Sinabro

Ars Technica reports

There are a few products you get tired of hearing about when you begin to review hardware and gaming equipment, and none more so than video headsets. I love a good monitor, and I can shop for televisions for hours, but whenever I’m at a trade show and a company tries to strap video equipment to my face, I know I’m in for a headache. I’ve tried every damn video headset on the market—and I’m sure a few that never made it to market—and quite frankly, I thought they all sucked. Everyone thinks they have the next big video headset, and they’re always wrong.

This is another line of product I’m keenly interested in (in addition to Tablet PCs).

Sigh. Too bad this is also a commercial (and perhaps technological) failure.

NY Times reports:

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

Well, I guess I won’t be starting any exercise routines or dramatic diets, then.

It looks like though, according to my body mass index, I can still stand to lose 10 to 20 pounds while staying in the “optimal” range. Perhaps a moderate control of calorie intake?

On BlogSpot:

“MLB no longer supports the DDS system” that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them “are no good. They will not work with the current system.”

Great. Just effing great. … As I told the supervisor, this is right in line with how wrong-headed and stupid and ass backwards MLB does everything.

I was told there is absolutely nothing MLB can do about these lost games. Plus, they said my purchases were all “one-time sales” and thus “there are no refunds”.

This is why DRM is EVIL. If you were offered a book that is printed in a disappearing ink, would you buy it? If you wouldn’t buy such a book, why would you buy its digital cousin—media encumbered with Digital Restrictions Management scheme?

Those who employ DRM goes far beyond evil. They commit crimes against the humanity and atrocity against the posterity by denying the eventual placement of the work into the public domain. Or, if not that, simple preservation, another artifact from ages ago for our children, ages after. These villains are willing to have history erased after they are long gone.

Boycott Digital Restrictions Management! Don’t buy anything encumbered with DRM! You wouldn’t place yourself in slavery; why would you enslave your media so willingly?

On Slashdot:

Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish.

This is a GOOD MOVE.

Yes, it is difficult to get a RESPECTED, peer-reviewed journal that is freely accessible going. ArXiv.org serves its purpose, and our group does post links to the ArXiv.org version of the paper (the same one published in a peer-review journal), but this does not make for an easy searching—as people searching for papers in ArXiv.org have no easy way of knowing whether the paper has been peer-reviewed.

While people work out a way to have more journals available openly, freely, and at no cost (some involving author-paid (which would then usually be covered by grants supporting the research activity) models have been suggested, but I haven’t seen it implemented), the more academic papers we can get out in the open (however lacking it may be at the moment), the better.

On System76.com:

powered by Linux, now featuring Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Almost too tempting. But after upgrading to some usable configuration, it comes out to nearly $1,300 or so. Well, but then, I guess that’s just about how much I paid for my Dell Inspiron 700m.

Ars Technica reports

Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon, emerged from the jungles last month and has been beating its chest ever since. Touted as the easiest-to-use desktop Linux distro yet, 7.10 hopes to bring the power of Linux to the masses.

THIS is how a Ubuntu review ought to be done!

Sure, it’s disappointing that they forgot to mention Debian, but at least the review focuses on the right features, rather than regurgitating things said about GNU/Linux for last decade.

Ars Technica reports:

Prince’s lawyers have requested that three fan sites remove the offending artwork, images, and even their “own photographs of their Prince-inspired tattoos,” according a to a joint statement from the site operators. Houseofquake.com, princefans.com, and prince.org have banded together to fight the cease-and-desist notices and have launched princefansunited.com to make their case to the world.

If I were a Prince fan, I would have responded rather simply—stop being a fan of such a jerk!

I mean, seriously. Can his music be that good? Good enough to compensate for such outrageous action, such as sending C&D notices for only inspired (not derived) works, whose copyright clearly doesn’t belong to Prince? I mean artists have been doing this for ages—and some litigious jerk wants to stop it now. Why do you like that jerk still?

Masochism can explain only so much.

Sigh. I wish people would please stop writing “how-to”s that require NDISwrapper. NDISwrapper is at best a stop-gap solution, a bandage. Even NDISwrapper developers agree that it should only be used as a last resort. But, for a device like this one, these people shouldn’t be writing “how-to”s that depend on a proprietary driver. There is a free driver (albeit one that requires a binary-only firmware) out there, and people need to use it. It needs to be tested more widely, and developed more actively until it is stable enough for mission critical tasks and overtakes the proprietary driver in features.

But, as long as people keep using NDISwrapper, this won’t happen as quickly as it possibly can. Using NDISwrapper only prolongs everyone’s captivity and slavery to the proprietary software. PLEASE, use it only as a very last resort, and PLEASE, PLEASE do not write a how-to using NDISwrapper if there is a free alternative out there.

Ars Technica reports:

Paramount has become the newest movie studio to make efforts to compete with pirates by offering low-cost, legitimate DVDs in China. New movie titles will go on sale some two months after their theater debut in the US, and for only $3. Paramount will also be joining forces with an unlikely partner in order to combat piracy: competitor Warner Bros., which already has outlets set up in China to sell DVDs.

… and, why are DVDs $10+ (even for crappy movies) in U.S. again? Or are U.S. consumers subsidizing DVD sales in the rest of the world?

This is yet another reason why DVD region codes are evil. Well, if you think “price discrimination” is bad, at least. I do (mainly because I don’t value DVDs as much as others in my geographical region do).