You walk into Best Buy, select your merchandise then take it to a checkout counter. The clerk charges you $0.00 and the receipt reflects that. You exit the store and on the way to your car the manager approaches you with the error.
That's why I never let them look at my receipts.:) None of their business anyway, once the sale is complete.
why shouldn't iTunes be the great mythical omniscient music repository where all the world's music is available instantly? Is this simply a marketing decision?
It *should* be a simple, global, find-it-and-buy-it repository. Unfortunately, the way that copyright has been worked, the right to sell a particular work (music, movie, tv show) only extends to a country's borders. If you want to sell that work in another nation, you have to somehow acquire the rights to sell there as well.
This used to be a real problem trying to buy import albums and CDs. If a particular overseas-only album had a local rights-owner who didn't have the title in print, that rights-owner could prevent you from importing the CD for purchase. (Naturally, they could also prevent you from importing if they *did* have it in print, but generally then you wouldn't want the import in the first place.) This didn't always happen in practice, but it did make things more difficult at times.
Today, they try to restrict trans-national media purchases via things like region coding.
Honestly, I think this is another of the ridiculously outdated aspects of copyright law that really needs to change. In my mind, if I purchase a legally-produced copy of a CD or DVD (or iTunes download), then somehow, somewhere, somewhen the artist was compensated for that purchase. Maybe not directly, and maybe not for that exact purchase, but at some point the artist's rights to sell the track were transfered to someone else who got money from me. It shouldn't matter if I'm buying a German pressed CD while visiting in Japan and holding a US passport. As long as the German CD was produced with the approval (or delegated approval) of the original artist/rights-holders, then it should be treated as legitimate and proper.
Of course, if you've got a situation where some country is permitting the sale of tracks for which the original artists have *not* delegated their rights to whomever made the [cd, dvd, file], then that shouldn't be permitted. Certainly, this isn't what's happening in Japan, but it is sort of what happened with AllOfMP3 (or so I understand -- I haven't followed that too closely).
I believe this is also why it's taken so long for new iTunes stores to open in new countries. It's not just a matter of arranging the financial-side of things for handling payments, currency conversions, etc., or even of getting servers and such set up for faster local access, but I bet a whole lot of it is securing the appropriate approvals from whomever "owns" the publishing rights for each track in that country.
If USA is at war then why don't I see military law in USA? Why there's no curfew, internment of enemy's civilians?
Well, first tell that to Jose Padilla.
Second, because even in times of war with real, obvious, credible, and realized threats against US territories and civilians (say, for example, Hawaii in WWII) military law is not permitted.
Not long after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the civilian government in Hawaii (not yet even a state) was suspended and military rule, and courts, imposed. The Supreme Court decided some time later that such a move was illegal except in cases of clear and present danger. You can't get a whole lot more "clear and present" than a territory that's just survived a devastating attack, but even after that the territory was safe enough that civilian government was capable of functioning, and so military rule was not permissible.
Of course, it always takes the Court years to make such a decision, so even now, the administration could get away (almost literally) with murder, and there'd be no repercussions other than a footnote in the history books, as any overturning, censure, or "you shouldn't have done that" finger-wagging won't happen until everyone's happily retired to the golf course.
...changing the time slot like they did is a death sentence for the show, IMHO
What? They moved it, what, AN HOUR!? Gimme a break.
I think other posters have hit on one of the real reasons that ratings might have slipped: They decided to go against all the broadcast shows, during broadcast season. A bold move, but perhaps a bad idea -- especially with all the sci-fi / fantasy shows (lost, heroes, jericho, etc.) that are competing for viewer's eyeballs.
(btw, I think they're moving it back to 10:00 in January...)
why do I keep seeing bills from the 80s and 90s? I work in a convenience store and I see a lot of bills.
I said *much* currency has only an 18-month lifespan.:) Dollar bills and $20s are the quickest to get worn out. Better yet, here's some info from the Fed (courtesy of moneyfactory.com, yes, that *is* the official site of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing!):
Hm. the $20 lasts longer than I'd expected. And you'll always see the occasional bill that's been lost in a drawer for a while.
Finally, remember that the dates on currency aren't like the dates on coins. Current policy (about the last 20 years or so) are that with every minor design change (or when the Treasurer of the US changes) they change a letter. So Series 2003 becomes Series 2003-A. When there's a major design change, or when the Secretary of the Treasury changes, then the series number itself changes. I think they printed Series 1995 bills well into 2000.
And you'll very rarely see something even older. A couple years back, a co-worker was complaining that he managed to get a counterfeit $10 (was turned down at three places with it, one of which ran a pen across it). I took one look at the bill, gave him $10 for it, and put it in my collection. It was from the late 50's / early 60's, and just looked different enough that nobody would take it. And of course the pen didn't work -- it was 40 years old!
As a coin collector, I've thought about this before, from the standpoint of coin design, which is even less likely to change than currency, but I digress. But the possibility of dropping the Dollar for the Euro is, I think everyone agrees, nil. Hell, even the Brits have yet to give up their Pound.
On a more serious note, though, I wonder if we'd even be *allowed* to join. I'm pretty sure that the US doesn't qualify to join the European Union, because we have capital punishment. Kind of a sobering thought, isn't it, that we can't even join a trans-national union that includes several former Soviet Satellites?
and invested in machinery to make a whole new dollar coin
If by "machinery," you mean "made coin dies", then, yeah, there's an investment. But it's not huge. The actual coin dies could fit in a soup can, and each pair of dies can mint thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of coins. They just install dies in a standard press, send blanks in, and get dollar coins out. when not making dollar coins, the same presses are used for other coins, so there's really no new infrastructure for the dollar coins.
To make any changes to currency would not only require completely recirculating the billions of papers out there, but it would probably require drastic changes to the printing process. Different shapes, sizes, or including braille print sound like expensive alterations.
I doubt the courts would require all currency to be recalled, especially since much currency has only an 18-month lifespan. And since we're redesigning the larger bills (5 through 100) every 7 years or so, we've already committed to spending a certain amount of money on redesign. Incorporating some raised devices (as on Canada's currency) would be a trivial addition to the next round of redesigns.
Changing the size of currency would obviously cost a lot more, but the Treasury is constantly looking at new printing technology, and so that could also be spread out as they replace equipment. Nobody said this had to happen overnight. And, oh, we've done this before -- in the 1920's we changed from a large format currency to the current small-sized notes. And before anyone brings up vending machine and ATM manufacturers' complaints, differing note sizes hasn't hurt anyone in Europe (where ATMs regularly dispense bills in four or more denominations, each a different size).
And this might finally be what lets Congress stand up to lobbyists and kill the dollar bill. Not only are we out of step with the rest of the world on blind access to currency, we're just about the only major country stubborn enough to still use currency for our primary currency measure -- everyone else, Pounds, Euro, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, have coins for 1 and 2 unit, and sometimes even 5 unit, denominations. I read recently that eliminating the dollar bill would save half a billion (BILLION) dollars a year, and that was a 1995 study, so it's probably even higher. But lobbyists (primarily for the unions that produce the paper) have consistently stopped cold any attempt to switch to coins only.
Anyway, I think the Judge is right and, though this wouldn't be free, it wouldn't be an undue burden.
What I would really love, would kill for, is a (yup, here's the kicker) free Controlled Vocabulary list I could utilise, either flat or ideally hierarchical.
Do you mean like multiple pre-populated tag hierarchies that you can use in your favorite application? I know that Shoebox has some you can download (replace the "shoebox://" with "http://" and you can get the xml files), both created by kavasoft and some created by users. They're a little oddly structured at first, but can be figured out pretty easily. Not sure about reuse rules, though. Is there a taxonomy wiki, maybe, that you can borrow from?
Somebody mod the parent up -- this is a pretty good start. I'll have to download it and futz around a bit on my own, but it's certainly an improvement over most of the photo library apps I've seen....
I've been looking for the same thing, and, at least in the Mac world, it ain't out there. The closest I've found is Shoebox, which has a great hierarchical tagging system, but it's still single-user. And it's been a little buggy for me.
Big bonus for Shoebox, though, is the hierarchical tags -- I can't believe how far we've gone with all sorts of folksonomy tagging systems, but virtually nobody's using a hierarchy of tags. Keeping these flat, especially if you want to start organizing and grouping by family, is just unusable after a 25-50 tags or so. With Shoebox's system, you can set things up like "John's Family" with John, his wife, and all kids as sub tags. Then, if, say, "Tim" (John's oldest son) marries "Jane", create "Tim's Family" as a sub to John's family, or even as a sub to Tim, and you can use aliases to have Tim show up in both places. It's hard to explain without pictures, but trust me, it's really very flexible.
Anyway, the downsides: * Again, a little buggy / flaky * Proprietary: Can't export the data, though you can export the tag hierarchy (just not the associations between tags and the photos, at least not that I've found) * Single-user: It's licensed for a single userid on a single CPU, so my wife can't even access it on the same box, let alone me or her on any other box in the house.
If we could get the organizational abilities of Shoebox (or a similar hierarchical tag system) in a client-server model, running on a linux server with clients on windows, mac, or whatever, then I think I'd have a personal winner. Bonus points if it speaks DPAP so iPhoto can read the libraries (to make printing, editing, etc., easier). Oh, and it'd have to have an easy way to store/track multiple versions of a photo, for when you crop, clean out redeye, etc.
I'm "this close" to starting to hack something together myself, but simply have no time with all the other unfinished projects in my life (not to mention my son). At least I should write up a more careful specifications document and post it on a blog somewhere, for someone who actually has time to start hacking at. Really, the back-end DB stuff is trivial, you just need a decent front end. And a web interface just wouldn't be all that usable for huge collections, either. (otherwise, I'd recommend giving Zoph a look, as it's got a lot of the DB stuff but it's 100% web based).
The Prisoner. A weird 60's British TV show about a spy who angrily resigns (we never learn why) and is almost immediately kidnapped and taken to "The Village," where they try to convince him to explain why he left. It's never truly revealed whether the Village is run by the good guys, the enemy, or even some higher-order cooperative effort of both.
Worth checking out, but really quite odd...some of the episodes are fantastic, and some are literally filler added at the request of the BBC.
You could store your desktop, etc. (basically your home directory) on that disk, taking it with you as you went from machine to machine.
I think the original idea was somewhat more than that. For a while, they made Cubes available with only a 40 MB HD (yes, 40 MEG, remember those days?) for local swap space and such. The idea was that you'd have not only your personal account, but the *entire OS* on the optical disc. You would walk up to a machine (in a lab -- this approach was aimed at colleges), pop in the disc, and you'd have your entire environment, home account, programs, *and* local root access, all at once. Mess up the machine with that root access? So what, as soon as you pop out the disc your changes would go with *you*, not stay with the machine.
It was an interesting idea, but the drives were slower even than some of the old 1st gen 10 meg IBM XT drives, and (worse yet) the fan in many units was installed backward and drew dusty air through the optical drive.
I've still got a "floptical" at home, and a cube with a drive. Some day I'll pop in a hard drive, load up NS, and see if I can't read the disc still. If I recall correctly, it's still filled with all kinds of stupid pictures & sounds from the pre-web internet.
The "hard media" DVDs *should* be more expensive than softcopy-only versions of a movie. The versions sold over iTunes (to my knowlege, I've not actually bought one) only have the movie itself, at a lesser resolution, and none of the special features, extras, secondary language tracks, etc.
That said, I think that the online copies ought to be even cheaper (high price of $10, and maybe $7.50 for "older" titles, $5.00 for "classics"), for just that reason.
This will definitely be interesting to watch, to see how it all shakes out. I think that Apple will win out in the end, but that it won't make a significant dent in physical DVD sales. Even if Apple manages to become the #1 vendor for movies over Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, etc., there are still LOTS of physical copies being sold through those other vendors. No way they ever account for more than 50% of "movie" sales (and probably will top out much less than that, but what do I know), unless and until they are able to sell the entire DVD contents (features, etc.), at DVD resolutions.
Fortunately, however, since it *is* illegal, if they actually do it they'll get class-actioned into oblivion. Something I'm sure they're acutely aware of.
Except that they feel that the end user has given them permission to do this, by virtue of clicking "Okay" on the license agreement. So my point was really that this might be the use that takes EULAs just a little bit too far, that finally gets click-through licenses killed.
My understanding is that it is illegal to tell people that they owe you money when they do not.
I'm not entirely sure that's the case, as long as you word your "invoice" correctly. At some stage it turns into a con, and obviously at that point you're breaking the law.
On the other hand, I'm VERY certain it's illegal to remotely break something and then demand money to fix it, which is exactly what Microsoft will be able to do with Vista, all because nobody's been able to put an end to software licensing abuses.
So, as with other posters here, I really hope this is an incredibly "successful" program, and pisses enough people off that it, and the EULAs which "authorize" it, can be knocked on its ass.
Have you tried RoundCube? It's not perfect, but it's better than (for example) SquirrelMail, and has a reasonably active development group. It's about the best I've found, at least among those that are truly web-based (as opposed to downloading a "lightweight" flash client).
Re:Uncontained turbine failure = bad Ju Ju
on
Two Tiny Gas Turbines
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ever seen the results of an uncontained turbine failure on a jet engine?
Have you ever seen the results of a *contained* failure? A while back, as the Boeing 777 was just coming into commercial use, PBS ran a long special (or maybe a series of episodes, I forget) about the plane. They showed how they wrapped the engine in some kind of special kevlar blanket, then tested it by shooting something into a fully spun-up engine.
The outsides of the engine (the whole chamber) sort of bulged out maybe 6-12", then compressed back down to normal size. And that was it. It looked like something out of a cartoon, where (say) Bugs Bunny might swallow a lit stick of dynamite, then his stomach would bulge suddenly as it exploded, then he'd burp out a small puff smoke and be done with it. Really very cool, actually.
Anyway, I'd expect they could do something similar with this, too. Plus, even though it's spinning faster, the mass of the spinning parts is probably pretty infinitessimal, so even a total catastrophic failure at 1 million RPM might not be cause for concern. (as compared to the mass of the fan blades in a massive jet engine).
I think Wal-Mart wouldn't give a fart even if iTunes sold $10MM worth of movies in the first week.
I didn't mean to say that Apple would be a serious threat to Wal-Mart. [on the other hand, if Wal-Mart really doesn't give a fart, why are they trying to persuade studios not to sell movies through iTunes?]
What I was trying to say was that, a single studio, selling like 40 titles or so (I forget the count) sold over $1 million of just those few titles in a single week. That's $25,000 per title. Netflix' home page says they have 65,000 titles in stock. Obviously, every single title won't sell $25000 copies a week, but if, on average, every title sold even just $1000 a week, you'd still have $65,000,000 in weekly sales.
My numbers are probably all screwed up, so don't put faith in them. The point is that a small number of titles, from a single studio, in the first week, sold a helluvalot of copies. I don't think that would be unnoticed by the big studios, and that they should see iTunes as a great sales channel. Plus, it seems (from the article, I believe) that Wal-Mart didn't pull the new Disney titles, anyway, so do studios really have anything to lose by going with iTunes?
Put another way: In just 5 years, the iTunes music store has made it to #5 of all US music retailers, *including* all the physical CD sales from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc. Is there any reason to suspect that it won't have similar growth in the movie world? (or possibly faster growth, now that people are used to buying music online?)
I just don't really see any advantage for Apple in cutting any kind of special deal with anybody, other than short-term gain that might be eclipsed by simply letting the business grow like they did with music.
(now, the article was really skimpy on details, but the whole discussion might just boil down to Apple selling iTunes gift cards at Wal-Mart, which is such a no-brainer that I'm amazed they don't already do it.)
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You walk into Best Buy, select your merchandise then take it to a checkout counter. The clerk charges you $0.00 and the receipt reflects that. You exit the store and on the way to your car the manager approaches you with the error.
:) None of their business anyway, once the sale is complete.
That's why I never let them look at my receipts.
They have a mirror set up on the moon so that anyone who knows where to look can fire a laser at it and get a reflection back;
:)
How do you know that's not just a shiny rock?
why shouldn't iTunes be the great mythical omniscient music repository where all the world's music is available instantly? Is this simply a marketing decision?
It *should* be a simple, global, find-it-and-buy-it repository. Unfortunately, the way that copyright has been worked, the right to sell a particular work (music, movie, tv show) only extends to a country's borders. If you want to sell that work in another nation, you have to somehow acquire the rights to sell there as well.
This used to be a real problem trying to buy import albums and CDs. If a particular overseas-only album had a local rights-owner who didn't have the title in print, that rights-owner could prevent you from importing the CD for purchase. (Naturally, they could also prevent you from importing if they *did* have it in print, but generally then you wouldn't want the import in the first place.) This didn't always happen in practice, but it did make things more difficult at times.
Today, they try to restrict trans-national media purchases via things like region coding.
Honestly, I think this is another of the ridiculously outdated aspects of copyright law that really needs to change. In my mind, if I purchase a legally-produced copy of a CD or DVD (or iTunes download), then somehow, somewhere, somewhen the artist was compensated for that purchase. Maybe not directly, and maybe not for that exact purchase, but at some point the artist's rights to sell the track were transfered to someone else who got money from me. It shouldn't matter if I'm buying a German pressed CD while visiting in Japan and holding a US passport. As long as the German CD was produced with the approval (or delegated approval) of the original artist/rights-holders, then it should be treated as legitimate and proper.
Of course, if you've got a situation where some country is permitting the sale of tracks for which the original artists have *not* delegated their rights to whomever made the [cd, dvd, file], then that shouldn't be permitted. Certainly, this isn't what's happening in Japan, but it is sort of what happened with AllOfMP3 (or so I understand -- I haven't followed that too closely).
I believe this is also why it's taken so long for new iTunes stores to open in new countries. It's not just a matter of arranging the financial-side of things for handling payments, currency conversions, etc., or even of getting servers and such set up for faster local access, but I bet a whole lot of it is securing the appropriate approvals from whomever "owns" the publishing rights for each track in that country.
If USA is at war then why don't I see military law in USA? Why there's no curfew, internment of enemy's civilians?
Well, first tell that to Jose Padilla.
Second, because even in times of war with real, obvious, credible, and realized threats against US territories and civilians (say, for example, Hawaii in WWII) military law is not permitted.
Not long after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the civilian government in Hawaii (not yet even a state) was suspended and military rule, and courts, imposed. The Supreme Court decided some time later that such a move was illegal except in cases of clear and present danger. You can't get a whole lot more "clear and present" than a territory that's just survived a devastating attack, but even after that the territory was safe enough that civilian government was capable of functioning, and so military rule was not permissible.
Of course, it always takes the Court years to make such a decision, so even now, the administration could get away (almost literally) with murder, and there'd be no repercussions other than a footnote in the history books, as any overturning, censure, or "you shouldn't have done that" finger-wagging won't happen until everyone's happily retired to the golf course.
...changing the time slot like they did is a death sentence for the show, IMHO
What? They moved it, what, AN HOUR!? Gimme a break.
I think other posters have hit on one of the real reasons that ratings might have slipped: They decided to go against all the broadcast shows, during broadcast season. A bold move, but perhaps a bad idea -- especially with all the sci-fi / fantasy shows (lost, heroes, jericho, etc.) that are competing for viewer's eyeballs.
(btw, I think they're moving it back to 10:00 in January...)
Now I'm gonna have that closing music stuck in my head all day long.
why do I keep seeing bills from the 80s and 90s? I work in a convenience store and I see a lot of bills.
:) Dollar bills and $20s are the quickest to get worn out. Better yet, here's some info from the Fed (courtesy of moneyfactory.com, yes, that *is* the official site of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing!):
.............. 22 months .............. 24 months .............. 18 months .............. 25 months .............. 55 months .............. 60 months
I said *much* currency has only an 18-month lifespan.
$ 1
$ 5
$ 10
$ 20
$ 50
$100
Hm. the $20 lasts longer than I'd expected. And you'll always see the occasional bill that's been lost in a drawer for a while.
Finally, remember that the dates on currency aren't like the dates on coins. Current policy (about the last 20 years or so) are that with every minor design change (or when the Treasurer of the US changes) they change a letter. So Series 2003 becomes Series 2003-A. When there's a major design change, or when the Secretary of the Treasury changes, then the series number itself changes. I think they printed Series 1995 bills well into 2000.
And you'll very rarely see something even older. A couple years back, a co-worker was complaining that he managed to get a counterfeit $10 (was turned down at three places with it, one of which ran a pen across it). I took one look at the bill, gave him $10 for it, and put it in my collection. It was from the late 50's / early 60's, and just looked different enough that nobody would take it. And of course the pen didn't work -- it was 40 years old!
It's time to switch to the Euro.
As a coin collector, I've thought about this before, from the standpoint of coin design, which is even less likely to change than currency, but I digress. But the possibility of dropping the Dollar for the Euro is, I think everyone agrees, nil. Hell, even the Brits have yet to give up their Pound.
On a more serious note, though, I wonder if we'd even be *allowed* to join. I'm pretty sure that the US doesn't qualify to join the European Union, because we have capital punishment. Kind of a sobering thought, isn't it, that we can't even join a trans-national union that includes several former Soviet Satellites?
and invested in machinery to make a whole new dollar coin
If by "machinery," you mean "made coin dies", then, yeah, there's an investment. But it's not huge. The actual coin dies could fit in a soup can, and each pair of dies can mint thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of coins. They just install dies in a standard press, send blanks in, and get dollar coins out. when not making dollar coins, the same presses are used for other coins, so there's really no new infrastructure for the dollar coins.
To make any changes to currency would not only require completely recirculating the billions of papers out there, but it would probably require drastic changes to the printing process. Different shapes, sizes, or including braille print sound like expensive alterations.
I doubt the courts would require all currency to be recalled, especially since much currency has only an 18-month lifespan. And since we're redesigning the larger bills (5 through 100) every 7 years or so, we've already committed to spending a certain amount of money on redesign. Incorporating some raised devices (as on Canada's currency) would be a trivial addition to the next round of redesigns.
Changing the size of currency would obviously cost a lot more, but the Treasury is constantly looking at new printing technology, and so that could also be spread out as they replace equipment. Nobody said this had to happen overnight. And, oh, we've done this before -- in the 1920's we changed from a large format currency to the current small-sized notes. And before anyone brings up vending machine and ATM manufacturers' complaints, differing note sizes hasn't hurt anyone in Europe (where ATMs regularly dispense bills in four or more denominations, each a different size).
And this might finally be what lets Congress stand up to lobbyists and kill the dollar bill. Not only are we out of step with the rest of the world on blind access to currency, we're just about the only major country stubborn enough to still use currency for our primary currency measure -- everyone else, Pounds, Euro, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, have coins for 1 and 2 unit, and sometimes even 5 unit, denominations. I read recently that eliminating the dollar bill would save half a billion (BILLION) dollars a year, and that was a 1995 study, so it's probably even higher. But lobbyists (primarily for the unions that produce the paper) have consistently stopped cold any attempt to switch to coins only.
Anyway, I think the Judge is right and, though this wouldn't be free, it wouldn't be an undue burden.
What I would really love, would kill for, is a (yup, here's the kicker) free Controlled Vocabulary list I could utilise, either flat or ideally hierarchical.
Do you mean like multiple pre-populated tag hierarchies that you can use in your favorite application? I know that Shoebox has some you can download (replace the "shoebox://" with "http://" and you can get the xml files), both created by kavasoft and some created by users. They're a little oddly structured at first, but can be figured out pretty easily. Not sure about reuse rules, though. Is there a taxonomy wiki, maybe, that you can borrow from?
Somebody mod the parent up -- this is a pretty good start. I'll have to download it and futz around a bit on my own, but it's certainly an improvement over most of the photo library apps I've seen....
I've been looking for the same thing, and, at least in the Mac world, it ain't out there. The closest I've found is Shoebox, which has a great hierarchical tagging system, but it's still single-user. And it's been a little buggy for me.
Big bonus for Shoebox, though, is the hierarchical tags -- I can't believe how far we've gone with all sorts of folksonomy tagging systems, but virtually nobody's using a hierarchy of tags. Keeping these flat, especially if you want to start organizing and grouping by family, is just unusable after a 25-50 tags or so. With Shoebox's system, you can set things up like "John's Family" with John, his wife, and all kids as sub tags. Then, if, say, "Tim" (John's oldest son) marries "Jane", create "Tim's Family" as a sub to John's family, or even as a sub to Tim, and you can use aliases to have Tim show up in both places. It's hard to explain without pictures, but trust me, it's really very flexible.
Anyway, the downsides:
* Again, a little buggy / flaky
* Proprietary: Can't export the data, though you can export the tag hierarchy (just not the associations between tags and the photos, at least not that I've found)
* Single-user: It's licensed for a single userid on a single CPU, so my wife can't even access it on the same box, let alone me or her on any other box in the house.
If we could get the organizational abilities of Shoebox (or a similar hierarchical tag system) in a client-server model, running on a linux server with clients on windows, mac, or whatever, then I think I'd have a personal winner. Bonus points if it speaks DPAP so iPhoto can read the libraries (to make printing, editing, etc., easier). Oh, and it'd have to have an easy way to store/track multiple versions of a photo, for when you crop, clean out redeye, etc.
I'm "this close" to starting to hack something together myself, but simply have no time with all the other unfinished projects in my life (not to mention my son). At least I should write up a more careful specifications document and post it on a blog somewhere, for someone who actually has time to start hacking at. Really, the back-end DB stuff is trivial, you just need a decent front end. And a web interface just wouldn't be all that usable for huge collections, either. (otherwise, I'd recommend giving Zoph a look, as it's got a lot of the DB stuff but it's 100% web based).
.....must....avoid....boy scout / brownie.....jokes.....
-gaaahhh!-
I don't get it. What is this in reference to?
The Prisoner. A weird 60's British TV show about a spy who angrily resigns (we never learn why) and is almost immediately kidnapped and taken to "The Village," where they try to convince him to explain why he left. It's never truly revealed whether the Village is run by the good guys, the enemy, or even some higher-order cooperative effort of both.
Worth checking out, but really quite odd...some of the episodes are fantastic, and some are literally filler added at the request of the BBC.
....and yes, you can leave the Agency. People do it all the time.
Yeah, but you gotta live in a weird village, drive around in golf carts, and wear a big "#6"-type pin on your lapel.
I think the line is "It's God's responsibility to punish the terrorists. It's our responsibility to arrange the meeting." Or something like that.
(google gets a lot of variants of this)
You could store your desktop, etc. (basically your home directory) on that disk, taking it with you as you went from machine to machine.
I think the original idea was somewhat more than that. For a while, they made Cubes available with only a 40 MB HD (yes, 40 MEG, remember those days?) for local swap space and such. The idea was that you'd have not only your personal account, but the *entire OS* on the optical disc. You would walk up to a machine (in a lab -- this approach was aimed at colleges), pop in the disc, and you'd have your entire environment, home account, programs, *and* local root access, all at once. Mess up the machine with that root access? So what, as soon as you pop out the disc your changes would go with *you*, not stay with the machine.
It was an interesting idea, but the drives were slower even than some of the old 1st gen 10 meg IBM XT drives, and (worse yet) the fan in many units was installed backward and drew dusty air through the optical drive.
I've still got a "floptical" at home, and a cube with a drive. Some day I'll pop in a hard drive, load up NS, and see if I can't read the disc still. If I recall correctly, it's still filled with all kinds of stupid pictures & sounds from the pre-web internet.
The "hard media" DVDs *should* be more expensive than softcopy-only versions of a movie. The versions sold over iTunes (to my knowlege, I've not actually bought one) only have the movie itself, at a lesser resolution, and none of the special features, extras, secondary language tracks, etc.
That said, I think that the online copies ought to be even cheaper (high price of $10, and maybe $7.50 for "older" titles, $5.00 for "classics"), for just that reason.
This will definitely be interesting to watch, to see how it all shakes out. I think that Apple will win out in the end, but that it won't make a significant dent in physical DVD sales. Even if Apple manages to become the #1 vendor for movies over Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, etc., there are still LOTS of physical copies being sold through those other vendors. No way they ever account for more than 50% of "movie" sales (and probably will top out much less than that, but what do I know), unless and until they are able to sell the entire DVD contents (features, etc.), at DVD resolutions.
Fortunately, however, since it *is* illegal, if they actually do it they'll get class-actioned into oblivion. Something I'm sure they're acutely aware of.
Except that they feel that the end user has given them permission to do this, by virtue of clicking "Okay" on the license agreement. So my point was really that this might be the use that takes EULAs just a little bit too far, that finally gets click-through licenses killed.
Hopefully.
My understanding is that it is illegal to tell people that they owe you money when they do not.
I'm not entirely sure that's the case, as long as you word your "invoice" correctly. At some stage it turns into a con, and obviously at that point you're breaking the law.
On the other hand, I'm VERY certain it's illegal to remotely break something and then demand money to fix it, which is exactly what Microsoft will be able to do with Vista, all because nobody's been able to put an end to software licensing abuses.
So, as with other posters here, I really hope this is an incredibly "successful" program, and pisses enough people off that it, and the EULAs which "authorize" it, can be knocked on its ass.
I have my own webmail, but it sucks.
Have you tried RoundCube? It's not perfect, but it's better than (for example) SquirrelMail, and has a reasonably active development group. It's about the best I've found, at least among those that are truly web-based (as opposed to downloading a "lightweight" flash client).
Ever seen the results of an uncontained turbine failure on a jet engine?
Have you ever seen the results of a *contained* failure? A while back, as the Boeing 777 was just coming into commercial use, PBS ran a long special (or maybe a series of episodes, I forget) about the plane. They showed how they wrapped the engine in some kind of special kevlar blanket, then tested it by shooting something into a fully spun-up engine.
The outsides of the engine (the whole chamber) sort of bulged out maybe 6-12", then compressed back down to normal size. And that was it. It looked like something out of a cartoon, where (say) Bugs Bunny might swallow a lit stick of dynamite, then his stomach would bulge suddenly as it exploded, then he'd burp out a small puff smoke and be done with it. Really very cool, actually.
Anyway, I'd expect they could do something similar with this, too. Plus, even though it's spinning faster, the mass of the spinning parts is probably pretty infinitessimal, so even a total catastrophic failure at 1 million RPM might not be cause for concern. (as compared to the mass of the fan blades in a massive jet engine).
I think Wal-Mart wouldn't give a fart even if iTunes sold $10MM worth of movies in the first week.
I didn't mean to say that Apple would be a serious threat to Wal-Mart. [on the other hand, if Wal-Mart really doesn't give a fart, why are they trying to persuade studios not to sell movies through iTunes?]
What I was trying to say was that, a single studio, selling like 40 titles or so (I forget the count) sold over $1 million of just those few titles in a single week. That's $25,000 per title. Netflix' home page says they have 65,000 titles in stock. Obviously, every single title won't sell $25000 copies a week, but if, on average, every title sold even just $1000 a week, you'd still have $65,000,000 in weekly sales.
My numbers are probably all screwed up, so don't put faith in them. The point is that a small number of titles, from a single studio, in the first week, sold a helluvalot of copies. I don't think that would be unnoticed by the big studios, and that they should see iTunes as a great sales channel. Plus, it seems (from the article, I believe) that Wal-Mart didn't pull the new Disney titles, anyway, so do studios really have anything to lose by going with iTunes?
Put another way: In just 5 years, the iTunes music store has made it to #5 of all US music retailers, *including* all the physical CD sales from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc. Is there any reason to suspect that it won't have similar growth in the movie world? (or possibly faster growth, now that people are used to buying music online?)
I just don't really see any advantage for Apple in cutting any kind of special deal with anybody, other than short-term gain that might be eclipsed by simply letting the business grow like they did with music.
(now, the article was really skimpy on details, but the whole discussion might just boil down to Apple selling iTunes gift cards at Wal-Mart, which is such a no-brainer that I'm amazed they don't already do it.)
>> if everyone else who sells an iTunes gift card gets some cut off the top of the cost of the card
:)
> Of course they do -- [...] you thought they just carried & sold the cards as a favor?
No, not really, but since I've never seen a wholesale invoice for iTunes or other gift cards, I chose to speak non-authoritatively.