"OK, so in fact you're saying hacking is legal where not all the security precautions have been taken. And I'm allowed into your house to browse around if you forget to lock your windows. Get a grip."
Just out of curiosity, has anybody ever won an argument with a metaphor? Or does the other side always find a way to prove it's not equal?
"What inexpensive video card do you recommend as an upgrade from an NVIDIA TNT2?"
Are you asking because you want a better card, or is that in relation to my comment about VGA to NTSC? You got a price range? $150 got me a Geforce 4MX with dual monitor outs. I don't remember if it does SVideo out or not. Is that what you're looking for?
Yes. It's not very hard to get VGA to NTSC anymore. Most cards, even the cheapy ones support it.
Question is: would you really want to run it on a TV? The answer is no. TV (NTSC) is not useful for your every day computing needs. Mainly because text would have to be rather large to be readabl.
I have a very particular use for an NTSC feature, though: VGA -- NTSC is crap. However, if soembody'd write a DivX player that plays back DivX.AVI files from the network to the screen with lots of attention paid to high quality NTSC playback, then I'd love to buy a modded XBOX.
Why? I have a PVR built from an old PC running Snapstream. Shows are captured to MS Media Player. (I have the option to use DivX or other codecs in.AVI format as well.) I'd love to have an XBOX on my network able to play back the captured shows on the NTSC hardware. It'd look a hell of a lot better than my S-Video out on my video card. The colors would look a lot nicer. (Although I'd probably need a more sophisticated capture card to guarantee a better picture...)
In any case, I don't think cracking the XBOX is that useful. Until somebody puts it to a really compelling use to it, it's going to be hard to shake the opinion that it's just a matter of playing burned games.
"It would appear that someone at Microsoft learned how to read -- say for example: Computer Lib/Dream Machines [amazon.com] [originally printed circa 1977 ] which describes Dynabook [artmuseum.net]."
If you're implying that MS just decided to rip what they read in a book, I'm not inclined to agree with you. To tell you the truth, I don't think any one person can be credited with conieving of the idea of a computer that can replace the stack of papers on my desk.
Here I am, 2002, and I'm still printing out documents and using a highlighter on them. When there's a change to a website that needs to be made, I still print the page, circle the area, and write the correction that needs to be made. I still have post-it notes all over my monitor. As much as I'd like to be paperless, there's still workflow to think about here.
MS is tackling issues such as these. Part of what the Tablet/Office XP interface (as of marketing literature from a year ago, no idea if it's still true today) interesting is that it's supposed to let you draw on your documents. Unfortunately, I'm having difficulty finding out if they made good on that promise today. (Note for the PocketPC lets you do something like that...)
Assuming they come close to living up to their promises, MS has a rather interesting product on their hands that has not been available before. And when I say not available, I don't mean 'stylus driven laptop', I mean "A portable computer running the de-facto desktop OS that utilizes a stylus similarly to how paper is used."
I'm definitely curious about this product, and I can definitely see people cheering about it. Of course, my decisions remain reserved until I have one of these units to play with. Unfortunately, I don't 100% trust MS to make it non-obnoxious to use until version 3.
I think the real reason that Linux fans are cheering is that MS did all the hard work. They had the machines designed and manufactured, they had a large team of engineers and QA make the things useful, and it's still a PC that does normal PC stuff. All the developers out there have to do is leech what MS has already done and throw it into a Linux distro.
Mod me a troll if you like, but I'm a little annoyed at all these pokes taken at MS, but at least they find interesting ways of making their products useful. (note: I did not use the word invent, so spare me the 'MS stole from Apple who really stole from Xerox' crap.) Linux is still playing catch up in many ways to Windows (i.e. the useful UI) but isn't doing a whole lot to depart from it, at least from the end-user perspective.
I fear that if MS dissolves like most of the/. Community wants, then Linux development will come to a virtual screeching halt. No innovation coming from that community.
However, I may be wrong about that. I invite polite rebuttals. My perception may be wrong, and I'm open to information that could change my mind. I'm honestly not trying to troll here, just sharing my view and am willing to discuss that.
"Even with a very fat pipe, downloading 700mb for an ok-quality divx or 1400mb for a good quality DivX is still a very long wait. Streaming a pixelated mosaic still sucks over broadband, too."
Fair point, though I disagree. I've seen 500kbit video that was quite acceptable. However, I don't want to debate about personal tastes. I have an alternative proposal.
Why doesn't AT&T provide this service for it's broadband customers? All they have to do is place a few servers between their customers and the outside world (heck, those might already be in place) and provide these movies as streams right to them.
The stream wouldn't have to go out to the net, so ATTBI would have pretty good control over the QoS. The connection should be pretty fast and reliable. And, it shouldn't cost them any extra to stream it down since they're not going to the outside world.
I'm a little surprised AT&T hasn't done this yet. It'd be quite an upsell.
"However he could write a _good_ bug report, and send it to the appropriate people, and perhaps file it with say the kde ppl to make a nice gui for it."
I think that's reasonable. He may very well do that too. I'll suggest it to him.
"Yes. As I stated, eMusic and Rhapsody have licensed the catalogs of major American record labels."
I'm sorry, I didn't phrase my question very well. I meant 'RIAA endorsed' as in they like it, vs. "We're reluctantly licensing it just to prove we're not evil bastards."
I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the RIAA saw it as a genuine business opportunity. Know what I mean?
"Well since your friend had this trouble, he wrote up about it and posted the solution on the net so that others can find the answer easily, didn't he? After all, we all know that the people that complain are the ones that are the quickest to help out others. So this is no longer a problem - and neither are any other problems that come up."
Sure, it's no longer a problem if you want to discover the problem by accident, then hunt around the web with (hopefully) the right search patterns, then edit the right conf file (with your monitor acting whacky) because it might be the right solution to your similar problem.
Yeah that's a much better solution than just having the problem fixed so nobody else has to deal with it.
"Provided you know which track you want to keep, then download the song on Rhapsody ($1/track) or eMusic ($15/mo), which are legitimate sites that have licensed labels' catalogs."
Are these sites RIAA supported? Im not asking so I can shout "No way, I'm boycotting!", but rather because so far the RIAA has done nothing but badmouth music in non-album-form. I'm concerned that if it's not endorsed by the RIAA, that one day that service will disappear.
I dunno... what do you think? I'm just being cautious. I don't want the RIAA taking a list of customers and saying "these people are all thieves". Yeah, I'm a little paranoid.
"Can you give me any good reasons why mozilla, with the same encryption you get with IE, can't be used for online banking?"
They fear the unknown? Chances are their web department has no idea what all the vulnerabilities out there can do, and people's money is a very sensitive topic.
Chances are they feel that cannot spread theirselves too thin and, at the same time, guarantee that the people's money is safe.
I wouldn't call that a good reason like you asked for, but I do think it's somewhat understandable.
"If you civil disobedience as a means to protest laws you don't like..."
Heh. The law is a different matter. I'm talking about expressing my dissatisfaction of the RIAA by not buying their music. That's what my original post was about.
It's not about not wanting to pay. (As mentioned in my previous posts I buy lots of games despite that it's relatively easy to get free copies around the web.) It's not about the law. I'm not happy with the DMCA either, but I'm not fighting that battle with P2P.
*Shrug* I think you're still operating under the idea that I want people to follow me or that I want to be some kind of martyr. Assuming I'm right, you're letting your imagination get ahead of you. I've done nothing to encourage 'followers'.
"The only thing the banks are interested in is your money, as long as they think you'll keep them there they don't care about you at all."
There's a disconnect there you may not be aware of: The tech support guy doesn't give a flying fart if the customer leaves or not. In other words, you got lucky.
"Feel stupid by rushing and saying the wrong thing? I guess Hilary is smarter than you, at least she didn't walk through the door, whereas you DID hit the Submit button."
Grow up dude. He missed a word while he was reading the article. Some people do that when they have more important things to dedicate their time to. You got hostile over an innocent mistake. Some people do that when they have a serious inferiority complex.
"What about Opera masquerading as IE or netscape?"
It doesn't really work. US Bank pulled a similar stunt with regard to their browsers. I had to use IE to get into my account, and that bothered me.
Here is what I did: I sent them a polite e-mail explaining that I work between Linux and Windows and the common browser (I use) between them is Opera. It is a well respected browser and I find it a bit painful to move to another browser just to use their site. They sent me an e-mail back saying they were getting a lot of requests like that and that they were looking into fixing it.
And they did. I can now use Opera at US Bank and all I get is a warning saying "this isn't a recommended browser, so it's yo fault." Heh.
So my advice to anybody who wants to contact their bank about this: Be polite. Don't make it sound like it's the end of the world. Don't make it sound like they're evil or stupid. Just politely explain your situation. You may or may not change any minds anywhere, but I guarantee you that if you get shitty with them you won't be heard.
"...why the debate is framed as free music v. the music industry."
I never really thought it was about music being 'free' anyway. My MP3 searches were about finding new music, not about getting it for free. I saw it as a way of finding stuff I thought I'd like. Paying for it is not an issue. I mean think about it: Buy a CD, open it, and it's yours. You can't take it back if it's not satisfactory.
So yeah, I'm gonna download songs from the album first before I buy the CD because I'm not paying $15 for 1 (one) song I liked from the radio. How many of you have been burned by that?
"Funny how we never see stories like this about Linux."
A friend of mine has Linux (RedHat I think...) on his computer at home. It has an LCD monitor. He pushed one of the buttons on the LCD monitor and the whole screen shifted right like 50 pixels. He had to fly around all over Linux to find the right conf file to get that fixed.
No, horror stories like that don't get posted. However, it is a big screaming deal when decent font support finally happens. Heh.
I bet I lose karma over this post. It'd be a pity if that happened, though. Shedding light on Linux's weaker areas of the UI would, at worst, cause a few developers to react to them. It wouldn't make people flock away from Linux.
In other words: Slashdot could get away with a little equality in the way it treats MS and Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
"OK, so in fact you're saying hacking is legal where not all the security precautions have been taken. And I'm allowed into your house to browse around if you forget to lock your windows. Get a grip."
Just out of curiosity, has anybody ever won an argument with a metaphor? Or does the other side always find a way to prove it's not equal?
heh Pretty much agree with that. I've found Star Fox to be quite enjoyable.
It provides a sub-optimal computer (you're already using a better computer to debate this point with me right now). At best it's a $200 toy.
"DivX DVD Players Arrive"
I thought Slashdot had gone back in time a few years heh.
I wonder if that'll spark a trademark dispute...
"But does that video card also include a DVD drive, component out, digital 5.1 out?"
"Can I play Xbox games on it?"
Heh. And why do you need to hack an XBOX to do all that?
"that is the best way to guarantee your show will have a short run: confuse the new viewers."
Makes you wonder why the broadcast industry's so anti-Tivo, doesn't it?
That was cool info, thanks!
"What inexpensive video card do you recommend as an upgrade from an NVIDIA TNT2?"
Are you asking because you want a better card, or is that in relation to my comment about VGA to NTSC? You got a price range? $150 got me a Geforce 4MX with dual monitor outs. I don't remember if it does SVideo out or not. Is that what you're looking for?
"Do I get NTSC TV output for that price?"
.AVI files from the network to the screen with lots of attention paid to high quality NTSC playback, then I'd love to buy a modded XBOX.
.AVI format as well.) I'd love to have an XBOX on my network able to play back the captured shows on the NTSC hardware. It'd look a hell of a lot better than my S-Video out on my video card. The colors would look a lot nicer. (Although I'd probably need a more sophisticated capture card to guarantee a better picture...)
Yes. It's not very hard to get VGA to NTSC anymore. Most cards, even the cheapy ones support it.
Question is: would you really want to run it on a TV? The answer is no. TV (NTSC) is not useful for your every day computing needs. Mainly because text would have to be rather large to be readabl.
I have a very particular use for an NTSC feature, though: VGA -- NTSC is crap. However, if soembody'd write a DivX player that plays back DivX
Why? I have a PVR built from an old PC running Snapstream. Shows are captured to MS Media Player. (I have the option to use DivX or other codecs in
In any case, I don't think cracking the XBOX is that useful. Until somebody puts it to a really compelling use to it, it's going to be hard to shake the opinion that it's just a matter of playing burned games.
"It would appear that someone at Microsoft learned how to read -- say for example: Computer Lib/Dream Machines [amazon.com] [originally printed circa 1977 ] which describes Dynabook [artmuseum.net]."
If you're implying that MS just decided to rip what they read in a book, I'm not inclined to agree with you. To tell you the truth, I don't think any one person can be credited with conieving of the idea of a computer that can replace the stack of papers on my desk.
Here I am, 2002, and I'm still printing out documents and using a highlighter on them. When there's a change to a website that needs to be made, I still print the page, circle the area, and write the correction that needs to be made. I still have post-it notes all over my monitor. As much as I'd like to be paperless, there's still workflow to think about here.
MS is tackling issues such as these. Part of what the Tablet/Office XP interface (as of marketing literature from a year ago, no idea if it's still true today) interesting is that it's supposed to let you draw on your documents. Unfortunately, I'm having difficulty finding out if they made good on that promise today. (Note for the PocketPC lets you do something like that...)
Assuming they come close to living up to their promises, MS has a rather interesting product on their hands that has not been available before. And when I say not available, I don't mean 'stylus driven laptop', I mean "A portable computer running the de-facto desktop OS that utilizes a stylus similarly to how paper is used."
I'm definitely curious about this product, and I can definitely see people cheering about it. Of course, my decisions remain reserved until I have one of these units to play with. Unfortunately, I don't 100% trust MS to make it non-obnoxious to use until version 3.
"That's the real reason why "Linux fans cheer."
/. Community wants, then Linux development will come to a virtual screeching halt. No innovation coming from that community.
I think the real reason that Linux fans are cheering is that MS did all the hard work. They had the machines designed and manufactured, they had a large team of engineers and QA make the things useful, and it's still a PC that does normal PC stuff. All the developers out there have to do is leech what MS has already done and throw it into a Linux distro.
Mod me a troll if you like, but I'm a little annoyed at all these pokes taken at MS, but at least they find interesting ways of making their products useful. (note: I did not use the word invent, so spare me the 'MS stole from Apple who really stole from Xerox' crap.) Linux is still playing catch up in many ways to Windows (i.e. the useful UI) but isn't doing a whole lot to depart from it, at least from the end-user perspective.
I fear that if MS dissolves like most of the
However, I may be wrong about that. I invite polite rebuttals. My perception may be wrong, and I'm open to information that could change my mind. I'm honestly not trying to troll here, just sharing my view and am willing to discuss that.
Nice troll. So let me ask ya something, are any of those movies on demand or is your point completely irrelevant?
"Even with a very fat pipe, downloading 700mb for an ok-quality divx or 1400mb for a good quality DivX is still a very long wait. Streaming a pixelated mosaic still sucks over broadband, too."
Fair point, though I disagree. I've seen 500kbit video that was quite acceptable. However, I don't want to debate about personal tastes. I have an alternative proposal.
Why doesn't AT&T provide this service for it's broadband customers? All they have to do is place a few servers between their customers and the outside world (heck, those might already be in place) and provide these movies as streams right to them.
The stream wouldn't have to go out to the net, so ATTBI would have pretty good control over the QoS. The connection should be pretty fast and reliable. And, it shouldn't cost them any extra to stream it down since they're not going to the outside world.
I'm a little surprised AT&T hasn't done this yet. It'd be quite an upsell.
Actually he is a software engineer, heh.
"However he could write a _good_ bug report, and send it to the appropriate people, and perhaps file it with say the kde ppl to make a nice gui for it."
I think that's reasonable. He may very well do that too. I'll suggest it to him.
"Yes. As I stated, eMusic and Rhapsody have licensed the catalogs of major American record labels."
I'm sorry, I didn't phrase my question very well. I meant 'RIAA endorsed' as in they like it, vs. "We're reluctantly licensing it just to prove we're not evil bastards."
I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the RIAA saw it as a genuine business opportunity. Know what I mean?
Sure, it's no longer a problem if you want to discover the problem by accident, then hunt around the web with (hopefully) the right search patterns, then edit the right conf file (with your monitor acting whacky) because it might be the right solution to your similar problem.
Yeah that's a much better solution than just having the problem fixed so nobody else has to deal with it.
"Provided you know which track you want to keep, then download the song on Rhapsody ($1/track) or eMusic ($15/mo), which are legitimate sites that have licensed labels' catalogs."
Are these sites RIAA supported? Im not asking so I can shout "No way, I'm boycotting!", but rather because so far the RIAA has done nothing but badmouth music in non-album-form. I'm concerned that if it's not endorsed by the RIAA, that one day that service will disappear.
I dunno... what do you think? I'm just being cautious. I don't want the RIAA taking a list of customers and saying "these people are all thieves". Yeah, I'm a little paranoid.
"Can you give me any good reasons why mozilla, with the same encryption you get with IE, can't be used for online banking?"
They fear the unknown? Chances are their web department has no idea what all the vulnerabilities out there can do, and people's money is a very sensitive topic.
Chances are they feel that cannot spread theirselves too thin and, at the same time, guarantee that the people's money is safe.
I wouldn't call that a good reason like you asked for, but I do think it's somewhat understandable.
"If you civil disobedience as a means to protest laws you don't like..."
Heh. The law is a different matter. I'm talking about expressing my dissatisfaction of the RIAA by not buying their music. That's what my original post was about.
It's not about not wanting to pay. (As mentioned in my previous posts I buy lots of games despite that it's relatively easy to get free copies around the web.) It's not about the law. I'm not happy with the DMCA either, but I'm not fighting that battle with P2P.
*Shrug* I think you're still operating under the idea that I want people to follow me or that I want to be some kind of martyr. Assuming I'm right, you're letting your imagination get ahead of you. I've done nothing to encourage 'followers'.
"The only thing the banks are interested in is your money, as long as they think you'll keep them there they don't care about you at all."
There's a disconnect there you may not be aware of: The tech support guy doesn't give a flying fart if the customer leaves or not. In other words, you got lucky.
"Feel stupid by rushing and saying the wrong thing? I guess Hilary is smarter than you, at least she didn't walk through the door, whereas you DID hit the Submit button."
Grow up dude. He missed a word while he was reading the article. Some people do that when they have more important things to dedicate their time to. You got hostile over an innocent mistake. Some people do that when they have a serious inferiority complex.
Who's the assclown?
"Ford and Chevy can't be compared, because neither is dominant in any market. "
It'd only be relevant if there were roads that Chevy couldn't drive on. (Gotta love how Slashdot users get so good at cooking up bad metaphors heh.)
"I'm so tired of the same old "W3C is the standard" horseshit. Get over it. The W3C is irrelevant. It has been for years."
I hear ya. It's also a standard that doesn't get too many facelifts. Like or hate MS or IE, they support the coolest browser stuff.
"What about Opera masquerading as IE or netscape?"
:)
It doesn't really work. US Bank pulled a similar stunt with regard to their browsers. I had to use IE to get into my account, and that bothered me.
Here is what I did: I sent them a polite e-mail explaining that I work between Linux and Windows and the common browser (I use) between them is Opera. It is a well respected browser and I find it a bit painful to move to another browser just to use their site. They sent me an e-mail back saying they were getting a lot of requests like that and that they were looking into fixing it.
And they did. I can now use Opera at US Bank and all I get is a warning saying "this isn't a recommended browser, so it's yo fault." Heh.
So my advice to anybody who wants to contact their bank about this: Be polite. Don't make it sound like it's the end of the world. Don't make it sound like they're evil or stupid. Just politely explain your situation. You may or may not change any minds anywhere, but I guarantee you that if you get shitty with them you won't be heard.
"...why the debate is framed as free music v. the music industry."
I never really thought it was about music being 'free' anyway. My MP3 searches were about finding new music, not about getting it for free. I saw it as a way of finding stuff I thought I'd like. Paying for it is not an issue. I mean think about it: Buy a CD, open it, and it's yours. You can't take it back if it's not satisfactory.
So yeah, I'm gonna download songs from the album first before I buy the CD because I'm not paying $15 for 1 (one) song I liked from the radio. How many of you have been burned by that?
"Funny how we never see stories like this about Linux."
A friend of mine has Linux (RedHat I think...) on his computer at home. It has an LCD monitor. He pushed one of the buttons on the LCD monitor and the whole screen shifted right like 50 pixels. He had to fly around all over Linux to find the right conf file to get that fixed.
No, horror stories like that don't get posted. However, it is a big screaming deal when decent font support finally happens. Heh.
I bet I lose karma over this post. It'd be a pity if that happened, though. Shedding light on Linux's weaker areas of the UI would, at worst, cause a few developers to react to them. It wouldn't make people flock away from Linux.
In other words: Slashdot could get away with a little equality in the way it treats MS and Linux.