I bought the original Half-Life to play DOD with friends. Then they released Steam(ing pile of DRM ad delivery garbage). For months I couldn't play the games because updates broke video compatibility. Then all of a sudden it worked, for a few weeks, then it broke again with security issues when connecting to other hosts. Then a few weeks later it works again (after more fixes are retrieved). It is a nightmare!
Everyone cries about Circuit City and their failed Divx initive. Steam cries of the same thing. It's an advertisement and upsell delivery system.
After suffering thru Steam, I would chuckle if people cracked the Steam software delivery system, or reverse engineered the Steam authentication system so rouge servers could auth clients on private networks.
I am proud to admit that Steam/DOD/HL started working just in time to deliver ads for HL2.
Warez puppies dissapointed me, they didn't manage to unlock the preload of HL2 or crack the authentication garbage.
MythTV, Freevo get all this publicity, but the hardware required to run them is still a pain (PC, WinTV card, composite output).
It's time to build a custom OS for the Tivo hardware platform!
MythTivo!
Series 2 tivo's seem to use the KFIR-II broadcom chipset, also used in the Pinnacle Bungee and already working under Linux. Series 2.5 seems to use custom Mips core, and odd hardware.
Linux people, Tivo is not your friend. You don't owe them anything for "letting" you upgrade YOUR machine's disk to a larger drive.
I've heard the pixar people are worked hard and don't make that great of pay (part of your pay is the fact you work for Pixar?). So Disney could probably flash the cash and come up with a good staff of animation artists.
Then work them hard and lower their pay like all evil corporations do.
If you can't beat them, lure away their talent.
Record companies already do this
on
The Music Man
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· Score: 1
Years ago various labels converted their entire catalogs to very high quality bitrate (384khz stereo) and packed the data away in nearline storage.
At least that was told to us by a nearline storage vendor who was listing several labels as customers of their HSM product.
If you get close enough to a truck you should be able to deduce it's contents without touching it. Then organized crime could instantly tally up how much the drugs are worth (to Rush L.), and then decide weather or not to proceed with a heist.
A friend who worked briefly @ a local walmart during the downturn in tech employment told me about the huge datacenters. Evidentially he was told this in training, or a manager filled him in. Basically they are an IBM shop from what he said.
The systems have the layout of every walmart store in them, and the stores respond to orders from the main office to move products around on the shelves. The systems will tell various stores to move products into different places, and anaylyze the results. If a store is making more money with XYZ sitting near the entrance, then the WOPR tells more stores the move that product into place, but still plays games against shoppers with a few more. It's basically an insanely well oiled statistical war against the shoppers to squeeze every last penny out of them. I hate to say it, but it doesn't work on me when I go there. But overall, it's creepy, and impressive at the same time.
PS- I had this evil idea. If anyone is into the hactivism role, embed a voice recorder IC into a telephone set that matches your local WalMart's phones. Get the code to get on the PA system, and setup your "rouge" telephone to bump onto the PA every 5 hours or so. Be sure to include sounds to make it sound like someone is picking up the phone, and hanging it up. It will drive them nuts. Some stores seem to use Lucent sets on the wall (MLX-xxx) which are most likely ISDN on the back. Other stores seem to have analog ports on a lucent system. Just remember to give me props.
Feel free to announce all shoppers a winner of a contest where they get everything they can stuff into a cart for free. Or remind them about the $700,000 in taxes the minimum wage making people cost the community at every WalMart.
A while ago there was a show on PBS that featured the eToys warehouse which was built in Blairs, Virginia (Or is it the one in Danville?).
These people were totally thrilled. In the interviews you could see how dedicated these people were, it was insane. Then the.com popped, as did the towns economy. The trucks weren't rolling thru the town, which ment the mom and pop diners lost out on much of the business. People got laid off, and depression was high.
I'm not sure which special it was, it might have been the one about Wal-Mart & Ashland Virginia but I'm positive. I just googled and found some references that the warehouse was picked up by K*B Toys, so maybe the people have jobs again. Of course, I think the K&B toys in the local malls are closing, IIRC. Maybe they are going online only. B&M is so 80s.
There are Kiosks here in the Virginia Beach, Virginia area as well. It looked like the games are all original NES games. This is similiar to the Atari classics self contained joystick sold thru places like Walmart? Are the Atari 2600 games licensed in those console systems?
I think it is funny that they started remaking Mr. Pac-Mac/Galaga arcade games. I guess they had to update the hardware+software since the original arcade couldn't be set to accept 50 cents per play. Bastards.
The ipod was helped in its jump to the top by the fact that it was innovative, so much so that people were willing to ignore its high price tag. Apple missed two big opportunities on this one; movie playback AND easy storage transfer from camera media.
No, the iPod was helped to jump to the top by marketing. There were other products that were similiar, first. Kind of how Tivo dwarfed ReplayTV, who had a better product (from what I've read). Replay is way more innovative, but Tivo won. The iPod case and controls were styled fairly well but honestly, a handheld Sony recordable minidisc player is ****WAY**** more of a marvel than an ipod. The drive inside the iPod is amazing, not the device itself.
It has to be the most comprehensive collection of Cray systems in the world (including Cray's facility in Chippawa falls?).
(Please do not post it on the front page of slashdot without digibarns permission). Those pictures are quite a bit outdated, as he no longer lives in that state and has added more systems since then.
I believe he had over 11 before. He donated a few to someone, I forget who.
It is just a matter of time before Vonage style services for television start appearing. TV over IP.
Now is the time for Multicast...
I think it would be cool to have an opensource set top box that pulls content from something like bittorrent. Each box could serve and play, as an appliance. Let people publish content on the network and wala, true television revolution.
Could make them out of Tivo units, after replacing Linux with NetBSD.
This has been disproven millions of times. The true legal broadcast power limits are measured in microvolts at a distance from the antenna. So Mr. Microphone is about the legal limit.
Also, if you start running over the legal limit, you get multipath reception issues as a receiver hears multiple transmitters on the same frequency (from adjacent cells).
Computer in car retrieves content from house via 802.11b, then content is played from cache during commute. Easy enough.
I know about building your own PVR, but the Tivo makes the perfect platform! Forget a $100 mini-ITX system board and a $200 wintv card! Imagine a new OS that you can DD onto the Tivo drive, plop it in there... and tnen trade content with people on the intarweb.. browse bit torrents, stream live sports TV using multicast IP to the ENTIRE NATION FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM! MOOHAHAH EAT THAT YOUR CORPORATE WHORES! Fuck your BLACKOUTS on your all mighty content.
What about an archive system on the backend, that sucks down all of the content from all of the opensource tivos, storing in a huge, massive, system ALL content from television! Okay, so that would indeed be alot of lawsuits but if you've ever tried to get some news content from 10 years ago, or even an old tv series like the whiz kids, it is damn near impossible.
Actually, Macrovision dates back to VHS tapes. The goal is to freak out the recording VCR's automatic gain control by strobing a signal. It's basically a hack.
DVD's are much different. Instead of the copy protection being implemented in the video stream itself, they actually implement it in software. This is why you can actually "turn it off" via hacked DVD player firmware (Apex or Creative kit or what have you).
Of coursee, most DVD players don't have RF modulators to provide channel 3/4 output, so many users who had television sets without composite inputs tried to use their VCRs as a means to connect DVD players. NOPE! Wouldn't work! Many combo TV/VCRs had the inputs wired thru the video deck circuitry as well.
I think Back to the Future was one of the first VHS tapes to have Macrovision on it.
Okay, why hasn't anyone created their own Linux for the Tivo hardware platform? For some reason, hacking the Tivo is taboo just because the thing runs linux. Oh it runs linux, and they "let us" "hack" it putting in bigger drives. CLUEBAT SAYS, YOU OWN IT. They can't stop you from upgrading it. CLUEBAT SAYS, if you were to replace the program guide system with something based off of XMLTV or some other open source project, they can't cry foul.
People laugh about the Xbox, Linux, and Microsoft loosing money since the thing is supposidly sold as a loss leader. But Tivo, Nooo can't touch that.
I called Tivo to inquire about how to add one of those "Press thumbs up to record" to a commercial. They wouldn't talk, they referred me to buy a $30,000 system that inserts the "push thumbs up to record" into the program signal. A EEG Line 21 encoder/decoder in raw mode and a commercial on VHS later I figured out how it was stored but haven't continued to research. They weren't nice, they weren't overflowing with joy. MY opinion is they took Replay's business, kind of like a Microsoft if you will.
So how does the Tivo work? Is there a software framebuffer rendering the menus to MPEG2 then pushing it to the decoder hardware? My roomate got a new Tivo and upgraded for someone, and I got the chance to peek inside. The new Tivos are using Broadcom KFIR-II chips for MPEG2 encoding (and probably decoding?). These chips are already usable under linux via the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe USB unit. They use the exact same MPEG2 chipset, I put one of my PCTV boards next to the tivo, and the chips are identical in revision, size and everything else.
It is my guess that people could make an open source OS replacement for the Tivo hardware platform that would introduce all of the features that Tivo is taking away. Hell, might even be able to make it run on a BSD varient, NetBSD powered Tivo... bring it ON!
I'm really curious how the Tivo renders the menus... outside of this, I can't think of any really difficult obstacles, unless the architecture is very very proprietary (MIPS core on the new boxes, PPC on the old..).
Were the Crossfire hosts targeting John Stewert? I'm sure the FCC uses the stern show as the whipping child to get their indecensy laws pushed. Not a huge Stern fan, but I don't think he is riding the bandwagon. Heck, his listeners have been dropping Stern's name on other people's news shows for many years.
Even better, for a short while they put a flash animation at the beginning of their website with no "skip intro" button. It went on to detail the history of the company.
Except there was no flash player for their main workstation platform, IRIX.
I guess it is good to see them in the news again, even if it isn't an Origin.
Groovy.
A long time ago I tried to use a Thinkpad 700X tablet as a home theater controller. Got them for $5 each since no one wanted tablets. Found out it requires a pen to actually register on the screen (much like the newer tablets that have showed up on the market). Funny how history repeats itself.
It's been 4 days since I read it, so maybe I'm fuzzy on a detail or two! Should I read it again? It said 100mbps network output... which makes it sound like a tablet PC with a software.
Man touch panels can only track one "press" at a time... I'm not sure if it is limited to capacitive touch systems or resistive touch systems (that one is definitly not IR)... but I wonder if this unit suffers from the same issue?
Also the lack of midi output is odd.
Re:Now if hackers could just learn to hack the gov
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I believe alot of the large wealth runs in familys. Also, wealth creates more wealth when applied properly.
For anyone interested, archive.org has quite a large collection of older episodes of "Computer Chronicals." These episodes can be downloaded in MPEG2 format, are ~1gb each and look VERY NICE! I've added 10 or so to my computer history video collection, and enocourage others to check them out. There are a good number of episodes that cover neat things, I was showing someone the episode where they were demo'ing Apple's A/UX just last night. Next, Silicon Graphics, Sun, HP, Unix versus DOS, Amiga and Atari... It's also fun to see the predictions, "will Unix unseat MS-DOS?"
I believe there is an episode that looks back at Gary Kildall's history in computers as well - but I must admit I haven't seen this one yet.
Check it out! Don't forget Cringley's Triumph of the Nerds series (cheap on eBay, $50 on vhs from ambrose, $100 on dvd from ambrose last time I checked).
TNT movie was released on VHS only, but is out on the p2p intarweb networks as a DivX.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought the original Half-Life to play DOD with friends. Then they released Steam(ing pile of DRM ad delivery garbage). For months I couldn't play the games because updates broke video compatibility. Then all of a sudden it worked, for a few weeks, then it broke again with security issues when connecting to other hosts. Then a few weeks later it works again (after more fixes are retrieved). It is a nightmare!
Everyone cries about Circuit City and their failed Divx initive. Steam cries of the same thing. It's an advertisement and upsell delivery system.
After suffering thru Steam, I would chuckle if people cracked the Steam software delivery system, or reverse engineered the Steam authentication system so rouge servers could auth clients on private networks.
I am proud to admit that Steam/DOD/HL started working just in time to deliver ads for HL2.
Warez puppies dissapointed me, they didn't manage to unlock the preload of HL2 or crack the authentication garbage.
MythTV, Freevo get all this publicity, but the hardware required to run them is still a pain (PC, WinTV card, composite output).
It's time to build a custom OS for the Tivo hardware platform!
MythTivo!
Series 2 tivo's seem to use the KFIR-II broadcom chipset, also used in the Pinnacle Bungee and already working under Linux. Series 2.5 seems to use custom Mips core, and odd hardware.
Linux people, Tivo is not your friend. You don't owe them anything for "letting" you upgrade YOUR machine's disk to a larger drive.
You are a customer of their service.
I've heard the pixar people are worked hard and don't make that great of pay (part of your pay is the fact you work for Pixar?). So Disney could probably flash the cash and come up with a good staff of animation artists.
Then work them hard and lower their pay like all evil corporations do.
If you can't beat them, lure away their talent.
Years ago various labels converted their entire catalogs to very high quality bitrate (384khz stereo) and packed the data away in nearline storage.
At least that was told to us by a nearline storage vendor who was listing several labels as customers of their HSM product.
He named the sample rates.
Sony was one label mentioned.
If you get close enough to a truck you should be able to deduce it's contents without touching it. Then organized crime could instantly tally up how much the drugs are worth (to Rush L.), and then decide weather or not to proceed with a heist.
A friend who worked briefly @ a local walmart during the downturn in tech employment told me about the huge datacenters. Evidentially he was told this in training, or a manager filled him in. Basically they are an IBM shop from what he said.
The systems have the layout of every walmart store in them, and the stores respond to orders from the main office to move products around on the shelves. The systems will tell various stores to move products into different places, and anaylyze the results. If a store is making more money with XYZ sitting near the entrance, then the WOPR tells more stores the move that product into place, but still plays games against shoppers with a few more. It's basically an insanely well oiled statistical war against the shoppers to squeeze every last penny out of them. I hate to say it, but it doesn't work on me when I go there. But overall, it's creepy, and impressive at the same time.
PS- I had this evil idea. If anyone is into the hactivism role, embed a voice recorder IC into a telephone set that matches your local WalMart's phones. Get the code to get on the PA system, and setup your "rouge" telephone to bump onto the PA every 5 hours or so. Be sure to include sounds to make it sound like someone is picking up the phone, and hanging it up. It will drive them nuts. Some stores seem to use Lucent sets on the wall (MLX-xxx) which are most likely ISDN on the back. Other stores seem to have analog ports on a lucent system. Just remember to give me props. Feel free to announce all shoppers a winner of a contest where they get everything they can stuff into a cart for free. Or remind them about the $700,000 in taxes the minimum wage making people cost the community at every WalMart.
A while ago there was a show on PBS that featured the eToys warehouse which was built in Blairs, Virginia (Or is it the one in Danville?).
.com popped, as did the towns economy. The trucks weren't rolling thru the town, which ment the mom and pop diners lost out on much of the business. People got laid off, and depression was high.
These people were totally thrilled. In the interviews you could see how dedicated these people were, it was insane. Then the
I'm not sure which special it was, it might have been the one about Wal-Mart & Ashland Virginia but I'm positive. I just googled and found some references that the warehouse was picked up by K*B Toys, so maybe the people have jobs again. Of course, I think the K&B toys in the local malls are closing, IIRC. Maybe they are going online only. B&M is so 80s.
There are Kiosks here in the Virginia Beach, Virginia area as well. It looked like the games are all original NES games. This is similiar to the Atari classics self contained joystick sold thru places like Walmart? Are the Atari 2600 games licensed in those console systems?
I think it is funny that they started remaking Mr. Pac-Mac/Galaga arcade games. I guess they had to update the hardware+software since the original arcade couldn't be set to accept 50 cents per play. Bastards.
The ipod was helped in its jump to the top by the fact that it was innovative, so much so that people were willing to ignore its high price tag. Apple missed two big opportunities on this one; movie playback AND easy storage transfer from camera media.
No, the iPod was helped to jump to the top by marketing. There were other products that were similiar, first. Kind of how Tivo dwarfed ReplayTV, who had a better product (from what I've read). Replay is way more innovative, but Tivo won. The iPod case and controls were styled fairly well but honestly, a handheld Sony recordable minidisc player is ****WAY**** more of a marvel than an ipod. The drive inside the iPod is amazing, not the device itself.
Which model?
I sold two J932se's a while ago, and have a 3rd one for sale in the works. Keeping #4.
This is a guy's PRIVATE, PERSONAL Cray collection:
h tm
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jamescurry/index.
It has to be the most comprehensive collection of Cray systems in the world (including Cray's facility in Chippawa falls?).
(Please do not post it on the front page of slashdot without digibarns permission). Those pictures are quite a bit outdated, as he no longer lives in that state and has added more systems since then.
I believe he had over 11 before. He donated a few to someone, I forget who.
Yea, but will they be able to use this coating on new laserdisc movies also?
It is just a matter of time before Vonage style services for television start appearing. TV over IP.
Now is the time for Multicast...
I think it would be cool to have an opensource set top box that pulls content from something like bittorrent. Each box could serve and play, as an appliance. Let people publish content on the network and wala, true television revolution.
Could make them out of Tivo units, after replacing Linux with NetBSD.
This has been disproven millions of times. The true legal broadcast power limits are measured in microvolts at a distance from the antenna. So Mr. Microphone is about the legal limit.
Also, if you start running over the legal limit, you get multipath reception issues as a receiver hears multiple transmitters on the same frequency (from adjacent cells).
Computer in car retrieves content from house via 802.11b, then content is played from cache during commute. Easy enough.
I know about building your own PVR, but the Tivo makes the perfect platform! Forget a $100 mini-ITX system board and a $200 wintv card! Imagine a new OS that you can DD onto the Tivo drive, plop it in there... and tnen trade content with people on the intarweb.. browse bit torrents, stream live sports TV using multicast IP to the ENTIRE NATION FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM! MOOHAHAH EAT THAT YOUR CORPORATE WHORES! Fuck your BLACKOUTS on your all mighty content.
What about an archive system on the backend, that sucks down all of the content from all of the opensource tivos, storing in a huge, massive, system ALL content from television! Okay, so that would indeed be alot of lawsuits but if you've ever tried to get some news content from 10 years ago, or even an old tv series like the whiz kids, it is damn near impossible.
Actually, Macrovision dates back to VHS tapes. The goal is to freak out the recording VCR's automatic gain control by strobing a signal. It's basically a hack.
DVD's are much different. Instead of the copy protection being implemented in the video stream itself, they actually implement it in software. This is why you can actually "turn it off" via hacked DVD player firmware (Apex or Creative kit or what have you).
Of coursee, most DVD players don't have RF modulators to provide channel 3/4 output, so many users who had television sets without composite inputs tried to use their VCRs as a means to connect DVD players. NOPE! Wouldn't work! Many combo TV/VCRs had the inputs wired thru the video deck circuitry as well.
I think Back to the Future was one of the first VHS tapes to have Macrovision on it.
Okay, why hasn't anyone created their own Linux for the Tivo hardware platform? For some reason, hacking the Tivo is taboo just because the thing runs linux. Oh it runs linux, and they "let us" "hack" it putting in bigger drives. CLUEBAT SAYS, YOU OWN IT. They can't stop you from upgrading it. CLUEBAT SAYS, if you were to replace the program guide system with something based off of XMLTV or some other open source project, they can't cry foul.
People laugh about the Xbox, Linux, and Microsoft loosing money since the thing is supposidly sold as a loss leader. But Tivo, Nooo can't touch that.
I called Tivo to inquire about how to add one of those "Press thumbs up to record" to a commercial. They wouldn't talk, they referred me to buy a $30,000 system that inserts the "push thumbs up to record" into the program signal. A EEG Line 21 encoder/decoder in raw mode and a commercial on VHS later I figured out how it was stored but haven't continued to research. They weren't nice, they weren't overflowing with joy. MY opinion is they took Replay's business, kind of like a Microsoft if you will.
So how does the Tivo work? Is there a software framebuffer rendering the menus to MPEG2 then pushing it to the decoder hardware? My roomate got a new Tivo and upgraded for someone, and I got the chance to peek inside. The new Tivos are using Broadcom KFIR-II chips for MPEG2 encoding (and probably decoding?). These chips are already usable under linux via the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe USB unit. They use the exact same MPEG2 chipset, I put one of my PCTV boards next to the tivo, and the chips are identical in revision, size and everything else.
It is my guess that people could make an open source OS replacement for the Tivo hardware platform that would introduce all of the features that Tivo is taking away. Hell, might even be able to make it run on a BSD varient, NetBSD powered Tivo... bring it ON!
I'm really curious how the Tivo renders the menus... outside of this, I can't think of any really difficult obstacles, unless the architecture is very very proprietary (MIPS core on the new boxes, PPC on the old..).
Were the Crossfire hosts targeting John Stewert? I'm sure the FCC uses the stern show as the whipping child to get their indecensy laws pushed. Not a huge Stern fan, but I don't think he is riding the bandwagon. Heck, his listeners have been dropping Stern's name on other people's news shows for many years.
Even better, for a short while they put a flash animation at the beginning of their website with no "skip intro" button. It went on to detail the history of the company.
Except there was no flash player for their main workstation platform, IRIX.
I guess it is good to see them in the news again, even if it isn't an Origin.
Groovy. A long time ago I tried to use a Thinkpad 700X tablet as a home theater controller. Got them for $5 each since no one wanted tablets. Found out it requires a pen to actually register on the screen (much like the newer tablets that have showed up on the market). Funny how history repeats itself.
It's been 4 days since I read it, so maybe I'm fuzzy on a detail or two! Should I read it again? It said 100mbps network output... which makes it sound like a tablet PC with a software.
Ooops, I ment to say "Many touchpanels".
Also, my friend Bart Grantham sent me the link to this thing a few days ago. He beat you, slashdot.
Man touch panels can only track one "press" at a time... I'm not sure if it is limited to capacitive touch systems or resistive touch systems (that one is definitly not IR)... but I wonder if this unit suffers from the same issue?
Also the lack of midi output is odd.
Actually, I believe alot of the large wealth runs in familys. Also, wealth creates more wealth when applied properly.
For anyone interested, archive.org has quite a large collection of older episodes of "Computer Chronicals." These episodes can be downloaded in MPEG2 format, are ~1gb each and look VERY NICE! I've added 10 or so to my computer history video collection, and enocourage others to check them out. There are a good number of episodes that cover neat things, I was showing someone the episode where they were demo'ing Apple's A/UX just last night. Next, Silicon Graphics, Sun, HP, Unix versus DOS, Amiga and Atari... It's also fun to see the predictions, "will Unix unseat MS-DOS?"
I believe there is an episode that looks back at Gary Kildall's history in computers as well - but I must admit I haven't seen this one yet.
Check it out! Don't forget Cringley's Triumph of the Nerds series (cheap on eBay, $50 on vhs from ambrose, $100 on dvd from ambrose last time I checked).
TNT movie was released on VHS only, but is out on the p2p intarweb networks as a DivX.