Music Industry Piracy Investigations this morning raided the offices of P2P companies Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment, along with the homes of key executives and several ISPs.It is strange to me that the Australian government would bother to allow such a raid to occur legally (MIPI had an Anton Pilar order to allow them to search for copyright breaches without notifying those they are searching) after the rulings in the Netherlands and US concluding that Sharman is not responsible for the KaZaA users’ copyright infringements.
Monthly Archive for February, 2004
According to this article at ZDNet Australia:
Embedded Systems Programming has an article titled Silicon 101 by Jim Turley. It’s an interesting read about how microchips are made. Turley writes about a few things that even I didn’t know about, such as the marketing of sometimes identical chips as chips with entirely different feature sets.
Chip makers commonly lie about a chip’s features. Well, maybe not lie exactly, but omit certain facts. You see, embedded processors with different features or peripherals often aren’t different chips at all. Vendors will produce a single silicon design but then package and market it as different chips. For example, one version might have two UARTs and Ethernet while another version has five UARTs and no Ethernet. Chances are, they’re really the same chip. Sometimes the “missing” features are disabled with a laser or by blowing a fuse. Sometimes they’re disabled with firmware. As often as not, they aren’t disabled at all, but just aren’t mentioned on the data sheet. Programmers have occasionally found “secret” peripherals that aren’t connected and aren’t mentioned in the manuals.So, if you’re a geek like me, head over to Embedded.com and take a look at the article.
So, I finally got to see the part of the Super Bowl Halftime Show that everyone is talking about. My reaction to it: a lot of people are overreacting, a few people aren’t. The detail in the video clips I’ve seen seem to be television quality, and a few are straight from a TiVo or other DVR device. You can see a blob of brown amongst the black of the vinyl/leather bustier, but really, that’s about it. I guess it’s still a little risque for broadcast television, so the FCC is right in investigating it (at least per the current rules set, which is entirely too puritanical for my liking). Seriously, though, this is no big deal.
When you have things like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and Cold Mountain being such great entertainment that feature more nudity than the halftime show ten times over, what is a half second of most of Janet’s boob on television? I understand that it was not what was expected to be seen by the viewing public, but I bet it would have gone mostly unnoticed if everyone didn’t make such a big deal about such an obvious publicity stunt (Janet’s new album is due out soon). So, Janet got what she wanted, Justin got what he wanted, MTV got what they wanted, CBS got what they wanted (and a little of what they didn’t), the NFL got red-faced, and the viewing public ate up the whole stunt without really noticing how they got played by everyone. Of course, I could just have a huge bias against big media.
I just spent some time shovelling a small portion of the driveway and the walkway so that the delivery guys (a Zippy’s guy tonight, a Peapod guy tomorrow) have a clean path to get to the door. Then I ate some gyros, and started to feel my lower back and hands giving me the sign that I’m getting old. So, I’m going to go hop in the hot tub for a few minutes. It takes a little work to keep it working great, but it’s worth it on nights like this.
Saturday night, Chris took me to Cafe la Cave, in Des Plaines. She got us a reservation in the cave, as suggested by Pam Skinner, her co-worker. Although it was a smoking room, it was quite romantic and impressive. The walls and ceiling were made to give you the feeling that you were actually in a cave, complete with a bat or two suspended from the ceiling above the bar! This was perfect, as all I wanted from Chris for my birthday was a nice night out to a restaurant, just the two of us.
Continue reading ‘Birthday goodness’
So, I finally got rid of the spammed comments from my blog. Apparently, it’s fun for spammers to deposit their filth on innocent web publishers’ blogs. After checking to see that MT does not store a value for the comment count somewhere in the database, I did a SQL query to delete all comments submitted via the spammer’s IP address, and I proceeded to ban that spammer’s IP. Another spammer hit this morning with something else entirely. So, I banned him, too. What a bunch of losers.
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