General

"Copy protected CDs not CDs"

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“Copy protected CDs not CDs” – Philips. Philips co-inventors of the Compact Disc and custodian of its standards reckon that copy protected CDs are not real CDs in this story at The Register. [kuro5hin.org]

As a consumer, I believe I should have the right to listen to a CD however I want when I buy it. I almost never listen to a CD on my stereo. When I do listen to a CD, I use iTunes on my Mac. More often, I copy my favorite tracks to my iTunes library as MP3 files and I build my own playlist of whatever tunes I feel like listening to at the moment instead of listening to an entire CD. I also like to burn music mix CDs to listen to in my car (usually on an 80 minute CDR) rather than listening to the original CD. What I’m doing is not illegal, since fair use allows copies to be made for personal use. The record companies have no right to prevent that.

What's up with Network Solutions?

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What’s up with Network Solutions? When I attempt to do a whois, I get this message:

Welcome to the NSI Registrar Whois Server.

The IP address from which you have visited the NSI Registrar WHOIS database

is contained within a list of IP addresses that may have failed to abide by

Network Solutions’ Whois policy. Failure to abide by this policy can adversely

impact our systems and servers, preventing the processing of other WHOIS

requests.

If you are trying to complete an individual Whois query, you may go directly to

the NSI Registrar’s Whois lookup, and try your inquiry again.

To use the NSI Registrar’s Whois lookup, click on or copy and paste the

following URL into your browser:

http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois/

Trying to do a query from my web browser results in the same message.

GEEK ALERT! If you don't

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GEEK ALERT! If you don’t want to read a technical programming discussion, skip this entry

Problem: I need to call any arbitrary function from a shared library, not knowing in advance how many arguments it requires. This is to be done in PowerPC code running under MacOS X.

I spent the last few days up to my neck in PowerPC assembly code (which I understand only enough to get myself into trouble). I finally came up with something like this, which doesn’t use any assembler:

long callfunc(FunctionPtr func,long *ap)

{

return (*func)(ap[0], ap[1], ap[2], ap[3], ap[4], ap[5], ap[6], ap[7],

ap[8], ap[9], ap[10], ap[11], ap[12], ap[13], ap[14], ap[15], ap[16], ap[17]);

}

This takes advantage of the fact that the caller, not the function being called cleans up the stack, and since the first 8 arguments are passed in registers and the remaining ones are passed at fixed offsets, the function being called can ignore any arguments it doesn’t use.

I’ve made the assumption that there’ll never be more than 18 arguments – I’ve never seen a toolbox function that takes more than 10. I’m also not handling floating point arguments, which need to be passed in FPRs instead of GPRs, but once again, I won’t be dealing with any toolbox functions that use floating point.

The application will be extensible by adding new shared libraries, so we’ll have to stay within these restrictions for our own code.

there's a good coverage of

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there’s a good coverage of the freedom fighters of the digital world in the la times .: [ via slashdot ]

In a soft voice, the computer scientist explains what is troubling him: the scarcity of news surrounding all those people, then numbering about 500, who have been rounded up in the terrorism investigation. Who are they? Why are they being held? Does anybody know anything? “Who’s representing these people and trying to get them out?”

The panelists’ silence leaves Gilmore exasperated.

“Are all the civil rights organizations afraid to step up to defend potential terrorists?”

Say this about the leaders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: They are not afraid to speak their minds. They are not afraid to push back.

the electronic frontier foundation (eff) is our vanguard. in more ways than one. they are buying us the time to form the friggin’ army. without them we don’t have a chance.

give them your support. end your apathy. help us build a free world.

[tav explores radio]