Long train commutes. I work in Chicago, and mercifully live blocks from the office, but many of my office mates travel an hour plus on train. If they could combine this with their Tivo's I can imagine it getting alot of play
I doubt they are interested in such devices. If they were, they would already be using the ones from Archos, which have the Tivo-like capabilities, better features in general, and are in pretty much every way superior to this Microsoft/Creative stuff, and have been out for quite a while.
Microsoft and Creative need to learn from Apple. Apple's iPod did well because it did two things different than the previous devices. First, it integrated very well with iTunes. Second, it was smaller and lighter. Other than on those two factors, the iPod is not better than an Archos. (Yes, iPod fans, the Archos has a UI every bit as intuitive as the iPod, and in many ways superior...and if you don't like that interface, there is Rockbox).
It was by being better on those two key points (integration and size/weight) that Apple was able to come into a market that already had several players and do well.
Microsoft/Creative seem to be coming into a market with several players and offering one that is near the bottom of the pack in features. All they have going for them is a bigger marketing budget...which may be enough, sadly.
Gas is a lot more expensive than you think, because it has large externalities.
What that means is that there are costs associated with gas that aren't paid directly by the producers or users of it, but rather are passed off on to others.
An example of an externality is pollution. For instance, suppose you've got two competing factories. One is next to a river, and dumps their waste into the river. The other is not, and has to pay to haul the waste away. The first factory might be able to make stuff to sell for lower cost, because they aren't paying to have waste hauled away. However, that waste might kill fish (costing fishermen downstream) and require downstream cities to spend more on filtering their water. Stuff from the first factory ACTUALLY costs more than stuff from the second factory, but some of that cost is shifted to non-consumers of the factory's products (e.g., the fishermen, and then downstream cities).
Gas has huge externalities. For example, pollution lowers crop yeilds, so we all pay more for food. Yes, most other sources of energy also pollute (for instance, burning coal to run a power plant). However, if you produce electricity in one place and use it somewhere else, you can confine the pollution to where the electricity is produced. With gas, you pollute where you use it, so we spread the pollution all over the place.
Another example is much of our military budget. If we didn't value the Mideast as a gas-producing region, we would have a lot less interest in what goes on there, and in much of the rest of the world.
Some studies I've seen cited put the real cost of gas at something like $10/gallon, which is more than many of the alternatives. However, the alternatives don't have big externalities to drive their price down, so to be widely adopted they have to not only beat the real cost of gas, but the artificially low price we have now.
Here's an interesting article, written about 10 years ago, by David Goodstein of Caltech, pointing out that the scientific process was not working correctly with cold fusion. (Basically, almost all CF was junk, but there were a couple of results by careful and competent experimenters, that should have been examined more deeply, but were dismissed as part of the "it's all junk" reaction).
The article is a good look at the whole CF phenomenon as of 1993.
On the other hand, there is the question of his actions being "speech," and in the class of "speech" protected by the first amendment[...]Precisely whether or not his actions fall into that protected class and trumping the local charges with federal law will, of course, be a matter for the courts
It won't matter if these actions are considered speech or not, as the exercise of the First Amendment is still subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. I doubt he will be able to make a First Amendment argument that this particular place and manner of expression is one that can't be restricted.
I wonder how often they bust schoolgirls for drawing hopscotch guides on public sidewalks
How often do schoolgirls roam the city, drawing hopscotch guides all over the place?
My recollection from when I was a kid was that almost all hopscotch guides were drawn near the home of one of the participants, usually on the sidewalk in front of their house.
It's from the Compaq side of HP. Playing with Compaq laptops at Best Buy and/or Circuit City, I'm NOT impressed with the keyboards. Is this one better?
I went to HP's website and configured one, and compared to a similarly configured Powerbook at Apple's site, and the HP comes out a lot cheaper, with a similar weight, and a higher resolution display, so it looks like a good choice for a non-Windows laptop, if the keyboard doesn't suck.
So far, the only good keyboard I've found is on ThinkPads. (No Apple dealer within 30 miles of where I live, so I haven't been able to check out Powerbook keyboards yet).
Analog tape recorders have allowed people to add broadcasts to their music libraries since before I was born
I don't recall analog tape recorders that could take a broadcast, turn it into an MP3 file per song, and tag it and sort it out by artist and album, all automatically.
Seems the ACLU or EFF or someone would want to make a big public test case out of some individuals lawsuit defense
You generally can't make a good test case when your client doesn't really have any remotely plausible defense to offer.
They aren't picking people at random to sue--there aren't people who downloaded to "try before buy" here. They are suing people who have large download collections and are sharing them prolifically.
I say this because there are plenty of people who download a song or even an album (I hate to buy an album and find that only one song is any good) in a "try before you buy" spirit. I did this recently and then took advantage of Real's $4.99 price for an album.
Of course. Numerous studies have shown that file sharing probably overall does more good for the RIAA than harm, and so they should embrace it, at least somewhat.
However, one point that is often overlooked here is that this is their decision to make, not ours.
Someone always brings up that silly argument. If you schedule law-enforcement resources strictly by the seriousness of the crime, plenty of crimes will NEVER be dealt with.
It is far better overall to occasionally go after things that are lower on the list of seriousness, so that there is still some risk for those who commit those crimes, to discourage them.
Uhm...many (most?) (all?) of your examples of free and open standards are patented and licensed. Firewire, for example, is patented by Apple, and they charge a license fee to manufacture Firewire chipsets.
A small university in Nebraska held an event called the Rat Olympics, but the Olympics Committee apparently owns a trademark on the name of an ancient contest, and threatened to sue
That's why the Gay Games are not the Gay Olympics. It is particularly silly in that case, considering that the original Olympics consisted of naked athletes performing for horny male spectators.
What I don't understand is, why? If these security features were in answer to 9-11 attacks, and all the attackers had valid ID, why make the rule
Well, one thing that comes to mind is that after something happens, it will considerably aid the investigation if everyone on the plane had to have ID that was checked.
If a plane full of completely anonymous passengers flew into a building, it would be a hell of a lot harder to figure out where to concentrate the investigation than if they all had checked ID, even if some of those IDs were faked.
Lets contact the owner of the site. Not legit? Prove it
Suppose the spam comes from a network of trojaned Windows machines. Just how am I suppose to prove that I didn't hire some Polish or Russian cracker gang to use their trojan spamming network on my behalf?
They have been doing that for years. It's called a joe job, after the first victim of such a scam
Not quite. Assume sites X and Y, spammer S that is hired by X (or may be X), user J, and another spammer, T. J is not connected with X, Y, S, or T. A joe job is when S sends mail advertising X, setting the from address to J.
What the original poster is talking about is the case where Y hires T to send spam advertising X. If T sets the return address to J, then that will also be a joe job, but that is not relevant here.
All of those devices have different interfaces in my house. Can't follow and can't buy your argument
What I'm getting at is the 4 way navigation that is in a lot of devices. That is, an up button that goes up in a menu, down to go down, an enter button to select a menu item, and a back button to go to the previous menu, with these 4 buttons arranged in that order.
The main menu on the iPod is fully customizable. The default shows you the many options you can browse by
Yeah, I know. It's iTunes I was complaining about here, not the iPod. When in "browse" mode, iTunes basically only has two choices: navigate by artist/album, or navigate by genre/artist/album. I think iTunes should be customizable so as to match the navigation on the iPod.
It remains to be seen if Job's distortion reality field can reach non-Mac iPod customers
The RDF is strong. For 18 months, I used an Archos Jukebox Recorder 15 gig. I recently got one of the new 4th generation iPods, because I needed more space.
The iPod is very slick. The screen is much more legible than the Archos screen. It's a nice unit. I had always been puzzled, though, be iPod fans telling me that its interface was so much simpler than anything else, because I could not imagine a simpler or more intuitive interface than that of my Archos.
Well, now that I've used them both, I know the truth: the iPod doesn't have a simpler or better interface than the Archos. In fact, in some ways it is noticably worse. The iPod has a bigger, better screen, for example, but when something doesn't fit, it doesn't handle it well. The Archos, on the other hand, autoscrolls it back and forth so you can see it. (The iPod does that for the song title of the playing song, but it doesn't pause at the ends, and since it is flickery and dim while scrolling, it is very hard to read). The navigation on the Archos, being basically the same mechanism that most people will have seen on the VCR, cable or satellite box, DVD player remote, cell phone, and other places, is immediately obvious. The iPod's click wheel, while freaking cool, is confusing at first (rotate a wheel to select in a menu? Press the "menu" button to go back instead of pressing the button with the "back" symbol?)
The iPod integrates well with iTunes, and I am actually letting iTunes manage my music--something I thought I'd never do, because I normally hate that kind of thing. I'm an "organize my music on the file system to manage it" type of guy.
Still, the iPod integration with iTunes is not nearly as good as it could be. For example, considering browsing your music collection in iTunes. You can basically go by genre/artist/album. Now consider browsing your music collection on the iPod. It adds some more categories for browsing (genre, composer, Audiobooks), and things are organized a bit differently.
It would make a lot more sense if the iTunes browsing categories matched the iPod music menu organization.
My conclusion? The iPod is pretty good. I like it a lot. It deserves to be a good seller. However, it is not nearly the great leap above the rest that the RDF makes it out to be, and without the RDF and the huge marketing Apple has put into it, it would not be nearly as dominant.
I still can't understand why I'd want to pay even $.050 for a compressed version of the real song. It isn't the song, it's a snapshot. If I want the real version I get a CD
The CD? Why not the SACD? If you are going to be a snob, at least be a high-end snob.:-)
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I doubt they are interested in such devices. If they were, they would already be using the ones from Archos, which have the Tivo-like capabilities, better features in general, and are in pretty much every way superior to this Microsoft/Creative stuff, and have been out for quite a while.
Microsoft and Creative need to learn from Apple. Apple's iPod did well because it did two things different than the previous devices. First, it integrated very well with iTunes. Second, it was smaller and lighter. Other than on those two factors, the iPod is not better than an Archos. (Yes, iPod fans, the Archos has a UI every bit as intuitive as the iPod, and in many ways superior...and if you don't like that interface, there is Rockbox).
It was by being better on those two key points (integration and size/weight) that Apple was able to come into a market that already had several players and do well.
Microsoft/Creative seem to be coming into a market with several players and offering one that is near the bottom of the pack in features. All they have going for them is a bigger marketing budget...which may be enough, sadly.
What that means is that there are costs associated with gas that aren't paid directly by the producers or users of it, but rather are passed off on to others.
An example of an externality is pollution. For instance, suppose you've got two competing factories. One is next to a river, and dumps their waste into the river. The other is not, and has to pay to haul the waste away. The first factory might be able to make stuff to sell for lower cost, because they aren't paying to have waste hauled away. However, that waste might kill fish (costing fishermen downstream) and require downstream cities to spend more on filtering their water. Stuff from the first factory ACTUALLY costs more than stuff from the second factory, but some of that cost is shifted to non-consumers of the factory's products (e.g., the fishermen, and then downstream cities).
Gas has huge externalities. For example, pollution lowers crop yeilds, so we all pay more for food. Yes, most other sources of energy also pollute (for instance, burning coal to run a power plant). However, if you produce electricity in one place and use it somewhere else, you can confine the pollution to where the electricity is produced. With gas, you pollute where you use it, so we spread the pollution all over the place.
Another example is much of our military budget. If we didn't value the Mideast as a gas-producing region, we would have a lot less interest in what goes on there, and in much of the rest of the world.
Some studies I've seen cited put the real cost of gas at something like $10/gallon, which is more than many of the alternatives. However, the alternatives don't have big externalities to drive their price down, so to be widely adopted they have to not only beat the real cost of gas, but the artificially low price we have now.
The article is a good look at the whole CF phenomenon as of 1993.
This isn't any different than current video standards, which incorporate patented standards out the wazoo.
It won't matter if these actions are considered speech or not, as the exercise of the First Amendment is still subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. I doubt he will be able to make a First Amendment argument that this particular place and manner of expression is one that can't be restricted.
How often do schoolgirls roam the city, drawing hopscotch guides all over the place?
My recollection from when I was a kid was that almost all hopscotch guides were drawn near the home of one of the participants, usually on the sidewalk in front of their house.
I went to HP's website and configured one, and compared to a similarly configured Powerbook at Apple's site, and the HP comes out a lot cheaper, with a similar weight, and a higher resolution display, so it looks like a good choice for a non-Windows laptop, if the keyboard doesn't suck.
So far, the only good keyboard I've found is on ThinkPads. (No Apple dealer within 30 miles of where I live, so I haven't been able to check out Powerbook keyboards yet).
I don't recall analog tape recorders that could take a broadcast, turn it into an MP3 file per song, and tag it and sort it out by artist and album, all automatically.
You generally can't make a good test case when your client doesn't really have any remotely plausible defense to offer.
They aren't picking people at random to sue--there aren't people who downloaded to "try before buy" here. They are suing people who have large download collections and are sharing them prolifically.
Of course. Numerous studies have shown that file sharing probably overall does more good for the RIAA than harm, and so they should embrace it, at least somewhat.
However, one point that is often overlooked here is that this is their decision to make, not ours.
Someone always brings up that silly argument. If you schedule law-enforcement resources strictly by the seriousness of the crime, plenty of crimes will NEVER be dealt with.
It is far better overall to occasionally go after things that are lower on the list of seriousness, so that there is still some risk for those who commit those crimes, to discourage them.
Cool, but can it make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs?
To use IEEE1394, you need to license several patents, including Apple's. You can license these patents for $0.25/system.
Uhm...many (most?) (all?) of your examples of free and open standards are patented and licensed. Firewire, for example, is patented by Apple, and they charge a license fee to manufacture Firewire chipsets.
RTFA.
And the banks are also the major targets of phishing. There's some kind of "circle of life" thing going on here, I think.
That's why the Gay Games are not the Gay Olympics. It is particularly silly in that case, considering that the original Olympics consisted of naked athletes performing for horny male spectators.
Well, one thing that comes to mind is that after something happens, it will considerably aid the investigation if everyone on the plane had to have ID that was checked.
If a plane full of completely anonymous passengers flew into a building, it would be a hell of a lot harder to figure out where to concentrate the investigation than if they all had checked ID, even if some of those IDs were faked.
Suppose the spam comes from a network of trojaned Windows machines. Just how am I suppose to prove that I didn't hire some Polish or Russian cracker gang to use their trojan spamming network on my behalf?
Not quite. Assume sites X and Y, spammer S that is hired by X (or may be X), user J, and another spammer, T. J is not connected with X, Y, S, or T. A joe job is when S sends mail advertising X, setting the from address to J.
What the original poster is talking about is the case where Y hires T to send spam advertising X. If T sets the return address to J, then that will also be a joe job, but that is not relevant here.
What I'm getting at is the 4 way navigation that is in a lot of devices. That is, an up button that goes up in a menu, down to go down, an enter button to select a menu item, and a back button to go to the previous menu, with these 4 buttons arranged in that order.
The main menu on the iPod is fully customizable. The default shows you the many options you can browse by
Yeah, I know. It's iTunes I was complaining about here, not the iPod. When in "browse" mode, iTunes basically only has two choices: navigate by artist/album, or navigate by genre/artist/album. I think iTunes should be customizable so as to match the navigation on the iPod.
Well, "open and available" in the sense that anyone who pays the license fee can use it--just like WMA (except that AAC costs more than WMA).
I'd reserve "open and available" for things like Ogg Vorbis.
The RDF is strong. For 18 months, I used an Archos Jukebox Recorder 15 gig. I recently got one of the new 4th generation iPods, because I needed more space.
The iPod is very slick. The screen is much more legible than the Archos screen. It's a nice unit. I had always been puzzled, though, be iPod fans telling me that its interface was so much simpler than anything else, because I could not imagine a simpler or more intuitive interface than that of my Archos.
Well, now that I've used them both, I know the truth: the iPod doesn't have a simpler or better interface than the Archos. In fact, in some ways it is noticably worse. The iPod has a bigger, better screen, for example, but when something doesn't fit, it doesn't handle it well. The Archos, on the other hand, autoscrolls it back and forth so you can see it. (The iPod does that for the song title of the playing song, but it doesn't pause at the ends, and since it is flickery and dim while scrolling, it is very hard to read). The navigation on the Archos, being basically the same mechanism that most people will have seen on the VCR, cable or satellite box, DVD player remote, cell phone, and other places, is immediately obvious. The iPod's click wheel, while freaking cool, is confusing at first (rotate a wheel to select in a menu? Press the "menu" button to go back instead of pressing the button with the "back" symbol?)
The iPod integrates well with iTunes, and I am actually letting iTunes manage my music--something I thought I'd never do, because I normally hate that kind of thing. I'm an "organize my music on the file system to manage it" type of guy.
Still, the iPod integration with iTunes is not nearly as good as it could be. For example, considering browsing your music collection in iTunes. You can basically go by genre/artist/album. Now consider browsing your music collection on the iPod. It adds some more categories for browsing (genre, composer, Audiobooks), and things are organized a bit differently.
It would make a lot more sense if the iTunes browsing categories matched the iPod music menu organization.
My conclusion? The iPod is pretty good. I like it a lot. It deserves to be a good seller. However, it is not nearly the great leap above the rest that the RDF makes it out to be, and without the RDF and the huge marketing Apple has put into it, it would not be nearly as dominant.
The CD? Why not the SACD? If you are going to be a snob, at least be a high-end snob. :-)
So because you evidently think MMORPGs aren't worthwhile, that somehow makes their database needs less demanding?