Slashdot Mirror

Apple, on the other hand, included the 68LC040 emulator with all editions of Mac OS X 7 through 9 for PowerPC-based computers and all editions of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 for Intel-based computers.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/10/25/apple-quietly-disposes-of-classic-in-leopard

According to recent studies, acupuncture is useful as a method of back pain relief, but it is completely irrelevant where you stick the needles. The concept of meridians and the flow of chi are compete mumbo jumbo. Sham acupuncture is as effective as real acupuncture within a reasonable margin or error (47.6% relief for real, 44.2% for sham, and 27.4% for conventional therapy).

Arstechnica has a nice article which links to the Kirn article as well.

Intro:
2008: Year of Information Overload?
Interruptions aren't merely annoying; they're also bad for productivity. And when you multiply the interruptions made possible by e-mail, phone calls, text messages, and Twitters across the entire US, the result is lost productivity on a massive scale: $650 billion in a single year.

They do.

Actually both disallow backups via DRM

Thus I believe you have never backup a HD DVD disk and it's pure FUD coming out of your mouth.

http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/security-news/1689-microsoft-convicted-fine-1-52-billion.html

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/48409524/m/3850972554

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=361048

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/19/why_microsofts_eu_concession/

http://search.zdnet.com/index.php?t=4&s=0&o=0&q=screwed

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/visualbasic/dotnet/archives/infoq-fire-and-motion-what-openxml-means-to-ibm-and-lotus-notes-14187

I don't know, man, do a little Google search - it's not hard to track down.
As head honcho, the responsibility for corporate crime rests on the CEO's shoulders, even if current legal practice doesn't actually make them pay for their surrogate criminality.

What's the old saying? I know enough about religion to know how to exploit it?

Likewise, I don't believe the bosses of scientology believe it any more than Hubbard did. But it'd be nice to see some Mutually Assured Destruction between two parties who actually seem to deserve it. It's difficult not to get in a bad mood when any article involves either of those two organisations. Think I'm going to need to include Cheney and co. in my next flight of ruinous fantasy at this rate.

A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/state-of-digital-music-2007.ars

"KDE developer Aaron Seigo also spoke about KDE's cross-platform ambitions and discussed some of the broader implications. Bringing popular KDE programs to Windows and Mac OS X is somewhat controversial in the open source software community, because doing so is seen by some as a means of eroding incentives for Linux adoption."
"Seigo and many in the KDE community contend that making KDE applications available on other platforms brings more freedom and choice to Windows users and gives them the ability to adopt open standards and establish an easier migration path to Linux."

Is KDE's cross-platform approach going to backfire?

Ok, where is your source on that one? Any citation? Windows XP SP2 meant a lot to consumers AFAIK.

I think this is the article cited in the summary.

"[...] the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse."

"FERC notes, in its usual bureaucratic style, that "poor vegetation management" has caused most of the problems relating to past regional blackouts."

"[...] the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse."

"FERC notes, in its usual bureaucratic style, that "poor vegetation management" has caused most of the problems relating to past regional blackouts."

Somehow the link to the story appears to have gotten lost.

They should have bought that island

Frankly, though, I'm skeptical that he is who he says he is.

I think the Apple TV updates are nice, though. I'd like to see an "update software/firmware war" between Apple TV, Xbox 360, PS3, the Netflix/LG set top box, and whatever Amazon Unbox comes up with (in addition to Unbox on TiVo).

One option I thought would make it a lot more attractive would be built-in ripping of DVDs into iTunes.

That certainly would be an attractive option, if it weren't illegal in the United States. Write your Senators and complain.

ars played with the full keyboard recently, complete with full color keys. seems like it is real, but freakin' expensive.

Enter Napster. Kids are copying music and distributing it over the internet. These corporations are now trying to sell a product that is often easier to get for free online. The iPod becomes the Walkman of the 00's. The labels fear P2P and mp3s and demand copy protection, which Apple offers them in the iTMS. Now they can sell their music online, which makes it easy to find, but control how it's copied and distributed. And it will play on the majority of players. Everything is getting back to normal, but they need more money. So they want to raise prices.

But things have changed. The labels no longer control the distribution channel of their product. Apple does. And Apple refuses to raise prices. The labels have tried other online stores, including creating their own (which is probably still their end goal), with little success because Apple will not license their copy protection, nor support other methods of copy protection on the iPod. While some governments are working to legislate this, the labels can not afford to wait for legislation to solve their problem. They are forced to make a choice.

1. Concede to Apple, sell all songs at a fixed price
2. Sell unprotected, iPod compatible files at other online retailers
3. Lose more market share

At the moment, the labels have opted to sell unprotected files on Amazon.com. If the labels can restore the retail market to at least what it was, then they can more tightly control the "authorized" distribution of their product. And for the unauthorized... While it doesn't accomplish their end goal of complete control of the distribution and retail sale of their music, it's a step closer. Apple loses some of its bargaining power, and the labels can call the shots again.

Option A will reinforce a reasonable business model that will benefit the industry, the artist, and you.

I disagree. While I would rather purchase non-DRM'd music over DRM'd music, simply because I like to play music on a number of devices; I don't believe the lack of DRM benefits artists. It may benefit me in the short term, but then again the labels might just be fattening me up to eat me. I would suggest that a solution that truly respects artist and consumer needs would: decentralize the production, marketing, and distribution chain; acknowledge that technology has lowered the cost of bringing an album to market, and pay artists appropriately; and stop intimidating law abiding citizens.

To accomplish this, we must:

1. Stop purchasing music from labels that support the RIAA
2. Support independent and local musicians. Go to their shows, buy their music.

By doing this, the artists get paid more, you often get DRM-free music, and innocent people

What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.

The FCC's power has grown far beyond it's original intention (regulating airwaves frequencies in the U.S.). Apparently they only do things in response to complaints. Or at least that's how it once was. But the really fucked up thing is 99% of complaints come from one organization.

So essentially this one single organization is responsible for most of the - detrimental in my opinion - changes to what is allowed to be broadcast or not.

It's not the popular decision. People just think it is because this one fucked up organization has such broad powers and people just assume that it's the popular opinion. It is not.

The organization responsible for all this? The Parent's Television Council. The sick thing is they're proud to be the nation's most influential advocacy organization yet have barely a million members. That's right one million up tight fucks are responsible for 99.8-99.9% of all FCC regulation that affects 303 million people.

And the FCC allows it.

Where are you getting that information? Usually from an outsider's perpective it's impossible to understand how high-level corporate negotiations work, but the chronology was that Steve wrote a letter calling for DRM to be abolished first, then EMI's songs were sold DRM-free starting some time after that.

Also, Steve Jobs wasn't the first digital music store honcho to call for the end of DRM. Nearly one year before the open letter, Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg spoke out against DRM, even mentioning eMusic as an example.

This is not to downplay the importance of the letter. Apple was and still is the Big Kahuna of digital music stores. Apple's anti-DRM stance was very important, even if they might not have been the first.

Totally. I can say with no fear of hyperbole that I have just about turned blue holding my breath waiting for Openmoko to release a consumer product. I am no developer, so the Neo 1973 (and the Trolltech greenphone before that) doesn't quite cut it for me. I nearly peed my pants when I saw news articles announcing the Freerunner. example

I still don't see it marketed anywhere though.

Visual Studio has to be the best piece of software to have ever come from Microsoft. IMHO it would be even better if they would support elastic tabstops, and I know I'm not the only one.

http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/thermalflow.png
The picture shows they're dumping the heat into the PCB
What I'm not really clear about is how that helps the cooling situation.
Sure, you're moving heat from the CPU/GPU die, but not to a heatsink...
So what's the point?

Dumb mods. For their education, this thread is about usability issues caused by increasingly wide screens and the inability of old-media to break out of a narrow-columns mindset. TFA links to a website designed to be taller than it is wider, and that website is showing a monitor that is very much wider than it is tall. This is irony of a very mild sort.

Somewhere about 15 words per line is optimum. It cuts both ways, as making lines too short increases eyeball 'flyback', which reduces reading speeds and hinders comprehension.

Things get even worse when you have to re-aquire you position in a document after scrolling text into view.

Go to the BBC, who show as little as 4 words per line. Note how they actually cause line breaks in the top and most popular stories columns.

Now go to Ars where they have 3 strips of banner across the top, meaning I have to scroll them off the screen to see an article posted 2 hours ago. Also see how the middle column causes flyback at about 5 words, making scanning the text harder. Many readers simply will not bother to look at content that is in too narrow a column.

Now worship at Jakob's Altar See how its far easier to read with the wider columns. The actual articles are shown absent of sidebars, at about 15 words/line.

Im at 2080x1024, and some web pages and applications that were designed on an A4 pad suffer usability issues. In particular, PDF documents and Excel seem determined to show as little on the screen as possible. This is just going to get worse as screens get wider.

Insightful? Someone wasn't paying attention and got it slightly backwards. Of course that wasn't exactly true either as there are apparently some titles out and more coming.

As of OS X 10.5 Carbon is slowly becoming "deprecated" and new APIs and 64-bit updates to APIs will not be available through Carbon, Objective-C/Cocoa is the One True Way to write apps for OS X. Basically if Adobe want their apps to take advantage of all the 64-bit goodness in Leopard and beyond they will have to rewrite their apps.

There was a whole thing about this in the in-depth Leopard review Ars Technica did - see the 64-bit section of that review.

The change of heart only happening after Christmas may have been because the holiday sales of CDs this year sucked, down 20%.

I doubt that videogames themselves were even close to the biggest issue, but apparently there is a large segment of the population who play them. I'm a gamer, and I know I certainly care about whether or not a candidate wants to censor the games I play. Of course, this wouldn't be my only reason for supporting one candidate over another, but it is an issue worth considering nonetheless.

It looks like to me that the basic premise for most things in the USA is to do something or grant something and then let the courts work it out after the fact. This has the benefit of getting things done cheaply along with that only the people who are grievously upset will bother to fight things in the courts (which is really those who have money to do so)

To me this is a direct result of a purely capitalistic approach - the worship of the Dollar.

The system should use different weightings for laptops and desktops: Many times when I am using a subnotebook I do so while I am walking or eating outdoors. Some times if I get interrupted by something I close the lid and I continue what I was doing afterwards. So laptop users are likely to take longer to complete a task compared to desktop users.

Also, while I was still learning to type in dvorak I needed amazingly more time to type than before on my desktop (after I learnt it I type ok, but I still have learnt it only for English and not for other languages). Could their algorithm take such training periods into account?

From TFA:

Oh yeah. I can see now that the system is guaranteed to misread the frustration levels whenever a user looks at porn peep shows. Yeah, this is 99.99999% of users, so they should take this into account somehow. Perhaps they should monitor the user's erection as well to make sure the detected heart rate is not related to libido!

I can imagine that... "Hello Sir: Do you need helping viewing your porn today?"

Expected. They have lots of users who feel frustration with their products.

Better become self-employed, I'd say (tip: it's easier than it sounds, especially if you save a lot before you begin). True freedom cannot be attained while being an employee of a traditional company.

Yes, but it's not that simple. Remember, in addition to iPod, Apple also has another product line - Macs. If Apple's DAP's are going to play protected-WMA files and the iTMS is going to sell protected-WMA files, than Apple's own computer line will need to play protected-WMA files.

Only there's one problem: Microsoft doesn't license WMA DRM for any PC platform except Windows. So yes, even if Steve Jobs showed up in Redmond with a briefcase full of 50's and 100's, he won't get WMA-DRM files to play on the Mac.

So why should Apple be forced to support a DRM'd music format on it's players that isn't supported on it's computing platform?

Traditionally, copyright was for the life of the author + some reasonably large number. The optimal lifetime has been studied under economic maximization theory. The result was ~ 14 years, which is rather closer to the 20 year patent life time than the proposed 5 years. The link is: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070712-research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.html

Mempile
http://www.mempile.com/

New DVD-sized disc to hold 1 to 5 terabytes of data
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070829-new-dvd-sized-disc-to-hold-terabytes-of-data.html

The key to finding "professional/business" notebooks with Windows XP is looking in the "Business" sites, not the "Home & Home Office" sites. Unfortunately, I've noticed most brick-and-mortor stores (even "office supply" stores) don't carry these real "business" notebooks (just "home office" notebooks at best).

Comment I posted in a firehose story (which took all of 30 seconds to realize the summary was simplistic and wrong):

More Info

here and here

Looks like the person in question was using Kazaa, which listed his mp3 files, although they weren't actually shared (uhh ... does kazaa publish them if they're not shared?) Media Sentry found them (but didn't actually download them?). He represented himself and lost big time.

RIAA already said ripping one's own CD is stealing before. Heck, the RIAA even sue the dead people.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050204-4587.html

Exactly. Here is an article which should scare the shit out of any US slashdotter. Just because it is Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Diabold doesn't mean it can happen to other systems.

I hate to break it to you (i'd love to see linux hit the mainstream too), but Apple sales are probably going to be at or near 2 million Mac's a quarter next year, putting their total sales at maybe 7-8 million.

That being said, I got an EEE PC for my father, and he (and my sister, surprisingly to me) love it. He spent something like 2 or 3 hours playing with it christmas night after we got back from all the festivities. I was glad he enjoyed it because I was worried at first it's small size would be hard for him, but it seems to be perfect. The fact that it's linux doesn't bother him at all either, as he already knows how to use firefox, and most of the reasons he wanted something like the EEE was to be able to look up things on the internet when out and about. Overall it was a great success, and I would recommend it to (most) anyone as a gift.

Just out of curiosity, what makes the Airport Extreme worth the extra $80 compared to a non-Apple 802.11n router?

Sure, it could, but given the face Google would lose, it seems unlikely they would suddenly pull it.

With a company with the size and profile of Google, that just aint going to happen.

Given Google's actions after closing their video store, I think The Clockwork Troll makes a good point in the part of the comment you left out:

Not to mention, you can always, well, download all your mail, documents, calendar items, etc.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071007-new-blu-ray-discs-with-bd-drm-failing-to-play-on-some-devices.html

/P

While copying media goes way back (remember the DAT tax or the fear that cassettes or VCRs would end the world?) before college students of today, the media conglomerates campaign against this type of crap is only really starting. With the RIAA making up its own commercials, getting laws passed by paying off lawmakers and adding so many fucking anti-infringement notices to their media that I burn DVDs just to rid myself of them.

In 30 years we might not see what we would expect. The RIAA and MPAA has deeper pockets than the nerd crowd and they have a lot more to lose.

No one here, or really anywhere else, could believe the RIAA would win that fucking case in Duluth and yet they did. For whatever reason there are still people out there that can be easily swayed by the bullshit that is strewn from the mouths of those douchebags.

I fear the worst. Support those artists that support freedom of music and media before your money is used against people just like you.

From TFA:
"I was motivated to take action when I found out that there was embedded illicit sexual content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The [ESRB] was unaware of the embedded content. I called on the FTC to investigate the source of the content and, as a result, the company issued a recall of the game."

Hillary takes full credit for getting GTA:SA off the shelves. That's not limiting who gets access, that's eliminating access.
Video games are already rated. Parents need to be aware of what their kids are buying, and the current ratings system allows this.

Also, her position in that bill was to create an oversight board to make sure the ESRA was giving "correct" ratings. If you'd like to see her full waffle on the issue (including the part where she shuts up in trade for campaign cash) check out Ars Technica's coverage of the dustup.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051212-5740.html

According to the Ars-ticle, even Jack Thompson knew the bill was a bad idea.
Think about what that means - Hillary is both more dumb and more rabid than Jack Thompson.

Well, the House already passed a bill that links Federal student aid monies to the implementation of RIAA-drafted "anti-piracy" measures. I don't think the GP's fear is too farfetched; certain members of Congress are pretty obviously in the pockets of the media corporations.

"That's the last time I buy something from Circuit City. "

well don't go to Best Buy either. They're not well liked around here:
Best Buy Hands Out Cease & Desist Letters for Christmas
Best Buy 'Geek Squad' Accused of Pirating Software
Best Buy hopes to exorcize devil patrons

The RIAA is simply protecting their rights.

While the fines aren't massive, they do show that the FCC takes retailer compliance with its rules seriously. Those rules, which went into effect on May 25, 2007, force any company selling analog-only TV sets to display a prominent "Consumer Alert" in "a size of type large enough to be clear, conspicuous and readily legible" that is located on the set itself or immediately adjacent to it. The Alert warns potential buyers that the set will not receive over-the-air broadcasts after February 17, 2009 without a converter box.