Odd that they didn't copy their supported format list from their product spec PDF, but oh well. In any case, if you check out that PDF here, they list the supported formats as PDF, XHTML, TXT and APABI (only in China). Support for OEB files as well as MP3 playback is due in an August/September firmware update.
I also use and love Webcalendar. It is quick to set up, and its only real needs are PHP and a MySQL backend. Viewing other people's calendars is easily set up via Layers, and any user with Admin rights can edit other people's calendars. I brought it in about a year and a half ago for the consulting business I work for. We've got 6 people regularly using it and it hasn't choked on us yet.
That was the C2BF Project, which finished up in March of this year. Apparently while the entirety of the 56-bit keyspace was checked, the proper key was not found and the project was closed as a failure.
The eMachines of today are NOTHING like the eMachines of 2+ years ago. Now they're fast, come with more bang-for-the-buck than comparably-priced Big Name models ($620 nets you an eM w/512MB RAM, 160GB HD, CD-RW and DVD-ROM. $620 from Dell gets you 256MB RAM, 80-120GB HD, and either a CD-RW or DVD-ROM.), and are a breeze to upgrade. They've made great strides in making their offerings compete with everyone else, and they're selling a ton of boxes. The local Costco can't get enough in to supply demand.
Actually, the entire "Scouring of the Shire" part was never going to be in the movie from the get-go. What they're talking about here is the aftermath of the Battle of Isengard, where Saruman and Wormtongue are thrown out of Orthanc, and Wormtongue throws the palantir at the Fellowship.
This is about the nastiest one I've seen in my consulting work. On its most basic level, it inserts itself into the registry as the default proxy server for IE. Unless you get the registry entry, it'll just keep putting itself back. What gets really bad is that I've seen Netsetter break several computers' TCP/IP stacks entirely. With Netsetter ripped out you get PCs that can dial up, connect, and have complete connectivity except no DNS resolution. And you can't get DNS back without either an in-place reinstall (works for 95/98/ME/XP), or a complete format and reinstall from scratch (NT/2K).
They're on my short list of People Who Need To Be Shot.
I played MTGO quite extensively during the free beta period. Stopped when they went live and started charging far too much.
1) Cards you buy for MTGO are not stored locally, but in a large database WOTC has back at their co-lo. It is conceivable that duping/illegal card hacks are possible, but the Leaping Lizard folks have been going out of their way to make sure that doesn't happen. Of course, that setup hasn't stopped all the duping hacks in Diablo II...
2) As was mentioned in another post, WOTC is charging real-life prices for MTGO cards. Same price per pack as if you went to your local store and got a physical set. This wouldn't be terrible if it didn't lead into...
3) You don't own your MTGO cards, nor is WOTC liable to replace them beyond $15. This language was inserted into the TOS about 2/3 of the way through the beta period and caused a huge shitstorm amongst the beta testers. So let's say you've spent $1000 on MTGO cards, and there's some sort of database corruption and your account is hosed. You're now out $985 with nothing to show for it.
See, the thing is that WOTC adamantly does NOT want MGTO to compete with standard MTG. They believe that if they charge less for MTGO (say, something like $0.50 US/booster) that all the MTG players will defect to MTGO. (Never mind the fact that physical MTG is on its last legs anyways.) They're right to a degree...I do think there would be some defecting, but not nearly as much as WOTC is panicking about. As it is, a significant portion of the beta testers pledged to quit as soon as the game went live, and from what I've seen most of them stuck to their guns.
We have Safeword Plus deployed on multiple platforms (servers running under Solaris, with sshds authenticating against it, also RADIUS hooking into the NT domain for VPN authentication, as well as their NES plugin on Solaris for protecting web servers), and have nothing but good things to say about it. The cost per seat has already been mentioned (we got our fobs in bulk for around $10/ea, compared to the $100+ for SecurID fobs), but also the ease of integration cannot be dismissed. Hooking it into ssh was the hardest part, requiring a bit of recoding. For everything else, it just went.
The EFF has a large page on the SSSCA, complete with sample letters for your Congresscritters, and information on how to contact them. Check out the EFF Action Alert: Defeat the SSSCA.
We can stand around all day and yammer, but the more of us who write *and* call our Congressfolks, the more our voices are heard.
I'm not particularly sure if widespread acceptance of what is essentially a hacked version of the MS-MPEG4 codec should be considered a Good Thing(tm). This is not to slight Gej for his work, or his work on Project Mayo (http://www.projectmayo.com), which is working on a true open source video codec. M$ has already shown that it'll go after folks hosting the original DivX;) codec.
Seems to me that we should be helping Project Mayo get its codec solid and stable and using that, instead of the DivX;) hack.
Hardcore gamers and hardcore games are no longer the juggernaut they used to be. Sure, your Quake XVII and Diablo 29 get a ton of sales, but that's slowly being eclipsed by the Joe Average gamer who plays things like Deer Hunter. Check the gaming sales charts back for the last year, and you'll notice hunting and fishing simulations all over the boards.
Whether or not there's a hardcore game market crash is almost irrelevant. Maybe it'll happen. Maybe the old "Golden Convergence" scenario that Robert Morgan was trumpetting two years ago will happen. In the end, it will have limited effect on the Wal-Mart gaming market, which is where the money is really being made these days. We can scoff at Barbie Detective, but it's making more money than the vast majority of other games out there.
The best part of SimEarth was building a civilization up to the Nanotech Age and having them start to leave the planet for the stars. Then you could nuke one of the remaining Nanotech Age cities and spontaneously create robot lifeforms. The robots started off at the bottom of the evolutionary chain, and you could start guiding them up the ladder. Robots survived in any environment, needed almost no care, bred like rabid rabbits, and loved to beat the heck out of each other. Eventually you could evolve your robots through the ages, and have them leave the planet for the stars.
> And WTF was up with the Princess visit? Did one
> of the producers want his daughter to have a
> bigger role? In the book, it never happened.
Not only did it never happen, but they've almost completely re-written Irulan. In the book, she has about two actual spoken lines, and a few of the chapter intros. In the mini-series, she's a major supporting character. And according to the previews, it looks like she's banging Feyd. Um...what?
The two new movies aren't due out until next year. Tentative date on the first movie is Summer 2001, while the second movie is Christmas 2001. The first movie will take up where the third season ended, and will wrap up the whole Web/Daemon/Virus plotline. The second movie is supposed to be the start of an entirely new storyline.
As for release, aside from the broadcast on YTV in Canada, nothing else is known. It's expected that Cartoon Network will pick up the movies (as they already have Reboot), and that ADV has the rights for DVDs.
Kudos to Jamie and to those citizens of Holland who had the intelligence and the guts to stand up to Yet Another Special Interest Group trying to force their views down the collective throat of society. It's gratifying to see a case where the underfunded and underdog voice of reason actually wins.
But the AFA will be back. Count on it. They take losing very badly, and when they come back the second time they'll bring big guns.
And the remainder of us shouldn't rest on our laurels. There's the DVD CCA/MPAA and UCITA still out there. Our fight is nowhere near over.
You can run the proxy server on either a UNIX box or a Win32 one, and it has the ability not only to filter out ad banners, but also to block cookies and to change the browser-type header you send. I've been using it for several months, and it's just peachy.
I find it horribly amusing that for both of @Home's "We're sorry, and it's our users' fault" messages to Usenet (the original, and a repost after the first one was plonk'd), they resorted to forging moderator approvals to get their posts across.
Some recent threads of note are the "Netgate.net.nz/ORBS spam collusion" (which degenerates quickly into a standard NANOG flamewar [which is a very different beast from your typical flamewar. NANOG flamewars tend to be several rungs up on the intelligence ladder], but has several interesting points and counterpoints), and the "Selection of Appropriate Local SMTP Relay" thread, which grew out of the Netgate thread.
> or is this a "play ball our way or screw off"... That's what it is. ORBS is well-known for playing these sorts of games with folks it doesn't like. Check out the NANOG mailing-list archives for more stories like this.
I've used the 8 & 16 port ServSwitch Ultras (the ones that can support PCs, Macs and Sparcs) very extensively, and haven't had a problem with them. They're very solid, plus the high-port-count models can come in rackmount chassis. Good for data center duty. I've got a 4-port ServSwitch Ultra at home, and I run a Mac, 2 PCs and a Sparc off of it.
It's not cheap, though. I paid $900 for the 4-port KVM, and cabling costs about $40-$50 per CPU. The investment is worth it, though, from a space-saving and time-saving point of view.
Fact: The v1.1 G3 Firmware Update does, in fact, make it impossible to upgrade that machine with a G4 CPU. This has been confirmed by various third-party accelerator makers, as well as some independent people. It's been indirectly confirmed by Apple, but they ain't coming out and saying it.
What folks are forgetting is that this is the one, sole fact that we have. We do not know Apple's motivation. We do not know if it is permanent. However, just about everyone has gone completely mental, accusing Apple of sabotage, threatening class-action lawsuits, and acting like a bunch of rabidly paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Now, worst case, it may have been expressly for the purpose of never allowing B&W G3 owners to pop in a G4 CPU. I highly doubt Apple is this stupid. They may be much more Microsoftian than in the early 80's, but Jobs' Apple ain't dumb. Third-party upgrade manufacturers are already working on getting around the block, and there have been scattered reports of success. Apple ends up in a situation where they don't just lose, but lose big time. I don't think so.
One of the things glossed over in recent months have been stability issues with the G4 and the new "Sawtooth" (the real new G4, with the 2X AGP and the MaxBus memory management chipset) architecture. This is why there's sizable delays on Sawtooth G4 models: they aren't ready yet! It makes sense to me that Apple would not want the bad press of G4 instability right before their introduction, thus the firmware block. When things are ok, then a new firmware update can be released which will remove the block.
This is simply rampant speculation. But I urge everyone else out there to engage those 8lbs of grey matter wedged between their foreheads before they run out and find a lawyer to go sue Apple. I do have problems with the fact that Apple didn't bother to tell anyone about the G4 block in the firmware update, and I'm not excusing them for that. This block can be removed by Apple at any time with a new firmware upgrade.
The reason they're not available until October...
on
Apple announces the G4
·
· Score: 1
...is that for the 450 and 500mhz models, the architecture isn't completed yet. The G4/400 they're selling now (and that currently has a 10-day ship time) is exactly the same as the current G3 towers, but with a G4/400 CPU inside it. Same lack of AGP, same 66mhz FSB. The boards with the goodies aren't completed yet, and won't be completed for another month.
So yes, as usual, Apple's selling hardware before it's ready. Amazingly enough, it doesn't seem to hurt them. According to the Seybold keynote, there are 140k pre-orders for the iBook in the United States alone. This is the iBook which was announced at Macworld NY in July, and isn't due to ship until September 15th.
Sadly, Apple has some sort of extended distribution deal with ATI, thus the fact that ATI chipsets are on-board anything Apple makes. The G4 does have an AGP 2X slot, though, so all PC graphics cards need are Mac drivers, and a flash ROM upgrade to deal with the big-endian/little-endian thing. (The Voodoo3 2000 PCI can be made into a Mac card this same way, using beta drivers from 3dfx.) Hopefully, someone like NVidia, Matrox or 3dfx will start making Mac drivers for their cards.
> MS would end up "loosing" money on the deal, even though they would be making money "on the books." Oh sure, it was a calculated risk. There were some other rumored under-the-table reasons for the investment, like a supposed cessation of Apple's attempts to prove that MS stole QuickTime code for their AVI codec, but nothing was ever proven. One of the best conspiracy theories is that if MS ever was brought up on anti-trust charges, they could point to their investment in Apple and say they were helping the competition. That never seems to have happened, though...
Slashdot Mirror
Odd that they didn't copy their supported format list from their product spec PDF, but oh well. In any case, if you check out that PDF here, they list the supported formats as PDF, XHTML, TXT and APABI (only in China). Support for OEB files as well as MP3 playback is due in an August/September firmware update.
I also use and love Webcalendar. It is quick to set up, and its only real needs are PHP and a MySQL backend. Viewing other people's calendars is easily set up via Layers, and any user with Admin rights can edit other people's calendars. I brought it in about a year and a half ago for the consulting business I work for. We've got 6 people regularly using it and it hasn't choked on us yet.
That was the C2BF Project, which finished up in March of this year. Apparently while the entirety of the 56-bit keyspace was checked, the proper key was not found and the project was closed as a failure.
The eMachines of today are NOTHING like the eMachines of 2+ years ago. Now they're fast, come with more bang-for-the-buck than comparably-priced Big Name models ($620 nets you an eM w/512MB RAM, 160GB HD, CD-RW and DVD-ROM. $620 from Dell gets you 256MB RAM, 80-120GB HD, and either a CD-RW or DVD-ROM.), and are a breeze to upgrade. They've made great strides in making their offerings compete with everyone else, and they're selling a ton of boxes. The local Costco can't get enough in to supply demand.
Actually, the entire "Scouring of the Shire" part was never going to be in the movie from the get-go. What they're talking about here is the aftermath of the Battle of Isengard, where Saruman and Wormtongue are thrown out of Orthanc, and Wormtongue throws the palantir at the Fellowship.
This is about the nastiest one I've seen in my consulting work. On its most basic level, it inserts itself into the registry as the default proxy server for IE. Unless you get the registry entry, it'll just keep putting itself back. What gets really bad is that I've seen Netsetter break several computers' TCP/IP stacks entirely. With Netsetter ripped out you get PCs that can dial up, connect, and have complete connectivity except no DNS resolution. And you can't get DNS back without either an in-place reinstall (works for 95/98/ME/XP), or a complete format and reinstall from scratch (NT/2K).
They're on my short list of People Who Need To Be Shot.
Cloudmakers lives!
I played MTGO quite extensively during the free beta period. Stopped when they went live and started charging far too much.
1) Cards you buy for MTGO are not stored locally, but in a large database WOTC has back at their co-lo. It is conceivable that duping/illegal card hacks are possible, but the Leaping Lizard folks have been going out of their way to make sure that doesn't happen. Of course, that setup hasn't stopped all the duping hacks in Diablo II...
2) As was mentioned in another post, WOTC is charging real-life prices for MTGO cards. Same price per pack as if you went to your local store and got a physical set. This wouldn't be terrible if it didn't lead into...
3) You don't own your MTGO cards, nor is WOTC liable to replace them beyond $15. This language was inserted into the TOS about 2/3 of the way through the beta period and caused a huge shitstorm amongst the beta testers. So let's say you've spent $1000 on MTGO cards, and there's some sort of database corruption and your account is hosed. You're now out $985 with nothing to show for it.
See, the thing is that WOTC adamantly does NOT want MGTO to compete with standard MTG. They believe that if they charge less for MTGO (say, something like $0.50 US/booster) that all the MTG players will defect to MTGO. (Never mind the fact that physical MTG is on its last legs anyways.) They're right to a degree...I do think there would be some defecting, but not nearly as much as WOTC is panicking about. As it is, a significant portion of the beta testers pledged to quit as soon as the game went live, and from what I've seen most of them stuck to their guns.
We have Safeword Plus deployed on multiple platforms (servers running under Solaris, with sshds authenticating against it, also RADIUS hooking into the NT domain for VPN authentication, as well as their NES plugin on Solaris for protecting web servers), and have nothing but good things to say about it. The cost per seat has already been mentioned (we got our fobs in bulk for around $10/ea, compared to the $100+ for SecurID fobs), but also the ease of integration cannot be dismissed. Hooking it into ssh was the hardest part, requiring a bit of recoding. For everything else, it just went.
The EFF has a large page on the SSSCA, complete with sample letters for your Congresscritters, and information on how to contact them. Check out the EFF Action Alert: Defeat the SSSCA.
We can stand around all day and yammer, but the more of us who write *and* call our Congressfolks, the more our voices are heard.
Seems to me that we should be helping Project Mayo get its codec solid and stable and using that, instead of the DivX ;) hack.
Hardcore gamers and hardcore games are no longer the juggernaut they used to be. Sure, your Quake XVII and Diablo 29 get a ton of sales, but that's slowly being eclipsed by the Joe Average gamer who plays things like Deer Hunter. Check the gaming sales charts back for the last year, and you'll notice hunting and fishing simulations all over the boards.
Whether or not there's a hardcore game market crash is almost irrelevant. Maybe it'll happen. Maybe the old "Golden Convergence" scenario that Robert Morgan was trumpetting two years ago will happen. In the end, it will have limited effect on the Wal-Mart gaming market, which is where the money is really being made these days. We can scoff at Barbie Detective, but it's making more money than the vast majority of other games out there.
The best part of SimEarth was building a civilization up to the Nanotech Age and having them start to leave the planet for the stars. Then you could nuke one of the remaining Nanotech Age cities and spontaneously create robot lifeforms. The robots started off at the bottom of the evolutionary chain, and you could start guiding them up the ladder. Robots survived in any environment, needed almost no care, bred like rabid rabbits, and loved to beat the heck out of each other. Eventually you could evolve your robots through the ages, and have them leave the planet for the stars.
Robots are your friends.
> And WTF was up with the Princess visit? Did one
> of the producers want his daughter to have a
> bigger role? In the book, it never happened.
Not only did it never happen, but they've almost completely re-written Irulan. In the book, she has about two actual spoken lines, and a few of the chapter intros. In the mini-series, she's a major supporting character. And according to the previews, it looks like she's banging Feyd. Um...what?
As for release, aside from the broadcast on YTV in Canada, nothing else is known. It's expected that Cartoon Network will pick up the movies (as they already have Reboot), and that ADV has the rights for DVDs.
But the AFA will be back. Count on it. They take losing very badly, and when they come back the second time they'll bring big guns.
And the remainder of us shouldn't rest on our laurels. There's the DVD CCA/MPAA and UCITA still out there. Our fight is nowhere near over.
Donate to the EFF!
You can run the proxy server on either a UNIX box or a Win32 one, and it has the ability not only to filter out ad banners, but also to block cookies and to change the browser-type header you send. I've been using it for several months, and it's just peachy.
I find it horribly amusing that for both of @Home's "We're sorry, and it's our users' fault" messages to Usenet (the original, and a repost after the first one was plonk'd), they resorted to forging moderator approvals to get their posts across.
Some recent threads of note are the "Netgate.net.nz/ORBS spam collusion" (which degenerates quickly into a standard NANOG flamewar [which is a very different beast from your typical flamewar. NANOG flamewars tend to be several rungs up on the intelligence ladder], but has several interesting points and counterpoints), and the "Selection of Appropriate Local SMTP Relay" thread, which grew out of the Netgate thread.
> or is this a "play ball our way or screw off"... That's what it is. ORBS is well-known for playing these sorts of games with folks it doesn't like. Check out the NANOG mailing-list archives for more stories like this.
It's not cheap, though. I paid $900 for the 4-port KVM, and cabling costs about $40-$50 per CPU. The investment is worth it, though, from a space-saving and time-saving point of view.
What folks are forgetting is that this is the one, sole fact that we have. We do not know Apple's motivation. We do not know if it is permanent. However, just about everyone has gone completely mental, accusing Apple of sabotage, threatening class-action lawsuits, and acting like a bunch of rabidly paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Now, worst case, it may have been expressly for the purpose of never allowing B&W G3 owners to pop in a G4 CPU. I highly doubt Apple is this stupid. They may be much more Microsoftian than in the early 80's, but Jobs' Apple ain't dumb. Third-party upgrade manufacturers are already working on getting around the block, and there have been scattered reports of success. Apple ends up in a situation where they don't just lose, but lose big time. I don't think so.
One of the things glossed over in recent months have been stability issues with the G4 and the new "Sawtooth" (the real new G4, with the 2X AGP and the MaxBus memory management chipset) architecture. This is why there's sizable delays on Sawtooth G4 models: they aren't ready yet! It makes sense to me that Apple would not want the bad press of G4 instability right before their introduction, thus the firmware block. When things are ok, then a new firmware update can be released which will remove the block.
This is simply rampant speculation. But I urge everyone else out there to engage those 8lbs of grey matter wedged between their foreheads before they run out and find a lawyer to go sue Apple. I do have problems with the fact that Apple didn't bother to tell anyone about the G4 block in the firmware update, and I'm not excusing them for that. This block can be removed by Apple at any time with a new firmware upgrade.
So yes, as usual, Apple's selling hardware before it's ready. Amazingly enough, it doesn't seem to hurt them. According to the Seybold keynote, there are 140k pre-orders for the iBook in the United States alone. This is the iBook which was announced at Macworld NY in July, and isn't due to ship until September 15th.
Sadly, Apple has some sort of extended distribution deal with ATI, thus the fact that ATI chipsets are on-board anything Apple makes. The G4 does have an AGP 2X slot, though, so all PC graphics cards need are Mac drivers, and a flash ROM upgrade to deal with the big-endian/little-endian thing. (The Voodoo3 2000 PCI can be made into a Mac card this same way, using beta drivers from 3dfx.) Hopefully, someone like NVidia, Matrox or 3dfx will start making Mac drivers for their cards.
> MS would end up "loosing" money on the deal, even though they would be making money "on the books." Oh sure, it was a calculated risk. There were some other rumored under-the-table reasons for the investment, like a supposed cessation of Apple's attempts to prove that MS stole QuickTime code for their AVI codec, but nothing was ever proven. One of the best conspiracy theories is that if MS ever was brought up on anti-trust charges, they could point to their investment in Apple and say they were helping the competition. That never seems to have happened, though...