>WHY would AOL want it's own tld?
>What's wrong with AOL.com ?
>What clear advantages does.AOL have?
I kind of doubt that they would use a.aol tld. I can easily see them
going for a.kid tld. You could then apply to AOL for a.kid domain
name and if they approved your site you would be issued a domain name
that would be accessable only to those who used AOL's DNS servers.
AOL would then implement a search engine (pretty easy, they already
have one) that only indexes.kid sites and they have an instant
nicely censored subset of the internet to offer to over protective
parents.
This is actually starting to sound like a half decent idea, maybe I
should buy an book on Bind
after work and set it up on my box at home. If anyone tries to patent
a business plan for this. You saw it here first.
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SBC has been known to route several thousand ADSL customers through a single T1.
<sarcasm>But DSL is better because you don't have to share your bandwidth like you do with cable. DSL is always fast.</sarcasm>
That said, I can't even imagine what it would be like to have several thousand ADSL customers sharing a single T1. If the bandwidth is that oversold you'd be better off with a 28.8 modem.
I'm not sure about how well a Faraday cage would work within the computer case. I suspect that a lot of the undesireable noise is actually coming off the bus (PCI or ISA depending on your card). For obvious reasons you would need to bring the signal lines from the bus into your cage and then you'd be bringing the noise along with it. There really isn't much of any way that you would be able to block noise from the PCI bus without setting up a separate North Bridge for the sound card.
If you still want to experiment with this, I'd suggest building your shield from copper sheeting. You can usually buy this in rolls at a hardware store. The thinner you go the easier it will be to work with. Fold it into a box around your soundcard and make sure to close all gaps at the edges with solder.
If Larry Flynt could win First Amendment protection for Hustler magazine, I'm sure we could do the same for video games.
The big difference here is that Larry Flynt doesn't sell his titty rags to kids. The CT government is trying to put the same kind of restrictions on games that already exist on Flynt's publications. I suspect that there really isn't much ground for a constitutional challenge to a law like this since children aren't protected under the first amendment in the same way that adults are.
Move the audio decoding outside of the box. There are 2 easy ways to go about this.
1) use a USB sound adapter. Several different ones exist and they aren't all that expensive (Sony bundles them with some of their Minidisc players).
2) use an optical link to your stereo. Several of the high end Sound Blaster cards have a toslink port on the back which should give you noise free audio output to your stereo.
Also, since the power lines must run both ways, coming and going (at least, I believe that's how it works to close the circuit)
Actually, this isn't right. The general scheme is to use an earth return to the power plant. Even if there is a conductor running as a return it shouldn't be carrying any current. You can demonstrate how this works pretty easily with a cheap 2 prong extension cord and a lightbulb.
Cut the extension cord so that you have a length of cord attached to the end that plugs into the wall. You may discard the end which you'd plug lamps into.
Cut the wider prong off of the plug end.
Remove the side of the cord associated with the removed prong.
Strip a small amount of the insulation from the end of the remaining wire.
solder this to the threaded part of a lightbulb.
Plug your modified plug into the wall and touch the base of the bulb to a faucet or other grounded metal object.
If the bulb doesn't light, turn the plug over and try again.
BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO TOUCH THE SHINY METAL PARTS WHEN PLUGGED IN. IT WILL HURT A LOT.
This works because one line in your home sockets is always held at ground potential while the other one varies between -120 and +120 volts (If you live in the US or another place with a 120V household supply). This page does a little bit of explaining on how all of this works. You might also want to check out this article at the always informative howstuffworks.com site.
Get to know the night staff - I eat my lunch at about the time the janitors finish, so I usually sit around with them and talk for a while. I've heard some amazing stories.
I'll have to second this. Janitors are often interesting people to talk to (they have a boring, lonely job and appreciate anyone who will talk to them).
To put a rather Machiavellian twist on things, janitors (and security gaurds and so forth) also have lots of keys. Upper management may get to make lots of decisions about how money gets spent and things like that, but they don't have anywhere near as many keys as the janitors and we all know that real power comes with keys. Always make friends with people who have lots of keys you never know when you might need to to call in a favor from them.
It's not an mp3 player, but I have a Fuji Finepix digicam that works like this. It uses the USB mass storage driver which mounts up the smart media card just like a scsi disk. I have used it with complete success in Win98, MacOS 8.6 and Linux 2.4 (I got 2.2 to work, but it took some kernel compiling and stuff like that).
There is a MiniDisc technology working against piracy (or fair use)
Unlike some other technologies (*ack*DVD Region Coding*ack* CSS *ack*) SCMS is in line with fair use. You can make as many copies as you like of a piece of digital media that you have purchased (or borrowed, or traded or whatever), what it prevents you from doing is making copies of those copies. Second generation copies generally aren't within the realm of fair use rights anyway.
SCMS is also a technology that it fair to musicians. Compliant players do not add copy protection to recordings made from an analog source (microphones, guitar amps, etc.) so the musician is free to make all the digital copies that they need for distribution. You still probably wouldn't want to do mass duplication on consumer grade equipment, but you could if you wanted to.
Another bonus to SCMS is that it doesn't impact the quality of the sound. The only way in which the sound fidelity of a recording is reduced by doing a digital transfer to minidisc is in the compression used to get the small form factor. I find the ATRAC compression scheme to be quite good, CDs copied digitally to minidisc sound much better than (so called "CD quality") 128kb/s.mp3s or FM radio. I generally can't tell the difference between CDs and MDs in a moving vehicle while I really can tell the difference between a minidisc and FM radio (this is mostly due to the fact that radio stations boost the bass signal to make music sound good on shitty radios. It adds a bunch of noise and distortion that makes it sound awful with a good amp).
Overall, I would say that SCMS is a good and fair compromise between citizens and content owners. I don't object at all to being prevented from making copies of copies since that isn't fair use anyway. The only thing that I do object to is that DVDs set the no copy bit on their soundtrack so that you can't make a digital recording of a DVD soundtrack onto a minidisc. Then again, that's the fault of the DVD producers and we already know all about them.
I'll apologise here. I probably should have done a quick search for fuckgeneralmotors.com before I submitted the story. Regardless, I think that it is significant that the story got a writeup in today's New York Times and got some coverage that didn't come in the form of press releases from 2600. Somehow it just means more when someone not involved in the case writes about it.
Don't think for one second that DVD would have caught on the way it has if mod chips to defeat region coding were not so readily available.
DVDs caught on because the restrictions that are put on them are ones that most people will never notice. I can honestly say that I have never had any problems with either CSS encryption or region coding while attempting to watch a DVD movie that I have purchased. And why would I have had problems? I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that to watch a new type of media I need to purchase a new player. I did that and hooked it up to my TV and stereo and it just works. It has never crossed my mind that it might be in any way convenient for me to purchase DVDs in another continent so I've never had a problem with the region coding. What it comes down to is that when used in the way that over 99% of all people will use a DVD movie (at least those who live in the US and speak only English) there is very little reason why you'd ever find a problem with either Region Coding or CSS and that is why people have adopted this technology. The limits on the technology just aren't in the realm that most people will ever notice.
It's going to be a really different matter if people can't record the game that they have to miss or that episode of Friends or what ever. Most people are very used to being able to tape a TV show that they're going to miss and aren't going to be willing to give that up to get a better picture.
If FreeDB is infringing on a CDDB patent, shouldn't CDDB be suing FreeDB instead of Roxio??
Probably, but I suspect that it wouldn't be worth their while to sue freeDB. Instead they waited for someone with a bit of money to start using the freeDB system and then sue them. That way they get to make an example out of someone and get a bit of cash to boot.
You're just fine doing everything that you mentioned above. The catch is that Gracenote holds a patent on generating a unique key for the database. The whole reason why CDDB and freeDB are so cool isn't that they have big lists of song titles it's that your album is recognised when you put it into your CD drive and the correct information is downloaded.
And how exactly is freedb a derivative of CDDB? As far as I know everything's been re-entered from scratch into it; there's never been a public copy of CDDB available to have been somehow copied by the freedb folks.
At issue here isn't the actual data. It's the fact that Gracenote has a patent on the CDDB technology. The slashdot discussion on the topic of the patent is located here, complete with all the usual/. I'm gonna patent breathing vindictive.
While Gracenote's behavior in general is pretty sleasy and just generally ugly, they did develop a cool technology and freeDB is just a rip off of that technology. That's still not much of an excuse for acting like this though.
I've always wondered why people say that. I can make several valid comparasions between apples and oranges:
Oranges have a thicker skin than apples
Apples grow better in northern regions than oranges
Apples make a better pie than oranges
Orange juice is thicker than apple juice
Oranges have larger seeds than apples
I could continue on like this for some time and I don't think that I would ever get around to mentioning either Linux or Win2k whilst comparing apples and oranges (Though, I might get around to mentioning OSX and British cell phone users if I were to keep at it long enough)
Not exactly on topic, but I'm pissed off and feel the need to vent someplace and the topic is cable modem so it's pretty close on this article.
I just called @home to request that my service be transferred from my apartment to the house I'm moving into. Their customer service is swift. They said that within 30 minutes of making the transfer request the service would be turned off at my old place. Then I could make an appointment to have the service installed at the new place. Furthermore he wouldn't even let me hear the list of avaliable appointment times before he would cut off my service. Pigfuckers.
Well, this is St. Olaf that you're talking about. I'll bet that they can't afford it, after all they can't afford to keep their hockey team either. Not that I should be all that smug, Luther didn't let me keep my @luther.edu e-mail address either, though I do still have my shell account on the CS department server.
For those of you who aren't in the know, stolaf.edu and luther.edu are rivals of sorts. It's generally a good natured thing, even if those Minnesota people are snobs.
I'm not sure that you really are quite in their target demographic. I think that the people they really expect to pay for this service are those who cover a lot of ground in their own vehicles. People like truckers and salesmen. For most of us it's not that big of a deal to go home every night and grab a handful of new CDs to listen to the next day.
Utilities do exist for Mac disks to be read in Windows machines. I don't know if any of them are much good, I generally use the HFS utilities in Linux when I need to mess with mac files. I do know that PC drives generally cant read 800k Mac disks, something about the track size.
When dealing with exchanging data in a mixed environment I generally use a network file server that knows how to talk to everyone on the network. Linux works fine for this, you run nfsd to talk to the *nix boxen, samba to talk to the windows machines and atalkd to talk to the Macs. If you need to use sneakernet you just have to use FAT formatted media. Pretty much every operating system I've ever run across can read FAT16 disks/memory cards/digital cameras/USB dongles/etc. If you need to sneakernet more than a few megs at a time, use.iso CDs. Pretty much everyone can read those too.
I'd rather have dinner with my dog and play with my fiancee.
I've found that my choices for a dinner entree are much more likely to be in line with those of my fiancee than my dog. The dog would much rather have kibble or a dead racoon than any variety of noodles. The dog and I do usually could agree on steaks, but like hell I'm sharing that with the dog. It's hard enough for me to share steaks with my fiancee.
I'm very curious about that magnetic field thing. I've never put too much stock in the magnetic field claims. I really don't believe that a magnetic bracelet is going to cure tennis elbow and I don't really believe that magnetic insoles are going to improve my energy lever and make me more productive. I do however understand that magnetic fields can have an impact on certian animals (carrier pidgeons and gophers come to mind) and would be curious about research on the effects of magnets on the human brain.
My suspicion would be that cell phones wouldn't be anywhere near the biggest problem with holding magnets near your head. The magnets in the cell phone speaker are quite a bit smaller than those in a good set of head phones and a whole lot smaller than the monster inside the old phone you used to rent from Bell.
Pretty much the same long term effects as spending 5 minutes a day in direct sunlight, except safer. What's going to happen? Your head gets warm. Nifty thing about heads, they have a built in liquid cooling system.
Let's think about this. An actual microwave oven puts out about 1000W of power (700 if you buy a cheap one) nearly all of this power gets absorbed by the food since the sides of the oven are microwave reflective. A cell phone puts out less than one Watt worth of RF power. Unless you put the antenna in your mouth at least half of the energy is radiated away from your head. Think about how long it would take to noticably heat 4 Kg of scrambled eggs in a microwave oven. Now multiply that by at least 2000. Then add in a large factor to compensate for the fact that your head is liquid cooled and it should be apparent that the risk to your health due to heating your head via microwaves from a phone is much smaller than the risk from stepping outside or holding a discharging battery near your head.
Slashdot Mirror
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
.AOL have?
.aol tld. I can easily see them
.kid tld. You could then apply to AOL for a .kid domain
.kid sites and they have an instant
t io d5WIuhUMoAnAlA
Hash: SHA1
>WHY would AOL want it's own tld?
>What's wrong with AOL.com ?
>What clear advantages does
I kind of doubt that they would use a
going for a
name and if they approved your site you would be issued a domain name
that would be accessable only to those who used AOL's DNS servers.
AOL would then implement a search engine (pretty easy, they already
have one) that only indexes
nicely censored subset of the internet to offer to over protective
parents.
This is actually starting to sound like a half decent idea, maybe I
should buy an book on Bind
after work and set it up on my box at home. If anyone tries to patent
a business plan for this. You saw it here first.
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________________________
<sarcasm>But DSL is better because you don't have to share your bandwidth like you do with cable. DSL is always fast.</sarcasm>
That said, I can't even imagine what it would be like to have several thousand ADSL customers sharing a single T1. If the bandwidth is that oversold you'd be better off with a 28.8 modem.
________________________
If you still want to experiment with this, I'd suggest building your shield from copper sheeting. You can usually buy this in rolls at a hardware store. The thinner you go the easier it will be to work with. Fold it into a box around your soundcard and make sure to close all gaps at the edges with solder.
________________________
The big difference here is that Larry Flynt doesn't sell his titty rags to kids. The CT government is trying to put the same kind of restrictions on games that already exist on Flynt's publications. I suspect that there really isn't much ground for a constitutional challenge to a law like this since children aren't protected under the first amendment in the same way that adults are.
________________________
1) use a USB sound adapter. Several different ones exist and they aren't all that expensive (Sony bundles them with some of their Minidisc players).
2) use an optical link to your stereo. Several of the high end Sound Blaster cards have a toslink port on the back which should give you noise free audio output to your stereo.
________________________
Actually, this isn't right. The general scheme is to use an earth return to the power plant. Even if there is a conductor running as a return it shouldn't be carrying any current. You can demonstrate how this works pretty easily with a cheap 2 prong extension cord and a lightbulb.
- Cut the extension cord so that you have a length of cord attached to the end that plugs into the wall. You may discard the end which you'd plug lamps into.
- Cut the wider prong off of the plug end.
- Remove the side of the cord associated with the removed prong.
- Strip a small amount of the insulation from the end of the remaining wire.
- solder this to the threaded part of a lightbulb.
- Plug your modified plug into the wall and touch the base of the bulb to a faucet or other grounded metal object.
- If the bulb doesn't light, turn the plug over and try again.
- BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO TOUCH THE SHINY METAL PARTS WHEN PLUGGED IN. IT WILL HURT A LOT.
This works because one line in your home sockets is always held at ground potential while the other one varies between -120 and +120 volts (If you live in the US or another place with a 120V household supply). This page does a little bit of explaining on how all of this works. You might also want to check out this article at the always informative howstuffworks.com site.________________________
I'll have to second this. Janitors are often interesting people to talk to (they have a boring, lonely job and appreciate anyone who will talk to them).
To put a rather Machiavellian twist on things, janitors (and security gaurds and so forth) also have lots of keys. Upper management may get to make lots of decisions about how money gets spent and things like that, but they don't have anywhere near as many keys as the janitors and we all know that real power comes with keys. Always make friends with people who have lots of keys you never know when you might need to to call in a favor from them.
________________________
It's not an mp3 player, but I have a Fuji Finepix digicam that works like this. It uses the USB mass storage driver which mounts up the smart media card just like a scsi disk. I have used it with complete success in Win98, MacOS 8.6 and Linux 2.4 (I got 2.2 to work, but it took some kernel compiling and stuff like that).
________________________
Unlike some other technologies (*ack*DVD Region Coding*ack* CSS *ack*) SCMS is in line with fair use. You can make as many copies as you like of a piece of digital media that you have purchased (or borrowed, or traded or whatever), what it prevents you from doing is making copies of those copies. Second generation copies generally aren't within the realm of fair use rights anyway.
SCMS is also a technology that it fair to musicians. Compliant players do not add copy protection to recordings made from an analog source (microphones, guitar amps, etc.) so the musician is free to make all the digital copies that they need for distribution. You still probably wouldn't want to do mass duplication on consumer grade equipment, but you could if you wanted to.
Another bonus to SCMS is that it doesn't impact the quality of the sound. The only way in which the sound fidelity of a recording is reduced by doing a digital transfer to minidisc is in the compression used to get the small form factor. I find the ATRAC compression scheme to be quite good, CDs copied digitally to minidisc sound much better than (so called "CD quality") 128kb/s .mp3s or FM radio. I generally can't tell the difference between CDs and MDs in a moving vehicle while I really can tell the difference between a minidisc and FM radio (this is mostly due to the fact that radio stations boost the bass signal to make music sound good on shitty radios. It adds a bunch of noise and distortion that makes it sound awful with a good amp).
Overall, I would say that SCMS is a good and fair compromise between citizens and content owners. I don't object at all to being prevented from making copies of copies since that isn't fair use anyway. The only thing that I do object to is that DVDs set the no copy bit on their soundtrack so that you can't make a digital recording of a DVD soundtrack onto a minidisc. Then again, that's the fault of the DVD producers and we already know all about them.
________________________
I'll apologise here. I probably should have done a quick search for fuckgeneralmotors.com before I submitted the story. Regardless, I think that it is significant that the story got a writeup in today's New York Times and got some coverage that didn't come in the form of press releases from 2600. Somehow it just means more when someone not involved in the case writes about it.
________________________
DVDs caught on because the restrictions that are put on them are ones that most people will never notice. I can honestly say that I have never had any problems with either CSS encryption or region coding while attempting to watch a DVD movie that I have purchased. And why would I have had problems? I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that to watch a new type of media I need to purchase a new player. I did that and hooked it up to my TV and stereo and it just works. It has never crossed my mind that it might be in any way convenient for me to purchase DVDs in another continent so I've never had a problem with the region coding. What it comes down to is that when used in the way that over 99% of all people will use a DVD movie (at least those who live in the US and speak only English) there is very little reason why you'd ever find a problem with either Region Coding or CSS and that is why people have adopted this technology. The limits on the technology just aren't in the realm that most people will ever notice.
It's going to be a really different matter if people can't record the game that they have to miss or that episode of Friends or what ever. Most people are very used to being able to tape a TV show that they're going to miss and aren't going to be willing to give that up to get a better picture.
________________________
Probably, but I suspect that it wouldn't be worth their while to sue freeDB. Instead they waited for someone with a bit of money to start using the freeDB system and then sue them. That way they get to make an example out of someone and get a bit of cash to boot.
________________________
You're just fine doing everything that you mentioned above. The catch is that Gracenote holds a patent on generating a unique key for the database. The whole reason why CDDB and freeDB are so cool isn't that they have big lists of song titles it's that your album is recognised when you put it into your CD drive and the correct information is downloaded.
________________________
At issue here isn't the actual data. It's the fact that Gracenote has a patent on the CDDB technology. The slashdot discussion on the topic of the patent is located here, complete with all the usual /. I'm gonna patent breathing vindictive.
While Gracenote's behavior in general is pretty sleasy and just generally ugly, they did develop a cool technology and freeDB is just a rip off of that technology. That's still not much of an excuse for acting like this though.
________________________
I think that there's more than enough of that going around without a specific handbook. For reference:
[lizrd@linuxbox lizrd]$ cd /usr/src/linux
[lizrd@linuxbox linux]$ grep -r shit * | wc -l
60
[lizrd@linuxbox linux]$ grep -r fuck * | wc -l
23
[lizrd@linuxbox linux]$ grep -r bastard * | wc -l
4
[lizrd@linuxbox linux]$ grep -r damn * | wc -l
20
I must confess though that the shit grep produces quite a few results for "Matsushita CD-ROM controller" which isn't exactly cursing.
________________________
I've always wondered why people say that. I can make several valid comparasions between apples and oranges:
- Oranges have a thicker skin than apples
- Apples grow better in northern regions than oranges
- Apples make a better pie than oranges
- Orange juice is thicker than apple juice
- Oranges have larger seeds than apples
I could continue on like this for some time and I don't think that I would ever get around to mentioning either Linux or Win2k whilst comparing apples and oranges (Though, I might get around to mentioning OSX and British cell phone users if I were to keep at it long enough)________________________
Then you'll save money by buying new Motherboard, Processor and RAm.
________________________
I just called @home to request that my service be transferred from my apartment to the house I'm moving into. Their customer service is swift. They said that within 30 minutes of making the transfer request the service would be turned off at my old place. Then I could make an appointment to have the service installed at the new place. Furthermore he wouldn't even let me hear the list of avaliable appointment times before he would cut off my service. Pigfuckers.
________________________
For those of you who aren't in the know, stolaf.edu and luther.edu are rivals of sorts. It's generally a good natured thing, even if those Minnesota people are snobs.
________________________
I'm not sure that you really are quite in their target demographic. I think that the people they really expect to pay for this service are those who cover a lot of ground in their own vehicles. People like truckers and salesmen. For most of us it's not that big of a deal to go home every night and grab a handful of new CDs to listen to the next day.
________________________
When dealing with exchanging data in a mixed environment I generally use a network file server that knows how to talk to everyone on the network. Linux works fine for this, you run nfsd to talk to the *nix boxen, samba to talk to the windows machines and atalkd to talk to the Macs. If you need to use sneakernet you just have to use FAT formatted media. Pretty much every operating system I've ever run across can read FAT16 disks/memory cards/digital cameras/USB dongles/etc. If you need to sneakernet more than a few megs at a time, use .iso CDs. Pretty much everyone can read those too.
________________________
I've found that my choices for a dinner entree are much more likely to be in line with those of my fiancee than my dog. The dog would much rather have kibble or a dead racoon than any variety of noodles. The dog and I do usually could agree on steaks, but like hell I'm sharing that with the dog. It's hard enough for me to share steaks with my fiancee.
________________________
I don't know, but I've gotten moderator access twice in the last 24 hours. Perhaps there's just too many points floating around right now.
________________________
My suspicion would be that cell phones wouldn't be anywhere near the biggest problem with holding magnets near your head. The magnets in the cell phone speaker are quite a bit smaller than those in a good set of head phones and a whole lot smaller than the monster inside the old phone you used to rent from Bell.
Let's think about this. An actual microwave oven puts out about 1000W of power (700 if you buy a cheap one) nearly all of this power gets absorbed by the food since the sides of the oven are microwave reflective. A cell phone puts out less than one Watt worth of RF power. Unless you put the antenna in your mouth at least half of the energy is radiated away from your head. Think about how long it would take to noticably heat 4 Kg of scrambled eggs in a microwave oven. Now multiply that by at least 2000. Then add in a large factor to compensate for the fact that your head is liquid cooled and it should be apparent that the risk to your health due to heating your head via microwaves from a phone is much smaller than the risk from stepping outside or holding a discharging battery near your head.