I cant believe they are going to try a third joe schmoe... the first one was pretty funny... I got sucked into it and i dont even like reality TV. but when I started watching the second one it was clear that they didnt have the quality of actors necessary to really pull it off. they kept trying to be too ridiculous and in fact one of the 2 contestants figured it out... now luckily for them she agreed to be in on the hoax on the guy that was left... but if they had only gone with one Joe Schmoe (or Jane Schmoe) they would have been screwed.
maybe they will learn from those mistakes and go back to something more like the original
I just dont see the angle for this to be a hoax on the audience... I mean, people like watching other people get fooled and act like idiots... they do not like to be fooled them selves... and in the end... how are you really fooling them... I mean, "We hired a bunch of actors to act like they are incredibly stupid and gullible and you believe that they actually were stupid and gullible wile watching our edited TV broadcast" isn't exactly an impressive piece of work...
now if you actually convinced the audience that the people were in space at least you would be really fooling them... hiring actors to act like morons only to fool people into believing that they are morons isnt going to attract viewers... might work the first time (because nobody knows) but you can forget about a sequel.
but that is exactly the case. In the end, users care more about the expeience of using the device than the under the hood details. if linux is going to go mainstream on the desktop its going to need a user interface that isnt just acceptable but actually preferred over windows or your not likely to get any traction in that market place.
torvolds might be great at low level programming but he has never demonstrated that he knows the first thing about interface design. Ignore the user interface nazis at your own risk.
quote: Must every wrong in the Wikipedia only be addressed by saying, "neiner neiner neiner, just edit it yourself?"
the alternative really is shutting the site down... the people who run that site cannot be expected to review ever submission and still leave the site as a free resource. I would be happy to hear your altenative plan.
oh yea, and after they are done with wikipedia... dont be surprised if they come for slashdot next... lots of people use this site for information about technology... what if in the next ask slashdot about linux someone posts a comment begging people not to use linux because linus is a child molester or something like that... what if one guy with too much time on his hands started flooding slashdot with that... wouldnt that be libel too?
just because ann coulter is a total bitch does not mean that is is the proper way to act. the grandparent poster is correct that this man is effectively throwing mud at wikipedia. he may have a point... but that doesnt make it the right way to go about doing something.
here is the question though... what should change?
should we shut down wikipedia? if they are to be held responsible for every edit by a user they obviously have to stop accepting submissions which pretty much kills the site.
while your at it... how about shutting down slashdot... I can type right here that george W bush likes to lick donkey balls in his spare time... or that bill gates has secretly implanted mind control code into windows and I cant even come back later to edit that away. Can slashdot handle the liability for what everyone says? I know that the submissions on slashdot are copyrighted to the poster as to help absolve the slashdot admins of resposibilty for ever AC posting but shouldn't wikipedia be given the same rights... why should the wiki admins be liable for stuff they did not write?
and if you want the ISPs to be resposible for what goes out over their wires then you may as well shut down the whole internet... would any company take the chance providing access if they know it might be used to transmit, say, kiddy porn? how about jail time for the AOL executives that have allows so much illegal material to be transmitted through their systems.
sure... I sympathize with this guy... but what he is suggesting would have a very negative effect on the internet as it exists today... and frankly... what is to stop wikipeidia from simply finding hosting in a country that doesn't have libel laws... what are you going to do then? I dont see a good way to handle this problem as it stands right now.
is it illegal for massachusetts to craft a law that says that all documents produced by the government have to be in a format that meets some minimum standard of openness? even though that law will mean that Microsoft office isnt acceptable for use by the state government?
no one is forcing microsoft or diebold to do anything... they have a choice and so does the state... the state does not have to buy what diebold or microsoft or anyone else for that matter... is selling.
the state absolutely has the right to put restrictions on what it buys and vendors have a choice between being compliant to make a sale or not. The state has absolutely NO requirement to buy what diebold is selling
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 1
I agree... though clearly the poster is in a strange situation... since being into D&D usually guarantees that you will not end up encumbered too much by things like a wife and kids....
I hear you... but the phone is already going to cost me a fortune and it wouldnt solve some of the problems (like ever IM you send counting as a text message)
really... I just want a really good phone with decent internet access for basic stuff and a nice-ish camera... but to spend 450 bucks on it is kind of out of the question.
even spending 200 on it is kind of hard to swallow.
if your girlfriends power book is crashing weekly then something is seriously fucked up... at the very least (if your not intersted in figuring out what is wrong) try wiping and re-installing... there is no way a machine running OS X should be crashing that often.
frankly there is no way any computer should be crashing that often.
I see kernel panics something like once a year (except when I was running the DVCR software that is provided as apples firewire API demo... that thing was a little flakey... but never enough to get me to try to fix it)
dont forget the VW bug... thats the same platform as well.
but there is more to a car than its chassis.... obviously the A3 is going to be a nicer car with nicer engine options, probably a better suspension and likely hundreds of small features you dont get on the cheeper cars.
to be fair... the quality of the components in the apple machines does not have to be better in order to provide a better user experience... it just needs to be standardized. By maintaing control over the hardware apple does not have to support 100 different chipsets from different manufacturers... they dont have to support every video card on the market or anything like that. They only have to support the hardware that they build into their own machine... if you make a change with a new machine and offer some new hardware that machine just requires the new version of OS X that came with it.
if some user wants to buy third party hardware and it doesnt work then it is not apples fault, it is the fault of the 3ird party for not supporting apple properly (and presumably claiming that they do)
This would not be the case if they had to support all generic third party hardware. they would no longer have control over the out of the box experience.
Furthermore the differences between a Mac and a PC are almost entirely in software (which is cheap to manufacture) and not hardware (which is expensive to manufacture).
you are totally nuts...
software may be totally cheep to reproduce but it is not cheep create... the amount of resources that go into researching developing and TESTING an OS is astronomical. I could put together a computer for about the same cost as a full copy of microsoft office... but office only cost about 10 bucks to press the CD, print the books and make the boxes... sure there were years of development and testing that went into that product and that is not cheep.
software may be cheep to produce in the open source community but its not like apple (or microsoft) have thousands of competent programers dying to dedicate their livelyhood to these companies... these people have to be paid.
I think the big difference here is that in the case of the Microsoft story we actually know that they did this... dude was using the name... Microsoft lawyers attacked... he relented and they took the name over.... they might even have a point about him using the windows name for his software, even if they hadnt intended to use the name (though going about it that way is a bit underhanded)
in the case of the apple story the problem is that we really dont know where the limit came from... everyone just points to the wired story which is just what some guy at wired wrote and doesn't even contain direct evidence that the limit came from apple... there isnt really damming evidence that apple did this at all and even if they did... Moto agreed to it... its not like apple could really force them to agree to a set of licensing terms... its not like moto couldn't develop an MP3 phone that didnt include iTumes.
while the original poster was obviously wrong about this being a technical limitation... you need to realize that you are arguing that apple imposed the limit based solely on a bit of text from wired... not a copy of the contract between the companies that imposed that limit... not a quote from the engineer that was told to implement the limit.
there is NO eveidence that apple imposed this limit... Moto might very well have imposed it for any number of reasons... stupidity among them... perhaps they felt that since they were putting in a shitty USB controller (to save money) that it would just plain take too long for people to copy more that 100 songs to the phone and that would piss people off... word has it that the card inside the phone can be upgraded as well... perhaps moto doesn't want people making their phones more useful by upgrading the memory and thus imposed a song limit to make sure that people go out and buy the new 1 GB phone that will be available next year and have a 200 song limit (or some other such crap)
moto is more than capable of making bad phones all on its own...
Just because wired says it doesnt mean that Apple had anything to do with the limit... and even if they DID motorola didnt have to play ball... they could have made like any of the other companies and made their own damn MP3 playing phone without the iTunes logo if they thought that any of the terms that apple dictated were unacceptable.
all of this is mindless speculation based on one article in fucking Wired...
while you are more correct than the previous poster you are exagerating quite a bit here... if apple had a profit margin over 50% someone else would have long since eaten their lunch...
it should be fairly easy to figure out the profit margin on these things... we know how many they sold and we know the profit that apple reports the iPod bringing in right? souldnt all this be in the quarterly reports? I havent owned apple stock in a few years but maybe it is time to dig up some of this info.
plus... there is not way that all the iPods have the same (or even similar) profit margins...
Im looking at the new LG 9800... it has a nice SD media card slot so you can put a big card in it (acutally apprently it doesnt work with cards bigger than 512 MB or a gig or something but thats a tehnical screw up) and you can use it as an MP3 player.... there is no technical reason why you cannot make these MP3s into ring tones.... but Verizon has crippled the phone to make it impossible to do this the way the designer of the phone intended becasue it would decimate their sales of ring tones
similarly you can store pictures from the halfway decent camera on that card but Verizon as crippled the SD card using DRM to keep you from copying the pictures off of the card and onto the computer so that you have to use their $.25 per picture service to send them attached to text messages to an email account so you can get them onto your home computer.
then there is the standard cripling of bluetooth on the phone so that it is really only usable to run a few wireless headsets...
the phone companies are a major player here... they want new phones with features that will compel people to buy but they dont want those features getting in the way of the revenue streams they have been building up...
now... for the record... if you really know what you are doing you can buy some hardware and software and get around these restrictions... but Im not so sure about spending 200 bucks on a phone (even after all the rebates) just to have to work around all of these problems to use the cool features of the phone
you know the article says that it was the fair play software that imposed the 100 song limit but it give no evidence of this... that is not a feature of fairplay on any other platform. Moto signed a contract that said you get fairplay but it will have a 100 song limit it is their own fault.
in the absence of any real proof (not just someone at wired and a guy from an industry trade group) couldnt it be just as likely that the engineers at motorola imposed the limit themselves? it wouldnt be the first time that they developed a poor quality interface or product.
moto didnt need to play ball with apple on this so either they put in the limit themselves or they agreed to do it to get apple to play along... god forbid they should do what the other manufactures do and make an MP3 playing phone without apples help.
frankly, I suspect the 512MB limit would be more than sufficent as a limit on music capacity as a hard 100 song limit... if you could only put 200 songs on the phone (about what you would get with iTunes purchases of 2.5 minute songs) would it be any better? Would it suddenly destroy the iPods market?
I would guess that these "applications" were really just scripts designed to do some specific tasks and that the source was in fact the final product...
but thats just a guess... the article lacks detail
to be fair... just because the majority of people access slashdot from windows doesn't mean that they dont run linux... it might just mean that they run windows at work... everyone knows that people only use slashdot to avoid doing work and really almost never access the site from their home computers where they could spend their time looking at porn...
do you really think that companies that produce open source drivers would close the source just because something like this is developed? I mean... wouldnt it be better to allow for more widespread hardware support and simply choose to support the companies that keep their source open?
isnt getting access to a wider variety of hardware worth something here especially when it comes to the widespread adoption of linux on the desktop?
the question I have for this is "why?" wouldn't a stable binary API likely result in far more third party hardware support for linux? possibly more laptops that are actually compatible with linux?
This seems like a case of open source programmers shooting themselves in the foot because they want everything to be open source... not every application and driver is going to be made open source just to suit the desires of the linux development community. It seems to me that sticking to a hard party line against closed source software instead of trying to co-exist with said software is bound to keep linux in relative obscurity and pretty much ensure that it never becomes a viable competitor in the desktop market.
first off... text books are VERY expensive... and that not just the content but also the printing and shipping. Second, they get replaced regularly and are often out of date due to lack of funds.
Now I dont know anything about this computer... but if you could invent a cheep durable piece of hardware that would replace all the text books and could be updated electronically and regularly I think that could be of significant value... especially since that decvice also doubles as a general purpose computer and can run educational software.
people on this board like to put down educational software because all they can think of is oregon trail... I work for a company that develops educational software... specifically reading comprehension software. This product in particular has proven to be very successful at improving literacy rates among its users. Its not a game... its a piece of software that, along with class room instruction, can really make a difference to kids (and adults).
Im sure this isnt the only piece of software out there that has this kind of effect....
just because the technophobe teachers using first generation computers with 0-th generation educational software came out looking like a joke to you when you were in middle school doesnt mean that the same thing has to be true now.
Slashdot Mirror
I cant believe they are going to try a third joe schmoe... the first one was pretty funny... I got sucked into it and i dont even like reality TV. but when I started watching the second one it was clear that they didnt have the quality of actors necessary to really pull it off. they kept trying to be too ridiculous and in fact one of the 2 contestants figured it out... now luckily for them she agreed to be in on the hoax on the guy that was left... but if they had only gone with one Joe Schmoe (or Jane Schmoe) they would have been screwed.
maybe they will learn from those mistakes and go back to something more like the original
I just dont see the angle for this to be a hoax on the audience... I mean, people like watching other people get fooled and act like idiots... they do not like to be fooled them selves... and in the end... how are you really fooling them... I mean, "We hired a bunch of actors to act like they are incredibly stupid and gullible and you believe that they actually were stupid and gullible wile watching our edited TV broadcast" isn't exactly an impressive piece of work...
now if you actually convinced the audience that the people were in space at least you would be really fooling them... hiring actors to act like morons only to fool people into believing that they are morons isnt going to attract viewers... might work the first time (because nobody knows) but you can forget about a sequel.
but that is exactly the case. In the end, users care more about the expeience of using the device than the under the hood details. if linux is going to go mainstream on the desktop its going to need a user interface that isnt just acceptable but actually preferred over windows or your not likely to get any traction in that market place.
torvolds might be great at low level programming but he has never demonstrated that he knows the first thing about interface design. Ignore the user interface nazis at your own risk.
quote:
Must every wrong in the Wikipedia only be addressed by saying, "neiner neiner neiner, just edit it yourself?"
the alternative really is shutting the site down... the people who run that site cannot be expected to review ever submission and still leave the site as a free resource. I would be happy to hear your altenative plan.
oh yea, and after they are done with wikipedia... dont be surprised if they come for slashdot next... lots of people use this site for information about technology... what if in the next ask slashdot about linux someone posts a comment begging people not to use linux because linus is a child molester or something like that... what if one guy with too much time on his hands started flooding slashdot with that... wouldnt that be libel too?
just because ann coulter is a total bitch does not mean that is is the proper way to act. the grandparent poster is correct that this man is effectively throwing mud at wikipedia. he may have a point... but that doesnt make it the right way to go about doing something.
here is the question though... what should change?
should we shut down wikipedia? if they are to be held responsible for every edit by a user they obviously have to stop accepting submissions which pretty much kills the site.
while your at it... how about shutting down slashdot... I can type right here that george W bush likes to lick donkey balls in his spare time... or that bill gates has secretly implanted mind control code into windows and I cant even come back later to edit that away. Can slashdot handle the liability for what everyone says? I know that the submissions on slashdot are copyrighted to the poster as to help absolve the slashdot admins of resposibilty for ever AC posting but shouldn't wikipedia be given the same rights... why should the wiki admins be liable for stuff they did not write?
and if you want the ISPs to be resposible for what goes out over their wires then you may as well shut down the whole internet... would any company take the chance providing access if they know it might be used to transmit, say, kiddy porn? how about jail time for the AOL executives that have allows so much illegal material to be transmitted through their systems.
sure... I sympathize with this guy... but what he is suggesting would have a very negative effect on the internet as it exists today... and frankly... what is to stop wikipeidia from simply finding hosting in a country that doesn't have libel laws... what are you going to do then? I dont see a good way to handle this problem as it stands right now.
thats ridiculous.
is it illegal for massachusetts to craft a law that says that all documents produced by the government have to be in a format that meets some minimum standard of openness? even though that law will mean that Microsoft office isnt acceptable for use by the state government?
no one is forcing microsoft or diebold to do anything... they have a choice and so does the state... the state does not have to buy what diebold or microsoft or anyone else for that matter... is selling.
the state absolutely has the right to put restrictions on what it buys and vendors have a choice between being compliant to make a sale or not. The state has absolutely NO requirement to buy what diebold is selling
I agree... though clearly the poster is in a strange situation... since being into D&D usually guarantees that you will not end up encumbered too much by things like a wife and kids....
I hear you... but the phone is already going to cost me a fortune and it wouldnt solve some of the problems (like ever IM you send counting as a text message)
really... I just want a really good phone with decent internet access for basic stuff and a nice-ish camera... but to spend 450 bucks on it is kind of out of the question.
even spending 200 on it is kind of hard to swallow.
if your girlfriends power book is crashing weekly then something is seriously fucked up... at the very least (if your not intersted in figuring out what is wrong) try wiping and re-installing... there is no way a machine running OS X should be crashing that often.
frankly there is no way any computer should be crashing that often.
I see kernel panics something like once a year (except when I was running the DVCR software that is provided as apples firewire API demo... that thing was a little flakey... but never enough to get me to try to fix it)
humm... maybe not... but I bet a ton of people here calling for "open" OS X would love to download a torrent for it.
dont forget the VW bug... thats the same platform as well.
but there is more to a car than its chassis.... obviously the A3 is going to be a nicer car with nicer engine options, probably a better suspension and likely hundreds of small features you dont get on the cheeper cars.
to be fair... the quality of the components in the apple machines does not have to be better in order to provide a better user experience... it just needs to be standardized. By maintaing control over the hardware apple does not have to support 100 different chipsets from different manufacturers... they dont have to support every video card on the market or anything like that. They only have to support the hardware that they build into their own machine... if you make a change with a new machine and offer some new hardware that machine just requires the new version of OS X that came with it.
if some user wants to buy third party hardware and it doesnt work then it is not apples fault, it is the fault of the 3ird party for not supporting apple properly (and presumably claiming that they do)
This would not be the case if they had to support all generic third party hardware. they would no longer have control over the out of the box experience.
Furthermore the differences between a Mac and a PC are almost entirely in software (which is cheap to manufacture) and not hardware (which is expensive to manufacture).
you are totally nuts...
software may be totally cheep to reproduce but it is not cheep create... the amount of resources that go into researching developing and TESTING an OS is astronomical. I could put together a computer for about the same cost as a full copy of microsoft office... but office only cost about 10 bucks to press the CD, print the books and make the boxes... sure there were years of development and testing that went into that product and that is not cheep.
software may be cheep to produce in the open source community but its not like apple (or microsoft) have thousands of competent programers dying to dedicate their livelyhood to these companies... these people have to be paid.
I think the big difference here is that in the case of the Microsoft story we actually know that they did this... dude was using the name... Microsoft lawyers attacked... he relented and they took the name over.... they might even have a point about him using the windows name for his software, even if they hadnt intended to use the name (though going about it that way is a bit underhanded)
in the case of the apple story the problem is that we really dont know where the limit came from... everyone just points to the wired story which is just what some guy at wired wrote and doesn't even contain direct evidence that the limit came from apple... there isnt really damming evidence that apple did this at all and even if they did... Moto agreed to it... its not like apple could really force them to agree to a set of licensing terms... its not like moto couldn't develop an MP3 phone that didnt include iTumes.
while the original poster was obviously wrong about this being a technical limitation... you need to realize that you are arguing that apple imposed the limit based solely on a bit of text from wired... not a copy of the contract between the companies that imposed that limit... not a quote from the engineer that was told to implement the limit.
there is NO eveidence that apple imposed this limit... Moto might very well have imposed it for any number of reasons... stupidity among them... perhaps they felt that since they were putting in a shitty USB controller (to save money) that it would just plain take too long for people to copy more that 100 songs to the phone and that would piss people off... word has it that the card inside the phone can be upgraded as well... perhaps moto doesn't want people making their phones more useful by upgrading the memory and thus imposed a song limit to make sure that people go out and buy the new 1 GB phone that will be available next year and have a 200 song limit (or some other such crap)
moto is more than capable of making bad phones all on its own...
Just because wired says it doesnt mean that Apple had anything to do with the limit... and even if they DID motorola didnt have to play ball... they could have made like any of the other companies and made their own damn MP3 playing phone without the iTunes logo if they thought that any of the terms that apple dictated were unacceptable.
all of this is mindless speculation based on one article in fucking Wired...
while you are more correct than the previous poster you are exagerating quite a bit here... if apple had a profit margin over 50% someone else would have long since eaten their lunch...
it should be fairly easy to figure out the profit margin on these things... we know how many they sold and we know the profit that apple reports the iPod bringing in right? souldnt all this be in the quarterly reports? I havent owned apple stock in a few years but maybe it is time to dig up some of this info.
plus... there is not way that all the iPods have the same (or even similar) profit margins...
OH OH I got this one!
Im looking at the new LG 9800... it has a nice SD media card slot so you can put a big card in it (acutally apprently it doesnt work with cards bigger than 512 MB or a gig or something but thats a tehnical screw up) and you can use it as an MP3 player.... there is no technical reason why you cannot make these MP3s into ring tones.... but Verizon has crippled the phone to make it impossible to do this the way the designer of the phone intended becasue it would decimate their sales of ring tones
similarly you can store pictures from the halfway decent camera on that card but Verizon as crippled the SD card using DRM to keep you from copying the pictures off of the card and onto the computer so that you have to use their $.25 per picture service to send them attached to text messages to an email account so you can get them onto your home computer.
then there is the standard cripling of bluetooth on the phone so that it is really only usable to run a few wireless headsets...
the phone companies are a major player here... they want new phones with features that will compel people to buy but they dont want those features getting in the way of the revenue streams they have been building up...
now... for the record... if you really know what you are doing you can buy some hardware and software and get around these restrictions... but Im not so sure about spending 200 bucks on a phone (even after all the rebates) just to have to work around all of these problems to use the cool features of the phone
you know the article says that it was the fair play software that imposed the 100 song limit but it give no evidence of this... that is not a feature of fairplay on any other platform. Moto signed a contract that said you get fairplay but it will have a 100 song limit it is their own fault.
in the absence of any real proof (not just someone at wired and a guy from an industry trade group) couldnt it be just as likely that the engineers at motorola imposed the limit themselves? it wouldnt be the first time that they developed a poor quality interface or product.
moto didnt need to play ball with apple on this so either they put in the limit themselves or they agreed to do it to get apple to play along... god forbid they should do what the other manufactures do and make an MP3 playing phone without apples help.
frankly, I suspect the 512MB limit would be more than sufficent as a limit on music capacity as a hard 100 song limit... if you could only put 200 songs on the phone (about what you would get with iTunes purchases of 2.5 minute songs) would it be any better? Would it suddenly destroy the iPods market?
Pastafarians!
that KICKS ASS!!
thank you... I really needed to read something like that today... especially with all the bullshit flying around.
heh heh heh... pastafarians...
I would guess that these "applications" were really just scripts designed to do some specific tasks and that the source was in fact the final product...
but thats just a guess... the article lacks detail
to be fair... just because the majority of people access slashdot from windows doesn't mean that they dont run linux... it might just mean that they run windows at work... everyone knows that people only use slashdot to avoid doing work and really almost never access the site from their home computers where they could spend their time looking at porn...
do you really think that companies that produce open source drivers would close the source just because something like this is developed? I mean... wouldnt it be better to allow for more widespread hardware support and simply choose to support the companies that keep their source open?
isnt getting access to a wider variety of hardware worth something here especially when it comes to the widespread adoption of linux on the desktop?
the question I have for this is "why?" wouldn't a stable binary API likely result in far more third party hardware support for linux? possibly more laptops that are actually compatible with linux?
This seems like a case of open source programmers shooting themselves in the foot because they want everything to be open source... not every application and driver is going to be made open source just to suit the desires of the linux development community. It seems to me that sticking to a hard party line against closed source software instead of trying to co-exist with said software is bound to keep linux in relative obscurity and pretty much ensure that it never becomes a viable competitor in the desktop market.
first off... text books are VERY expensive... and that not just the content but also the printing and shipping. Second, they get replaced regularly and are often out of date due to lack of funds.
Now I dont know anything about this computer... but if you could invent a cheep durable piece of hardware that would replace all the text books and could be updated electronically and regularly I think that could be of significant value... especially since that decvice also doubles as a general purpose computer and can run educational software.
people on this board like to put down educational software because all they can think of is oregon trail... I work for a company that develops educational software... specifically reading comprehension software. This product in particular has proven to be very successful at improving literacy rates among its users. Its not a game... its a piece of software that, along with class room instruction, can really make a difference to kids (and adults).
Im sure this isnt the only piece of software out there that has this kind of effect....
just because the technophobe teachers using first generation computers with 0-th generation educational software came out looking like a joke to you when you were in middle school doesnt mean that the same thing has to be true now.