I hadn't thought that an analog recording could be made at high speed. I personally don't have the equipment to do it, but I imagine any older style radio station would.
The question is, does a radio station that has entirely converted to digital format, (or built from scratch that way), have the equipment to do that?
Would they really want to take the trouble to purchase or find the equipment, set it up, and copy these things by analog, especially if it means they are violating the dmca?
I think the issue is a bit more complicated than than them simply copying a protected cd that they were given TO play on the radio.
Here, have a cd. Please play our music on your station. Btw, you will have to bend over backward to load the music into your system. Hope you don't mind.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it's worth doing.
They can't do it without violating the dmca though. I suspect they really don't wish to get involved in doing that.
Doing it by magic marker, or by analog transfer, still violates the dmca.
Not violating the dmca would require installing the drm software on their machines. I would hesitate to do that on my personal machine much less my work machine. Since their livelyhood depends on their machines working properly, I can't blame them for not wanting to get involved with copy protected cds.
Even if spammers received absolutely no sales via spam, there would still be people paying spammers to send out solicitations.
Many spammers make money not by selling to the email targets, but by selling spamming services.
And then there are the companies that view it as cheap advertising. Even if they make no sales, the fact that they get their name out is good in their eyes. They don't quite understand yet that they are generating badwill because even a bad commercial is good as long as you remember the name.
Unfortunately, it's gonna get much worse before it gets better. Companies have only recently discovered the use of email as advertising instead of merely selling.
Are you joking? You seem to be seriously suggesting that they spend the time to copy the cd via analog cables in order to copy these things.
Sure, it's fine for a single cd. Only take about an hour or so to copy it. Of course, that means they have to have a technician spend the time setting it up and verifying it. The first one will probably be a few hours.
But what happens when they get more that are copy protected? I am not sure how many CD's the average station gets per week, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were 5 to 20. If all of them were protected, that's a minimum of 5 to 20 hours per week to copy them. That may mean hiring a technician just to copy these things so that the station can play these "freebies".
I can seriously understand why a station wouldn't want to start down that path.
Not a bad idea, although I would guess that unreachable sites inside of PA would have to be tested in PA multiple times, or at least by different routes, since all sites are down at least occassionally and so are some routers.
Sorry for the run-on sentence there. Too lazy to think of a better way to say that.
The problem also suggests that some isp's may have blocked different sites as well, since the attorney general may or may not have sent the same list to each. He will have, assuming his office is competent, but details often get lost or overlooked, and even isp's might not keep things current.
Ironic. The secrecy of the list may actually cause it to be more well-known than otherwise. Blocking the sites might actually help them. Same sort of thing happens to banned books. Some books have become far more popular merely because they were banned.
Excuse me, but when the PA can censor websites without oversight, and without any public disclosure, it's not a matter of unfounded paranoia.
Throwing fearful phrases such as "protect innocent children" doesn't make it ok.
Frankly, the "government" doesn't have a great track record on protecting children either.
Let's lock up all white males over 30, because as we all know, pedophiles are often 35 year old white males. We have to do it to "protect innocent children"!
It's not quite enforcing the law. Enforcing the law would be putting down those sites rather than blocking the access to the sites.
The problem with this situation is that no one but the isp and the attorney general knows which sites are being blocked. There was a story in theregister.com a few weeks ago about a site that the city of Chesterfield wanted blocked by google. Seems that Chester the Molester was supposedly a child porn site. Google blocked them. The site had no idea they were being blocked.
Turns out that the site was actually a site with tasteless jokes. No child porn involved. But the city of Chesterfield didn't care or couldn't tell.
So what happens when PA decides that slashdot should be blocked? Or sites that critisize the PA attorney general? No one will know it because PA won't allow the list of sites be be known.
What happens when one of the sites being blocked goes out of business or gets a new IP? Some innocent site gets that IP, and no one in PA will know. Is the attorney general going to keep that list up to date? Is he going to let the ISP's know when to stop blocking address blocks? How can he? If the isp is blocked the address, he can never check that address again either, so he won't know it's clean.
Seems to me that "software" is basically the user interface, the storing of the program, the displaying of the program, and the guide.
The guide is fluff. It's not necessary to the product anymore than it's necessary to a vcr. Admittedly, it would be a good feature, but I don't believe tivo is the only company that could write it. In fact, tivo gpl'd their code anyway, iirc.
Aside from that, all that's left, as I said before, is the recording and displaying of the program. The user interface sure doesn't have to be licensed from tivo.
The closest patent of tivo's I can think of for your point is the one where the user can record the current show while pausing, fast forwarding, and rewinding. I believe Tivo settled out of court with sonicblue, and it hasn't gone to court. I don't believe tivo would have allowed sonicblue to exist if they owned the general idea of a pvr.
Certainly having the software record shows that I haven't selected isn't a feature I want.
So turn it off. It's not like it's compulsory.
You missed the point. My point was that the basic pvr functionality doesn't have to require fluff like the feature I mentioned above. Also, the dang thing will continue trying to sell you the guide if you haven't already purchased it.
So far, you haven't shown me that There's a lot more to a PVR than recording video to disk!
From your post, you seem to be a tivo fan. I won't try to disuade you. More power to you. A friend of mine at work loves his units. However, I personally won't buy a product that advertises to sell services to me that I already told them I didn't want, lets the company know what I'm watching or where I pause, and switches away from what I'm watching to record a program that's being pushed by the company. All of these things are tivo.
Re:Funny you should mention...
on
Clothes That Kill
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I KNEW there was a good thing about growing up in a filthy house like I did! I always thought we were just slobs.
Re:This antiseptic obsession
on
Clothes That Kill
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Tell that to the silicon-based bacteria found inside volcanoes.
We can now market our products as methods against Tourism! Yes, folks. As of today, we can prevent those annoying and obnoxious tourists from visiting your cities.
Our first offering is the exploding camera. Guaranteed to take out only the tourist and not the surrounding pedestrians.
Besides recording, all that's left is the playing of the disk file, retrieving the guide, displaying the guide, and setting the recording to be based on the guide. I'm not sure what else is there is.
Certainly having the software record shows that I haven't selected isn't a feature I want.
Replaytv has a guide too, can get the data from the internet, and probably isn't powered by tivo.;)
I'm not saying it's not using tivo technology. I'm saying that it probably isn't. Why would Sony want to sell a product that requires licensing something from Tivo that they can create themselves?
Additionally, one of the tivo's flaws (imo) is that it requires a monthly fee (or a "lifetime" fee) to get the guide. Licensing tivo's technology might require that monthly fee again. This is the reason I, at least, will never own a tivo. (Yes, I know one doesn't *have* to get the subscription. But the dang software will keep trying to sell it to you. Very annoying.)
I expect Sony would much rather not involve themselves with other companies for a single product when not abolutely necessary.
I imagine it's not based on tivo technology other than the fact that it's recording broadcast to disk. I don't believe Tivo patented this.
Tivo itself only makes the software, which probably isn't being used by this product.
Tivo makes their money by selling the guide to users. This product gets the guide via an internet connection. I didn't see anything that states that it gets it from a Tivo source. Since there are lots of free tv guides online, it quite possibly gets it from those.
So for all practical purposes, there is probably no Tivo technology involved. The fact that Sony makes a Tivo product as well is meaningless, since Tivo actually pays Sony for every Tivo unit Sony sells.
So the original poster is at fault for all those idiot tourists?
Or perhaps all US Citizens are at fault for idiot tourists?
From the original poster's comment, it seems likely that he's never left the country and been a "american" tourist. Unless he does, he shouldn't be blamed for other people's actions, simply because he shares citizenship with them.
As a programmer who designs a set of requirements, implements the design, and tests the application, on a multi-tier system using multiple languages where necessary, I highly object to being compared to lawyers and Lawmakers.
Engineers produce products that are constrained to a set of rules too. The rules are called physics. Lawyers are constrained to a set of rules called laws. Lawmakers are constrained to a set of rules called the Constitution.
Don't compare me to a lawyer. I don't need to be insulted like that.
Mainframes aren't always the best solution though.
At one job, the mainframe was horribly underpowered, and they couldn't add more processors without going to the next level of licensing for all their software.
What they needed to do was remove all non-cpu intensive apps such as email, project timelining, etc, from the mainframe, and limit the mainframe to just those cpu-intensive applications that needed it.
Some applications, such as the accounting ones at that place, didn't even need to be on the mainframe. They weren't cpu intensive.
The big stuff could have been run on pcs as well. Half the time, our jobs were loading data from tape. A few million records from tape takes a while to load. Or write, for that matter. The rest of the job it was sorting against another file. The biggest reason it was on the mainframe seemed to be because that's where the primary data was stored, not because it was efficient.
Those jobs we ran could probably run on today's pc almost as quickly.
Always a fun movie to watch. It was originally just a short 10 minute bit played at sci fi conventions, but the author made a full length movie out of it, which was basically the making of the 10 minute bit. Really well done.
I've been looking for this movie for a long time. I saw a few minutes of it on cable at someone's house like 20 years ago, and thought the movie was "super cop", but could never find it.
Thanks. With the correct name, I might actually be able to find it now.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't thought that an analog recording could be made at high speed. I personally don't have the equipment to do it, but I imagine any older style radio station would.
The question is, does a radio station that has entirely converted to digital format, (or built from scratch that way), have the equipment to do that?
Would they really want to take the trouble to purchase or find the equipment, set it up, and copy these things by analog, especially if it means they are violating the dmca?
I think the issue is a bit more complicated than than them simply copying a protected cd that they were given TO play on the radio.
Here, have a cd. Please play our music on your station. Btw, you will have to bend over backward to load the music into your system. Hope you don't mind.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it's worth doing.
They can't do it without violating the dmca though. I suspect they really don't wish to get involved in doing that.
Doing it by magic marker, or by analog transfer, still violates the dmca.
Not violating the dmca would require installing the drm software on their machines. I would hesitate to do that on my personal machine much less my work machine. Since their livelyhood depends on their machines working properly, I can't blame them for not wanting to get involved with copy protected cds.
Even if spammers received absolutely no sales via spam, there would still be people paying spammers to send out solicitations.
Many spammers make money not by selling to the email targets, but by selling spamming services.
And then there are the companies that view it as cheap advertising. Even if they make no sales, the fact that they get their name out is good in their eyes. They don't quite understand yet that they are generating badwill because even a bad commercial is good as long as you remember the name.
Unfortunately, it's gonna get much worse before it gets better. Companies have only recently discovered the use of email as advertising instead of merely selling.
Are you joking? You seem to be seriously suggesting that they spend the time to copy the cd via analog cables in order to copy these things.
Sure, it's fine for a single cd. Only take about an hour or so to copy it. Of course, that means they have to have a technician spend the time setting it up and verifying it. The first one will probably be a few hours.
But what happens when they get more that are copy protected? I am not sure how many CD's the average station gets per week, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were 5 to 20. If all of them were protected, that's a minimum of 5 to 20 hours per week to copy them. That may mean hiring a technician just to copy these things so that the station can play these "freebies".
I can seriously understand why a station wouldn't want to start down that path.
Not a bad idea, although I would guess that unreachable sites inside of PA would have to be tested in PA multiple times, or at least by different routes, since all sites are down at least occassionally and so are some routers.
Sorry for the run-on sentence there. Too lazy to think of a better way to say that.
The problem also suggests that some isp's may have blocked different sites as well, since the attorney general may or may not have sent the same list to each. He will have, assuming his office is competent, but details often get lost or overlooked, and even isp's might not keep things current.
Ironic. The secrecy of the list may actually cause it to be more well-known than otherwise. Blocking the sites might actually help them. Same sort of thing happens to banned books. Some books have become far more popular merely because they were banned.
unfounded paranoia?
Excuse me, but when the PA can censor websites without oversight, and without any public disclosure, it's not a matter of unfounded paranoia.
Throwing fearful phrases such as "protect innocent children" doesn't make it ok.
Frankly, the "government" doesn't have a great track record on protecting children either.
Let's lock up all white males over 30, because as we all know, pedophiles are often 35 year old white males. We have to do it to "protect innocent children"!
It's not quite enforcing the law. Enforcing the law would be putting down those sites rather than blocking the access to the sites.
The problem with this situation is that no one but the isp and the attorney general knows which sites are being blocked. There was a story in theregister.com a few weeks ago about a site that the city of Chesterfield wanted blocked by google. Seems that Chester the Molester was supposedly a child porn site. Google blocked them. The site had no idea they were being blocked.
Turns out that the site was actually a site with tasteless jokes. No child porn involved. But the city of Chesterfield didn't care or couldn't tell.
So what happens when PA decides that slashdot should be blocked? Or sites that critisize the PA attorney general? No one will know it because PA won't allow the list of sites be be known.
What happens when one of the sites being blocked goes out of business or gets a new IP? Some innocent site gets that IP, and no one in PA will know. Is the attorney general going to keep that list up to date? Is he going to let the ISP's know when to stop blocking address blocks? How can he? If the isp is blocked the address, he can never check that address again either, so he won't know it's clean.
The whole thing is just a mess.
Software, guides, ui, etc.
Seems to me that "software" is basically the user interface, the storing of the program, the displaying of the program, and the guide.
The guide is fluff. It's not necessary to the product anymore than it's necessary to a vcr. Admittedly, it would be a good feature, but I don't believe tivo is the only company that could write it. In fact, tivo gpl'd their code anyway, iirc.
Aside from that, all that's left, as I said before, is the recording and displaying of the program. The user interface sure doesn't have to be licensed from tivo.
The closest patent of tivo's I can think of for your point is the one where the user can record the current show while pausing, fast forwarding, and rewinding. I believe Tivo settled out of court with sonicblue, and it hasn't gone to court. I don't believe tivo would have allowed sonicblue to exist if they owned the general idea of a pvr.
Certainly having the software record shows that I haven't selected isn't a feature I want.
So turn it off. It's not like it's compulsory.
You missed the point. My point was that the basic pvr functionality doesn't have to require fluff like the feature I mentioned above. Also, the dang thing will continue trying to sell you the guide if you haven't already purchased it.
So far, you haven't shown me that There's a lot more to a PVR than recording video to disk!
From your post, you seem to be a tivo fan. I won't try to disuade you. More power to you. A friend of mine at work loves his units. However, I personally won't buy a product that advertises to sell services to me that I already told them I didn't want, lets the company know what I'm watching or where I pause, and switches away from what I'm watching to record a program that's being pushed by the company. All of these things are tivo.
I KNEW there was a good thing about growing up in a filthy house like I did! I always thought we were just slobs.
Tell that to the silicon-based bacteria found inside volcanoes.
Or was that just in "Tremors, the series"?
We can now market our products as methods against Tourism! Yes, folks. As of today, we can prevent those annoying and obnoxious tourists from visiting your cities.
Our first offering is the exploding camera. Guaranteed to take out only the tourist and not the surrounding pedestrians.
Ok. That's tasteless. Sorry.
Recording video to disk is the primary function.
Besides recording, all that's left is the playing of the disk file, retrieving the guide, displaying the guide, and setting the recording to be based on the guide. I'm not sure what else is there is.
Certainly having the software record shows that I haven't selected isn't a feature I want.
Replaytv has a guide too, can get the data from the internet, and probably isn't powered by tivo. ;)
I'm not saying it's not using tivo technology. I'm saying that it probably isn't. Why would Sony want to sell a product that requires licensing something from Tivo that they can create themselves?
Additionally, one of the tivo's flaws (imo) is that it requires a monthly fee (or a "lifetime" fee) to get the guide. Licensing tivo's technology might require that monthly fee again. This is the reason I, at least, will never own a tivo. (Yes, I know one doesn't *have* to get the subscription. But the dang software will keep trying to sell it to you. Very annoying.)
I expect Sony would much rather not involve themselves with other companies for a single product when not abolutely necessary.
SonicBlue is exactly what I was thinking of when I suggested that the Sony pvr might not be using any of tivo's technology or patents.
I should hope that neither tivo nor sonicblue was able to patent recording tv broadcast to a hard drive. It's been done before either, IIRC.
I imagine it's not based on tivo technology other than the fact that it's recording broadcast to disk. I don't believe Tivo patented this.
Tivo itself only makes the software, which probably isn't being used by this product.
Tivo makes their money by selling the guide to users. This product gets the guide via an internet connection. I didn't see anything that states that it gets it from a Tivo source. Since there are lots of free tv guides online, it quite possibly gets it from those.
So for all practical purposes, there is probably no Tivo technology involved. The fact that Sony makes a Tivo product as well is meaningless, since Tivo actually pays Sony for every Tivo unit Sony sells.
So the original poster is at fault for all those idiot tourists?
Or perhaps all US Citizens are at fault for idiot tourists?
From the original poster's comment, it seems likely that he's never left the country and been a "american" tourist. Unless he does, he shouldn't be blamed for other people's actions, simply because he shares citizenship with them.
Charge 'em up at 2volts, release all at once to flash fry the food.
Yum.
I wonder how many capacitors it would take for that.
As a programmer who designs a set of requirements, implements the design, and tests the application, on a multi-tier system using multiple languages where necessary, I highly object to being compared to lawyers and Lawmakers.
Engineers produce products that are constrained to a set of rules too. The rules are called physics. Lawyers are constrained to a set of rules called laws. Lawmakers are constrained to a set of rules called the Constitution.
Don't compare me to a lawyer. I don't need to be insulted like that.
One time I had a VB 'programmer' was contracting at a company I was at, makine 100 dollars an hour, and didn't understand classes. Ohh the pain
Well, you gotta admit that VB doesn't lend itself well to oop. Understanding classes really requires learning an oop language.
Hey cool. I'd much prefer a dvd version too, but I'd be happy with a vhs just to see it.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Mainframes aren't always the best solution though.
At one job, the mainframe was horribly underpowered, and they couldn't add more processors without going to the next level of licensing for all their software.
What they needed to do was remove all non-cpu intensive apps such as email, project timelining, etc, from the mainframe, and limit the mainframe to just those cpu-intensive applications that needed it.
Some applications, such as the accounting ones at that place, didn't even need to be on the mainframe. They weren't cpu intensive.
The big stuff could have been run on pcs as well. Half the time, our jobs were loading data from tape. A few million records from tape takes a while to load. Or write, for that matter. The rest of the job it was sorting against another file. The biggest reason it was on the mainframe seemed to be because that's where the primary data was stored, not because it was efficient.
Those jobs we ran could probably run on today's pc almost as quickly.
I actually LOL when I watched that movie.
I gotta see if I can rent it. Maybe I'll just buy it.
Ironically, I liked Hudson Hawk better than 12 monkeys, even though few agree with me.
12 monkeys was just too depressing. I prefer movies where the protagonist doesn't die in the end.
link
Always a fun movie to watch. It was originally just a short 10 minute bit played at sci fi conventions, but the author made a full length movie out of it, which was basically the making of the 10 minute bit. Really well done.
I've been looking for this movie for a long time. I saw a few minutes of it on cable at someone's house like 20 years ago, and thought the movie was "super cop", but could never find it.
Thanks. With the correct name, I might actually be able to find it now.