08.31.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:58 am by
Can’t afford that 23 inch flat screen monitor? Why not just getting some goo for your walls and an affordable projector and calling it good?
Screen Goo is a specially formatted, highly reflective acrylic paint, designed specifically for the video projection industry. Screen Goo acrylic paint allows one to transform any smooth paintable surface into a high performance projection screen.
Screen Goo’s performance reflects many years of research and development. It has the capacity to outperform most of the existing screen products in use today. Screen Goo is made from the highest grade acrylic available and contains no filler materials. Whether used in a professional, or home situation its simple application, versatility, quality and variable gain characteristics are remarkable.
Neat, neat.
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Posted in forum archive at 11:55 am by
Great article at CNN about how cell phone vendors are ripping people off with line-items on their bills. They’re using governmental regulation charges as cover for charging additional fees. The best part? They don’t have to advertise these fees when talking about price.
The fees have raised consumers’ ire. Ken Juler of Angwin, California, says he pays “under objection” the 99 cent monthly fee that AT&T Corp. adds to his bill.
“These were costs the company was supposed to pay themselves out of operations,” Juler said. “They want to make the bottom line look better, so they stick the customer with it. It’s dishonest.”
Very little from the fees goes to the federal government, said Patrick Pearlman, deputy consumer advocate for West Virginia’s Consumer Advocate Division. “Regulatory costs are not the reason for the fees, they’re the cover for the fees,” he said. “Any industry has a cost of complying with government regulation. You don’t get nailed with a National Environmental Policy Act surcharge by General Motors when you buy a car.”
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Sprint PCS says it uses the fees for “a host of regulatory compliance costs imposed by the FCC,” according to the National Association of Consumer Advocates petition. Yet those costs include “posting its rates on the Internet, responding to informal complaints and investigations and administrative costs associated with the federal Universal Service Fund.”
Sprint Corp’s landline bills say that its 99 cent-a-month “Carrier Cost Recovery Charge” includes “certain property taxes.” AT&T Corp. bills say its 99 cent-a-month fees include “regulatory compliance and proceedings costs and property taxes.”
T-Mobile USA’s 86-cent-a-month “regulatory cost recovery fee” pays for local number portability (the cost when customers keep their numbers but switch providers), E911 and “other regulatory mandates and programs,” the company says. Its other surcharge, currently 1.39 percent of a customer’s bill, goes toward the company’s contribution to the federal Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone service in places such as rural areas.
A company’s Universal Service Fund contribution is calculated annually as a percentage of its revenue, currently 8.9 percent. (The FCC also mandates three other telecom surcharges. Together, the three fees equal less than one percent of a company’s revenue.)
To make matters more confusing, some companies bill consumers directly for their Universal Service Fund contributions, then add other fees. The FCC allows the fees as long as they’re “just and reasonable” and puts no cap on them.
People who fight the fees say they’re no different than passing on the companies’ cost of buying office supplies.
If VOIP was possible across Wyoming… 
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Posted in forum archive at 11:48 am by
This week MSN is debuting its new music store, in conjunction with Windows Media Player 10 beta. The new player, reportedly, will have the store built in:
People familiar with the company’s plans say the MSN Music song store will have Web-based components, but will also depend heavily on its role inside the Media Player software. (That spot will be shared with other services, such as Napster, that use the Windows Media format to distribute their songs.) The store will offer 99-cent downloads for now, leaving the monthly subscription model to its other partners. Ultimately, it will offer some additional features, such as the ability for customers to chat with each other.
Windows Media Player is already so bloated that many people view it as unusuable (along with conspiracy theories about how it radios their darkest secrets to a hidden underground base of Billy G). But seriously, including the media store in 10 begs the question – how bloated with the Media Player be now?? 
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08.27.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:37 am by
If there’s TiVo for Television, why not TiVo for the radio? Well, because the lawyers don’t like it:
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said his organization had not reviewed the software, but said that in principle it was disturbed by the idea. “We remain concerned about any devices or software that permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library,” RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.
While recording your morning drive time shock jocks might not be very exciting, if you’re a subscriber to XM satellite radio this is a big idea. The service routinely broadcasts entire concerts live. If you miss it because you’re out or unwilling to stay up until 4am to listen to a concert, tough luck buddy. 
I only see the head-butting between technology empowered individuals and old-media business practices continuing.
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Posted in forum archive at 11:33 am by
What happens when poorly drawn characters meet RPGs – The Kindom of Loathing.
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08.26.04
Posted in miscellaneous at 10:30 pm by
This site is very cool – complete pdf specifications for making transformer models out of paper.
Neat neat. :upper:
http://www.protoformproject.com/Paperformers/images/Paperformer_Blaster.gif
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08.25.04
Posted in forum archive at 10:52 pm by
As if making bloated media software wasn’t enough to erode marketshare – now hackers have figured out how to manipulate themes to give them complete control of a user’s computer:
The flaw is being used by some spyware makers to infect people’s computers with their illicit programs, according to another group of researchers, at French company K-Otik Security. The attack had been used to spread spyware among Internet relay chat users, infecting a computer after the victim clicked on a Web address that appeared in the chat window.
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Posted in forum archive at 10:45 pm by
This is a surprise – Federal agents raided the homes of five people who are accused of swapping huge volumes of copyrighted material.
Even Ashcroft was involved because, apparently, the Department of Justice has nothing better to do:
“We do not believe it is appropriate for the Department of Justice to stand by while such theft is taking place,” Ashcroft said at a press conference.
“P2P does not stand for ‘permission to pilfer,’” Ashcroft said.
He’s so witty. Now if Orrin Hatch would just put that to music.
Oh – and the RIAA has sued 744 more people.
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Posted in forum archive at 10:42 pm by
Sad to read this, but apparently HP has a pretty decent way of slowing virii from spreading, but have had to shelve it.
After unveiling cutting-edge technology for choking off the spread of viruses in March, Hewlett-Packard is quietly shelving the project, citing conflicts with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, a company executive says.
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The technology notices changes in host machine behavior, which indicates a virus infection. It then chokes off the attack by limiting the frequency of outbound communications from the host machine to “throttle” communications with other hosts on the network, Redmond says.
HP got Virus Throttler to work well in its labs with products using operating systems like HP-UX and Linux (news – web sites). However, the technology required changes to the way those operating systems run that HP couldn’t duplicate on Windows systems, because “we don’t own Windows,” Redmond says.
bummer. Not a bad idea though. Hopefully parts of the project will live on in some other form.
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Posted in forum archive at 5:53 pm by
Tomorrow may be a tough day to surf the web – a Russian has said tomorrow will be the day of ‘Electronic Jihad’ against Finanical and political sites.
According to a Tuesday RIA Novosti report, Russian security researcher Yevgeny Kaspersky, founder of Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs International, said a strike against political and financial sites was expected on Thursday.
“The hackers who have proclaimed ‘electronic jihad’ have enough experience and resources to paralyze the Internet for several hours at least,” Kaspersky said in the report.
Scary. We’ll see if this is on the scale of a new social engineering worm or the Year 2000 bug.
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