... but those people who are trying to piggyback on top of MS's sales? Mod your system till your heart is content. Just don't try making a business out of it.
Giving away copies of Mame is hardly making a profit, but even for those making and selling mod chips, so what? They are not doing anything illegal (afaik). They didn't steal trade secret information, they legitimately reverse engineered the console. For M$ to claim no one can do such things goes contrary to all precedent and logic. If you buy a car you can have a third party company customize it, repaint it, add spoilers, a sunroof, or more, even when the factory offers the same features. I can't think of any industry other than M$ and the console industry where such a concept of not being able to modify a product and use as you see fit is applied to a product that you buy, and that has to include being able to buy the modification parts from someone who legitimately designed and made them.
If Microsoft grew food they would claim that no one could buy that food and then open their own restaurant.
Is there any proof, or even reason to believe, that uncapping a modem at all leads to increased data usage? I rather doubt it. I have DSL, not cable, and my bandwidth is lower than that of friends who do have cable, yet I am not using peak bandwidth hardly at all. Sure, uncapping will allow one to download a file faster, but until we get those trabyte hard drives I don't see uncapping as likely to increase actual usage at all. Sure, it will let a user get a file faster, but how many users are getting so many files that they use up all of their 24/7 bandwidth now? I doubt any, so I don't see how uncapping really has any effect on usage, assuming all of these uncappers didn't download at the same time.
Of course, if you're using your system as a server or to feed a vast library of MP3 or video on a p2p network, the model changes. But from my experiences I would expect this would already be in violation of the ISP's "acceptable use agreement". If that the real issue then that's what should be targeted, not people who figure out that there is an artificial limitation that they can easily bypass.
I've seen plenty of cable modems on sale at Circuit City and other places. Presumably one can legally buy and use them rather than buying or renting one from the cable company. It seems reasonable to assume that different cable companies might put a different cap on usage, so such a store bought modem certainly might have a higher cap, or since it is sold to the end-user and not the ISP, no cap at all. What happens when a consumer purchased modem attracts the attention of the FBI?
And I certainly don't see, even if this is theft of services, why the FBI comes into the picture. It certainly seems like a local or state crime, not a federal one. And there seems to be no valid reason at all to have taken the computers, it's the modems that were uncapped. Taking the computers is just abusive over exercise of questionable authority. (sure, they might find instructions on how to uncap a modem still on the computer, but that knowledge isn't illegal in itself, and they have the modem as proof. And if I bought my own capped modem I would expect it to include printed instructions in the manual on how to change the cap for my particular system, so what?) Looks like the FBI wants to appear to be doing something to counter all of the bad press they got recently; too bad they chose to abuse people outside of their rightful jurisdiction.
Is there any reason that a phone could not simply fire up the GPS unit when 911 were called?
The GPS will have to be already running, it takes time to lock on the satellites and get enough data to compute a fix; once it has that info it can track very accurately. The real question is will the sending of that data be limited to just 911 calls. Every indication is that it will not. While it would be very handy to be able to send the data when you want to and let another party receive it (perhaps a person you are trying to meet with or a website you want location specific information from), it seems more likely that the phone company will capture this data against your will and sell it, it would be valuable to a lot of people. It's even been suggest you might start getting targeted instant messaging advertisements when you get close to a store targeting you.
Lets not kid ourselves, this isn't a hardware solution to playing back divx; it's just a software solution with the software and a cpu on a separate card. Of course, most of us realize we don't want a hardware solution, it would be locked in to current codecs and hard or impossible to upgrade. But there are a lot of reasons to not want a software/firmware playback system either. Maybe it might have been handy when my p90 just couldn't keep up, but now that I have the cpu to support it, extra hardware just seems foolish. The only people I can see having a use for this are those who want to "upgrade" a very old computer, and that seldom if ever is a smart move. Considering the cost of putting together a new box these days, it seems like just throwing money away to do this and have an extra card that can only play video but the computer is still under powered for everything else. For those of use with anything remotely recent, it's just redundant. Here are some of the problems I see:
More cards, more power, more heat.
Opps, there goes another slot, as well as all the driver issues involved in supporting it.
I'm not the only one to see this, but it deserves to be mentioned in any list: The card will quickly get out of date compared to the newest codecs. Updates, if they come at all, will likely be so slow to appear that most new videos will always be a version ahead of the card. And, of course, if the manufacturer goes out of business, or looses interest, or doesn't support the same favor of M$ software that you want to run, you have a hundred dollars worth of junk.
From the article: Palladium won't run unauthorized programs
OK, who here wants to let Microsoft decide what is an authorized program and what isn't??? Obviously a user can't "self authorize" or that would defeat all of the protection. Sounds like Bill Gate's dream system to me.
I'm not advocating copy protection, just questioning why it's done in such lame ways when there is information on each media that identifies if it's CDR or CDRW or not.
If I included code in the program to detect a CD-R drive and, if found, attempt to overwrite the TOC on the CD, could this actually work as a "copy protection" technique?
As a protection system, this doesn't work - it would take most hackers just few seconds to figure out what happened, and about the same amount of time for word of it to circle the globe on the Internet. The work around is obvious for most users - write the CD on the CD-RW drive and then run it from a CD or DVD drive. However, if the user doesn't leave the new disc open for further writing when making the copy, you can't write on it anyway.
One has to wonder though, why there are all the lame hacks to attempt copy protection for data CD's (games mostly) when the right "fix" would seem to be to simply determine if the media ID matches that of a CDR or CDRW media rather than the original pressed media. Can't any of the protection programmers figure out how to get this basic information from the drive?
so who sets the color code?
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What a stupid idea, make the money even more like play money to supposedly suit foreigners. I just don't buy it. Sure, I've seen different colored money in other countries, but I certainly never learned their color code, I looked at the numbers on the bills. Has the new world order standardized the color code for money, or will this just lead to more problems? How many foreigners, not competent enough to read the numbers on the bills are going to be thinking in terms of our color code, rather than their own? We're just inviting problems when we encourage foreigners to use a color code, then someone is sure to accuse us that we deliberately cheated them because they didn't realize that our bills are not valued in the same order as their bills.
well, this end the arguement on whether PCs or consoles are more practical for gaming. A $299 Playstation 2 sounds quite better if you're just in it for gaming.
Different things suit different people. I'm not going to list all of the reasons, but a PC suits me much better than a game console. But one thing that you missed and that does favor your belief is that the PS2 came down in price about a month ago, it's now $199 US (as is the X-box. And the PS-one is $49, with the cube at $149)
I always find it funny when there's people repeating the "didn't we see this already?"
Well, to you and the person who moderatd me down, let me explain something that you don't grasp. The original post was a 1:59. I saw it at 2:00. There were no other responses of this nature posted when I looked, and I did. But in the seconds I was typing my short post, previewing it and posting it, several others made similar observations. It happens. Get over it.
Perhaps the fact that you always find it funny indicates that the problem (duplicated original posts) happens often enough that it indeed should be mentioned.
Copy Protection is OK (witness: video games). Protection from theft is OK.
But video games pretty much have one specific use, and that isn't impacted by VG copy protection. But when you buy a CD there are any number of legitimate (fair use) things that you should be able to do with it, from pay it on your computer to transfer the music to your portable MP3 player and play it there. Just what is one expected to do with their Sony MP3 player if Sony protects disc that you buy? Seems they are legitimizing downloading illegal copies from the Internet.
It does seem more like a gimic than anything that would be useful in day to day operation. I can see one use though. More than once I've be installing an OS (Microsoft - what do you want to reinstall today) and suddenly found that I needed information on a hard drive, or an updated driver, or some other information that I wanted to get from the web. In my case I fire up the old P166 and reslove things with it, but the ability to get to the web while resolving problems could be handy for many.
Who really cares? We've got a great browser named Mozilla now, with great features, great standards support and a great feature. As long as people care about Mozilla it will continue.
That's kind of the whole point - if IE continues to make even more ground, perhaps by a certain evil monopoly putting IE specific stuff in it's web tools, then Mozilla and the other may not continue, or they may be less and less useful when you need to do something on the web.
My problem with the industry is that they want it both ways (or 3 ways if they can figure out how to get that). They want royalties on recordable media (with the assumption that they are owed royalties on everything, and that you'll never make CD's of your own garage band or other material they don't have claim on), then claim you have no right to make a copy of a CD you buy and copy protect originals to prevent even fair use. Sony makes MP3 players (and even advertises for users to download music from the web!) but then fight MP3s on the web and again trys to prevent you from making MP3s from the CD's you legitimately buy. Now the attack on resold CD - with the stated assumption that if a CD is sold used the original buyer must have made a copy. I grew up with the belief in presumption of innocence; but the recording industry wants a policy of since you might have done something wrong they are entitled to to go after not just you but anyone you deal with. After all, they are not accusing the second hand CD store of duplicating the CD's, just implying that they are owed a royalty because a copy of the CD might have been made before the store got it!
So turn it off. If you only use it for emergencies then you shouldn't care whether it is on or off, since you don't make or take calls on it unless there is an emergency.
If you could conveniently schedule your emergencies that would work fine. But many people (think they) need that phone to receive emergency calls. Imagine being in charge of a real time mission critical system at work, and your office couldn't reach you because you had to turn off your phone so the battery wouldn't die. Or being a doctor on call, or just needing to be able to be reached when your wife goes into labor. Unfortunately, not all "emergencies" are outbound.
And I too have lots of doubts that it would work, even if customers didn't fight it.
Let me get this straight: If I buy a Sony CD and take it home, then put it in my Sony CD duplicator in my Hi-Fi system and make a copy (without the track I despise) on special audio CDR media that Sony gets an extra royality payment for, they also deserve yet another royality if I sell someone else the original album? Yea, that seems fair.
We might as well make it illegal to sell used cars. After all, poor Detroit goes to a lot of trouble to make those new cars, far more than the recording industry does when they just stamp out CD's and run funny acounting practices to cheat the artists.
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Giving away copies of Mame is hardly making a profit, but even for those making and selling mod chips, so what? They are not doing anything illegal (afaik). They didn't steal trade secret information, they legitimately reverse engineered the console. For M$ to claim no one can do such things goes contrary to all precedent and logic. If you buy a car you can have a third party company customize it, repaint it, add spoilers, a sunroof, or more, even when the factory offers the same features. I can't think of any industry other than M$ and the console industry where such a concept of not being able to modify a product and use as you see fit is applied to a product that you buy, and that has to include being able to buy the modification parts from someone who legitimately designed and made them.
If Microsoft grew food they would claim that no one could buy that food and then open their own restaurant.
Of course, if you're using your system as a server or to feed a vast library of MP3 or video on a p2p network, the model changes. But from my experiences I would expect this would already be in violation of the ISP's "acceptable use agreement". If that the real issue then that's what should be targeted, not people who figure out that there is an artificial limitation that they can easily bypass.
And I certainly don't see, even if this is theft of services, why the FBI comes into the picture. It certainly seems like a local or state crime, not a federal one. And there seems to be no valid reason at all to have taken the computers, it's the modems that were uncapped. Taking the computers is just abusive over exercise of questionable authority. (sure, they might find instructions on how to uncap a modem still on the computer, but that knowledge isn't illegal in itself, and they have the modem as proof. And if I bought my own capped modem I would expect it to include printed instructions in the manual on how to change the cap for my particular system, so what?) Looks like the FBI wants to appear to be doing something to counter all of the bad press they got recently; too bad they chose to abuse people outside of their rightful jurisdiction.
By the way, this is a recent change to our cash, I have several older bills without the offending phrase on them.
The GPS will have to be already running, it takes time to lock on the satellites and get enough data to compute a fix; once it has that info it can track very accurately. The real question is will the sending of that data be limited to just 911 calls. Every indication is that it will not. While it would be very handy to be able to send the data when you want to and let another party receive it (perhaps a person you are trying to meet with or a website you want location specific information from), it seems more likely that the phone company will capture this data against your will and sell it, it would be valuable to a lot of people. It's even been suggest you might start getting targeted instant messaging advertisements when you get close to a store targeting you.
I definitely want the Weird Artificial Intelligence. Sounds like fun ;-)
More cards, more power, more heat.
Opps, there goes another slot, as well as all the driver issues involved in supporting it.
I'm not the only one to see this, but it deserves to be mentioned in any list: The card will quickly get out of date compared to the newest codecs. Updates, if they come at all, will likely be so slow to appear that most new videos will always be a version ahead of the card. And, of course, if the manufacturer goes out of business, or looses interest, or doesn't support the same favor of M$ software that you want to run, you have a hundred dollars worth of junk.
OK, who here wants to let Microsoft decide what is an authorized program and what isn't??? Obviously a user can't "self authorize" or that would defeat all of the protection. Sounds like Bill Gate's dream system to me.
I'm not advocating copy protection, just questioning why it's done in such lame ways when there is information on each media that identifies if it's CDR or CDRW or not.
I've yet to see any deals near this price point. Please suggest a source in this range.
As a protection system, this doesn't work - it would take most hackers just few seconds to figure out what happened, and about the same amount of time for word of it to circle the globe on the Internet. The work around is obvious for most users - write the CD on the CD-RW drive and then run it from a CD or DVD drive. However, if the user doesn't leave the new disc open for further writing when making the copy, you can't write on it anyway.
One has to wonder though, why there are all the lame hacks to attempt copy protection for data CD's (games mostly) when the right "fix" would seem to be to simply determine if the media ID matches that of a CDR or CDRW media rather than the original pressed media. Can't any of the protection programmers figure out how to get this basic information from the drive?
What a stupid idea, make the money even more like play money to supposedly suit foreigners. I just don't buy it. Sure, I've seen different colored money in other countries, but I certainly never learned their color code, I looked at the numbers on the bills. Has the new world order standardized the color code for money, or will this just lead to more problems? How many foreigners, not competent enough to read the numbers on the bills are going to be thinking in terms of our color code, rather than their own? We're just inviting problems when we encourage foreigners to use a color code, then someone is sure to accuse us that we deliberately cheated them because they didn't realize that our bills are not valued in the same order as their bills.
Different things suit different people. I'm not going to list all of the reasons, but a PC suits me much better than a game console. But one thing that you missed and that does favor your belief is that the PS2 came down in price about a month ago, it's now $199 US (as is the X-box. And the PS-one is $49, with the cube at $149)
This might also explain the "region 2 error" I get in my experiments when I try to teleport a DVD to England.
Well, to you and the person who moderatd me down, let me explain something that you don't grasp. The original post was a 1:59. I saw it at 2:00. There were no other responses of this nature posted when I looked, and I did. But in the seconds I was typing my short post, previewing it and posting it, several others made similar observations. It happens. Get over it.
Perhaps the fact that you always find it funny indicates that the problem (duplicated original posts) happens often enough that it indeed should be mentioned.
Didn't we just see this here a couple of days ago?
But video games pretty much have one specific use, and that isn't impacted by VG copy protection. But when you buy a CD there are any number of legitimate (fair use) things that you should be able to do with it, from pay it on your computer to transfer the music to your portable MP3 player and play it there. Just what is one expected to do with their Sony MP3 player if Sony protects disc that you buy? Seems they are legitimizing downloading illegal copies from the Internet.
It does seem more like a gimic than anything that would be useful in day to day operation. I can see one use though. More than once I've be installing an OS (Microsoft - what do you want to reinstall today) and suddenly found that I needed information on a hard drive, or an updated driver, or some other information that I wanted to get from the web. In my case I fire up the old P166 and reslove things with it, but the ability to get to the web while resolving problems could be handy for many.
That's kind of the whole point - if IE continues to make even more ground, perhaps by a certain evil monopoly putting IE specific stuff in it's web tools, then Mozilla and the other may not continue, or they may be less and less useful when you need to do something on the web.
My problem with the industry is that they want it both ways (or 3 ways if they can figure out how to get that). They want royalties on recordable media (with the assumption that they are owed royalties on everything, and that you'll never make CD's of your own garage band or other material they don't have claim on), then claim you have no right to make a copy of a CD you buy and copy protect originals to prevent even fair use. Sony makes MP3 players (and even advertises for users to download music from the web!) but then fight MP3s on the web and again trys to prevent you from making MP3s from the CD's you legitimately buy. Now the attack on resold CD - with the stated assumption that if a CD is sold used the original buyer must have made a copy. I grew up with the belief in presumption of innocence; but the recording industry wants a policy of since you might have done something wrong they are entitled to to go after not just you but anyone you deal with. After all, they are not accusing the second hand CD store of duplicating the CD's, just implying that they are owed a royalty because a copy of the CD might have been made before the store got it!
Oh, right, I forgot that the courts can be depended on to be wise and fair.
If you could conveniently schedule your emergencies that would work fine. But many people (think they) need that phone to receive emergency calls. Imagine being in charge of a real time mission critical system at work, and your office couldn't reach you because you had to turn off your phone so the battery wouldn't die. Or being a doctor on call, or just needing to be able to be reached when your wife goes into labor. Unfortunately, not all "emergencies" are outbound.
And I too have lots of doubts that it would work, even if customers didn't fight it.
Let me get this straight: If I buy a Sony CD and take it home, then put it in my Sony CD duplicator in my Hi-Fi system and make a copy (without the track I despise) on special audio CDR media that Sony gets an extra royality payment for, they also deserve yet another royality if I sell someone else the original album? Yea, that seems fair.
We might as well make it illegal to sell used cars. After all, poor Detroit goes to a lot of trouble to make those new cars, far more than the recording industry does when they just stamp out CD's and run funny acounting practices to cheat the artists.
You're right, I'm sure our represenatives in congress will realise how crazy this is and demand plenty of bribes before they pass it.