will be unable to operate as intended because of the things they are doing to the CD's used in it?
Can the M$ time sync for XP be disabled, or is this just another way for them to impose Bill's vision on us all?
Unfortunately, they insisted on using WinXP, and despite hours spent on the MSI website and calls to their tech support, we can't get the MSI supplied mother board monitor software to work reliably for any user that logs into XP, and even when it randomly does work it seems to be shut off when the user logs out. Bummer, but that's progress Microsoft style.
Perhaps more applicable in this case is that these boards also offer inputs for fan speed sensing when used with an appropriate fan (generally the ones with 3 wires and a small tach sensor built in). Unfortunately, I have yet to see a power supply that comes with such a fan and provides the sensor feedback to go back to the motherboard. (I'm not saying they don't make them, just in my limited experience I haven't seen any.) If you could find the right size fan with the speed sensor you should be able to install it in the power supply and route it to the MB though. If there was enough demand voiced I expect the sensor would start showing up, but manufacturers would have to know that some people we basing case purchases on this feature.
This doesn't help older systems like this Tiger system much, but the issue has been addressed. There also have been available for quite some time temperature sensors that you installed in the case and they would sound an alarm when a critical temperature was reached. Several years ago I had a programmer build some watchdog timers for some critical systems with PIC chips and we decided to add a Dallas temperature sensor. By tapping on the reset button a few times you could get it to beep the internal case temperature back to you.(Obviously, you didn't reset the computer - the watchdog took over the MB reset input so it could reboot the system if it detected a failure. A long press of the reset could still reset the system through the PIC chip.)
This is reasonably timely for me, just yesterday I started getting alarms that my CPU fan was erratically slowing down. So far CPU temp looks good, but I'm going to have to replace the fan (if I can find an available fan of the right size with a speed sensor) or the whole heat sink assembly. I do have another 12 volt fan with the right hole pattern, but it lacks the speed sensor and is much thicker. Maybe I could find some really long metal screws and stack both fans above the heat sink, count on the new one to cool the CPU, but the old one to help and to continue to monitor the RPM and airflow. Any thoughts?
"Since you don't know what any of the values are mathematically, [a hacker] can't solve it," says Robert E. Kauffman, who is a senior research chemist at Dayton and Jason Kauffman's father. Robert Kauffman formed a partnership with his son and the university to patent the idea. The Kauffmans are reluctant to go into more detail about the idea because it's in the patenting process.
Cryptography based on a hacker "not knowing" something can be in for quite a surprise. And there is not even a hint here that this technique is based on a mathematically sound formula that is "hard" to solve. Perhaps this guy is on to something, but this attempt to talk about it but at the same time claim they can't talk about it yet leads me to believe this is more of an exercise in hype or ego than anything scientific. Cartoon cryptography might turn out to be a fitting term for it.
There is a major benefit to this approach that was not mentioned: Once the Swedish post office starts making that 19 cents per piece of spam, the Swedish government will look twice at all the spammers who are sending UCE directly without paying. While I certainly wouldn't want the government to stick it's nose so far into e-mail that any e-mail was taxed (and I expect this would be the final result), this should lead to some serious anti-spam laws with teeth in them. If done here in the U.S., and followed up with anti-(direct)-spam laws and serious enforcement, I'm certain it would significantly decrease the amount of spam sent to me each day.
I personally hope I never have a 10,000 rpm drive. Rotational speed isn't the only factor, a higher rotational speed gets you more power usage, more heat and more noise. At these speeds you have to consider what stress on the media does to the recording surface, as well. A greater data density, on the other hand, can improve transfer rates while giving you a lower RPM, along with the lower power and noise that go with it. New head technology is promising us much greater data density (remember the recent /. article on terabyte drives?) I would much rather see the manufacturers focus on an approach that continues to improve data density than working on increasing rotational speed.
There are some state laws, and there have been some national laws proposed (which the spammers like to quote as if they were passed claiming that their spam complies and is therefor legal), but I don't believe there is any passed national law. While there could still be problems with international spam, most spam needs to identify the benefactor in some way for it to pay off, an 800#, a web site to visit or an e-mail address. These terrorists can be tracked down, if the government was just willing to put some teeth into a law to protect us. There is a clear federal law against junk faxes (which some have claimed might apply to spam, but from the wording it is not clear enough that it does) with clear and stiff penalties, if we had the same for spam it would help a lot.
It's just like Micro$oft; get caught, even loose a trial, and as your "punishment" you promise not to do it again. Then, of course, it's business as usual. I've lost track of how many times M$ has done this. Pretty much the entire record industry, as their punishment two years ago when they were caught in predatory practices, agreed to stop doing what they were doing, which was going to lead to lower prices. See how much they have come down?
A careful read of their TOS leads me to believe they had reason to expect this would happen. (Isn't that the implication you get from reading it?) If they knew or believed it would happen they may not be able to worm out of responsibility based on a disclaimer.
As long as the site isn't outright claiming that they don't bias searches based on 'ad revenue' (payola), I don't see that they have done anything wrong in doing it. Could be an unwise move to do it if there is a public backlash, but it doesn't strike me as anything that tax paid "public servants" need to stick their nose in.
And he won has a typo in his sig looks like a fool.
Sorry, couldn't comment on the 2 headed monnster, slashdot effect.