buffer overflow

OMG I love this movie for being so horrible.

They have the little video changing equipment fight…oh man.

Before you could download movies, could hack into TV stations and just get them to play what you want.

“You are terminated!”

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Posted by darkhelmet under Computers | No Comments »

Oligopoly

Normally we just talk about monopolies (*cough* Microsoft *cough*), so it is of no suprise that this word was a tad new to me. I have the feeling I’ve heard of it before but it didn’t pop out when I was trying to describe what I had in mind. Anyway, the word of the day (despite what my sidebar says) is oligopoly.

An oligopoly is when a few select parties control a market, instead of a single entity as in a monopoly. This idea popped into my head when I read the RIAA quote in the internet radio discussion:

Well, we don’t really model this as an industry with thousands of webcasters, we think it should be an industry with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it’s a stable, predictable market.

So like the music and movie production industries, the television and radio broadcasting industries, they want to cripple the internet radio industry like they have the others. The industries concerning music and movie production and television and radio broadcasting are oligopolies whether you want to belive it or not. Sure there are a few smaller players and independent labels and studios and stations, but really, it’s all controlled by a select few. If the small companies get out of line, the big players have the muscle to ‘fix’ the problem. The nice thing about the internet is anybody can be anything on the internet so if you want to be a radio DJ you can. Assuming internet radio was treated like regular radio, sure you’d still have to pay fees for music you want to play, but you don’t need the overhead cost of a big building, and broadcasting equipment. You could run your entire setup off free software and the things you’d have to pay for would be bandwidth and the normal copyright fees like any radio station, and those could be paid for by advertising. But no, the RIAA screwed it up again for the regular joe.

In this situation, an oligopoly is just as bad as a monopoly.

Thanks RIAA!

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Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | 1 Comment »

App Store Experience of a Developer - Mac Forums

What would you do in this case? Is there any way to make Apple take notice of me?

Not develop on Apple’s shitty platform maybe?

Fuck iPods…

Posted by darkhelmet under Intraweb & Programming | No Comments »

I’ve been quite enjoying Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. One section that really caught my eye was where he compares the penalties for ’stealing.’

[W]hen I take a CD from Tower Records, the maximum fine that
might be imposed on me, under California law, at least, is $1,000. According
to the RIAA, by contrast, if I download a ten-song CD, I’m liable
for $1,500,000 in damages.

This makes just shake my head in disgust. I suppose it comes down to who believes they are getting the short end of the stick. If I steal a CD from HMV, HMV gets screwed, as they are out a CD, and they are the ones that lose money. They’ve already bought the CD from the distribution house, which has already bought the CD from the record label, so therefore the record label has already made money. If somebody robs every HMV in the country, the record label doesn’t care. In fact, they would be laughing since HMV would have to rebuy a large amount of media, giving the the record company more media.

With P2P file sharing however, the record companies believe they are the ones getting stolen from. And they have a point, but they seem to treat it as if somebody is stealing the master copy of a CD, thereby robbing them of the ability to ever sell that CD. This is completely not the case. First of all, the person who makes the CD or song initially available is the really the person at fault, if we want to talk like that. By downloading it, I’m only taking advantage of something already available. This may still be wrong on other levels but we aren’t discussing that. Think of this: if person A steal a loaf of bread from Safeway, eats a piece, and then leaves the loaf of bread on a table for all to see, and then person B goes up and eats a piece. Who is at fault? Person B simply because they ate a piece of bread that was out and about? I think not.

I think the main problem is when you download a song or CD, you’re not getting anything tangible. This creates the impression that you’re not doing anything wrong, and gives the record company a reason to claim an exorbitant amount of damage fees.  This is an inherent problem with record (and other) companies who feel like they can never make enough money.

*le sigh*

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | 1 Comment »

I needed to convert some Pascal case strings to human readable strings. Basically I have an enum containing errors, but wanted a nice way to convert them straight to messages for the exceptions that would be thrown.

Here’s how I did it.

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public static string ToHumanFromPascal(this string s)
{
    var sb = new StringBuilder();
    var ca = s.ToCharArray();
    sb.Append(ca[0]);
    for (int i = 1; i < ca.Length - 1; i++)
    {
        char c = ca[i];
        if (char.IsUpper(c) && (char.IsLower(ca[i + 1]) || char.IsLower(ca[i - 1])))
        {
            sb.Append(' ');
        }
        sb.Append(c);
    }
    sb.Append(ca[ca.Length - 1]);
    return sb.ToString();
}

Posted by darkhelmet under Computers & Programming | No Comments »

How not to Fly an RC Jet - Watch more free videos

Posted by darkhelmet under Intraweb & Life & Random | No Comments »