....Tivo is to media devices what Apple is to computers, they build things that work intuitively.....
Since I already have an Apple PB and a Sony camcorder, adding an external 250GB HD was the only additional cost to have an easy to use system for recording material from the satellite receiver. The Toast software allows the burning of DVDs that can play back either on the PB connected to a projector or on any DVD payer around the house. The camcorder directly converts the signal from the receiver and feeds it to the Powerbook.
An Mac PB with an external HD and using a Sony Camcorder as a TV digitizer works great for me to record anything I want to watch again at a later time. A Mac Mini then plays the recordings back beautifully using a digital projector on a large screen. The 250GB HD can hold as may shows as I'd ever want to keep around.
....And I will be an old, old man before you ANY music at higher fidelity....
By the time you're an old old man, your hearing and vision wil have gone down to the point where all that fancy gagetry will no longer matter anyway. Besides getting to see the whiskers on the poorly shaved news anchor, what does HD TV do for the quality of the content? Are the loud, insistent commercials so much more enjoyable in surround sound and HD pictures? Will a car blowing up in HD detail give most people a bigger thrill than on a normal TV today? Until the costs for HD TV are the same or close to the same as present ordinary TV, HD will not be adopted nearly as fast as the plain DVD players or CD recorders were.
.....With.KKK, anyone wanting to talk about hate, post pictures of hate.....
Slash-dot and every other technical site should be required to a special.NERD or.GEEK domain. Nerdy posts about obscure topics like Linux, SQL, open source and all the other stuff here should not be on a.COM domain which is supposed to be for commercial things like buying and selling stuff, including porn.
....I don't approve of *ANY* centralized control. ANY.....
Indeed, there are billions of phone numbers and who knows how many phone books. If there is no single centralized phone book to look up phone numbers, why does there have to be single centralized directory to look up IP numbers? If someone were to make one single centralized phone book, lising every phone number and who it belonged to on Earth, who should that be and why would anybody care? This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot/. ers and lots of others seem to get so worked up about. Every country can make an internet DNS directory of their own which can list any IP number they care to put therein, including those in any other country. Right now everybody is using the DNS "phone book" that is made and kept up to date by the USA, so what? The US is not forcing anybody to use our phone book for IP number lookup.
How does the existence or non-existence of that or any other name affect even one single internet user? If you want your porn, it is just as accessible or unaccessible now, with or without that or any other name. The DNS system is nothing more than the equivalent of a telphone directory and search engines like a fancy set of yellow pages. Having another domain name or two has about the same effect as re-numbering the pages of a city's phone book. Just like any country can print their own phone books, so any country make their own DNS internet phone directory. So what is the big deal about that.
.....The purpose of domain names was never so every person could have a domain like yourname.com......
And just who do YOU think you are to determine what the purpose of a domain name ought to be? I think domain names ought to be available at cost, which is next to nothing. If I can have a free 800 phone number from my phone provider, why should I not also get a free domain name from any company, such as my ISP, that wishes to give out such names? There is even a.name domain for this purpose.
.....I will be more than happy to support those who choose go for a system that is not as prone to abuse......
What abuse? Oh you mean the Nigerian scams, the Russian phishing sites and the widespread spam, p0orn and gambling on the WORLD wide web? Under the so called abuse by the US you cannot communicate with your uncle in Afghanistan or your cousin in Rumania? Maybe you DO have trouble communicating with some friends behind the Great Firewall of China? That problem of course would disappear if the UN or EU wrestle control of the DNS system away from the US.
The US lets other countries have a voice. They can jump up and down, have a tantrum like a three year old and yell as loud as they want to and maybe even pound a shoe or two in the UN. The US will even allow them to make their own DNS system and tax the H*** out of their own internet users. Nobody is forced to use neither the DNS nor the GPS systems we make available for free to all.
....I will be more than happy to support those who choose go for a system that is not as prone to abuse.....
What abuse? Oh you mean the Nigerian scams or the Russian phishing sites and all the porn and gambling on WORLD wide web? So far, the Internet has been working just fine for everybody. What needs fixing that is broken? Have you not been able to e-mail your uncle in Afghanistan of cousin in Rumania? You may have had trouble communicating with friends behind the great China firewall, but then that would go away if the UN or EU wrestled control of the DNS system away from the US. The US does let the other countries have a voice. They can yell at the top of their lungs as long as they want to about OUR Internet or OUR GPS system.
....Other countries going for their own DNS system is much harder to implement than you imply.....
There is no reason right now for anybody to roll their own DNS. All I am saying that they may do so if they WANT to. There is no reason to fix something that isn't broken and that has absolutely nothing to do with democracy. All the spam and p0rn can travel all over the global internet just fine still and by and large it is still tax free.
Name me some other nations that have had a peaceful succession of governments under a single constitutional framework for the last 229 years.
....What if your government decides to unilaterally change the current status quo?.....
Then your government and any others could set up their own servers and be happy. The same can be said of the GPS system that everybody gets to use for free even though it belongs to the US.
....why shouldn't the rest of the world be free to choose wether they want an.xxx domain or not.....
Can anybody here on/. tell me that the US has mandated that China, Brazil or any other country can't set up a server system that allows for a.XXX or.YYY or any other domain for thier respective countries?
.....It's about sharing control of something that's too big for ANY single country to control.....
Any country that doesn't like the way we have run the internet can opt out any time they wish and do it all themselves and there is nothing the US could or even wants to do about it. No country needs to use OUR GPS system either, we just allow *anybody* to use that for free, just as we allow anybody to use OUR DNS servers without them paying a dime. There are those who don't like the US controlling the GPS system either, but it is more difficult to argue that we don't have the right to control that. Anybody also can build their own GPS system if they don't like the way ours operates.
.....They simply don't want to be dependent on the US in something as important as this network is......
Neither you nor anyone else here on/. has explained how *any* other country is dependent on the US running their portion of the internet. Any country can put up servers and point all their users to those rather than the ones here in the US. Other countries run their own phone systems, radio and TV stations etc, so why couldn't they run their own computer network also? This all has the makings of a tempest in a teapot.
....Also, 60% being out of print means that 40% are IN PRINT.....
The article stated that of the remaining 40%, about 20% are public domain, so that leaves only 20% in print.
If the libraries decided to upgrade their computerized catalogs themselves to full text search indexes, could the publishers stop them? Could they stop them from making those catalogs available on the Internet? Can the libraries contract this job to a third party, such as Google? Let the courts decide these complex questions.
.....If I need more context, I go to the library.....
So if you go to the library, borrow the book and copy the relevant pages, has the publisher gotten any additional money? If each of the libraries themselves decided to upgrade their current computerized catalogs to full text searches and make them available on the Internet, could the publishers stop them? That is really the question the court has to decide. Google is essentially only an aggregator of such library catalogs for the libraries involved, allowing all those library catalogs to be searched from a single search query.
.....shrinkwrapping the things and putting nasty EULAs in them.....
The "A" at the end of EULA stands for Agreement. Just because I unwrap somthing with a bunch of legal crap printed thereon does NOT make that an agreement. An agreement ALWAYS has to state what is agreed to, WHO is making the agreement (at least two parties) and whether either of the parties (minors?) can enter into a legally binding agreement.
.....Honestly, without the contents - this service is useless.....
Why? If the book is in print, a link to a store selling it would result in more profit for the publisher. If it is out of print, why should the publisher care if someone finds out about its existence and whereabouts? If it is in the public domain, why not let everybody that wants it have it? More information to more people is always a good thing.
........Publishers could make a compelling argument in my opinion that they are entitled to a portion of Google's revenue...
And so of course the RIAA companies are entitled to a share in the iPod and other music player revenues also. RIAA and publishers tend to be technophobes who are afraid of new ideas than seem to threaten what they are used to doing for all these years. As the article pointed out, about 60% of all books in these libaries are out of print and therefore not likely to further contribute to the coffers of the publishers. Many of them are out of business anyway. Publishers whose books are out of print could be notified every time one of these works is referenced and if there are many such references may decide it might be worthwhile to print up another edition for sale. Currently in print books with a "buy now" link would only increase their sales. What Google wants to do would never decrease the sales of any copyrighted works, but could possibly increase them.
......There is no lawful way to remove DVD DRM......
You can break any of artificial man-made law like DMCA, that has nothing to do with right or wrong any time you want. There is one law you must however NEVER break":"Thou shalt not get caught!" It may be illegal to decrypt and copy a movie onto a hard drive from a DVD so that you can watch it on your laptop without dragging a fragile, easily damaged DVD all over creation, but it is not wrong to do so. It would be wrong however to post that decrypted file so anybody could copy it or give away or sell copies since you MAY be depriving the producer of legitimte income, thereby violating the golden rule. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it is wrong.
....I have found that I'm distracted by a device that does too much, and isn't particularly good at anything that it's supposed to do.....
In so much of life there is specalization. Think of how many kinds of medical practitioners there are, each specializing in a different part of the body. I wouldn't want a general family doctor to do open heart surgery on me, but a good surgeon who does heart surgery only, every day.
It is like that in tecnological devices also. In a phone, I want one that does that really well and not compromise that function with a lot of bells and whistles that waste precious battery life and have nothing to do with calling or receiving just plain phone calls.
If I want to have my entire music library with me and easily select any song, a phone will always be a compromise compared to a specialized, well designed device like an iPod.
If I want to enjoy a movie, I'll go to a movie show or at least watch it in the comfort of my living room on as big a screen as I can afford or fit into the room.
In a digital camera, I want one with enough quality so that I can significantly crop a picture and not have it look fuzzy and pixilated when printed as a 5x7.
Devices that try to be a jack of all trades are a master of none are ultimately a huge waste of money.
That's easy! Apple has lot of money and there are lawyers who think they can use our messed up legal system to extort some money from a company that has deep pockets. I hope that Apple does NOT settle but fights this to the bitter end in court if need be, just in order to set a precedent to deter other lawyers from trying such blantant legal robbery in the future.
I know that such variations can and have been used to power a clock, but whether a mechanism can be built that utilizes this and also lasts for 10K or so years is another thing entirely. I don't believe than *anything* man-made can last that long, even if only subjected to "natural" deterioration through the laws of entropy.
(....Laboratory limits on the variation of alpha....)
Just because we can measure somthing in the lab NOW doesn't mean that it was not greatly different in the past. Most processes in nature are non-linear. In the past, many cherished notions of scientific "truth" finally collapsed under the weight of accumulating evidence in spite of dogmatic opposition from the then existing scientific esablishment. The mounting evidence that some of the so called fundamental "constants" are far from constant is still being hotly denied because it has some very unsettling implications to the established world view concerning the assumptions and methods used to determine the age of things.
If you are interested to find out more, you can begin here:
Clocks based on the atom are great and incredibly accurate for short term stuff, like the GPS and our even normal appointment calendars, but on really long time scales appear to be subject to drift against the clocks based on gravity.
Atmospheric pressure variations. I read about a clock that is powered that way that was built in the 50s and was a for sale item. It used a pendulum to keep time. A clock such as the one in the article uses the force of gravity and the orbit of the earth as a time keeping basis. As such it can be accurate long term, because the equations of gravity contain no time containing variable units and are therefore long term stable.
Atomic clocks, such as our national standards use atomic forces which do contain time units. (Planks constant) There is evidence that some of these "constants" are only stable for the relatively short human life times, but have drifted lower throughout the long ages of time and are still changing today. This means that "clocks" such as radioactive decays must also be corrected for this drift.
Great beginning! I have never heard of that being done with Linux, but it is obviously possible. So why are not most if not all Linux apps packaged this way? At the top of the linked site is the phrase; "There are currently 3 distributions". That is the biggest trouble with Linux. If a user happens to have one of the other than those 3, who knows how many distributions he/she is out of luck right then and there. A non-geek Linux user might not even know which particular flavor and version he's got. With both Mac and Windows there is ONE system respectively and all a user has to read on the software box is that the program will work on his OS. Until Linux gets that way also, so that Linux is Linux is Linux everywhere exactly the SAME on all x86 computers no matter who makes the box, Linux will always be a wonderful, flexible, powerful, reliable, reasonbly secure OS for geeks only. Joe or Jane user want to walk out of Circuit City or wherever and have a WORKING computer and be able to simply install the software and joystick they bought along with it for their kids. That's what they get EVERY time with a Mac and usually also with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
....Tivo is to media devices what Apple is to computers, they build things that work intuitively.....
Since I already have an Apple PB and a Sony camcorder, adding an external 250GB HD was the only additional cost to have an easy to use system for recording material from the satellite receiver. The Toast software allows the burning of DVDs that can play back either on the PB connected to a projector or on any DVD payer around the house. The camcorder directly converts the signal from the receiver and feeds it to the Powerbook.
....So - if you were a Mac guy.....
An Mac PB with an external HD and using a Sony Camcorder as a TV digitizer works great for me to record anything I want to watch again at a later time. A Mac Mini then plays the recordings back beautifully using a digital projector on a large screen. The 250GB HD can hold as may shows as I'd ever want to keep around.
....And I will be an old, old man before you ANY music at higher fidelity....
By the time you're an old old man, your hearing and vision wil have gone down to the point where all that fancy gagetry will no longer matter anyway. Besides getting to see the whiskers on the poorly shaved news anchor, what does HD TV do for the quality of the content? Are the loud, insistent commercials so much more enjoyable in surround sound and HD pictures? Will a car blowing up in HD detail give most people a bigger thrill than on a normal TV today? Until the costs for HD TV are the same or close to the same as present ordinary TV, HD will not be adopted nearly as fast as the plain DVD players or CD recorders were.
.....With .KKK, anyone wanting to talk about hate, post pictures of hate.....
.NERD or .GEEK domain. Nerdy posts about obscure topics like Linux, SQL, open source and all the other stuff here should not be on a .COM domain which is supposed to be for commercial things like buying and selling stuff, including porn.
Slash-dot and every other technical site should be required to a special
....I don't approve of *ANY* centralized control. ANY.....
/. ers and lots of others seem to get so worked up about. Every country can make an internet DNS directory of their own which can list any IP number they care to put therein, including those in any other country. Right now everybody is using the DNS "phone book" that is made and kept up to date by the USA, so what? The US is not forcing anybody to use our phone book for IP number lookup.
Indeed, there are billions of phone numbers and who knows how many phone books. If there is no single centralized phone book to look up phone numbers, why does there have to be single centralized directory to look up IP numbers? If someone were to make one single centralized phone book, lising every phone number and who it belonged to on Earth, who should that be and why would anybody care? This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot
.....Why? Because of .XXX.....
How does the existence or non-existence of that or any other name affect even one single internet user? If you want your porn, it is just as accessible or unaccessible now, with or without that or any other name. The DNS system is nothing more than the equivalent of a telphone directory and search engines like a fancy set of yellow pages. Having another domain name or two has about the same effect as re-numbering the pages of a city's phone book. Just like any country can print their own phone books, so any country make their own DNS internet phone directory. So what is the big deal about that.
.....The purpose of domain names was never so every person could have a domain like yourname.com......
.name domain for this purpose.
And just who do YOU think you are to determine what the purpose of a domain name ought to be? I think domain names ought to be available at cost, which is next to nothing. If I can have a free 800 phone number from my phone provider, why should I not also get a free domain name from any company, such as my ISP, that wishes to give out such names? There is even a
.....I will be more than happy to support those who choose go for a system that is not as prone to abuse......
What abuse? Oh you mean the Nigerian scams, the Russian phishing sites and the widespread spam, p0orn and gambling on the WORLD wide web? Under the so called abuse by the US you cannot communicate with your uncle in Afghanistan or your cousin in Rumania? Maybe you DO have trouble communicating with some friends behind the Great Firewall of China? That problem of course would disappear if the UN or EU wrestle control of the DNS system away from the US.
The US lets other countries have a voice. They can jump up and down, have a tantrum like a three year old and yell as loud as they want to and maybe even pound a shoe or two in the UN. The US will even allow them to make their own DNS system and tax the H*** out of their own internet users. Nobody is forced to use neither the DNS nor the GPS systems we make available for free to all.
....I will be more than happy to support those who choose go for a system that is not as prone to abuse.....
What abuse? Oh you mean the Nigerian scams or the Russian phishing sites and all the porn and gambling on WORLD wide web? So far, the Internet has been working just fine for everybody. What needs fixing that is broken? Have you not been able to e-mail your uncle in Afghanistan of cousin in Rumania? You may have had trouble communicating with friends behind the great China firewall, but then that would go away if the UN or EU wrestled control of the DNS system away from the US. The US does let the other countries have a voice. They can yell at the top of their lungs as long as they want to about OUR Internet or OUR GPS system.
....Other countries going for their own DNS system is much harder to implement than you imply.....
There is no reason right now for anybody to roll their own DNS. All I am saying that they may do so if they WANT to. There is no reason to fix something that isn't broken and that has absolutely nothing to do with democracy. All the spam and p0rn can travel all over the global internet just fine still and by and large it is still tax free.
Name me some other nations that have had a peaceful succession of governments under a single constitutional framework for the last 229 years.
....What if your government decides to unilaterally change the current status quo?.....
Then your government and any others could set up their own servers and be happy. The same can be said of the GPS system that everybody gets to use for free even though it belongs to the US.
....why shouldn't the rest of the world be free to choose wether they want an .xxx domain or not.....
/. tell me that the US has mandated that China, Brazil or any other country can't set up a server system that allows for a .XXX or .YYY or any other domain for thier respective countries?
Can anybody here on
.....It's about sharing control of something that's too big for ANY single country to control.....
Any country that doesn't like the way we have run the internet can opt out any time they wish and do it all themselves and there is nothing the US could or even wants to do about it. No country needs to use OUR GPS system either, we just allow *anybody* to use that for free, just as we allow anybody to use OUR DNS servers without them paying a dime. There are those who don't like the US controlling the GPS system either, but it is more difficult to argue that we don't have the right to control that. Anybody also can build their own GPS system if they don't like the way ours operates.
.....They simply don't want to be dependent on the US in something as important as this network is......
/. has explained how *any* other country is dependent on the US running their portion of the internet. Any country can put up servers and point all their users to those rather than the ones here in the US. Other countries run their own phone systems, radio and TV stations etc, so why couldn't they run their own computer network also? This all has the makings of a tempest in a teapot.
Neither you nor anyone else here on
....Also, 60% being out of print means that 40% are IN PRINT.....
The article stated that of the remaining 40%, about 20% are public domain, so that leaves only 20% in print.
If the libraries decided to upgrade their computerized catalogs themselves to full text search indexes, could the publishers stop them? Could they stop them from making those catalogs available on the Internet? Can the libraries contract this job to a third party, such as Google? Let the courts decide these complex questions.
.....If I need more context, I go to the library .....
So if you go to the library, borrow the book and copy the relevant pages, has the publisher gotten any additional money? If each of the libraries themselves decided to upgrade their current computerized catalogs to full text searches and make them available on the Internet, could the publishers stop them? That is really the question the court has to decide. Google is essentially only an aggregator of such library catalogs for the libraries involved, allowing all those library catalogs to be searched from a single search query.
.....shrinkwrapping the things and putting nasty EULAs in them.....
The "A" at the end of EULA stands for Agreement. Just because I unwrap somthing with a bunch of legal crap printed thereon does NOT make that an agreement. An agreement ALWAYS has to state what is agreed to, WHO is making the agreement (at least two parties) and whether either of the parties (minors?) can enter into a legally binding agreement.
.....Honestly, without the contents - this service is useless.....
Why? If the book is in print, a link to a store selling it would result in more profit for the publisher. If it is out of print, why should the publisher care if someone finds out about its existence and whereabouts? If it is in the public domain, why not let everybody that wants it have it? More information to more people is always a good thing.
........Publishers could make a compelling argument in my opinion that they are entitled to a portion of Google's revenue...
And so of course the RIAA companies are entitled to a share in the iPod and other music player revenues also. RIAA and publishers tend to be technophobes who are afraid of new ideas than seem to threaten what they are used to doing for all these years. As the article pointed out, about 60% of all books in these libaries are out of print and therefore not likely to further contribute to the coffers of the publishers. Many of them are out of business anyway. Publishers whose books are out of print could be notified every time one of these works is referenced and if there are many such references may decide it might be worthwhile to print up another edition for sale. Currently in print books with a "buy now" link would only increase their sales. What Google wants to do would never decrease the sales of any copyrighted works, but could possibly increase them.
......There is no lawful way to remove DVD DRM......
You can break any of artificial man-made law like DMCA, that has nothing to do with right or wrong any time you want. There is one law you must however NEVER break":"Thou shalt not get caught!" It may be illegal to decrypt and copy a movie onto a hard drive from a DVD so that you can watch it on your laptop without dragging a fragile, easily damaged DVD all over creation, but it is not wrong to do so. It would be wrong however to post that decrypted file so anybody could copy it or give away or sell copies since you MAY be depriving the producer of legitimte income, thereby violating the golden rule. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it is wrong.
....I have found that I'm distracted by a device that does too much, and isn't particularly good at anything that it's supposed to do.....
In so much of life there is specalization. Think of how many kinds of medical practitioners there are, each specializing in a different part of the body. I wouldn't want a general family doctor to do open heart surgery on me, but a good surgeon who does heart surgery only, every day.
It is like that in tecnological devices also. In a phone, I want one that does that really well and not compromise that function with a lot of bells and whistles that waste precious battery life and have nothing to do with calling or receiving just plain phone calls.
If I want to have my entire music library with me and easily select any song, a phone will always be a compromise compared to a specialized, well designed device like an iPod.
If I want to enjoy a movie, I'll go to a movie show or at least watch it in the comfort of my living room on as big a screen as I can afford or fit into the room.
In a digital camera, I want one with enough quality so that I can significantly crop a picture and not have it look fuzzy and pixilated when printed as a 5x7.
Devices that try to be a jack of all trades are a master of none are ultimately a huge waste of money.
....so why sue?....
That's easy! Apple has lot of money and there are lawyers who think they can use our messed up legal system to extort some money from a company that has deep pockets. I hope that Apple does NOT settle but fights this to the bitter end in court if need be, just in order to set a precedent to deter other lawyers from trying such blantant legal robbery in the future.
....to use atmospheric pressure variations....
I CLE_ID=39733
I know that such variations can and have been used to power a clock, but whether a mechanism can be built that utilizes this and also lasts for 10K or so years is another thing entirely. I don't believe than *anything* man-made can last that long, even if only subjected to "natural" deterioration through the laws of entropy.
(....Laboratory limits on the variation of alpha....)
Just because we can measure somthing in the lab NOW doesn't mean that it was not greatly different in the past. Most processes in nature are non-linear. In the past, many cherished notions of scientific "truth" finally collapsed under the weight of accumulating evidence in spite of dogmatic opposition from the then existing scientific esablishment. The mounting evidence that some of the so called fundamental "constants" are far from constant is still being hotly denied because it has some very unsettling implications to the established world view concerning the assumptions and methods used to determine the age of things.
If you are interested to find out more, you can begin here:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
Clocks based on the atom are great and incredibly accurate for short term stuff, like the GPS and our even normal appointment calendars, but on really long time scales appear to be subject to drift against the clocks based on gravity.
....but what drives this super clock?.....
Atmospheric pressure variations. I read about a clock that is powered that way that was built in the 50s and was a for sale item. It used a pendulum to keep time. A clock such as the one in the article uses the force of gravity and the orbit of the earth as a time keeping basis. As such it can be accurate long term, because the equations of gravity contain no time containing variable units and are therefore long term stable.
Atomic clocks, such as our national standards use atomic forces which do contain time units. (Planks constant) There is evidence that some of these "constants" are only stable for the relatively short human life times, but have drifted lower throughout the long ages of time and are still changing today. This means that "clocks" such as radioactive decays must also be corrected for this drift.
.....whole application in a single file.....
Great beginning! I have never heard of that being done with Linux, but it is obviously possible. So why are not most if not all Linux apps packaged this way? At the top of the linked site is the phrase; "There are currently 3 distributions". That is the biggest trouble with Linux. If a user happens to have one of the other than those 3, who knows how many distributions he/she is out of luck right then and there. A non-geek Linux user might not even know which particular flavor and version he's got. With both Mac and Windows there is ONE system respectively and all a user has to read on the software box is that the program will work on his OS. Until Linux gets that way also, so that Linux is Linux is Linux everywhere exactly the SAME on all x86 computers no matter who makes the box, Linux will always be a wonderful, flexible, powerful, reliable, reasonbly secure OS for geeks only. Joe or Jane user want to walk out of Circuit City or wherever and have a WORKING computer and be able to simply install the software and joystick they bought along with it for their kids. That's what they get EVERY time with a Mac and usually also with Windows.