Yes, but everytime any copyright issue comes up 70% of the discussion is about whether or not its stealing.
It's hard to call it stealing because no one actually loses anything except potential sales. Copyright infringement is more akin to counterfeiting whereby the original's value is affected by lots of new unauthorized copies appearing in the marketplace for free.
It's a semantic thing, but I'd prefer the word "steal" (and harsher legal penalties) to be reserved for the people who remove physical copies from store shelves and "infringement" be applied to those making new copies when they shouldn't.
Its getting something without paying for it. Regardless of what term you'd like to use, its wrong.
No one's saying it's not wrong. Murder and assault are both wrong too, but they're different things and deserve to be treated differently under the law. Equating the physical theft of property to the unlawful duplication of property only serves to confuse the issue.
Oddly enough, aren't comics drawn at least 1 month in advance?
Typically yes. But it's been known for awhile when the new Farscape miniseries would air, so it'd be easy to draw that particular one well in advance. It's just like doing theme comics meant to run on holidays and so forth.
I wonder why they only support AIFF and ACC. Neither of my MP3 players (Archos and iRiver) support these formats. Would supporting MP3 have been that difficult?
If you've got a PCM AIFF file, encoding it to MP3 (or Vorbis, or FLAC, or whatever) is trivial. It just takes a little CPU time. It would be nice if the device could do it automatically, though.
The (estimated) high price tag and (estimated) very low battery life make it easy to forget about. Sony is mum on both, and that doesn't inspire confidence.
Seeing this article that says installing drivers for my Nvidia card are now simple (at least in Suse, I usually run Fedora) makes me think about going dual boot on my gaming machine just to start trying a conversion to Linux gaming.
I'm running an nVidia card on Fedora 2 (x86-64) and the installation went flawlessly. After a few trivial X11 config changes to let the X server know about the new video card, DVI and accelerated OpenGL worked like a charm.
The only company that should be worried here is Nintendo. They came out dead last in the next gen console wars, and their prospects don't look great on the future console versions. They only market they dominate is the portable gaming one, and now the company that beat them before is joining in.
Worldwide, the Gamecube has outsold the X-Box. Naturally, both trail the Playstation 2 by a wide margin. A lot of that success is because the Playstation 1 was such a smash hit and people wanted to bring their existing library investment to a new console. So, in spite of the technical superiority of the competition, the PS2 is a huge hit.
Considering the GBA has far outsold the PS2, and lots of people have GBA software, the prospects of the DS look quite good. The PSP, starting from scratch, has more of an uphill climb ahead of it.
Seriously, the opinion has really shifted. At first everyone thought the PSP would smackdown the DS. But Nintendo bit by bit is slowly showing us that there is far more to the DS than meets the eye.
That's largely because the PSP looks more and more like the next Game Gear. It's more powerful than the DS, but it's also likely to be far more expensive. Now with the battery life problem being shifted to the developers, it's almost certain the DS' card media and low-power ARM chips will beat the PSP in that vital category.
Add in the backwards compatibility and wireless networking and the DS looks like a portable juggernaut. The PSP might do well with Sony's muscle, but unless some new portable market has emerged I have a hard time believing it'll do better than second place.
Hate to break it to you, but Gene Roddenberry began work on the new Star Trek in 1975 (Two years before Star Wars had any sway)... Originaly for TV, it evolved into a Motion Picture later on. Not to mention the cartoon between 1973 and 1975.
Despite the big syndication ratings, Star Trek: Phase II never caught on. It wasn't until George Lucas made a mint on Star Wars that Paramount came calling looking to capitalize on their existing sci-fi franchise. So, Roddenberry rolled all the Phase II stuff into TMP and made enough money to rebuild the franchise. But without Star Wars, all we'd have today is the original series running in syndication.
More specifically, a semicolon should be use to link two independent clauses not joined by a coordinating conjunction. In this case, "information we can use" is not a complete sentence. An em dash or plain comma would be better, such as:
Please stop treating your customers like idiots and give us information - information that we can use.
It seems silly that it doesn't support FLAC, being a device with a large hard drive.
FLAC would be nice (and easy to add, since decoding it is all cheap integer ops), but the bitrate of the files is so high that the device would need to keep its hard drive spinning the whole time in order to play them - and that'd kill its battery life.
That's pretty close to a contradiction since we have both Ogg FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. You meant to say it supports Vorbis? Or is it just plain FLAC files it doesn't support, but Ogg FLAC is fine?
I don't know of any player that supports Ogg FLAC, much less a hardware one. They're all content to use FLAC's native container format instead. From what I've seen, Ogg FLAC is more of a proof-of-concept format - at least until the Ogg plugins start supporting it.
The "Color" was the same processor hardware as the original, and had the same display resolution. Adding color is a tiny change as far as the platform is concerned.
The Gameboy Color also had a Z80 CPU that was twice as fast as the original and an IR port (I think). Though not major changes, they still go beyond the cosmetic GBA -> GBA-SP improvements.
Officially, the DS is meant to be a third platform to go alongside the Gameboy and Gamecube lines. Unofficially, the DS is the GBA's successor and will soon take its place in the market. Though I have a feeling a lot of people will cling to the GBA-SP's svelte form-factor for as long as possible.
Unlike the GBA, the nintendo DS doesn't allow you to play your favorite nintendo games from other consoles... no NES, no Super NES, no N64, no Gamecube compatibility.
The GBA never had NES, SNES, N64 or Gamecube compatibility. But the GBA did have GB/GBC compatibility, and the DS will have GBA compatibility (at least). That built-in library, along with low cost and good battery life give Nintendo the same huge edge they enjoyed when the GBA first came out.
The majority of Slashdot readers seem to be pissed about the greatest trilogy of all-time being released on the most popular video format right now.
I'm only pissed that RotK:EE doesn't arrive until December. Then the greatest trilogy of all-time will be out on the most popular video format right now. Much like the Godfather, Star Wars manages to be the greatest trilogy only by ignoring how much the third one drags the first two down. Between the "Leia as sister" pulled out of thin air, the "lies are all a point of view" excuse, Vader getting soft the first time Luke shows up, Yet Another Death Star and those oh-so-marketable Ewoks, Jedi really is a mess.
I guess movies still make money by using a big theatrical release to pump dvd sales, but for Miyazaki, hasn't his entire target audience already seen Innocence before it was released?
There is no connection between Hayao Miyazaki and "Innocence". Miyazaki's films pay for themselves several times over before reaching home video - and in two cases becoming the highest grossing films ever in Japan. Mamoru Oshii's films like "Innocence" are niche titles that reach profitability once they get to DVD. The theatrical release is mostly a formality and advertising. But the notion that everyone's seen it is overestimating the amount of people who import DVDs or pirate the film.
but what happened to Appleseed? The last I heard, it had a North American distribution deal, but not a peep since.
Geneon has the license and it was supposed to be released to theaters this summer, but obviously that hasn't happened. The North American release date is still unknown. But the film is only 5 months old, so one shouldn't get too worried about it just yet.
The common complaint among critics is that while the movie is beautiful, it is souless with too much technological mumbo jumbo and not enough likable characters. The story is said to be at once extremely convaluted and boring with action sequences too far between and countless uniteresting quotes form philosophers or the bible hindering the story.
Sounds like a typical Oshii picture. Pretty, brooding, contemplative films are what he does nowdays. If one's looking for entertainment, go see "Sky Captain" or wait for "Steamboy".
The safest and best thing is to use a real VM, like the JVM. Another alternative is to use something like Cyclone which also doesn't allow unsafe memory operations.
The JVM is a memory management punt; the programmer is offloading that task to Sun. But the JVM is written in C, and if it has a buffer overflow then you're just as screwed. What's more useful is a "no-execute" bit that prevents memory meant to hold data from executing code to begin with - the sort that's already available on x86-64 platforms.
if I uninstall and upgrade Thunderbird will it keep my account info and emails?
I've gone through about 6 uninstall/install cycles with Thunderbird and have yet to lose any account info or emails. Its actual user data is stored in.thunderbird in your home directory on Unix-like systems - on Windows systems, search around for a "thunderbird" folder of some sort.
I just didnt want to leave this "only flac can losslessly compress audio better than maybe 5 or 10%" uncorrected. Of course flac has much more speed and flexibility, and compresses better then an alrounder, but not THAT much.
There's lots of dedicated lossless audio formats available, from the venerable Shorten (shn) to the newfangled Monkey's Audio (ape). All of them get about 50% compression on average (give or take a few % points) and nearly all of them can play in Winamp, xmms or other cross-platform players. If one is taking the effort to store audio losslessly, it really is very convenient to use one of the many formats that'll play directly without needing to decompress them to wav files first. Rar may work for plain old storage, but I think it'll be a bit of a hassle in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to call it stealing because no one actually loses anything except potential sales. Copyright infringement is more akin to counterfeiting whereby the original's value is affected by lots of new unauthorized copies appearing in the marketplace for free.
It's a semantic thing, but I'd prefer the word "steal" (and harsher legal penalties) to be reserved for the people who remove physical copies from store shelves and "infringement" be applied to those making new copies when they shouldn't.
No one's saying it's not wrong. Murder and assault are both wrong too, but they're different things and deserve to be treated differently under the law. Equating the physical theft of property to the unlawful duplication of property only serves to confuse the issue.
Typically yes. But it's been known for awhile when the new Farscape miniseries would air, so it'd be easy to draw that particular one well in advance. It's just like doing theme comics meant to run on holidays and so forth.
If you've got a PCM AIFF file, encoding it to MP3 (or Vorbis, or FLAC, or whatever) is trivial. It just takes a little CPU time. It would be nice if the device could do it automatically, though.
The (estimated) high price tag and (estimated) very low battery life make it easy to forget about. Sony is mum on both, and that doesn't inspire confidence.
It'd already been in-use for 10 years by then.
I'm running an nVidia card on Fedora 2 (x86-64) and the installation went flawlessly. After a few trivial X11 config changes to let the X server know about the new video card, DVI and accelerated OpenGL worked like a charm.
Worldwide, the Gamecube has outsold the X-Box. Naturally, both trail the Playstation 2 by a wide margin. A lot of that success is because the Playstation 1 was such a smash hit and people wanted to bring their existing library investment to a new console. So, in spite of the technical superiority of the competition, the PS2 is a huge hit.
Considering the GBA has far outsold the PS2, and lots of people have GBA software, the prospects of the DS look quite good. The PSP, starting from scratch, has more of an uphill climb ahead of it.
That's largely because the PSP looks more and more like the next Game Gear. It's more powerful than the DS, but it's also likely to be far more expensive. Now with the battery life problem being shifted to the developers, it's almost certain the DS' card media and low-power ARM chips will beat the PSP in that vital category.
Add in the backwards compatibility and wireless networking and the DS looks like a portable juggernaut. The PSP might do well with Sony's muscle, but unless some new portable market has emerged I have a hard time believing it'll do better than second place.
Despite the big syndication ratings, Star Trek: Phase II never caught on. It wasn't until George Lucas made a mint on Star Wars that Paramount came calling looking to capitalize on their existing sci-fi franchise. So, Roddenberry rolled all the Phase II stuff into TMP and made enough money to rebuild the franchise. But without Star Wars, all we'd have today is the original series running in syndication.
FLAC would be nice (and easy to add, since decoding it is all cheap integer ops), but the bitrate of the files is so high that the device would need to keep its hard drive spinning the whole time in order to play them - and that'd kill its battery life.
I don't know of any player that supports Ogg FLAC, much less a hardware one. They're all content to use FLAC's native container format instead. From what I've seen, Ogg FLAC is more of a proof-of-concept format - at least until the Ogg plugins start supporting it.
The Gameboy Color also had a Z80 CPU that was twice as fast as the original and an IR port (I think). Though not major changes, they still go beyond the cosmetic GBA -> GBA-SP improvements.
Officially, the DS is meant to be a third platform to go alongside the Gameboy and Gamecube lines. Unofficially, the DS is the GBA's successor and will soon take its place in the market. Though I have a feeling a lot of people will cling to the GBA-SP's svelte form-factor for as long as possible.
No Nintendo portable has ever had region lockouts. Though there's been no official word yet (that I'm aware of), I'd bet that the DS has none either.
The GBA never had NES, SNES, N64 or Gamecube compatibility. But the GBA did have GB/GBC compatibility, and the DS will have GBA compatibility (at least). That built-in library, along with low cost and good battery life give Nintendo the same huge edge they enjoyed when the GBA first came out.
I'm only pissed that RotK:EE doesn't arrive until December. Then the greatest trilogy of all-time will be out on the most popular video format right now. Much like the Godfather, Star Wars manages to be the greatest trilogy only by ignoring how much the third one drags the first two down. Between the "Leia as sister" pulled out of thin air, the "lies are all a point of view" excuse, Vader getting soft the first time Luke shows up, Yet Another Death Star and those oh-so-marketable Ewoks, Jedi really is a mess.
There is no connection between Hayao Miyazaki and "Innocence". Miyazaki's films pay for themselves several times over before reaching home video - and in two cases becoming the highest grossing films ever in Japan. Mamoru Oshii's films like "Innocence" are niche titles that reach profitability once they get to DVD. The theatrical release is mostly a formality and advertising. But the notion that everyone's seen it is overestimating the amount of people who import DVDs or pirate the film.
Geneon has the license and it was supposed to be released to theaters this summer, but obviously that hasn't happened. The North American release date is still unknown. But the film is only 5 months old, so one shouldn't get too worried about it just yet.
Sounds like a typical Oshii picture. Pretty, brooding, contemplative films are what he does nowdays. If one's looking for entertainment, go see "Sky Captain" or wait for "Steamboy".
The JVM is a memory management punt; the programmer is offloading that task to Sun. But the JVM is written in C, and if it has a buffer overflow then you're just as screwed. What's more useful is a "no-execute" bit that prevents memory meant to hold data from executing code to begin with - the sort that's already available on x86-64 platforms.
I've gone through about 6 uninstall/install cycles with Thunderbird and have yet to lose any account info or emails. Its actual user data is stored in .thunderbird in your home directory on Unix-like systems - on Windows systems, search around for a "thunderbird" folder of some sort.
FotR has been broadcast on various high-definition cable channels. Naturally, a few people have captured it from there.
There's lots of dedicated lossless audio formats available, from the venerable Shorten (shn) to the newfangled Monkey's Audio (ape). All of them get about 50% compression on average (give or take a few % points) and nearly all of them can play in Winamp, xmms or other cross-platform players. If one is taking the effort to store audio losslessly, it really is very convenient to use one of the many formats that'll play directly without needing to decompress them to wav files first. Rar may work for plain old storage, but I think it'll be a bit of a hassle in the long run.