I have had all my red t-shirts disappear from an apartment laundry room, and I'd always picked up my laundry promptly. Once I'd noticed I had none left (start of next sports season) I never left my laundry unattended in that building again.
Which is why the very low-tech version of affixing a simple magnet with your address or phone number to the machines you're using doesn't work in practice either. You wouldn't want some stranger suffering from Laundromat Rage harrassing you by phone and knowing where you live.
However, an audible alert isn't going to cut it if you're more than two or three rooms over and have the stereo going. They aren't the loud-ass buzzers that they used to be!
And they certainly aren't persistent. It goes off once, and if you don't hear it, tough. Not like cell phones with missed calls left in work cubicles beeping every three minutes, or a microwave oven with a cooling cup of coffee left in it.
I've had an idea for awhile. It came to me while in college and seeing people using those plastic balls that release fabric softener at (hopefully) the right time during the wash. I thought, why not put some electronic sensors in there and seal it watertight with firmware that will tell it to start transmitting a signal when it notices that it (a) is not floating or submerged and (b) is not undergoing any acceleration. Now that campuses are set up for WiFi, they just need to get online and send a message to your room when you're laundry is done, so you can get to it before someone else dumps it on the floor. Give it a battery that can operate for at least 12 loads and an inductive recharging station, or make it like a self-winding watch, charging as its being thrown about in the washer or dryer.
which raises the question: exactly how is focus handled? Can I type in two xterms at once? Are there lots of different complex focus models to choose from now?
Crisis or opportunity?
I've been wanting this for years. Unfortunately, not only have I had no time to work on it, but I still don't now that someone has done the basics, But I've thought of it as ways to have one user use two mice, not two users in one session each having his own mouse at the same display, and how to extend the UI to support it.
Having two mice allows you to eliminate the implied paperweight that says you can only resize windows by grabbing their edges or other special widgets. Instead, one mouse moves, two mice in different directions stretch. With dual focus-follows-mouse now you'll either want dual keyboard support or stop using focus-follows-mouse, or make it only follow when both mice are in the same object. Otherwise, conflicts for overlapping focus space can be handled by shifting windows out of conflict or require click-foward.
I've been meaning to do something like this, but for a different goal. Instead of eliminating content in DVDs, I want to insert it. Specifically, when watching the box sets of The X-Files I want the spots included on the last disk inserted before and after the credits of the preceding episode without having to swap disks and navigate menus.
And for television, I not only want the commercial blocks marked, I want each individual commercial marked, categorized, and where appropriate when their offers expire, because sometimes I just want to search current ads for products I may want to buy (and I don't care to see any more ads about July 4th sales until next year).
Aggregating that information though gets complicated when dealing with ads inserted by the local affiliate and ads inserted by the local cable company, plus one or both overruning their ad slots.
Before you go into the portal room for the jump to Xen, doesn't a scientist max out your weapons and then give you some kind of extended long jump pack, all the while telling you that it will be vital when moving around in Xen?
Yes, but as I recall there was a bit of a rush to get you on your way. No safe play in a practice area before you had to get in the portal. Not like in Half Life 2 where you get to play catch with the gravity gun for awhile until you're used to it. (The fun ended for me when I accidentally threw the ball off the map.)
A quick textual reminder in the HUD would have sufficed, especially after falling to your death on the first jump... um... 50 times.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is Half-Life. The original. They do give you lots of new and interesting weapons throughout the game, but the gameplay is the same, which means you don't actually have to learn many new skills during the course of the game. My only complaint there would be Xen at the end, where the physics completely change.
Indeed, I was at a loss to find a way to stop falling to my death starting that level. And it appeared from search results many people were just so exasperated with questions about it that they just berated people for not going through the tutorial when really it is just that it takes so long for some players to get that far (not playing every free hour of every day) that that one little detail on how to do those long jumps gets forgotten.
Just like how I don't know how to do them right now.
Well, we have no problem establishing that they don't mind carding for frivolous items
"Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Hey! Hey! You kids be careful with this gum, it can hurt your teeth." "Don't worry we will." "Okay then. Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Toilet paper."
[The m]ovies they [sell] are still VERY proud to display that "UNRATED" version in clear view for you and stock a hell of a lot more of them over the R rated countered parts.
And yet if it were an *UNRATED* version of a game....
Which you'd have to re-encode with something lossy to make it manageable.
Who says? Maybe it'll stay as one multi-gigbyte file passed around via P2P.
>600 GB per hour for uncompressed 1920x1080 video? Yeah, sure it will.
And for that matter, what's to keep one from compressing it using the same thing they use for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? It's not like the original was compressed with a magic codec that vastly surpasses what we "mundanes" have access to.
Then it won't be a perfect digital copy anymore. You'll have introduced more lossage in the video quality than the studios did. Even if your codec is better than the studio's, you're still adding lossage on top of lossage.
Better would be a perfect copy made of the original signal after decryption but before decompression.
It's interesting that the concept of having more than two people in a game has not penetrated into sports games yet.
One problem: if you have a griefers on your team in the real world, you can fire them; it's a lot harder to ban a determined griefer in a virtual game.
utilize the first 15 second of a thirty second commercial spot to present a static image that will catch the attention of a DVR user in fast-forward.
I guess you haven't noticed that they are practically doing that right now, only that it is the last 5-10 seconds.
Another method would be to embed flip-book style animations into the video. TiVo's FF speeds are 3x, 18x, and 30x. Assuming most go through the ads at 18x, embed 18 animations every 18 frames, each 50 frames long (1 2/3 seconds). Then, depending on how the frames fall in the buffer, the same ad can give 18 different impressions to fast-forwarding TiVo users.
Alternatively, go with three animations every third frame and you get three impressions each 10 seconds long. Builds up the curiosity over the ads and the rest of the screen still gets an impression.
Of course, they may have to be designed to look good when only one field per frame is visible (deinterlaced).
there are many other facts that need to be established in order to determine that you actually have a license (like the fact that you purchased the software at all).
And I'm sure everyone who has given someone a copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition as a gift has always included a receipt, let alone one that was not printed on thermal paper which erases itself over time.
I would think it would be Microsoft's burden of proof to prove I obtained the valid certificate illicitly, not mine to prove I obtained it legally. Hasn't the UK adopted the premise "innocent until proven guilty" yet? Even in US civil proceedings that is true; only the concept of proof is watered down to "preponderance of the evidence" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Microsoft itself ensures there is a 1:1 correspondence between CoAs and licenses. That should be proof enough that ownership of a CoA conveys the right to agree to a license. The audit of operating copies provides the count of agreed-to licenses to compare to the count of CoAs.
This judge is wrong.
And the GP post was meant to be Funny (though to correctly invoke Colbert, I should have said "The Wørd"; I wasn't sure whether ø was an allowed entity here).
"The fallacy in the argument is that if the bank does not accept the EULA [licence] terms [by operating the software and agreeing the terms], it receives no licence."
That is not in dispute. The issue is that the only thing that grants validity to the license is the agreement to it. You can't enforce terms of an unsigned contract. Upon resale, one is not conferring a license, one is conferring ownership which carries with it the option to license in order to use. It is selling of the opportunity to agree to the license, not the license itself.
Even if the licensing system is enforceable by law, one cannot be bound by an unsigned contract, especially one you can demonstrate have had no opportunity to read (e.g. by not breaking the seal).
The CoA has a 1:1 correspondence to the number of licenses offered by Microsoft. It is thus a prima facie artifact of a presence of a license, and its absence a lack of a license. Whether or not the license was agreed to is evidenced by the number of actual installations matching or being fewer than the number of CoAs.
That a judge would not agree to that smacks of corruption and a willful ignorance of the facts and of reality.
I would wish UK vendors would pull all Microsoft products off their shelves and force Microsoft to sell their OS direct to the consumer, and for consumers to demand proof from every vendor on their authorization to convey to them the opportunity to agree to the contained license agreement.
you can use the COA to satisfy yourself of certain facts, not to use it as evidence in court.
Because facts have no place in a court of law. It isn't, "I swear to tell the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts," it's truth. Facts are for the cops. (Thank God it's Joe Friday.) Courts are a place for truthiness.
What Microsoft is doing here is taking legitimate software (they made it and they sold it) and by fiat converting it into pirated/counterfeit software solely by stint of how they have their EULA structured. The software hasn't been reproduced, isn't being used by multiple people, in fact the core of the argument rests on the fact that the software has been completely unused prior to the sale.
I thought the EULA wasn't binding until agreed to. Until I install the software or break certain seals, I do in fact own that copy of the software, up until I agree that I don't via the EULA. I don't need a license until I agree to a license that says I need one. It's up to them to put the license agreement between me and ability to use it. And if I never agreed to a license that revokes First Sale Doctrine saying I couldn't resell it, then I sure as hell can resell it.
(And if that flies, expect Microsoft license agreements to be amended with terms that say you agree that all Microsoft software requires a license and cannot be resold so that once you agree to one you've agreed to them all.)
Capturing the printscreen output is subject to output colour adjustments and the quality of your decoder. Beyond that, however, it's perfect digital output in full resolution.
Which you'd have to re-encode with something lossy to make it manageable.
I know a story about a box of supposedly "100% Certified" 5.25" disks a friend got. When he went to format the first disk, the format didn't proceed as normally. When he took the disk out, there was a decrease in the amount of magnetic substrate on the disk. He wiped his finger on the disk, and it came right off on his finger, so it also come off on the drive head. After cleaning the drive, he then wiped the entire disk on both sides, leaving only the clear acetate underneath. When he went to complain about this and the other quality problems I'll get to, he held up the wiped disc, looked through the acetate at the man behind the counter and said, "Now that is a blank disk!"
Another one of the disks wouldn't turn inside the jacket of the disk. An inspection revealed that the manufacturer has managed to cram two disks in the same jacket. Not the same sleeve, two inside the sealed black 5.25" jacket of the disk! Another disk in the same shipment had no disk it it at all, so at least the count balanced out.
The vendor accepted the return of the defective disks and gave him his money back, checked a few other boxes from the same shipment and found similar problems, then got rid of the remaining stock of disks... by selling it below cost to one of his local competitors.
And one with a fatal flaw: the bezel is continuous through the middle of the open tray. That drive wouldn't be able to close at all with a disk in it and probably only halfway without.
Oh, I've made a lot of flippies. Thing is though, if they actually used the timing hole, you would still need to punch a new one of those in the disk even if no side notch was necessary to enable writing. The Apple II didn't use it. I still don't know of any systems that did.
I ordered the Y2K update (post-Y2K) for NEXTSTEP from Apple (free upgrade to NEXTSTEP 3.3 and Y2K patches). My Cube didn't have a CD-ROM drive, but I had an external SCSI CD-RW drive I had used with my PowerMac 7500 that worked with it. One of the CDs wasn't completely smooth, having some ridges in the plastic on the label side. The disc buzzed like a maniac in drive, but thankfully it did not self-destruct and I was able to update the system.
Some of this brain damage has survived into the USB era. My KVM switch won't accept keyboard commands unless they come through the keyboard port of the switch. It will also beep incessantly if the keyboard or mouse ports aren't connected to devices.
But then I don't care for it to intercept my keystrokes for possible KVM control (esp. in the middle of a game) so I put a:CueCat on the keyboard port instead. So I guess it's a feature.
It will sometimes start beeping for no reason though requiring that I unplug it and shut down all machines connected to it (it will still draw power from the USB and/or monitor connections). Thankfully most times it does this I'm not using it, but it will have annoyed the cat all day long.
Interesting. The 8" floppies I encountered were the opposite way: a notch would protect, a sticker would re-enable writing.
What systems required punching a timing hole as well to use both sides? Did you have to put part of the punch inside the jacket so that you wouldn't punch the media a second time?
Ever put a small padlock through the write protect hole of a 3.5" disk as a read-protect scheme?
Ouch, that's an embarrassing typo. I really hate myself when I make mistakes like that. I guess my hands just want to type a "k" after typing five-letter words beginning with "thin". Muscle memory takes over.
The only time I use a spell checker is when it is forced upon me. I usually get it right the first time or catch the mistakes immediately. I preview more for formatting. Thank you for the correction though; I'll add it to the list of words to which I need to pay more attention.
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I have had all my red t-shirts disappear from an apartment laundry room, and I'd always picked up my laundry promptly. Once I'd noticed I had none left (start of next sports season) I never left my laundry unattended in that building again.
Which is why the very low-tech version of affixing a simple magnet with your address or phone number to the machines you're using doesn't work in practice either. You wouldn't want some stranger suffering from Laundromat Rage harrassing you by phone and knowing where you live.
However, an audible alert isn't going to cut it if you're more than two or three rooms over and have the stereo going. They aren't the loud-ass buzzers that they used to be!
And they certainly aren't persistent. It goes off once, and if you don't hear it, tough. Not like cell phones with missed calls left in work cubicles beeping every three minutes, or a microwave oven with a cooling cup of coffee left in it.
I've had an idea for awhile. It came to me while in college and seeing people using those plastic balls that release fabric softener at (hopefully) the right time during the wash. I thought, why not put some electronic sensors in there and seal it watertight with firmware that will tell it to start transmitting a signal when it notices that it (a) is not floating or submerged and (b) is not undergoing any acceleration. Now that campuses are set up for WiFi, they just need to get online and send a message to your room when you're laundry is done, so you can get to it before someone else dumps it on the floor. Give it a battery that can operate for at least 12 loads and an inductive recharging station, or make it like a self-winding watch, charging as its being thrown about in the washer or dryer.
which raises the question: exactly how is focus handled? Can I type in two xterms at once? Are there lots of different complex focus models to choose from now?
Crisis or opportunity?
I've been wanting this for years. Unfortunately, not only have I had no time to work on it, but I still don't now that someone has done the basics, But I've thought of it as ways to have one user use two mice, not two users in one session each having his own mouse at the same display, and how to extend the UI to support it.
Having two mice allows you to eliminate the implied paperweight that says you can only resize windows by grabbing their edges or other special widgets. Instead, one mouse moves, two mice in different directions stretch. With dual focus-follows-mouse now you'll either want dual keyboard support or stop using focus-follows-mouse, or make it only follow when both mice are in the same object. Otherwise, conflicts for overlapping focus space can be handled by shifting windows out of conflict or require click-foward.
I've been meaning to do something like this, but for a different goal. Instead of eliminating content in DVDs, I want to insert it. Specifically, when watching the box sets of The X-Files I want the spots included on the last disk inserted before and after the credits of the preceding episode without having to swap disks and navigate menus.
And for television, I not only want the commercial blocks marked, I want each individual commercial marked, categorized, and where appropriate when their offers expire, because sometimes I just want to search current ads for products I may want to buy (and I don't care to see any more ads about July 4th sales until next year).
Aggregating that information though gets complicated when dealing with ads inserted by the local affiliate and ads inserted by the local cable company, plus one or both overruning their ad slots.
Before you go into the portal room for the jump to Xen, doesn't a scientist max out your weapons and then give you some kind of extended long jump pack, all the while telling you that it will be vital when moving around in Xen?
Yes, but as I recall there was a bit of a rush to get you on your way. No safe play in a practice area before you had to get in the portal. Not like in Half Life 2 where you get to play catch with the gravity gun for awhile until you're used to it. (The fun ended for me when I accidentally threw the ball off the map.)
A quick textual reminder in the HUD would have sufficed, especially after falling to your death on the first jump... um... 50 times.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is Half-Life. The original. They do give you lots of new and interesting weapons throughout the game, but the gameplay is the same, which means you don't actually have to learn many new skills during the course of the game. My only complaint there would be Xen at the end, where the physics completely change.
Indeed, I was at a loss to find a way to stop falling to my death starting that level. And it appeared from search results many people were just so exasperated with questions about it that they just berated people for not going through the tutorial when really it is just that it takes so long for some players to get that far (not playing every free hour of every day) that that one little detail on how to do those long jumps gets forgotten.
Just like how I don't know how to do them right now.
Well, we have no problem establishing that they don't mind carding for frivolous items
"Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Hey! Hey! You kids be careful with this gum, it can hurt your teeth."
"Don't worry we will."
"Okay then. Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Toilet paper."
[The m]ovies they [sell] are still VERY proud to display that "UNRATED" version in clear view for you and stock a hell of a lot more of them over the R rated countered parts.
And yet if it were an *UNRATED* version of a game....
Then it won't be a perfect digital copy anymore. You'll have introduced more lossage in the video quality than the studios did. Even if your codec is better than the studio's, you're still adding lossage on top of lossage.
Better would be a perfect copy made of the original signal after decryption but before decompression.
It's interesting that the concept of having more than two people in a game has not penetrated into sports games yet.
One problem: if you have a griefers on your team in the real world, you can fire them; it's a lot harder to ban a determined griefer in a virtual game.
utilize the first 15 second of a thirty second commercial spot to present a static image that will catch the attention of a DVR user in fast-forward.
I guess you haven't noticed that they are practically doing that right now, only that it is the last 5-10 seconds.
Another method would be to embed flip-book style animations into the video. TiVo's FF speeds are 3x, 18x, and 30x. Assuming most go through the ads at 18x, embed 18 animations every 18 frames, each 50 frames long (1 2/3 seconds). Then, depending on how the frames fall in the buffer, the same ad can give 18 different impressions to fast-forwarding TiVo users.
Alternatively, go with three animations every third frame and you get three impressions each 10 seconds long. Builds up the curiosity over the ads and the rest of the screen still gets an impression.
Of course, they may have to be designed to look good when only one field per frame is visible (deinterlaced).
there are many other facts that need to be established in order to determine that you actually have a license (like the fact that you purchased the software at all).
And I'm sure everyone who has given someone a copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition as a gift has always included a receipt, let alone one that was not printed on thermal paper which erases itself over time.
I would think it would be Microsoft's burden of proof to prove I obtained the valid certificate illicitly, not mine to prove I obtained it legally. Hasn't the UK adopted the premise "innocent until proven guilty" yet? Even in US civil proceedings that is true; only the concept of proof is watered down to "preponderance of the evidence" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Microsoft itself ensures there is a 1:1 correspondence between CoAs and licenses. That should be proof enough that ownership of a CoA conveys the right to agree to a license. The audit of operating copies provides the count of agreed-to licenses to compare to the count of CoAs.
This judge is wrong.
And the GP post was meant to be Funny (though to correctly invoke Colbert, I should have said "The Wørd"; I wasn't sure whether ø was an allowed entity here).
"The fallacy in the argument is that if the bank does not accept the EULA [licence] terms [by operating the software and agreeing the terms], it receives no licence."
That is not in dispute. The issue is that the only thing that grants validity to the license is the agreement to it. You can't enforce terms of an unsigned contract. Upon resale, one is not conferring a license, one is conferring ownership which carries with it the option to license in order to use. It is selling of the opportunity to agree to the license, not the license itself.
Even if the licensing system is enforceable by law, one cannot be bound by an unsigned contract, especially one you can demonstrate have had no opportunity to read (e.g. by not breaking the seal).
The CoA has a 1:1 correspondence to the number of licenses offered by Microsoft. It is thus a prima facie artifact of a presence of a license, and its absence a lack of a license. Whether or not the license was agreed to is evidenced by the number of actual installations matching or being fewer than the number of CoAs.
That a judge would not agree to that smacks of corruption and a willful ignorance of the facts and of reality.
I would wish UK vendors would pull all Microsoft products off their shelves and force Microsoft to sell their OS direct to the consumer, and for consumers to demand proof from every vendor on their authorization to convey to them the opportunity to agree to the contained license agreement.
Can you explain to me how purchasing a piece of software does not legally entitle me to use it into eternity?
By clicking the button labeled, "I agree".
you can use the COA to satisfy yourself of certain facts, not to use it as evidence in court.
Because facts have no place in a court of law. It isn't, "I swear to tell the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts," it's truth. Facts are for the cops. (Thank God it's Joe Friday.) Courts are a place for truthiness.
And that's The Word.
What Microsoft is doing here is taking legitimate software (they made it and they sold it) and by fiat converting it into pirated/counterfeit software solely by stint of how they have their EULA structured. The software hasn't been reproduced, isn't being used by multiple people, in fact the core of the argument rests on the fact that the software has been completely unused prior to the sale.
I thought the EULA wasn't binding until agreed to. Until I install the software or break certain seals, I do in fact own that copy of the software, up until I agree that I don't via the EULA. I don't need a license until I agree to a license that says I need one. It's up to them to put the license agreement between me and ability to use it. And if I never agreed to a license that revokes First Sale Doctrine saying I couldn't resell it, then I sure as hell can resell it.
(And if that flies, expect Microsoft license agreements to be amended with terms that say you agree that all Microsoft software requires a license and cannot be resold so that once you agree to one you've agreed to them all.)
Capturing the printscreen output is subject to output colour adjustments and the quality of your decoder. Beyond that, however, it's perfect digital output in full resolution.
Which you'd have to re-encode with something lossy to make it manageable.
I know a story about a box of supposedly "100% Certified" 5.25" disks a friend got. When he went to format the first disk, the format didn't proceed as normally. When he took the disk out, there was a decrease in the amount of magnetic substrate on the disk. He wiped his finger on the disk, and it came right off on his finger, so it also come off on the drive head. After cleaning the drive, he then wiped the entire disk on both sides, leaving only the clear acetate underneath. When he went to complain about this and the other quality problems I'll get to, he held up the wiped disc, looked through the acetate at the man behind the counter and said, "Now that is a blank disk!"
Another one of the disks wouldn't turn inside the jacket of the disk. An inspection revealed that the manufacturer has managed to cram two disks in the same jacket. Not the same sleeve, two inside the sealed black 5.25" jacket of the disk! Another disk in the same shipment had no disk it it at all, so at least the count balanced out.
The vendor accepted the return of the defective disks and gave him his money back, checked a few other boxes from the same shipment and found similar problems, then got rid of the remaining stock of disks... by selling it below cost to one of his local competitors.
That's just a rendering made on a computer.
And one with a fatal flaw: the bezel is continuous through the middle of the open tray. That drive wouldn't be able to close at all with a disk in it and probably only halfway without.
Oh, I've made a lot of flippies. Thing is though, if they actually used the timing hole, you would still need to punch a new one of those in the disk even if no side notch was necessary to enable writing. The Apple II didn't use it. I still don't know of any systems that did.
I ordered the Y2K update (post-Y2K) for NEXTSTEP from Apple (free upgrade to NEXTSTEP 3.3 and Y2K patches). My Cube didn't have a CD-ROM drive, but I had an external SCSI CD-RW drive I had used with my PowerMac 7500 that worked with it. One of the CDs wasn't completely smooth, having some ridges in the plastic on the label side. The disc buzzed like a maniac in drive, but thankfully it did not self-destruct and I was able to update the system.
I think the drive was at most a 24x.
Some of this brain damage has survived into the USB era. My KVM switch won't accept keyboard commands unless they come through the keyboard port of the switch. It will also beep incessantly if the keyboard or mouse ports aren't connected to devices.
:CueCat on the keyboard port instead. So I guess it's a feature.
But then I don't care for it to intercept my keystrokes for possible KVM control (esp. in the middle of a game) so I put a
It will sometimes start beeping for no reason though requiring that I unplug it and shut down all machines connected to it (it will still draw power from the USB and/or monitor connections). Thankfully most times it does this I'm not using it, but it will have annoyed the cat all day long.
Belkin SOHO 4-port USB VGA KVMA.
Interesting. The 8" floppies I encountered were the opposite way: a notch would protect, a sticker would re-enable writing.
What systems required punching a timing hole as well to use both sides? Did you have to put part of the punch inside the jacket so that you wouldn't punch the media a second time?
Ever put a small padlock through the write protect hole of a 3.5" disk as a read-protect scheme?
Ouch, that's an embarrassing typo. I really hate myself when I make mistakes like that. I guess my hands just want to type a "k" after typing five-letter words beginning with "thin". Muscle memory takes over.
The only time I use a spell checker is when it is forced upon me. I usually get it right the first time or catch the mistakes immediately. I preview more for formatting. Thank you for the correction though; I'll add it to the list of words to which I need to pay more attention.
My client was already using a fax to sent us copies of the needed files.
But it remains a classic one
Just wait. You'll encounter one that also doesn't know the difference between the fax machine and the shredder.