First off, every laptop is 3D. As long as they don't make it into flat sheets of paper, they have width, height and depth. And then referring to flat screen as 3D... Yeah, mod me down as flamebait/troll, the fact that you see 2 separate images with 2 eyes doesn't make it 3D. You can't look behind it, you can't just tilt your head to see it from different angle, and if you try, you lose all the '3d' effect.
I remember one SCI-FI book where they had a really 3D computer. A small medallion with one button, that upon pressing the button displays a holographic interface - and senses user's interaction with it. And the display is fully holo=3D too. But that's a far future, and now anything that cheats your brain into seeing depth being called 3D is considered a good marketing technique.
...or story of authors and pirates coexisting peacefully.
Shortly after capitalism was introduced in Poland, many software companies emerged, producing games for most common computers - primarily 8-bit Atari. I was a lucky owner of one at that time, and I recall that times with some nostalgy. Multitude of games was written. Some of them really exceptional. Spy Master, platform game with built-in 'DOS' in which you could launch mini-games from floppies you found thorough the game. Viki, a game with over 1000 rooms (on 64K RAM!), Barahir, really exceptional graphics, 'Dwie Wieze', gfx imported from Amiga, many, many more. And the companies were pretty successful, despite the fact piracy was widespread and legal. How? The games always did have some copy-protection scheme, but not uncrackable one. More skilled pirates did circumvent it. BUT the games were released at prices very comparable to the pirates. Usually one game costed the same as one disk (with 5 or so games) from a pirate. And people were buying them, because they were very available at affordable prices, and every Atari user held it as a point of honour to support the authors... Well, with exception: games that sucked;)
Time passed, Atari died and even best Atari games couldn't compete with Amigas and PCs. No local 'scene' for games for such appeared - all was either import or pirates.
Once originals prices suddenly rose from like, 3 zl (our prices) to 100 zl (western prices), sales suddenly died. Despite introduced anti-piracy law, piracy was more widespread than ever before. It just wasn't legal, small firms that made profit on it, just mafia sindicates. Hardly anybody buys originals nowadays. "We suffer from low sales because of piracy" claim the releasers and increase the prices more to increase profit from the few games they sell even more. And users, just pissed off, "How DARE they to demand such money for that", just buy pirated games instead. And almost nobody remembers that selling and buying original games in Poland at one time was not only very comon, but quite profitable - and the key was LOW PRICES.
I used ICQ for a while, then uninstalled it, multiple times had to uninstall YIM that got installed with Netscape before Mozilla really came into play, fought kids installing GG (polish IM) on classroom computers, generally did a lot to get rid of instant messengers from my life. Am I weird or what?
Next time somebody patents oxygen-nitrogen mix and the court will say you don't have to pay royalties for breathing air. Yeah, big win.
Sorry, but this reminds me "victories" from state of terror. In a country where people get killed for the way they think, you're happy if you go free from prison (with barely your toenails missing) and announce everyone that after all they decided you DO have right to paint your fenceposts green.
YEAH! I DESIGNED THIS PRICE! Nobody! I repeat NOBODY from now on dare to put $9.99 price tag on their merchandise or I'll call people from RIAA, MPAA, FBI, CIA, NSA and many more scary letters and sue, sue, sue! HAHAHAHAHAHA[evil laughter]
True, US is about the world's biggest consumer (and nearly as big producer) of digital media and electronics. But how are they going to force other countries to adopt DRM? Won't this be just that China, Taiwan, or Japan will continue to produce two versions of all their hardware - one with DRM for US market and one with some DRM-Dummy - a chip that acts like DRM circumvention device - for the rest of the world? Are you going to nuke them or sue them? Will you make import of foreign electronics illegal?
I can already imagine devices, "DRM-safe. You own what you buy! Copy, edit and record anything safely, DRM won't stop you from that".
I know some basic truths: If it can be displayed, it can be recorded. If it can be heard, it can be recorded. Only heavily crippled hardware could stop you from doing this and circumvention of the protection can't be really hard for someone who makes that protection themselves - foreign producers.
I can expect even more. US will lag about a year after world technological progress: "The new player device will be available in stores worldwide in January. A special DRM-enabled version for US market is expected in November."
By talking packrats out of stuff they really don't need, they usually end up putting less than 10% of the stuff back in the house....just to find out a week later they got rid of stuff they now REALLY need. It happened to me so many times. "Oh shit, how stupid I was! Why did I discard it?! It would be so handy now!"
I learned my lesson and just got a few boxes aside, where I keep "hardly useful" stuff. Completely unordered but off the main "useful" area... and I visit it surprisingly often.
Just set "funny" to +3, all the rest to "-6" in Comment Options, and surf at +5 treshold. Will display only +3 Funny and above, discarding all otherwise moderated.
You misunderstood the idea of Faraday's Cage. It prevents the waves from getting IN, not getting OUT.
Any static charge on enclosed area (sphere, cube etc) gathers on its outermost surfaces and edges (from where it radiates further by ion flux), so the inside is pretty much neutral. If the static is created outside the enclosure, it will gather on the surface, without getting in. But if there's a wave/ion source inside, the charge will simply flow to the surface and radiate around.
Re:Disk Swap by snailmail.
on
Snail Mail Tech
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Bob opens it, non-destructively, then sends it back with new contents marked "return to sender, address unknown". Alice receives info that the letter was returned. She goes to the post office and to get her letter back, she must pay cost of sending it from Bob to Alice.
Besides, she would have to send it as registered letter. Only registered letters can be returned to sender in that manner. Normal misadressed leters get discarded.
Now what does THIS mean? At one time parent post (the one +5 now) was "0, Troll". It would signify some of its informations are purposedly false. So I asked if someone could point out what is false - if anything is, because I would like to know whether I can depend on that info or just someone who shouldn't, became a moderator. And now I still don't know whether that post is true or false, only that some people here definitely feel bad about investigating the truth and are ready to waste their mod points in order to prevent revealing it.
Disk Swap by snailmail.
on
Snail Mail Tech
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A bit of "technology" used by Amiga Demosceners...when the modems were scarce and phone bills high. Every more or less respectable demoscene group had a member whose function was listed as "swapper".
Swappers would get in contact with swappers from other groups, and exchange floppies full of newest stuff, productions, news, and everything of any interest (plus some exotic stuff other than floppies - a chicken bone, The Party membership ID, misprinted train tickets, and whatever interesting that caught the eye and filled the envelope up to (but not above) another price-weight treshold.)
One of the most specific swapper activities was "faking stamps". With 80 and more contacts, at least one letter a month exchanged with each of them, you had to cut on stamp prices, so you smeared the stamp with water-washable glue and wrote in the letter "stamps back", so your contact ripped your stamps off the envelope and sent you in his reply letter together with floppies. Then some washing and stamps could be reused - one set of stamps could go the same way 5-6 times before they needed to be replaced because they started looking suspect. And if it was found - you never put return address on the envelope and nobody in the post office could ever read an Amiga floppy:)
Another practice was making the floppies sent pretty. You almost never sent back the same floppies - they were in constant flow. Adding a marker signature was the default. Often some sticker or a drawing was common. But there were true masterpieces: A floppy painted gold, with the metal part (and under it) painted silver, the metal part without the spring but removable and attached with a thin chain to the write-protect hole, so you removed it before inserting and it was hanging from your floppy drive while the floppy was inside.
And finally all the "disk hunt" methods. Famous swappers were rarely replying to newbies who were asking for contact - you had to gain some fame on the scene with your group's productions - or get a recommendation from another swapper. So - the unanswered letters were a good supply of floppies. Sometimes they would even put an ad in some zine (spread by swapp of course;) which said a girl wants to swap, everyone welcome etc. This was bringing a good deal of free floppies, often with some quite funny stuff on them.
Well, Internet was what put end to it. Plus average data size - sending 6-8 floppies in one letter wasn't cheap or easy anymore, and with A1200 getting more common, high-level languages, multi-disk demos and mpeg movies, it became necessity...
[this post is environmentally friendly - created with 95% recycled material]
Yep, LINK REL="next","prev". Supported by Mozilla, with its "site navigation bar", together with buttons for "top", "up", "first", "last", and two separate menus for others. And WITH PRELOAD. (about the only situation when Mozilla preloads anything - a page with those tags. First "next" is preloaded, then "previous" (if not already in cache), then "up" and "top" (ditto).
You hope your cables won't work as energy gathering antennas, and that your VGA, power supply, sound card and whatever you have anything plugged in, will stand some 1000V?
probe that lasts longer than several hundred lightyears.
I'm not sure if you're trolling here or you're just misguided...
1) Light year is an unit of distance, not time, so no "last longer than" but "go further than". 2) It's helluva much too - distance it takes one year for light to travel. There's 3 light seconds from Earth to Moon, 7 light minutes to the Sun, about one light hour to Neptune, four light years to Proxima Centauri, nearest star. Mars is at worst several light minutes away from Earth - when it's on the opposite side of the Sun. Building a probe that would stand several hundred lightyears, traveling at speed near to light, would be pretty hard... it would take several hundred years for it to get to its destination and it would probably be hit by numerous micrometeorites in the meantime. And E=(Mv^2)/2, in this case E=(Mc^2)/2 so energy of one micrometeorite hitting the probe would be half the energy of its nuclear annihilation. Enough to evaporate a serious starship.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, every laptop is 3D. As long as they don't make it into flat sheets of paper, they have width, height and depth. And then referring to flat screen as 3D... Yeah, mod me down as flamebait/troll, the fact that you see 2 separate images with 2 eyes doesn't make it 3D. You can't look behind it, you can't just tilt your head to see it from different angle, and if you try, you lose all the '3d' effect.
I remember one SCI-FI book where they had a really 3D computer. A small medallion with one button, that upon pressing the button displays a holographic interface - and senses user's interaction with it. And the display is fully holo=3D too.
But that's a far future, and now anything that cheats your brain into seeing depth being called 3D is considered a good marketing technique.
Shortly after capitalism was introduced in Poland, many software companies emerged, producing games for most common computers - primarily 8-bit Atari. I was a lucky owner of one at that time, and I recall that times with some nostalgy.
Multitude of games was written. Some of them really exceptional. Spy Master, platform game with built-in 'DOS' in which you could launch mini-games from floppies you found thorough the game. Viki, a game with over 1000 rooms (on 64K RAM!), Barahir, really exceptional graphics, 'Dwie Wieze', gfx imported from Amiga, many, many more.
And the companies were pretty successful, despite the fact piracy was widespread and legal. How?
The games always did have some copy-protection scheme, but not uncrackable one. More skilled pirates did circumvent it. BUT the games were released at prices very comparable to the pirates. Usually one game costed the same as one disk (with 5 or so games) from a pirate. And people were buying them, because they were very available at affordable prices, and every Atari user held it as a point of honour to support the authors... Well, with exception: games that sucked
Time passed, Atari died and even best Atari games couldn't compete with Amigas and PCs. No local 'scene' for games for such appeared - all was either import or pirates.
Once originals prices suddenly rose from like, 3 zl (our prices) to 100 zl (western prices), sales suddenly died. Despite introduced anti-piracy law, piracy was more widespread than ever before. It just wasn't legal, small firms that made profit on it, just mafia sindicates. Hardly anybody buys originals nowadays. "We suffer from low sales because of piracy" claim the releasers and increase the prices more to increase profit from the few games they sell even more. And users, just pissed off, "How DARE they to demand such money for that", just buy pirated games instead.
And almost nobody remembers that selling and buying original games in Poland at one time was not only very comon, but quite profitable - and the key was LOW PRICES.
1GB/1cc doesn't sound too impressive. Look up 'tesa-rom' on Google, 1TB on a roll of 'magic tape', a common transparent adhesive. Maybe 10cc one.
Yes, it means what you think it means.
Just see the logo
This worries me. Either people are so dumb, or SCO has some ace up its a^Hsleeve.
I used ICQ for a while, then uninstalled it, multiple times had to uninstall YIM that got installed with Netscape before Mozilla really came into play, fought kids installing GG (polish IM) on classroom computers, generally did a lot to get rid of instant messengers from my life. Am I weird or what?
Next time somebody patents oxygen-nitrogen mix and the court will say you don't have to pay royalties for breathing air. Yeah, big win.
Sorry, but this reminds me "victories" from state of terror. In a country where people get killed for the way they think, you're happy if you go free from prison (with barely your toenails missing) and announce everyone that after all they decided you DO have right to paint your fenceposts green.
YEAH! I DESIGNED THIS PRICE!
Nobody! I repeat NOBODY from now on dare to put $9.99 price tag on their merchandise or I'll call people from RIAA, MPAA, FBI, CIA, NSA and many more scary letters and sue, sue, sue! HAHAHAHAHAHA[evil laughter]
...Are those investors dumb or what? Seems there's quite a few people who actually believe SCO is not a sinking boat. I wonder why.
True, US is about the world's biggest consumer (and nearly as big producer) of digital media and electronics. But how are they going to force other countries to adopt DRM? Won't this be just that China, Taiwan, or Japan will continue to produce two versions of all their hardware - one with DRM for US market and one with some DRM-Dummy - a chip that acts like DRM circumvention device - for the rest of the world? Are you going to nuke them or sue them? Will you make import of foreign electronics illegal?
I can already imagine devices, "DRM-safe. You own what you buy! Copy, edit and record anything safely, DRM won't stop you from that".
I know some basic truths: If it can be displayed, it can be recorded. If it can be heard, it can be recorded. Only heavily crippled hardware could stop you from doing this and circumvention of the protection can't be really hard for someone who makes that protection themselves - foreign producers.
I can expect even more. US will lag about a year after world technological progress: "The new player device will be available in stores worldwide in January. A special DRM-enabled version for US market is expected in November."
United States stopped military/financial support for Israel. They will continue providing moral support though.
By talking packrats out of stuff they really don't need, they usually end up putting less than 10% of the stuff back in the house. ...just to find out a week later they got rid of stuff they now REALLY need.
It happened to me so many times. "Oh shit, how stupid I was! Why did I discard it?! It would be so handy now!"
I learned my lesson and just got a few boxes aside, where I keep "hardly useful" stuff. Completely unordered but off the main "useful" area... and I visit it surprisingly often.
No. Just get your girl to organise your gear. Of course you won't be able to find anything, but it will at least look neat.
Just set "funny" to +3, all the rest to "-6" in Comment Options, and surf at +5 treshold. Will display only +3 Funny and above, discarding all otherwise moderated.
...will I still be able to make an EMP gun from such a microwave?
You misunderstood the idea of Faraday's Cage. It prevents the waves from getting IN, not getting OUT.
Any static charge on enclosed area (sphere, cube etc) gathers on its outermost surfaces and edges (from where it radiates further by ion flux), so the inside is pretty much neutral. If the static is created outside the enclosure, it will gather on the surface, without getting in. But if there's a wave/ion source inside, the charge will simply flow to the surface and radiate around.
Bob opens it, non-destructively, then sends it back with new contents marked "return to sender, address unknown".
Alice receives info that the letter was returned. She goes to the post office and to get her letter back, she must pay cost of sending it from Bob to Alice.
Besides, she would have to send it as registered letter. Only registered letters can be returned to sender in that manner. Normal misadressed leters get discarded.
At least that's how it works here.
Now what does THIS mean?
At one time parent post (the one +5 now) was "0, Troll". It would signify some of its informations are purposedly false. So I asked if someone could point out what is false - if anything is, because I would like to know whether I can depend on that info or just someone who shouldn't, became a moderator. And now I still don't know whether that post is true or false, only that some people here definitely feel bad about investigating the truth and are ready to waste their mod points in order to prevent revealing it.
A bit of "technology" used by Amiga Demosceners. ..when the modems were scarce and phone bills high. Every more or less respectable demoscene group had a member whose function was listed as "swapper".
:)
;) which said a girl wants to swap, everyone welcome etc. This was bringing a good deal of free floppies, often with some quite funny stuff on them.
Swappers would get in contact with swappers from other groups, and exchange floppies full of newest stuff, productions, news, and everything of any interest (plus some exotic stuff other than floppies - a chicken bone, The Party membership ID, misprinted train tickets, and whatever interesting that caught the eye and filled the envelope up to (but not above) another price-weight treshold.)
One of the most specific swapper activities was "faking stamps". With 80 and more contacts, at least one letter a month exchanged with each of them, you had to cut on stamp prices, so you smeared the stamp with water-washable glue and wrote in the letter "stamps back", so your contact ripped your stamps off the envelope and sent you in his reply letter together with floppies. Then some washing and stamps could be reused - one set of stamps could go the same way 5-6 times before they needed to be replaced because they started looking suspect. And if it was found - you never put return address on the envelope and nobody in the post office could ever read an Amiga floppy
Another practice was making the floppies sent pretty. You almost never sent back the same floppies - they were in constant flow. Adding a marker signature was the default. Often some sticker or a drawing was common. But there were true masterpieces: A floppy painted gold, with the metal part (and under it) painted silver, the metal part without the spring but removable and attached with a thin chain to the write-protect hole, so you removed it before inserting and it was hanging from your floppy drive while the floppy was inside.
And finally all the "disk hunt" methods. Famous swappers were rarely replying to newbies who were asking for contact - you had to gain some fame on the scene with your group's productions - or get a recommendation from another swapper. So - the unanswered letters were a good supply of floppies. Sometimes they would even put an ad in some zine (spread by swapp of course
Well, Internet was what put end to it. Plus average data size - sending 6-8 floppies in one letter wasn't cheap or easy anymore, and with A1200 getting more common, high-level languages, multi-disk demos and mpeg movies, it became necessity...
[this post is environmentally friendly - created with 95% recycled material]
Yep, LINK REL="next","prev". Supported by Mozilla, with its "site navigation bar", together with buttons for "top", "up", "first", "last", and two separate menus for others. And WITH PRELOAD. (about the only situation when Mozilla preloads anything - a page with those tags. First "next" is preloaded, then "previous" (if not already in cache), then "up" and "top" (ditto).
Too bad so few webpages use it.
You hope your cables won't work as energy gathering antennas, and that your VGA, power supply, sound card and whatever you have anything plugged in, will stand some 1000V?
Could someone explain that -1 troll moderation on this?
probe that lasts longer than several hundred lightyears.
I'm not sure if you're trolling here or you're just misguided...
1) Light year is an unit of distance, not time, so no "last longer than" but "go further than".
2) It's helluva much too - distance it takes one year for light to travel. There's 3 light seconds from Earth to Moon, 7 light minutes to the Sun, about one light hour to Neptune, four light years to Proxima Centauri, nearest star. Mars is at worst several light minutes away from Earth - when it's on the opposite side of the Sun. Building a probe that would stand several hundred lightyears, traveling at speed near to light, would be pretty hard... it would take several hundred years for it to get to its destination and it would probably be hit by numerous micrometeorites in the meantime. And E=(Mv^2)/2, in this case E=(Mc^2)/2 so energy of one micrometeorite hitting the probe would be half the energy of its nuclear annihilation. Enough to evaporate a serious starship.
Some of first manned missions to Mars will pick them and put them in "Museum of Conquest of Mars".
Stupid People AdvertiseMent
A backronym.