Actually, I thought up that one on my own a while back (can't remember why), and out of curiosity did a search to see if anyone else had already thought up the idea- turned out they had.
But I think the fact that I came up with it independently entitles me to use it at least once:)
Of course, this means a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]" -- this ought to be interesting.
Air-cooled athlons hit 1 GHz, and of course Kryotech came out with even faster systems, but it was obvious that the advantage you were getting was temporally speaking not worth the price.
Yes, but you could make the same argument for a lot of ultra-high-end computer hardware; I don't know if this is still the case, but a few years back people would pay through the nose for state-of-the-art graphics cards etc. that were sure to have plummeted in price and gone mainstream within months. Didn't stop them.
My parents still had a black and white set when I was fairly young (up until the age of seven or so; I'm in my early thirties just now). I can assure you that colour was a big, visible and in-your-face difference and even then I was envious of other people who had colour TVs. I still remember watching an episode of the Doctor Who story 'The Keeper of Traken' in colour at the house of friends of my parents (must have been around 5 then), specifically the scenes in the grove with the statue, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been such a big deal if it hadn't been in colour.
I'm sure you're right that colour vs. black and white is something that the brain can filter out- I don't specifically remember most TV I watched then as being in black and white, more just (in retrospect) not having been in colour. But I certainly knew the difference between black and white and colour, just like I remember if a program was colour or black and white (i.e. old) when my parents got the colour TV.
HD is a bad example because although it's certainly an improvement, it's not likely to be one that's as noticable to kids, no matter how good it is. It's essentially improved video quality, not a fundamental in-your-face difference. Remember that kids like bright colours.
Interesting. We had only a B&W until I was 11, but I was always sure I could tell when things on the screen were actually red or brown. No other colors, just red and brown.
I noticed that when using my dad's old portable black and white TV that things that would have been coloured (on a colour TV) appeared to have a subtle pattern to them. If you detuned the signal slightly (in such a way that on a colour TV would cause it to lose the colour signal and display as slightly fuzzy black and white) then this effect was lost.
I assume that this was some form of artifacting caused by the high-frequency colour subcarrier, which obviously wouldn't have been used by the B&W TV per se, but may have caused some sort of interference unless completely filtered out.
Back where I come from (the Channel Islands), we didn't get colour TV until the early 1970s.
Ditto lots of the rest of the UK; although BBC2 started broadcasting in colour in 1967, BBC1 and ITV- didn't officially go colour until late 1969 (Wikipedia, salt etc.). And I'm guessing that even then it would have been quite some time before all transmitters had been upgraded (possibly less if the colour upgrades had been rolled into the 625-line upgrades required for BBC2's launch).
Besides which, colour TV was expensive when it first came out, so it probably would have taken some time before everyone had it. Matter of fact, they were still quite expensive (both relative to black and white and in absolute terms) during the early 1980s. My family only had black and white until I was seven, and colour TV was a big deal to me when I was at other peoples houses. (HD might look nice, but I bet that it's unlikely to have as much impact for a kid of similar age today as the in-your-face visceral difference of going from black and white to colour.)
You're probably thinking that this is ancient history, and while this is correct- it was over 25 years (or roughly a generation) ago, which is a long time, damn I am old!- it's not the 50+ years ago that the article implies. (Even newspapers were almost entirely monochromatic then). I'm still in my early thirties, not my late fifties(!) but I grew up with black and white television...
And yet, I can not recall *ever* (not ONCE) having dreamed in black and white. Was my exposure- even on rare occasions- to colour media (including being at the cinema) responsible? Who knows. But I do know that my television viewing was overwhelmingly black and white and that it didn't stop me dreaming in colour.
My six (?) year old Microsoft Optical Intellimouse is still working fine, even though I've covered it in paint splashes and it's gone a rather nasty yellow colour.
I'm still using my Logitech Mouseman mechanical model as my main mouse, despite its 9th birthday being imminent, the plastic having gone a bit yellow and the logo rubbed off the top (and there being a gap from when I took it apart and couldn't quite snap it together again). I can't recall ever having to have made any serious repairs/fixes beyond cleaning.
'Course, I appreciate that there are probably many older mice in regular use...
Well I keep hearing the 70's are making a comeback so... just an example of trying to be prepared for emerging markets?
No, the 70s revival happened during the 1990s, we're at the peak of the 80s revival now. Fortunately, when the 1990s revival comes around you can can revive the 1990s' 1970s revival...?!
Seems that approx. 50% of Daily Mail front pages (the ones not about immigrants, obviously) are health-related stories that describe either:-
(a) How the deadly threat from something everyday is going to kill us all, or
(b) How some everyday fruit or substance is the latest miracle cure to something or other, stuff like "Beetroot cures AIDS!"... oops, sorry, wrong bunch of f***wits.
The "time limit of popularity" has passed. His music is not on the charts anymore so using it is not unfairly drawing off his work to garner profit or popularity.
Not agreeing or disagreeing with the main thrust of your post. However, I'm pretty confident that Prince's material from his commercial heyday (80s and early 90s) continues to sell respectably over the long term via CD compilations and iTunes downloads. I'm also willing to bet that it continues to provide Prince with a fairly healthy income. Just because something hasn't hogged the #1 position recently doesn't mean there's no commercial interest in it.
In fact, it can be argued that he garnered popularity because of this second work.
Yeah, that's a better point. I can think of at least three tracks that I've bought off iTunes recently because I came across (or rediscovered) them via YouTube.
I don't see why we'd be unwelcome. There are quite a few of us that don't like him just as much as the rest of the world. Hell some of us are trying to escape.
Maybe they'd prefer that you stayed there rather than leaving control over what is still (at present and likely for quite a while yet) the world's most influential country to the right-wingers and religious fundamentalists.
""pants" is a British adjective synonymous with "rubbish"."
This comes from the British "pants" which is short for "underpants". Which I guess is kind of weird etymologically, but since we didn't call trousers "pants" in the first place it doesn't matter to us:-P
There have *long* been players with a higher capacity and more features for less money than the iPod costs. You assume that people are buying on the basis of bang-for-buck alone and forget issues like the user interface, appearance and- yes- marketing that makes them a fashion accessory.
Not saying that the iPod is the best MP3 player out there, but fact is that not everyone buys products on the same basis as you. You are- I assume- a geek (this is Slashdot after all). The majority of people are not.
Wanking off to a Playmate of the Month is somewhat less likely to kill him than running into a telephone pole at 95 MPH. I'd say it's worth trying to make cars a bit safer where possible.
Yes, but if he runs into the pole at 95MPH he might still get into heaven if he's been good. OTOH, wanking off to Playboy means that even if he gets 120 years on our sin-filled earth, he'll definitely burn in hell for eternity when he dies.
So the solution is obvious- buy your son a car, the faster and more dangerous the better.
(Note: The bit about getting into heaven is nullified if he runs into a pole at 95MPH *because* he was too busy wanking off to Playboy).
Instead, now you're "pirating" from the artists directly. [..] Then again... isn't pirating another form of advertisement, and one that specifically Adobe and MS used at one time?
Adobe's last album sucked ass, and as for MS, Bill Gates never could sing. It's even worse now that they've got Steve Ballmer on lead vocals, he's already burned out four auto-tuners trying to get his "singing" into shape.
The videos are even more horrific, featuring as they do Ballmer performing highly-synchronised dance routines in an open shirt for an intended audience of 10 to 14 year old girls. Upon seeing this, many such girls have been permanently scarred at a sensitive time in their emotional development.
Do you [my emphasis] honestly expect us to believe that [snip]
*I* don't expect you to believe that either way- whether the OP did is another matter. Please address that point to him/her.
What I did was to point out that the OP's statement
"That's not really "defectivebydesign", as it's got nothing to do with DRM. It is, however, a defective design"
wasn't the incomprehensible and/or pointless statement that the AC made it out to be. Matter of fact, it was a perfectly sensible and comprehensible expression of the guy's position, whether you thought it believable or not.
That's not really "defectivebydesign", as it's got nothing to do with DRM. It is, however, a defective design.
Thanks. That clears it up.
It wasn't as stupid as you imply. What he was effectively saying was that this was just a poorly-thought out (i.e. defective) design, unlike DRM whose "flaws" are an intentional part (i.e. "by design") - or at least an obvious consequence- of what it was meant to do in the first place.
I think you mean with Walter Carlos, unless you give into that "but I'm really a woman inside!" nonsense.
Well, plenty of studies have shown that transexuals have brain structures more akin to those of the opposite (physical) sex, so in the sense that "inside" means (I assume) who they are psychologically or as a person, it seems perfectly plausible.
But that aside, who gives a toss what Carlos wants to call him/herself? She must have been called Wendy at the time she first worked with Yankovic, so it's not changed since then, and if you're going to whine that she's not using her birth name then I expect to see you complaining the same way about Ringo Starr, Freddie Mercury, Cher, Ne-Yo, whatever... Carlos at least has a "valid" reason for changing her name, so your picking up the guy about using it just sounds like an excuse to whine about transexuals.
sorry . . . ots = off the shelf. I was thinking that the dtv converter box makers were simply buying stock pieces and doing some assembly. Either way they probably are.
Oh yeah, I agree- I've no doubt that the "manufacturers" are designing their systems around some fairly standard chips. The question is whether they're using a single chip that does all the major work internally (i.e. total black box) or whether they're using two or more with some sort of bus to transfer the data. I don't know which.
You could be right; my post was just speculation, and I didn't research either. What is OTS though, and does it output the signal in a standard (or easily converted) HD format?
But it must be possible to hack the box to get the HD signal out, or at least it seems like it would be.
Not if all the core circuitry is contained within a single chip, or at least- and more plausibly- the part that decodes the digital signal and the part that converts it into a picture are within the same chip. Only if the HD signal is travelling across the circuit board- between two or more chips- in a reasonably *standard* format will your idea work.
But it's quite possible that not only will this process take place within a chip (which are effectively black boxes from a practical point of view), but that it might take the signal and convert that *directly* to standard definition without converting it to some sort of usable intermediate HD picture. Even if they did that, would it be in a standard format and how would you access the buffer?
Now that I've thought about it, I find it fairly implausible that they'd even bother doing that. So I don't think your idea would work simply because it's unlikely that there's even an HD picture, let alone signal, to access.
Slashdot Mirror
But, what would we expect of someone with a Mexican name?
I'm Brazilian, you insensitive clod!
That's not too bad a mistake, given that some people can't tell the difference between a Brazilian and an alleged terrorist with an Indian-subcontinental background.
So did you come up with that on your own or did you read it here first? http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=596435&cid=23953419
Actually, I thought up that one on my own a while back (can't remember why), and out of curiosity did a search to see if anyone else had already thought up the idea- turned out they had.
:)
But I think the fact that I came up with it independently entitles me to use it at least once
Of course, this means a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]" -- this ought to be interesting.
Does this mean ICANN has cheezburger?
Air-cooled athlons hit 1 GHz, and of course Kryotech came out with even faster systems, but it was obvious that the advantage you were getting was temporally speaking not worth the price.
Yes, but you could make the same argument for a lot of ultra-high-end computer hardware; I don't know if this is still the case, but a few years back people would pay through the nose for state-of-the-art graphics cards etc. that were sure to have plummeted in price and gone mainstream within months. Didn't stop them.
They're trying to appeal to two growing demographics: hardcore gaming mobsters and gangsta autocad designers
They're trying to appeal to the Scots- we'll deep-fry anything!
My parents still had a black and white set when I was fairly young (up until the age of seven or so; I'm in my early thirties just now). I can assure you that colour was a big, visible and in-your-face difference and even then I was envious of other people who had colour TVs. I still remember watching an episode of the Doctor Who story 'The Keeper of Traken' in colour at the house of friends of my parents (must have been around 5 then), specifically the scenes in the grove with the statue, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been such a big deal if it hadn't been in colour.
I'm sure you're right that colour vs. black and white is something that the brain can filter out- I don't specifically remember most TV I watched then as being in black and white, more just (in retrospect) not having been in colour. But I certainly knew the difference between black and white and colour, just like I remember if a program was colour or black and white (i.e. old) when my parents got the colour TV.
HD is a bad example because although it's certainly an improvement, it's not likely to be one that's as noticable to kids, no matter how good it is. It's essentially improved video quality, not a fundamental in-your-face difference. Remember that kids like bright colours.
Interesting. We had only a B&W until I was 11, but I was always sure I could tell when things on the screen were actually red or brown. No other colors, just red and brown.
I noticed that when using my dad's old portable black and white TV that things that would have been coloured (on a colour TV) appeared to have a subtle pattern to them. If you detuned the signal slightly (in such a way that on a colour TV would cause it to lose the colour signal and display as slightly fuzzy black and white) then this effect was lost.
I assume that this was some form of artifacting caused by the high-frequency colour subcarrier, which obviously wouldn't have been used by the B&W TV per se, but may have caused some sort of interference unless completely filtered out.
Back where I come from (the Channel Islands), we didn't get colour TV until the early 1970s.
Ditto lots of the rest of the UK; although BBC2 started broadcasting in colour in 1967, BBC1 and ITV- didn't officially go colour until late 1969 (Wikipedia, salt etc.). And I'm guessing that even then it would have been quite some time before all transmitters had been upgraded (possibly less if the colour upgrades had been rolled into the 625-line upgrades required for BBC2's launch).
Besides which, colour TV was expensive when it first came out, so it probably would have taken some time before everyone had it. Matter of fact, they were still quite expensive (both relative to black and white and in absolute terms) during the early 1980s. My family only had black and white until I was seven, and colour TV was a big deal to me when I was at other peoples houses. (HD might look nice, but I bet that it's unlikely to have as much impact for a kid of similar age today as the in-your-face visceral difference of going from black and white to colour.)
You're probably thinking that this is ancient history, and while this is correct- it was over 25 years (or roughly a generation) ago, which is a long time, damn I am old!- it's not the 50+ years ago that the article implies. (Even newspapers were almost entirely monochromatic then). I'm still in my early thirties, not my late fifties(!) but I grew up with black and white television...
And yet, I can not recall *ever* (not ONCE) having dreamed in black and white. Was my exposure- even on rare occasions- to colour media (including being at the cinema) responsible? Who knows. But I do know that my television viewing was overwhelmingly black and white and that it didn't stop me dreaming in colour.
My six (?) year old Microsoft Optical Intellimouse is still working fine, even though I've covered it in paint splashes and it's gone a rather nasty yellow colour.
I'm still using my Logitech Mouseman mechanical model as my main mouse, despite its 9th birthday being imminent, the plastic having gone a bit yellow and the logo rubbed off the top (and there being a gap from when I took it apart and couldn't quite snap it together again). I can't recall ever having to have made any serious repairs/fixes beyond cleaning.
'Course, I appreciate that there are probably many older mice in regular use...
Well I keep hearing the 70's are making a comeback so... just an example of trying to be prepared for emerging markets?
No, the 70s revival happened during the 1990s, we're at the peak of the 80s revival now. Fortunately, when the 1990s revival comes around you can can revive the 1990s' 1970s revival...?!
At that distance, it's safe for MY hering.
It makes a change from a goldfish, I guess.
If the Daily Mail says it, it must be true!
Seems that approx. 50% of Daily Mail front pages (the ones not about immigrants, obviously) are health-related stories that describe either:-
(a) How the deadly threat from something everyday is going to kill us all, or
(b) How some everyday fruit or substance is the latest miracle cure to something or other, stuff like "Beetroot cures AIDS!"... oops, sorry, wrong bunch of f***wits.
The "time limit of popularity" has passed. His music is not on the charts anymore so using it is not unfairly drawing off his work to garner profit or popularity.
Not agreeing or disagreeing with the main thrust of your post. However, I'm pretty confident that Prince's material from his commercial heyday (80s and early 90s) continues to sell respectably over the long term via CD compilations and iTunes downloads. I'm also willing to bet that it continues to provide Prince with a fairly healthy income. Just because something hasn't hogged the #1 position recently doesn't mean there's no commercial interest in it.
In fact, it can be argued that he garnered popularity because of this second work.
Yeah, that's a better point. I can think of at least three tracks that I've bought off iTunes recently because I came across (or rediscovered) them via YouTube.
I don't see why we'd be unwelcome. There are quite a few of us that don't like him just as much as the rest of the world. Hell some of us are trying to escape.
Maybe they'd prefer that you stayed there rather than leaving control over what is still (at present and likely for quite a while yet) the world's most influential country to the right-wingers and religious fundamentalists.
""pants" is a British adjective synonymous with "rubbish"."
:-P
This comes from the British "pants" which is short for "underpants". Which I guess is kind of weird etymologically, but since we didn't call trousers "pants" in the first place it doesn't matter to us
There have *long* been players with a higher capacity and more features for less money than the iPod costs. You assume that people are buying on the basis of bang-for-buck alone and forget issues like the user interface, appearance and- yes- marketing that makes them a fashion accessory.
Not saying that the iPod is the best MP3 player out there, but fact is that not everyone buys products on the same basis as you. You are- I assume- a geek (this is Slashdot after all). The majority of people are not.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could use this technique to clear up the fuzzies on censored Japanese pr0n?!
Uh, those "fuzzies" are what are known as pubic hair. You might be unfamiliar with it as American porn stars have razor rash down there instead :)
<sarcasm>Wasn't it ingenious of them to grow hair down there to cover up all that unsightly stubble?</sarcasm>
Wanking off to a Playmate of the Month is somewhat less likely to kill him than running into a telephone pole at 95 MPH. I'd say it's worth trying to make cars a bit safer where possible.
Yes, but if he runs into the pole at 95MPH he might still get into heaven if he's been good. OTOH, wanking off to Playboy means that even if he gets 120 years on our sin-filled earth, he'll definitely burn in hell for eternity when he dies.
So the solution is obvious- buy your son a car, the faster and more dangerous the better.
(Note: The bit about getting into heaven is nullified if he runs into a pole at 95MPH *because* he was too busy wanking off to Playboy).
Instead, now you're "pirating" from the artists directly. [..] Then again... isn't pirating another form of advertisement, and one that specifically Adobe and MS used at one time?
Adobe's last album sucked ass, and as for MS, Bill Gates never could sing. It's even worse now that they've got Steve Ballmer on lead vocals, he's already burned out four auto-tuners trying to get his "singing" into shape.
The videos are even more horrific, featuring as they do Ballmer performing highly-synchronised dance routines in an open shirt for an intended audience of 10 to 14 year old girls. Upon seeing this, many such girls have been permanently scarred at a sensitive time in their emotional development.
Do you [my emphasis] honestly expect us to believe that [snip]
*I* don't expect you to believe that either way- whether the OP did is another matter. Please address that point to him/her.
What I did was to point out that the OP's statement
"That's not really "defectivebydesign", as it's got nothing to do with DRM. It is, however, a defective design"
wasn't the incomprehensible and/or pointless statement that the AC made it out to be. Matter of fact, it was a perfectly sensible and comprehensible expression of the guy's position, whether you thought it believable or not.
That's not really "defectivebydesign", as it's got nothing to do with DRM. It is, however, a defective design.
Thanks. That clears it up.
It wasn't as stupid as you imply. What he was effectively saying was that this was just a poorly-thought out (i.e. defective) design, unlike DRM whose "flaws" are an intentional part (i.e. "by design") - or at least an obvious consequence- of what it was meant to do in the first place.
I think you mean with Walter Carlos, unless you give into that "but I'm really a woman inside!" nonsense.
Well, plenty of studies have shown that transexuals have brain structures more akin to those of the opposite (physical) sex, so in the sense that "inside" means (I assume) who they are psychologically or as a person, it seems perfectly plausible.
But that aside, who gives a toss what Carlos wants to call him/herself? She must have been called Wendy at the time she first worked with Yankovic, so it's not changed since then, and if you're going to whine that she's not using her birth name then I expect to see you complaining the same way about Ringo Starr, Freddie Mercury, Cher, Ne-Yo, whatever... Carlos at least has a "valid" reason for changing her name, so your picking up the guy about using it just sounds like an excuse to whine about transexuals.
sorry . . . ots = off the shelf. I was thinking that the dtv converter box makers were simply buying stock pieces and doing some assembly. Either way they probably are.
Oh yeah, I agree- I've no doubt that the "manufacturers" are designing their systems around some fairly standard chips. The question is whether they're using a single chip that does all the major work internally (i.e. total black box) or whether they're using two or more with some sort of bus to transfer the data. I don't know which.
You could be right; my post was just speculation, and I didn't research either. What is OTS though, and does it output the signal in a standard (or easily converted) HD format?
But it must be possible to hack the box to get the HD signal out, or at least it seems like it would be.
Not if all the core circuitry is contained within a single chip, or at least- and more plausibly- the part that decodes the digital signal and the part that converts it into a picture are within the same chip. Only if the HD signal is travelling across the circuit board- between two or more chips- in a reasonably *standard* format will your idea work.
But it's quite possible that not only will this process take place within a chip (which are effectively black boxes from a practical point of view), but that it might take the signal and convert that *directly* to standard definition without converting it to some sort of usable intermediate HD picture. Even if they did that, would it be in a standard format and how would you access the buffer?
Now that I've thought about it, I find it fairly implausible that they'd even bother doing that. So I don't think your idea would work simply because it's unlikely that there's even an HD picture, let alone signal, to access.