Breakthrough blah Electronic distribution blah blah publishing blah blah blah old media blah blah slow download blah marketing blah blah...
So, is the story worth reading?
If you like other stuff by King, yes. He does a good job of taking an old, traditional ghost story and making it more... solid, I suppose. I've never found him scary (with the exception of Pet Semetary), but I've always enjoyed his work, and this is no exception. Easily worth the $2.50. ______________________
I am a little confused as to the formats that the book comes in. First there is the Rocket eBook which is a pretty nifty thing. Second is from Barnes & Noble called a Glassbook format. Third, from Softlock it appears that the book is in pdf format.
There's also the Peanut Press.pdb format, which is very good for PalmOS or WinCE machines.
For me I would think that the pdf format would be the best since I can transort it to just about any platform. But I am wondering how they enable the copying protection that they mention. I have never heard of any type of copying protection like this available through a pdf file.
The new Acrobat Reader 4.05 includes 'WebBuy', which allows you to sell encrypted PDFs which unlock when the proper code is entered. And of course, you get the code when you buy it online. ______________________
Well, I must thank King for being ther first author I've heard of to do this e-text thing, and I hope others will follow. I'm not sure if reading books via the computer screen would be that comfortable though, unless there's a Palm-sized unit with lots of battery power and an easy-to-look-at-for-long-time-periods screen.
There is... it's called a Palm Pilot.;)
Seriously though, I just bought this story from Peanut Press last night, and I've bought several other books from them before. It's great, because their books work with either PalmOS or WinCE portables, meaning my Handspring Visor is now a portable library. And the selection is pretty good... it could stand some more stuff, but they're growing rather quickly for such a small establishment.
Now, I just have to wait on Peanut to release their Springboard book collections, which, according to an email I got yesterday, are due out 'in two weeks'. ______________________
The cool thing is that since Mac OS is based on BSD, and since BSD can generally run Linux apps with a mild amount of tweaking, companies like Loki could see a big jump in their market share by porting to BSD/Mac OS X, with little effort. Theoretically.
I doubt it'll happen though. The MacOS has its own standards for graphics and hardware interface, plus the added benifit of the MacOS GUI. I suppose it might be possible, but you'd get better results with a MacOS X specific port to take advantage of InputSprockets and such. OpenGL support might make it easier though, and if Apple would drop SoundSprocket in favor of OpenAL, it might make things even easier for companies like Loki and Westlake Interactive to build ports.
Now if we can just convince more developers to use OpenPlay networking instead of that horrid DirectPlay of MicroSoft's, we could have more games simultaneously released for Windows/MacOS X/ Linux, and the world would be a better place.:) ______________________
I thought about this for a couple of minutes and I think I can see a workable solution. Here's my idea, and my apologies go to anyone else who may have already thought of it.
The contributing volunteers shouldn't add sites to a blacklist or even a broad categorization. Instead they should apply a number of labels simultaneously to each page. Here are rough examples of what I mean, for three different sites:
"Entertainment+ExplicitHomoSexuality+Graphics" "Educational+Art+MildHeteroSexuality+Graphics" "Political+Literature+ExtremeRacism+Text" [rest snipped for space]
Now this makes sense! Take the best aspects of the RSAC idea, and apply it through the open blocking model the original author had... that could work! Perhaps your filters for things like racsim can be scaled from 1 to 5 (the way RSAC works), and individual sites/servers can be rated according to content that way... it's much better than a blanket declaration of whether the site is appropriate or not.
So, running with the standard RSAC rating categories, we can break it down:
o Violence - pretty clear by itself, but you might add subcategories for animated violence and such so your kids can still see their Batman cartoon sites, but not COPS sites.
o Sex - obvious 1-5 rating, with subcategories for sexuality, abortion issues, medical sites, etc...
o Nudity - Might be lumped in as a subcategory to sex... make exceptions for artwork or medical sites again...
o Language - This can be for the racism subcategory, as well as 'adult' lanugage.
Overall, I like this idea. Combined with the web-based 'meta-moderation', this could actually work! There's still the problem in that you can't keep up with all the sites being made, but still, it's a start.
Under this system, you might have a site marked like this:
Violence: 2
Animated Violence: 0 Blood: 0 Gunfire: 2 (Threats with Firearms, no shots) etc...
Sex: 2
Nudity: 3(Partial Frontal) Sexual Acts: 2 (Implied or Partially Hidden) Medical Value: 0 Artistic Value: 0
Anyway, that's not specific, but just the idea. The end-user program could allow people to set an overall category rating (i.e. no Language above Mild), or just by subcategories (Expletives up to Unblocked, while Racist blocked above 0, meaning any). ______________________
One large arguement I see from many of you is that censor proxies have too many valid sites blocked. Well, how about taking the Open Source/distributed.net approach? I know there are some for squid. How about a system where each morning/once a week/whatever a group of moderators are sent URLs to check up on. They do so, trying to determine if it's some directory, or the whole domain that gets listed. If there is porn (a set of standards would have to be established), they report back and it's added to the blacklist. I know I would be willing to take a few minutes every once in a while to do so. You could have a whole system of checks on the web site, if someone doesn't agree with a blacklisting, it's sent to two or three moderators and if they don't agree it's removed. If someone finds a new porn page, they can submit it and it's added to the queue. If there were hundreds of moderators, like Debian does with it's packs, each individual has only a small workload.
Unfortunately, it won't work.When you have a (self-appointed?) group of people deciding these things, it's going to get skewed towards their own personal biases. Unless you take an open,/. model, you can't avoid it. Even with 'meta-moderating' on the website like you propose, you're going to get a disproportionate amount of certain site content that the main moderators dislike to wade through.
And even then, the/. style of moderation depends on the honesty of its users... now how honest do you think the meta-moderators are going to be about adult sites?
For one thing, who is actually doing the moderating? It's basically two camps: the 'net savvy geeks, and the casual users who just point and click. Most of the point-and-clickers won't want to spend time doing this, so we're down to the geeks and the end-user protectionists. I think we've seen how all the geeks tend to respond to this on these boards, and with situations like Holland, we know how the protectionists work. So, where do we end up?
We end up with people who don't want to see porn either having to view it to verify those sites, or just trusting what's already been submitted and clicking 'Fair'. On the other side are the people with more liberal views of porn, who will mark such things 'Unfair' even if they may be rather graphic to others. Then we have the very few who will actually check out the sites, think it through, and then moderate appropriately once they've considered what they believe is 'acceptable' to the 'majority'. Of course, their own views on what the 'majority' finds acceptable are based on their own personal biases...
It's way, way too fuzzy. Is there a limit to how many times a site can be submitted as porn? What about subsites? What about old sites that change from porn to non-porn, or vice versa?
This would require tremendous amounts of people, or tremendous amounts of time for a small group (who would be much more likely to skew the results just based on sample size). I don't see either way as practical.
And to top it off, you have to educate people to use the end-software. It either has to be built into the web browsers (and we know how quickly things become non-standard that way), or a seperate program that has to be downloaded, installed, and set up. And yes, you have to make it cross platform (open source?), or it's useless to a majority of Internet users (not just Windows, but MacOS, *nix, and even BeOS). Otherwise you're only catering to a specific subset of the users, which is just as ineffective as having no blocking at all.
Won't it be fun if someone implements a non-standard blacklist in addition to the 'official' one for the blocker program, or even writes their own version of the blocker program? I'm sure we'll have many seperate organizations popping up with their own lists, just as we have many different blocking programs right now. We'll have the offical OpenBlock list, Anti-Gay Block list, No-Bare-Skin-At-All-Even-For-Medical-Sites Block list, etc... And you can bet people will be downloading the more strict versions based on their own preferences, meaning they may be stuck with blacklists as erroneous as the commercial ones are now. Back to square one...
So far the only method I've seen that's even halfway effective is the RSAC rating system. The only downfall has been that it's completely voluntary, and most commercial porn sites aren't going to bother with such things (either because they don't care, or because it would lower their hits which means lower ad revenue). I don't know how to make it more useful without legislation requiring rating every time you put up a new/altered webpage though. And we all know the pace of web development is too fast for such a thing.
I just don't see blocking software as effective in any form, because of its inherent flaws in determining what is or is not porn, and the personal choices of the companies/moderators as to what is appropriate for viewing. Even with your open content model, it's brought to its knees by the sheer numbers necessary for a fair moderation of content, or by other groups making competing (and error prone) alternate lists.
I actually like your idea, I just can't see a way for any central blocking system to work practically with web content. ______________________
Does anyone know why they're not suing Gateway for their Astro PC?
Probably because the Astro is boxy, beige and has a distinctive curve that isn't reminiscent of the iMac. If anything, it looks more like the old G3 All-In-One that Apple shipped a while back, though I'll admit the Gateway offering is classier in that respect.
Apple isn't after people manufacturing 'all in one box' enclosures', just PCs that are mimicing the iMac's style and color scheme. The all-in-one idea is fairly old (TRS-80, anyone?), it's the unique blend of transparent and colored plastics, combined with the unique shape, that Apple is being protective of. ______________________
This is a pretty good price, actually. The game itself is probably going to be $50 on the shelf, and the D&D supplement is $20... that's not including the audio CD and special DVD video, not to mention a signed copy of the manual. If they make a simultaneous Mac/PC release, I'll probably grab this special edition. ______________________
So, with a name like Joshua, will it finally let me nuke the Russians?
For those of you who are left scratching your heads at this joke, Joshua was the name of the computer in the movie Wargames. It was offically known as the WOPR, but its creator called it Joshua. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
Some replies to the original article
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MacOS X DP3
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There's no hot key for hiding an application as you switch to another. Hopefully they'll add that.
That's what the 'single window view' is for. Just click on the button in the top right of the window (where the resize button used to be) and only one window will show at a time. Click on another app/window in the taskbar, and the current window will drop to the taskbar as the other pops open.
The root user is currently called "root", but root's home directory is "Users/Administrator" and the documentation refers to the "Administrative" user. Please, Apple, don't change root to Administrator.
Well, most end-users won't know what 'root' means, but Administrator is easy to figure out. Owner would be even better, but doesn't make as much sense in a corporate environment. Besides, those in the know will still call it root amongst themselves anyway.;)
There are three view modes: by icon, as list, or in columns. In the icon view I couldn't find a way to set the DEFAULT icon size, which drove me nuts. The default icon size is WAY too big. The list view worked very well, but I couldn't find a way to set the defaults for this view either (why does Apple think that modification date is more important than file size?).
Most users don't even look at the file size of their documents unless there's some specific reason. Most of the time people leave their windows in Icon mode, which doesn't show either of those things. I keep my documents in List view, but turn off everything but the filename. And I'm sure you'll be able to at least turn off certain info you don't need, and hopefully be able to rearrange the columns as you want. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
...they were delivered to my door for free. I used to read a newspaper during my lunch break at work, but now that I'm in college, I generally don't get a chance to sit down and do that until late in the evening. By then, I'm either tied up at the computer, doing homework, or just trying to relax.
If I really wanted to read a paper, my campus library (or local library) has copies I can read for free. Admittedly, that's not as nice as sitting at your dinner table with a cup of tea/coffee/soda and just relaxing at the end of the day, but I also can't justify paying for something I won't necessarily get to use when it comes to my door every day.
Now, once I'm out of college, with a regular job, I may start subscribing to one again. Why? As some others have pointed out, local papers cover things that you won't hear about online or in national papers. And national papers also carry AP Newswire verified information, usually with more in-depth reporting than a web article, which has to be up fast to beat the other news sites to the punch.
I don't actually see newspapers dying until someone makes a magazine sized PDA with a hi-res color screen and decent storage/battery life for less than the cost of a yearly subscription. The best way to distribute such electronic newspapers/magazines, would probably be in the new WebBuy PDF format, in which you have to purchase an unlock code for your document. You could download today's edition just by plugging the reader into a phone jack and hitting a button, and your code is embedded into the reader. When you pay for your X weeks/months subscription, the code in their database is made valid, and when it expires, the code is made invalid.
Until that happens (and probably for a while after that even), newspapers will survive. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
One interesting thing about this article is that, near the end, it mentions that MS is concentrating on the LORG (large corporation) market. This isn't the first time I've read this; even last week I saw another article mentioning this.
SOHO (small-office/home office) users and consumers aren't quite the target audience for MS and their products. Which leaves another niche for companies to fill. It looks like Apple is exploiting this, with their iMacs and the Aqua interface to MacOS X, carving out a role not only with page designers, but also with general consumers.
For the Linux centric, this means two things: If you want to compete with Windows in large corporations, you have to be able to also compete with Office and Outlook, not just the server market. Plus, if you want Linux to make inroads in the consumer market, you may have to compete with Apple, plus there needs to be a simple interface and apps that are tight, easy to use, and low on bloatware features.
Right now, all I'm seeing is Linux being hyped as a server system, outside of SlashDot at least. When it comes to desktops, most people and companies would never consider it. Unless someone can market a Linux bundle that includes a decent (and Word compatible) office suite plus an intuitive, simple graphical interface, Linux will never break out of this niche it has carved as a server OS.
Personally, I'm glad MS is concentrating on LORGs, as it gives Apple a better chance with consumers. But I also like BeOS and Linux, and wish they could carve out pieces of those areas as well. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
Okay, so I might as well start this off. A lot of people in the fandom tend to look at the current X-books and say, "That makes no sense... I could do better!"
Well, here's my two cents: I'm all for hitting the big red Reset button.
I'm one of the few people that enjoyed it when certain other Marvel heroes got that treatement (I loved the new Iron Man), and was disappointed when they folded the characters back in the the old universe. I would like to see the X-Men get the same treatment. Virtually none of the other Marvel books use the 'mutant' idea, so they don't really fit into the rest of the Marvel continuity well.
My plot idea goes like this: the M'Krann crystal (the thing that holds reality together, and the object the Pheonix guards) has begun to crack. The strain of too many people time travelling and warping the fabric of reality (in very bad storylines) has taken its toll. If it shatters, all of reality will be destroyed. The only thing that can repair it is the Phoenix Force channeled through a mortal host.
Our candidates? Jean Grey, X-Man (ick), and Cable. In my version, good ol' Jeanie is now incompatible with the PF. According to Marvel storyline, the PF had to make a clone of Jean to use her as a host (that's how they got around killing her), and I'd say that's because Jean cannot contain it's power normally. Her offspring, however, would be able to.
X-Man is a creation of Mr. Sinister in an alternate timeline, using Jean Grey's and Scott Summer's (Cyclops) DNA. As such, he is very powerful, and capable of handling the PF. It chooses him, because even though Cable is Jean and Scott's natural child, his infection with the Technovirus weakens his ability to channel his powers.
To make a long story short, X-Man starts to fix the crystal, but lacks the experience with his powers to handle them, especially in addition to the Pheonix Force. He dies a bloody, awful death. (No, I don't like him at all.:) ). To save the universe, Cable steps in and takes the Pheonix, struggling to repair the crystal as reality bends and collapses...
... and wakes up, the only person to survive the warping that results. He still retains the Pheonix, but cannot access its power fully due to his Technovirus, which the PF seems unable to remove from him while he's controlling it. As the only survivor of the previous reality, Cable is the wild card in this one. He is Phoenix, although he cannot tap the full potential of its powers. He would become another background figure, like Sinister or Apocalypse, very rarely showing himself yet still manipulating things in the world to his own ends: the destruction of Apocalypse, and the freedom of mutantkind. In fact, it wouldn't be clear for some time that he did survive the changes... he may be a shadowy figure that appears in a few initial issues, and isn't fully revealed until a good way into the new books.
In this universe, it is the modern day. Jean Grey died on the moon during the Dark Pheonix Saga, and stayed dead. Time travel is virtually non-existant, so there is no Bishop, was no Rachael Summers (Jean & Scott's kid in yet another timeline), and Cable shouldn't exist either, as he died from the Technovirus as a child, since no one was able to time travel back to take him. The only reason he lives is the Phoenix force.
In this world, Senator Kelly has passed the Mutant Registration Act. All mutants must identify themselves as such to the government as soon as they discover their powers. They are not obviously marked as mutants, but anyone doing a reasonable (i.e. police) background check on their identification will find them marked as such.
There would be 4 major X-books in my version:
X-Men: Charles Xavier has died, and Cyclops has taken on the responsibility of training the next generation of young mutants, along with Storm. This book concentrates on the training of the new mutants, along with filling in backstory on what happened between Dark Pheonix and now
X-Factor: A government run group of mutants who enforce the Mutant Registration Act. Unlike the original book, these mutants believe they really are doing the right thing, protecting humanity from criminal mutants and providing law-abiding mutants a place to learn how to control their powers without going to the underground X-Men, whom they are currently hunting...
X-Force: A group of mutants, originally affiliated with the X-Men, who have broken ties with them to persue a more agressive stance against the Mutant Registration Act. They are more prone to use violent means to their ends, and government installations are their targets as often as evil mutants.
Wolverine: Let's face it, this guy is a loner, and Marvel would never get rid of this title anyway.:)
Anyhow, that's my personal recommendation. Anyone else want to share theirs? Maybe their favorite 'Dream Team' of mutants? ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
Why are Sabretooth and Wolverine fighting atop the Statue of Liberty and not in the Canadian wilderness? Must every action movie include symbols of American patriotism?
Because Xavier's School for the Gifted is in New York state, and the X-Men frequently have to save New York City from bad guys. At a guess, I'd say NYC was Magneto's choice for announcing his presence to the world in this movie. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
Wasn't this promised (and even available for ordering) several months ago?
This was a major 'oops' a while back. Apple originally had their 400/450/500 lineup when the G4's came out, but quickly discovered Motorola couldn't make enough 500 Mhz G4's to keep up at any reasonable pace, so they had to scale back to a 350/400/450 lineup... but kept the price the same. 'Oops' again. They quickly recanted and lowered the prices respectively. Now, we finally have the 400/450/500 lineup again... at the lower price. Woohoo!:) Unfortunately, I just bought an iMac, so I can't afford a nice G4... ah well. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
This was a pretty cool article. It's interesting to see just how much the Lisa team put into their creation, with the work and testing. If you want to read more about the development of the MacOS, Apple Confidential is a pretty good book for it. This article though has a lot more in depth info on the process that went into the creation of the interface (which was somewhat ripped off for the MacOS, since both were in development at overlapping points). ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
The card idea sounds much more marketable. Forget flash memory, minidiscs, and CD's - these are inexpensive (relatively - they said something of about $10 to produce one), shock resistant (nearly no moving parts - I'm sure they could be made very resistant to all but the heaviest shocks), small, fast, and very big (1tb on a 50 layer card? wow!).
I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).
This is what got my attention. Yea, those 140 GB discs are a neat idea, but not terrible practical just yet. However, the 1 GB cards are. If this company could make them affordable (i.e. about $20 each and reasonably priced read/write drives), this could finally begin to kill Zip/Jaz disks, and would definately put floppies to shame. I hate magnetic media...
My only concern is, again, the price. Flash cards could have killed the floppy disk years ago, but even now they're still too expensive per megabyte to do the trick. The key is to make these cards affordable, and we may finally be able to have reliable portable storage.
On another note... how about a device the size of a modern hard drive using this stuff?:) Like I said, I hate magnetic media... even if this is a little slower on the seek time, I'd like to see what could be done in making a hard drive replacement out of this stuff. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
How can you say "Christ is in heaven, not alive". His is in Heaven, and alive! This is not even contraversial Christian doctrine.
The bodily (not spiritual, bodily) resurrection of Jesus, the appearance of himself in his old body (remember Doubting Thomas) and the fact that he is alive today are basic qualifications for calling whatever it is you believe "Christianity".
Gerv Again, not all Christians believe the same as you (is there an echo in here?). I have personally spoken with people who do not believe he is 'alive' in the truest sense of the word. Yes, some of the Christians I have talked with look at it the way you do. But others do not. These people look at as, what need is there for a human physical body in heaven? So, I'm sorry, but I'll repeat myself one more time:
Not all Christians have the exact same belief as you. Thank you. Have a nice day. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
But He is! All Christians believe this... It seems odd to say that if He were alive today you would be in His church, when the only reason for anyone to be in His church is _because_ he is alive today!
Uh, no. Not 'all Christians' believe he is alive. Most that I know believe that yes, he died on the cross, and his soul arose. Because he was the 'son of God', he was able to take a physical form and speak with his disciples before ascending to heaven. To many (in my experience) Christ is in Heaven, not alive.
And yes, I realize some people do consider that alive... I'm just saying not all do. Be careful of sweeping generalizations...
Oh, and a minor disclaimer: I was raised Christian, but no longer follow the faith the way most consider. I agree with Katz on this one, many churches (and this is my direct experience) take views that go blatantly against Christ's teachings of peace and acceptance, yet still call themselves Christians. I no longer consider myself Christian because of the way the term has been perverted like this, and simply live by those teachings (plus a little Taoism) to try and live a good life. ____________________ Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun
The best reason to legalize digital signatures is for age verification purposes. Right now, the only way for a web site to verify a customer's age is if they provide a credit card #, a very poor method.
With standardized digital signatures, a central resource can be created where you register your signature, along with enough data to verify your identity. This agency (probably a government one) can then act as a server for verification. When you attempt to access an 'adult' site, you submit your digital signature, and the site checks with the agency's server to compare the signature you provided with one on record at the agency. If it's a match, you're allowed in. If not, when the vendor requests verification, the agency's server would simply give them an error stating that you're not subscribed, and therefor not of age. (I call it a subscription, but no fees should be charged if it's a government run agency.)
It's more secure than the credit card method, and finally makes it easier to simply enforce standard laws about providing such material to minors, since there would be a way for web vendors to verify their customer's age. Of course, this is difficult to enforce outside of sites that literally proclaim themselves to host porn; but for those who do, regular federal laws can be enforced without as much controversy. It might help get this 'Internet porn' media-hype off our backs.
The biggest flaw is, like I said, someone has to run the confirmation agency, and that agency has to be able to verify your identity and age. The records at that agency should be very secure, and none of that would be given out to anyone verifying your age via signature... if you're not of legal age, that particular agency would simply deny you to sign up with their service, meaning you can't verify your age with the vendor.
The other flaw is that vendors could use the public key service that allows your signature to verify other documents to figure out who you are, and keep a database, but this isn't any different from a regular porn shop keeping credit card records, so it's a moot point. You lose a little anonymity, but any company that fails to keep its records secure won't get much buisness in the long run anyway.
This seems to be the best method for allowing adults to legally get what they want with the minimal amount of hassle, while preventing minors from doing the same (within reason... no system is perfect, yadda-yadda-yadda, this is just the best one I can think of that's not too arbitrarily restrictive.)
And of course, this has no legal effect on Usenet or mailing lists, since subscribing to such content is just like subscribing to Playboy... you made your intent clear by requesting it in the first place; whereas web shops are like physical stores that you could wander into by accident without knowing what they were (until you saw the dildo display, at least:) ). At that point, it becomes the vendor's responsibility to shoo kids right back out the door.
Please, feel free to comment... I'd like to know just how many people think this would be practical and/or effective.
I wonder why they only released the second one, though?
Here's the reason:
There were three games in this series: Marathon Marathon 2: Durandal Marathon Infinity
Of those though, there were only two code-bases: M.2 and M.Inf shared the same code base, with only minor tweaks between them (mostly in the Mac-specific stuff, such as InputSprocket support and a few bug-fixes). You could actually play M.2 maps with M.Inf, and didn't have to tweak them at all.
So, what you're getting is still the "mature" code for the game.
I wonder why they only released the second one, though? Here's the reason: There were three games in this series: Marathon Marathon 2: Durandal Marathon Infinity Of those though, there were only two code-bases: M.2 and M.Inf shared the same code base, with only minor tweaks between them (mostly in the Mac-specific stuff, such as InputSprocket support and a few bug-fixes). You could actually play M.2 maps with M.Inf, and didn't have to tweak them at all. So, what you're getting is still the "mature" code for the game.
Black holes do grow in a sense, but it's terribly gradual. As they accumulate matter, they become more dense. More dense means a higher gravitational pull, which means a larger area is affected by it. So, the object itself may not grow much, but its event horizon can slowly expand over time. Still, you're more likely to have a rogue hole drift into the solar system and hit something than have one expand enough to affect us in any amount of time that matters.
According to this C|NET article, they were advertising the software on their website as DVD cracking software...This Wired article names sites like krackdown.com and dvd-copy.com which sound like piracy sites to me. It seem they advertised the DeCSS software as DVD copying software. I expect this to be fodder for the DVD-CCA's lawyers next week.
I never did see the original web site, but honestly, C|Net never gives a specific place they took the quote from. I'd be curious to see how they attribute it to the authors of the program.
As to the sites listed, after the lawsuit was filed, the owners let the program go and be distributed on a lot of sites. True, mostly crack/hack sites picked it up, but those don't have any direct relation to the authors.
Damn people, you amaze me. This is about Apple being pricks about the whole Skins thing. IfMicrosoft did the same thing there would be enough noise to wake the dead. However mentionApple and all the Mac Nuts come out of the woodwork and make this into another Microsoft bashingsession. Lets get real here boys and girls. Apple is INFRINDGING on our rights to SKINsomething, not copy the features of an OS, not taking code from a program...
It's spelled 'infringing', and no, Apple's not doing that. They asked the sites (maybe a bit sternly, I don't know) to remove the themes, but AFAIK no legal action was threatened. Probably because they wouldn't have a leg to stand on, but still, Apple isn't playing dictator.
BTW: Is it just me, or did the previous post sound more like a flame than a thoughtful comment? Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
So, is the story worth reading?
If you like other stuff by King, yes. He does a good job of taking an old, traditional ghost story and making it more... solid, I suppose. I've never found him scary (with the exception of Pet Semetary), but I've always enjoyed his work, and this is no exception. Easily worth the $2.50.
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There's also the Peanut Press .pdb format, which is very good for PalmOS or WinCE machines.
For me I would think that the pdf format would be the best since I can transort it to just about any platform. But I am wondering how they enable the copying protection that they mention. I have never heard of any type of copying protection like this available through a pdf file.
The new Acrobat Reader 4.05 includes 'WebBuy', which allows you to sell encrypted PDFs which unlock when the proper code is entered. And of course, you get the code when you buy it online.
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There is... it's called a Palm Pilot. ;)
Seriously though, I just bought this story from Peanut Press last night, and I've bought several other books from them before. It's great, because their books work with either PalmOS or WinCE portables, meaning my Handspring Visor is now a portable library. And the selection is pretty good... it could stand some more stuff, but they're growing rather quickly for such a small establishment.
Now, I just have to wait on Peanut to release their Springboard book collections, which, according to an email I got yesterday, are due out 'in two weeks'.
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I doubt it'll happen though. The MacOS has its own standards for graphics and hardware interface, plus the added benifit of the MacOS GUI. I suppose it might be possible, but you'd get better results with a MacOS X specific port to take advantage of InputSprockets and such. OpenGL support might make it easier though, and if Apple would drop SoundSprocket in favor of OpenAL, it might make things even easier for companies like Loki and Westlake Interactive to build ports.
Now if we can just convince more developers to use OpenPlay networking instead of that horrid DirectPlay of MicroSoft's, we could have more games simultaneously released for Windows/MacOS X/ Linux, and the world would be a better place. :)
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The contributing volunteers shouldn't add sites to a blacklist or even a broad categorization. Instead they should apply a number of labels simultaneously to each page. Here are rough examples of what I mean, for three different sites:
"Entertainment+ExplicitHomoSexuality+Graphics"
"Educational+Art+MildHeteroSexuality+Graphics"
"Political+Literature+ExtremeRacism+Text"
[rest snipped for space]
Now this makes sense! Take the best aspects of the RSAC idea, and apply it through the open blocking model the original author had... that could work! Perhaps your filters for things like racsim can be scaled from 1 to 5 (the way RSAC works), and individual sites/servers can be rated according to content that way... it's much better than a blanket declaration of whether the site is appropriate or not.
So, running with the standard RSAC rating categories, we can break it down:
o Violence - pretty clear by itself, but you might add subcategories for animated violence and such so your kids can still see their Batman cartoon sites, but not COPS sites.
o Sex - obvious 1-5 rating, with subcategories for sexuality, abortion issues, medical sites, etc...
o Nudity - Might be lumped in as a subcategory to sex... make exceptions for artwork or medical sites again...
o Language - This can be for the racism subcategory, as well as 'adult' lanugage.
Overall, I like this idea. Combined with the web-based 'meta-moderation', this could actually work! There's still the problem in that you can't keep up with all the sites being made, but still, it's a start.
Under this system, you might have a site marked like this:
Violence: 2
Animated Violence: 0
Blood: 0
Gunfire: 2 (Threats with Firearms, no shots)
etc...
Sex: 2
Nudity: 3(Partial Frontal)
Sexual Acts: 2 (Implied or Partially Hidden)
Medical Value: 0
Artistic Value: 0
Language: 3
Explitives: 2 (Mild Explitives)
Racist Lanuage: 0
Sexist Language: 3 (Strong)
etc...
Anyway, that's not specific, but just the idea. The end-user program could allow people to set an overall category rating (i.e. no Language above Mild), or just by subcategories (Expletives up to Unblocked, while Racist blocked above 0, meaning any).
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Unfortunately, it won't work.When you have a (self-appointed?) group of people deciding these things, it's going to get skewed towards their own personal biases. Unless you take an open, /. model, you can't avoid it. Even with 'meta-moderating' on the website like you propose, you're going to get a disproportionate amount of certain site content that the main moderators dislike to wade through.
And even then, the /. style of moderation depends on the honesty of its users... now how honest do you think the meta-moderators are going to be about adult sites?
For one thing, who is actually doing the moderating? It's basically two camps: the 'net savvy geeks, and the casual users who just point and click. Most of the point-and-clickers won't want to spend time doing this, so we're down to the geeks and the end-user protectionists. I think we've seen how all the geeks tend to respond to this on these boards, and with situations like Holland, we know how the protectionists work. So, where do we end up?
We end up with people who don't want to see porn either having to view it to verify those sites, or just trusting what's already been submitted and clicking 'Fair'. On the other side are the people with more liberal views of porn, who will mark such things 'Unfair' even if they may be rather graphic to others. Then we have the very few who will actually check out the sites, think it through, and then moderate appropriately once they've considered what they believe is 'acceptable' to the 'majority'. Of course, their own views on what the 'majority' finds acceptable are based on their own personal biases...
It's way, way too fuzzy. Is there a limit to how many times a site can be submitted as porn? What about subsites? What about old sites that change from porn to non-porn, or vice versa?
This would require tremendous amounts of people, or tremendous amounts of time for a small group (who would be much more likely to skew the results just based on sample size). I don't see either way as practical.
And to top it off, you have to educate people to use the end-software. It either has to be built into the web browsers (and we know how quickly things become non-standard that way), or a seperate program that has to be downloaded, installed, and set up. And yes, you have to make it cross platform (open source?), or it's useless to a majority of Internet users (not just Windows, but MacOS, *nix, and even BeOS). Otherwise you're only catering to a specific subset of the users, which is just as ineffective as having no blocking at all.
Won't it be fun if someone implements a non-standard blacklist in addition to the 'official' one for the blocker program, or even writes their own version of the blocker program? I'm sure we'll have many seperate organizations popping up with their own lists, just as we have many different blocking programs right now. We'll have the offical OpenBlock list, Anti-Gay Block list, No-Bare-Skin-At-All-Even-For-Medical-Sites Block list, etc... And you can bet people will be downloading the more strict versions based on their own preferences, meaning they may be stuck with blacklists as erroneous as the commercial ones are now. Back to square one...
So far the only method I've seen that's even halfway effective is the RSAC rating system. The only downfall has been that it's completely voluntary, and most commercial porn sites aren't going to bother with such things (either because they don't care, or because it would lower their hits which means lower ad revenue). I don't know how to make it more useful without legislation requiring rating every time you put up a new/altered webpage though. And we all know the pace of web development is too fast for such a thing.
I just don't see blocking software as effective in any form, because of its inherent flaws in determining what is or is not porn, and the personal choices of the companies/moderators as to what is appropriate for viewing. Even with your open content model, it's brought to its knees by the sheer numbers necessary for a fair moderation of content, or by other groups making competing (and error prone) alternate lists.
I actually like your idea, I just can't see a way for any central blocking system to work practically with web content.
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Probably because the Astro is boxy, beige and has a distinctive curve that isn't reminiscent of the iMac. If anything, it looks more like the old G3 All-In-One that Apple shipped a while back, though I'll admit the Gateway offering is classier in that respect.
Apple isn't after people manufacturing 'all in one box' enclosures', just PCs that are mimicing the iMac's style and color scheme. The all-in-one idea is fairly old (TRS-80, anyone?), it's the unique blend of transparent and colored plastics, combined with the unique shape, that Apple is being protective of.
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This is a pretty good price, actually. The game itself is probably going to be $50 on the shelf, and the D&D supplement is $20... that's not including the audio CD and special DVD video, not to mention a signed copy of the manual. If they make a simultaneous Mac/PC release, I'll probably grab this special edition.
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For those of you who are left scratching your heads at this joke, Joshua was the name of the computer in the movie Wargames. It was offically known as the WOPR, but its creator called it Joshua.
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That's what the 'single window view' is for. Just click on the button in the top right of the window (where the resize button used to be) and only one window will show at a time. Click on another app/window in the taskbar, and the current window will drop to the taskbar as the other pops open.
The root user is currently called "root", but root's home directory is "Users/Administrator" and the documentation refers to the "Administrative" user. Please, Apple, don't change root to Administrator.
Well, most end-users won't know what 'root' means, but Administrator is easy to figure out. Owner would be even better, but doesn't make as much sense in a corporate environment. Besides, those in the know will still call it root amongst themselves anyway. ;)
There are three view modes: by icon, as list, or in columns. In the icon view I couldn't find a way to set the DEFAULT icon size, which drove me nuts. The default icon size is WAY too big. The list view worked very well, but I couldn't find a way to set the defaults for this view either (why does Apple think that modification date is more important than file size?).
Most users don't even look at the file size of their documents unless there's some specific reason. Most of the time people leave their windows in Icon mode, which doesn't show either of those things. I keep my documents in List view, but turn off everything but the filename. And I'm sure you'll be able to at least turn off certain info you don't need, and hopefully be able to rearrange the columns as you want.
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...they were delivered to my door for free. I used to read a newspaper during my lunch break at work, but now that I'm in college, I generally don't get a chance to sit down and do that until late in the evening. By then, I'm either tied up at the computer, doing homework, or just trying to relax.
If I really wanted to read a paper, my campus library (or local library) has copies I can read for free. Admittedly, that's not as nice as sitting at your dinner table with a cup of tea/coffee/soda and just relaxing at the end of the day, but I also can't justify paying for something I won't necessarily get to use when it comes to my door every day.
Now, once I'm out of college, with a regular job, I may start subscribing to one again. Why? As some others have pointed out, local papers cover things that you won't hear about online or in national papers. And national papers also carry AP Newswire verified information, usually with more in-depth reporting than a web article, which has to be up fast to beat the other news sites to the punch.
I don't actually see newspapers dying until someone makes a magazine sized PDA with a hi-res color screen and decent storage/battery life for less than the cost of a yearly subscription. The best way to distribute such electronic newspapers/magazines, would probably be in the new WebBuy PDF format, in which you have to purchase an unlock code for your document. You could download today's edition just by plugging the reader into a phone jack and hitting a button, and your code is embedded into the reader. When you pay for your X weeks/months subscription, the code in their database is made valid, and when it expires, the code is made invalid.
Until that happens (and probably for a while after that even), newspapers will survive.
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One interesting thing about this article is that, near the end, it mentions that MS is concentrating on the LORG (large corporation) market. This isn't the first time I've read this; even last week I saw another article mentioning this.
SOHO (small-office/home office) users and consumers aren't quite the target audience for MS and their products. Which leaves another niche for companies to fill. It looks like Apple is exploiting this, with their iMacs and the Aqua interface to MacOS X, carving out a role not only with page designers, but also with general consumers.
For the Linux centric, this means two things: If you want to compete with Windows in large corporations, you have to be able to also compete with Office and Outlook, not just the server market. Plus, if you want Linux to make inroads in the consumer market, you may have to compete with Apple, plus there needs to be a simple interface and apps that are tight, easy to use, and low on bloatware features.
Right now, all I'm seeing is Linux being hyped as a server system, outside of SlashDot at least. When it comes to desktops, most people and companies would never consider it. Unless someone can market a Linux bundle that includes a decent (and Word compatible) office suite plus an intuitive, simple graphical interface, Linux will never break out of this niche it has carved as a server OS.
Personally, I'm glad MS is concentrating on LORGs, as it gives Apple a better chance with consumers. But I also like BeOS and Linux, and wish they could carve out pieces of those areas as well.
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Okay, so I might as well start this off. A lot of people in the fandom tend to look at the current X-books and say, "That makes no sense... I could do better!"
:) ). To save the universe, Cable steps in and takes the Pheonix, struggling to repair the crystal as reality bends and collapses...
:)
Well, here's my two cents: I'm all for hitting the big red Reset button.
I'm one of the few people that enjoyed it when certain other Marvel heroes got that treatement (I loved the new Iron Man), and was disappointed when they folded the characters back in the the old universe. I would like to see the X-Men get the same treatment. Virtually none of the other Marvel books use the 'mutant' idea, so they don't really fit into the rest of the Marvel continuity well.
My plot idea goes like this: the M'Krann crystal (the thing that holds reality together, and the object the Pheonix guards) has begun to crack. The strain of too many people time travelling and warping the fabric of reality (in very bad storylines) has taken its toll. If it shatters, all of reality will be destroyed. The only thing that can repair it is the Phoenix Force channeled through a mortal host.
Our candidates? Jean Grey, X-Man (ick), and Cable. In my version, good ol' Jeanie is now incompatible with the PF. According to Marvel storyline, the PF had to make a clone of Jean to use her as a host (that's how they got around killing her), and I'd say that's because Jean cannot contain it's power normally. Her offspring, however, would be able to.
X-Man is a creation of Mr. Sinister in an alternate timeline, using Jean Grey's and Scott Summer's (Cyclops) DNA. As such, he is very powerful, and capable of handling the PF. It chooses him, because even though Cable is Jean and Scott's natural child, his infection with the Technovirus weakens his ability to channel his powers.
To make a long story short, X-Man starts to fix the crystal, but lacks the experience with his powers to handle them, especially in addition to the Pheonix Force. He dies a bloody, awful death. (No, I don't like him at all.
... and wakes up, the only person to survive the warping that results. He still retains the Pheonix, but cannot access its power fully due to his Technovirus, which the PF seems unable to remove from him while he's controlling it. As the only survivor of the previous reality, Cable is the wild card in this one. He is Phoenix, although he cannot tap the full potential of its powers. He would become another background figure, like Sinister or Apocalypse, very rarely showing himself yet still manipulating things in the world to his own ends: the destruction of Apocalypse, and the freedom of mutantkind. In fact, it wouldn't be clear for some time that he did survive the changes... he may be a shadowy figure that appears in a few initial issues, and isn't fully revealed until a good way into the new books.
In this universe, it is the modern day. Jean Grey died on the moon during the Dark Pheonix Saga, and stayed dead. Time travel is virtually non-existant, so there is no Bishop, was no Rachael Summers (Jean & Scott's kid in yet another timeline), and Cable shouldn't exist either, as he died from the Technovirus as a child, since no one was able to time travel back to take him. The only reason he lives is the Phoenix force.
In this world, Senator Kelly has passed the Mutant Registration Act. All mutants must identify themselves as such to the government as soon as they discover their powers. They are not obviously marked as mutants, but anyone doing a reasonable (i.e. police) background check on their identification will find them marked as such.
There would be 4 major X-books in my version:
X-Men: Charles Xavier has died, and Cyclops has taken on the responsibility of training the next generation of young mutants, along with Storm. This book concentrates on the training of the new mutants, along with filling in backstory on what happened between Dark Pheonix and now
X-Factor: A government run group of mutants who enforce the Mutant Registration Act. Unlike the original book, these mutants believe they really are doing the right thing, protecting humanity from criminal mutants and providing law-abiding mutants a place to learn how to control their powers without going to the underground X-Men, whom they are currently hunting...
X-Force: A group of mutants, originally affiliated with the X-Men, who have broken ties with them to persue a more agressive stance against the Mutant Registration Act. They are more prone to use violent means to their ends, and government installations are their targets as often as evil mutants.
Wolverine: Let's face it, this guy is a loner, and Marvel would never get rid of this title anyway.
Anyhow, that's my personal recommendation. Anyone else want to share theirs? Maybe their favorite 'Dream Team' of mutants?
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Because Xavier's School for the Gifted is in New York state, and the X-Men frequently have to save New York City from bad guys. At a guess, I'd say NYC was Magneto's choice for announcing his presence to the world in this movie.
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This was a major 'oops' a while back. Apple originally had their 400/450/500 lineup when the G4's came out, but quickly discovered Motorola couldn't make enough 500 Mhz G4's to keep up at any reasonable pace, so they had to scale back to a 350/400/450 lineup... but kept the price the same. 'Oops' again. They quickly recanted and lowered the prices respectively. Now, we finally have the 400/450/500 lineup again... at the lower price. Woohoo! :) Unfortunately, I just bought an iMac, so I can't afford a nice G4... ah well.
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This was a pretty cool article. It's interesting to see just how much the Lisa team put into their creation, with the work and testing. If you want to read more about the development of the MacOS, Apple Confidential is a pretty good book for it. This article though has a lot more in depth info on the process that went into the creation of the interface (which was somewhat ripped off for the MacOS, since both were in development at overlapping points).
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I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).
This is what got my attention. Yea, those 140 GB discs are a neat idea, but not terrible practical just yet. However, the 1 GB cards are. If this company could make them affordable (i.e. about $20 each and reasonably priced read/write drives), this could finally begin to kill Zip/Jaz disks, and would definately put floppies to shame. I hate magnetic media...
My only concern is, again, the price. Flash cards could have killed the floppy disk years ago, but even now they're still too expensive per megabyte to do the trick. The key is to make these cards affordable, and we may finally be able to have reliable portable storage.
On another note... how about a device the size of a modern hard drive using this stuff? :) Like I said, I hate magnetic media... even if this is a little slower on the seek time, I'd like to see what could be done in making a hard drive replacement out of this stuff.
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The bodily (not spiritual, bodily) resurrection of Jesus, the appearance of himself in his old body (remember Doubting Thomas) and the fact that he is alive today are basic qualifications for calling whatever it is you believe "Christianity".
Gerv Again, not all Christians believe the same as you (is there an echo in here?). I have personally spoken with people who do not believe he is 'alive' in the truest sense of the word. Yes, some of the Christians I have talked with look at it the way you do. But others do not. These people look at as, what need is there for a human physical body in heaven? So, I'm sorry, but I'll repeat myself one more time:
Not all Christians have the exact same belief as you. Thank you. Have a nice day.
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Uh, no. Not 'all Christians' believe he is alive. Most that I know believe that yes, he died on the cross, and his soul arose. Because he was the 'son of God', he was able to take a physical form and speak with his disciples before ascending to heaven. To many (in my experience) Christ is in Heaven, not alive.
And yes, I realize some people do consider that alive... I'm just saying not all do. Be careful of sweeping generalizations...
Oh, and a minor disclaimer: I was raised Christian, but no longer follow the faith the way most consider. I agree with Katz on this one, many churches (and this is my direct experience) take views that go blatantly against Christ's teachings of peace and acceptance, yet still call themselves Christians. I no longer consider myself Christian because of the way the term has been perverted like this, and simply live by those teachings (plus a little Taoism) to try and live a good life.
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The best reason to legalize digital signatures is for age verification purposes. Right now, the only way for a web site to verify a customer's age is if they provide a credit card #, a very poor method.
:) ). At that point, it becomes the vendor's responsibility to shoo kids right back out the door.
With standardized digital signatures, a central resource can be created where you register your signature, along with enough data to verify your identity. This agency (probably a government one) can then act as a server for verification. When you attempt to access an 'adult' site, you submit your digital signature, and the site checks with the agency's server to compare the signature you provided with one on record at the agency. If it's a match, you're allowed in. If not, when the vendor requests verification, the agency's server would simply give them an error stating that you're not subscribed, and therefor not of age. (I call it a subscription, but no fees should be charged if it's a government run agency.)
It's more secure than the credit card method, and finally makes it easier to simply enforce standard laws about providing such material to minors, since there would be a way for web vendors to verify their customer's age. Of course, this is difficult to enforce outside of sites that literally proclaim themselves to host porn; but for those who do, regular federal laws can be enforced without as much controversy. It might help get this 'Internet porn' media-hype off our backs.
The biggest flaw is, like I said, someone has to run the confirmation agency, and that agency has to be able to verify your identity and age. The records at that agency should be very secure, and none of that would be given out to anyone verifying your age via signature... if you're not of legal age, that particular agency would simply deny you to sign up with their service, meaning you can't verify your age with the vendor.
The other flaw is that vendors could use the public key service that allows your signature to verify other documents to figure out who you are, and keep a database, but this isn't any different from a regular porn shop keeping credit card records, so it's a moot point. You lose a little anonymity, but any company that fails to keep its records secure won't get much buisness in the long run anyway.
This seems to be the best method for allowing adults to legally get what they want with the minimal amount of hassle, while preventing minors from doing the same (within reason... no system is perfect, yadda-yadda-yadda, this is just the best one I can think of that's not too arbitrarily restrictive.)
And of course, this has no legal effect on Usenet or mailing lists, since subscribing to such content is just like subscribing to Playboy... you made your intent clear by requesting it in the first place; whereas web shops are like physical stores that you could wander into by accident without knowing what they were (until you saw the dildo display, at least
Please, feel free to comment... I'd like to know just how many people think this would be practical and/or effective.
I wonder why they only released the second one, though?
Here's the reason:
There were three games in this series:
Marathon
Marathon 2: Durandal
Marathon Infinity
Of those though, there were only two code-bases: M.2 and M.Inf shared the same code base, with only minor tweaks between them (mostly in the Mac-specific stuff, such as InputSprocket support and a few bug-fixes). You could actually play M.2 maps with M.Inf, and didn't have to tweak them at all.
So, what you're getting is still the "mature" code for the game.
I wonder why they only released the second one, though? Here's the reason: There were three games in this series: Marathon Marathon 2: Durandal Marathon Infinity Of those though, there were only two code-bases: M.2 and M.Inf shared the same code base, with only minor tweaks between them (mostly in the Mac-specific stuff, such as InputSprocket support and a few bug-fixes). You could actually play M.2 maps with M.Inf, and didn't have to tweak them at all. So, what you're getting is still the "mature" code for the game.
Black holes do grow in a sense, but it's terribly gradual. As they accumulate matter, they become more dense. More dense means a higher gravitational pull, which means a larger area is affected by it. So, the object itself may not grow much, but its event horizon can slowly expand over time. Still, you're more likely to have a rogue hole drift into the solar system and hit something than have one expand enough to affect us in any amount of time that matters.
According to this C|NET article, they were advertising the software on their website as DVD cracking software...This Wired article names sites like krackdown.com and dvd-copy.com which sound like piracy sites to me. It seem they advertised the DeCSS software as DVD copying software. I expect this to be fodder for the DVD-CCA's lawyers next week.
I never did see the original web site, but honestly, C|Net never gives a specific place they took the quote from. I'd be curious to see how they attribute it to the authors of the program.
As to the sites listed, after the lawsuit was filed, the owners let the program go and be distributed on a lot of sites. True, mostly crack/hack sites picked it up, but those don't have any direct relation to the authors.
Damn people, you amaze me. This is about Apple being pricks about the whole Skins thing. IfMicrosoft did the same thing there would be enough noise to wake the dead. However mentionApple and all the Mac Nuts come out of the woodwork and make this into another Microsoft bashingsession. Lets get real here boys and girls. Apple is INFRINDGING on our rights to SKINsomething, not copy the features of an OS, not taking code from a program...
It's spelled 'infringing', and no, Apple's not doing that. They asked the sites (maybe a bit sternly, I don't know) to remove the themes, but AFAIK no legal action was threatened. Probably because they wouldn't have a leg to stand on, but still, Apple isn't playing dictator.
BTW: Is it just me, or did the previous post sound more like a flame than a thoughtful comment? Oh well.