With the addition of a BT848 TV card and a cheap PSX/ PS One console, i can play all the latest playstation games in a window under X.
I find this solution quite workable. No CPU usage (aside from the minimal impact of the BT848). Works on linux, windows, the BeOS and probably most other OSes too.
Plus i can just unplug it and carry it downstairs if i want to play games with my friends on my TV.
This is one of the more important aspects of console gaming as opposed to PC gaming.
PCs are largely limited to single-user input, while consoles are designed specifically to allow multiple people in the same location to play - all with a standard interface i.e gamepads as opposed to one person on keyboard, one on joystick.
Two people crouched over a keyboard is hardly comfortable, and while USB should allow you to chain as many controllers as you like together, you still need hubs, extra power supplies to run them and its generally a big pain in the ass.
Even if this PCI card sported multiple controller connections, who wants to reach around the back of the machine to connect and disconnect them?
PCs excel with regard to multiplayer gaming over the internet, but this is aspect relies solely on their ability to take ethernet and broadband connections. Modem play was fun back in the days of Quake 1, but it was the LAN parties that were the real deal.
This PCI-card approach was also tried with the Sega Saturn i believe, but i don't think anyone actually bought the thing.
As a computer programmer living and working in New Zealand, I have to say this makes me pretty mad..
Theres no way i'll be providing the passphrases to my encrypted filesystems to anyone. Whatever happened to the right to remain silent?
They'll be pushing this because the government is apparently paranoid about organised crime being coordinated through encrypted channels by gangs and others.
Whether there is currently any encrypted communication being exchanged by said gangs is something nobody can provide any data on, so personally i find this reasoning rather hard to swallow.
Basically, they are relying on the fact that nobody in this country actually gives a flying fuck about anything but rugby. I doubt there are very many people in this country would have any idea just how much personal freedom is being lost by a move like this.
This really sucks, and they've been planning it for a while. Some parliamentary commission made similar recommendations a few months back.
It's not like you couldn't just use a computer in another country to store your encrypted data.
Somehow i doubt that there has been any call by the citizens of New Zealand to implement this law, or any like it.
My gateway is a linux machine running an ipchains-based firewall/NAT and the Squid proxy.
All internal traffic on port 80 is redirected through Squid (on port 3128) via ipchains, and Squid can then use its redirector to filter and/or redirect URLS. - in my case the redirector is a simple perl script that simply uses regular expressions to match and replace URLS.
You also get caching with squid, of course.
So you could use it to filter anything that didn't match the appropriate pattern and redirect that request to a 'sorry you can't access that site' page on your intranet.
It also lets users behind the NAT gateway use the same URLs to access web servers as they would outside the firewall.
Squid also has authentication features i believe, but i'm not familiar with them.
Client setup in completely transparent, the browser doesn't even know its talking to a proxy server.
I couldn't be happier, since it means that MS Proxy Server 2 is going on its long-awaited trip out the window.
After developing my latest little project in Java, and having it run without recompilation on Linux and Windows, i'm sold.
As it stands, Swing is the worst thing about Java today, but hopefully we'll get a fast native GUI from Sun at some point in the future.
Anyone know of there is some kind of JNI interface for GTK+?
I quite like programming for the AWT, it's not too slow, but it does take some work to implement the groovy stuff like transparency and arbitarily rotated text and things.
If i wanted a language purely for its OO features, i'd use Smalltalk, Objective-C or Python perhaps.
C# is a waste of time.. If MS had concentrated on improving Java performance instead of getting all pissed off they couldn't use it as a tool to tie users to their licensing fees, we might have a high-performance Java today. Now theyre reinventing the wheel, yet again.
The most ridiculous aspect of the whole thing is their claim you can write C# code in any language you like, except the one that's semantically and conceptually closest - Java.
Is there actually a good technical reason for not supporting Java syntax with C#?
Sounds awfully like Civilization? Why do you think these animals are dead in the first place??
You think it might have something to do with so-called 'civilised' morons wiping them out by indiscriminately destroying their habitats?
You talk about Civilisation like its somehow different from the civilisation that other species have achieved.. Ants, and many other insects, for example, are extremely civilised creatures. Do you know how many ants or termites youd have crawling all over your body right now if they never died?
No, theres no proof at all of what happens after death.. But far more people have died in this world than there are alive today, if this didn't result in some kind of progress, then where do you get off even thinking about employing the word 'civilised'?
You think that the current generation of people were just dropped onto the surface of this planet, fully 'civilised'?
You want to live forever? Personally, i think thats a stupid notion. A species expanding without limit and never dying is quite obviously unsustainable, yet you think you somehow have the right to persist over others who must necessarily die to ensure your survival. Thats not very civilised now, is it?
You can live forever, and the method has been employed successfully for millions of years. Its called having kids.
The fact of the matter is that you have to die in order to make room for new people. At least some of whom will be better equipped than you, in every conceivable way.
If youre so arrogant to believe youre the pinnacle of friggin evolution, that you're right to live somehow outweighs everything else's, then you're gonna be real surprised when that car hits you, your own cancerous cells eat your vital organs, your heart just plain gives out or you get mauled to death by some example of a long dead species that escapes from it's cage.
Jesus, instead of actually doing something to modify our own behaviour to avoid killing these species, now everythings ok because we can breed them on demand, regardless of how long they've been dead.
Its basically a pretty sick thing to do to the poor creatures. Whats so terribly wrong about being dead?? We wiped them out, and now seek to assuage our guilt by 'resurrecting' them
They have no home to go back to, and are born into a prison where they'll live out the rest of their miserable lives. I can't imagine a worse life for an animal than to be born and die in captivity, and i'll never visit another zoo after seeing, as a young child, those poor cats (leopards, lions) in tiny cages.
Why not clone, breed and reintroduce those native american indians that got slaughtered wholesale? Clone a few herds of buffalo, and set em up on the plains so they can build their wigwams and make the good ol' whitebread US feel less guilty about things.
Surely this means that players with a license purchased from the MPAA by the manufacturer to play region 1 discs, may not in fact be able to play region 1 disc.
Surely you could return such a player to the manufacturer or aftermarket supplier if the player did not, in fact, do what they said it would do?
I just hope that someone like the EU determines that region coding is an unfair trade restraint and bans the import of any region coded or encrypted DVDs at some point in the future.
Its bad enough that the US has to suffer from such ridiculous marketing, legal, and media industry practices, but to force the rest of the world to keep on having this crap shoved down our throats is really quite shitty indeed.
The whole point of attending university is to gain knowledge and skill which will increase a students value to the economy.
Obviously many attend university for other reasons, but the vast majority of students are students so they can profit, whether it be financially or otherwise, from the knowledge imparted by their lecturers, textbooks, fellow students and tutors.
The whole point of attending a lecture and taking notes is to profit from them. In fact, if youre not paying for a license to use that information when you sign up for a university course, i fail to understand what is being provided for the money you pay.
Whats next - a lawsuit by the EIAA (Education Industry Association of America) against Notester, the peer-to-peer lecture not sharing system?
Surely this is chump-change for any government to come up with... sure russia is poor, but even our sad little country on the ass-end of the planet (New Zealand) can afford to throw away five times that amount on failed government IT projects.
I have to admit i don't have $10 million sitting in my back pocket, but surely they could sell a couple of nukes to iraq or something to cover the shortfall?
I'm generally happy with it, except for the obvious bloat.
The only thing that worries me about mozilla is the fact they have so many things 'half-done' - will Mozilla 1.0 support the full DOM, XML/XSLT, SVG and ECMAscript standards?
The work done so far is great, but damn, it looks like it will be shipping with the features and standards that were important on the web last year, completely ignoring the ones that will matter (and which Windows/IE supports quite well right now) now and in the future.
Well, i have yet to see a software solution that will even encode fullscreen MPEG-1 in realtime. By fullscreen realtime i mean taking a SIF (720 x 576 x60fps PAL) (compressed or uncompressed) video stream + audio, and digitise that into 352 x 288 1.5 MBit/s MPEG stream in high quality without dropping frames or sailing off into artifact-land.
as for MPEG-2 in realtime in software?? no way, unless your definition of either 'realtime' or 'software' are very differenet from mine.
Region coding exists on both the DVD Drive (mine is a Samsung SD-612 and the MPEG-2 decoder board (mine is a Sigma Hollywood+)
I had to patch the firmware of my drive to disable the region coding on the player, and there are a few utilities to disable the region coding on the Hollywood+ player.
Considering that region-coding is an illegal trade barrier in my country, it bothers me that i should have to do this at all.
Still, before i bought any DVD playing hardware, i made sure it was patchable. I advise anyone else looking to buy a DVD player for their computer to do the same and avoid drives which don't offer an easy way to disable region coding.
After all my patching efforts, i now enjoy excellent quality viewing of DVDs from any zone on both my monitor and big-screen TV, and the DivX encodings i have made of my purchased disks are great for easy viewing from CD on my non-DVD equipped computers.
The Hollywood board is also great for playing back MPEG-1 encoded shorts downloaded off the web. theres nothing like watching 'Tripping the Rift' on a TV screen:)
Realtime MPEG encoding in software is not really an option. You might be able to do it on a 1GHz PC or something, but thats an expensive MPEG encoder...
What would be really cool is if a device like a Tivo supported streaming of the MPEG it was playing back over ethernet through, say, a Java based (for cross-platform considerations) client. Something like the Video4LAN application.. You could control and view your Tivo's playback stream through a wireless network so you could watch TV on your laptop or something like that.
I guess you could build something like that out of a linux box without too much trouble, given hardware support for the MPEG encoder card..
You could then archive the stream to your local hard drive easily, without needing an MPEG encoder in that machine.
The Tivo-like device is your local TV-server. Just log on and watch what you feel like watching out of the 30GB buffer.
This of course, would probably make the MPAA, RIAA and probably various other dumbass corporations throw a squealing fit on the floor, since the possibilities with regard to then broadcasting or archiving the content on the internet are obvious and tempting;)
IT would be extremely difficult to saturate a 100Mbps link. I would, however, like to see the ability to stream MPEG-2 over the internet with good quality, and it would seem that only a connection with this much headroom will really make that a possibility.
> a. Internal documents at the companies creation > indicate that they were created solely in order > to facilitate copyright infringement, and to put
> the record industy players, large > and small, out of business.
Eh? A legally binding licensing agreement prohibiting the users of a service from trading copyrighted material is somehow facilitating copyright infringement? This agreement is rendered null and void because of the content of 'internal documents' detailing relations between Napster and some unrelated 3rd parties - in this case the record comapnies??
Should i not have to pay for my Sun servers because their internal memos detail plans to put Microsoft out of business?
Do i not have to pay for a can of Coke because their internal documents detail their fierce competitiveness with Pepsi?
Since when has it been illegal to put anyone out of business, or to plan an action with that result?
> b. They have the technical means to > allow only pre-approved files to be listed in > their system, but they choose not to do this.
Thats hardly the point. They have a legal agreement with their users that they will not use the napster service to copy copyrighted material.
Just becuase something is technically possible doesn't mean it should or will be done.
Altavista has the technical means to filter out any links to MP3s, DeCSS, kiddie porn and anything else deemed illegal but should they be required to implement this?
Your ISP has the technical means to sniff every packet that passes through it and block whatever it sees at possibly legally dubious. Should they do that?
The US government has the technical means to stop many illegal acts you might choose to engage in by premptively locking you in jail for even talking about doing something illegal. Should they do that?
For christs sake, Napsters servers hold no copyrighted works. End of story. How can you be sued for copyright infringement when you didn't copy anything???
Just how are they encouraging their users to copy music illegally when they have a clear license agreement prohibiting this when you sign on for their service. How is napsters EULA any less binding than anyone elses?? for example the EULA that comes with a CD - you may not copy this recording illegally blah blah..
If its napster's fault their users breach their license agreement, how is it not the RIAA members' faults that their users have breached their license agreements?
Napster should sue the RIAA for allowing their music to be traded by Napsters' users. It puts them in a difficult legal situation , obviously, and has clearly damaged their business.
Oh, but wait. one of these companies has billions of dollars. I guess thats justice in the USA.
With Everquest, you buy the client software. These guys are doing nothing with Verant/Sony's client software. They aren't distributing modified versions, or anything.
Microsoft can't sue the samba developers because its possible to use a UNIX server instead of a Windows server.
Would it be legal for Microsoft to place an addition to the Internet Explorer/Windows EULA in the next service pack of Internet Explorer/Windows that their browser may not be used to connect to any server not running Windows NT/2000?
What the hell is wrong with these people. Instead of saying 'we won't assign any more IPV4 addresses for virtual hosting', why not say 'we will only assign IPV6 addresses for virtual hosting purposes.
Then, at the every least, some of the people on the internet might have a good reason to drive the adoption of IPV6.
Slashdot is probably worried that Apple will sue them for publishing trade secrets and using their copyrighted material (Apple Logo).
Since fair use is going out the window with the DMCA, and a website surely comes under the auspice of 'digital media', allowing the unauthorised copying of Apples logo to millions of client machines around the world is surely a felony computer crime.
So changing to a patented, proprietary electrical interface for the slot to make it impossible for other motherboard manufacturers to produce P2-compatible motherboards or CPUs without a license was just an accident??
Why is it that my video card will soon have more RAM, a much faster bus and probably a more powerful CPU than the ones on my motherboard?
NVidia should take a whack at Intel by integrating an x86-compatible CPU onto the next GeForce series cards. Make it possible for OEMs to ship a system that doesn't have a tradtional motherboard, but rather just a video card with a CPU on it to handle the general purpose computing tasks.
The 'motherboard' would then be a compact passive backplane with disk controllers,ethernet and USB ports and you upgrade your CPU when you upgrade your graphics card..
I'm sick of watching Intel dick around. The whole 'Slot' debacle is laughable - they deliberately make a 'slotted' CPU to try and slow down AMD/Cyrix, then they go back to making socketed CPUs because the slotted versions are too expensive.
Now its RAMBUS - they try and force everyone to use RAMBUS, but then they go back to SDRAM because RAMBUS is too expensive.
The Celeron has exactly the same cache-on-die technology as their supposedly high-end Xeons, and the Xeon is supposed to be expensive because it offers higher performance - why? it has exactly the same improvement as the lowend celeron has, as compared to the P2?? 'Oh yeah but the Xeons don't have the SMP support burnt out of their dies'
Intel is stumbling blindly with the P4 and the Itanium.. Even joe average knows that the P3 does not give anyone a 'better internet experience', and the difference between a 600MHz Celeron and a 1.3GHz P3 is unnoticeable during day to day tasks..
The Itanium will probably be outperformed by whatever the latest Celeron is when it finally gets released, and the P4 is just another 'Pentium'. Personally, i haven't noticed any difference in speed between the P2-450 i used to have and the P3-500 i have now at work..
Clock-for-clock, i doubt the P3 is any significantly faster than the P2, and i doubt that clock-for-clock, the P4 will be either.
The last two PCs i purchased had intel CPUs. The next one definitely won't.
is a P200 (should get a faster one) with a 6GB drive (should get a bigger one), remote control via LIRC and a cheap-ass remote control, video in via a BT848 TV tuner and video output via an external scan converter hooked up to a 27" Sony Video Monitor (ie a TV without a tuner - should get a proper TV).
I also have a remote mouse which came with the scan converter, but unfortunately no remote keyboard - though i would suggest one of those keyboards with the mouse built-in.
This meant i could watch TV fullscreen or in a window via the BT848, play MP3s with mpg123 & LIRC (remote buttons worked for stepping through tracks and selecting playlists) and surf the web/chat on IRC at the same time on the same screen. I also had the playstation plugged into the BT848s composite input so i could play PSX on the same screen or in a window with the click of a mouse.
Was fun, great for the 'wow factor' but somewhat fiddly without extensive desktop and application customisation to increase font sizes etc.
I've since torn the setup apart, and just use the P200 as a general purpose PC.
But this stuff is all quite doable, a lot of fun, and linux is a great platform to do it on.
Slashdot Mirror
With the addition of a BT848 TV card and a cheap PSX/ PS One console, i can play all the latest playstation games in a window under X.
I find this solution quite workable. No CPU usage (aside from the minimal impact of the BT848). Works on linux, windows, the BeOS and probably most other OSes too.
Plus i can just unplug it and carry it downstairs if i want to play games with my friends on my TV.
This is one of the more important aspects of console gaming as opposed to PC gaming.
PCs are largely limited to single-user input, while consoles are designed specifically to allow multiple people in the same location to play - all with a standard interface i.e gamepads as opposed to one person on keyboard, one on joystick.
Two people crouched over a keyboard is hardly comfortable, and while USB should allow you to chain as many controllers as you like together, you still need hubs, extra power supplies to run them and its generally a big pain in the ass.
Even if this PCI card sported multiple controller connections, who wants to reach around the back of the machine to connect and disconnect them?
PCs excel with regard to multiplayer gaming over the internet, but this is aspect relies solely on their ability to take ethernet and broadband connections. Modem play was fun back in the days of Quake 1, but it was the LAN parties that were the real deal.
This PCI-card approach was also tried with the Sega Saturn i believe, but i don't think anyone actually bought the thing.
And you would be very wrong.
m phlets/bill_of_rights/bill_rights.pdf
you can take a look at it the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act at the URL below, and see that it clearly states you have the right to remain silent.
http://www.justice.govt.nz/justicepubs/other/pa
No, we don't have a constitution.
m phlets/bill_of_rights/bill_rights.pdf
What we do have is the Bill of Rights Act 1990.
We also supposedly compose our laws with respect to 'Natural Law', or some such concept that presumes the right to privacy is undeniable.
This has obviously just been pitched straight out the window with this new legislation and its really starting to piss me off even more now.
you can take a look at it the Bill of Rights Act at the URL below, and see that it clearly states you have the right to remain silent.
http://www.justice.govt.nz/justicepubs/other/pa
As a computer programmer living and working in New Zealand, I have to say this makes me pretty mad..
Theres no way i'll be providing the passphrases to my encrypted filesystems to anyone. Whatever happened to the right to remain silent?
They'll be pushing this because the government is apparently paranoid about organised crime being coordinated through encrypted channels by gangs and others.
Whether there is currently any encrypted communication being exchanged by said gangs is something nobody can provide any data on, so personally i find this reasoning rather hard to swallow.
Basically, they are relying on the fact that nobody in this country actually gives a flying fuck about anything but rugby. I doubt there are very many people in this country would have any idea just how much personal freedom is being lost by a move like this.
This really sucks, and they've been planning it for a while. Some parliamentary commission made similar recommendations a few months back.
It's not like you couldn't just use a computer in another country to store your encrypted data.
Somehow i doubt that there has been any call by the citizens of New Zealand to implement this law, or any like it.
My gateway is a linux machine running an ipchains-based firewall/NAT and the Squid proxy.
All internal traffic on port 80 is redirected through Squid (on port 3128) via ipchains, and Squid can then use its redirector to filter and/or redirect URLS. - in my case the redirector is a simple perl script that simply uses regular expressions to match and replace URLS.
You also get caching with squid, of course.
So you could use it to filter anything that didn't match the appropriate pattern and redirect that request to a 'sorry you can't access that site' page on your intranet.
It also lets users behind the NAT gateway use the same URLs to access web servers as they would outside the firewall.
Squid also has authentication features i believe, but i'm not familiar with them.
Client setup in completely transparent, the browser doesn't even know its talking to a proxy server.
I couldn't be happier, since it means that MS Proxy Server 2 is going on its long-awaited trip out the window.
Personally, I won't be using it.
After developing my latest little project in Java, and having it run without recompilation on Linux and Windows, i'm sold.
As it stands, Swing is the worst thing about Java today, but hopefully we'll get a fast native GUI from Sun at some point in the future.
Anyone know of there is some kind of JNI interface for GTK+?
I quite like programming for the AWT, it's not too slow, but it does take some work to implement the groovy stuff like transparency and arbitarily rotated text and things.
If i wanted a language purely for its OO features, i'd use Smalltalk, Objective-C or Python perhaps.
C# is a waste of time.. If MS had concentrated on improving Java performance instead of getting all pissed off they couldn't use it as a tool to tie users to their licensing fees, we might have a high-performance Java today. Now theyre reinventing the wheel, yet again.
The most ridiculous aspect of the whole thing is their claim you can write C# code in any language you like, except the one that's semantically and conceptually closest - Java.
Is there actually a good technical reason for not supporting Java syntax with C#?
Sounds awfully like Civilization? Why do you think these animals are dead in the first place??
You think it might have something to do with so-called 'civilised' morons wiping them out by indiscriminately destroying their habitats?
You talk about Civilisation like its somehow different from the civilisation that other species have achieved.. Ants, and many other insects, for example, are extremely civilised creatures. Do you know how many ants or termites youd have crawling all over your body right now if they never died?
No, theres no proof at all of what happens after death.. But far more people have died in this world than there are alive today, if this didn't result in some kind of progress, then where do you get off even thinking about employing the word 'civilised'?
You think that the current generation of people were just dropped onto the surface of this planet, fully 'civilised'?
You want to live forever? Personally, i think thats a stupid notion. A species expanding without limit and never dying is quite obviously unsustainable, yet you think you somehow have the right to persist over others who must necessarily die to ensure your survival. Thats not very civilised now, is it?
You can live forever, and the method has been employed successfully for millions of years. Its called having kids.
The fact of the matter is that you have to die in order to make room for new people. At least some of whom will be better equipped than you, in every conceivable way.
If youre so arrogant to believe youre the pinnacle of friggin evolution, that you're right to live somehow outweighs everything else's, then you're gonna be real surprised when that car hits you, your own cancerous cells eat your vital organs, your heart just plain gives out or you get mauled to death by some example of a long dead species that escapes from it's cage.
Jesus, instead of actually doing something to modify our own behaviour to avoid killing these species, now everythings ok because we can breed them on demand, regardless of how long they've been dead. Its basically a pretty sick thing to do to the poor creatures. Whats so terribly wrong about being dead?? We wiped them out, and now seek to assuage our guilt by 'resurrecting' them They have no home to go back to, and are born into a prison where they'll live out the rest of their miserable lives. I can't imagine a worse life for an animal than to be born and die in captivity, and i'll never visit another zoo after seeing, as a young child, those poor cats (leopards, lions) in tiny cages. Why not clone, breed and reintroduce those native american indians that got slaughtered wholesale? Clone a few herds of buffalo, and set em up on the plains so they can build their wigwams and make the good ol' whitebread US feel less guilty about things.
Surely this means that players with a license purchased from the MPAA by the manufacturer to play region 1 discs, may not in fact be able to play region 1 disc.
Surely you could return such a player to the manufacturer or aftermarket supplier if the player did not, in fact, do what they said it would do?
I just hope that someone like the EU determines that region coding is an unfair trade restraint and bans the import of any region coded or encrypted DVDs at some point in the future.
Its bad enough that the US has to suffer from such ridiculous marketing, legal, and media industry practices, but to force the rest of the world to keep on having this crap shoved down our throats is really quite shitty indeed.
The whole point of attending university is to gain knowledge and skill which will increase a students value to the economy. Obviously many attend university for other reasons, but the vast majority of students are students so they can profit, whether it be financially or otherwise, from the knowledge imparted by their lecturers, textbooks, fellow students and tutors. The whole point of attending a lecture and taking notes is to profit from them. In fact, if youre not paying for a license to use that information when you sign up for a university course, i fail to understand what is being provided for the money you pay. Whats next - a lawsuit by the EIAA (Education Industry Association of America) against Notester, the peer-to-peer lecture not sharing system?
Surely this is chump-change for any government to come up with... sure russia is poor, but even our sad little country on the ass-end of the planet (New Zealand) can afford to throw away five times that amount on failed government IT projects.
I have to admit i don't have $10 million sitting in my back pocket, but surely they could sell a couple of nukes to iraq or something to cover the shortfall?
Oh poor Apple, theyre missing out on your Dock-tweaking by charging for their OS...
I'm generally happy with it, except for the obvious bloat.
The only thing that worries me about mozilla is the fact they have so many things 'half-done' - will Mozilla 1.0 support the full DOM, XML/XSLT, SVG and ECMAscript standards?
The work done so far is great, but damn, it looks like it will be shipping with the features and standards that were important on the web last year, completely ignoring the ones that will matter (and which Windows/IE supports quite well right now) now and in the future.
Well, i have yet to see a software solution that will even encode fullscreen MPEG-1 in realtime. By fullscreen realtime i mean taking a SIF (720 x 576 x60fps PAL) (compressed or uncompressed) video stream + audio, and digitise that into 352 x 288 1.5 MBit/s MPEG stream in high quality without dropping frames or sailing off into artifact-land.
as for MPEG-2 in realtime in software?? no way, unless your definition of either 'realtime' or 'software' are very differenet from mine.
Region coding exists on both the DVD Drive (mine is a Samsung SD-612 and the MPEG-2 decoder board (mine is a Sigma Hollywood+)
:)
I had to patch the firmware of my drive to disable the region coding on the player, and there are a few utilities to disable the region coding on the Hollywood+ player.
Considering that region-coding is an illegal trade barrier in my country, it bothers me that i should have to do this at all.
Still, before i bought any DVD playing hardware, i made sure it was patchable. I advise anyone else looking to buy a DVD player for their computer to do the same and avoid drives which don't offer an easy way to disable region coding.
After all my patching efforts, i now enjoy excellent quality viewing of DVDs from any zone on both my monitor and big-screen TV, and the DivX encodings i have made of my purchased disks are great for easy viewing from CD on my non-DVD equipped computers.
The Hollywood board is also great for playing back MPEG-1 encoded shorts downloaded off the web. theres nothing like watching 'Tripping the Rift' on a TV screen
Realtime MPEG encoding in software is not really an option. You might be able to do it on a 1GHz PC or something, but thats an expensive MPEG encoder...
;)
What would be really cool is if a device like a Tivo supported streaming of the MPEG it was playing back over ethernet through, say, a Java based (for cross-platform considerations) client. Something like the Video4LAN application.. You could control and view your Tivo's playback stream through a wireless network so you could watch TV on your laptop or something like that.
I guess you could build something like that out of a linux box without too much trouble, given hardware support for the MPEG encoder card..
You could then archive the stream to your local hard drive easily, without needing an MPEG encoder in that machine.
The Tivo-like device is your local TV-server. Just log on and watch what you feel like watching out of the 30GB buffer.
This of course, would probably make the MPAA, RIAA and probably various other dumbass corporations throw a squealing fit on the floor, since the possibilities with regard to then broadcasting or archiving the content on the internet are obvious and tempting
IT would be extremely difficult to saturate a 100Mbps link. I would, however, like to see the ability to stream MPEG-2 over the internet with good quality, and it would seem that only a connection with this much headroom will really make that a possibility.
> a. Internal documents at the companies creation > indicate that they were created solely in order > to facilitate copyright infringement, and to put
> the record industy players, large > and small, out of business.
Eh? A legally binding licensing agreement prohibiting the users of a service from trading copyrighted material is somehow facilitating copyright infringement? This agreement is rendered null and void because of the content of 'internal documents' detailing relations between Napster and some unrelated 3rd parties - in this case the record comapnies??
Should i not have to pay for my Sun servers because their internal memos detail plans to put Microsoft out of business?
Do i not have to pay for a can of Coke because their internal documents detail their fierce competitiveness with Pepsi?
Since when has it been illegal to put anyone out of business, or to plan an action with that result?
> b. They have the technical means to > allow only pre-approved files to be listed in > their system, but they choose not to do this.
Thats hardly the point. They have a legal agreement with their users that they will not use the napster service to copy copyrighted material.
Just becuase something is technically possible doesn't mean it should or will be done.
Altavista has the technical means to filter out any links to MP3s, DeCSS, kiddie porn and anything else deemed illegal but should they be required to implement this?
Your ISP has the technical means to sniff every packet that passes through it and block whatever it sees at possibly legally dubious. Should they do that?
The US government has the technical means to stop many illegal acts you might choose to engage in by premptively locking you in jail for even talking about doing something illegal. Should they do that?
For christs sake, Napsters servers hold no copyrighted works. End of story. How can you be sued for copyright infringement when you didn't copy anything???
Just how are they encouraging their users to copy music illegally when they have a clear license agreement prohibiting this when you sign on for their service. How is napsters EULA any less binding than anyone elses?? for example the EULA that comes with a CD - you may not copy this recording illegally blah blah..
If its napster's fault their users breach their license agreement, how is it not the RIAA members' faults that their users have breached their license agreements?
Napster should sue the RIAA for allowing their music to be traded by Napsters' users. It puts them in a difficult legal situation , obviously, and has clearly damaged their business.
Oh, but wait. one of these companies has billions of dollars. I guess thats justice in the USA.
With Everquest, you buy the client software. These guys are doing nothing with Verant/Sony's client software. They aren't distributing modified versions, or anything.
Microsoft can't sue the samba developers because its possible to use a UNIX server instead of a Windows server.
Would it be legal for Microsoft to place an addition to the Internet Explorer/Windows EULA in the next service pack of Internet Explorer/Windows that their browser may not be used to connect to any server not running Windows NT/2000?
What the hell is wrong with these people. Instead of saying 'we won't assign any more IPV4 addresses for virtual hosting', why not say 'we will only assign IPV6 addresses for virtual hosting purposes.
Then, at the every least, some of the people on the internet might have a good reason to drive the adoption of IPV6.
Slashdot is probably worried that Apple will sue them for publishing trade secrets and using their copyrighted material (Apple Logo).
Since fair use is going out the window with the DMCA, and a website surely comes under the auspice of 'digital media', allowing the unauthorised copying of Apples logo to millions of client machines around the world is surely a felony computer crime.
So changing to a patented, proprietary electrical interface for the slot to make it impossible for other motherboard manufacturers to produce P2-compatible motherboards or CPUs without a license was just an accident??
Why is it that my video card will soon have more RAM, a much faster bus and probably a more powerful CPU than the ones on my motherboard?
NVidia should take a whack at Intel by integrating an x86-compatible CPU onto the next GeForce series cards. Make it possible for OEMs to ship a system that doesn't have a tradtional motherboard, but rather just a video card with a CPU on it to handle the general purpose computing tasks.
The 'motherboard' would then be a compact passive backplane with disk controllers,ethernet and USB ports and you upgrade your CPU when you upgrade your graphics card..
I'm sick of watching Intel dick around. The whole 'Slot' debacle is laughable - they deliberately make a 'slotted' CPU to try and slow down AMD/Cyrix, then they go back to making socketed CPUs because the slotted versions are too expensive.
Now its RAMBUS - they try and force everyone to use RAMBUS, but then they go back to SDRAM because RAMBUS is too expensive.
The Celeron has exactly the same cache-on-die technology as their supposedly high-end Xeons, and the Xeon is supposed to be expensive because it offers higher performance - why? it has exactly the same improvement as the lowend celeron has, as compared to the P2?? 'Oh yeah but the Xeons don't have the SMP support burnt out of their dies'
Intel is stumbling blindly with the P4 and the Itanium.. Even joe average knows that the P3 does not give anyone a 'better internet experience', and the difference between a 600MHz Celeron and a 1.3GHz P3 is unnoticeable during day to day tasks..
The Itanium will probably be outperformed by whatever the latest Celeron is when it finally gets released, and the P4 is just another 'Pentium'. Personally, i haven't noticed any difference in speed between the P2-450 i used to have and the P3-500 i have now at work..
Clock-for-clock, i doubt the P3 is any significantly faster than the P2, and i doubt that clock-for-clock, the P4 will be either.
The last two PCs i purchased had intel CPUs. The next one definitely won't.
is a P200 (should get a faster one) with a 6GB drive (should get a bigger one), remote control via LIRC and a cheap-ass remote control, video in via a BT848 TV tuner and video output via an external scan converter hooked up to a 27" Sony Video Monitor (ie a TV without a tuner - should get a proper TV).
I also have a remote mouse which came with the scan converter, but unfortunately no remote keyboard - though i would suggest one of those keyboards with the mouse built-in.
This meant i could watch TV fullscreen or in a window via the BT848, play MP3s with mpg123 & LIRC (remote buttons worked for stepping through tracks and selecting playlists) and surf the web/chat on IRC at the same time on the same screen. I also had the playstation plugged into the BT848s composite input so i could play PSX on the same screen or in a window with the click of a mouse.
Was fun, great for the 'wow factor' but somewhat fiddly without extensive desktop and application customisation to increase font sizes etc.
I've since torn the setup apart, and just use the P200 as a general purpose PC.
But this stuff is all quite doable, a lot of fun, and linux is a great platform to do it on.