The question now becomes "will the PR0N guys buy this?
Probably not. Most porn DVD publishers don't even bother with CSS encryption or region codes. In fact, they don't seem to worry about piracy at all and yet they're still making money. Hollywood should take a lesson...
There's a nice floor there and you really don't want to go beneath it. With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
Not really. In 1987, you could count on a CD having a certain level of quality. Lately, the MAKE IT AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE approach has taken over. Instead of trying to make the most of CDDA's dynamic range, recording engineers are bent on making their album is the LOUDEST DISC IN YOUR CHANGER, and in the process you lose half the dynamic range. Maybe you mostly listen to classical music, and they haven't yet converted to the AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE school of recording. Try listening to a rock album from the 1980s and one from the last 2-3 years. It's depressing how the new recordings, made with brand new computer technology and better equipment sound worse than older ones.
try to copy&paste some webpage in a Office application and get something more then plain-text
I just pasted your comment into OpenOffice writer, and it came across with formatting and links intact. The only thing missing is your friend/foe/neutral icon.
BTW, if you want image editor interoperability, The Gimp can save in 36 different file formats (count 'em!) including Adobe PSD.
If you're wondering, this is why people prefer Macs.
If you're going to make a half-hearted attempt at trolling for Apple, pretend I posted the standard long-winded polemic about vendor lock-in, overpriced hardware, and one button mice here.
Mention Macs on Slashdot, get flamed by bitter ex-Mac-users who remember System 7.5. It Just Works (tm).
I had one of those steaming heaps! A Performa 630CD (I think), it was one of the last 68040 machines Apple made. The box claimed it was "PowerPC Upgrade Ready!" in 3-inch-tall red letters, but the PPC upgrade card never made it to market. It could only run the abominable System 7.5.x, and had possibly the world's slowest SCSI chip. Backing up files to an external zip drive required a Zen master's patience.
Some magazine (Macworld, maybe?) published a list of the 10 worst Macs ever made, and the 68k-based Performa line was near the top.
Re:if it is like the real doom game....
on
DOOM: The Boardgame
·
· Score: 4, Funny
A half life 2 board game will come out later leaving the old doom game in the dust.
Unfortunately, the Half-Life2 board game can't be played in the same building as a computer running Linux or MacOS, and requires all players to call the publisher to ask for permission before playing. Most slashdot geeks clamor for a boycott against the game, but secretly play it at their friend's houses.
If it weren't for Apple's DRM on the music sold through the iTMS, there would be no iTMS. No way to buy that one track you like. No way to support the artists that deserve the support.
Sounds good to me. No iTMS = less revenue for big record labels. That would speed the inevitable demise of the RIAA, and limit the potential damage they can do to the American legal system before they go.
I read the effing article up to the phrase "paradigm shifts", then decided I would rather post a snide comment than read the rest of this corporatespeak infested fluff peice. Get over yourselves, tech writers. Industrialization was a paradigm shift. The Italian rennaissance was a paradigm shift. People buying small form factor computers instead of mini-towers is not!
Mod the parent funny if you want, but sim sex would drive debelopment of lots of cool new technology. The requirements are mind-boggling.
First, before any code could be written, you would have to integrate biology and psychology into a single unified theory just to get a handle on what sex really *is*.
Second, you would need code and hardware capable of simulating a human mind and body. Even the NSA's "It doesn't really exist, we promise" crypto-crunching supercomputers would choke on that task.
Third, you would need an interface. A full model person is going to be impractically large and heavy(*). It would also be difficult to change after it's built (and I don't think many potential sim-sex customers are going to want sim-monogamy). The best solution would be a direct neural interface, but that would require more new technologies.
If somene had the motivation (and the knowledge, and the money) to make sim sex work, it would be a huge boost to all sorts of science and technology. Get busy, pornographers!
* Don't bother posting the obvious joke about how most/. readers (and their partners) are already impractically large and heavy. I'm sure everyone reading has already thought of that one...
In 1985, a PC cost $4000 and Windows cost $99. In 2005, a PC can be had for $500 (1/8 the cost), and Windows costs $199 (twice as much as it did twenty years ago).
Unless you think going from Windows 1.0 to XP is 16 times as much improvement as from the original IBM PC to a modern P4 system, Windows has become a ripoff...
Don't worry. Hardly anybody is going to mistake a prefab major-label pop act for a group of musicians.
Aaah yes, canned Mac troll #17...
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's a classic. Reposted countless times on Slashdot and other websites since it's first appearance in 1998. The poster had enough sense to change the claimed Mac model from 8600/300 to G5, which is better than your average canned post troll can do, but it's still a six-year-old repost.
(see http://www.kottke.org/98/11/ for a nearly word-for-word identical post made 6 years ago)
Yeah, but you have to use the secret beta text-mode only klik client (codenamed "xterm"). Open xterm and type "emerge " (the trailing space is important!) Open the klik! web site and highlight the name of the app you want to install with your mouse pointer. Then middle-klik on xterm, and press enter. Presto!
The F-117 Raptor and M1 tank aren't really high technology anymore. They've both been in service for more than 10 years, and the design work was all done in the early 1980. Also, if the only entity buying big-ticket American tech products is the US military, that's a sign there is a problem, not a sign of good economic health!
here is a reply to a post implying Apple is on shaky financial ground from October 1985. That's nearly 20 years of going out of buniness "real soon now"!
I've even consulted internally on techniques used by military-grade security ICs that not only defy structural or e-beam attacks but also detact indirect attacks such as power analysis. Keep in mind that these security tricks are also used by "smart cards" and the like that you hope are actually fairly secure.
Would those be the same uncrackable "smart cards" that satellite TV pirates have been cracking, cloning, emulationg, and extracting keys from regularly for the last 10 years?
In theory you may be able to hide information on the silicon in such a way that it's nearly impossible to recover, but all past experience with copy-control technology shows that you can't give the keys (in *ANY* form) to a reasonably motivated attacker and not have them compromised in short order.
It doesn't matter how strong their spy-agency grade encryption is. In any DRM system, the customer will always have the cyphered content, the cypher, and the key. If content can be decrypted for watching/listening, it can be decrypted for copying.
The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary... It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data.
Two miles in only a year? Wow, at this rate it'll only take a few hundred thousand years to explore all of the Martian surface! Yay rovers!
It's hard to take the "we don't need to send humans to Mars, we can explore with rovers" crowd seriously when our best and brightest rover covers only two miles of ground in an entire year.
I was putting updates/info in.plan files before some of these "bloggers" were born.
I'm sure you were. The question is did anyone you don't regularly exchange email or phone calls with ever read it?
Also, is there a search engine where I can look up.plan files that are relevant to my interests? Can I embed links to other.plans or web content in my.plan file? Did anyone but John Carmack ever have a.plan that was fingered more than once per day?
Maybe the blog isn't just those damn kids taking your ideas and putting them in a shiny point-and-click web interface...
Once again, your post says one thing and your sig says the opposite. If you already have your 5 suckers...errr..."friends" signed up, and don't need me (or any other slashdot readers) why are you still spamming a referrer link for freeipods.com in your sig?
If you want anyone to remotely take you seriously, you will have to first drop the double-standard....and as we all know, Slashdot is a single entity, with 700,000 user accounts all controlled by one mind. That's the reason why differences of opinion, name-calling, and petty insults are so rare here, we're all the same person.
A post from some random guy with two pseudo-anonymous friends who claim to have been burned by this scam counts for more to me than a thousand rebuttals from people with "free iPod" links in their sigs. To put it bluntly, they have no obvious reason to lie. You do.
Slashdot Mirror
The question now becomes "will the PR0N guys buy this?
Probably not. Most porn DVD publishers don't even bother with CSS encryption or region codes. In fact, they don't seem to worry about piracy at all and yet they're still making money. Hollywood should take a lesson...
There's a nice floor there and you really don't want to go beneath it. With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
Not really. In 1987, you could count on a CD having a certain level of quality. Lately, the MAKE IT AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE approach has taken over. Instead of trying to make the most of CDDA's dynamic range, recording engineers are bent on making their album is the LOUDEST DISC IN YOUR CHANGER, and in the process you lose half the dynamic range. Maybe you mostly listen to classical music, and they haven't yet converted to the AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE school of recording. Try listening to a rock album from the 1980s and one from the last 2-3 years. It's depressing how the new recordings, made with brand new computer technology and better equipment sound worse than older ones.
try to copy&paste some webpage in a Office application and get something more then plain-text
I just pasted your comment into OpenOffice writer, and it came across with formatting and links intact. The only thing missing is your friend/foe/neutral icon.
BTW, if you want image editor interoperability, The Gimp can save in 36 different file formats (count 'em!) including Adobe PSD.
If you're wondering, this is why people prefer Macs.
If you're going to make a half-hearted attempt at trolling for Apple, pretend I posted the standard long-winded polemic about vendor lock-in, overpriced hardware, and one button mice here.
Mention Macs on Slashdot, get flamed by bitter ex-Mac-users who remember System 7.5. It Just Works (tm).
I had one of those steaming heaps! A Performa 630CD (I think), it was one of the last 68040 machines Apple made. The box claimed it was "PowerPC Upgrade Ready!" in 3-inch-tall red letters, but the PPC upgrade card never made it to market. It could only run the abominable System 7.5.x, and had possibly the world's slowest SCSI chip. Backing up files to an external zip drive required a Zen master's patience.
Some magazine (Macworld, maybe?) published a list of the 10 worst Macs ever made, and the 68k-based Performa line was near the top.
A half life 2 board game will come out later leaving the old doom game in the dust.
Unfortunately, the Half-Life2 board game can't be played in the same building as a computer running Linux or MacOS, and requires all players to call the publisher to ask for permission before playing. Most slashdot geeks clamor for a boycott against the game, but secretly play it at their friend's houses.
If it weren't for Apple's DRM on the music sold through the iTMS, there would be no iTMS. No way to buy that one track you like. No way to support the artists that deserve the support.
Sounds good to me. No iTMS = less revenue for big record labels. That would speed the inevitable demise of the RIAA, and limit the potential damage they can do to the American legal system before they go.
I read the effing article up to the phrase "paradigm shifts", then decided I would rather post a snide comment than read the rest of this corporatespeak infested fluff peice. Get over yourselves, tech writers. Industrialization was a paradigm shift. The Italian rennaissance was a paradigm shift. People buying small form factor computers instead of mini-towers is not!
"I also find it humorous where some people label him as a wacko conservative, and other label him as a wacko liberal."
That's because he's really a libertarian wacko, but "liberal" and "conservative" are the only political epithets most Americans know how to sling...
Mod the parent funny if you want, but sim sex would drive debelopment of lots of cool new technology. The requirements are mind-boggling.
/. readers (and their partners) are already impractically large and heavy. I'm sure everyone reading has already thought of that one...
First, before any code could be written, you would have to integrate biology and psychology into a single unified theory just to get a handle on what sex really *is*.
Second, you would need code and hardware capable of simulating a human mind and body. Even the NSA's "It doesn't really exist, we promise" crypto-crunching supercomputers would choke on that task.
Third, you would need an interface. A full model person is going to be impractically large and heavy(*). It would also be difficult to change after it's built (and I don't think many potential sim-sex customers are going to want sim-monogamy). The best solution would be a direct neural interface, but that would require more new technologies.
If somene had the motivation (and the knowledge, and the money) to make sim sex work, it would be a huge boost to all sorts of science and technology. Get busy, pornographers!
* Don't bother posting the obvious joke about how most
In 1985, a PC cost $4000 and Windows cost $99. In 2005, a PC can be had for $500 (1/8 the cost), and Windows costs $199 (twice as much as it did twenty years ago).
Unless you think going from Windows 1.0 to XP is 16 times as much improvement as from the original IBM PC to a modern P4 system, Windows has become a ripoff...
Not reformatting the hard drive would have been faster, and he wouldn't have lost any data.
He also wouldn't have lost any spyware...
Don't worry. Hardly anybody is going to mistake a prefab major-label pop act for a group of musicians.
It's a classic. Reposted countless times on Slashdot and other websites since it's first appearance in 1998. The poster had enough sense to change the claimed Mac model from 8600/300 to G5, which is better than your average canned post troll can do, but it's still a six-year-old repost.
(see http://www.kottke.org/98/11/ for a nearly word-for-word identical post made 6 years ago)
Yeah, but you have to use the secret beta text-mode only klik client (codenamed "xterm"). Open xterm and type "emerge " (the trailing space is important!) Open the klik! web site and highlight the name of the app you want to install with your mouse pointer. Then middle-klik on xterm, and press enter. Presto!
The F-117 Raptor and M1 tank aren't really high technology anymore. They've both been in service for more than 10 years, and the design work was all done in the early 1980. Also, if the only entity buying big-ticket American tech products is the US military, that's a sign there is a problem, not a sign of good economic health!
here is a reply to a post implying Apple is on shaky financial ground from October 1985. That's nearly 20 years of going out of buniness "real soon now"!
I've even consulted internally on techniques used by military-grade security ICs that not only defy structural or e-beam attacks but also detact indirect attacks such as power analysis. Keep in mind that these security tricks are also used by "smart cards" and the like that you hope are actually fairly secure.
Would those be the same uncrackable "smart cards" that satellite TV pirates have been cracking, cloning, emulationg, and extracting keys from regularly for the last 10 years?
In theory you may be able to hide information on the silicon in such a way that it's nearly impossible to recover, but all past experience with copy-control technology shows that you can't give the keys (in *ANY* form) to a reasonably motivated attacker and not have them compromised in short order.
It doesn't matter how strong their spy-agency grade encryption is. In any DRM system, the customer will always have the cyphered content, the cypher, and the key. If content can be decrypted for watching/listening, it can be decrypted for copying.
The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary ... It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data.
Two miles in only a year? Wow, at this rate it'll only take a few hundred thousand years to explore all of the Martian surface! Yay rovers!
It's hard to take the "we don't need to send humans to Mars, we can explore with rovers" crowd seriously when our best and brightest rover covers only two miles of ground in an entire year.
I was putting updates/info in .plan files before some of these "bloggers" were born.
.plan files that are relevant to my interests? Can I embed links to other .plans or web content in my .plan file? Did anyone but John Carmack ever have a .plan that was fingered more than once per day?
I'm sure you were. The question is did anyone you don't regularly exchange email or phone calls with ever read it?
Also, is there a search engine where I can look up
Maybe the blog isn't just those damn kids taking your ideas and putting them in a shiny point-and-click web interface...
Once again, your post says one thing and your sig says the opposite. If you already have your 5 suckers...errr..."friends" signed up, and don't need me (or any other slashdot readers) why are you still spamming a referrer link for freeipods.com in your sig?
If you want anyone to remotely take you seriously, you will have to first drop the double-standard. ...and as we all know, Slashdot is a single entity, with 700,000 user accounts all controlled by one mind. That's the reason why differences of opinion, name-calling, and petty insults are so rare here, we're all the same person.
Oh, wait...
A post from some random guy with two pseudo-anonymous friends who claim to have been burned by this scam counts for more to me than a thousand rebuttals from people with "free iPod" links in their sigs. To put it bluntly, they have no obvious reason to lie. You do.
Yeah, and just think how much safer the roads could be if nobody had seatbelts or airbags!
After all, good drivers who inspect their vehicles prior to a trip and don't make dumb decisions never have accidents...