My friends have this odd tendancy to send cute little powerpoint presentations to me. Some of them are rather neat (like one showing the stages in creation of an airport raised from the ocean). I tend to use OO to open them because it won't execute some of the nasty macroviruses etc that MS Office might... but it appears one still has to be wary.
Just installed a $200CAD JVC deck in a younger friend's car a few weeks ago. The sound is actually quite good. It's got a 24-bit DAC, 200W output (that doesn't frag out over half-volume), RCA inputs, subwoofer line-out and dual 5V RCA outputs.
EQ functions seem rather decent as well. I've talked to a few people about this deck and the consensus has been that the cheaper brands such as JVC actually do quite well (even better than the big brands quite often) in the lower-end, they just don't *have* a higher end like the $1000+ units other companies sell.
As somebody who has owned overpriced Sony Mp3 decks myself... I'd say that you might want to consider some of the lesser brands and just get a decent-but-cheap deck (and besides, as I mentioned it does have RCA-style input jacks, which could easily be adapted to the small headphone style line jack).
I notice that it has a battery which has to be charged. If you're playing it in a standard tape deck, couldn't you provide most of the power needed by the spinning of the tape rollers turning a gyro and/or charging a small capacitor?
A simple cable and you could transfer them from your computer... *except* that most mobile providers sell you their phones, which are then feature locked so that you can't do thinks like upload ringtones from your PC.
One would say that this it he trade-off because they *give* you a phone for free... but that really doesn't happen anymore. You sign a 3-year-contract, which locks you in so that if you break it you end up paying a hefty sum. Even if you *buy* your phone straight out, you haven't really bought the advertised phone but a crippled parody of what the phone was supposed to be. And of course you can't use *other* phones... because even if you buy the exact same model it has to be one from the provider.
That's my little rant anyhow, I will specify that this seems to (locally) apply to Telus and Bell, but Rogers is much more friendly with 3rd-party phones... they're just happy to sell you service and screw up your billing every so often:-)
Indeed... good ol' Christopher Columbus himself was known to have massacred and/or enslaved people of various non-caucasian races. However, according to most of what you would learn in school, he's a hero for "discovering" America.
Shutting down people who are hosting pirate torrents etc is one thing, however the MPAA has been known to strongly badmouth the torrent technology itself, and make attempts to kill the P2P/torrent/etc technology as a whole.
So what do they really want? Kill torrent, use torrent, or kill torrent for everyone else but use it for themselves?
They don't know whether or not the movie renter is going to slap it in their computer, run it through a copying program, and burn a copy.
Neither does the P2P uploader know if the recipient has a legit copy... but why should they be any less liable than Blockbuster? Hell, the P2P user doesn't even get paid for this...
Both have their charm... recently I've been car shopping and find that the things that make online car publications vs offline decent apply in a similar way to magazines.
Online: Searchable, easy access to older/archive editions, instant-available, less physical item to carry around esp with multiple issues, easy to send to a friend etc in another location
Offline: Portable, doesn't need a computer, doesn't need power, can take it to the restaurant, bathroom, whatever. I can bring an ad to a car dealer and show them, or a magazine to a friend.
A comment has already been made about USB 2 cards, but how about firewire. Both my laptop and my portable (Epia-M10000) have USB2 and Firewire ports.
Does anyone know what would be the best card out of those worlds (are firewire better than USB 2)... on a cost VS quality comparison. Mostly they'll probably be used for helping to convert my old VHS video collection into DVD format, and perhaps some PVR-type stuff.
PCI cards are nice... but of course they don't go in my laptop.
Yes, and such hardware is often cheap to manufacture, and cheap in quality. When we buy laptops at work it's a toss-up between quality/reliability (generally IBM) and lower quality/cost.
Quite often we hit the lower cost items, and as one the technicians who has to service said hardware I'd have to say it sucks. Most people don't realize that even if your cheaper laptop has a 3yr warrantee, that doesn't get you back the 2yr worth of data that goes down the toilet when the el-cheapo hard-drive overheats and dies.
Did the same to me when my fooling around with the proxy made it a bit too open (at one point had it open to my work IP, later changed the firewall rules not remembering the proxy was active and made it open to the world).
In under a week, and with a few complains, Telus had canned my connection. Of course, I had already found the problem a few days earlier on my own (thanks to slashdot, which will tell you if you have a known open proxy, thanks slashdot!).
I was connecting to home from work to download some docs and suddenly the connection canned. When I went back to check (I needed those docs to finish my job) I found a message on my machine stating I'd be shut down and to call them.
However, it wasn't too big a hassle as I just called Telus and informed them that the proxy was unintentional and had already been closed sometime earlier. A few moment later, and I was back up and running.
Though this was a personal inconvenience I'd much rather have my ISP nuking the spamming idiots etc than letting them pollute the internet. I *did* update their phone records with my cellular # so that they can catch me before they disconnect my service next time though.
And one thing I've been wondering about, obviously you would keep the drives on different IDE channels if possible (hda, and hdc here).
If you also have non-RAID drives on hdb, and a CD-ROM on hdd... that should not overly influence the data speeds of the RAID drives except when there is actual data transfer on hdc/hdd, or would a machine automatically split the available pipe upon having two IDE devices (master/slave) on a given IDE channel?
But when an individual customer files multiple complaints, and then several other customers do the same... perhaps ICANN would look at putting the screws to said shitty registrar
I think this was a really great analogy. Personally I'd rather have a hunting knife while skinning that a swiss-Army... and I'd rather have a massive optimized old-but-tested hardware system pushing me into orbit than a shuttle with a USB connection to my PDA:-)
Advanced lighting introduce a lot of new gaming strategies that correspond to real life.
How about having a level wherein a realistic sun moves over time (as it gets towards night). Shadows will move, causing good sniping spots to come and go. On a bright day, you might even want to sit in a corner right near the sun, so anyone looking towards you will be blinded as you snipe em.
A new function key could be added as well. How about closing your eyes so that you don't get blinded, or perhaps so that you can adjust for an upcoming dark room. Maybe a "shades" item might come in handy.
A lot of real-life tactical situations can evolve around light and shadows, so they would definately add a lot to FPS games, and perhaps even other genres such as RTS (moving in for the kill when the sun is positioned so that you have shadow from a mountain, etc)
I should really install some tools to monitor what ports pull traffic through my NAT machine, but a basic model would be
Pr0n: 1-3GB/month
Music/downloads: 0-500MB+/month (legit downloads)
Music/streaming; Unknown, under 1GB... and again legit
CD images, apt-updates, etc: 4GB+/month
Seriously, doing my general upgrades of debian/unstable hit me for a bit of bandwidth on my various machines, downloading ISO's to test are about 500-700MB a pop. Games suck banwidth, and lots of other very legitimate activity. Music falls into the low end of the spectrum, and even that is generally legit downloads or a song somebody has told me to "check out" (which I will probably look at snagging from iTunes if it is good).
Much as it puts a bad taste in my mouth to defend a sell-out band like Metallica:
We made a demo and I gave ten copies to ten friends
If I give out free copies of my own material with the intent that they be spread out, that's different than when somebody else copies my paid-for product and then gives the copies to all their friends.
Personally, I do think that P2P both helps and hinders music. A lot of this is because the RIAA definately missed the boat, but for everyone who buys a CD based on a song from the internet there is somebody who just downloads 100 songs without buying anything.
From personal experience, the best distribution model has been companies that offer demo tracks and then sell CD's. CDbaby has a nice model where you could stream the song, you could even rip the steam if you know what you're doing, but it would be incomplete because they just give you enough to get to like/dislike the song. So I can listen to 5-6 songs on a CD... hear enough of them so I know if they sound worth my coin, and then buy the album as a please.
So yes, the music industry has a flawed business model. General P2P is also a semi-useless/flawed model for them. But there are lots of other models that would benefit both the RIAA and the consumer, should they have enough brains to use them.
You'd need a pretty dumb judge to count that though. If they told CD-R/DVD-R manufacturers to note down or restrict those that bought large volume of media, would it count as goodwill. The internet companies have a business model, and the RIAA is telling them to change it with zero benefit to themselves.
I'm lucky though, as a Canadian I find we're still doing rather well in the fight again RIAA/MPAA/DMCA abuse... and our court system seems to quite often have some good heads behind it when dealing with that type of crap. There are some stupid lobbies going through again right now but I've got reasonable confidence they'll be shot down.
A compromise is a mutually beneficial situation. The RIAA don't want compromise, they want to have their pie and eat it too... I hope they end up with a pie-in-the-face for their BS "efforts"
Slashdot Mirror
My friends have this odd tendancy to send cute little powerpoint presentations to me. Some of them are rather neat (like one showing the stages in creation of an airport raised from the ocean). I tend to use OO to open them because it won't execute some of the nasty macroviruses etc that MS Office might... but it appears one still has to be wary.
a) It's an item that is appealing to both the middle-class and wealthy
b) It must be a rather simple/easy interface to use... GWB isn't known for his technical knowhow...
Just installed a $200CAD JVC deck in a younger friend's car a few weeks ago. The sound is actually quite good. It's got a 24-bit DAC, 200W output (that doesn't frag out over half-volume), RCA inputs, subwoofer line-out and dual 5V RCA outputs.
EQ functions seem rather decent as well. I've talked to a few people about this deck and the consensus has been that the cheaper brands such as JVC actually do quite well (even better than the big brands quite often) in the lower-end, they just don't *have* a higher end like the $1000+ units other companies sell.
As somebody who has owned overpriced Sony Mp3 decks myself... I'd say that you might want to consider some of the lesser brands and just get a decent-but-cheap deck (and besides, as I mentioned it does have RCA-style input jacks, which could easily be adapted to the small headphone style line jack).
I notice that it has a battery which has to be charged. If you're playing it in a standard tape deck, couldn't you provide most of the power needed by the spinning of the tape rollers turning a gyro and/or charging a small capacitor?
A simple cable and you could transfer them from your computer... *except* that most mobile providers sell you their phones, which are then feature locked so that you can't do thinks like upload ringtones from your PC.
:-)
One would say that this it he trade-off because they *give* you a phone for free... but that really doesn't happen anymore. You sign a 3-year-contract, which locks you in so that if you break it you end up paying a hefty sum. Even if you *buy* your phone straight out, you haven't really bought the advertised phone but a crippled parody of what the phone was supposed to be. And of course you can't use *other* phones... because even if you buy the exact same model it has to be one from the provider.
That's my little rant anyhow, I will specify that this seems to (locally) apply to Telus and Bell, but Rogers is much more friendly with 3rd-party phones... they're just happy to sell you service and screw up your billing every so often
Anyone actually in China at the moment who can access slashdot, or is it blocked?
Indeed... good ol' Christopher Columbus himself was known to have massacred and/or enslaved people of various non-caucasian races. However, according to most of what you would learn in school, he's a hero for "discovering" America.
If a large portion of it has for quite awhile been filmed out-of-country, wouldn't that mean it isn't so much being outsourced as just not insourced?
Now what are good tools to encode large libraries of FLAC files. For windows, for linux?
Shutting down people who are hosting pirate torrents etc is one thing, however the MPAA has been known to strongly badmouth the torrent technology itself, and make attempts to kill the P2P/torrent/etc technology as a whole.
So what do they really want? Kill torrent, use torrent, or kill torrent for everyone else but use it for themselves?
They don't know whether or not the movie renter is going to slap it in their computer, run it through a copying program, and burn a copy.
Neither does the P2P uploader know if the recipient has a legit copy... but why should they be any less liable than Blockbuster? Hell, the P2P user doesn't even get paid for this...
Both have their charm... recently I've been car shopping and find that the things that make online car publications vs offline decent apply in a similar way to magazines.
Online: Searchable, easy access to older/archive editions, instant-available, less physical item to carry around esp with multiple issues, easy to send to a friend etc in another location
Offline: Portable, doesn't need a computer, doesn't need power, can take it to the restaurant, bathroom, whatever. I can bring an ad to a car dealer and show them, or a magazine to a friend.
A comment has already been made about USB 2 cards, but how about firewire. Both my laptop and my portable (Epia-M10000) have USB2 and Firewire ports.
Does anyone know what would be the best card out of those worlds (are firewire better than USB 2)... on a cost VS quality comparison. Mostly they'll probably be used for helping to convert my old VHS video collection into DVD format, and perhaps some PVR-type stuff.
PCI cards are nice... but of course they don't go in my laptop.
Yes, and such hardware is often cheap to manufacture, and cheap in quality. When we buy laptops at work it's a toss-up between quality/reliability (generally IBM) and lower quality/cost.
Quite often we hit the lower cost items, and as one the technicians who has to service said hardware I'd have to say it sucks. Most people don't realize that even if your cheaper laptop has a 3yr warrantee, that doesn't get you back the 2yr worth of data that goes down the toilet when the el-cheapo hard-drive overheats and dies.
Did the same to me when my fooling around with the proxy made it a bit too open (at one point had it open to my work IP, later changed the firewall rules not remembering the proxy was active and made it open to the world).
In under a week, and with a few complains, Telus had canned my connection. Of course, I had already found the problem a few days earlier on my own (thanks to slashdot, which will tell you if you have a known open proxy, thanks slashdot!).
I was connecting to home from work to download some docs and suddenly the connection canned. When I went back to check (I needed those docs to finish my job) I found a message on my machine stating I'd be shut down and to call them.
However, it wasn't too big a hassle as I just called Telus and informed them that the proxy was unintentional and had already been closed sometime earlier. A few moment later, and I was back up and running.
Though this was a personal inconvenience I'd much rather have my ISP nuking the spamming idiots etc than letting them pollute the internet. I *did* update their phone records with my cellular # so that they can catch me before they disconnect my service next time though.
One thing to note: slower writes, faster reads.
And one thing I've been wondering about, obviously you would keep the drives on different IDE channels if possible (hda, and hdc here).
If you also have non-RAID drives on hdb, and a CD-ROM on hdd... that should not overly influence the data speeds of the RAID drives except when there is actual data transfer on hdc/hdd, or would a machine automatically split the available pipe upon having two IDE devices (master/slave) on a given IDE channel?
But when an individual customer files multiple complaints, and then several other customers do the same... perhaps ICANN would look at putting the screws to said shitty registrar
I think this was a really great analogy. Personally I'd rather have a hunting knife while skinning that a swiss-Army... and I'd rather have a massive optimized old-but-tested hardware system pushing me into orbit than a shuttle with a USB connection to my PDA :-)
I think that the military probably has the patent on laser-guided bombs... so maybe they could introduce SCO to a couple of those....
Maybe for bragging rights that they've beat it?
Advanced lighting introduce a lot of new gaming strategies that correspond to real life.
How about having a level wherein a realistic sun moves over time (as it gets towards night). Shadows will move, causing good sniping spots to come and go. On a bright day, you might even want to sit in a corner right near the sun, so anyone looking towards you will be blinded as you snipe em.
A new function key could be added as well. How about closing your eyes so that you don't get blinded, or perhaps so that you can adjust for an upcoming dark room. Maybe a "shades" item might come in handy.
A lot of real-life tactical situations can evolve around light and shadows, so they would definately add a lot to FPS games, and perhaps even other genres such as RTS (moving in for the kill when the sun is positioned so that you have shadow from a mountain, etc)
I should really install some tools to monitor what ports pull traffic through my NAT machine, but a basic model would be
Pr0n: 1-3GB/month
Music/downloads: 0-500MB+/month (legit downloads)
Music/streaming; Unknown, under 1GB... and again legit
CD images, apt-updates, etc: 4GB+/month
Seriously, doing my general upgrades of debian/unstable hit me for a bit of bandwidth on my various machines, downloading ISO's to test are about 500-700MB a pop. Games suck banwidth, and lots of other very legitimate activity. Music falls into the low end of the spectrum, and even that is generally legit downloads or a song somebody has told me to "check out" (which I will probably look at snagging from iTunes if it is good).
Much as it puts a bad taste in my mouth to defend a sell-out band like Metallica:
We made a demo and I gave ten copies to ten friends
If I give out free copies of my own material with the intent that they be spread out, that's different than when somebody else copies my paid-for product and then gives the copies to all their friends.
Personally, I do think that P2P both helps and hinders music. A lot of this is because the RIAA definately missed the boat, but for everyone who buys a CD based on a song from the internet there is somebody who just downloads 100 songs without buying anything.
From personal experience, the best distribution model has been companies that offer demo tracks and then sell CD's. CDbaby has a nice model where you could stream the song, you could even rip the steam if you know what you're doing, but it would be incomplete because they just give you enough to get to like/dislike the song. So I can listen to 5-6 songs on a CD... hear enough of them so I know if they sound worth my coin, and then buy the album as a please.
So yes, the music industry has a flawed business model. General P2P is also a semi-useless/flawed model for them. But there are lots of other models that would benefit both the RIAA and the consumer, should they have enough brains to use them.
You'd need a pretty dumb judge to count that though. If they told CD-R/DVD-R manufacturers to note down or restrict those that bought large volume of media, would it count as goodwill. The internet companies have a business model, and the RIAA is telling them to change it with zero benefit to themselves.
I'm lucky though, as a Canadian I find we're still doing rather well in the fight again RIAA/MPAA/DMCA abuse... and our court system seems to quite often have some good heads behind it when dealing with that type of crap. There are some stupid lobbies going through again right now but I've got reasonable confidence they'll be shot down.
A compromise is a mutually beneficial situation. The RIAA don't want compromise, they want to have their pie and eat it too... I hope they end up with a pie-in-the-face for their BS "efforts"
Though I suppose it might fall under video at times. You forgot porn, which has for a long time been a dominant aspect of internet growth.