The standard supports variable audio and video bitrate, but not variable frame rate.
Luckily, mp3 is constant frame rate and doesn't really require any hacks (up until a few years ago, most developers had also read the specs as 'constant samplerate' rather than constant 'framerate', amd there was period of much weeping and grinding of teeth in fixing bugs)
Vorbis is neither constant bitrate nor constant framerate, and to support vorbis inside avi you need some nasty hacks. It is possible in a "proper" way, but the overhead is obscene and you lose any bitrate benefit you could've received with vorbis anyway.
Whether avi is streamable or not seems to be mostly up to the developers of your movie player. For example, mplayer can play an avi file over http just fine, even seeking works with avi over http. Players that aren't totally crap (vlc, xine, mplayer,...) have no trouble playing incomplete avi files either.
I'm not defending avi, it's quite terrible. There's not much choice though. OGM is an abomination. WMV/ASF is proprietary and closed-spec (there is a public ASF spec, but it's actually for a completely different version of ASF, that *nobody* uses or has ever used). MP4 is quicktime bloat. MKV is some terrible "binary XML" format, but alas, the best container format available now imo.
So remember kids, don't do avi/mp4/mov/ogm/asf/wmv, not only are drugs bad, but they give you bad skin. MKV just gives you gas.
I wish to add, that of the media that has indeed become available to me during the past half deacade, after the fact that I pirated it, I have actually procured nearly 80% of it through legal channels. I find the DVD version with its case and cover to be more enjoyable to own than half a dozen discs in a spindle of a few hunred.
I wish to again stress, that the major reason why I resort to pirating, is that the content is simply not available any other way for me:-(
Erm, inducement to commit copyright infringement? Pardon me sir, but are you perhaps referring to the ONE MAJOR REASON why the WHOLE WORLD (apart from the US) are tempted to defer to copyright infringement?
Ok, I have to confess. Per hollywood definitions, I am a pirate.
When my peers on internet are discussing movies and shows, which will at best, if one is very optimistic, be released here on TV or in Cinema, a year (for cinema) or 3 years (for TV), if at all, from when they air in the US, and the DVD release, if there is one at all, being even further delayed, I have no choice but to use illegal sources to watch this show.
I wish to welcome all of you lucky US citizens who like Battlestar Galactica, to the reality of us who like ANY american produced show. Welcome to the crowd.
It is my firm and principal belief, that most of the TV and Movie piracy could be eradicated if only the silly time limits and restrictiond on the content were removed. Release Movie A only in Country B. Obviously, Country C - Z will pirate it, DUH! It is simple. Why can not the moviemakers understand this?
Why can not the content distributors realize, that by restricting distribution, they are only hurting themselves, and feeding the pirates? Why are the distributors this damn braindead? Why the hell do you want to kill prospective audiences? Why the hell do you want to tell your customers to FUCK OFF? Why do you want to tell your customers to go away? Why do you want to tell your customers to come back in 2 years?
It is quite illogical. It is what breeds contempt for the legitimate content produces in general, evne for those who do not practice these unfriendly procedures. I do wonder, do they even want our legitimate business?
It seems to me, that they would rather see us download the pirates versions, which, contrary to the legitimate versions, actually PLAY in STANDARD media players, without need for custom media players or custom DRM patches or DRM software or DRM players, and, the illegitimate versions most often play on every operating syste, every processor and every architechture in use, whereas, the very few proprietary DRM releases that make it to the internet, are restricted to the few who afford a platform powerful enough, a platform glamorous enough, a platform recent enough, a platform lucky to run one of the few system approved by the media conglomerages.
WMV the file format is not WMV the codec. The WMV file format, sometimes goes by the extension of asf, but precisely the same thing, is just the container.
You can put, for example, XviD and mp3 inside wmv, and it will be perfectly playable with MPlayer on almost any platform.
wmv9, the video codec, however, has no open source implementation. Thus, xine and mplayer will at most only play such files on x86 machines.
Hm. I have to disagree here. While my actions were no doubt ranging on the border of admissable for submission to the annual darwin awards, I was using an old cellphone battery to power my CD player. The CD player was even older, and had power consumption that made you feel lucky if you got through a single CD on one set of batteries.
Anyway, the battery pack was not happy. The cells started swelling, and the plastic encasing was shattered at the edges. Needless to say I immediately disconnected it and locked it up for the time being in case it would've already reached critical point.
On another point, cellphone manufacturers DO print clear directions in the manual. Don't drop the phone, don't get it wet, don't throw it at people who piss you off (popular thing to do here), excess heat is bad for both you and the phone. Seems sane enough.
The university through which my own university's connectivity is provided, has quite a hefty firewall setup, with the capacity to classify traffic based on content rather than port usage. They then later used this to setup traffic shaping and limit p2p activity to a mere fraction of what it was before.
As the hotlinking whore I am, I will just link to their week-long sampling of traffic, which shows that BitTorrent accounted for 44% of outgoing traffic. This is before traffic shaping. No graphs of after-traffic shaping has been provided (yet).
Have you ever tried to do this? Do you know how most of those tunnels work?
I think not.
Last time I tried, there were no "publicly" offered tunnels available which would work even over a firewalled Public-IP connection, which is one step less evil than a NAT connection.
Sure, you can use a PPP tunnel and push IPv6 over that, but you could just as easily push IPv4 over that, as previously suggested here. You'd either way need an external machine on the real-Internet and not the fake NAT deal.
This reminds me of my first internet connection, it was Netscape 1.0 days, so I'm pretty young actually and not an old geezer at all. Anyway, the ISP only allowed IP within their own network, and the only access to outside internet was through a HTTP proxy, making it effectively Web only:-)
Evil ISPs take note: this is how you become more evil than you already are; proxy only access.
> Because they're conscripts, by definition they don't want to be there.
Despite not much else impressing me in the finnish defence forces, their ability to place conscripts in suitable tasks was amazing. The way most people adjusted to military life was amazing. Every conscript had a task, which had been chosen for them, and often the choice was a right one, putting the right kind of people in the right places. People didn't just loiter around waiting for the 6, 9, or 12 months to end, trying to avoid doing anything useful in the meanwhile. People were actually giving their best, doing their best.
Those who couldn't adjust, those who really didn't try, who didn't want to try, etc, really stood out compared to the others, and were obviously not sent to under-officer training or anything such. That's why you'd most likely have your Jet served by someone who was an airplane fanatic in his civilian life, or an aspiring engineer, or an enthusiastic mechanic interested in something else than trying to make Opel cars stop rust.
The defence forces capability to see the individual, surprised me. It strengthened the teams in an unbelievable way.
One could say that a 'professional' army is just as bad, where all the soldiers are those who could not afford to go to a real college and thus ended up in the military, and wouldn't be much different from being forced to do it.
> Actually, they receive regural training in the Pori Brigade. the additional traning is only relevant for peace-keeping-missions (mob-control, applying of force etc.). They receive the actual combat-training during the regural-training.
Mob-control, applying of force, etc, was atleast trained during my time in the navy's coastal land forces in the finnish defence forces. There were also excercises held together with Swedish and Norwegian military forces, with focus on peace-keeping missions.
If Dirac is open source it should be trivial to just stuff the dirac frames into any container format you want, right?
Assuming Dirac is somewhat frame based, I don't see why you couldn't do it. Heck, people even came up with hacks to store VBR MP3 and B-frames into avi:-)
In what way? For what it's worth, I find both KDE and WinXP help system totally worthless.
XP help always tells me to run this or that troubleshooter, which asks some stupid questions which are mostly irrelevant and have nothing to do with my problem, only having the blindingly obvious documented. KDE help lacks troubleshooters, focuses mostly on setting up various software, and documents mostly the very obvious (as opposed to blindingly obvious in XP).
One day the network wasn't working in XP, I checked the device manager, and it said "Device not working. Error code 10.", having no clue what "Error code 10" means, I thought I'd have a look at the great help. It told me I should run network troubleshooter. After about 20 pages of irrelevant stuff, the troubleshooter gave up with me. The next day I checked, and networking was working again in XP. For all I know, code 10 means "don't feel like doing anything today":)
The problem begins with those pesky carbon based lifeforms called humans. Their perception of quality is not as simple as a measurement of error between original and encoded->decoded picture, but a much more complex one, which can't be reliably measured by any numerical algorithms fit to run on PCs.
Complicate the problem further with the users feeding the codec source material of the most varying quality and form, no controlled viewing enviroment or even device. A mostly bright movie viewed in a dark room on a bright screen, and you might get away with throwing away lots of the darker details without anyone noticing, saving bits to use on things the viewers might notice.
Having a very dark source, which the viewer then views on a crappy and dark screen with gamme ramped up to 2.0 or 3.0 or something just to see the movie, and you'll see nothign but some blinking blocks using the same settings as in the previous scenario.
The source has lots of noise in it? We'll chuck it all away. No point in storing noise. What? The users complain? But it's just noise... Oh? Film grain, not noise? Could've fooled me, and the computer.
Until computers evolve a bit, excellent results at the click of a button will only exist in the utopian dreams of the casual user. Until then, the casual user will just have to make do with spending more bits on the video to get good results, instead of spending more time learning options and finding the best ones for the particular source/quality target/viewer to get good results.
There are for sure plenty of tunables in any decent codec, even xvid, though I don't know how much the windows front end hides.
There are however some absolutely necessary things that don't change between the different mpeg4 codecs, and it has little to do with tuning the codec.
Not cropping out ALL of the black borders, and aligning/scaling the dimensions to multiples of 16 is a sure way to kill quality.
Trying to encode telecined material as is at the 29.97 ntsc framerate is also a foolproof way to create horrible quality. Same for encoding interlaced material as progressive.
Not even so called professionals get it right all the time even. There are plenty of very badly mastered DVDs out there...
What would help more than windows source code here, would be non-broken hardware, and hardware vendors publishing specs and programming information for their hardware.
When open source developers have to use guesses, trial and error, and pure luck to write drivers for something that is completely undocumented, it's no wonder that some hardware combinations don't always work. And even for things that are supposed to be standardized, it doesn't always help, when hardware vendors ignore the standard. As an example are the LG CD-RW drives that would blow up in Mandrake Linux. A worryingly large part of driver sources these days seem to be work arounds for bugs in specific hardware.
The windows disc also only has drivers for the most common hardware, and you have to install the graphics card's own drivers from its cd before you get anything except 640x480 16 colour (XP might be using VESA for unrecognized cards and through that give you higher resolutions).
I've never had any problems with PNP in Linux myself. I'm not aware of any problems with PNP either, perhaps someone else knows better...
While windows sourcecode might be slightly helpful, to discover hardware specs, you have to keep in mind that windows doesn't have that many drivers of its own anyway, to extract hardware specs from.
My ultracheap slightly aged Asus (yuck) motherboard with the intel i815 chipset has a mindboggling feature, that when enabled, will reset the computer if the OS hangs or crashes.
My even more ancient Compaq prosignia VS, a 486 server, that is now collecting dust in the attic, allegedly (according to Compaq marketing at the time) had a similar feature.
"the USA Wide Web" already exists, sortof. Some TV Shows' and tv channel (American, of course) sites are US-only, they must filter based on TLD of the resolved host, and looking up IP's in arin:-)
I think it was Firefly that was limited to USA only, although I could be wrong.
I wish Slashdot would have an article on discussing 21st Century payment methods sometime...
Is it just me, or is it somewhat laughable, that the best payment method when crossing national boundaries, still seems to be cash in an envelope?
Foolishly, I thought that paypal would be easy, and work internationally, oh how wrong I was. I eventually gave up, there seemed to be no way at all to transfer money into a paypal account. I ask the same as in the article, "the money is in my account, I want to transfer it, what's the problem?"... Sigh.
I'm limited to.fi sites only when buying or selling anything online. Ah well, atleast it works. Money arrives instantly on the other person's account, or mine, and my bank's web interface is a hell of a lot better than paypal's monstrosity, which btw, must've taken hundreds of manhours to make so horrendous.
Ok, so maybe I can understand that banking everywhere hasn't progressed into www yet, but come on, should transfers really take hours, let alone DAYS!? *grumble* Actually, I could live with days, if it just would work for more than one country.
I'm straying from my original intent... To ask the slashdot crowd, for ideas on a payment system of the future. Do the banks in your country use a system which you like/dislike? The banks might not listen or care, but brainstorming can never hurt.
I live in the beforementioned cold country as well, and have never received any SMS-spam during my ~5 years as a cellphone owner.
My operator, Radiolinja, has never sent me any "information message", either. I believe you have to send an sms to a special number to 'subscribe' to those messages.
It's currently not possible for a restaurant owner to target users within 100metres of his restaurant. However, it IS possible for a cellphone owner to send a message to another special number, with the command "find restaurant", in finnish, and the GSM system will pin-point your cellphone (no Gps!), cross reference it with a map, and send you a list of the nearest restaurants. I imagine it's just one step from getting a MMS reply with customized ads from the restaurants nearby...
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that the berne convention only applies to comercial use of copyrighted material.
That's why countries that allow copying for personal use can allow that without violating the Berne Convention.
Time to kill some avi myths here.
...) have no trouble playing incomplete avi files either.
The standard supports variable audio and video bitrate, but not variable frame rate.
Luckily, mp3 is constant frame rate and doesn't really require any hacks (up until a few years ago, most developers had also read the specs as 'constant samplerate' rather than constant 'framerate', amd there was period of much weeping and grinding of teeth in fixing bugs)
Vorbis is neither constant bitrate nor constant framerate, and to support vorbis inside avi you need some nasty hacks. It is possible in a "proper" way, but the overhead is obscene and you lose any bitrate benefit you could've received with vorbis anyway.
Whether avi is streamable or not seems to be mostly up to the developers of your movie player. For example, mplayer can play an avi file over http just fine, even seeking works with avi over http.
Players that aren't totally crap (vlc, xine, mplayer,
I'm not defending avi, it's quite terrible. There's not much choice though. OGM is an abomination. WMV/ASF is proprietary and closed-spec (there is a public ASF spec, but it's actually for a completely different version of ASF, that *nobody* uses or has ever used). MP4 is quicktime bloat. MKV is some terrible "binary XML" format, but alas, the best container format available now imo.
So remember kids, don't do avi/mp4/mov/ogm/asf/wmv, not only are drugs bad, but they give you bad skin. MKV just gives you gas.
I wish to add, that of the media that has indeed become available to me during the past half deacade, after the fact that I pirated it, I have actually procured nearly 80% of it through legal channels. I find the DVD version with its case and cover to be more enjoyable to own than half a dozen discs in a spindle of a few hunred.
:-(
I wish to again stress, that the major reason why I resort to pirating, is that the content is simply not available any other way for me
Erm, inducement to commit copyright infringement?
Pardon me sir, but are you perhaps referring to the ONE MAJOR REASON why the WHOLE WORLD (apart from the US) are tempted to defer to copyright infringement?
Ok, I have to confess. Per hollywood definitions, I am a pirate.
When my peers on internet are discussing movies and shows, which will at best, if one is very optimistic, be released here on TV or in Cinema, a year (for cinema) or 3 years (for TV), if at all, from when they air in the US, and the DVD release, if there is one at all, being even further delayed, I have no choice but to use illegal sources to watch this show.
I wish to welcome all of you lucky US citizens who like Battlestar Galactica, to the reality of us who like ANY american produced show. Welcome to the crowd.
It is my firm and principal belief, that most of the TV and Movie piracy could be eradicated if only the silly time limits and restrictiond on the content were removed. Release Movie A only in Country B. Obviously, Country C - Z will pirate it, DUH! It is simple. Why can not the moviemakers understand this?
Why can not the content distributors realize, that by restricting distribution, they are only hurting themselves, and feeding the pirates? Why are the distributors this damn braindead? Why the hell do you want to kill prospective audiences? Why the hell do you want to tell your customers to FUCK OFF? Why do you want to tell your customers to go away? Why do you want to tell your customers to come back in 2 years?
It is quite illogical. It is what breeds contempt for the legitimate content produces in general, evne for those who do not practice these unfriendly procedures. I do wonder, do they even want our legitimate business?
It seems to me, that they would rather see us download the pirates versions, which, contrary to the legitimate versions, actually PLAY in STANDARD media players, without need for custom media players or custom DRM patches or DRM software or DRM players, and, the illegitimate versions most often play on every operating syste, every processor and every architechture in use, whereas, the very few proprietary DRM releases that make it to the internet, are restricted to the few who afford a platform powerful enough, a platform glamorous enough, a platform recent enough, a platform lucky to run one of the few system approved by the media conglomerages.
WMV the file format is not WMV the codec. The WMV file format, sometimes goes by the extension of asf, but precisely the same thing, is just the container.
You can put, for example, XviD and mp3 inside wmv, and it will be perfectly playable with MPlayer on almost any platform.
wmv9, the video codec, however, has no open source implementation. Thus, xine and mplayer will at most only play such files on x86 machines.
Simply because in comparison to cellphones, laptops, handheld computers and digicams are quite rare.
Digicams not AS rare, but most, if not all, that I have seen, used regular AA NiMh rechargeables.
Hm. I have to disagree here. While my actions were no doubt ranging on the border of admissable for submission to the annual darwin awards, I was using an old cellphone battery to power my CD player. The CD player was even older, and had power consumption that made you feel lucky if you got through a single CD on one set of batteries.
Anyway, the battery pack was not happy. The cells started swelling, and the plastic encasing was shattered at the edges. Needless to say I immediately disconnected it and locked it up for the time being in case it would've already reached critical point.
On another point, cellphone manufacturers DO print clear directions in the manual. Don't drop the phone, don't get it wet, don't throw it at people who piss you off (popular thing to do here), excess heat is bad for both you and the phone. Seems sane enough.
However, CDs or DVDs spinning at 52X have been known to explode and shoot shrapnel out of the drive bays.
I am not sure about the specifics, but an example classifier for linux netfilter, for p2p traffic, can be found here
The university through which my own university's connectivity is provided, has quite a hefty firewall setup, with the capacity to classify traffic based on content rather than port usage. They then later used this to setup traffic shaping and limit p2p activity to a mere fraction of what it was before.
As the hotlinking whore I am, I will just link to their week-long sampling of traffic, which shows that BitTorrent accounted for 44% of outgoing traffic. This is before traffic shaping. No graphs of after-traffic shaping has been provided (yet).
In: http://www.cc.utu.fi/verkko/maarat/sisaan.png
Out: http://www.cc.utu.fi/verkko/maarat/ulos.png
Translation:
Muut = Other
Rest should be self-explanatory.
Have you ever tried to do this?
:-)
Do you know how most of those tunnels work?
I think not.
Last time I tried, there were no "publicly" offered tunnels available which would work even over a firewalled Public-IP connection, which is one step less evil than a NAT connection.
Sure, you can use a PPP tunnel and push IPv6 over that, but you could just as easily push IPv4 over that, as previously suggested here. You'd either way need an external machine on the real-Internet and not the fake NAT deal.
This reminds me of my first internet connection, it was Netscape 1.0 days, so I'm pretty young actually and not an old geezer at all. Anyway, the ISP only allowed IP within their own network, and the only access to outside internet was through a HTTP proxy, making it effectively Web only
Evil ISPs take note: this is how you become more evil than you already are; proxy only access.
> Because they're conscripts, by definition they don't want to be there.
Despite not much else impressing me in the finnish defence forces, their ability to place conscripts in suitable tasks was amazing. The way most people adjusted to military life was amazing. Every conscript had a task, which had been chosen for them, and often the choice was a right one, putting the right kind of people in the right places. People didn't just loiter around waiting for the 6, 9, or 12 months to end, trying to avoid doing anything useful in the meanwhile. People were actually giving their best, doing their best.
Those who couldn't adjust, those who really didn't try, who didn't want to try, etc, really stood out compared to the others, and were obviously not sent to under-officer training or anything such. That's why you'd most likely have your Jet served by someone who was an airplane fanatic in his civilian life, or an aspiring engineer, or an enthusiastic mechanic interested in something else than trying to make Opel cars stop rust.
The defence forces capability to see the individual, surprised me. It strengthened the teams in an unbelievable way.
One could say that a 'professional' army is just as bad, where all the soldiers are those who could not afford to go to a real college and thus ended up in the military, and wouldn't be much different from being forced to do it.
> Actually, they receive regural training in the Pori Brigade. the additional traning is only relevant for peace-keeping-missions (mob-control, applying of force etc.). They receive the actual combat-training during the regural-training.
Mob-control, applying of force, etc, was atleast trained during my time in the navy's coastal land forces in the finnish defence forces. There were also excercises held together with Swedish and Norwegian military forces, with focus on peace-keeping missions.
If Dirac is open source it should be trivial to just stuff the dirac frames into any container format you want, right?
:-)
Assuming Dirac is somewhat frame based, I don't see why you couldn't do it. Heck, people even came up with hacks to store VBR MP3 and B-frames into avi
> Help system inferior
:)
In what way? For what it's worth, I find both KDE and WinXP help system totally worthless.
XP help always tells me to run this or that troubleshooter, which asks some stupid questions which are mostly irrelevant and have nothing to do with my problem, only having the blindingly obvious documented.
KDE help lacks troubleshooters, focuses mostly on setting up various software, and documents mostly the very obvious (as opposed to blindingly obvious in XP).
One day the network wasn't working in XP, I checked the device manager, and it said "Device not working. Error code 10.", having no clue what "Error code 10" means, I thought I'd have a look at the great help. It told me I should run network troubleshooter. After about 20 pages of irrelevant stuff, the troubleshooter gave up with me. The next day I checked, and networking was working again in XP. For all I know, code 10 means "don't feel like doing anything today"
The problem begins with those pesky carbon based lifeforms called humans. Their perception of quality is not as simple as a measurement of error between original and encoded->decoded picture, but a much more complex one, which can't be reliably measured by any numerical algorithms fit to run on PCs.
Complicate the problem further with the users feeding the codec source material of the most varying quality and form, no controlled viewing enviroment or even device.
A mostly bright movie viewed in a dark room on a bright screen, and you might get away with throwing away lots of the darker details without anyone noticing, saving bits to use on things the viewers might notice.
Having a very dark source, which the viewer then views on a crappy and dark screen with gamme ramped up to 2.0 or 3.0 or something just to see the movie, and you'll see nothign but some blinking blocks using the same settings as in the previous scenario.
The source has lots of noise in it? We'll chuck it all away. No point in storing noise. What? The users complain? But it's just noise... Oh? Film grain, not noise? Could've fooled me, and the computer.
Until computers evolve a bit, excellent results at the click of a button will only exist in the utopian dreams of the casual user. Until then, the casual user will just have to make do with spending more bits on the video to get good results, instead of spending more time learning options and finding the best ones for the particular source/quality target/viewer to get good results.
There are for sure plenty of tunables in any decent codec, even xvid, though I don't know how much the windows front end hides.
There are however some absolutely necessary things that don't change between the different mpeg4 codecs, and it has little to do with tuning the codec.
Not cropping out ALL of the black borders, and aligning/scaling the dimensions to multiples of 16 is a sure way to kill quality.
Trying to encode telecined material as is at the 29.97 ntsc framerate is also a foolproof way to create horrible quality. Same for encoding interlaced material as progressive.
Not even so called professionals get it right all the time even. There are plenty of very badly mastered DVDs out there...
What would help more than windows source code here, would be non-broken hardware, and hardware vendors publishing specs and programming information for their hardware.
When open source developers have to use guesses, trial and error, and pure luck to write drivers for something that is completely undocumented, it's no wonder that some hardware combinations don't always work.
And even for things that are supposed to be standardized, it doesn't always help, when hardware vendors ignore the standard. As an example are the LG CD-RW drives that would blow up in Mandrake Linux. A worryingly large part of driver sources these days seem to be work arounds for bugs in specific hardware.
The windows disc also only has drivers for the most common hardware, and you have to install the graphics card's own drivers from its cd before you get anything except 640x480 16 colour (XP might be using VESA for unrecognized cards and through that give you higher resolutions).
I've never had any problems with PNP in Linux myself. I'm not aware of any problems with PNP either, perhaps someone else knows better...
While windows sourcecode might be slightly helpful, to discover hardware specs, you have to keep in mind that windows doesn't have that many drivers of its own anyway, to extract hardware specs from.
My ultracheap slightly aged Asus (yuck) motherboard with the intel i815 chipset has a mindboggling feature, that when enabled, will reset the computer if the OS hangs or crashes.
My even more ancient Compaq prosignia VS, a 486 server, that is now collecting dust in the attic, allegedly (according to Compaq marketing at the time) had a similar feature.
Hardware watchdogs, auto reset.
Erm.....
SInfo... You wouldn't happen to be running Linux yourself on an i686 class machine, would you...
*waits for the bat of clue to enlighten the poster*
Linux and Windows didn't die even if VMS went Open, I doubt opening w32 sourcecode would do much.
"the USA Wide Web" already exists, sortof. Some TV Shows' and tv channel (American, of course) sites are US-only, they must filter based on TLD of the resolved host, and looking up IP's in arin :-)
I think it was Firefly that was limited to USA only, although I could be wrong.
I wish Slashdot would have an article on discussing 21st Century payment methods sometime...
.fi sites only when buying or selling anything online. Ah well, atleast it works. Money arrives instantly on the other person's account, or mine, and my bank's web interface is a hell of a lot better than paypal's monstrosity, which btw, must've taken hundreds of manhours to make so horrendous.
Is it just me, or is it somewhat laughable, that the best payment method when crossing national boundaries, still seems to be cash in an envelope?
Foolishly, I thought that paypal would be easy, and work internationally, oh how wrong I was. I eventually gave up, there seemed to be no way at all to transfer money into a paypal account. I ask the same as in the article, "the money is in my account, I want to transfer it, what's the problem?"... Sigh.
I'm limited to
Ok, so maybe I can understand that banking everywhere hasn't progressed into www yet, but come on, should transfers really take hours, let alone DAYS!? *grumble* Actually, I could live with days, if it just would work for more than one country.
I'm straying from my original intent... To ask the slashdot crowd, for ideas on a payment system of the future. Do the banks in your country use a system which you like/dislike? The banks might not listen or care, but brainstorming can never hurt.
But not as bad as the nitpicks, who don't realize that "an" is not a typo.
I live in the beforementioned cold country as well, and have never received any SMS-spam during my ~5 years as a cellphone owner.
My operator, Radiolinja, has never sent me any "information message", either. I believe you have to send an sms to a special number to 'subscribe' to those messages.
It's currently not possible for a restaurant owner to target users within 100metres of his restaurant. However, it IS possible for a cellphone owner to send a message to another special number, with the command "find restaurant", in finnish, and the GSM system will pin-point your cellphone (no Gps!), cross reference it with a map, and send you a list of the nearest restaurants. I imagine it's just one step from getting a MMS reply with customized ads from the restaurants nearby...