Who is still running a CRT? Who wants any program to change the resolution of their screen?
Gamers often do. An average application might run nicely at a high resolution, but for a smooth Skyrim experience, many people may find it necessary to allow it to run at a lower resolution.
Just publish the designs on the web. You don't have to own it to pass it on, you simply have to share it. -- Hiten
I'm not sure, as IANAL, and stuff. But my understanding is, in the U.S. at least, that if a design is patented, then it can't be legally manufactured by an unauthorized party. Publishing the design on the web or other public forum doesn't change the protection a patent offers. Remember, patents and all they describe are all available to the public already from the USPO itself.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to hate on this guy. I admire his work, and he's just the sort of person patents are intended to benefit.
I wondered whether he decided to patent his design, in an effort to license it to a manufacturer. The reason I wonder about this is that if he stops making these because of health or death, no one else will be able to make them either, unless the patent ownership is passed on, sold, or the patent expires. Which would seem like a shame.
I noticed the same thing shortly after grabbing an AVC video via an RSS feed. Also that the Spiderman trailer from Sony's Connect site was AVC and worked. Most of my videos were created with PSPVideo 9, which uses the MobileHackerz modified ffmpeg. So it may be an bug with that encoder.:(
As is often the case, the description Sony issues with the firmware updates doesn't usually tell the full story.
Yup, they added MUSIC, PHOTO, and VIDEO folders to the root directory, which is good. The VIDEO folder can contain subfolders, also good. You can dump that stupid naming format, goodgood.
Here's what's not so obvious... videos placed in this folder not only no longer make use of Sony's proprietary metadata atoms, they no longer require it. This means that you can use non-DRM iPod videos or many vanilla MPEG-4 files on the PSP. Videos placed under the old video folders still require that these atoms be present, though. Last, those *.THM thumbnail files are ignored in the new VIDEO folder.
But, for some bizarre reason, AVC/h.264 videos won't work under the new VIDEO folder. This seems like a horrendous oversight to me, and you'll definitely want to keep it in mind. I know most of my videos are AVC, so the new folder is pretty useless for me for the moment. Here's hoping for a quick 2.81 to fix this. (I won't hold my breath, though.)
As other people have pointed out, unlike RSS music feeds, video feeds do not stream video, but instead save it to the memstick, after which you may play it. Disappointing.:(
It is quite possible to download the video from google. It does take some extra steps, though.
Open up that.GVP file in your favorite text editor. You'll find a rather lengthy URL in there. Copy and paste that URL into your browser's address box, and you've got access to the actual media.
I'm too lazy to look, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's a Firefox extension around that might even do the dirty work for you.
Now i grant you, the name was just announced yesterday, and hasn't had time to spread far and wide. But a Google search for "wii" is interesting.
When I went to do a simple search for "wii" on Google today, I got a ton of sites from companies or organizations that make use of "WII" as an acronym. Sites on WWII show up on page two of the search. I looked through 20 pages of results, and not one of them appeared to be related to Nintendo's next console.
A search for "nintendo wii" gives a whole 640 results, most not in english. Some of those are prolly typos, or regarding a WWII game for Nintendo. This will change, of course... the name was only announced yesterday. But I'm tellin' ya, don't expect just "wii" to return anything useful on Google if you're interested in finding info on the console. Well, other than in the adverts.
Personally, I prefer to hear the original language while reading subtitles. But dubs have their place, I think, for two reasons. Well, not reasons... just my preferences.;)
The one downside with subs is that you almost have to keep your eyes glued to the screen if you want to be sure not to miss anything. When I first watched FF:AC I did so at a time I wasn't likely to be distracted. Good thing too, because some of those subs flash by lighting fast at times. But sometimes you wanna watch a movie and not have to give it your wholly undivided attention. Just be casually entertained rather than a wholly submersive experience.
Another interesting thing about dubs versus subs is that they're never the same. That is, subs tend to be translated slightly differently than the dubs. Subs usually are more precise... more faithful to the original. Dubs seem to be more flexible. For example, idioms tend to be more literally translated in subs, while dubs will substitute a similiar but more familiar western idiom in it's place. As a result, I'll usually watch the sub first, and then watch the dub at some later time. Comparing the two can occasionally provide interesting insights.
I really don't know much about how drives store data. So this may be a really stupid question. But do larger sectors also mean the boot sector? Is this good news for boot loaders?
Thank you! The show stopper for ebooks hasn't been because of devices, it has been because of super-heavy handed DRM.
I'm all for ebooks. I have read eBooks that came free with a printed book quite happily on my laptop. Baen's books mentioned by parent are also fantastic, and available in HTML laced with Javascript, so I can even read one on my PSP's browser if I'm so inclined. Replacing an LCD display with an E-Ink one is just icing on the cake.
But I absolutely do not want to have to validate against a server somewhere to read my ebooks. I don't want to wind up tied to just one device or brand. And apparently, neither do most consumers.
This ebook reader of Sony's is not their first. There was the Librie, and it fell flat on its face thanks in part to DRM. You didn't buy a book, you rented it, and it would cease to be accessable after a time.
I have zero problem with downloading software, including games. Like most people, I grab shareware and open source software online all the time. But I do want to be sure that I can retain the data I bought a copy of. I don't want to hop on a website and have to prove I bought the damn thing, and download it again if I need to reinstall my OS, or lose the game when the company I downloaded it from goes out of business for whatever reason. Driving to the store can seem like much less of a hassle than DRM locked data. Especially gigs of locked data.
From TFA: "You're not going to stop tracks getting on P2P sites," he added. "It's designed to stop casual piracy... It's not saying you'll stop people from doing it, but it makes people stop and think."
I really, really do hope people stop and think about statements like this, and what it means to equate fair use with piracy.
Re:Is Skype [dev'd outside of USA] exempt?
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From TFA:
Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom told me last fall that "we do not have any legal obligation to provide any means for interception" in his company's VoIP software. How will you force a company based in Luxembourg to insert backdoors in its software when it has no obligation to do so?
This doesn't qualify as an official statement from Skype, but it pretty much says it all, I think.
The whole point of making users "activate" a new installation of Windows is to discourage the use or distribution of pirated copies. It didn't really work. The honest people stayed honest, but were inconvenienced. And the pirates kept pirating.
I might guess that activation is probably something of an inconvenience to MS as well. It didn't work as well as they had hoped, and in fact they had to keep track of illegitimate or "leaked" product keys in addition to the good ones. And it still hasn't stopped piracy.
So now MS is throwing "carrots" out to people in an effort to weed out illegal copies of Windows. They haven't said just what they're going to do with the data they've collected, or how they'll expect users to deal with it. More work for them, and potential pain for those that thought they had purchased legal copies of Windows, but didn't.
I don't know if I have a point... but this all just looks bad to me, and does seem to make product activation more and more of a hassle for everybody all around. It just seems to escalate, and I wonder if this is a case of diminishing returns. Maybe it gives MS some benefit (perhaps the marketing people get good data out of it somehow), but discouraging piracy doesn't seem to be one of them, from what I can see.
The FTC and NIST are holding a joint summit on email authentication in two weeks in Washington, DC (during the same week as IETF's 61st conference). They hinted earlier this year that if the industry does not come up with a standard for authentication, the feds might impose one.
Could the FTC actually do this? I wasn't aware that they had any authority over internet standards. The internet isn't some corporation, or the sole property of any business, even if some companies wish it were.
Well... I think part of this is about mindset. I'm all about CG eye candy. I'm a sucker for it every time. When I went to the theater to see FF:The Spirits Within, I was expecting to be hugely blown away by realism. While it wasn't horrible, it didn't live up to the expectations I had built up in my mind.
I won't do this when I see FF:Advent Children. All movies require a certain amount of suspension of belief, and no matter how well it will be rendered, I'll keep it firmly in mind that this is, ultimately, just a cartoon. One with it's own style and conventions. Instead of expecting realism, I'll look for beauty. If there's one thing Square can deliver, it's beautiful artwork and graphics.
Well, I didn't say it would be media center, only that it might borrow from it. And I do have to admit that I am indeed being pretty pessimistic about this.
But I'm afraid that whatever ends up in the set-top box will have far less functionality than media center. It almost has to in order to make it as simple as possible for the average consumer, and in an attempt to reduce the burden of support. And I personally fear that reduced freedom on the part of the consumer in an effort to charge money for whatever they can, might very well be an appealing strategy for a company like SBC.
Forget the broadcast flag. If Microsoft is providing the software, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to make use of much of the same software that goes into Windows Media Center Edition. At any rate, you can bet it includes MS DRM, codecs, and bugs.
You think the box will let you make a copy of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't hold my breath. If you're lucky, you will have to pay for a second box, and will be "allowed" to watch it in your bedroom.
The company also announced that the first advertiser to participate in the network is RealNetworks, Inc., the leading creator of digital media services and software.
I'm not typically a basher of Real Networks, but I don't suppose I'm the only one to find this par for the course for Real.
There are "vanilla" DLLs, which often live in C:\Windows\System32\. They can also live in C:\Windows\System\ or C:\Program Files\Common Files\, your application's directory, or tucked away Lord knows where on your PATH.
You also have COM DLLs. These are DLLs that need to be registered in the registry upon installation. Once registered, any application that needs it can find it and make use of it. In theory, this was supposed to alleviate DLL Hell.
It didn't. And it just adds more hassles to both the installation and uninstallation process. A power user can't move this kind of DLL to another place on your PATH without first unregistering it and then reregistering it with an obscure command line utility, for example. Uninstall apps are far too frequently guilty of failing to either unregister these DLL at all, or leaving crap behind in the registry regarding them.
I do not like COM DLLs. At all. Hehe.;) In best practice, these things work out okay, but in reality it's just more complication and mess.
My understanding is that the developer simply didn't wish to put his code into CVS or the like until after a version 1.0 release. Some other people at Irrlicht NX decided to take the source, stick it in CVS, and apply patches and fixes and the like. The author had zero problems with this, and even lauded the effort.
It's hardly surprising that some people aren't sure how to feel about AOL sometimes. On one hand, they adopt IE or kill some promising project and get hisses and boos. On the other, they occasionally support or initiate a nifty open source project, or take a position we're prone to like.
Seems to me... and I'm hugely guessing here... that there's two factions in AOL to consider. The tech people, and then marketing/legal/etc. The tech people can sometimes (not always) do some stuff that benefits people, and probably mean well in general in any case. As long as something remains under the radar of the rest of AOL's bunch, and/or results in lots of positive P.R., it lives. But if the legal department or someone panics, well... we all saw what happened to Nullsoft's gnutella implementation, initially. And AOL is kinda flip-flopping where Netscape is concerned, I think.
In this case, the tech guys over there probably pretty much had a lot of sway over the Sender-ID thing. The lawyers, marketing people, et al. have far more important things to worry about, I presume.
Slightly offtopic, but this reminds me of something I tend to tell people a lot. I've had friends who become paranoid about putting pictures or whatever online, looking for javascript to prevent right-clicking and watermarking everything. I shake my head, and I tell them, "If you don't want people to be able to copy something, don't put it online." Javascript is easy enough to bypass, and watermarks are easy enough to remove.
Now, I'm not saying people shouldn't be a little piqued if they find that their content has been copied. But being a little philosophical about this can save you a lot of stress.
Personally, when I stick something I created online, I figure it would be flattering to find it elsewhere. And some people might even have the decency to credit me for it, which is always nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is still running a CRT? Who wants any program to change the resolution of their screen?
Gamers often do. An average application might run nicely at a high resolution, but for a smooth Skyrim experience, many people may find it necessary to allow it to run at a lower resolution.
Just publish the designs on the web. You don't have to own it to pass it on, you simply have to share it. -- Hiten
I'm not sure, as IANAL, and stuff. But my understanding is, in the U.S. at least, that if a design is patented, then it can't be legally manufactured by an unauthorized party. Publishing the design on the web or other public forum doesn't change the protection a patent offers. Remember, patents and all they describe are all available to the public already from the USPO itself.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to hate on this guy. I admire his work, and he's just the sort of person patents are intended to benefit.
I wondered whether he decided to patent his design, in an effort to license it to a manufacturer. The reason I wonder about this is that if he stops making these because of health or death, no one else will be able to make them either, unless the patent ownership is passed on, sold, or the patent expires. Which would seem like a shame.
I noticed the same thing shortly after grabbing an AVC video via an RSS feed. Also that the Spiderman trailer from Sony's Connect site was AVC and worked. Most of my videos were created with PSPVideo 9, which uses the MobileHackerz modified ffmpeg. So it may be an bug with that encoder. :(
As is often the case, the description Sony issues with the firmware updates doesn't usually tell the full story.
Yup, they added MUSIC, PHOTO, and VIDEO folders to the root directory, which is good. The VIDEO folder can contain subfolders, also good. You can dump that stupid naming format, goodgood.
Here's what's not so obvious... videos placed in this folder not only no longer make use of Sony's proprietary metadata atoms, they no longer require it. This means that you can use non-DRM iPod videos or many vanilla MPEG-4 files on the PSP. Videos placed under the old video folders still require that these atoms be present, though. Last, those *.THM thumbnail files are ignored in the new VIDEO folder.
But, for some bizarre reason, AVC/h.264 videos won't work under the new VIDEO folder. This seems like a horrendous oversight to me, and you'll definitely want to keep it in mind. I know most of my videos are AVC, so the new folder is pretty useless for me for the moment. Here's hoping for a quick 2.81 to fix this. (I won't hold my breath, though.)
As other people have pointed out, unlike RSS music feeds, video feeds do not stream video, but instead save it to the memstick, after which you may play it. Disappointing. :(
It is quite possible to download the video from google. It does take some extra steps, though.
Open up that .GVP file in your favorite text editor. You'll find a rather lengthy URL in there. Copy and paste that URL into your browser's address box, and you've got access to the actual media.
I'm too lazy to look, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's a Firefox extension around that might even do the dirty work for you.
Now i grant you, the name was just announced yesterday, and hasn't had time to spread far and wide. But a Google search for "wii" is interesting.
When I went to do a simple search for "wii" on Google today, I got a ton of sites from companies or organizations that make use of "WII" as an acronym. Sites on WWII show up on page two of the search. I looked through 20 pages of results, and not one of them appeared to be related to Nintendo's next console.
A search for "nintendo wii" gives a whole 640 results, most not in english. Some of those are prolly typos, or regarding a WWII game for Nintendo. This will change, of course... the name was only announced yesterday. But I'm tellin' ya, don't expect just "wii" to return anything useful on Google if you're interested in finding info on the console. Well, other than in the adverts.
For those who like to read such things, the patent is right here.
It is long. Very, very long.
Personally, I prefer to hear the original language while reading subtitles. But dubs have their place, I think, for two reasons. Well, not reasons... just my preferences. ;)
The one downside with subs is that you almost have to keep your eyes glued to the screen if you want to be sure not to miss anything. When I first watched FF:AC I did so at a time I wasn't likely to be distracted. Good thing too, because some of those subs flash by lighting fast at times. But sometimes you wanna watch a movie and not have to give it your wholly undivided attention. Just be casually entertained rather than a wholly submersive experience.
Another interesting thing about dubs versus subs is that they're never the same. That is, subs tend to be translated slightly differently than the dubs. Subs usually are more precise... more faithful to the original. Dubs seem to be more flexible. For example, idioms tend to be more literally translated in subs, while dubs will substitute a similiar but more familiar western idiom in it's place. As a result, I'll usually watch the sub first, and then watch the dub at some later time. Comparing the two can occasionally provide interesting insights.
I really don't know much about how drives store data. So this may be a really stupid question. But do larger sectors also mean the boot sector? Is this good news for boot loaders?
I'm a little bit surprised that nobody has linked to this site yet. ;) It's been a fav of mine for many years.
Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control
Thank you! The show stopper for ebooks hasn't been because of devices, it has been because of super-heavy handed DRM.
I'm all for ebooks. I have read eBooks that came free with a printed book quite happily on my laptop. Baen's books mentioned by parent are also fantastic, and available in HTML laced with Javascript, so I can even read one on my PSP's browser if I'm so inclined. Replacing an LCD display with an E-Ink one is just icing on the cake.
But I absolutely do not want to have to validate against a server somewhere to read my ebooks. I don't want to wind up tied to just one device or brand. And apparently, neither do most consumers.
This ebook reader of Sony's is not their first. There was the Librie, and it fell flat on its face thanks in part to DRM. You didn't buy a book, you rented it, and it would cease to be accessable after a time.
I have zero problem with downloading software, including games. Like most people, I grab shareware and open source software online all the time. But I do want to be sure that I can retain the data I bought a copy of. I don't want to hop on a website and have to prove I bought the damn thing, and download it again if I need to reinstall my OS, or lose the game when the company I downloaded it from goes out of business for whatever reason. Driving to the store can seem like much less of a hassle than DRM locked data. Especially gigs of locked data.
From TFA: ... It's not saying you'll stop people from doing it, but it makes people stop and think."
"You're not going to stop tracks getting on P2P sites," he added. "It's designed to stop casual piracy
I really, really do hope people stop and think about statements like this, and what it means to equate fair use with piracy.
Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom told me last fall that "we do not have any legal obligation to provide any means for interception" in his company's VoIP software. How will you force a company based in Luxembourg to insert backdoors in its software when it has no obligation to do so?
This doesn't qualify as an official statement from Skype, but it pretty much says it all, I think.
You know, this really makes me wonder.
The whole point of making users "activate" a new installation of Windows is to discourage the use or distribution of pirated copies. It didn't really work. The honest people stayed honest, but were inconvenienced. And the pirates kept pirating.
I might guess that activation is probably something of an inconvenience to MS as well. It didn't work as well as they had hoped, and in fact they had to keep track of illegitimate or "leaked" product keys in addition to the good ones. And it still hasn't stopped piracy.
So now MS is throwing "carrots" out to people in an effort to weed out illegal copies of Windows. They haven't said just what they're going to do with the data they've collected, or how they'll expect users to deal with it. More work for them, and potential pain for those that thought they had purchased legal copies of Windows, but didn't.
I don't know if I have a point... but this all just looks bad to me, and does seem to make product activation more and more of a hassle for everybody all around. It just seems to escalate, and I wonder if this is a case of diminishing returns. Maybe it gives MS some benefit (perhaps the marketing people get good data out of it somehow), but discouraging piracy doesn't seem to be one of them, from what I can see.
sigh
From Netwizard's Blog:
The FTC and NIST are holding a joint summit on email authentication in two weeks in Washington, DC (during the same week as IETF's 61st conference). They hinted earlier this year that if the industry does not come up with a standard for authentication, the feds might impose one.
Could the FTC actually do this? I wasn't aware that they had any authority over internet standards. The internet isn't some corporation, or the sole property of any business, even if some companies wish it were.
Well... I think part of this is about mindset. I'm all about CG eye candy. I'm a sucker for it every time. When I went to the theater to see FF:The Spirits Within, I was expecting to be hugely blown away by realism. While it wasn't horrible, it didn't live up to the expectations I had built up in my mind.
I won't do this when I see FF:Advent Children. All movies require a certain amount of suspension of belief, and no matter how well it will be rendered, I'll keep it firmly in mind that this is, ultimately, just a cartoon. One with it's own style and conventions. Instead of expecting realism, I'll look for beauty. If there's one thing Square can deliver, it's beautiful artwork and graphics.
Well, I didn't say it would be media center, only that it might borrow from it. And I do have to admit that I am indeed being pretty pessimistic about this.
But I'm afraid that whatever ends up in the set-top box will have far less functionality than media center. It almost has to in order to make it as simple as possible for the average consumer, and in an attempt to reduce the burden of support. And I personally fear that reduced freedom on the part of the consumer in an effort to charge money for whatever they can, might very well be an appealing strategy for a company like SBC.
Forget the broadcast flag. If Microsoft is providing the software, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to make use of much of the same software that goes into Windows Media Center Edition. At any rate, you can bet it includes MS DRM, codecs, and bugs.
You think the box will let you make a copy of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't hold my breath. If you're lucky, you will have to pay for a second box, and will be "allowed" to watch it in your bedroom.
From the press release:
The company also announced that the first advertiser to participate in the network is RealNetworks, Inc., the leading creator of digital media services and software.
I'm not typically a basher of Real Networks, but I don't suppose I'm the only one to find this par for the course for Real.
It gets worse.
There are "vanilla" DLLs, which often live in C:\Windows\System32\. They can also live in C:\Windows\System\ or C:\Program Files\Common Files\, your application's directory, or tucked away Lord knows where on your PATH.
You also have COM DLLs. These are DLLs that need to be registered in the registry upon installation. Once registered, any application that needs it can find it and make use of it. In theory, this was supposed to alleviate DLL Hell.
It didn't. And it just adds more hassles to both the installation and uninstallation process. A power user can't move this kind of DLL to another place on your PATH without first unregistering it and then reregistering it with an obscure command line utility, for example. Uninstall apps are far too frequently guilty of failing to either unregister these DLL at all, or leaving crap behind in the registry regarding them.
I do not like COM DLLs. At all. Hehe. ;) In best practice, these things work out okay, but in reality it's just more complication and mess.
My understanding is that the developer simply didn't wish to put his code into CVS or the like until after a version 1.0 release. Some other people at Irrlicht NX decided to take the source, stick it in CVS, and apply patches and fixes and the like. The author had zero problems with this, and even lauded the effort.
It's hardly surprising that some people aren't sure how to feel about AOL sometimes. On one hand, they adopt IE or kill some promising project and get hisses and boos. On the other, they occasionally support or initiate a nifty open source project, or take a position we're prone to like.
Seems to me... and I'm hugely guessing here... that there's two factions in AOL to consider. The tech people, and then marketing/legal/etc. The tech people can sometimes (not always) do some stuff that benefits people, and probably mean well in general in any case. As long as something remains under the radar of the rest of AOL's bunch, and/or results in lots of positive P.R., it lives. But if the legal department or someone panics, well... we all saw what happened to Nullsoft's gnutella implementation, initially. And AOL is kinda flip-flopping where Netscape is concerned, I think.
In this case, the tech guys over there probably pretty much had a lot of sway over the Sender-ID thing. The lawyers, marketing people, et al. have far more important things to worry about, I presume.
Slightly offtopic, but this reminds me of something I tend to tell people a lot. I've had friends who become paranoid about putting pictures or whatever online, looking for javascript to prevent right-clicking and watermarking everything. I shake my head, and I tell them, "If you don't want people to be able to copy something, don't put it online." Javascript is easy enough to bypass, and watermarks are easy enough to remove.
Now, I'm not saying people shouldn't be a little piqued if they find that their content has been copied. But being a little philosophical about this can save you a lot of stress.
Personally, when I stick something I created online, I figure it would be flattering to find it elsewhere. And some people might even have the decency to credit me for it, which is always nice.