This is all great until LaLa goes under, or simply does a Microsoft and just leaves millions of PlaysForSure customers with a lot of paid-for but now unplayable music, just because of a change in DRM and marketing strategy. This model does nothing to guarantee you will always be able to access the music you already paid for.
Furthermore, what about all the times you want to play your music when you're not able to use an internet connection?
Call me old-fashioned but when I buy something I still expect to get something tangible I can be in control of, and use when I want. If that isn't the case then I just don't buy it. I suspect there are still enough people like me that will tip the balance on this.
There seems to be a collectors market for old infocom stuff at least:
On ebay an Infocom Starcross game (Apple II version) still in shrinkwrap is currently at $611!!! I used to have one of these back in the day and I made a motorized flying toy out of it. Doh.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230253373809
My barber has a sign up in front of his barber chair asking for donations of old laptops. I've been helping him renovate them and give them to 'deserving causes' who need laptops but can't afford one. (think poor families with kids who need them for school/college or single parents etc). From the feedback we've got, it really does help fill a need in our the local community.
keep looking on ebay for an old cpc 6128 or PCW-8256 or PCw-8512 (they all had the same 3" Hitachi microdrive). You can probably pick one up for like 10 uk pounds or something,
The Hitachi 3" Microdrive which was intended to be a direct competitor to Sony's 3.5" format. (Unfortunately for Amstrad the Sony format was the one that won-out in the PC world). Because of that I'm guessing the possibility that the 3" Microdrive has a PC-compatable connector may be high (but I don't know for sure).
Of course even if you got the drive connected to your PC OK still the problem would still be to get your PC to recognise the AMSDOS file system on the floppy.
I guess another option (if you get your hands on an amstrad computer) would be to write some little program that implements a simple file transfer protocol via whatever ports (RS-232 etc) that are available on the amstrad you get, then connect it directly to a regular PC via a homebrew cable.
Microsoft showed their true colours when they screwed everyone over with the PlaysForSure fiasco.
The fact that Microsoft could and did use DRM to prevent their own customers from playing media they already paid good money for through a legitimate MS Music store is enough to keep me away from ever buying a Zune (or any MS DRM-based product) forever.
The superhuman stength without giant external components, flying with pulse jets small enough to go in your feet, and infinite shock-absorbing ability are all the most useful skills, and coincidentally all the ones still far from possible with todays tech, so I think its not really true to say the science and tech of Ironman is pretty solid.
>>> Breakaway, who happens to be an attorney, is trying to defend his company's apparent snatching of this block based upon his own rather novel legal theory that ARIN doesn't have jurisdiction over any IP address space that was handed out before ARIN was formed, in 1997."
By George he's right! I'm gonna lay claim to 127.0.0.1. oh wait I already seem to own it...
IMHO regardless of intentions, writing/releasing something that installs/spread itself to otherwise uninfected PCs without express prior agreement of the PC owner is bad. Period.
I personally do think its OK and even desireable for any owner of a botnet-infected computer to install something that will use the botnet mechanism itself to undo/unifect the whole botnet though.
This is a very good thing for Linux and the Open Source community for the following reasons:
Finally we have 100% proof that Microsoft have been lying all along when denying there is a security backdoor in Windows.
Now we know beyond doubt that you just can't trust any Microsoft-developed security system to even be intended to be fully secure.
This will ensure all worldwide military, and most (non-US) government departments will be obliged to migrate away from Windows and other Microsoft products simply for security reasons.
The first big business bust made with evidence gained by COFEE will ensure the rest of the commercial world will shortly follow.
Baloney. Its a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition.
> but any developer knows that vertical space matters!
Yes but I still prefer widescreen for development as you can have two windows open side by side. E.g. Sourcecode and compiler output, sourcecode and man page etc.
Also I prefer higher pixel displays so that you can have more readable lines of code through having a smaller font. Generally non-widescreen screens are either 1024x768 or 1280 x 1024, while widescreen displays tend to have higher pixel resolutions.
My 5 year old widescreen Dell laptop is 1920x1200 so in practice I got more readable lines of code on it than an old-style square display. Wierdly it seems harder to find widescreen laptops with such high resolutions these days though.
Its an erroneous but very common mistake to presume the amount of P2P traffic is directly relative to the amount of copyrighted music being illegally traded. It seems to me that more and more legal stuff (device drivers, service packs etc) are being made available as torrents, in some cases exclusively.
For example, many popular linux distros are made available as torrents. I wonder how much of the spike is actually down to the fact that people are fed up with vista and downloading alternatives to it?
If an individual went around pretending to represent the law, then he would get into serious trouble right away. Why aren't the police taking direct action against the RIAA's illegal operations instead of just sending them a cease-and-desist letter?
does anyone else also feel that companies should not be legally able to remotely alter or even disable a product once you have fully paid for it, without your express agreement each time?
So it seems along with the massive uptake of IM, facebook, myspace et al. mostly by all the teens and twentysomethings that we coming to the point where if anyone of any age choses not to be connected to everyone else ALL the time, then they are now labelled as introverts, the implication being that they are somehow deviant or have a psychological problem.
Actually its not the cameras. They are only watching for speeders anyway. Driving like that always used to be the case even before the advent of cameras, which have only really been widespread in the UK (outside of big cities like London at least) in last 15 years or so anyway.
When I emigrated to the US from the UK about 6 years ago, it took me some adjustment to get used to the fact that most Americans don't have good manners for other road users. In the UK you can automatically expect a 'thankyou' wave if you leave a gap to let other road-users in/out. In the US its very rare to see any acknowledgement for showing consideration. Also in most American cities you need to get used to drivers that just cut you off whenever they feel like it.
It seems there is a very widespread and selfish 'me first' attitude in the US that isn't so common in other places.
>> Well then it's a good thing their driver support is so crappy with Linux!
Actually I've never had a problem with stability of nVidia's Linux video drivers. THey don't have all the bells and whisltes the windows drivers have but they alwayy work stably, at least for me.
I certainly can;t say the same thing about ATI. Their drivers suck under both windows and Linux. Whats worse is that I can't even find Linux drivers for my laptop's ATI GPU. I'll never buy ATI again because of their drivers (especially Linux) being shitty or even totally non-existent.
>> You don't lose something that you've typed in notepad and haven't saved.
Wrong. actually I just now experienced Vista crashing apparently as a result of ATI driver issues.
>> Whereas in Linux you would lose the gvim session with the unsaved buffers.
Wrong again. VIM _does_ save a journal file as you go. Unlike notepad, if VIM was terminated abnormally it gives you an option to recover a file you were editing when you (re)run it.
>> Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said.
Translation: Comcast will soon introduce bandwidth-limiting on port 80 too.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all great until LaLa goes under, or simply does a Microsoft and just leaves millions of PlaysForSure customers with a lot of paid-for but now unplayable music, just because of a change in DRM and marketing strategy. This model does nothing to guarantee you will always be able to access the music you already paid for.
Furthermore, what about all the times you want to play your music when you're not able to use an internet connection?
Call me old-fashioned but when I buy something I still expect to get something tangible I can be in control of, and use when I want. If that isn't the case then I just don't buy it. I suspect there are still enough people like me that will tip the balance on this.
There seems to be a collectors market for old infocom stuff at least: On ebay an Infocom Starcross game (Apple II version) still in shrinkwrap is currently at $611!!! I used to have one of these back in the day and I made a motorized flying toy out of it. Doh. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230253373809
My barber has a sign up in front of his barber chair asking for donations of old laptops.
I've been helping him renovate them and give them to 'deserving causes' who need laptops but can't afford one. (think poor families with kids who need them for school/college or single parents etc).
From the feedback we've got, it really does help fill a need in our the local community.
shit right now.
He needs some extra magic to add inverse-fisheye to the image coming out of the projector to make it appear correct to the user.
..is to make you look like such a nerd that women will avoid you like the plague.
keep looking on ebay for an old cpc 6128 or PCW-8256 or PCw-8512 (they all had the same 3" Hitachi microdrive). You can probably pick one up for like 10 uk pounds or something,
The Hitachi 3" Microdrive which was intended to be a direct competitor to Sony's 3.5" format. (Unfortunately for Amstrad the Sony format was the one that won-out in the PC world). Because of that I'm guessing the possibility that the 3" Microdrive has a PC-compatable connector may be high (but I don't know for sure).
Of course even if you got the drive connected to your PC OK still the problem would still be to get your PC to recognise the AMSDOS file system on the floppy.
I guess another option (if you get your hands on an amstrad computer) would be to write some little program that implements a simple file transfer protocol via whatever ports (RS-232 etc) that are available on the amstrad you get, then connect it directly to a regular PC via a homebrew cable.
Microsoft showed their true colours when they screwed everyone over with the PlaysForSure fiasco.
The fact that Microsoft could and did use DRM to prevent their own customers from playing media they already paid good money for through a legitimate MS Music store is enough to keep me away from ever buying a Zune (or any MS DRM-based product) forever.
The superhuman stength without giant external components, flying with pulse jets small enough to go in your feet, and infinite shock-absorbing ability are all the most useful skills, and coincidentally all the ones still far from possible with todays tech, so I think its not really true to say the science and tech of Ironman is pretty solid.
>>> Breakaway, who happens to be an attorney, is trying to defend his company's apparent snatching of this block based upon his own rather novel legal theory that ARIN doesn't have jurisdiction over any IP address space that was handed out before ARIN was formed, in 1997."
By George he's right! I'm gonna lay claim to 127.0.0.1. oh wait I already seem to own it...
>> they will now include wording in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the delivery of open source drivers
ooooh and if you don't provide linux drivers we'll still buy your hardware but we will wag our finger at you and tell your mom.
Why can't they just say that they won't even consider buying any hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers?
IMHO regardless of intentions, writing/releasing something that installs/spread itself to otherwise uninfected PCs without express prior agreement of the PC owner is bad. Period.
I personally do think its OK and even desireable for any owner of a botnet-infected computer to install something that will use the botnet mechanism itself to undo/unifect the whole botnet though.
This is a very good thing for Linux and the Open Source community for the following reasons:
Finally we have 100% proof that Microsoft have been lying all along when denying there is a security backdoor in Windows.
Now we know beyond doubt that you just can't trust any Microsoft-developed security system to even be intended to be fully secure.
This will ensure all worldwide military, and most (non-US) government departments will be obliged to migrate away from Windows and other Microsoft products simply for security reasons.
The first big business bust made with evidence gained by COFEE will ensure the rest of the commercial world will shortly follow.
>> MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product
Baloney. Its a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition.
Isn't this another class action lawsuit against Microsoft just waiting to happen?
I mean apart from anything else, how fucking difficult could it be for Microsoft to keep a license server running anyway?
> but any developer knows that vertical space matters!
Yes but I still prefer widescreen for development as you can have two windows open side by side.
E.g. Sourcecode and compiler output, sourcecode and man page etc.
Also I prefer higher pixel displays so that you can have more readable lines of code through having a smaller font. Generally non-widescreen screens are either 1024x768 or 1280 x 1024, while widescreen displays tend to have higher pixel resolutions.
My 5 year old widescreen Dell laptop is 1920x1200 so in practice I got more readable lines of code on it than an old-style square display. Wierdly it seems harder to find widescreen laptops with such high resolutions these days though.
Its an erroneous but very common mistake to presume the amount of P2P traffic is directly relative to the amount of copyrighted music being illegally traded. It seems to me that more and more legal stuff (device drivers, service packs etc) are being made available as torrents, in some cases exclusively.
For example, many popular linux distros are made available as torrents. I wonder how much of the spike is actually down to the fact that people are fed up with vista and downloading alternatives to it?
UAC is totally ineffective as as its one of the first things nearly everyone turns off because its so damned annoying.
If an individual went around pretending to represent the law, then he would get into serious trouble right away.
Why aren't the police taking direct action against the RIAA's illegal operations instead of just sending them a cease-and-desist letter?
does anyone else also feel that companies should not be legally able to remotely alter or even disable a product once you have fully paid for it, without your express agreement each time?
So it seems along with the massive uptake of IM, facebook, myspace et al. mostly by all the teens and twentysomethings that we coming to the point where if anyone of any age choses not to be connected to everyone else ALL the time, then they are now labelled as introverts, the implication being that they are somehow deviant or have a psychological problem.
Actually its not the cameras. They are only watching for speeders anyway. Driving like that always used to be the case even before the advent of cameras, which have only really been widespread in the UK (outside of big cities like London at least) in last 15 years or so anyway.
When I emigrated to the US from the UK about 6 years ago, it took me some adjustment to get used to the fact that most Americans don't have good manners for other road users. In the UK you can automatically expect a 'thankyou' wave if you leave a gap to let other road-users in/out. In the US its very rare to see any acknowledgement for showing consideration. Also in most American cities you need to get used to drivers that just cut you off whenever they feel like it.
It seems there is a very widespread and selfish 'me first' attitude in the US that isn't so common in other places.
>> Well then it's a good thing their driver support is so crappy with Linux!
Actually I've never had a problem with stability of nVidia's Linux video drivers. THey don't have all the bells and whisltes the windows drivers have but they alwayy work stably, at least for me.
I certainly can;t say the same thing about ATI. Their drivers suck under both windows and Linux. Whats worse is that I can't even find Linux drivers for my laptop's ATI GPU. I'll never buy ATI again because of their drivers (especially Linux) being shitty or even totally non-existent.
>> You don't lose something that you've typed in notepad and haven't saved.
Wrong. actually I just now experienced Vista crashing apparently as a result of ATI driver issues.
>> Whereas in Linux you would lose the gvim session with the unsaved buffers.
Wrong again. VIM _does_ save a journal file as you go. Unlike notepad, if VIM was terminated abnormally it gives you an option to recover a file you were editing when you (re)run it.
>> Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said.
Translation: Comcast will soon introduce bandwidth-limiting on port 80 too.
Yeah. Shame it can't actually playback DVDs though unless you buy extra hardware.