Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I read there. Mostly this stems from the fact that in any topic on which I am an expert, I can generally stumble across several very glaring errors. Of course, reading topics on which I am not an expert, I find myself to be generally entertained and educated-- provided that I don't think about the likelihood of errors in those articles. I will grant that the errors usually don't take away from the overall education that a novice would receive.
With a staff editing the articles for content, fixing some of the more glaring errors, and selecting the more stable articles, I think a Wikipedia tome will nicely bridge the gap between meatspace and cyberspace. Keep in mind, not everyone has Internet connection at all times, nor is Wikipedia guaranteed to be functioning 100% of the time.. DNS errors, routing problems, etc.. they all occur. The last couple of years, have begun an interesting transition of merging between various forms of entertainment and education. It's no longer divided into books (paper), tv/radio (static electronic entertainment), and Internet (chatting, web forums, other forms of dynamic entertainment). You have tv shows producing extra content for web playing, you have individual content publishers using youtube and other outlets to publish stuff that would never otherwise have an audience, you have radio shows (NPR, etc) offering podcast downloads, you have paper books also being published electronically (Kindle, Googlebooks, etc), and now you have an electronic encyclopedia almost ironically making the jump to paper edition.
Call me an old fashioned geek, but I like paper, and given the chance, I'd buy a Wikipedia print edition.
I didn't see a reference [in linked article] to percentage of sale paid to Wikimedia, but found one here. My kneejerk reaction is that if only 5% of the sale price ends up in the pockets of Wikimedia: that sounds a little thin to me. The article does note that a staff of ten was required to edit the articles for content and length, but it still sounds like the publisher is profiting perhaps a bit more than normal off of the work of others. And knowing that many people will likely purchase the reference to support Wikipedia, it would be nice to see around 10-15% gross sale returned to the author (or, in this case, to Wikipedia).
My ballpark of "10-15% of gross" comes from the fact that although I am not in the literary world, I do work in entertainment (aka: cinema), and it's common for DVD producers to receive between $1.50 and $4 on each sold copy. On two of my films I receive around $3.50 after each wholesale transaction (when a chain retailer buys copies at $12/each wholesale to sell for $19.99 on their shelves). The second film in question was offered distribution to WalMart, and because of the bulk they buy in, the deal with them was closer to $1.50. (In the end, for artistic reasons that had to do with creating a specially "WalMart-friendly" edited version, we passed on the WalMart deal). I wonder if someone in book publishing can speak to whether the numbers I'm used to from video publishing are generally commensurate? I don't know what the cost-of-goods-sold for books is, so perhaps it's substantially high enough that it pushes authors' margins to a fraction of what they are in video publishing, but my kneejerk reaction is that 5% is too low.
Maybe the college kids here in the US could learn a thing or two from this. Why provoke the beast when nobody has to know about your trading? Who says this isn't already widely taking place? Private DC hubs come to mind. Additionally, I can assure you there are many private FTP servers, sitting on fat pipes, maintained and expanded (content-wise) by groups of like-minded individuals. I am speaking from past experience in this case, and knowing human nature.. if some of my nerd friends did this in college, then many others are doing the same currently. The RIAA just goes after the lowest common demoninator, which in many cases means people sitting on common P2P apps, sharing the latest crappy music/films.
It's sort of like any other enforcement.. the coke dealer on the corner is easy to bust, but the guy who is moving kilos of product to the hedgefund managers in the downtown highrise? Well, he's a lot more under the radar.
Oh, the delicious amusement that struck me at seeing this article about sleep deprivation appear at 3:30AM (Pacific time zone, United States).
In all seriousness, despite being a major geek (I'm posted to slashdot at 3am on a Sunday, that should be geek-cred enough!), I decided to get rid of my HDTV (and in fact, stop watching TV alltogether) as an experiment. Although I miss The Daily Show, Colbert, and a few others, I've found I actually prefer not having it.. and as a rather shocking side effect, I actually keep better hours now. Suddenly I realized that the insomnia I've had since I was 13 or so, is at least in large part, related to certain stimuli. TV being one of them. As you can probably tell by the fact that I'm awake at 3:30AM on a Sunday, the Internet is an even bigger culprit.. and I'm in the process of working out how I can dial back its hold on me.
So what would be the average of both noble philanthropist and devious scammer? I'd say: Human Being.
There is a great book by a primatologist named Franz De Waal ("Our Inner Ape"), and the book largely deals with this subject, by speaking at lengths to the behaviors of various primates. The conclusion is, of course, that humans are not innately good or evil-- we have the capacity for both compassion and uncaring selfishness.
Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. If an item's correct price is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation.
So, um, basically, their policy allows for them to cancel orders at their discretion. Which is approximately what it said in 2001, when I placed an order for 4 plasma TVs they had priced at $27/each. A few days later, they cancelled my order (along with the others of several others I know who were hoping for cheap TVs!). This has happened many times before with Amazon-- although by many I mean "several, that I am aware of," which is probably really good, considering the sheer volume of sales Amazon does. So, basically, nothing to see here.. move along. The product was priced incorrectly, they didn't charge anyone, they cancelled the orders. This is common practice for Amazon and other merchants.
Jeeeeez people, calm down. As of composing this, about 75% of the comments are complaining of digg similarities, the new discussion system, blah blah. Calm down, people.. it's still slashdot. As best I can tell, they've just debuted a new section (idle.slashdot). You can still post your retarded memes (In soviet Russia our new CSS web 2.0 overlords welcome I, for one), and otherwise go about your typical slashdot business.
Back to the actual article.. I'd never heard of computer.com.. I guess it would help if I watched the superbowl.. but, yea, I don't. After viewing all the ads in TFA, some are decent (and I've seen re-run later), and some aren't terribly memorable (the salesgenie ad looks like something a 12 year old kid could storyboard in about an hour). Most of the dotcom ads are from companies I'm aware of (monster, pets.com, etc), although I never heard of computer.com or ourbeginning.com.
I tried to do some research on computer.com to see what its story was (currently a doorway page for a linkfarm).. and as best I can tell, it burned out right away (Seattle PI story from 2yrs later). (They raised $6M+ in venture funding, and blew $3M on the superbowl ads). There's even a 3yr old/. story that has computer.com in the comments, but TFA doesn't seem to mention computer.com directly (and the linked "video dot-bombs" from TFA doesn't seem to work for me). I'm curious if anyone here knows the full story?
Being in the film industry, I work in footcandles usually and not lumens, but If I recall correctly the correlation between them is close (I'm not a cinematographer, so lighting is secondary to my normal job function). A 'birthday cake candle' in a pitch black room, will produce 1 foot candle of light at-- wait for it.. 1 foot. If you put a 1-foot-square surface (like a 12" x 12" piece of paper) 1 foot away from that candle, it will be hit with "1 lumen"
A 'normal' candle produces about 15 lumens. Incandescent bulbs (normal lightbulbs) produce about 15-18 lumens *PER WATT*. So this projector is roughly equivalent to
Now, there are claims of a 50" projection (diagonal, I assume) from this-- no specification as to how far from the projection source the 'screen' is, but light works on the inverse square law-- basically, as you double the distance from a given light source, you get a square root of intensity. So if this sucker threw 10FC at 1 foot, at 2 feet that intensity has dropped to 3.2. At 4 feet, 1.8. So if that 50" screen requires you to be 8 feet back.. forget about it.
Overall, this sounds like a cool little geek gadget, but as other posters have said, probably just another example of cellphones trying to do too much (too poorly;). If they can increase the light output significantly, it might be useful for something other than showing someone really low brightness web pages shined onto a piece of whitepaper 10" away while in a darkened room.
Apologies if I screwed up any of my tutorial, as I said, I don't paint directly with light, I just admire the guys who do.
I was going to mod this thread too, but decided I wanted to respond instead. If you look at my past postings, you'll see 95% of them are +4 or +5.. I make a concerted effort to only post to slashdot when I feel I have something useful to share. I am not a troll, and I hope you can read my post with all of this in mind.
Sharing needles isn't a factor? That's exactly how my sister caught it...
I'm sorry to hear your sister died-- it's difficult to lose anyone you care about, especially long before you'd expected to have to prepare for their loss. That said, his point was that sharing needles isn't a factor *if* AIDS (the breakdown of the immune sistem) isn't a bloodborne illness. No one disputes that hiv exists (afaik), just that hiv is the true cause of AIDS. I am not a doctor, a medical researcher, or a virologist-- my understanding is that of a lay person. If I recall, Duesberg has pointed out that hiv is in a family of retroviruses that are all rather benign. It definitely exists, and I don't think Duesberg or others are denying this; just contesting the correlation between hiv, and persons dying of immune system breakdowns.
So some HIV-positive people never get AIDS? Stop the presses! It's a miracle! No one in the history of the world has ever been a carrier of disease and never shown symptoms of it before... [SNIP] A disease that simulates another disease? Oh, how extraordinary!
Again, I'm not a virologist, and the last time I knew any of this information with better than an extremely casual recollection was a long time ago (when I watched a documentary centered around Duesberg and his contentions). That said, Duesberg has some pretty elegant arguments about various rules and tenets of virology (tenets that are held true by all scientists, afaik), and hiv does appear to break several of them. In previous instances (such as Scurvy), when medicine *thought* it had finally found a virus that broke these rules, eventually it was revealed that indeed the rules remained unbroken and the cause was elsewhere. Combine that with the curious way in which statistics are gathered (people who die of "AIDS" but don't have hiv, and are nicely lumped into some other statistical category to keep the status quo).
The fact of the matter, in my opinion, is that there is some compelling, or at least interesting evidence in support of Duesberg-- and no one can say he is not intelligent, respected, and qualified enough to raise these sort of questions. I'm not a virologist, so I can't refute or support them, but I can listen with an open mind. I sure as hell still practice safe sex, and I definitely would not inject myself with hiv tainted blood (but some doctors have, and afaik none have died of AIDS yet-- although I occasionally google trying to see if the status on this has changed). The point is that there is some argument to be made in support of Duesberg and his theories, and there is no harm in listening and examining these theories with an open mind (and for this reason he has the support of several Nobel prize winners, etc). I find it a little upsetting that some doctors and researchers who do not support the party line about where AIDS comes from, are ignored, their careers tainted, and all research continues in one direction. These are intellectuals dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and advancement of medicine-- they aren't making these claims for attention: they genuinely believe we've made a mistake somewhere along the line, and it's probably in our best interest to at least hear them out (which is why a host of publications have featured articles by Deusberg.. as wikipedia notes: "His letters and commentary on the subject have since been published in other journals including Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS, AIDS Forschung, Biomedicine and Pharmaco
Bloomberg quotes the number at 200k units for the first day.. 1800 stores at just under (averaging) 1000 units each, with another 72,000 units moved by AT&T stores. If you check the stock online right now on Apple's site, you'll see that around half of the stores are currently out of stock (90% of CA sold out). I can't say how many stores were restocked nationwide, by I know most California stores were restocked on Saturday for sure, and perhaps Sunday (i'm just guessing here, though). I don't think it's particularly unfair to assume 200k units for day one, 100k for day two, 50k for day three. At this point, as you said, I'm now pulling numbers out of my ass, but you don't have to develop a complex algorithm to see that there is still a lot of demand, and (if Apple has the stock) they can easily move 300k units this next week. JCR is even on my "enemies" list (apparently he's said some stuff before that I really didn't care for, haha, since I don't move many people to enemy status), but what he said here is perfectly fair IMO.
I'm not trying to shift blame at all. I said myself that 25% of the phones I purchased had activation problems. But I don't posit that as evidence that 25% of *ALL* iphones have had activation problems. Look at the replied to my last three comments (which all got modded +5, btw), and you'll find the exact people i'm talking about who may have clicked "my phone is still unactivated!" when they don't even own one. (for the lazy, comments: here | here | here)
Replied to those comments, you'll see people who said they would laugh at me/whomever they saw on the street using an iPhone, people calling me stupid/dumb, calling those in lines "emo retards," calling those in line "suckers," etc. Now, most people who choose not to buy an iPhone just do so out of logical choice, and that's the extent of their involvement.. but there most definitely is a vocal minority that feels slighted by Apple.. I really don't know exactly why, but I can say for sure that when I spent $600 a piece on my unlocked Treos (as did many others a few years ago), I don't recall a sizable portion of people calling me retarded/dumb/etc. The fact is a lot of people online have some sort of irrational distaste for the iPhone, and for those that buy it. And I don't believe that 40% of the people who bought the phone so far are still without service (as noted in the poll). I suspect it's in the single digit percentile, which still sucks if you're in that group, but 40% it isn't. I even posted a link to the Apple discussion page that has hundreds if not thousands of relies from people with activation problems.. but Apple is quickly approaching the "million iPhones sold" mark, and I don't imagine that of those million there will be several hundred thousand that take 48+hrs to navigate an activation quagmire. But hey, maybe I'm just lucky in my experiences. Engadget even noted themselves that they've activated 6 iphones without any problems.
I am aware of the activation problems, especially after seeing this looooong thread on Apple's own forums. However, with regard to the engadget poll, I would be wary of its results-- there are many people who are "haters" of the Apple products, of the iPhone, etc, and I suspect many people who don't own iPhones are responding anyway saying they have activation problems, to skew the poll. My experience has been generally good.. bought 4 phones (I discussed yesterday), and three of them activated almost immediately. My primary phone, our biz dev guy's phone, our operations director.. no problem. The fourth, got the notorious "we need more time to complete this activation" (I was porting a second line, after porting my primary line from t-mobile). After about 12 hours, it started receiving texts, and within 24hrs it was ringing at the correct number. I called t-mobile tonight to cancel my service (40hr mark, or so) and they told me the second number has yet to fully release and to call back tomorrow to confirm it released and my service was fully cancelled.
I admit not to have much technical knowhow with respec to the inner workings of this process, but I don't imagine it's entirely any one aspect.. AT&T, Apple, etc. It's probably due to the slowness of every vendor involved (those releasing numbers, etc) and the sheer volume of registrations over the last 72hrs.
Honestly, I don't know WHAT THE F happened. Jobs himself said when announcing the iphone release date that those wishing to buy it should "go to an AT&T store.." there were questions about whether Apple would sell it at all on launch date. Then in the days before the release, I saw a lot of talk on the 'net about people lining up at Apple stores, and ZERO people lining up at AT&T.
As some who saw my posts 3 days ago may have noted, i was very excited for the release of the iphone, and i bought four of them. However, this was GROSSLY mishandled by Apple not making it patently clear that Jobs had misspoke (or whatever) earlier. My plan to go to the AT&T owned local store was thwarted when one of our guys went down there (I was in meetings all day) check the line, then reported to me that he was told the store didn't have ANY iPhones at all, but was giving out "vouchers."
By this time the local Apple store was a madhouse. I'd dropped in around noon on my way to a meeting, and it had around 150 people in line (this is a not-so-very-well-known one, inside a crappy mall). By the time I got out of meetings and adjusted the buying plan, it was almost 8. The store ran out with around 200 people still ahead of me in line.
I got up this morning at 8am, and went to the store when it opened. I was the 42nd through the door, and bought 4 of the remaining 18 4GB phones (the 8GBs were all gone). Everyone behind me in line was told a shipment would arrive "later today sometime" and they could wait. No one got out of line and left.
Now that I have the iPhone, i'm as impressed as I hoped i'd be (and glad I bought three more for my colleagues), although it certainly could use some minor software updates (minor tweaks to the UI.. adding of buttons, landscape mode for the keyboard in other than Safari, etc).. but the pinch/stretch zoom, animations, etc are all phenomenal. The phone is very impressive, but does give a few feels of "beta," and the fact that some of the software even between our 4 phones is different suggests to the phones are still "development build" and several major revisions will be pushed through itunes software updates.
Overall, I am very pleased with the phone.. and less than pleased with Apple's management of the whole thing (I mean, it's their reputation here.. not AT&T's.. if anything I feel bad for AT&T, as it seems they may have been screwed out of phones originally due them so that the Apple stores could garner some publicity)
I will also say that the Apple store employees were applauding for us as we entered the store this morning. Really people.. APPLAUSE? WTF. It's a fricking phone, I'm not shaving my head for charity or doing something noble... I'm an American jackass spending $2k on phones because they can play H.264, have a nice UI, and won't crash, LOL. Also, for what it's worth, T-mobile has had my monthly payments for 3yrs now, and I *NEVER* have service (and I live in a major, populated, affluent part of Los Angeles). My treo/blackberry constantly say "no service" in my house. Today I have 5bars on my iPhone. Now, maybe this is just luck of the draw, and i'll have crappy reception in place that t-mobile rocked, but so far, I have zero regrets.
Re:Don't believe the hype
on
All Things iPhone
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I mentioned the negatives because I figured the positive were obvious-- they're the details we've all known for a while, and the ones that get most exposure in the 34838483 stories on/. and elsewhere. The negatives you hear, well, on many sites like Engadget, these are often spurious, or at best they're speculations. The negatives I pointed out really do exist, but aren't the end of the world (for me), and I figured maybe other readers would want to hear my take. I don't consider the price a negative. I spent $500 on my blackberry, and around $700 on my Treo (back in the day), so Apple's price is right about what I'm willing to pay for a good smartphone.
"except for the select few reviewers that have actually used an iPhone can know that the UI is better"
Anyone who had watched the apple tour video can tell you the UI is lightyears ahead of Blackberry, Treo, etc. Even the commercials make this apparent. And as I said, I'm willing to put some faith in certain reviewers (Pogue, etc), and they have all said positive things about the majority of the phone's features.
"How anyone could be sure that the iPhone doesn't crash as "often" as existing smart phones on the market is beyond me"
My Treo would endure around 3-5 crashes PER DAY. My blackberry doesn't crash, but has gotten considerable slower over time, and freezes occasionally (and this always seems to be at the exact wrong moment). I am not someone who grants corporations a lot of faith, but Apple is one of the few who has earned my faith. They're products aren't know for being cheap, but their UI and industrial design are both industry leading, and stability is an important factor to them. This is evidenced in the lack of third party apps-- that's what causes many other phones crash 10 times a day (instead of the normal once or twice if you're only using the native apps). Apple has earned enough credit with me that I'm willing to stake $500 on their product being solid. Apple doesn't have the best reputation for 1st gen devices, but I've had no issues with my Macbook Pro, so I'm willing to take that "gamble" again.. some aren't. Incidentally, the only other company that I can think of that I've decided to buy a product without even seeing it in person, was my Lotus, and that was for the same reasons. And I was very happy I made the purchase.
"How can you know that the iPhone is worth the money or even decent?"
I can't "KNOW" anything about the iPhone, really. What I do "KNOW" is that apple has, in the past, built many products I am very happy with, and has earned a reputation for quality. So yes, it's a gamble, but I believe the odds are handicapped in my favor. Incidentally, if you're tempted to call me an Apple zealot.. I'm making this post from an Opteron box running XP64 Corp. I tend to believe in the right tool for the right job-- in this case, I don't feel like the blackberry is the right tool for me, and even if the iPhone isn't [exactly] either, it's as close as anything will be for a while.
It seems TFS has now been corrected from the mysterious future, but I took the time to compose my oh-so-informative post, so I'm going forward anyway, haha. Unless Samzenpus is in Australia (where it wouldn't be night right now), it's still the 27th, which is the night before the night before the iPhone is released. That extra "night before" missing from TFS might seem inconsequential, but remember kids-- if you're buying an iPhone, don't get off work early [thurs] TOMORROW night, get off work early on Friday June 29 to get in linein time.
I'm going to send one of our employees to get in line (for myself and three others) around noon, heh. Sure, I wish it had GPS and 3G, but since I'm coming from a BB8700, which doesn't have GPS (nor 3G), nor did my Treo before that, I'll live. And so far I'm encouraged by the reviews from Pogue and Mossberg (etc) discussed here yesterday. I've been closely watching engadget (etc), and believe the reviews to confirm that many of those sites (such as engadget) spreading negative rumors like "two thumb touchscreen typing was impossible to do, and our anonymous source gave up after a day or two" are really just sensational speculation for driving viewers to the site. It seems the screen takes some getting used to, but not nearly on the level that some "anonymous sources" have characterized. I'm also a bit disappointed in the family pricing.. it's not considerably cheaper for my own phone + my partner's on the same plan, versus individual plans. If they had made corporate/family pricing a little more attractive, I'd be inclined to buy some for our employees. The paltry 200 txt msgs standard to each plan is also annoying (so now I'll have to drop $10 or $20 per phone for extra). But even still, I'm firmly in the demographic that is willing to pay extra for the phone, the service, just for the UI (and non-crashyness) that Apple will bring to the table. This will hopefully have a very nice positive net effect-- I suspect most iPhone users will be very happy, and all other companies will now be pushed to improve their products or lose customers.
You're completely correct. First of all, the phrase "angel investor" should never be used to accompany a five digit figure --even "venture capital" is kindof out of place. Secondly, if they're investing (up to) $20k into a startup, it is they who are failing the IQ test. [in my experience] Serious venture investors want to see startups that have already bootstrapped a significant amount of funding (at least six if not seven figures), have PhDs onboard, etc. Now, obviously some industries and ideas have a much larger barrier to entry than others. For instance, I'm in the cinema field, where a cutting edge product might cost between $50k (low end) and $1M (high end). So designing, manufacturing (etc) these products has a much larger barrier than say, the guy who has a bright idea for the next digg.com or whatever web-two-point-oh site is hot this week (where $20k might actually pay a brilliant developer to write much of the code needed). But, even using the American Idol analogy-- if you were going to invest in a singer, someone who doesn't have any sofware/hardware development needed, just needs the cash to get into a studio and get recorded, that alone would cost more than $20k.
Twenty grand really is peanuts. Hell, some venture capital groups have proposal fees that can easily run a few thousand dollars (that the startup needs to pay just to present the business plan to them), not to mention cookie-cutter research for business plans alone can easily run $5-10k (I won't even get into custom research).
My advice if you need $20k of investment capital? Put it on your Visa (worked for Under Armor). Selling off a chunk of anything you genuinely believe to be a good idea should only be considered when you have no other available means to bring that idea to fruition.
I am also not a lawyer, but I don't believe what you are positing would fall under fair use.
In 1989, Kinkos was found guilty of copyright violation for copying substantial portions of textbooks (up to 100 pages at a stretch), and fined $1.9M plus court costs.
Basically (as I understand it) there are several factors that fall into the test for fair use. First, is whether the use is for commercial or non-profit use. In this case, copying the music would probably pass the test. The second test is whether the work is "creative" or "informational" in its origin. In this case, the deck would be stacked against a student copying the average RIAA CD for "educational" purposes, as the work itself is probably of a creative nature. The third factor is the scope of the portion used. Simply put, the less you use, the more chance it is fair use. So copying a whole CD wouldn't pass this test. Copying a whole "hit" song probably wouldn't either. There was an actual case where a church choir director was found guilty of copyright infringement for copying essentially all of the lyrics (or something like that) from a song, arranging it to his music, and distributing copies to his choir. It was found that despite his good faith desire (not to infringe), he was still infringing. I recall the famous instance of Gerald Ford's memoirs as well, where only a few hundred words of his 100,000 word work were reprinted, and the supreme court found in his publisher's favor.
So.. in summary, I think you are mistaken. It (copyright law) doesn't state what you think it does, and the test for fair use definitely isn't "explicit" (as you said).. it is rather subjective. Nice shell game, though. Anyone who is a real lawyer, feel free to respond and repudiate my whole post;)
you have made this statement in multiple places in this discussion. I have tried to verify the veracity of your claims, however google finds nothing, and the ny court law server is throwing errors when i query it, but the ny court system web site specifically has a "how to defend myself when i cannot afford a lawyer" pdf, which might indicate you are incorrect (..if a lawyer is free to anybody in any court, why would you even need a pdf guide to defending yourself pro se.. EVERYONE would just take the free lawyer). Unfortunately it crashes both firefox and ie, so i'll never know what it contains.
and you have the gall (in another post) to call other states "redneck" ? tell your 'redneck state' to hire some better sysadmins from the "crazy redneck" states i've lived in where one is NOT provided an attorney by the civil courts;)..(redneck places like.. you know.. CA.. WA..)...so if you can find a cite (or a new england lawyer can reply and confirm/deny), because this sounds somewhat implausible to me. in my experience, even in CRIMINAL court, getting access to a free lawyer is very difficult unless you are up on very serious charges or completely indigent. for instance, in WA, one must show bank records to the court (etc) to prove one has no means of income, etc.. and even then they provide you with an attorney, you must agree to pay something like $350-500 to their firm for representing you.
so, since everyone here seems to disagree with you, I would respectfully ask for you to cite your source.. I am quite interested to find out if this is true. As of yet, I am under the impression that nothing is free in the US legal system.
I'm sure I won't be the only person to reply and point out that hours of national TV exposure (and subsequent stories, etc) are worth at LEAST $2M. As they say, "no press is bad press.."
Furthermore, think about how many people (on the fringes of their target demographics) that hadn't heard of ATHF are now keenly aware of the show? With the movie coming up.. yea.. $2M is cheap.
FTFA:
"Ms. Coakley said the amount was more than the state would have obtained through litigation. The settlement shields the companies from civil or criminal liability by state and local agencies, Ms. Coakley said."
..and frankly, in the end, they may not have been liable for any of this anyhow.. since it was mostly just the Boston police/whomever being semi-retarded. But $2M is a small price to pay for the publicity they got, and now the goodwill of paying "more than their fair share" towards homeland security and what the authorities even term as "goodwill funds."
Too bad ATHF jumped the shark a bit (IMHO) after season 3. And even more bad that the two poor schmucks working for the ad agency are still charged with crimes. They should be set free, and whatever moron phoned in a litebrite as a "bomb" (and the corresponding police moron who agreed with him) should be looking at potential liability. WTF is wrong with our government. Does anybody remember the post-9/11 homeland security debacle with Tom Ridge reccomending people use duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect themselves from terrorists.. and then several people dying by asphyxiating themselves in their own homes? The sad fact is that our society has become so stupid and centered around sensationalist events that terrorists don't even need to make bombs anymore.. just scatter throughout several major cities a few dozen briefcases with litebrites affixed to them, and watch the panic ensue.
Based on their behavior here, Microsoft may also already own the patent on having brass balls!
A quick USPTO search doesn't find any specifically covering brass balls as big as these ones, so look for them to file for that patent pretty soon. Amusing sidenote.. I actually did search, and did come across this. And a backup (less amusing) source if first goes down.
I agree with your assessment of why they are aiming at a uniform agreement between all the major providers. (and I also agree that the parent is probably missing this point)
But the principle you explained is fundamentally flawed. (Don't worry, I know you didn't think of this principle, and I'm not criticizing you.. I simply want to point out some problems with it)
It is akin to saying, "hey, drugs are bad, so let's all make a rule saying no one will sell drugs anymore. In fact, to deter people, let's make another rule saying you go to jail if you do!"...and with that, America's drug problems were solved!
The point is, it's a matter of supply and demand. If google, msn, yahoo all agree to provide the whole truth and nothing but the truth to chinese citizens.. and to refuse to turn in chinese bloggers (etc).. i suspect they will find themselves firewalled. And then one of the lower guys on the totem pole will climb to the top in china. Either an engine with a lower market share, such as Ask/AltaVista/etc will step up, or perhaps google.cn will just magically DNS resolve to a state-run search engine.
I think MSFT/GOOG/Y! are doing the right thing by agreeing to resolve to not do BadThings[tm], but this is only a step, and won't solve the problem that China doesn't want its people to read/see/say certain things. Maybe faced with the efforts involved in bypassing MSFT/GOOG/Y!, this might at least soften China's resistance somewhat (information wants to be free, and they will have to face and accept this at some point), but I don't see the proverbial dam busting anytime soon.
I am sorry.. i was modding your post insightful, and the trackpad on my macbook made the mouse cursor "jump" and it landed on troll RIGHT AS I CLICKED.
i am now replying to kill the modpoint i applied to you as being a troll. Sorry.
(and fuck, this pisses me off, because I try to only post when I have some particular insight to share.. and now i will have this post on my userpage. I like the new web2.0ish drop down moderation menu.. but it *REALLY* needs to have an undo feature)
FTFS: "Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."
Medial tasks? I think you mean menial tasks. Although there are such things as medial equations in algebra, I believe, but I don't think you were referring to those.
I hate to go into grammar police mode, but it bugs me when people misunderstand the usage of common phrases by replacing one or more words with another. I have actually heard people say "for all intensive purposes," hahaha. (as opposed to "for all intents and purposes"). And then there are all the weird expressions we do use, that are redundant or just make no sense: hot water heater, end result, safe haven, advance warning, vin number, atm machine.
let's look at Colbert Report and The Daily Show. These run on one of the smaller cable-only networks (Comedy Central), and many/. readers should be familiar with them. Daily show has a team of 40+ writers (iirc) and Jon Stewart (the "face" of The Daily Show) makes $1.5M+/yr (last I heard). Now, surely by doing a weekly show instead of a daily one, you could probably operate with substantially less writers (maybe three or four, if they are quite good), and maybe the face of your podcast is even going to be as comedically talented as Stewart (which is very doubtful, the guy is a genius). But there are still so many other elements to the production. Assuming you're broadcasting in standard def or below (320x240), you could get away with having simple DV cameras ($3k/each), of which you'll need at *LEAST* two for coverage, and probably would want three. Lighting will mean several thousand watts of very hot incandescent lights, or more expensive fluorescents. Cameramen. Production staff (cue card/teleprompter guy, boom operators, etc). Editing (equipment, trained editor, etc). A set. It gets expensive very quickly.
The bottom line is, shows like The Daily Show and Colbert Report have millions of dollars of budget per year, and even their day to day production values are pretty crappy. Comedy Central may run a lot of teaser compositing done by Interspectacular, but for the most part the graphics in the shows we're talking about are pretty low in quality (and this is coming from productions who have millions of dollars to play with.. if they have trouble coming up with slick graphics on a show-to-show basis, imagine the hurdles you will face).
Even if you're lucky and you already own a lot of the equipment and posess many of the skills needed, you will still be several orders of magnitude below anything produced for TV nowadays. The only place where video podcasts may excel is in giving people *SUBSTANCE* that they can't find on tv-- a different opinion or commentary from what you normally hear from broadcast media, access to interviews and coverage of subjects that would never make it on tv (because they are too specialized, or too tabboo or whatever the case). For instance, a Vegan Cooking Podcast may be able to draw many viewers simply because even the most specialized shows (on the cooking channel) don't ever cover vegan foods (let alone regularly devote a timeslot to it).
Video podcasts can definitely outperform traditional broadcast media in some ways, but to even imagine that they will supplant/usurp regaulr television is naive. (I know one post mentioned "goodbye to regular tv" and another mentioned this would be a "good opportunity" for new media.. so I want to make it clear I am not combining those posts inside my head.. re: post #2, this could indeed be a good opporunity for new media.. but even under the best circumstances, it won't even draw a fraction of a percent of users away from watching American Idol [which is what i am trying to say by agreeing with my parent post])
However, let me temper my analysis by saying that obviously some videos on YouTube, with low production values, have garnered hundreds of thousands or even (in a few cases) millions of views. It would be unlikely that all but a handful of video podcasts could regularly do this themselves (other than LonelyGirl15 and a few select others, most of these videographers don't have repeat success), but some might see this type of success.. which, when measured against the daily viewing of even reruns of Alton Brown or MythBusters, may not shatter any records, but it's still pretty impressive.
As someone who has done a lot of independent videography.. (spending one to two years shooting and traveling just to put together a film wit
After reading the linked "details" article, I am at a loss to tell whether or not this will work with HD-Tivo. I've wanted to buy one of these for a long time (and they've recently hit the market, but at $700ish I can't justify the cost unless I have some way to archive my programing (and Tivo2Go is not offered for HDcontent). HD-DVD and BluRay are both non-starters at the moment, whereas HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc all play assloads of HD content all the time (including many movies that aren't out on DVD yet, as well as their own series such as Deadwood, Dexter, etc).
So can anyone tell me if this actually brightens the prospects of being able to use a series 3 HD Tivo to record HD shows and then archive them offline for storage? I did RTFA but the jargon about headers and address bytes and whatnot got a little heavy for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I read there. Mostly this stems from the fact that in any topic on which I am an expert, I can generally stumble across several very glaring errors. Of course, reading topics on which I am not an expert, I find myself to be generally entertained and educated-- provided that I don't think about the likelihood of errors in those articles. I will grant that the errors usually don't take away from the overall education that a novice would receive.
With a staff editing the articles for content, fixing some of the more glaring errors, and selecting the more stable articles, I think a Wikipedia tome will nicely bridge the gap between meatspace and cyberspace. Keep in mind, not everyone has Internet connection at all times, nor is Wikipedia guaranteed to be functioning 100% of the time.. DNS errors, routing problems, etc.. they all occur. The last couple of years, have begun an interesting transition of merging between various forms of entertainment and education. It's no longer divided into books (paper), tv/radio (static electronic entertainment), and Internet (chatting, web forums, other forms of dynamic entertainment). You have tv shows producing extra content for web playing, you have individual content publishers using youtube and other outlets to publish stuff that would never otherwise have an audience, you have radio shows (NPR, etc) offering podcast downloads, you have paper books also being published electronically (Kindle, Googlebooks, etc), and now you have an electronic encyclopedia almost ironically making the jump to paper edition.
Call me an old fashioned geek, but I like paper, and given the chance, I'd buy a Wikipedia print edition.
I didn't see a reference [in linked article] to percentage of sale paid to Wikimedia, but found one here. My kneejerk reaction is that if only 5% of the sale price ends up in the pockets of Wikimedia: that sounds a little thin to me. The article does note that a staff of ten was required to edit the articles for content and length, but it still sounds like the publisher is profiting perhaps a bit more than normal off of the work of others. And knowing that many people will likely purchase the reference to support Wikipedia, it would be nice to see around 10-15% gross sale returned to the author (or, in this case, to Wikipedia).
My ballpark of "10-15% of gross" comes from the fact that although I am not in the literary world, I do work in entertainment (aka: cinema), and it's common for DVD producers to receive between $1.50 and $4 on each sold copy. On two of my films I receive around $3.50 after each wholesale transaction (when a chain retailer buys copies at $12/each wholesale to sell for $19.99 on their shelves). The second film in question was offered distribution to WalMart, and because of the bulk they buy in, the deal with them was closer to $1.50. (In the end, for artistic reasons that had to do with creating a specially "WalMart-friendly" edited version, we passed on the WalMart deal). I wonder if someone in book publishing can speak to whether the numbers I'm used to from video publishing are generally commensurate? I don't know what the cost-of-goods-sold for books is, so perhaps it's substantially high enough that it pushes authors' margins to a fraction of what they are in video publishing, but my kneejerk reaction is that 5% is too low.
It's sort of like any other enforcement.. the coke dealer on the corner is easy to bust, but the guy who is moving kilos of product to the hedgefund managers in the downtown highrise? Well, he's a lot more under the radar.
Oh, the delicious amusement that struck me at seeing this article about sleep deprivation appear at 3:30AM (Pacific time zone, United States).
In all seriousness, despite being a major geek (I'm posted to slashdot at 3am on a Sunday, that should be geek-cred enough!), I decided to get rid of my HDTV (and in fact, stop watching TV alltogether) as an experiment. Although I miss The Daily Show, Colbert, and a few others, I've found I actually prefer not having it.. and as a rather shocking side effect, I actually keep better hours now. Suddenly I realized that the insomnia I've had since I was 13 or so, is at least in large part, related to certain stimuli. TV being one of them. As you can probably tell by the fact that I'm awake at 3:30AM on a Sunday, the Internet is an even bigger culprit.. and I'm in the process of working out how I can dial back its hold on me.
There is a great book by a primatologist named Franz De Waal ("Our Inner Ape"), and the book largely deals with this subject, by speaking at lengths to the behaviors of various primates. The conclusion is, of course, that humans are not innately good or evil-- we have the capacity for both compassion and uncaring selfishness.
So, um, basically, their policy allows for them to cancel orders at their discretion. Which is approximately what it said in 2001, when I placed an order for 4 plasma TVs they had priced at $27/each. A few days later, they cancelled my order (along with the others of several others I know who were hoping for cheap TVs!). This has happened many times before with Amazon-- although by many I mean "several, that I am aware of," which is probably really good, considering the sheer volume of sales Amazon does. So, basically, nothing to see here.. move along. The product was priced incorrectly, they didn't charge anyone, they cancelled the orders. This is common practice for Amazon and other merchants.
Damn kids, get off my lawn!
/. story that has computer.com in the comments, but TFA doesn't seem to mention computer.com directly (and the linked "video dot-bombs" from TFA doesn't seem to work for me). I'm curious if anyone here knows the full story?
Jeeeeez people, calm down. As of composing this, about 75% of the comments are complaining of digg similarities, the new discussion system, blah blah. Calm down, people.. it's still slashdot. As best I can tell, they've just debuted a new section (idle.slashdot). You can still post your retarded memes (In soviet Russia our new CSS web 2.0 overlords welcome I, for one), and otherwise go about your typical slashdot business.
Back to the actual article.. I'd never heard of computer.com.. I guess it would help if I watched the superbowl.. but, yea, I don't. After viewing all the ads in TFA, some are decent (and I've seen re-run later), and some aren't terribly memorable (the salesgenie ad looks like something a 12 year old kid could storyboard in about an hour). Most of the dotcom ads are from companies I'm aware of (monster, pets.com, etc), although I never heard of computer.com or ourbeginning.com.
I tried to do some research on computer.com to see what its story was (currently a doorway page for a linkfarm).. and as best I can tell, it burned out right away (Seattle PI story from 2yrs later). (They raised $6M+ in venture funding, and blew $3M on the superbowl ads). There's even a 3yr old
Being in the film industry, I work in footcandles usually and not lumens, but If I recall correctly the correlation between them is close (I'm not a cinematographer, so lighting is secondary to my normal job function). A 'birthday cake candle' in a pitch black room, will produce 1 foot candle of light at-- wait for it.. 1 foot. If you put a 1-foot-square surface (like a 12" x 12" piece of paper) 1 foot away from that candle, it will be hit with "1 lumen"
;). If they can increase the light output significantly, it might be useful for something other than showing someone really low brightness web pages shined onto a piece of whitepaper 10" away while in a darkened room.
A 'normal' candle produces about 15 lumens. Incandescent bulbs (normal lightbulbs) produce about 15-18 lumens *PER WATT*. So this projector is roughly equivalent to
Now, there are claims of a 50" projection (diagonal, I assume) from this-- no specification as to how far from the projection source the 'screen' is, but light works on the inverse square law-- basically, as you double the distance from a given light source, you get a square root of intensity. So if this sucker threw 10FC at 1 foot, at 2 feet that intensity has dropped to 3.2. At 4 feet, 1.8. So if that 50" screen requires you to be 8 feet back.. forget about it.
Overall, this sounds like a cool little geek gadget, but as other posters have said, probably just another example of cellphones trying to do too much (too poorly
Apologies if I screwed up any of my tutorial, as I said, I don't paint directly with light, I just admire the guys who do.
I was going to mod this thread too, but decided I wanted to respond instead. If you look at my past postings, you'll see 95% of them are +4 or +5.. I make a concerted effort to only post to slashdot when I feel I have something useful to share. I am not a troll, and I hope you can read my post with all of this in mind.
Sharing needles isn't a factor? That's exactly how my sister caught it...
I'm sorry to hear your sister died-- it's difficult to lose anyone you care about, especially long before you'd expected to have to prepare for their loss. That said, his point was that sharing needles isn't a factor *if* AIDS (the breakdown of the immune sistem) isn't a bloodborne illness. No one disputes that hiv exists (afaik), just that hiv is the true cause of AIDS. I am not a doctor, a medical researcher, or a virologist-- my understanding is that of a lay person. If I recall, Duesberg has pointed out that hiv is in a family of retroviruses that are all rather benign. It definitely exists, and I don't think Duesberg or others are denying this; just contesting the correlation between hiv, and persons dying of immune system breakdowns.
So some HIV-positive people never get AIDS? Stop the presses! It's a miracle! No one in the history of the world has ever been a carrier of disease and never shown symptoms of it before... [SNIP] A disease that simulates another disease? Oh, how extraordinary!
Again, I'm not a virologist, and the last time I knew any of this information with better than an extremely casual recollection was a long time ago (when I watched a documentary centered around Duesberg and his contentions). That said, Duesberg has some pretty elegant arguments about various rules and tenets of virology (tenets that are held true by all scientists, afaik), and hiv does appear to break several of them. In previous instances (such as Scurvy), when medicine *thought* it had finally found a virus that broke these rules, eventually it was revealed that indeed the rules remained unbroken and the cause was elsewhere. Combine that with the curious way in which statistics are gathered (people who die of "AIDS" but don't have hiv, and are nicely lumped into some other statistical category to keep the status quo).
The fact of the matter, in my opinion, is that there is some compelling, or at least interesting evidence in support of Duesberg-- and no one can say he is not intelligent, respected, and qualified enough to raise these sort of questions. I'm not a virologist, so I can't refute or support them, but I can listen with an open mind. I sure as hell still practice safe sex, and I definitely would not inject myself with hiv tainted blood (but some doctors have, and afaik none have died of AIDS yet-- although I occasionally google trying to see if the status on this has changed). The point is that there is some argument to be made in support of Duesberg and his theories, and there is no harm in listening and examining these theories with an open mind (and for this reason he has the support of several Nobel prize winners, etc). I find it a little upsetting that some doctors and researchers who do not support the party line about where AIDS comes from, are ignored, their careers tainted, and all research continues in one direction. These are intellectuals dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and advancement of medicine-- they aren't making these claims for attention: they genuinely believe we've made a mistake somewhere along the line, and it's probably in our best interest to at least hear them out (which is why a host of publications have featured articles by Deusberg.. as wikipedia notes: "His letters and commentary on the subject have since been published in other journals including Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS, AIDS Forschung, Biomedicine and Pharmaco
Bloomberg quotes the number at 200k units for the first day.. 1800 stores at just under (averaging) 1000 units each, with another 72,000 units moved by AT&T stores. If you check the stock online right now on Apple's site, you'll see that around half of the stores are currently out of stock (90% of CA sold out). I can't say how many stores were restocked nationwide, by I know most California stores were restocked on Saturday for sure, and perhaps Sunday (i'm just guessing here, though). I don't think it's particularly unfair to assume 200k units for day one, 100k for day two, 50k for day three. At this point, as you said, I'm now pulling numbers out of my ass, but you don't have to develop a complex algorithm to see that there is still a lot of demand, and (if Apple has the stock) they can easily move 300k units this next week. JCR is even on my "enemies" list (apparently he's said some stuff before that I really didn't care for, haha, since I don't move many people to enemy status), but what he said here is perfectly fair IMO.
I'm not trying to shift blame at all. I said myself that 25% of the phones I purchased had activation problems. But I don't posit that as evidence that 25% of *ALL* iphones have had activation problems. Look at the replied to my last three comments (which all got modded +5, btw), and you'll find the exact people i'm talking about who may have clicked "my phone is still unactivated!" when they don't even own one. (for the lazy, comments: here | here | here)
Replied to those comments, you'll see people who said they would laugh at me/whomever they saw on the street using an iPhone, people calling me stupid/dumb, calling those in lines "emo retards," calling those in line "suckers," etc. Now, most people who choose not to buy an iPhone just do so out of logical choice, and that's the extent of their involvement.. but there most definitely is a vocal minority that feels slighted by Apple.. I really don't know exactly why, but I can say for sure that when I spent $600 a piece on my unlocked Treos (as did many others a few years ago), I don't recall a sizable portion of people calling me retarded/dumb/etc. The fact is a lot of people online have some sort of irrational distaste for the iPhone, and for those that buy it. And I don't believe that 40% of the people who bought the phone so far are still without service (as noted in the poll). I suspect it's in the single digit percentile, which still sucks if you're in that group, but 40% it isn't. I even posted a link to the Apple discussion page that has hundreds if not thousands of relies from people with activation problems.. but Apple is quickly approaching the "million iPhones sold" mark, and I don't imagine that of those million there will be several hundred thousand that take 48+hrs to navigate an activation quagmire. But hey, maybe I'm just lucky in my experiences. Engadget even noted themselves that they've activated 6 iphones without any problems.
I am aware of the activation problems, especially after seeing this looooong thread on Apple's own forums. However, with regard to the engadget poll, I would be wary of its results-- there are many people who are "haters" of the Apple products, of the iPhone, etc, and I suspect many people who don't own iPhones are responding anyway saying they have activation problems, to skew the poll. My experience has been generally good.. bought 4 phones (I discussed yesterday), and three of them activated almost immediately. My primary phone, our biz dev guy's phone, our operations director.. no problem. The fourth, got the notorious "we need more time to complete this activation" (I was porting a second line, after porting my primary line from t-mobile). After about 12 hours, it started receiving texts, and within 24hrs it was ringing at the correct number. I called t-mobile tonight to cancel my service (40hr mark, or so) and they told me the second number has yet to fully release and to call back tomorrow to confirm it released and my service was fully cancelled.
I admit not to have much technical knowhow with respec to the inner workings of this process, but I don't imagine it's entirely any one aspect.. AT&T, Apple, etc. It's probably due to the slowness of every vendor involved (those releasing numbers, etc) and the sheer volume of registrations over the last 72hrs.
Honestly, I don't know WHAT THE F happened. Jobs himself said when announcing the iphone release date that those wishing to buy it should "go to an AT&T store.." there were questions about whether Apple would sell it at all on launch date. Then in the days before the release, I saw a lot of talk on the 'net about people lining up at Apple stores, and ZERO people lining up at AT&T.
As some who saw my posts 3 days ago may have noted, i was very excited for the release of the iphone, and i bought four of them. However, this was GROSSLY mishandled by Apple not making it patently clear that Jobs had misspoke (or whatever) earlier. My plan to go to the AT&T owned local store was thwarted when one of our guys went down there (I was in meetings all day) check the line, then reported to me that he was told the store didn't have ANY iPhones at all, but was giving out "vouchers."
By this time the local Apple store was a madhouse. I'd dropped in around noon on my way to a meeting, and it had around 150 people in line (this is a not-so-very-well-known one, inside a crappy mall). By the time I got out of meetings and adjusted the buying plan, it was almost 8. The store ran out with around 200 people still ahead of me in line.
I got up this morning at 8am, and went to the store when it opened. I was the 42nd through the door, and bought 4 of the remaining 18 4GB phones (the 8GBs were all gone). Everyone behind me in line was told a shipment would arrive "later today sometime" and they could wait. No one got out of line and left.
Now that I have the iPhone, i'm as impressed as I hoped i'd be (and glad I bought three more for my colleagues), although it certainly could use some minor software updates (minor tweaks to the UI.. adding of buttons, landscape mode for the keyboard in other than Safari, etc).. but the pinch/stretch zoom, animations, etc are all phenomenal. The phone is very impressive, but does give a few feels of "beta," and the fact that some of the software even between our 4 phones is different suggests to the phones are still "development build" and several major revisions will be pushed through itunes software updates.
Overall, I am very pleased with the phone.. and less than pleased with Apple's management of the whole thing (I mean, it's their reputation here.. not AT&T's.. if anything I feel bad for AT&T, as it seems they may have been screwed out of phones originally due them so that the Apple stores could garner some publicity)
I will also say that the Apple store employees were applauding for us as we entered the store this morning. Really people.. APPLAUSE? WTF. It's a fricking phone, I'm not shaving my head for charity or doing something noble... I'm an American jackass spending $2k on phones because they can play H.264, have a nice UI, and won't crash, LOL. Also, for what it's worth, T-mobile has had my monthly payments for 3yrs now, and I *NEVER* have service (and I live in a major, populated, affluent part of Los Angeles). My treo/blackberry constantly say "no service" in my house. Today I have 5bars on my iPhone. Now, maybe this is just luck of the draw, and i'll have crappy reception in place that t-mobile rocked, but so far, I have zero regrets.
I mentioned the negatives because I figured the positive were obvious-- they're the details we've all known for a while, and the ones that get most exposure in the 34838483 stories on /. and elsewhere. The negatives you hear, well, on many sites like Engadget, these are often spurious, or at best they're speculations. The negatives I pointed out really do exist, but aren't the end of the world (for me), and I figured maybe other readers would want to hear my take. I don't consider the price a negative. I spent $500 on my blackberry, and around $700 on my Treo (back in the day), so Apple's price is right about what I'm willing to pay for a good smartphone.
"except for the select few reviewers that have actually used an iPhone can know that the UI is better"
Anyone who had watched the apple tour video can tell you the UI is lightyears ahead of Blackberry, Treo, etc. Even the commercials make this apparent. And as I said, I'm willing to put some faith in certain reviewers (Pogue, etc), and they have all said positive things about the majority of the phone's features.
"How anyone could be sure that the iPhone doesn't crash as "often" as existing smart phones on the market is beyond me"
My Treo would endure around 3-5 crashes PER DAY. My blackberry doesn't crash, but has gotten considerable slower over time, and freezes occasionally (and this always seems to be at the exact wrong moment). I am not someone who grants corporations a lot of faith, but Apple is one of the few who has earned my faith. They're products aren't know for being cheap, but their UI and industrial design are both industry leading, and stability is an important factor to them. This is evidenced in the lack of third party apps-- that's what causes many other phones crash 10 times a day (instead of the normal once or twice if you're only using the native apps). Apple has earned enough credit with me that I'm willing to stake $500 on their product being solid. Apple doesn't have the best reputation for 1st gen devices, but I've had no issues with my Macbook Pro, so I'm willing to take that "gamble" again.. some aren't. Incidentally, the only other company that I can think of that I've decided to buy a product without even seeing it in person, was my Lotus, and that was for the same reasons. And I was very happy I made the purchase.
"How can you know that the iPhone is worth the money or even decent?"
I can't "KNOW" anything about the iPhone, really. What I do "KNOW" is that apple has, in the past, built many products I am very happy with, and has earned a reputation for quality. So yes, it's a gamble, but I believe the odds are handicapped in my favor. Incidentally, if you're tempted to call me an Apple zealot.. I'm making this post from an Opteron box running XP64 Corp. I tend to believe in the right tool for the right job-- in this case, I don't feel like the blackberry is the right tool for me, and even if the iPhone isn't [exactly] either, it's as close as anything will be for a while.
It seems TFS has now been corrected from the mysterious future, but I took the time to compose my oh-so-informative post, so I'm going forward anyway, haha. Unless Samzenpus is in Australia (where it wouldn't be night right now), it's still the 27th, which is the night before the night before the iPhone is released. That extra "night before" missing from TFS might seem inconsequential, but remember kids-- if you're buying an iPhone, don't get off work early [thurs] TOMORROW night, get off work early on Friday June 29 to get in line in time.
I'm going to send one of our employees to get in line (for myself and three others) around noon, heh. Sure, I wish it had GPS and 3G, but since I'm coming from a BB8700, which doesn't have GPS (nor 3G), nor did my Treo before that, I'll live. And so far I'm encouraged by the reviews from Pogue and Mossberg (etc) discussed here yesterday. I've been closely watching engadget (etc), and believe the reviews to confirm that many of those sites (such as engadget) spreading negative rumors like "two thumb touchscreen typing was impossible to do, and our anonymous source gave up after a day or two" are really just sensational speculation for driving viewers to the site. It seems the screen takes some getting used to, but not nearly on the level that some "anonymous sources" have characterized. I'm also a bit disappointed in the family pricing.. it's not considerably cheaper for my own phone + my partner's on the same plan, versus individual plans. If they had made corporate/family pricing a little more attractive, I'd be inclined to buy some for our employees. The paltry 200 txt msgs standard to each plan is also annoying (so now I'll have to drop $10 or $20 per phone for extra). But even still, I'm firmly in the demographic that is willing to pay extra for the phone, the service, just for the UI (and non-crashyness) that Apple will bring to the table. This will hopefully have a very nice positive net effect-- I suspect most iPhone users will be very happy, and all other companies will now be pushed to improve their products or lose customers.
You're completely correct. First of all, the phrase "angel investor" should never be used to accompany a five digit figure --even "venture capital" is kindof out of place. Secondly, if they're investing (up to) $20k into a startup, it is they who are failing the IQ test. [in my experience] Serious venture investors want to see startups that have already bootstrapped a significant amount of funding (at least six if not seven figures), have PhDs onboard, etc. Now, obviously some industries and ideas have a much larger barrier to entry than others. For instance, I'm in the cinema field, where a cutting edge product might cost between $50k (low end) and $1M (high end). So designing, manufacturing (etc) these products has a much larger barrier than say, the guy who has a bright idea for the next digg.com or whatever web-two-point-oh site is hot this week (where $20k might actually pay a brilliant developer to write much of the code needed). But, even using the American Idol analogy-- if you were going to invest in a singer, someone who doesn't have any sofware/hardware development needed, just needs the cash to get into a studio and get recorded, that alone would cost more than $20k.
Twenty grand really is peanuts. Hell, some venture capital groups have proposal fees that can easily run a few thousand dollars (that the startup needs to pay just to present the business plan to them), not to mention cookie-cutter research for business plans alone can easily run $5-10k (I won't even get into custom research).
My advice if you need $20k of investment capital? Put it on your Visa (worked for Under Armor). Selling off a chunk of anything you genuinely believe to be a good idea should only be considered when you have no other available means to bring that idea to fruition.
I am also not a lawyer, but I don't believe what you are positing would fall under fair use. In 1989, Kinkos was found guilty of copyright violation for copying substantial portions of textbooks (up to 100 pages at a stretch), and fined $1.9M plus court costs.
;)
Basically (as I understand it) there are several factors that fall into the test for fair use. First, is whether the use is for commercial or non-profit use. In this case, copying the music would probably pass the test. The second test is whether the work is "creative" or "informational" in its origin. In this case, the deck would be stacked against a student copying the average RIAA CD for "educational" purposes, as the work itself is probably of a creative nature. The third factor is the scope of the portion used. Simply put, the less you use, the more chance it is fair use. So copying a whole CD wouldn't pass this test. Copying a whole "hit" song probably wouldn't either. There was an actual case where a church choir director was found guilty of copyright infringement for copying essentially all of the lyrics (or something like that) from a song, arranging it to his music, and distributing copies to his choir. It was found that despite his good faith desire (not to infringe), he was still infringing. I recall the famous instance of Gerald Ford's memoirs as well, where only a few hundred words of his 100,000 word work were reprinted, and the supreme court found in his publisher's favor.
So.. in summary, I think you are mistaken. It (copyright law) doesn't state what you think it does, and the test for fair use definitely isn't "explicit" (as you said).. it is rather subjective. Nice shell game, though. Anyone who is a real lawyer, feel free to respond and repudiate my whole post
you have made this statement in multiple places in this discussion. I have tried to verify the veracity of your claims, however google finds nothing, and the ny court law server is throwing errors when i query it, but the ny court system web site specifically has a "how to defend myself when i cannot afford a lawyer" pdf, which might indicate you are incorrect (..if a lawyer is free to anybody in any court, why would you even need a pdf guide to defending yourself pro se.. EVERYONE would just take the free lawyer). Unfortunately it crashes both firefox and ie, so i'll never know what it contains.
;) ..(redneck places like.. you know.. CA.. WA..) ...so if you can find a cite (or a new england lawyer can reply and confirm/deny), because this sounds somewhat implausible to me. in my experience, even in CRIMINAL court, getting access to a free lawyer is very difficult unless you are up on very serious charges or completely indigent. for instance, in WA, one must show bank records to the court (etc) to prove one has no means of income, etc.. and even then they provide you with an attorney, you must agree to pay something like $350-500 to their firm for representing you.
and you have the gall (in another post) to call other states "redneck" ? tell your 'redneck state' to hire some better sysadmins from the "crazy redneck" states i've lived in where one is NOT provided an attorney by the civil courts
so, since everyone here seems to disagree with you, I would respectfully ask for you to cite your source.. I am quite interested to find out if this is true. As of yet, I am under the impression that nothing is free in the US legal system.
I'm sure I won't be the only person to reply and point out that hours of national TV exposure (and subsequent stories, etc) are worth at LEAST $2M. As they say, "no press is bad press.."
..and frankly, in the end, they may not have been liable for any of this anyhow.. since it was mostly just the Boston police/whomever being semi-retarded. But $2M is a small price to pay for the publicity they got, and now the goodwill of paying "more than their fair share" towards homeland security and what the authorities even term as "goodwill funds."
Furthermore, think about how many people (on the fringes of their target demographics) that hadn't heard of ATHF are now keenly aware of the show? With the movie coming up.. yea.. $2M is cheap.
FTFA: "Ms. Coakley said the amount was more than the state would have obtained through litigation. The settlement shields the companies from civil or criminal liability by state and local agencies, Ms. Coakley said."
Too bad ATHF jumped the shark a bit (IMHO) after season 3. And even more bad that the two poor schmucks working for the ad agency are still charged with crimes. They should be set free, and whatever moron phoned in a litebrite as a "bomb" (and the corresponding police moron who agreed with him) should be looking at potential liability. WTF is wrong with our government. Does anybody remember the post-9/11 homeland security debacle with Tom Ridge reccomending people use duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect themselves from terrorists.. and then several people dying by asphyxiating themselves in their own homes? The sad fact is that our society has become so stupid and centered around sensationalist events that terrorists don't even need to make bombs anymore.. just scatter throughout several major cities a few dozen briefcases with litebrites affixed to them, and watch the panic ensue.
Based on their behavior here, Microsoft may also already own the patent on having brass balls!
A quick USPTO search doesn't find any specifically covering brass balls as big as these ones, so look for them to file for that patent pretty soon. Amusing sidenote.. I actually did search, and did come across this. And a backup (less amusing) source if first goes down.
I agree with your assessment of why they are aiming at a uniform agreement between all the major providers. (and I also agree that the parent is probably missing this point)
...and with that, America's drug problems were solved!
But the principle you explained is fundamentally flawed. (Don't worry, I know you didn't think of this principle, and I'm not criticizing you.. I simply want to point out some problems with it)
It is akin to saying, "hey, drugs are bad, so let's all make a rule saying no one will sell drugs anymore. In fact, to deter people, let's make another rule saying you go to jail if you do!"
The point is, it's a matter of supply and demand. If google, msn, yahoo all agree to provide the whole truth and nothing but the truth to chinese citizens.. and to refuse to turn in chinese bloggers (etc).. i suspect they will find themselves firewalled. And then one of the lower guys on the totem pole will climb to the top in china. Either an engine with a lower market share, such as Ask/AltaVista/etc will step up, or perhaps google.cn will just magically DNS resolve to a state-run search engine.
I think MSFT/GOOG/Y! are doing the right thing by agreeing to resolve to not do BadThings[tm], but this is only a step, and won't solve the problem that China doesn't want its people to read/see/say certain things. Maybe faced with the efforts involved in bypassing MSFT/GOOG/Y!, this might at least soften China's resistance somewhat (information wants to be free, and they will have to face and accept this at some point), but I don't see the proverbial dam busting anytime soon.
I am sorry.. i was modding your post insightful, and the trackpad on my macbook made the mouse cursor "jump" and it landed on troll RIGHT AS I CLICKED.
i am now replying to kill the modpoint i applied to you as being a troll. Sorry.
(and fuck, this pisses me off, because I try to only post when I have some particular insight to share.. and now i will have this post on my userpage. I like the new web2.0ish drop down moderation menu.. but it *REALLY* needs to have an undo feature)
FTFS: "Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."
Medial tasks? I think you mean menial tasks. Although there are such things as medial equations in algebra, I believe, but I don't think you were referring to those.
I hate to go into grammar police mode, but it bugs me when people misunderstand the usage of common phrases by replacing one or more words with another. I have actually heard people say "for all intensive purposes," hahaha. (as opposed to "for all intents and purposes"). And then there are all the weird expressions we do use, that are redundant or just make no sense: hot water heater, end result, safe haven, advance warning, vin number, atm machine.
let's look at Colbert Report and The Daily Show. These run on one of the smaller cable-only networks (Comedy Central), and many /. readers should be familiar with them. Daily show has a team of 40+ writers (iirc) and Jon Stewart (the "face" of The Daily Show) makes $1.5M+/yr (last I heard). Now, surely by doing a weekly show instead of a daily one, you could probably operate with substantially less writers (maybe three or four, if they are quite good), and maybe the face of your podcast is even going to be as comedically talented as Stewart (which is very doubtful, the guy is a genius). But there are still so many other elements to the production. Assuming you're broadcasting in standard def or below (320x240), you could get away with having simple DV cameras ($3k/each), of which you'll need at *LEAST* two for coverage, and probably would want three. Lighting will mean several thousand watts of very hot incandescent lights, or more expensive fluorescents. Cameramen. Production staff (cue card/teleprompter guy, boom operators, etc). Editing (equipment, trained editor, etc). A set. It gets expensive very quickly.
The bottom line is, shows like The Daily Show and Colbert Report have millions of dollars of budget per year, and even their day to day production values are pretty crappy. Comedy Central may run a lot of teaser compositing done by Interspectacular, but for the most part the graphics in the shows we're talking about are pretty low in quality (and this is coming from productions who have millions of dollars to play with.. if they have trouble coming up with slick graphics on a show-to-show basis, imagine the hurdles you will face).
Even if you're lucky and you already own a lot of the equipment and posess many of the skills needed, you will still be several orders of magnitude below anything produced for TV nowadays. The only place where video podcasts may excel is in giving people *SUBSTANCE* that they can't find on tv-- a different opinion or commentary from what you normally hear from broadcast media, access to interviews and coverage of subjects that would never make it on tv (because they are too specialized, or too tabboo or whatever the case). For instance, a Vegan Cooking Podcast may be able to draw many viewers simply because even the most specialized shows (on the cooking channel) don't ever cover vegan foods (let alone regularly devote a timeslot to it).
Video podcasts can definitely outperform traditional broadcast media in some ways, but to even imagine that they will supplant/usurp regaulr television is naive. (I know one post mentioned "goodbye to regular tv" and another mentioned this would be a "good opportunity" for new media.. so I want to make it clear I am not combining those posts inside my head.. re: post #2, this could indeed be a good opporunity for new media.. but even under the best circumstances, it won't even draw a fraction of a percent of users away from watching American Idol [which is what i am trying to say by agreeing with my parent post])
However, let me temper my analysis by saying that obviously some videos on YouTube, with low production values, have garnered hundreds of thousands or even (in a few cases) millions of views. It would be unlikely that all but a handful of video podcasts could regularly do this themselves (other than LonelyGirl15 and a few select others, most of these videographers don't have repeat success), but some might see this type of success.. which, when measured against the daily viewing of even reruns of Alton Brown or MythBusters, may not shatter any records, but it's still pretty impressive.
As someone who has done a lot of independent videography.. (spending one to two years shooting and traveling just to put together a film wit
After reading the linked "details" article, I am at a loss to tell whether or not this will work with HD-Tivo. I've wanted to buy one of these for a long time (and they've recently hit the market, but at $700ish I can't justify the cost unless I have some way to archive my programing (and Tivo2Go is not offered for HDcontent). HD-DVD and BluRay are both non-starters at the moment, whereas HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc all play assloads of HD content all the time (including many movies that aren't out on DVD yet, as well as their own series such as Deadwood, Dexter, etc).
So can anyone tell me if this actually brightens the prospects of being able to use a series 3 HD Tivo to record HD shows and then archive them offline for storage? I did RTFA but the jargon about headers and address bytes and whatnot got a little heavy for me.