That library is great but if you read the license agreement it is not free (Beer) for commercial use. And since we were being paid to develop what is most deffinatly a commercial site unless we got the client to cough up the cost of the lib it wasn't going to be an option.
Not to mention I tend to prefer free (Beer,speech) software for anything I do and anything I pass along to clients.
Luckily a bit of work with google and I found some guy in england who had written his own PDF libraries (not nearly as nice as PDFlib linked above) which were GPL'd and had enough functionality to do what I needed.
I learned my lesson about researching and testing what I offer before selling it to clients thanks to PDF. I knew that PHP was capable of generating PDF's so I went ahead and accepted a job to create a website which would automagically generate PDF resumes for the visitors. What I then found out was that PHP could only generate PDF's if you bought one of two pricy libraries which actually do the PDF work.
I ended up searching for three days (and submitting an ask/. which was discarded) before I found a set of OS (free as in beer and speach) perl libraries for generating PDF's. But oh what a pain. I ended up designing a sample resume in QuarkXpress then using a pica ruler on the printout to convert it to something I could generate. But after about two weeks of hacking I had a resume generator which spits out very clean professional looking resumes in HTML and PDF for anyone who's willing to register on the site and fill out a few simple forms. Client was happy and I tucked another language into my cap. (Since the libraries I found pretty much required you to know PostScript).
Moral of story: test the technology before selling to a client. And trying to generate PDF's on the cheap is only for those who have way more time than money!
I tried it on both a Dell Inspirion 7000 and my Sharp mobilon HC-4500. On both screens I noticed very distracting color fringing. Like I said it may just be the way I perceive colors. But at this point if I get anything (software or hardware) that included this technology it had better have a way to turn it off! I'd rather read plain non anti-aliased chunk type than this rainbow colored eye fest:)
All arguments over wether this is actually different than what Apple did way back with the II or not aside I'm not as impressed as I had expected to be.
Back when this was first announced I thought it made sense and would work great. I even read a few pages which showed how Apple did the same thing and loaded the samples on there up on a few screens to see how they looked. Yeah there was a difference but nothing major.
Now this comes across with what sounds like samples made using the exact algos that MS is touting as their great new innovation. So I pull out the old palmtop and laptop and check the page out.
But this looks like hell to me! I can see major color fringing and in those text waterfall examples I see rainbows in the CT examples that are so prominent they make it harder for me to read than the AA example! Yuck!
Does anyone else notice it as much as I do? Or are my eyes just abnormally color sensitive?
Well, it's not a problem with the service but rather a problem with how other companies deal with it. My housemate is currently looking at buying his own house. And therefore is spending a lot of time dealing with lenders and mortgage companies. One problem that has come up is that for christmass this year his parents decided that rather than buy him a gift they would add him to one of their credit cards and let him buy his own gift.
However now that he's applying for a home loan he needs to prove his credit and sources of income. And that card is causing some major problems. His mother who's the main cardholder has been paying it with a direct deposit from her bank account. And the morgtage company won't accept the card as being paid for unless they can see the actuall payments. But all his mom gets is her bank statement showing the money being transfered. And since that's from her main savings account she is not willing to provide them with the entire statement.
The lending company won't even accept the bank statements with everything but the payments they're interested in whited out. He tried sending copies of the Card bill showing no balance and showing that previous payments had been received but they won't accept that. They only know how to deal with cancled checks....and there simply aren't any.
Of course this is more complicated than normal since he's just an extra card holder and not the main person on the account. But it is something to watch for.
Ok, this is probably going to guarantee that if I ever do request my own file there'll be something in it:)
But, With so many people asking how to rquest their files. And so many people worried about the UL that requesting your file creates one if you don't already have one....
Why don't we test their ability to deal with a paper based DOS attack? Ok, that's pretty harsh language, but imagine what they'd do if even 50% of the people reading this site sent in requests. They'd be overwhelmed. Sure the net effect would be to just slow down the response to our requests, but it could be interesting to watch them try to open that many new files.
I'm not trying to suggest anyone actually do this, and I know I woulden't try to organize it. But as a gedankenexperiment (that's a lot tougher to spell that I though, and I though it was two words...any arguments see www.m-w.com). it's deffinatly something interesting.
But I've GOT to get me a copy of that Linux for drunk-sysadmins. Extra large icons in X, double font size in text mode. Special "anti-wobble" code on the mouse routines.
Of course if your system dosen't have one of those spiffy 20x beer can holders it won't do you much good.
While I agree that no one SHOULD NEED the net I have to disagree about forcing a child to use "tradional" research instead of net based research. I don't know how long it's been since you've been in an educational environment but having recently escaped college I can tell you that more and more using the 'net is required.
I had several journalism classes which you could not pass if you did not use the net for at least some of the research. (And proved it no less). And even worse teachers are being encouraged at all levels to require computer skills. (Of course we're talking mousing and GUI's here not true computer skills which are degrading and being forgotten about even faster than tradional library skills).
But more importantly is where will it stop? Sure you can start by blocking the 'net. But once you've got your foot in the door you may notice those "other" computer terminals that replaced your tradional card file. Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if someone did the same searches there? Next thing you know we've got groups blocking any computer in a library and trying to halt inter-library lending to keep that smut where it belongs (anywhere but here).
Still the quote about erasing a pornographic image from a childs mind did get me to laugh. I've been on the net since the late 80's and I've yet to find porn by accident. (And having been a high school student for part of that time I can tell you I would have loved finding some by accident!). I'm sorry but the only way a child will find porn on the net is if they are looking for it. And as the censorware project has shown before kids just aren't dumb enough to be looking up porn at school.
Not to mention the already old dispute over why Lucas isn't releasing a DVD version. If he has the time to put together a special edition VHS version they why can't he also do a special edition DVD. (Which is the excuse given for no DVD release).
I hate to think it but the only explanation I can come up with is trying to trick us into buying the movie twice. One on VHS since that's the only way we can get it and once on DVD so we can actually enjoy a quality version with good video and true surround sound (Not that lucas even bothers with dolby Pro-Logic on his videos instead claiming his THX crap is better. Even though all THX does is simulate suround from a non-suround recording and then only if you shell out the bucks to buy a decoder from someone who shelled out the bucks to guy the rights to put THX on).
Sorry, but personally I wasn't impressed enough by the movie to run out a spend my money twice. Espically if I have to shell out more to get widescreen (How anyone can defent pan and scan I still don't understand.). Lucas, if you truly care as much about quality as you claim then stop bilking your customers for money and give us a true high quality home video. This crap just dosen't cut it with informed consumers.
But if history is any indicator just being able to hack a console dosen't mean people will. Look at the Playstation. Sure there are loads of people putting mod chips in and copying games but there are also serious hacker possibilities there too.
A quick search through the web will turn up a bunch of places with libraries and tools for writing your own PSX games. Yet all I've seen from that is a few weak tetris clones, a half-finished vertical scrolling shooter (I.E. Galaxan) and a bunch of worthless demos that do little more than brag that they managed to compile something for the Playstation.
So just because the tools are out there dosen't mean the geeks will embrace. I'm still waiting for the first console to be open enough to truly attract the hacks. Personally I'm hoping the PSXII will be well enough documented quickly enough that we get independant creations going quick.
That's what I get for spouting my mouth off before I finish reading the article. Oh well.
Still considering how many things Xerox came up with at PARC that they basically let slip into public domain (wether or not they always wanted to) it seems a little late to be enforcing something they don't even seem to be using.
Oh well, guess I'll just crawl back under my rock and be quite for a bit now.
Having fallen in love with my Palm III this sounds like a major bummer. Of course I'd like to see them try and take my Palm back!
But at the same time I'm not too surprised. After all PARC invented just about anything and everything we think of as a "modern" computer. GUI, mouse, why not graffiti too! Even so I am dissapointed to see them enforcing a patent like this so long after the technology has been in use, I mean come on Palms have been around for what 3, 4 years now? In internet time that's as close to forever as I want to get!
I've known about this site for over year. And as much as I want a Klein bottle the thing that realy amazed me was who's behind the site.
Dosen't Clifford Stoll ring a bell for anyone else here? Haven't any of you read "The Cuckoos Egg" (Not that I can spell it even though I've read it several times).
If you haven't read this book yet go grab it. It's a great story and it's even more interesting because Cliff is basically an astronomer who got sucked into a life as a "white hat hacker" even though he's never even been that big on computers. It's very interesting reading a technical story told by someone who didn't know much more than how to login to a system but ended up tracking down an international cracker being paied by the KGB to break into US sites.
So, go read his book, marvel at his story. Then go buy one of the cool zero volume bottles he sells:)
That it's a camera disguised in a watch so you can sneak it in places. That a LOT worse than anything Ramsey advertised thier cameras for and look at the fun their having now.
But I think Casio is a bit more than they have the political clout to bully about this kind of thing. Could create too much bad press.
Sorry, I'm just still bitter that I'm going to have to handbuild a transmitter for my next project now that I can't wimp out and buy a 'cube'.
Personally I won't even rent VHS tapes anymore because I end up getting too distracted by the poor video and sound quality to enjoy the movie.
For someone who claims to have his viewers best interest in mind at all times (Go read some THX crap to see what I mean) this is a slap in the face. Lucas is way to concerned about getting every penny he can out of the THX name to worry about quality at all anymore.
Note that there is nothing in that article that suggests the VHS will even be letterboxed. So not only do we only get a low quality video image with low quality not even surround sound but we don't even get the full frame of the movie! And this mastered in THX crap isn't worth anything sure it may be nice if you have a THX compatable home system (Major $$$$) which can create it's pseudo-surround effects but I'd much rather see plain old pro-logic surround than the sorry excuse of a remaster THX does for home video.
I'm sorry but if half of what that press release said was accurate they'd only be releasing on DVD with a full widescreen image, Dolby Digital or DTS soundtrack. If they did that I woulden't even care if they included any extra features or not. But as it is I won't even bother to rent the damn thing.
For what it's worth I have no interest at all in spying on anyone for any reason. But I do have several radio kits from Ramsey and was planing on buying several other things where were included on the list of siesed items.
No not cameras and mics in smoke detectors (which I've been tempted to buy before because I've seen them cheaper than cameras by themselves!) but things like the wireless FM mic (which I use as a primitive tracking device in model rockets) and their cube video transmitter which I had also hoped to use in rocketry and other RC applications . (Like David Lettermans's old RC car with a TV camera on top).
And much like the agrument against DeCSS I don't care if these devices can be used to spy on people they can also be used legitimately. It's not the manufacturers problem to enforce how their product is used. The gov't needs to focus on enforcing the laws about use of such devices if they want to retain any credibility in most of our eyes. DeCSS can be used to help copy DVD's but it's designed to play DVD's on systems that don't have native players. Just because a camera is small and can be concealed should not mean it's illegal.
Well for what it's worth I did investigate building a macrovision defeat instead of the hack I used to display my DVD's on my older TV. (I'm an old-school hardware hacker and as such refuse to buy anything I think I can build myself)
But it's not a moot point for me. That old TV (which got a new lease on life thanks to DVD and the Video Essential Disk which helped me tune it up) finally died. Well it still works but it's got a lot of horizontal lines and I didn't feel like digging out my old TV repair manuals to fix a 20 year old TV when the rest of my home theatre was less than 1 year old. So I bit the bullet and bought myself a new larger TV with full component video input. Now suddenly I'm a DVD collector and movie buff. Suddenly technology dosen't seem so great any more now that it's finally sucking all my money away:)
One small problem with your comment is that it's not nearly as easy to copy a DVD as you would make it sound.
When I first bought my DVD player last year I had an older TV with only RF inputs...no composite video, no S-Video and no component video. So I planned on hooking my DVD player up through my VCR to convert the composite signal to RF so I could view it on my older TV.
When I got home what I learned was one of the forms of copy protection included on DVD's (there are several CSS is only one of them) is the tradional macrovision style of copyprotection designed to keep you from copying videos as well as DVD's.
What this means is when I put in my first DVD (Casino for those who care) I coulden't watch it. The image jumped and scrolled uncontrolably from time to time. This was because of the macrovision style protection included within the actual video signal getting to my VCR and my VCR doing what it was designed to do and mucking up my image! A videotape made from a DVD would suffer from the same extreme degredation of image.
I eventually hacked together a solution using an old composite to RF converter from a first generation PSX, a power cube, some wire and a voltage regulator. It worked but still gave me slightly corrupted video when the protection signal would kick in. It wasn't as bad as going through a VCR and was actually viewable. But when that signal came in my screen would randomly darken and lighten.
So what's my point? First off even if you can copy the movie off a DVD and even if you could burn it to a new disk you still have a level of copyprotection that's embedded within the actual video signal itself. Second and more approiate to this posting is that you can't just copy a DVD to a videotape (as if you'd want to since that way you loose the extra video resolution, 5.1 surround sound, and interactive extras...in other words all the things that would make you want to copy a DVD instead of going to the local video store renting the damn movie and copying the video tape [which has the same macrovision protection embedded within it's signal as well!])
Just how big are the core bits of DeCSS? I remember when the "Munitions T-shirts" with a perl implimentation of DSS came out (Still have mine) some guy went so far as to tatoo the code on his body.
I'd love to see them put a restraining order against someone's tatoo:)
I don't know about any of this "Grand Unified Theory" or how accurate it is. But I do know about cool Nobel Laureates.
I still hold that Sheldon Glasgow is the all time coolest Nobel laureate for all the work he's done on the Ig. Nobel awards along with the crew of AIR (And previously JIR).
I still miss the old "Journal of Irreproducable Results" which far surpassed the new "Annuls of Improbable Research". Both great journals of science which in their own words "Can not or should not be repeated".
(Suddenly remembering my drunken trees article I started just before JIR changed to AIR. I was studying the beverage preference of local trees based on how many of what kind of beer cans could be found at the base of certian trees)
I agree with a lot of what you said but have a major problem with your second point.
Most of what you said about DOS attacks I agree with. Heck I'll agree to everything you said about DOS. But this:
>2) CNN's not wrong; their article on the > etoy/etoys things is truth. Just using a > different set of words that seems to put etoys > on the right side of the thing. Words > are very powerful, but you can't blame CNN for > misusing them.
I agree that different wording can and will change the appearance of who or what is in the wrong in any given situation. But I do blame CNN when they misuse words. Be it intentional or unintentional.
CNN is a news agency, the public expects them to present fair unbiased reporting on a wide variety of subjects. When CNN misuses words to take sides in an ongoing argument they abuse their power as the press. Because CNN is very infulential and has this power they must be carefull not to abuse it. It's basic good journalism.
However, this entire article was very "fluffly" IMHO. Very low S/N ratio and not aimed towards anyone with any kind of technical knowledge. Which IMHO makes it even more damaging in that it will infuence people who don't have enough background information to form their own fair beliefs.
Oh, well I guess I should just shut up and stick to my policy of disregarding anything even remotely technical that CNN tries to do.
I really want that AIBO, and I've got a couple of places I could whip up a BUNCH of temporary spam collecting e-mail addresses at. But is it worth the effort? In the time it would take me to set it all up, filter it for a winning message and remove the accounts I could easily make more than value of an AIBO by using the same skills doing some extra consulting here locally! Besides, with them basically encouraging such behaviour by giving links other places that give free e-mail addresses is asking for it.
This is little more than a fancy web-based chain letter if you think about it! I gave it one address just so I could track how much SPAM it sends. I'm sickly curious that way.
You know throwing the/. effect at this thing could cause more dammage than the recent slew of e-mail macro-viruses. They could end up getting blacklisted for mailboming quickly if they don't have the right agreements.
wondering if should have posted this anonmyously now that it's got me scared of my mailbox......
Since I helped start this thread I'll throw in another 2 cents.
I've got both KDE and Gnome on my system but I'd ditch both in an instant for 4Dwm/IRIX (Whatever they call the package now..I haven't touched that SGI in two years). Personally I use KDE on my linux box and don't much care fur Gnome.
After my first week of working on an SGI though I fell in love. I told everyone I knew that IMHO the major GUI's compared thusly:
Windows: A shell for DOS. (98 and NT4 have helped but still pretty weak...and crash way too much)
Mac OS: Nice idea but takes too much power away from the system. That's why Mac are always such burly boxes but run so slow and crash so often!
IRIX: Everything Mac OS wants to be and should be. Plus hardware that's so incredibly burly you don't care if it sucks away some performance!
Of course now that SGI is almost 5 years old and I doubt you could pay me to do any "real work" on it. But then again it was their cheapest INDY when we got it and it still hosts a couple of websites without even breaking a sweat. And the only upgrade we ever did to it was add more HD space!
Hey, that's the quote I was trying to remember while explaining my ideas about neuro computing!
I remembered the basic tone and message of the quote but I coulden't remember the exact words or who it was that said it. And I can't think of any other example that seems to make it more understandable than the idea of recreating telepathy through neurocomputing!
Slashdot Mirror
That library is great but if you read the license agreement it is not free (Beer) for commercial use. And since we were being paid to develop what is most deffinatly a commercial site unless we got the client to cough up the cost of the lib it wasn't going to be an option.
Not to mention I tend to prefer free (Beer,speech) software for anything I do and anything I pass along to clients.
Luckily a bit of work with google and I found some guy in england who had written his own PDF libraries (not nearly as nice as PDFlib linked above) which were GPL'd and had enough functionality to do what I needed.
I learned my lesson about researching and testing what I offer before selling it to clients thanks to PDF. I knew that PHP was capable of generating PDF's so I went ahead and accepted a job to create a website which would automagically generate PDF resumes for the visitors. What I then found out was that PHP could only generate PDF's if you bought one of two pricy libraries which actually do the PDF work.
/. which was discarded) before I found a set of OS (free as in beer and speach) perl libraries for generating PDF's. But oh what a pain. I ended up designing a sample resume in QuarkXpress then using a pica ruler on the printout to convert it to something I could generate. But after about two weeks of hacking I had a resume generator which spits out very clean professional looking resumes in HTML and PDF for anyone who's willing to register on the site and fill out a few simple forms. Client was happy and I tucked another language into my cap. (Since the libraries I found pretty much required you to know PostScript).
I ended up searching for three days (and submitting an ask
Moral of story: test the technology before selling to a client. And trying to generate PDF's on the cheap is only for those who have way more time than money!
I tried it on both a Dell Inspirion 7000 and my Sharp mobilon HC-4500. On both screens I noticed very distracting color fringing. Like I said it may just be the way I perceive colors. But at this point if I get anything (software or hardware) that included this technology it had better have a way to turn it off! I'd rather read plain non anti-aliased chunk type than this rainbow colored eye fest :)
All arguments over wether this is actually different than what Apple did way back with the II or not aside I'm not as impressed as I had expected to be.
Back when this was first announced I thought it made sense and would work great. I even read a few pages which showed how Apple did the same thing and loaded the samples on there up on a few screens to see how they looked. Yeah there was a difference but nothing major.
Now this comes across with what sounds like samples made using the exact algos that MS is touting as their great new innovation. So I pull out the old palmtop and laptop and check the page out.
But this looks like hell to me! I can see major color fringing and in those text waterfall examples I see rainbows in the CT examples that are so prominent they make it harder for me to read than the AA example! Yuck!
Does anyone else notice it as much as I do? Or are my eyes just abnormally color sensitive?
Well, it's not a problem with the service but rather a problem with how other companies deal with it. My housemate is currently looking at buying his own house. And therefore is spending a lot of time dealing with lenders and mortgage companies. One problem that has come up is that for christmass this year his parents decided that rather than buy him a gift they would add him to one of their credit cards and let him buy his own gift.
However now that he's applying for a home loan he needs to prove his credit and sources of income. And that card is causing some major problems. His mother who's the main cardholder has been paying it with a direct deposit from her bank account. And the morgtage company won't accept the card as being paid for unless they can see the actuall payments. But all his mom gets is her bank statement showing the money being transfered. And since that's from her main savings account she is not willing to provide them with the entire statement.
The lending company won't even accept the bank statements with everything but the payments they're interested in whited out. He tried sending copies of the Card bill showing no balance and showing that previous payments had been received but they won't accept that. They only know how to deal with cancled checks....and there simply aren't any.
Of course this is more complicated than normal since he's just an extra card holder and not the main person on the account. But it is something to watch for.
What was that in the Halloween documents about embracing and extending into the OS arena much like they have in other areas?
Could this be some sick twist of that old MS ploy.
Embrace - Call what they're doing OS even though it blatantly isn't.
Extend - Use their market power to convince corporate america that what they're doing is real OS.
Then just use that posistion to downplan Linux and true OS as some sort of communist joke.
Man, I depress myself when I try to think like MS.
Ok, this is probably going to guarantee that if I ever do request my own file there'll be something in it :)
But, With so many people asking how to rquest their files. And so many people worried about the UL that requesting your file creates one if you don't already have one....
Why don't we test their ability to deal with a paper based DOS attack? Ok, that's pretty harsh language, but imagine what they'd do if even 50% of the people reading this site sent in requests. They'd be overwhelmed. Sure the net effect would be to just slow down the response to our requests, but it could be interesting to watch them try to open that many new files.
I'm not trying to suggest anyone actually do this, and I know I woulden't try to organize it. But as a gedankenexperiment (that's a lot tougher to spell that I though, and I though it was two words...any arguments see www.m-w.com). it's deffinatly something interesting.
I don't know about Linux for ABIT systems....
But I've GOT to get me a copy of that Linux for drunk-sysadmins. Extra large icons in X, double font size in text mode. Special "anti-wobble" code on the mouse routines.
Of course if your system dosen't have one of those spiffy 20x beer can holders it won't do you much good.
While I agree that no one SHOULD NEED the net I have to disagree about forcing a child to use "tradional" research instead of net based research. I don't know how long it's been since you've been in an educational environment but having recently escaped college I can tell you that more and more using the 'net is required.
I had several journalism classes which you could not pass if you did not use the net for at least some of the research. (And proved it no less). And even worse teachers are being encouraged at all levels to require computer skills. (Of course we're talking mousing and GUI's here not true computer skills which are degrading and being forgotten about even faster than tradional library skills).
But more importantly is where will it stop? Sure you can start by blocking the 'net. But once you've got your foot in the door you may notice those "other" computer terminals that replaced your tradional card file. Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if someone did the same searches there? Next thing you know we've got groups blocking any computer in a library and trying to halt inter-library lending to keep that smut where it belongs (anywhere but here).
Still the quote about erasing a pornographic image from a childs mind did get me to laugh. I've been on the net since the late 80's and I've yet to find porn by accident. (And having been a high school student for part of that time I can tell you I would have loved finding some by accident!). I'm sorry but the only way a child will find porn on the net is if they are looking for it. And as the censorware project has shown before kids just aren't dumb enough to be looking up porn at school.
Not to mention the already old dispute over why Lucas isn't releasing a DVD version. If he has the time to put together a special edition VHS version they why can't he also do a special edition DVD. (Which is the excuse given for no DVD release).
I hate to think it but the only explanation I can come up with is trying to trick us into buying the movie twice. One on VHS since that's the only way we can get it and once on DVD so we can actually enjoy a quality version with good video and true surround sound (Not that lucas even bothers with dolby Pro-Logic on his videos instead claiming his THX crap is better. Even though all THX does is simulate suround from a non-suround recording and then only if you shell out the bucks to buy a decoder from someone who shelled out the bucks to guy the rights to put THX on).
Sorry, but personally I wasn't impressed enough by the movie to run out a spend my money twice. Espically if I have to shell out more to get widescreen (How anyone can defent pan and scan I still don't understand.). Lucas, if you truly care as much about quality as you claim then stop bilking your customers for money and give us a true high quality home video. This crap just dosen't cut it with informed consumers.
But if history is any indicator just being able to hack a console dosen't mean people will. Look at the Playstation. Sure there are loads of people putting mod chips in and copying games but there are also serious hacker possibilities there too.
A quick search through the web will turn up a bunch of places with libraries and tools for writing your own PSX games. Yet all I've seen from that is a few weak tetris clones, a half-finished vertical scrolling shooter (I.E. Galaxan) and a bunch of worthless demos that do little more than brag that they managed to compile something for the Playstation.
So just because the tools are out there dosen't mean the geeks will embrace. I'm still waiting for the first console to be open enough to truly attract the hacks. Personally I'm hoping the PSXII will be well enough documented quickly enough that we get independant creations going quick.
That's what I get for spouting my mouth off before I finish reading the article. Oh well.
Still considering how many things Xerox came up with at PARC that they basically let slip into public domain (wether or not they always wanted to) it seems a little late to be enforcing something they don't even seem to be using.
Oh well, guess I'll just crawl back under my rock and be quite for a bit now.
Having fallen in love with my Palm III this sounds like a major bummer. Of course I'd like to see them try and take my Palm back!
But at the same time I'm not too surprised. After all PARC invented just about anything and everything we think of as a "modern" computer. GUI, mouse, why not graffiti too! Even so I am dissapointed to see them enforcing a patent like this so long after the technology has been in use, I mean come on Palms have been around for what 3, 4 years now? In internet time that's as close to forever as I want to get!
I've known about this site for over year. And as much as I want a Klein bottle the thing that realy amazed me was who's behind the site.
Dosen't Clifford Stoll ring a bell for anyone else here? Haven't any of you read "The Cuckoos Egg" (Not that I can spell it even though I've read it several times).
If you haven't read this book yet go grab it. It's a great story and it's even more interesting because Cliff is basically an astronomer who got sucked into a life as a "white hat hacker" even though he's never even been that big on computers. It's very interesting reading a technical story told by someone who didn't know much more than how to login to a system but ended up tracking down an international cracker being paied by the KGB to break into US sites.
So, go read his book, marvel at his story. Then go buy one of the cool zero volume bottles he sells
That it's a camera disguised in a watch so you can sneak it in places. That a LOT worse than anything Ramsey advertised thier cameras for and look at the fun their having now.
But I think Casio is a bit more than they have the political clout to bully about this kind of thing. Could create too much bad press.
Sorry, I'm just still bitter that I'm going to have to handbuild a transmitter for my next project now that I can't wimp out and buy a 'cube'.
Personally I won't even rent VHS tapes anymore because I end up getting too distracted by the poor video and sound quality to enjoy the movie.
For someone who claims to have his viewers best interest in mind at all times (Go read some THX crap to see what I mean) this is a slap in the face. Lucas is way to concerned about getting every penny he can out of the THX name to worry about quality at all anymore.
Note that there is nothing in that article that suggests the VHS will even be letterboxed. So not only do we only get a low quality video image with low quality not even surround sound but we don't even get the full frame of the movie! And this mastered in THX crap isn't worth anything sure it may be nice if you have a THX compatable home system (Major $$$$) which can create it's pseudo-surround effects but I'd much rather see plain old pro-logic surround than the sorry excuse of a remaster THX does for home video.
I'm sorry but if half of what that press release said was accurate they'd only be releasing on DVD with a full widescreen image, Dolby Digital or DTS soundtrack. If they did that I woulden't even care if they included any extra features or not. But as it is I won't even bother to rent the damn thing.
For what it's worth I have no interest at all in spying on anyone for any reason. But I do have several radio kits from Ramsey and was planing on buying several other things where were included on the list of siesed items.
No not cameras and mics in smoke detectors (which I've been tempted to buy before because I've seen them cheaper than cameras by themselves!) but things like the wireless FM mic (which I use as a primitive tracking device in model rockets) and their cube video transmitter which I had also hoped to use in rocketry and other RC applications . (Like David Lettermans's old RC car with a TV camera on top).
And much like the agrument against DeCSS I don't care if these devices can be used to spy on people they can also be used legitimately. It's not the manufacturers problem to enforce how their product is used. The gov't needs to focus on enforcing the laws about use of such devices if they want to retain any credibility in most of our eyes. DeCSS can be used to help copy DVD's but it's designed to play DVD's on systems that don't have native players. Just because a camera is small and can be concealed should not mean it's illegal.
Well for what it's worth I did investigate building a macrovision defeat instead of the hack I used to display my DVD's on my older TV. (I'm an old-school hardware hacker and as such refuse to buy anything I think I can build myself)
:)
But it's not a moot point for me. That old TV (which got a new lease on life thanks to DVD and the Video Essential Disk which helped me tune it up) finally died. Well it still works but it's got a lot of horizontal lines and I didn't feel like digging out my old TV repair manuals to fix a 20 year old TV when the rest of my home theatre was less than 1 year old. So I bit the bullet and bought myself a new larger TV with full component video input. Now suddenly I'm a DVD collector and movie buff. Suddenly technology dosen't seem so great any more now that it's finally sucking all my money away
One small problem with your comment is that it's not nearly as easy to copy a DVD as you would make it sound.
When I first bought my DVD player last year I had an older TV with only RF inputs...no composite video, no S-Video and no component video. So I planned on hooking my DVD player up through my VCR to convert the composite signal to RF so I could view it on my older TV.
When I got home what I learned was one of the forms of copy protection included on DVD's (there are several CSS is only one of them) is the tradional macrovision style of copyprotection designed to keep you from copying videos as well as DVD's.
What this means is when I put in my first DVD (Casino for those who care) I coulden't watch it. The image jumped and scrolled uncontrolably from time to time. This was because of the macrovision style protection included within the actual video signal getting to my VCR and my VCR doing what it was designed to do and mucking up my image! A videotape made from a DVD would suffer from the same extreme degredation of image.
I eventually hacked together a solution using an old composite to RF converter from a first generation PSX, a power cube, some wire and a voltage regulator. It worked but still gave me slightly corrupted video when the protection signal would kick in. It wasn't as bad as going through a VCR and was actually viewable. But when that signal came in my screen would randomly darken and lighten.
So what's my point? First off even if you can copy the movie off a DVD and even if you could burn it to a new disk you still have a level of copyprotection that's embedded within the actual video signal itself. Second and more approiate to this posting is that you can't just copy a DVD to a videotape (as if you'd want to since that way you loose the extra video resolution, 5.1 surround sound, and interactive extras...in other words all the things that would make you want to copy a DVD instead of going to the local video store renting the damn movie and copying the video tape [which has the same macrovision protection embedded within it's signal as well!])
Just how big are the core bits of DeCSS? I remember when the "Munitions T-shirts" with a perl implimentation of DSS came out (Still have mine) some guy went so far as to tatoo the code on his body.
:)
I'd love to see them put a restraining order against someone's tatoo
I don't know about any of this "Grand Unified Theory" or how accurate it is. But I do know about cool Nobel Laureates.
I still hold that Sheldon Glasgow is the all time coolest Nobel laureate for all the work he's done on the Ig. Nobel awards along with the crew of AIR (And previously JIR).
I still miss the old "Journal of Irreproducable Results" which far surpassed the new "Annuls of Improbable Research". Both great journals of science which in their own words "Can not or should not be repeated".
(Suddenly remembering my drunken trees article I started just before JIR changed to AIR. I was studying the beverage preference of local trees based on how many of what kind of beer cans could be found at the base of certian trees)
I agree with a lot of what you said but have a major problem with your second point.
Most of what you said about DOS attacks I agree with. Heck I'll agree to everything you said about DOS. But this:
>2) CNN's not wrong; their article on the > etoy/etoys things is truth. Just using a
> different set of words that seems to put etoys > on the right side of the thing. Words
> are very powerful, but you can't blame CNN for > misusing them.
I agree that different wording can and will change the appearance of who or what is in the wrong in any given situation. But I do blame CNN when they misuse words. Be it intentional or unintentional.
CNN is a news agency, the public expects them to present fair unbiased reporting on a wide variety of subjects. When CNN misuses words to take sides in an ongoing argument they abuse their power as the press. Because CNN is very infulential and has this power they must be carefull not to abuse it. It's basic good journalism.
However, this entire article was very "fluffly" IMHO. Very low S/N ratio and not aimed towards anyone with any kind of technical knowledge. Which IMHO makes it even more damaging in that it will infuence people who don't have enough background information to form their own fair beliefs.
Oh, well I guess I should just shut up and stick to my policy of disregarding anything even remotely technical that CNN tries to do.
I really want that AIBO, and I've got a couple of places I could whip up a BUNCH of temporary spam collecting e-mail addresses at. But is it worth the effort? In the time it would take me to set it all up, filter it for a winning message and remove the accounts I could easily make more than value of an AIBO by using the same skills doing some extra consulting here locally! Besides, with them basically encouraging such behaviour by giving links other places that give free e-mail addresses is asking for it.
This is little more than a fancy web-based chain letter if you think about it! I gave it one address just so I could track how much SPAM it sends. I'm sickly curious that way.
You know throwing the
wondering if should have posted this anonmyously now that it's got me scared of my mailbox......
Since I helped start this thread I'll throw in another 2 cents.
I've got both KDE and Gnome on my system but I'd ditch both in an instant for 4Dwm/IRIX (Whatever they call the package now..I haven't touched that SGI in two years). Personally I use KDE on my linux box and don't much care fur Gnome.
After my first week of working on an SGI though I fell in love. I told everyone I knew that IMHO the major GUI's compared thusly:
Windows: A shell for DOS. (98 and NT4 have helped but still pretty weak...and crash way too much)
Mac OS: Nice idea but takes too much power away from the system. That's why Mac are always such burly boxes but run so slow and crash so often!
IRIX: Everything Mac OS wants to be and should be. Plus hardware that's so incredibly burly you don't care if it sucks away some performance!
Of course now that SGI is almost 5 years old and I doubt you could pay me to do any "real work" on it. But then again it was their cheapest INDY when we got it and it still hosts a couple of websites without even breaking a sweat. And the only upgrade we ever did to it was add more HD space!
Hey, that's the quote I was trying to remember while explaining my ideas about neuro computing!
I remembered the basic tone and message of the quote but I coulden't remember the exact words or who it was that said it. And I can't think of any other example that seems to make it more understandable than the idea of recreating telepathy through neurocomputing!