Out of curiosity, does anyone know how they fake the holographic foil stuff on our Canadian bills?
The only older $20s still in circulation have a shiny foil rectangle with "20" in the top-right corner, and the new $5, $10, and $20 bills have holographic maple leafs on them. They also have a woven band through the paper (like the annoying "rub to check" band through the old Windows 95 Certificate of Authenticity) with the denomination printed on it.
Look -- I'm not sure if you are trying to be funny (you certainly have been moderated that way), but I seriously doubt some of the things you say. (I'm Canadian, BTW). For anyone who may be confused:
I would be exteremly surprised if anyone actually still has a party line phone, or has even had one for a long time. Got any references? If anyone actually did, it would be limited to extremities of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories. Of course, microwave and satellite service is readily available there.
Also, OTA is far better than you suggest (and what's the deal with "a couple [of channels]"? That is all one can expect on American OTA, too.. the networks, and an independant or two..).. Anyone within 100-200km of the border should be able to recieve CBC, CTV, Global, an independant or two and all the American networks with a good antenna. Further north you should be able to receive at least CBC, CTV, and Global. Only in the northernmost extremities are you limited to CBC.
Imagine a remote that if you pushed the button for channel change, the channel would actually change. Every single time.
Those exist; they use UHF, mostly.
The remote with my ATI TV Wonder is one, and the remote for my Chaparral C-BAND satellite receiver is also. It is great; you can do with only one satellite receiver (with C-band, more wouldn't be helpful anyway since the channels are spread between a dozen satellites that must be tuned to, but I digress) by just running the RF-out of the receiver to your other TVs.
However, a geek like me is paying $1,500 for a TV that could be purchased for $100 or so (about 700 for the TV, and a good percentage of the money going to pay for engineers, etc like me for the TV
That's a bit different, isn't it? There are clear, measurable tangible benefits between an HDTV and a regular set. I think a better analogy would be to buy a $4,000 Sony HDTV set instead of a $1,500 JVC HDTV set because Sony is 'better'.
Actually, they talk about this on the North American DVD release. Apparently, they tried showing it two different orders (Totoro/Fireflies and Fireflies/Totoro), and found that people absolutely HATED Fireflies when seen after Totoro.
Guess that ties into the aforementioned psychological effect.
Rekall (available in commercial or GPL licenses) is a MS-Access type thing -- it can hold a database in its own format and create forms and reports (like FileMaker) or you can connect it to an SQL server. Last time I tried it was in the v2.2x days, and it would crash just trying to open the demo database. That was on Linux, the Windows demo (NOT GPL) simply crashed before opening. Not good for a software that is supposed to be in its second major version. Maybe it has improved since, though. Not sure if there is a Mac version.
The other option is Openoffice. It has a database form and report mode, but you will need MySQL or PostgreSQL at the backend. Also, there is almost no documentation for it.
The 2GB limitation is a flaw in the ISO9660 filesystem -- with UDF write support there should be no such problem. The same thing comes up in Windows in Nero if you try to write more a larger than 2GB file in pure ISO mode (it tells you to switch to UDF/ISO).
FYI, mkisofs has done DVD-video for some time now.. in fact, growisofs simply passes the --dvd-video flag through to mkisofs.
By audio I'm not sure what you mean.. DVD-Audio is just a bunch of properly encoded files burned in the proper layout in an ISO9660 file system (Just like DVD-Video).
All you need to do for either should be growisofs -M/dev/scd0 -R -J [--dvd-video]/filepath.
Even from a very young age, we have been taught in our Canadian schools that the secret ballot is one of the fundamental, most important keys to a democratic election.
Have Americans forgotten this?
Of course, we Canadians take election ballots very seriously. For example, it is illegal to eat your ballot. This upsets some people. (No, ballot eating has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just wanted an excuse to post that.)
Many mice are still ambidextrous.. completely symmetrical.
I have in my hand a Logitech optical scroll wheel mouse.. it can be used equally in either hand. (I am left-handed, but use my right hand for mousing.. it is not worth the hassle whenever you need to use someone else's computer).
It may not have a cool laser on it, but I've never been convinced that fancy mice make a difference, anyway.. the ambidextrous ones are cheaper, and there is none of that crazy ergonomic design shit.
PunkPig is actually right on this point, for any moderators out there.
It sucks, it makes no sense, but you are right. Well, it isn't HIGHLY illegal but you could theoretically go to jail.
Now I don't think that he should be tossed in jail for this (ESPECIALLY since he has paid XM for service, appearantly), but I would be curious why you think so, PunkPig?
That would be fine and all, except the rating system is not supposed to be a measure of how true something is, it is a measure of a film's suitability for children in terms of "inappropriate" content (sex, violence, etc).
For example, Microsoft's search feature only can search inside documents that Microsoft understands (Microsoft Office files, HTML, text, etc..)
It can't read inside my Wordperfect files, which makes it useless to me.
The amount of fragmentation in the Linux software market would make this really tricky. I suspect they could make it search inside of Koffice documents easily enough (isn't KDE application code supposed to modular enough to be incredibly easy to integrate with other programs?), but OpenOffice.. what about Abiword? or Textmaker?
Yours currently applies to DAT and CD-R Audio (it was last revised in 1995), and is 3% of the price.
Ours does not go straight to CRIA's pockets. The fee is collected by the CPCC and is distributed as follows:
To Eligible Authors 66.0%
To Eligible Performers 18.9%
To Eligible Makers 15.1%
Nice try.
Meanwhile, we can point
and laugh as Americans get sued by the hundreds for sharing music, while our Canadian courts say that CRIA has no right to subscriber contact info.
First of all, you seem to be somewhat confused as to what the various rating are actually called. Perhaps you are referring to a 13+ rating? The names DO make a difference -- PG in one province means something different in another and may not even exist in another provice. Also, if a movie was rated (by the Ontario or BC system) R in Canada this would NOT be equivilent to an American R -- this would be equivilent to an American NC-17. You CANNOT see an R movie if you are under 18 in those provinces. The movie would probably get 14A or 18A. This site explains.
It makes more sense than you think. People in, say, Alberta (not to pick on Albertans, but, well..) may be particularly offended by movies with sex in them (pushing the rating higher) than people in Quebec, who tend to have a more liberal outlook on these sorts of things (dropping the rating lower).
I have herad this too, and I think it is a load of rubbish.
In my personal experience, I have occasionally had huge problems with rental DVDs that have a small, almost invisible ding in them. I purchased a used set of Babylon 5 Season 1 discs. On one of them the video broke up and jumped 2 minutes in one part. The problem? A tiny spot (of something) on the disc. Rubbed off, played perfectly.
With an audio CD you can put a huge scratch through it and it will still play perfectly. In fact, in early public demonstrations of CD technology they would drill a hole in the CD and then play it, with little interruption.
And yes, the difference between 24fps telecined to 59.94 fields per second (movies, NTSC), 29.97fps progressive (some television programs shot on video), and 59.94 interlaced fields per second (most programs shot on video) is definitely very noticable.
Slashdot Mirror
The only older $20s still in circulation have a shiny foil rectangle with "20" in the top-right corner, and the new $5, $10, and $20 bills have holographic maple leafs on them. They also have a woven band through the paper (like the annoying "rub to check" band through the old Windows 95 Certificate of Authenticity) with the denomination printed on it.
How do they convincingly counterfeit these?
You can't bring a cell phone within about 1.5 metres of my monitor; it makes it go crazy.
I would be exteremly surprised if anyone actually still has a party line phone, or has even had one for a long time. Got any references? If anyone actually did, it would be limited to extremities of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories. Of course, microwave and satellite service is readily available there.
Also, OTA is far better than you suggest (and what's the deal with "a couple [of channels]"? That is all one can expect on American OTA, too.. the networks, and an independant or two..).. Anyone within 100-200km of the border should be able to recieve CBC, CTV, Global, an independant or two and all the American networks with a good antenna. Further north you should be able to receive at least CBC, CTV, and Global. Only in the northernmost extremities are you limited to CBC.
This has been implemented in PuTTY for Windows, for anyone who is interested. Sets up a local SOCKS proxy.. pretty neat.
The remote with my ATI TV Wonder is one, and the remote for my Chaparral C-BAND satellite receiver is also. It is great; you can do with only one satellite receiver (with C-band, more wouldn't be helpful anyway since the channels are spread between a dozen satellites that must be tuned to, but I digress) by just running the RF-out of the receiver to your other TVs.
They are not common, apparently due to the cost.
Sorry.. I was just using those as an example. You are right in that it does support a variety of back-ends (including ODBC).
The second time you open the menu it is far faster.
Guess that ties into the aforementioned psychological effect.
Rekall (available in commercial or GPL licenses) is a MS-Access type thing -- it can hold a database in its own format and create forms and reports (like FileMaker) or you can connect it to an SQL server. Last time I tried it was in the v2.2x days, and it would crash just trying to open the demo database. That was on Linux, the Windows demo (NOT GPL) simply crashed before opening. Not good for a software that is supposed to be in its second major version. Maybe it has improved since, though. Not sure if there is a Mac version.
The other option is Openoffice. It has a database form and report mode, but you will need MySQL or PostgreSQL at the backend. Also, there is almost no documentation for it.
They deliver here. (Bowmanville, Ontario)
The 2GB limitation is a flaw in the ISO9660 filesystem -- with UDF write support there should be no such problem. The same thing comes up in Windows in Nero if you try to write more a larger than 2GB file in pure ISO mode (it tells you to switch to UDF/ISO).
By audio I'm not sure what you mean.. DVD-Audio is just a bunch of properly encoded files burned in the proper layout in an ISO9660 file system (Just like DVD-Video).
All you need to do for either should be growisofs -M /dev/scd0 -R -J [--dvd-video] /filepath.
Cdrdao may do what you want. Only disc-at-once mode, though.
Have Americans forgotten this?
Of course, we Canadians take election ballots very seriously. For example, it is illegal to eat your ballot. This upsets some people. (No, ballot eating has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just wanted an excuse to post that.)
I have in my hand a Logitech optical scroll wheel mouse.. it can be used equally in either hand. (I am left-handed, but use my right hand for mousing.. it is not worth the hassle whenever you need to use someone else's computer).
It may not have a cool laser on it, but I've never been convinced that fancy mice make a difference, anyway.. the ambidextrous ones are cheaper, and there is none of that crazy ergonomic design shit.
CD-R Audio contains an unwriteable part that identifies it to the crippled stand-alone audio CD writers that sold like a lead balloon..
It sucks, it makes no sense, but you are right. Well, it isn't HIGHLY illegal but you could theoretically go to jail.
Now I don't think that he should be tossed in jail for this (ESPECIALLY since he has paid XM for service, appearantly), but I would be curious why you think so, PunkPig?
That would be fine and all, except the rating system is not supposed to be a measure of how true something is, it is a measure of a film's suitability for children in terms of "inappropriate" content (sex, violence, etc).
For example, Microsoft's search feature only can search inside documents that Microsoft understands (Microsoft Office files, HTML, text, etc..)
It can't read inside my Wordperfect files, which makes it useless to me.
The amount of fragmentation in the Linux software market would make this really tricky. I suspect they could make it search inside of Koffice documents easily enough (isn't KDE application code supposed to modular enough to be incredibly easy to integrate with other programs?), but OpenOffice.. what about Abiword? or Textmaker?
Yours currently applies to DAT and CD-R Audio (it was last revised in 1995), and is 3% of the price.
Ours does not go straight to CRIA's pockets. The fee is collected by the CPCC and is distributed as follows:
To Eligible Authors 66.0%
To Eligible Performers 18.9%
To Eligible Makers 15.1%
Nice try.
Meanwhile, we can point and laugh as Americans get sued by the hundreds for sharing music, while our Canadian courts say that CRIA has no right to subscriber contact info.
Quebec: G; Ontario: 14A; Alberta: 14A; British Columbia: 14A.
(14A means those under 14 require adult accompaniement. Quebec G is same as in US. I have no data for the other provinces.)
Source.
It makes more sense than you think. People in, say, Alberta (not to pick on Albertans, but, well..) may be particularly offended by movies with sex in them (pushing the rating higher) than people in Quebec, who tend to have a more liberal outlook on these sorts of things (dropping the rating lower).
It is designed to reflect community standards.
In my personal experience, I have occasionally had huge problems with rental DVDs that have a small, almost invisible ding in them. I purchased a used set of Babylon 5 Season 1 discs. On one of them the video broke up and jumped 2 minutes in one part. The problem? A tiny spot (of something) on the disc. Rubbed off, played perfectly.
With an audio CD you can put a huge scratch through it and it will still play perfectly. In fact, in early public demonstrations of CD technology they would drill a hole in the CD and then play it, with little interruption.
And yes, the difference between 24fps telecined to 59.94 fields per second (movies, NTSC), 29.97fps progressive (some television programs shot on video), and 59.94 interlaced fields per second (most programs shot on video) is definitely very noticable.