Argument #1: Perhaps once upon a time, the argument about whether it should be Linux or GNU/Linux centered around whether it was insulting to Linus or not. Now though, I think the more important issue is that calling it GNU/Linux would be slighting all the other hundreds upon thousands of applications that run on a standard Linux box. Even if whittle it down to just the really big projects, there's still dozens. The KDE/GNU/Linux example is a good one; most of us would probably have to call our operating system something like Red Hat/KDE/Mozilla/Open Office/Xfree86/GNU/Linux. Perhaps from RMS's point of view, GNU/Linux makes sense, because it sounds like about all he uses are GNU apps. For most of us though, that's not the case.
No, it's inside tags, at least that's what I'm getting when I check the page source (and the example code given in the article also has
tags). Could it just be the fact that the input type is "crash?" That's such an absurd vunerability, it borders on parody. Anyone have a good explanation of what's going on?
Actually, Caldera has approximately tripled since announcing this lawsuit. The one day loss was a blip. That being said, the only reason it's gone up is that otherwise, the company had no prospects at all. This at least is a shot in the dark.
You also wouldn't be able to use later changes. So if you wanted to make more movies about Steamboat Willy, you probably could. I'm not sure that he was called "Mickey" back then, so you wouldn't be able to use that name. You also would have to draw him the way he was drawn in the early cartoons (looking more like a rat, really), rather than as the child friendly icon he is today.
Likewise with Aladdin, you can make Aladdin movies, but if in your movie Aladdin had a pet monkey, the princess had a pet tiger, and Jaffar had a pet parrot, you'd probably be hearing from Disney's lawyers.
Actually, it's not loans, it's the stock market. America has 1/3rd of the world's economy, but fully 1/2 the total market capitalization. Yes, the Euro may make Europe a moderately more attractive investment market, but it's not going to destroy the US. Besides, given all the infighting about tax rates and the like, I'm honestly not convinced that Europe will be able to hold it together in the long run.
I said this the first time this was posted, but for those that missed it: if this upsets you, don't buy American Greetings or Carlton Cards for Mother's day (a bit over 2 weeks away). That's it, pretty simple. Maybe it'll have an impact, maybe it won't. But it's SO easy to do, that we ought to at least make that much of an effort.
If you don't normally buy cards anyway, well good for you, you don't need to reply to this telling me about how you're superior because of it. Maybe you'd like to buy a Hallmark card anyway, just so that AGC's market share as a percentage of money spent on greeting cards this month falls, maybe not, up to you. But for those of you who were planning on buying a card for your mother anyway, how about checking the brand on the back first?
Well, the Rocket Guy isn't in IT, he's mainly a toy inventor. For that matter, I wouldn't call Carmack or Rutan IT guys, though "nerd" is probably appropriate. Who else are you thinking of as an IT guy trying to go into space?
Certainly in the days when circumcision was believed to prevent various infection it was done by parents to their sons. Few had any moral problem with that. Indeed, given the standard age range, nationality, and gender of the/. audience, I'd bet that fully half the people in this discussion were circumsized. If there were a new set of procedures that were believed to help children, but which could only be done before the child is able to make its own decisions, I have little doubt that we'd overcome our initial reservations.
I think what the parent meant was that it would help increase retail sales of the original RTCW if this update required the original to run. I agree with him, it seems very odd that this is standalone.
My issue isn't with the "regular" special edition, it's that everyone is convinced that there will be a "special" special edition after all the movies have been released, and so are avoiding the "regular" special edition.
I KNEW this was going to happen. With so many people getting burned on special editions, people won't buy the original releases anymore. Now, the studios are practically obligated to make special editions, which further reinforces people's avoidance of the standard edition. I honestly think the DVD market is permanently fucked up by this, I can't see any way that the studios can reverse the assumption that all movies that were at least decent will have special editions, so there's no point in buying it when it's first released. I'm sure it was a tremendous moneymaker when they started, but now Hollywood's shortsighted greed has obligated them to waste money printing a non-special edition that no one wants, and filming special filler, just so that people will believe them when they release the real version.
Okay, you've got a good guess there. But the.wav would still have the same quality as the original, it's just the mp3 that'd be degraded, right? So instead of compressing it to a standard 128 kbps mp3, you'd want to either use a lossless compresion, or a really high quality (256 mp3, or quality 8+ ogg) lossy compression. It wouldn't be CD quality, but it should be indistinguishable from the original.aa file.
For psuedo ripping, my thinking was that it could be done in better than realtime, and you could also do a whole bunch of files in a batch, rather than having to manually start and stop your recorder at the beginnings and ends of each tracks. I suppose a clever program could probably get similar functionality out of the play-record technique too though.
As an aside, where are these.aa's cropping up? I've never bought any digital, compressed music to date, so my experience with these DRM formats is limited at best, but I'm curious who's using this stuff.
How does the sound quality deteriorate? It's a direct digital copy, isn't it? The only way the sound quality could deteriorate is when it's being burned to the cd (because of some kind of DRM watermark), not when it's being ripped. Besides, if you can burn it to cd (even just once), it should be trivial for someone to write a program that pretends to burn to cd, but instead just writes that.wav to your hard drive.
kazaa is slow as shit and labor intensive if you're trying to get good quality.
Not anymore. Many of the songs I've searched for recently have actually shown that the most popular 192 kbps copy has more users sharing than the most popular 128 kbps copy. As little as 6 months ago I would have agreed with you, but as the recording industry has dragged their feet on this, the black market (black free resource pool?) has continued to improve to the point where I'm not sure a private solution would ever be able to compete.
In this example, they've already said that they're unable to secure permission to use the works of major artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It's obvious that the RIAA members will never be able to offer the same catalog that Kazaa can (which is to say, all music ever put on CD). There's too much legal entanglement with copyrights that go back 75 years.
Okay, what if as you ate more and more ribs, they started bringing you ones that had less and less meat? As someone pointed out above, this is a bait and switch. The service you get in the trial period (when you have no previous history) is not the same as the service you'll get subsequently, and NetFlix never tells you this. You are encouraged to believe it's just your imagination, or that your buffer just happens to have more popular movies in it right now than when you started out.
Yes, keeping a large buffer keeps you from having no movies at all, but if you'd rather see movie A, a moderately popular movie, they should tell you that keeping a large buffer will likely mean that you'll never see movie A, because renting movies B, C, D, and so on from your buffer will always keep your ranking too low to get movie A. Yes, having a large buffer of movies you want to watch more or less equally is good, but adding movies you only have a minor interest in is bad.
There is a reason that NetFlix has not disclosed how their ranking works: because if people knew about it, they'd all just cancel at the end of every month and start up again at the beginning of the next. Any business plan which depends on the ignorance of its customer base is eventually doomed to fail, because someone will figure it out (as has happened here).
P.S. As an aside, in case people are wondering, I do not have a NetFlix subscription, I'm not bitter at them for any reason. I just think that this kind of business practice is despicable, dishonest, and quite possibly illegal.
I think we all agree that this makes good business sense from NetFlix's perspective. People who rent the least are probably in most danger of cancelling. They make the most profit on low volume accounts. People who only rent really hard to get movies will have a low volume and will therefore see their priority rise.
However, what's upsetting about this is that it's not made public by NetFlix. They advertise "unlimited rentals," but penalize you for renting a lot. They encourage you to keep a large buffer of movies so that if your first choice isn't avaliable, you'll get a second, third, fourth, or lower choice, but they don't tell you that this will decrease your priority. That second point, in particular, is rather infuriating, because they're telling you to do something that is directly against your best interest if you want that first choice movie at some point!
If NetFlix can't make money from people who rent 20 movies a month, they need to set an upper limit, or charge a per movie cost. If the business model of a mail order rental place is inherently unsustainable, then they need to admit that, liquidate their company, and cash out. Being deceptive about the priority in which movies are rented is simply unacceptable.
it appears we need a new case or two at the highest level to reaffirm our rights to fair use in parody.
We did, the Aqua "Barbie Girl" case recently confirmed fair use. The American Greetings Company knew they were wrong in sending this out, but they didn't care. They figured that with a little intimidation, they would have a good chance of convincing the PA people to yank the pic. If it didn't work, then what have they lost?
This is why it's important to make these companies realize that sending out C&D letters to people when you have no legal justification will result in bad publicity. Furthermore, they need to be shown that this bad publicity will do more harm to them than the original work.
With Mother's Day just around the corner (May 11th), this is an easy boycott to participate in. Make sure not to buy cards from American or Carlton. By the time the next holiday rolls around, the situation will probably be resolved.
Between Penny-Arcade and Slashdot readers, there are probably enough people to make a difference in their Mother's Day card sales, and unlike boycotting the entire movie industry, this is a really easy one to do. Also, unlike with an MPAA member boycott, they won't simply be able to attribute declining sales to increasing piracy.
So buy Hallmark, tell your friends to do likewise, and let the American Greetings Company know you're doing it. Maybe we can start to teach companies that in the information age, sending out indiscriminate C&D letters in the hopes of intimidation will cause more harm than good to their brand names.
Sorry if I'm telling you something you already know, but there's a reason that the Pentium was called "Pentium" instead of "586." A court case found that they could not trademark a 3 digit number, so other companies were free to call their chips 486, or 486-compatible. Pentium is a trademarked term.
As for why they don't come up with a new trademarkable name, I'm really not sure. I suppose they figure that "Sexium" would just get too many giggles and not be taken seriously, so any new name would have to be just pulled out of their ass. After all the time spent getting people who know nothing about computers to learn the term "Pentium," I don't think they want to have to start all over again. For the most part, they'd rather keep the marketing advantage of numbers (so that people know "4 is better than 3") while prefixing it with a trademarked term, so that other people can't copy their naming scheme.
I recall hearing that the Chevrolet Nova was less than a hot selling vehicle in the Hispanic market because "no va" means, well, "no go", not exactly the best name for your next car.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's just an urban legend.
Because the Quicktime player (at least for windows) is an ugly, clumsy piece of shit that bugs you about giving them money every 5 movies or so.
Quicktime is hardly the anti-christ, but it's one of the most closed and controlled video formats in widespread use these days (as bad as Real or WMV).
Slashdot Mirror
Argument #1: Perhaps once upon a time, the argument about whether it should be Linux or GNU/Linux centered around whether it was insulting to Linus or not. Now though, I think the more important issue is that calling it GNU/Linux would be slighting all the other hundreds upon thousands of applications that run on a standard Linux box. Even if whittle it down to just the really big projects, there's still dozens. The KDE/GNU/Linux example is a good one; most of us would probably have to call our operating system something like Red Hat/KDE/Mozilla/Open Office/Xfree86/GNU/Linux. Perhaps from RMS's point of view, GNU/Linux makes sense, because it sounds like about all he uses are GNU apps. For most of us though, that's not the case.
No, it's inside tags, at least that's what I'm getting when I check the page source (and the example code given in the article also has tags). Could it just be the fact that the input type is "crash?" That's such an absurd vunerability, it borders on parody. Anyone have a good explanation of what's going on?
Actually, Caldera has approximately tripled since announcing this lawsuit. The one day loss was a blip. That being said, the only reason it's gone up is that otherwise, the company had no prospects at all. This at least is a shot in the dark.
Likewise with Aladdin, you can make Aladdin movies, but if in your movie Aladdin had a pet monkey, the princess had a pet tiger, and Jaffar had a pet parrot, you'd probably be hearing from Disney's lawyers.
Actually, it's not loans, it's the stock market. America has 1/3rd of the world's economy, but fully 1/2 the total market capitalization. Yes, the Euro may make Europe a moderately more attractive investment market, but it's not going to destroy the US. Besides, given all the infighting about tax rates and the like, I'm honestly not convinced that Europe will be able to hold it together in the long run.
If you don't normally buy cards anyway, well good for you, you don't need to reply to this telling me about how you're superior because of it. Maybe you'd like to buy a Hallmark card anyway, just so that AGC's market share as a percentage of money spent on greeting cards this month falls, maybe not, up to you. But for those of you who were planning on buying a card for your mother anyway, how about checking the brand on the back first?
"Your most exciting day on a movie set is your first day. Your most boring day is every day which follows."
So in other words, just another day in the life, huh? :)
Well, the Rocket Guy isn't in IT, he's mainly a toy inventor. For that matter, I wouldn't call Carmack or Rutan IT guys, though "nerd" is probably appropriate. Who else are you thinking of as an IT guy trying to go into space?
Certainly in the days when circumcision was believed to prevent various infection it was done by parents to their sons. Few had any moral problem with that. Indeed, given the standard age range, nationality, and gender of the /. audience, I'd bet that fully half the people in this discussion were circumsized. If there were a new set of procedures that were believed to help children, but which could only be done before the child is able to make its own decisions, I have little doubt that we'd overcome our initial reservations.
I think what the parent meant was that it would help increase retail sales of the original RTCW if this update required the original to run. I agree with him, it seems very odd that this is standalone.
My issue isn't with the "regular" special edition, it's that everyone is convinced that there will be a "special" special edition after all the movies have been released, and so are avoiding the "regular" special edition.
I KNEW this was going to happen. With so many people getting burned on special editions, people won't buy the original releases anymore. Now, the studios are practically obligated to make special editions, which further reinforces people's avoidance of the standard edition. I honestly think the DVD market is permanently fucked up by this, I can't see any way that the studios can reverse the assumption that all movies that were at least decent will have special editions, so there's no point in buying it when it's first released. I'm sure it was a tremendous moneymaker when they started, but now Hollywood's shortsighted greed has obligated them to waste money printing a non-special edition that no one wants, and filming special filler, just so that people will believe them when they release the real version.
For psuedo ripping, my thinking was that it could be done in better than realtime, and you could also do a whole bunch of files in a batch, rather than having to manually start and stop your recorder at the beginnings and ends of each tracks. I suppose a clever program could probably get similar functionality out of the play-record technique too though.
As an aside, where are these .aa's cropping up? I've never bought any digital, compressed music to date, so my experience with these DRM formats is limited at best, but I'm curious who's using this stuff.
How does the sound quality deteriorate? It's a direct digital copy, isn't it? The only way the sound quality could deteriorate is when it's being burned to the cd (because of some kind of DRM watermark), not when it's being ripped. Besides, if you can burn it to cd (even just once), it should be trivial for someone to write a program that pretends to burn to cd, but instead just writes that .wav to your hard drive.
Not anymore. Many of the songs I've searched for recently have actually shown that the most popular 192 kbps copy has more users sharing than the most popular 128 kbps copy. As little as 6 months ago I would have agreed with you, but as the recording industry has dragged their feet on this, the black market (black free resource pool?) has continued to improve to the point where I'm not sure a private solution would ever be able to compete.
In this example, they've already said that they're unable to secure permission to use the works of major artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It's obvious that the RIAA members will never be able to offer the same catalog that Kazaa can (which is to say, all music ever put on CD). There's too much legal entanglement with copyrights that go back 75 years.
Yes, keeping a large buffer keeps you from having no movies at all, but if you'd rather see movie A, a moderately popular movie, they should tell you that keeping a large buffer will likely mean that you'll never see movie A, because renting movies B, C, D, and so on from your buffer will always keep your ranking too low to get movie A. Yes, having a large buffer of movies you want to watch more or less equally is good, but adding movies you only have a minor interest in is bad.
There is a reason that NetFlix has not disclosed how their ranking works: because if people knew about it, they'd all just cancel at the end of every month and start up again at the beginning of the next. Any business plan which depends on the ignorance of its customer base is eventually doomed to fail, because someone will figure it out (as has happened here).
P.S. As an aside, in case people are wondering, I do not have a NetFlix subscription, I'm not bitter at them for any reason. I just think that this kind of business practice is despicable, dishonest, and quite possibly illegal.
Actually, even better would be to just cancel your account and open a new one every month.
However, what's upsetting about this is that it's not made public by NetFlix. They advertise "unlimited rentals," but penalize you for renting a lot. They encourage you to keep a large buffer of movies so that if your first choice isn't avaliable, you'll get a second, third, fourth, or lower choice, but they don't tell you that this will decrease your priority. That second point, in particular, is rather infuriating, because they're telling you to do something that is directly against your best interest if you want that first choice movie at some point!
If NetFlix can't make money from people who rent 20 movies a month, they need to set an upper limit, or charge a per movie cost. If the business model of a mail order rental place is inherently unsustainable, then they need to admit that, liquidate their company, and cash out. Being deceptive about the priority in which movies are rented is simply unacceptable.
We did, the Aqua "Barbie Girl" case recently confirmed fair use. The American Greetings Company knew they were wrong in sending this out, but they didn't care. They figured that with a little intimidation, they would have a good chance of convincing the PA people to yank the pic. If it didn't work, then what have they lost?
This is why it's important to make these companies realize that sending out C&D letters to people when you have no legal justification will result in bad publicity. Furthermore, they need to be shown that this bad publicity will do more harm to them than the original work.
Between Penny-Arcade and Slashdot readers, there are probably enough people to make a difference in their Mother's Day card sales, and unlike boycotting the entire movie industry, this is a really easy one to do. Also, unlike with an MPAA member boycott, they won't simply be able to attribute declining sales to increasing piracy.
So buy Hallmark, tell your friends to do likewise, and let the American Greetings Company know you're doing it. Maybe we can start to teach companies that in the information age, sending out indiscriminate C&D letters in the hopes of intimidation will cause more harm than good to their brand names.
As for why they don't come up with a new trademarkable name, I'm really not sure. I suppose they figure that "Sexium" would just get too many giggles and not be taken seriously, so any new name would have to be just pulled out of their ass. After all the time spent getting people who know nothing about computers to learn the term "Pentium," I don't think they want to have to start all over again. For the most part, they'd rather keep the marketing advantage of numbers (so that people know "4 is better than 3") while prefixing it with a trademarked term, so that other people can't copy their naming scheme.
Willie: Lunchlady Doris, have ye got any grease?
Doris: Yes, yes we do.
Willie: [ripping shirt] Then grrrease me up, woman!
Doris: Okey-dokey.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's just an urban legend.
As long as we're on the subject:
Donatello: Bossa Nova! ... Cowabunga?
Michelangelo: Bossa Nova?
Donatello: Chevy Nova?
Michelangelo: Cowabunga!
Quicktime is hardly the anti-christ, but it's one of the most closed and controlled video formats in widespread use these days (as bad as Real or WMV).