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Another example of the perils of DRM
Time and again I’ve warned my readers of the perils of DRM. (Specifically here and here). That’s why I don’t buy music on iTunes and have given all of my digital music patronage to Amazon.com. Even my wife, who’s not as into FOSS and all that as I am, has become disgusted as she’s understood…
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The Perils of the Edge of Change
We’re on the edge of the largest disruption in Tv technology since color Tv became mainstream. In 2009 all analog television transmission will cease. Although the two terms tend to go hand-in-hand that doesn’t mean that all channels will become HD. There just isn’t the bandwidth for that in the cable pipes right now. But…
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Trick or Treat: The Director’s Cut (Part 2)
Ok, I got a better version uploaded. The video is MUCH better quality and the audio is better as well. However, the conversion to flash caused it to go a little out of sync. It’s still not as bad as it was before. Still, for someone like me who’s trying to share their creative vision,…
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Is it really stealing?
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. If you don’t believe that illegal copying is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy”…
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Newton’s Laws in the Bullet Physics Engine
I was reading 3D World Issue #95 and they had a tutorial for Blender in the Questions section. It involved having a ball hit a wall of bricks and knocking them down. This is tedious to animate brick by brick, but relatively simple with the Blender physics engine. The following animation only took me about…
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Cycles
As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on…. Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to…
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HEY RIAA, all you needed to do was offer DRM-free music!
I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the…
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Fair Use
Stanford University, a leader in trying to get Congress and the public to understand the importance of the Public Domain have done what I’ve been dreaming of doing for a few months now. They decided to test the doctrine of Fair Use in copyrights by creating the following video. Any Disney fan should be sure…
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I can’t freakin’ believe it!!
Alberto Gonzalez has resigned as Attorney General. The guy who Bush said wasn’t going anywhere is leaving! I haven’t been able to to catch the news at all today as I was in training, but I saw a little headline on Tv in the lunchroom! I am so curious to find out what caused this…
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Hear your IP Address Moaned to You?
WTF is this world coming to? From the digg “horny nerd” files, comes this website: http://www.moanmyip.com/. Interesting things I learned on this site are how web servers and websites see me. Here’s what it says it thinks it knows about me: YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM AND BROWSER Linux / Safari YOUR USER AGENT INFORMATION Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;…
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Some more work on Sugar
Here are some more test renders I’ve done for Sugar. First I created an advertisement for the beer similar to the ones you see in a typical restaurant. I used the GIMP and the fact that backgrounds in blender are transparent. Not bad, eh? I did later fix the light color of the ads. It…
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Some more Water Simulation
So, with water simulations in Blender, the resolution of the water particles can be set. Basically, you are telling the simulation engine how big to consider the particles of water to be. This can have extremely dramatic results. Let’s take the tank of water I rendered yesterday. This time I’m at a more exciting point…
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Civ 4: Beyond the Sword
Will be out either tomorrow or wednesday. Gamestop says tomorrow and Best Buy’s website says Wednesday. I played one last Warlords Game and did pretty well. I think this was my third best score in the expansion pack. So you can download it and play this last turn and add it to your high score…
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Infinity on High is Worth the Money
Often the biggest gripe people have about CDs is that they are two or three hit singles packaged with a bunch of crap to justify selling it to you for $12 or more. I’ve felt that way many, many times. The phenomenon is a large part of the reason behind models like iTunes. In fact,…
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Babalu Grill in Baltimore, MD is a horrible dance club
Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got…