Ironically, enabling the "advanced features" of the Google Toolbar does nearly exactly the same thing as WhenU's software in that it sends the URL of the page you are visiting to Google which returns the page rank and category of that URL.
indeed, it's barfarific...
i feel a bit queasy now...
One note though: IANAL, but i do believe any Tetris variant that ends with "tris" has been ruled as a violation of the original programmer's trademark in a civil suit.
Hmmm...yes, how ironic: let's oppose putting an alternative energy source in France because they opposed a war that will make us more dependent on foreign oil...
...or does Iraq no longer count as a foreign country?
I used to live next to the town where Lloyd Alexander lived, and we had a "Lloyd Alexander Day" at school with a costume contest and such festivities (I dressed as Eilonwy;)).
Anyway, that turned me on to the books and I read through the entire series in a short period of time. They're definitely great books for kids, with more complex characters and a richer world than, say, the Harry Potter series. They deftly combine both humor and epic scale with nary an elf to be seen, if I remember correctly.
I'd also recommend, for the teenage set, the Westmark Trilogy. These books have a slightly more serious tone, although the bits about the whole "government by the people" thing are somewhat overblown and contrived, IMHO. Also worth a look are the Vesper Holly books, although those aren't fantasy at all, but detective capers.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin.
From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at
Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).
The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.
During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well:
you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.
Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights
is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.
Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.
For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.
A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.
WebCam
Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.
The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.
Contact
Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries
of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.
For the company, doesn't diversity in standards actually help them protect their materials? It seems that having only one standard would just concentrate everyone's efforts on breaking it and therefore would get cracked faster.
Agreed. And as others have pointed out many many times, no one wants an all-in-one device, especially if it's that tiny. If I'd wanted a credit-card replacement, have gotten a speedpass already.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I think one of the reasons a lot of people buy disposable cameras especially for long trips is that they don't need to worry about having it stolen or lost. A "rental" model with a refundable deposit would eliminate this segment of the market, and it seems to me that the loss of revenue as a result would be greater than the loss from the very small number of geeks who hack their disposable digital cameras.
Really, geek girls still have to face a lot of opposition (despite the discussions on the semantics of nerd/geek/dork, I'll stick with geek as my preferred title, but this idea applies universally, I think). The worst offenders are other girls, who simply cannot understand that really, I'd rather tinker with memory timings than peruse "Seventeen".
Not to say that guys are completely understanding either. I've tangibly seen guys get intimidated when I mention the words "computer engineering". Once in a while, I'll meet someone who's a psuedo-nerd and thinks it's really cool that there's a girl that "likes computers". Then we get to the point where he gives me a blank stare when we barely scratch the surface of the *really* technical stuff.
I understand and somewhat appreciate the elevated status that geek girls tend to automatically attain in the presence of geek males. I've noticed, though, that attitudes towards geek girls tend to go in two directions. Either a geek treats them with kid gloves or ends up treating them exactly as they would a guy. I've tended to try to sway people towards the latter, since I don't believe others should treat me better just because of something determined at my conception. I can't help but feel, however, that there are grave compromises made with that solution also; namely, the problem is that I tend to lose the feminine part of my identity.
So I guess my question is, can one be fully geek and also fully feminine? Is it possible for me to customize keywords in Visual Studio to color-coordinate and not be ridiculed from both sides? Can you guys start treating your geek girl friends like the women they are?
Please note that this is just what I've observed from personal experiences and obviously, I'm not trying to make blanket statements about all geek guys. I do think that there is some truth to what I'm saying, though, and that perhaps I can challenge you to examine how you treat your geek girl friends and see how you can improve those relationships.
Slashdot Mirror
i'm not sure; i know a little bit about copyrights but almost nothing about trademarks...ask a lawyer friend ;)
Ironically, enabling the "advanced features" of the Google Toolbar does nearly exactly the same thing as WhenU's software in that it sends the URL of the page you are visiting to Google which returns the page rank and category of that URL.
Same method, completely different use.
indeed, it's barfarific... i feel a bit queasy now... One note though: IANAL, but i do believe any Tetris variant that ends with "tris" has been ruled as a violation of the original programmer's trademark in a civil suit.
In that vein of thought:
Type using brainwaves =D
Hmmm...yes, how ironic: let's oppose putting an alternative energy source in France because they opposed a war that will make us more dependent on foreign oil...
...or does Iraq no longer count as a foreign country?
I used to live next to the town where Lloyd Alexander lived, and we had a "Lloyd Alexander Day" at school with a costume contest and such festivities (I dressed as Eilonwy ;)).
Anyway, that turned me on to the books and I read through the entire series in a short period of time. They're definitely great books for kids, with more complex characters and a richer world than, say, the Harry Potter series. They deftly combine both humor and epic scale with nary an elf to be seen, if I remember correctly.
I'd also recommend, for the teenage set, the Westmark Trilogy. These books have a slightly more serious tone, although the bits about the whole "government by the people" thing are somewhat overblown and contrived, IMHO. Also worth a look are the Vesper Holly books, although those aren't fantasy at all, but detective capers.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).
The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.
During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.
Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.
For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.
Overview
Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.
For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.
A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.
WebCam
Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.
The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.
Contact
Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.
If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.
Chump change in the pockets of a multi-billion dollar industry. Besides, they'll somehow make it sound as if they actually lost money on this...
...how this is /. material? There's a reason I've eschewed from those econ classes...
For the company, doesn't diversity in standards actually help them protect their materials? It seems that having only one standard would just concentrate everyone's efforts on breaking it and therefore would get cracked faster.
Agreed. And as others have pointed out many many times, no one wants an all-in-one device, especially if it's that tiny. If I'd wanted a credit-card replacement, have gotten a speedpass already. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I think one of the reasons a lot of people buy disposable cameras especially for long trips is that they don't need to worry about having it stolen or lost. A "rental" model with a refundable deposit would eliminate this segment of the market, and it seems to me that the loss of revenue as a result would be greater than the loss from the very small number of geeks who hack their disposable digital cameras.
Really, geek girls still have to face a lot of opposition (despite the discussions on the semantics of nerd/geek/dork, I'll stick with geek as my preferred title, but this idea applies universally, I think). The worst offenders are other girls, who simply cannot understand that really, I'd rather tinker with memory timings than peruse "Seventeen".
Not to say that guys are completely understanding either. I've tangibly seen guys get intimidated when I mention the words "computer engineering". Once in a while, I'll meet someone who's a psuedo-nerd and thinks it's really cool that there's a girl that "likes computers". Then we get to the point where he gives me a blank stare when we barely scratch the surface of the *really* technical stuff.
I understand and somewhat appreciate the elevated status that geek girls tend to automatically attain in the presence of geek males. I've noticed, though, that attitudes towards geek girls tend to go in two directions. Either a geek treats them with kid gloves or ends up treating them exactly as they would a guy. I've tended to try to sway people towards the latter, since I don't believe others should treat me better just because of something determined at my conception. I can't help but feel, however, that there are grave compromises made with that solution also; namely, the problem is that I tend to lose the feminine part of my identity.
So I guess my question is, can one be fully geek and also fully feminine? Is it possible for me to customize keywords in Visual Studio to color-coordinate and not be ridiculed from both sides? Can you guys start treating your geek girl friends like the women they are?
Please note that this is just what I've observed from personal experiences and obviously, I'm not trying to make blanket statements about all geek guys. I do think that there is some truth to what I'm saying, though, and that perhaps I can challenge you to examine how you treat your geek girl friends and see how you can improve those relationships.