I checked listings for all PBS stations in Los Angeles (28, 50, and 58), and New York City (13, 21, 25).
It's not listed.
The only showing I can find is the national PBS feed available to sat owners like DirecTV and DishNetwork. The national feed is delayed one day (to encourage you to support local PBS?), so the show is on Friday at 10pm Eastern (7pm Pacific).
Of course the PBS.ORG listings can't be searched....
For instance the first Sony high-end model the DVP-7000 from a few years ago had dip switches inside that let you disable the region blocking and Macrovision.
The APEX 600D mentioned here at Slashdot has the "hidden" menu that lets you disable Macrovision.
Here is a list of region/macrovision cracks for home dvd players (many done with a keysequence on remote control)
So basicly, the PS2 hack is not news. You can go out today and a consumer DVD player with a known Macrovision disable feature, and copy movies to video tape to your hearts content, and avoid all the Macrovision glitches.
A cosmetic flaw when copying lots of files. The file copy dialog doesn't handle multiple gigs correctly and starts saying things like 373689 Minutes Remaining.
A couple bugs in the OS/2 console app emulation used to run older Microsoft console Apps and most importantly, to run the Brief editor. The OS/2 --version of Brief supports long filenames, runs great under WinNT.
One, The Ctrl-S and Ctrl-C keys are trapped and don't get through (this works in WinNT, the OS/2 support DLLs are unchanged in Win2000, it's a bug in Win2000).
Two, The file create function does not work on FAT32 volumes, just gives an error. Open works fine. (So for instance you cannot use Brief to edit a file on FAT32).
The most serious bug I know of it IDE driver doesn't work on Micronics 440FX based motherboards (and maybe others). Very popular in Dual Pentium Pro servers.
Re:Why UseNet ... Deja discontinued binaries
on
Is Usenet Dying?
·
· Score: 3
> Yeah, the binary problem is rampant... > If a user desperately needs them (and > I'm sure many do:), then www.deja.com > remains an option.
Deja.com discontinued their direct news service (the only way to access binary newsgroups via Deja.com, and the only way to read the deja/dejanews internal newsgroups with a standard newsreader).
Alternatives are: Airnews, Altopia, Remarq, Giganews, Newscene, Newsguy, Remarq and so on. You can find any of them at Google or at this Yahoo category:
Or even better check out the newsgroup which exists to compare news providers:
alt.binaries.news-server-comparison
Here is the letter Deja.com sent to account holders on Jan 22, 2000:
To Our Valued Customers,
You are receiving this email because you currently have a Deja.com Personal Newsreader account.
Deja.com and bCandid Corporation, the providers of the Personal Newsreader service, have elected to discontinue offering the service effective February 2, 2000. In connection with the discontinuance of your account and as provided in the Terms of Service, bCandid Corporation will be issuing to you a prorata refund for any prepaid but unused days of the Personal Newsreader service. bCandid Corporation will start issuing refunds in February, 2000. The refund will be made to the credit card specified in your Personal Newsreader account. Please let us know if your credit card information has changed.
Should you wish to continue your Newsreader participation, we have located a qualified provider, UseNetServer.com, that can provide a similar service. UseNetServer.com is prepared to offer you the first 30 days of service free of charge, and can transition you to its News servers without service interruption if you act before February 2, 2000. To take advantage of this offer or to learn more about it, please visit:
http://www.usenetserver.com/deja.htm
We believe UseNetServer.com will be able to provide you with a smooth transition to a high-quality Usenet service.
If you have any questions regarding the discontinuation of your Personal Newsreader account, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@bcandid.deja.com.
As old groups become talked out, or invaded, new groups are added or old junk groups suddenly come to life.
Here are some stats on the most read groups (according to one medium newsprovider): http://www.newsadmin.com/top100reads.htm
Usenet continues to grow, and thrive. It's over 100GB a day now, and over 1 million articles.
Size of Usenet Stats here: http://newsfeed-east.remarq.com/feed-size/
Although a lot of that is MP3, Movies, Porn and Warez, the number of text messages continues to soar as well, over half those messages posted every day are under 20k.
Sure there are the occasional wars and attacks on the usenet infrastructure, stuff like insane number of jobs posts, the clueless cable modem users who post the full Quake3 CD image a few times in one day, the superceeds, forged cancels and so on. But usenet is big, DAMN BIG... it can take a lot of punishment, there are sizable companies throwing mountains of hardware at the problems to keep their paying customers happy.
>> Why worry about filenames... Any self-respecting person that creates MP3's puts info in the ID3 tag fields anyway
The APEX doesn't display ID3 tag data (and no other DVD/MP3 players do either as far as I know).
ID3 data is nice when it's there, but not all MP3s have the data (or sadly the correct data).
One problem with ID3 data is that it requires seeking to the end of the file, not exactly an instant operation... Particularly when you'd like near seemless playback from track to track.
I think all the current purchasers would be thrilled if they just showed 30 characters of the Joliet name instead of putting two filenames on a line with lots of dead space around them.
>>Does this mean you could theoretically take it out of the unit and use it internally in a PC?
The drive in mine is labelled "DSS" made in Korea.
I don't see why not, but since it's likely a 1X, maybe 2X DVD IDE drive, why bother? You could buy a generic DVD drive on the street for $40 to $50.
It might be interesting to do the reverse. Put a new high-speed 10X DVD drive in there and see if the 4x VCD playback/scan becomes smooth (right now it's very jerky, like it can't read the data quickly enough).
Just picked up two (one for a friend), they had one on Display, two in the back. $149 each, normal price, no special sale or anything.
Display says nothing about MP3, box has a small line of text saying it supports MPEG3 Audio.
Salesman said it's a new item, had them a couple weeks.
It really does play MP3 CD's, even with complex directory structures and long filenames.
The 8 character limit is far worse than you suspect. First for any duplicates (in the first 8 chars, which is darn likely) it immediately chops off 2 characters to put a 'N' and '1' to '9' to handle the duplicate names. If it hits more than 9 duplicates it chops off another 4 characters (leaving you with 2 unique chars), putting a 4 digit hex checksum of some sort, then a 'N' '1' (assume that's there on the 1 in 65536 chance of a duplicate hex checksum).
So it's really quite hard to figure out what the tracks are!
Even when playing a track there is no extra info, no more filename, no track number, no MP3 tags. Only an elapsed time for that track (which defaults to off, you have to use the display button to get it). You have to read the track number from the front display.
As for VCD, it will actually play a PAL format VCD on a NTSC TV! So all those pirate movies from Hong Kong on VCD will now play on your TV. Even plays slightly messed up VCDs (like a couple I burned with Adaptec CD Creator 4.0 which would never play on my Phillips play fine on the APEX).
Still at $149, it's a STEAL!! I am so happy to be able to play my MP3 CDs directly without a computer, if I was richer I'd buy one for everyone in my family.
The drive is a standard DVD drive with IDE interface and 4 pin power connector.
It's based on the ESS 4308A chipset (which I assume is a newer version of the 3308 since the default Adult password is 3308).
Here is a press release from ESS announcing APEX using their chipset:
http://www.esstech.com/Newsroom/1999/9-23-99.htm l
Microsoft is letting WebTV drift off into no-where for a reason!!
They know the cheap (free?) PC is destroying most of the market for the standalone WebTV unit.
WebTV's only (limited) future is in integrated SatTV, Cable and HDTV boxes, like the new unit from Dish Network which aims to be WebTV, Dish Reciever and TiVo in one box.
Although Microsoft doesn't sell a 16bit compiler anymore, Watcom does.
Who is going to go out and develop a new Win31 project who doesn't already have 16bit development tools? The last release of Microsoft's 16bit compiler (8.0c) runs fine under Win98 and WinNT, even supports long filenames.
As for "API reading from a serial port" changing, the only real changes were a few function names (open, close, read, write all changed to standard file i/o versions). All the wierd DCB stuff is still supported with no changes!
I'm near the end of porting a big Win16 program to Win32 (maintaining both at the same time from the same source). Very little of the work is API oriented. Most of the work is rewriting 16bit assembly language, and wierd 16bit specific stuff with FAR or HUGE pointers and other kludgey hacks.
Slashdot Mirror
I checked listings for all PBS stations in Los Angeles (28, 50, and 58), and New York City (13, 21, 25).
It's not listed.
The only showing I can find is the national PBS feed available to sat owners like DirecTV and DishNetwork. The national feed is delayed one day (to encourage you to support local PBS?), so the show is on Friday at 10pm Eastern (7pm Pacific).
Of course the PBS.ORG listings can't be searched....
The APEX 600D mentioned here at Slashdot has the "hidden" menu that lets you disable Macrovision.
Here is a list of region/macrovision cracks for home dvd players (many done with a keysequence on remote control)
DVD Utils Home DVD Cracks
If that is already slashdot'd, try one of the mirrors through:
DVD Utils
So basicly, the PS2 hack is not news. You can go out today and a consumer DVD player with a known Macrovision disable feature, and copy movies to video tape to your hearts content, and avoid all the Macrovision glitches.
Pizza Rolls? Same problem with almost all frozen prepared foods.
Look at Stouffers red box, or Budget Gourmet. The prices have fallen, sales have skyrocketed.
But the portions shrink, and most of all the quality of ingredients has dropped drasticly.
Turkey pieces become cubes of processed turkey loaf.
Meaty meatballs become mushy with added filler, and start to taste like TVP.
Tomato sauce becomes a sweet thickened "gravy".
Little bits of tasty vegetables have disappeared.
So based on this POVRAY benchmark we get:
G3 400mhz 1.3x
PIII 450mhz 1x
Athlon 550mhz 2x
Athlon 400mhz would be 1.45x (to compare with G3)
Athlon 750mhz would be 2.72x (Athlon 500mhz overlocks to 750mhz easily)
Does the port of POVRAY you are using make use of any MMX, 3DNow, SSE, or G4 instructions?
Pity there are no SMP Althon machines yet.... stick a couple overclocked 500's in there, and get 1.5Ghz of performance!
A cosmetic flaw when copying lots of files. The file copy dialog doesn't handle multiple gigs correctly and starts saying things like 373689 Minutes Remaining.
A couple bugs in the OS/2 console app emulation used to run older Microsoft console Apps and most importantly, to run the Brief editor. The OS/2 --version of Brief supports long filenames, runs great under WinNT.
One, The Ctrl-S and Ctrl-C keys are trapped and don't get through (this works in WinNT, the OS/2 support DLLs are unchanged in Win2000, it's a bug in Win2000).
Two, The file create function does not work on FAT32 volumes, just gives an error. Open works fine. (So for instance you cannot use Brief to edit a file on FAT32).
The most serious bug I know of it IDE driver doesn't work on Micronics 440FX based motherboards (and maybe others). Very popular in Dual Pentium Pro servers.
> Yeah, the binary problem is rampant... :), then www.deja.com
n ies/Internet_Services/Usenet_Servers/Comme rcial/
> If a user desperately needs them (and
> I'm sure many do
> remains an option.
Deja.com discontinued their direct news service (the only way to access binary newsgroups via Deja.com, and the only way to read the deja/dejanews internal newsgroups with a standard newsreader).
Alternatives are: Airnews, Altopia, Remarq, Giganews, Newscene, Newsguy, Remarq and so on. You can find any of them at Google or at this Yahoo category:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Compa
Or even better check out the newsgroup which exists to compare news providers:
alt.binaries.news-server-comparison
Here is the letter Deja.com sent to account holders on Jan 22, 2000:
To Our Valued Customers,
You are receiving this email because you currently have a
Deja.com Personal Newsreader account.
Deja.com and bCandid Corporation, the providers of the
Personal Newsreader service, have elected to discontinue
offering the service effective February 2, 2000. In
connection with the discontinuance of your account and as
provided in the Terms of Service, bCandid Corporation will
be issuing to you a prorata refund for any prepaid but
unused days of the Personal Newsreader service. bCandid
Corporation will start issuing refunds in February, 2000.
The refund will be made to the credit card specified in
your Personal Newsreader account. Please let us know if
your credit card information has changed.
Should you wish to continue your Newsreader participation,
we have located a qualified provider, UseNetServer.com,
that can provide a similar service. UseNetServer.com is
prepared to offer you the first 30 days of service free of
charge, and can transition you to its News servers without
service interruption if you act before February 2, 2000.
To take advantage of this offer or to learn more about it,
please visit:
http://www.usenetserver.com/deja.htm
We believe UseNetServer.com will be able to provide you
with a smooth transition to a high-quality Usenet service.
If you have any questions regarding the discontinuation of
your Personal Newsreader account, please do not hesitate to
contact us at support@bcandid.deja.com.
Sincerely,
Deja.com
bCandid Corporation
As old groups become talked out, or invaded, new groups are added or old junk groups suddenly come to life.
Here are some stats on the most read groups (according to one medium newsprovider):
http://www.newsadmin.com/top100reads.htm
Usenet continues to grow, and thrive. It's over 100GB a day now, and over 1 million articles.
Size of Usenet Stats here:
http://newsfeed-east.remarq.com/feed-size/
Although a lot of that is MP3, Movies, Porn and Warez, the number of text messages continues to soar as well, over half those messages posted every day are under 20k.
Message size stats:
http://www.newsadmin.com/cgi-bin/msgsummary
Dejanews is still the best source of information for me, blows away any sort of web search engine. The old Dejanews interface is aailable at:
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/deja.html
As for SPAM, it's become a virtual non issue if you have a decent news provider.
Usenet SPAM stats:
http://www.newsadmin.com/spamreports.htm
Sure there are the occasional wars and attacks on the usenet infrastructure, stuff like insane number of jobs posts, the clueless cable modem users who post the full Quake3 CD image a few times in one day, the superceeds, forged cancels and so on. But usenet is big, DAMN BIG... it can take a lot of punishment, there are sizable companies throwing mountains of hardware at the problems to keep their paying customers happy.
It's $149 at all Southern California stores.
Go to the circuit city web site, they have a store locator, put in your zip code and it will dump out a list of stores in your area.
Call each one, see who has it in stock. You can try asking the price, some will tell you over the phone if you ask nice.
I suspect it's the same price for an entire region, but maybe someone will give you a break on a display model.
>> Why worry about filenames... Any self-respecting person that creates MP3's puts info in the ID3 tag fields anyway
The APEX doesn't display ID3 tag data (and no other DVD/MP3 players do either as far as I know).
ID3 data is nice when it's there, but not all MP3s have the data (or sadly the correct data).
One problem with ID3 data is that it requires seeking to the end of the file, not exactly an instant operation... Particularly when you'd like near seemless playback from track to track.
I think all the current purchasers would be thrilled if they just showed 30 characters of the Joliet name instead of putting two filenames on a line with lots of dead space around them.
>>Does this mean you could theoretically take it out of the unit and use it internally in a PC?
The drive in mine is labelled "DSS" made in Korea.
I don't see why not, but since it's likely a 1X, maybe 2X DVD IDE drive, why bother? You could buy a generic DVD drive on the street for $40 to $50.
It might be interesting to do the reverse. Put a new high-speed 10X DVD drive in there and see if the 4x VCD playback/scan becomes smooth (right now it's very jerky, like it can't read the data quickly enough).
Just picked up two (one for a friend), they had one on Display, two in the back.
m l
$149 each, normal price, no special sale or anything.
Display says nothing about MP3, box has a small line of text saying it supports MPEG3 Audio.
Salesman said it's a new item, had them a couple weeks.
It really does play MP3 CD's, even with complex directory structures and long filenames.
The 8 character limit is far worse than you suspect. First for any duplicates (in the first 8 chars, which is darn likely) it immediately chops off 2 characters to put a 'N' and '1' to '9' to handle the duplicate names. If it hits more than 9 duplicates it chops off another 4 characters (leaving you with 2 unique chars), putting a 4 digit hex checksum of some sort, then a 'N' '1' (assume that's there on the 1 in 65536 chance of a duplicate hex checksum).
So it's really quite hard to figure out what the tracks are!
Even when playing a track there is no extra info, no more filename, no track number, no MP3 tags. Only an elapsed time for that track (which defaults to off, you have to use the display button to get it). You have to read the track number from the front display.
As for VCD, it will actually play a PAL format VCD on a NTSC TV! So all those pirate movies from Hong Kong on VCD will now play on your TV. Even plays slightly messed up VCDs (like a couple I burned with Adaptec CD Creator 4.0 which would never play on my Phillips play fine on the APEX).
Still at $149, it's a STEAL!! I am so happy to be able to play my MP3 CDs directly without a computer, if I was richer I'd buy one for everyone in my family.
The drive is a standard DVD drive with IDE interface and 4 pin power connector.
It's based on the ESS 4308A chipset (which I assume is a newer version of the 3308 since the default Adult password is 3308).
Here is a press release from ESS announcing APEX using their chipset:
http://www.esstech.com/Newsroom/1999/9-23-99.ht
The Price is $149 in many Circuit City Stores. Some as low as $139.
It's often not on display, you have to ask them to look it up on the computer.
They cannot order from other stores, but can have them hold it for you or order from the central warehouse.
PriceWatch already lists the Maxtor 93652U8 36.5GB drive (9gig per platter, 4 platters).
It's only $290
Price Watch Search Maxtor 36.5
Of course the most gig per buck is the Maxtor 27.2GB for $201. (I payed $260 a few weeks ago)
The 27.2GB Maxtor transfers at over 18meg per second according to the Adaptec SCSIBench32 in EZ-SCSI 5.0 (which does test IDE as well as SCSI).
Pretty impressive for a 5400RPM consumer level drive!
Microsoft is letting WebTV drift off into no-where for a reason!!
They know the cheap (free?) PC is destroying most of the market for the standalone WebTV unit.
WebTV's only (limited) future is in integrated SatTV, Cable and HDTV boxes, like the new unit from Dish Network which aims to be WebTV, Dish Reciever and TiVo in one box.
It's called Ampapod: http://www.v.nu/core/ampapod/
The device is a universal remote control (IR only), with a wireless X10 (RF) controller, and a wireless mouse (RF).
The wireless mouse interface emulates a standard 2 button mouse, and works with Linux.
Ampapod (Winamp plugin) ignores the mouse functionality, and uses the other buttons on the remote to control WinAMP.
Although Microsoft doesn't sell a 16bit compiler anymore, Watcom does.
Who is going to go out and develop a new Win31 project who doesn't already have 16bit development tools? The last release of Microsoft's 16bit compiler (8.0c) runs fine under Win98 and WinNT, even supports long filenames.
As for "API reading from a serial port" changing, the only real changes were a few function names (open, close, read, write all changed to standard file i/o versions). All the wierd DCB stuff is still supported with no changes!
I'm near the end of porting a big Win16 program to Win32 (maintaining both at the same time from the same source). Very little of the work is API oriented. Most of the work is rewriting 16bit assembly language, and wierd 16bit specific stuff with FAR or HUGE pointers and other kludgey hacks.