I have heard stories of cable companies coming down *extremely* hard on uncappers, doing things like banning them from having cable service for life and other such actions.
Given this, and the actions of DirectTV towards those who buy smartcards, I wonder what the cable companies will do.
Will they ignore those who download these firmwares for the advanced features like the remote terminals and have no intention of uncapping, or will they treat everyone who re-flashes their firmware as a "criminal".
What I love about mindstorms is its hackability. sure, the default programming "language" it comes with is limited and annoying to use, but reflash it with something like BrickOS and you can program it in C. very cool stuff, sorry to see it go.
what would be *really* cool is they higher diffiuclties were made more difficult not only becuase of AI changes but plot and map changes, this would be more work, but it would dramatically increase what you term the "replay value" of the game.
Ever watched a video on a 3 inch screen? it ain't fun.
One of the reasons people like the ipod is it's small size, it fits nicely in the pocket. This thing looks more liek it would be a hardcover book in your pocket.
On the other hand, I feel certain microsoft will continue their long tradition of being hip and innovative and come out with a truly revolutionary product
obviously things (especially laptops) can't be expected to "last until the end of time" however, that's not the point. Apple obviously has a QA problem, and they need to fix it (by this I mean offer a solution, not necessarily free), Even if it occured out of warrenty.
I am really annoyed at all the people whining about the iPods, however. The complaint was somewhat justified when apple had no replacement program, but now that they do, I see no problem. It is unfortunate that the batteries cost $99, but remember, these are not Alkaline batteries, they are lithium polymer cells that are very complex and costly to produce.
Companies almost never cover batteries in warrenty, as they are known to degrade over time. Don't believe me? check one out.
My thoughts exactly. When I read this article the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" sprung to mind. I have never seen a "does everything" device that actually worked well.
One of the strengths of the wikipedia is it's rapid update time, I can post an article, then 2 seconds later, you can see that post, edit it etc. If wikipedia was mirrored, then any changes made would have to be propagated across the mirrors, resulting in delays.
but thats not the half of it. consider the following
at 10:01:01 Alice adds a sentence to article X on mirror 1 at 10:01:01 Bob notices that the whole paragraph in article X is wrong, and deletes it on server 2
now then, how do we synch these?
mirroring wikipedia would make basic editing and retrieval slow and difficult, and result in inconsistent data across the mirrors
It looks like it tracks both timing and pitch, sounds nifty, must have one hell of a signal analysis software in it to figure out whether the person is on target.
I hope it has a good music selection, sounds like a cool game, kinda like a vocal Dance Dance Revolution
Slashdot is a technology oriented website, i can say with some certainty that everyone here has a fairly comprehensive knowledge of computers. However, this is not true of the rest of the world. For people who know little about computers aside from basic email checking and word processing, sending handwritten documents and other such things electronically is only feasible by fax. I have helped several people who send documents of this nature on a regular basis set up scanners they had purchased. They were absolutely mystified at how to set up the scanner and email documents that were scanned with it. Fax machines are far far easier to use than email and a scanner, and the recipient gets a paper copy of the document, something which is mentally comforting for many.
from the article: to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.
This may or may not be an exaggeration, I have no idea, but Shirky makes a good point. When the vast majority of a society is violating a certain law, it is a sign that the law, not the society needs to change.
At this time, it seems that the RIAA is winning, and we are moving inexorably towards a world where large corporations control what people do with there computers. However, because there is so little popular respect at the moment for copyright law, it follows that eventually those laws will change.
Over the next 5-10 years, I predict that many laws will be completely rewritten to better accommodate the changes that the internet has brought upon society. Many of these changes will be for the better, and the end result will almost certainly be a more free and open society. Unfortunately, democracies are slow to act, so there will be years more of legal confusions and abuses of power before things finally straighten out.
(disclaimer: I don't have a TI-89, and I haven't messed with the emulator)
It looks like a cool interface, but I have a few questions
1) the screenshot I saw made looked like some kind of pseudo unix shell. This is all fine and good with a normal computer, but with a graphing calc, where you have no QWERTY keyboard, a GUI is much faster. Is one available for this OS, or do we have do do everything pecking keys in alpha mode?
2) having games on a graphing calculator is cool for when boredom strikes, but the main reason for investing in a graphing calculator, particularly a high-end one like the TI-89 is its ability to do advanced math functions. are these still available, or will they have to be developed third party? TI put a large number of very complicated math functions into their OS, and the usefulness of this OS would be severely limited if these functions were not available or had to be re-implemented.
At any rate, this looks like an interesting project, and they seem to have made some good progress.
Is retrieving your songs going to require signing up for the service?
Yes, in order to download the songs, you will need to sign up for the Itunes service. I'm not sure if you need to give them a credit card number for a free song, but my guess would be that you do, given that deals like this are partially designed to give iTunes new customers.
Also what if then the redemption goes wrong (you entere a code wrong/etc..) and you have millions of people getting billed for songs they thought were going to be free?
Apple has built gift card functionality into their music store, this isn't a special set up. If you were to type in a number incorrectly, It would tell you that the number was invalid, not just bill your account.
Giveaways like this serve to increase a user-base out of which many will never return.
Thats true, but lets say that out of all of McDonalds customers, 50 million actually redeem their songs. Even if a tiny percentage return, thats a large number of returning customers.
From the article: "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."
I honestly hope that this program has a more complex take on IP than this. I can easily think of many, many things on line that can be obtained for free, legally. (the entire contents of sourceforge comes to mind.) IP law is phenomenally complicated and cannot be boiled down to simple slogans and sound bytes.
Microsoft Autodrive XP has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Please stand by while Microsoft Autodrive XP sends an error report in order to serve you bet(&*....[CARRIER LOST]
The problem with electronic voting is that if there is another "floridagate" noone will ever know. I would have no problem with electronic voting if there was some paper trail and if the companies opened thier hardware and software for independent investigation. However, this is clearly not the case.
As much as this would make things easier, think about the negative aspects. Software is never perfect, and it would be far to easy for such an "auto delete" program to damage crucial files. A far better solution would be to integrate/bundle a spyware scanner that the user could run at thier leisure.
I would not want ANY company (microsoft, apple, sun, redhat, etc.) deleting software during an update. A box saying Windows Blah has detected x, y, z malware on your computer, is it ok to clean these files? is fine, but a non interactive auto delete would be a Bad Thing.
You actually have a point. Eventually things will become so restrictive that the public will realize the problem with software patents and other restrictive legislation/technology and begin to become angry about it. Hopefully this issue will become a political issue that political candidates are expected to have an opinion, then things will begin to change. As it stands now software patents do not effect nearly enough people to get the attention they deserve.
It is unfortunate, but oftentimes things must get worse before they get better, this is one of those situations.
Whats even wrose is when some idoit with a SUV full of hydrogen plows info a parked car and turns downtown into a mushroom cloud.
that probably wouldn't happen. Contrary to popular belief, Hydrogen isn't very dangerous. Although it is extremely flammable, A hydrogen fire will be extremely short lived and burn straight up as the hydrogen rises rapidly, as opposed to a gasolene fire, which will burn for a comparativly long time and flows over the ground.
additionally, most hydrogen fuel cell designs involve storing the hydrogen in some stable form, such as chemically bound to a metal compound. When a small electric current is run across the metal, the hydrogen is released in small amounts. Its not like the back of your SUV would have a huge compressed hydrogen tank in it.
Im sure the subject of the hidenburg (sp?) will occur in this thread, so i should probably mention that recent studies on that explosion point to the cause of the huge red fire being not the hydrogen itself, but the skin of the airship which was coated with an extremely flammable material chemically similar to solid rocket fuel. Witnesses at the scene reported seeing a large red flame erupt from the airship. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible blue flame, and would have exploded above the airship as the hydrogen escaped. It is likely that the fire was started when an electrical discharge ignited the skin of the airship, and that the hydrogen had little to do with the outcome, i.e, a similar result would have occured if helium was used instead.
im afraid i'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one, I have been Running OOo for about a year and find it to be as good as or better than MSWord.
Most of what I do with a word processor involves 8-15 page documents with large amounts of graphs and photos. all the various versions of word I have used have been completely misersable at formatting this type of document. I will agree that OOo has an ugly interface, but as long as the program functions well, interface is a second priority for me.
I have not used the latest versions of Word, so it may have gotten better since the last version i used (2000 i think). Given the price I have found OOo to be an extremely powerful and complete piece of software and it more than satisfies my needs in an office Suite
by the way, I use OSX and linux as my primary OSs and am rather dissapointed to see the lack of an aqua port. Oh well, guess i'll just have to keep running it under X.
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard stories of cable companies coming down *extremely* hard on uncappers, doing things like banning them from having cable service for life and other such actions.
Given this, and the actions of DirectTV towards those who buy smartcards, I wonder what the cable companies will do.
Will they ignore those who download these firmwares for the advanced features like the remote terminals and have no intention of uncapping, or will they treat everyone who re-flashes their firmware as a "criminal".
aagghh my eyes.
that is one of the ugliest webpages I think I have ever seen, with the possible exception of this one .
Not loud at all, you have to use one of these
What I love about mindstorms is its hackability. sure, the default programming "language" it comes with is limited and annoying to use, but reflash it with something like BrickOS and you can program it in C. very cool stuff, sorry to see it go.
what would be *really* cool is they higher diffiuclties were made more difficult not only becuase of AI changes but plot and map changes, this would be more work, but it would dramatically increase what you term the "replay value" of the game.
Ever watched a video on a 3 inch screen? it ain't fun.
One of the reasons people like the ipod is it's small size, it fits nicely in the pocket. This thing looks more liek it would be a hardcover book in your pocket.
On the other hand, I feel certain microsoft will continue their long tradition of being hip and innovative and come out with a truly revolutionary product
and the beauty of it is that it would be optional, say activated with a regex: similar to the way domain limits are done with site:
obviously things (especially laptops) can't be expected to "last until the end of time" however, that's not the point. Apple obviously has a QA problem, and they need to fix it (by this I mean offer a solution, not necessarily free), Even if it occured out of warrenty.
I am really annoyed at all the people whining about the iPods, however. The complaint was somewhat justified when apple had no replacement program, but now that they do, I see no problem. It is unfortunate that the batteries cost $99, but remember, these are not Alkaline batteries, they are lithium polymer cells that are very complex and costly to produce.
Companies almost never cover batteries in warrenty, as they are known to degrade over time. Don't believe me? check one out.
My thoughts exactly. When I read this article the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" sprung to mind. I have never seen a "does everything" device that actually worked well.
One of the strengths of the wikipedia is it's rapid update time, I can post an article, then 2 seconds later, you can see that post, edit it etc. If wikipedia was mirrored, then any changes made would have to be propagated across the mirrors, resulting in delays.
but thats not the half of it. consider the following
at 10:01:01 Alice adds a sentence to article X on mirror 1
at 10:01:01 Bob notices that the whole paragraph in article X is wrong, and deletes it on server 2
now then, how do we synch these?
mirroring wikipedia would make basic editing and retrieval slow and difficult, and result in inconsistent data across the mirrors
It looks like it tracks both timing and pitch, sounds nifty, must have one hell of a signal analysis software in it to figure out whether the person is on target.
I hope it has a good music selection, sounds like a cool game, kinda like a vocal Dance Dance Revolution
And I figured out how to do it
I just can't remember how I did it.
Slashdot is a technology oriented website, i can say with some certainty that everyone here has a fairly comprehensive knowledge of computers. However, this is not true of the rest of the world. For people who know little about computers aside from basic email checking and word processing, sending handwritten documents and other such things electronically is only feasible by fax. I have helped several people who send documents of this nature on a regular basis set up scanners they had purchased. They were absolutely mystified at how to set up the scanner and email documents that were scanned with it. Fax machines are far far easier to use than email and a scanner, and the recipient gets a paper copy of the document, something which is mentally comforting for many.
sure, they are silent, but have you ever typed on one? its like typing on marshmallows.
Yuck.
from the article:
to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.
This may or may not be an exaggeration, I have no idea, but Shirky makes a good point. When the vast majority of a society is violating a certain law, it is a sign that the law, not the society needs to change.
At this time, it seems that the RIAA is winning, and we are moving inexorably towards a world where large corporations control what people do with there computers. However, because there is so little popular respect at the moment for copyright law, it follows that eventually those laws will change.
Over the next 5-10 years, I predict that many laws will be completely rewritten to better accommodate the changes that the internet has brought upon society. Many of these changes will be for the better, and the end result will almost certainly be a more free and open society. Unfortunately, democracies are slow to act, so there will be years more of legal confusions and abuses of power before things finally straighten out.
Good point, I had forgotten about that, but my point still stands Re the 89, which IMHO is far more common than the 92 etc.
(disclaimer: I don't have a TI-89, and I haven't messed with the emulator)
It looks like a cool interface, but I have a few questions
1) the screenshot I saw made looked like some kind of pseudo unix shell. This is all fine and good with a normal computer, but with a graphing calc, where you have no QWERTY keyboard, a GUI is much faster. Is one available for this OS, or do we have do do everything pecking keys in alpha mode?
2) having games on a graphing calculator is cool for when boredom strikes, but the main reason for investing in a graphing calculator, particularly a high-end one like the TI-89 is its ability to do advanced math functions. are these still available, or will they have to be developed third party? TI put a large number of very complicated math functions into their OS, and the usefulness of this OS would be severely limited if these functions were not available or had to be re-implemented.
At any rate, this looks like an interesting project, and they seem to have made some good progress.
Is retrieving your songs going to require signing up for the service?
Yes, in order to download the songs, you will need to sign up for the Itunes service. I'm not sure if you need to give them a credit card number for a free song, but my guess would be that you do, given that deals like this are partially designed to give iTunes new customers.
Also what if then the redemption goes wrong (you entere a code wrong/etc..) and you have millions of people getting billed for songs they thought were going to be free?
Apple has built gift card functionality into their music store, this isn't a special set up. If you were to type in a number incorrectly, It would tell you that the number was invalid, not just bill your account.
Giveaways like this serve to increase a user-base out of which many will never return.
Thats true, but lets say that out of all of McDonalds customers, 50 million actually redeem their songs. Even if a tiny percentage return, thats a large number of returning customers.
From the article:
"If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."
I honestly hope that this program has a more complex take on IP than this. I can easily think of many, many things on line that can be obtained for free, legally. (the entire contents of sourceforge comes to mind.) IP law is phenomenally complicated and cannot be boiled down to simple slogans and sound bytes.
Microsoft Autodrive XP has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Please stand by while Microsoft Autodrive XP sends an error report in order to serve you bet(&*....[CARRIER LOST]
The problem with electronic voting is that if there is another "floridagate" noone will ever know. I would have no problem with electronic voting if there was some paper trail and if the companies opened thier hardware and software for independent investigation. However, this is clearly not the case.
As much as this would make things easier, think about the negative aspects. Software is never perfect, and it would be far to easy for such an "auto delete" program to damage crucial files. A far better solution would be to integrate/bundle a spyware scanner that the user could run at thier leisure.
I would not want ANY company (microsoft, apple, sun, redhat, etc.) deleting software during an update. A box saying Windows Blah has detected x, y, z malware on your computer, is it ok to clean these files? is fine, but a non interactive auto delete would be a Bad Thing.
You actually have a point. Eventually things will become so restrictive that the public will realize the problem with software patents and other restrictive legislation/technology and begin to become angry about it. Hopefully this issue will become a political issue that political candidates are expected to have an opinion, then things will begin to change. As it stands now software patents do not effect nearly enough people to get the attention they deserve.
It is unfortunate, but oftentimes things must get worse before they get better, this is one of those situations.
Whats even wrose is when some idoit with a SUV full of hydrogen plows info a parked car and turns downtown into a mushroom cloud.
that probably wouldn't happen. Contrary to popular belief, Hydrogen isn't very dangerous. Although it is extremely flammable, A hydrogen fire will be extremely short lived and burn straight up as the hydrogen rises rapidly, as opposed to a gasolene fire, which will burn for a comparativly long time and flows over the ground.
additionally, most hydrogen fuel cell designs involve storing the hydrogen in some stable form, such as chemically bound to a metal compound. When a small electric current is run across the metal, the hydrogen is released in small amounts. Its not like the back of your SUV would have a huge compressed hydrogen tank in it.
Im sure the subject of the hidenburg (sp?) will occur in this thread, so i should probably mention that recent studies on that explosion point to the cause of the huge red fire being not the hydrogen itself, but the skin of the airship which was coated with an extremely flammable material chemically similar to solid rocket fuel. Witnesses at the scene reported seeing a large red flame erupt from the airship. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible blue flame, and would have exploded above the airship as the hydrogen escaped. It is likely that the fire was started when an electrical discharge ignited the skin of the airship, and that the hydrogen had little to do with the outcome, i.e, a similar result would have occured if helium was used instead.
im afraid i'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one, I have been Running OOo for about a year and find it to be as good as or better than MSWord.
Most of what I do with a word processor involves 8-15 page documents with large amounts of graphs and photos. all the various versions of word I have used have been completely misersable at formatting this type of document. I will agree that OOo has an ugly interface, but as long as the program functions well, interface is a second priority for me.
I have not used the latest versions of Word, so it may have gotten better since the last version i used (2000 i think). Given the price I have found OOo to be an extremely powerful and complete piece of software and it more than satisfies my needs in an office Suite
by the way, I use OSX and linux as my primary OSs and am rather dissapointed to see the lack of an aqua port. Oh well, guess i'll just have to keep running it under X.