I find that I can get CDs almost as cheaply and easily at Play.com, and they don't charge for postage. Something to do with the VAT laws for Jersey.
HMV and Music Zone stores, at least here in the UK, are dropping their prices to be similarly competitive. For example, Nelly Furtado's new album is a hair under ten pounds in HMV, about a pound more expensive in Music Zone, and I bet it's a similar price in my three local (large-chain) supermarkets.
I must admit, even though it can be quite convenient to shop at Play.com, and CD-Wow is a bit cheaper still, there's nothing quite as nice as browsing the racks. It's good to see real competition in the music retail industry again.
(By and large, I don't buy singles, though I have been thinking about getting a small MP3 player to house my collection of older and more esoteric single-track stuff, mostly 70s and 80s music with the occasional oddball track...)
I don't know much about this kind of technology, but I know that there are similar setups going on at the Burning Man festival every year. Maybe it's worth looking around the site to see if you can find anecdotes and contact info for people who've done the same.
Also, the Mars Society uses satellite hookups to keep in touch with its field stations. Perhaps they can give you some pointers?
Depending on where the event is held and how well cellphone signals can be received, you might also want to try a mobile phone carrier. A lot of the larger UK events like Glastonbury are, I believe, getting support in this area from larger telcos. It may be more complex, and will probably involve getting everyone a new PCMCIA card, but it could be an option.
Sorry I couldn't be of more help; sadly IANA techie, but I hope these couple of snippets I've seen around the net are of use to you.
In general, I agree with the parent.
However, I was disappointed by the last two - especially since they seemed to be mere excuses for Lucas to show off flashy CGI effects with very little thought to the writing. In fact, I think that "Attack of the Clones" was so simplistic and really just a FX-driven movie with no script, the next part is going to be...
Star Wars III: The Search for Plot
(Lucas was far better at titles for the first trilogy... why couldn't he have just left it alone and gone to suck the soul out of some other franchise, huh?);-)
It could be used for advertising, legitimately, on a company webserver - it's a possibility though I wouldn't endorse it. But what I meant was, what's the betting that you start getting people replacing the answer code (by whatever means) with, say... "v|@g.ra! buy now!" messages?
I don't see how a TV series that started in 1965 and has run continuously for the past 15 years (sometimes with 2 versions active at once) can have "fresh ideas" left.
That's why my profile says "recovering ex-Trekkie" - because it just continually recycled, went from cutting-edge to bland, and in the end was reduced to telling the same story every week for seven years. (Voyager - the only Trek that boldly blows like no Trek has blown before!) Farscape, on the other hand, knew its cliches and played to them - to the point of inserting Trek jokes and other pop-culture references (just about the only good thing to come out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, aside from Alyson Hannigan) - but it was also terribly innovative with twisting the sorts of things you'd expect in a scifi universe, and with using puppetry where Trek instead used latex noses.
I do have friends interested in Trek fandom, and sometimes we discuss how it could've been done better. At the time of writing there are a few dozen pages of notes on the ol' hard disk, which I'll use for my own (non-Trek) scifi scribblings... eventually.
You know, if you hooked a good heat conductor to the heatsink - say, copper wiring - and then hooked THAT to a good emitter in a ceramic-lined box, then you could overclock your processor and make a pizza oven...
Well, maybe. It's a bit of a gimcrack Heath Robinson-esque bodge, but it does sound like a real casemodder's McGuffin. It's also a long shot but it would be good fun trying to make it happen! Disclaimer: I can't change the laws of physics. Nor do I really grasp them, but that's beside the point;-)
Lots of potential for unique idents, a revival of the old ASCII art, and a return of classic IRC "finger" gags to the mainstream - what more could you want?
(The IRC thing - well, a friend of mine used to have ASCII art of a hand throwing the finger. Thus, anyone who fingered him got fingered in return...)
IMHO this does, as parent says, seem like a very cool and very harmless bit of fun screwing with corporate level technology. It would also have a good place in the corporate market - if, say, MS incorporated something similar into Longhorn, it could use a Windows logo as its default reply, or various Linux distros could use a Tux, a BSD demon, or a fedora. Other brand-name companies could work an ASCII version of their logo into it.
(Not to mention, you could also use those 70 lines to advertise - provide your company's contact info, or if you're a hosting company, give your pingers a free list of your latest packages. But how long til someone abuses it? Sure, the goatse guy is OK as net humour, but how long til we're fighting off idiots who want to incorporate spam messages in these ping responses?)
We can but hope that Berman gets cancelled. A quote attributed to Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Next Generation artist Andrew Probert opines that Berman doesn't know jack about scifi...
Personally, I think the mooted Friday-night slot is ironic, the final nail in the coffin. Anyone remember where classic Trek was put by the network for its third season before cancellation?
Yup. Friday night. When its core audience was out doing other things, the sort of things young people, young adults, do... if they'd had demographics back then, the advertisers would've run away in droves. (As it is, they didn't bring in the demographics til much later - and classic Trek proved, in syndication, to be an ideal show for the advertisers to hit certain groups.)
As an ex-Trekkie, all I can say is... roll on those Friday nights, I'm waiting to see the/. headline: Berman on Enterprise: "It's dead, Jim."
(Or, admittedly, a clip of Dean Stockwell on the bridge, saying something like, "Uhh, Sam... you're not really a starship captain...");-)
He wouldn't be the first fictional character to do so. If I were in the US, I'd be voting Cthulhu for President - after all, why settle for the lesser evil?;-)
The actual film copy is reused from one region to another for later releases.
... and at sneak previews or press screenings, this really shows. My local cinema often invites my boss (as he owns the local speciality sci-fi/cult TV store) and local schoolchildren (often from the school where my mum teaches) to sneak previews for word-of-mouth publicity, and so I see a few films early, either with my boss to do in-store advertising, or with my mum as a chaperone.
Believe you me, the state of the prints can and does show! For example, Disney's "Haunted Mansion" was previewed using a copy FedExed in from the US. The actual opening, five days later, used a new copy - for the most popular non-digital films, they do tend to bring in new copies for the major cinema chains, and circulate them out to smaller ones eventually, as the US prints can be pretty badly worn.
This is just in my experience, and with my sparse knowledge of the local cinema's operations. Maybe the situation is different outside of the UK, or depending on the film... anyone knows better, fill me in?
ESA's new prototype shuttle was again recently re-dubbed Firefox (formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix) to avoid confusion with a NASA program that had started up some months earlier...
... and receives a hefty lawsuit from Craig Thomas and MiG. Lovers of red pandas everywhere remain baffled, but the Mozilla project team see very little for potential in confusing a web browser with a space shuttle, and so choose to say nothing.
Interestingly, I understand that an increasing number of DVDs of older shows are being released in a "region zero" (region-free) format.
My understanding of the rationale behind this is to cut the production costs on something which will sell, but not sell enough in some areas to make region coding worthwhile. When they're around 20 or so years old, there's not much to lose to piracy.
On the other hand, stopping the region-coding of movies might be bad for the cinema industry. Why? Well, take the movie Galaxy Quest. The UK theatrical release date was the same as the US DVD release date. Given the prevalence of international sales via, say, eBay and Amazon, I can imagine people being tempted to buy a DVD and sell it if they don't like it, or buy a secondhand one.
That said, IMHO movies like LotR wouldn't be hurt due to simultaneous releases, unless they take more than a year to get out to the most remote cinemas in some parts of the world.
So, the long and short? My 2c is that region encoding is good for the industry in some cases (and also means they don't have to squeeze every language soundtrack or subtitle onto the same disc), but is also detrimental to the industry - if, for example, ST:TOS had been released in region-free format originally, Paramount would have easily at least doubled, if not tripled, their sales. (I don't intend to buy it now. The profile says recovering ex-Trekkie, and not only do I not want to waste the money on that stuff, but that packaging is hideous.)
Heck, they don't need computers to create orcs and oliphaunts now - just a really good dose of LSD;-)
But I know what you mean about computing power. My old Psion has more power than the first computer I ever bought... and that WAS scary. I think the Psion also cost less!
Interesting, AC.
I know that since switching to Mozilla Firefox and the latest version of Sun Java, I've had some minor issues with web-based applications (mostly games) which refuse to work with anything but MS Java VM. So I suppose there's at least one forked (or b0rked, depending on your view of MS Java VM) version of Java out there in widespread use.
Anyone else wants to throw their 2c into the ring on this?
The value of a man stepping on to the surface of another planet being measured in television ratings makes me want to drop to one knee and weep openly.
It makes me want to drop to my knees on the beach and scream "Damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
Actually, Mission to Mars was just on cable. Crap movie, but it had some valid points - the relevant one here being that the Mars rover had corporate logos on it, and some of the shipboard computer screens had a little "sgi" logo. I'd much rather see that sort of sponsorship/advertising than a photo of Mars with the Coca-Cola logo across, say, Utopia Planitia.
That said, there is entertainment value in having reality TV in space. We can just send the Osbournes, Jessica Simpson, the American Idol finalists, the Dell Dude and anyone else we deem worthy, into a cometary orbit. Or perhaps into the heart of the sun. And if the viewing public feel merciful, they can vote to explosively decompress the capsule.
(Of course, the best thing about reality TV is, you're perfectly free to turn it off. But I agree with the parent, I sure as hell don't want to see the viewing public voting for the first person on Mars, or clips of beered-up frat boys playing spacesuit strip poker in a vacuum -- no, wait, that might actually be funny...)
The source is already available, and all that is required to change it and redistribute it is to pass a standard suite of tests.
I agree with the parent. I'm not 100% clued up on such technical matters, but it seems to me that if Java were opensourced, suddenly every developer would implement their favourite functions and fixes, and it could risk losing its crossplatform compatibility.
As it stands, I understand that Sun is (as the parent quotes) pretty liberal with its Java policy. Would it be worth creating potentially problematic issues by changing this policy to make Java opensource?
It seems sensible, at least to me, to keep Java as it stands with regard to source changes, or we'll end up having Joe's Java, MSJava, Java for Nokia Mobile Phones, Java Reloaded... all built off the same core, but all implementing the same thing different ways, possibly with platform dependence or crosscompilation compatibility issues.
I'm guessing that Sun's "standard suite of tests" for additions/changes to Java is designed to prevent this kind of branching, and is (in a multi-OS, infinite-diversity-of-hardware-combinations world) A Very Good Thing.
... innovation.
It seems that a lot of people around the globe have worked hard to design proxies that get around existing systems which governments use to restrict their citizens' access to information on the internet.
IMHO, this new piece of software will just lead to a new breed of web proxy, and until China either cuts off net use entirely or has a massive change in government policy, it's going to be a continuation of the government vs. infolibertarian game of "build the better mousetrap". Just now, instead of bypassing and improving filters, it'll be about tracking and masking data...
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of: Lucy
The troll is [in]. Advice: 1 mod point.
I find that I can get CDs almost as cheaply and easily at Play.com, and they don't charge for postage. Something to do with the VAT laws for Jersey.
HMV and Music Zone stores, at least here in the UK, are dropping their prices to be similarly competitive. For example, Nelly Furtado's new album is a hair under ten pounds in HMV, about a pound more expensive in Music Zone, and I bet it's a similar price in my three local (large-chain) supermarkets.
I must admit, even though it can be quite convenient to shop at Play.com, and CD-Wow is a bit cheaper still, there's nothing quite as nice as browsing the racks. It's good to see real competition in the music retail industry again.
(By and large, I don't buy singles, though I have been thinking about getting a small MP3 player to house my collection of older and more esoteric single-track stuff, mostly 70s and 80s music with the occasional oddball track...)
I don't know much about this kind of technology, but I know that there are similar setups going on at the Burning Man festival every year. Maybe it's worth looking around the site to see if you can find anecdotes and contact info for people who've done the same.
Also, the Mars Society uses satellite hookups to keep in touch with its field stations. Perhaps they can give you some pointers?
Depending on where the event is held and how well cellphone signals can be received, you might also want to try a mobile phone carrier. A lot of the larger UK events like Glastonbury are, I believe, getting support in this area from larger telcos. It may be more complex, and will probably involve getting everyone a new PCMCIA card, but it could be an option.
Sorry I couldn't be of more help; sadly IANA techie, but I hope these couple of snippets I've seen around the net are of use to you.
In general, I agree with the parent.
;-)
However, I was disappointed by the last two - especially since they seemed to be mere excuses for Lucas to show off flashy CGI effects with very little thought to the writing. In fact, I think that "Attack of the Clones" was so simplistic and really just a FX-driven movie with no script, the next part is going to be...
Star Wars III: The Search for Plot
(Lucas was far better at titles for the first trilogy... why couldn't he have just left it alone and gone to suck the soul out of some other franchise, huh?)
It could be used for advertising, legitimately, on a company webserver - it's a possibility though I wouldn't endorse it. But what I meant was, what's the betting that you start getting people replacing the answer code (by whatever means) with, say... "v|@g.ra! buy now!" messages?
I don't see how a TV series that started in 1965 and has run continuously for the past 15 years (sometimes with 2 versions active at once) can have "fresh ideas" left.
That's why my profile says "recovering ex-Trekkie" - because it just continually recycled, went from cutting-edge to bland, and in the end was reduced to telling the same story every week for seven years. (Voyager - the only Trek that boldly blows like no Trek has blown before!) Farscape, on the other hand, knew its cliches and played to them - to the point of inserting Trek jokes and other pop-culture references (just about the only good thing to come out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, aside from Alyson Hannigan) - but it was also terribly innovative with twisting the sorts of things you'd expect in a scifi universe, and with using puppetry where Trek instead used latex noses.
I do have friends interested in Trek fandom, and sometimes we discuss how it could've been done better. At the time of writing there are a few dozen pages of notes on the ol' hard disk, which I'll use for my own (non-Trek) scifi scribblings... eventually.
You know, if you hooked a good heat conductor to the heatsink - say, copper wiring - and then hooked THAT to a good emitter in a ceramic-lined box, then you could overclock your processor and make a pizza oven...
;-)
Well, maybe. It's a bit of a gimcrack Heath Robinson-esque bodge, but it does sound like a real casemodder's McGuffin. It's also a long shot but it would be good fun trying to make it happen!
Disclaimer: I can't change the laws of physics. Nor do I really grasp them, but that's beside the point
Parent has good taste in beer. Mod parent up! ;-)
Personally, I'd kill for a pint of Bluebird Bitter, or that delicious oyster stout they only serve in The Porterhouse in Dublin...
Lots of potential for unique idents, a revival of the old ASCII art, and a return of classic IRC "finger" gags to the mainstream - what more could you want?
(The IRC thing - well, a friend of mine used to have ASCII art of a hand throwing the finger. Thus, anyone who fingered him got fingered in return...)
IMHO this does, as parent says, seem like a very cool and very harmless bit of fun screwing with corporate level technology. It would also have a good place in the corporate market - if, say, MS incorporated something similar into Longhorn, it could use a Windows logo as its default reply, or various Linux distros could use a Tux, a BSD demon, or a fedora. Other brand-name companies could work an ASCII version of their logo into it.
(Not to mention, you could also use those 70 lines to advertise - provide your company's contact info, or if you're a hosting company, give your pingers a free list of your latest packages. But how long til someone abuses it? Sure, the goatse guy is OK as net humour, but how long til we're fighting off idiots who want to incorporate spam messages in these ping responses?)
We can but hope that Berman gets cancelled. A quote attributed to Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Next Generation artist Andrew Probert opines that Berman doesn't know jack about scifi...
/. headline: Berman on Enterprise: "It's dead, Jim."
;-)
Personally, I think the mooted Friday-night slot is ironic, the final nail in the coffin. Anyone remember where classic Trek was put by the network for its third season before cancellation?
Yup. Friday night. When its core audience was out doing other things, the sort of things young people, young adults, do... if they'd had demographics back then, the advertisers would've run away in droves. (As it is, they didn't bring in the demographics til much later - and classic Trek proved, in syndication, to be an ideal show for the advertisers to hit certain groups.)
As an ex-Trekkie, all I can say is... roll on those Friday nights, I'm waiting to see the
(Or, admittedly, a clip of Dean Stockwell on the bridge, saying something like, "Uhh, Sam... you're not really a starship captain...")
... aren't there laws (or doesn't the FCC have mandates enforceable by law) against this kind of deliberate interference with communications systems?
And if he'd've won, would he have insisted on going to Iraq anyway?
(Nah, you're the man. Doonesbury rawks!)
He wouldn't be the first fictional character to do so. If I were in the US, I'd be voting Cthulhu for President - after all, why settle for the lesser evil? ;-)
The actual film copy is reused from one region to another for later releases.
... and at sneak previews or press screenings, this really shows. My local cinema often invites my boss (as he owns the local speciality sci-fi/cult TV store) and local schoolchildren (often from the school where my mum teaches) to sneak previews for word-of-mouth publicity, and so I see a few films early, either with my boss to do in-store advertising, or with my mum as a chaperone.
Believe you me, the state of the prints can and does show! For example, Disney's "Haunted Mansion" was previewed using a copy FedExed in from the US. The actual opening, five days later, used a new copy - for the most popular non-digital films, they do tend to bring in new copies for the major cinema chains, and circulate them out to smaller ones eventually, as the US prints can be pretty badly worn.
This is just in my experience, and with my sparse knowledge of the local cinema's operations. Maybe the situation is different outside of the UK, or depending on the film... anyone knows better, fill me in?
ESA's new prototype shuttle was again recently re-dubbed Firefox (formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix) to avoid confusion with a NASA program that had started up some months earlier...
... and receives a hefty lawsuit from Craig Thomas and MiG. Lovers of red pandas everywhere remain baffled, but the Mozilla project team see very little for potential in confusing a web browser with a space shuttle, and so choose to say nothing.
Interestingly, I understand that an increasing number of DVDs of older shows are being released in a "region zero" (region-free) format.
My understanding of the rationale behind this is to cut the production costs on something which will sell, but not sell enough in some areas to make region coding worthwhile. When they're around 20 or so years old, there's not much to lose to piracy.
On the other hand, stopping the region-coding of movies might be bad for the cinema industry. Why? Well, take the movie Galaxy Quest. The UK theatrical release date was the same as the US DVD release date. Given the prevalence of international sales via, say, eBay and Amazon, I can imagine people being tempted to buy a DVD and sell it if they don't like it, or buy a secondhand one.
That said, IMHO movies like LotR wouldn't be hurt due to simultaneous releases, unless they take more than a year to get out to the most remote cinemas in some parts of the world.
So, the long and short? My 2c is that region encoding is good for the industry in some cases (and also means they don't have to squeeze every language soundtrack or subtitle onto the same disc), but is also detrimental to the industry - if, for example, ST:TOS had been released in region-free format originally, Paramount would have easily at least doubled, if not tripled, their sales. (I don't intend to buy it now. The profile says recovering ex-Trekkie, and not only do I not want to waste the money on that stuff, but that packaging is hideous.)
Who was it that said computers would never need more than 256k? ;-)
I bet if nobody had built PCs with more memory, bloatware would never have been invented.
Heck, they don't need computers to create orcs and oliphaunts now - just a really good dose of LSD ;-)
But I know what you mean about computing power. My old Psion has more power than the first computer I ever bought... and that WAS scary. I think the Psion also cost less!
Interesting, AC.
I know that since switching to Mozilla Firefox and the latest version of Sun Java, I've had some minor issues with web-based applications (mostly games) which refuse to work with anything but MS Java VM. So I suppose there's at least one forked (or b0rked, depending on your view of MS Java VM) version of Java out there in widespread use.
Anyone else wants to throw their 2c into the ring on this?
The value of a man stepping on to the surface of another planet being measured in television ratings makes me want to drop to one knee and weep openly.
It makes me want to drop to my knees on the beach and scream "Damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
Actually, Mission to Mars was just on cable. Crap movie, but it had some valid points - the relevant one here being that the Mars rover had corporate logos on it, and some of the shipboard computer screens had a little "sgi" logo. I'd much rather see that sort of sponsorship/advertising than a photo of Mars with the Coca-Cola logo across, say, Utopia Planitia.
That said, there is entertainment value in having reality TV in space. We can just send the Osbournes, Jessica Simpson, the American Idol finalists, the Dell Dude and anyone else we deem worthy, into a cometary orbit. Or perhaps into the heart of the sun. And if the viewing public feel merciful, they can vote to explosively decompress the capsule.
(Of course, the best thing about reality TV is, you're perfectly free to turn it off. But I agree with the parent, I sure as hell don't want to see the viewing public voting for the first person on Mars, or clips of beered-up frat boys playing spacesuit strip poker in a vacuum -- no, wait, that might actually be funny...)
The source is already available, and all that is required to change it and redistribute it is to pass a standard suite of tests.
/.ers?
I agree with the parent. I'm not 100% clued up on such technical matters, but it seems to me that if Java were opensourced, suddenly every developer would implement their favourite functions and fixes, and it could risk losing its crossplatform compatibility.
As it stands, I understand that Sun is (as the parent quotes) pretty liberal with its Java policy. Would it be worth creating potentially problematic issues by changing this policy to make Java opensource?
It seems sensible, at least to me, to keep Java as it stands with regard to source changes, or we'll end up having Joe's Java, MSJava, Java for Nokia Mobile Phones, Java Reloaded... all built off the same core, but all implementing the same thing different ways, possibly with platform dependence or crosscompilation compatibility issues.
I'm guessing that Sun's "standard suite of tests" for additions/changes to Java is designed to prevent this kind of branching, and is (in a multi-OS, infinite-diversity-of-hardware-combinations world) A Very Good Thing.
Opinions, developer-type
... innovation.
It seems that a lot of people around the globe have worked hard to design proxies that get around existing systems which governments use to restrict their citizens' access to information on the internet.
IMHO, this new piece of software will just lead to a new breed of web proxy, and until China either cuts off net use entirely or has a massive change in government policy, it's going to be a continuation of the government vs. infolibertarian game of "build the better mousetrap". Just now, instead of bypassing and improving filters, it'll be about tracking and masking data...
where do I find the "Post Humously" option?
;-)
Since this is a Trekkie thread, I feel I can now make the joke I've been dying to make about this sig...
It's dead, Jim
I dunno about HK-47, but if people like this (the folks on the video, not Liselle!) become the dominant life form, I swear I'm going to get an AK-47. ("When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.")
Yeah, no kidding, does "Get A Life" mean anything to these folks...?
Sure it does. Except that Radio Shack can't order one without a part number.