Microsoft has been trying to take over the world with their WMP formats. They've done this because by locking down the media so tightly, they can boast about how secure music is with WMP, playing into the RIAA/MPAA fears about piracy. All the while, the main reason is to lock the media companies into a proprietary format, and then they can charge a toll at every step of the digital chain (think of a VAT tax on media with all the money going to MS).
So if Apple knocks out the structural underpinnings for DRM, that essentially screws Microsoft. It locks AAC into place as the defacto commercial way of selling digital music, further enshrines MP3 as the default used by consumers, and leaves the WMA/WMP format as nothing more than a niche used by the Zune.
I have to admit, Apple is playing this beautifully. I'm guessing we may see a few more chairs thrown in Redmond if the major labels dump copy protection.
Why do I get the image of a server sitting in the pokey in Thailand?
No seriously...
Do people think Google officials should be sent to Thailand on extradition the way Australia sent alleged copyright criminals to the United States? Is this the same situation, or is it fundamentally different?
Companies bank on the fact that people generally want to be nice to each other. So they put in a system where you take nice people, make them CSR's, and then refuse to actually give them the authority to do anything other than take info and pass it to "tier 2" support of some kind. Tier 2 can charitably described in many instances as "throwing your complaint in the circular file and keep doing that until you stop calling".
I feel two ways about it... on one hand, who wants to add to the burden of some poor soul just trying to pay the rent. On the other hand, these people are the human shield encouraging large companies to treat customers poorly by counting on people's politeness.
Or to put it another way, if you manage to get 5% of the customers with a legitimate gripe to just drop the issue, you've made 5% more money. So, ethics be damned, and hire a bunch more minimum wage guys to take the fall.
"They also make the vast assumption that the angels are pointing to a treble clef, when there are many others such as the C clef and bass clef that were more common in the 15th Century."
That's true, but it doesn't matter since the relative spacing between the notes is the same. So the key moves up or down but the melody remains the same.
I'm not trying to defend it, and if nothing else, it's fun to watch the patterns of the sand how complex the patterns became at different pitches. Does that equal music? It might. People weren't dumber 600 years ago... they just didn't have access to Wikipedia.
When little Nancy wanted a dog, she went to her father and said "daddy, I want a pony". Her father looked at Nancy and smiled and said "Nancy, horses cost a lot of money". But Nancy persisted "DADDY,I WANT A PONY". Her father frowned a bit "Nancy, besides costing so much, we'd need a stable and the horse would have to be trained and cared for".
So Nancy threw herself on the ground started crying, screaming and kicking "DADDY, I WANT A PONY. WAAAH".
In desperation, the father said "Nancy, how about a nice dog instead?".
And with that, Nancy smiled and went back to her room. She got the dog she wanted in the first place.
"one of those problems has been their entry into the high-end electronics market, which has gone over like a lead balloon"
I have no idea if that's really true. But my experience at Wal-Mart has been that if you buy stuff that is generic and can be stamped out in china by one of a hundred factories, then Wal-Mart can be cheap. But when you compare prices on things that you can buy at Best Buy, Circuit City, Amazon, or any place that discounts high-end electronics, then Wal-Mart is often the most expensive place to purchase stuff.
And don't you think that if someone is going to spend $500 on electronics, they'll at least go to Amazon to check the price? It only takes 30 seconds.
I mean, if I can find it doing a 30 second search over at Sony, why can't the author, rather than implying that Blu-Ray players will be $1000 until 2008. The Sony BDP-S300 is due to be released in Summer 2007.
My experience is that I bought cheap replacement ink for a Canon printer, and it clogged the print heads, didn't last as long, and produced poor quality color. I ended up throwing them out. Instead, I shop at the warehouse clubs where you can typically save 33-50% on name brand inks.
I prefer Canon because it allows you to replace individual ink tanks (which can be slightly thrifter). HP tends to do all-in-ones, which is bad if they mix Black, since you'll go through black 2-3x as fast. Overall, HP's tend to be expensive to run for that reason. In fact, with HP's your best bet is to wait until the computer stores sell new HP printers for $15 after rebate, use up the ink and then throw away the printer. It feels terribly wasteful to do that, but the ink is so expensive for HP's that it's really the most economical way to own them.
Epson is worse, mainly because the ones I've owned tended to clog their print heads if you let them sit for more than a week or two. Then you run 2-3 cleaning cycles which used up the ink even faster. Back in the day of tractor feeds and impact printers, the joke was "Epson" was a Japanese word that meant "Paper Jam". I hope they've fixed that.
"Well, what a coincidence, so did all the CPU drivers; what are the odds, eh? "
But there's also a rubber band on the computer's car, no matter how well the computer drives and how badly you drive, you generally can catch up.
In a real race, if you run a terrible lap, you're 20-40 seconds behind. You have no chance of catching up. You're done. Unless it's NASCAR, there's no reason to run the rest of the race, and even in NASCAR, the only reason you run is because you get points for lapping.
Imagine making a space game where each move took months and years because space is really really big (you have no idea...).
So what's the right answer? Something completely accurate and deadly dull, or something that's silly and fun? This the age-old debate over computer game design.
"If they can remove the artist from the equation and make themselves feel like they're fighting a bad guy, they feel less guilty and ashamed for FUCKING OVER artists and their rights."
I agree... you'd think the RIAA would feel a little ashamed about screwing the artists, but as you say, they don't feel very guilty at all.
"They should prioritize their kids and raise them in the same way their parents did. "
Almost all parents do. And I think you'll find, if you look, is that in the past, when you were old enough to do work (which was probably as young as 6 or 8), you were sent to work from sun-up to sun-down in the fields. Or perhaps the 10 year old girl would be responsible for raising the children while mom worked in the fields. And parents did that because they themselves worked from sun-up to sun-down.
Life has been very hard for almost everyone for most of recorded history. The Ozzie and Harriet notion of child rearing is a post WW 2 phenomenon.
And parents today, as in generations past, do their best to raise their kids with the tools and time they have.
I think for the most part the analysts are lying when they say Microsoft or Sony is losing hundreds of dollars on each console. When you look into all these pricings, they generally including costs that are comparable to retail.
Not to mention that when you look at this article: http://www.ps3focus.com/archives/167 It claimed a $100 loss if Sony sold at $500. But the retail is closer to $600 suggesting at worst Sony is breaking even.
I say it's all nonsense. I think Sony & Microsoft like this analysis of pricing because people lap it up and think "Oh gee, for $600, I'm getting something worth almost twice as much! What a deal!". It plays on greed.
The only people who know how much the console makes (or doesn't make) aren't saying. Everybody else is talking out of their ass. Everybody.
But I don't think it was a nefarious plot; I just thought the bandwidth from my house back to Comcast was so slow that it didn't support VOIP very well. When I switched to FIOS it worked very well, except when I'm downloading a lot of stuff and the bandwidth gets saturated very quickly.
Comcast may be a lot of things, but I don't think they're smoothly run enough to support a conspiracy like this. And even if you accept Comcast is lowering the priority of Vonage packets, Vonage should disguise their packets better so it's harder for Comcast to spot the app running.
I decided to look for the 20G model since I saw the HD was user replaceable. The WiFi is nice, but I have no need.
But when I tried to buy one, none were available anywhere. I've never seen one at retail.
So it's too bad really... I figured on using the additional $100 to upgrade the HD, making the PS3 a good media extender. But it's pretty clear the 20G model was always the model for price comparison, and I believe it became a casualty of sonhy trying to get a bit rational about distributio of the PS3.
I think we'll see a reduced price PS3 by the fall in the United States, but it will not have hardware emulation for PS2. They'll do the same they did for the European release of the PS3 and use software emulation (perhaps making the early PS3's slightly more desirable?). It's going to be a tough year for Sony Games.
Maybe, just maybe, he should have ignored it to begin with.
And the reason I say that is not just for the practical reasons, but to teach his students the same thing. It's awfully hard to tell a bunch of guys to "just let it go, just let it drop" when you won't do the same thing.
The end result is a lot of lawsuits. What did the principal gain from all of this? Does he even have his dignity left at this point? All because he couldn't follow the advice that any parents tells their 8 year old. Ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has been trying to take over the world with their WMP formats. They've done this because by locking down the media so tightly, they can boast about how secure music is with WMP, playing into the RIAA/MPAA fears about piracy. All the while, the main reason is to lock the media companies into a proprietary format, and then they can charge a toll at every step of the digital chain (think of a VAT tax on media with all the money going to MS).
So if Apple knocks out the structural underpinnings for DRM, that essentially screws Microsoft. It locks AAC into place as the defacto commercial way of selling digital music, further enshrines MP3 as the default used by consumers, and leaves the WMA/WMP format as nothing more than a niche used by the Zune.
I have to admit, Apple is playing this beautifully. I'm guessing we may see a few more chairs thrown in Redmond if the major labels dump copy protection.
Why do I get the image of a server sitting in the pokey in Thailand?
No seriously...
Do people think Google officials should be sent to Thailand on extradition the way Australia sent alleged copyright criminals to the United States? Is this the same situation, or is it fundamentally different?
Companies bank on the fact that people generally want to be nice to each other. So they put in a system where you take nice people, make them CSR's, and then refuse to actually give them the authority to do anything other than take info and pass it to "tier 2" support of some kind. Tier 2 can charitably described in many instances as "throwing your complaint in the circular file and keep doing that until you stop calling".
I feel two ways about it... on one hand, who wants to add to the burden of some poor soul just trying to pay the rent. On the other hand, these people are the human shield encouraging large companies to treat customers poorly by counting on people's politeness.
Or to put it another way, if you manage to get 5% of the customers with a legitimate gripe to just drop the issue, you've made 5% more money. So, ethics be damned, and hire a bunch more minimum wage guys to take the fall.
"A rape can be simulated in SL just fine,"
Assuming the programmers allowed such a thing.
This is what happens when an idealist gets mixed up with politics.
They say politics is like sausage. You can't simultaneously appreciate the taste of sausage and know how it's made.
"They also make the vast assumption that the angels are pointing to a treble clef, when there are many others such as the C clef and bass clef that were more common in the 15th Century."
That's true, but it doesn't matter since the relative spacing between the notes is the same. So the key moves up or down but the melody remains the same.
I'm not trying to defend it, and if nothing else, it's fun to watch the patterns of the sand how complex the patterns became at different pitches. Does that equal music? It might. People weren't dumber 600 years ago... they just didn't have access to Wikipedia.
It's not rocket science, it's obvious. The price of a good is not related to the cost of producing that good, except in a very general way.
It's obvious if you think about it for a few seconds, really.
Start with the premise that every piece of information that is out there is "yours".
If you track a person for any reason, you must let that person know you're tracking them and what information you have about them. Even government.
That's all. Beyond that, you just need to let human nature and outrage do the rest. The privacy issue will be sorted out properly in no time.
"Sweep up--don't vacuum--all of the glass fragments and fine particles."
Is that feasible on a carpeted floor?
When little Nancy wanted a dog, she went to her father and said "daddy, I want a pony". Her father looked at Nancy and smiled and said "Nancy, horses cost a lot of money". But Nancy persisted "DADDY,I WANT A PONY". Her father frowned a bit "Nancy, besides costing so much, we'd need a stable and the horse would have to be trained and cared for".
So Nancy threw herself on the ground started crying, screaming and kicking "DADDY, I WANT A PONY. WAAAH".
In desperation, the father said "Nancy, how about a nice dog instead?".
And with that, Nancy smiled and went back to her room. She got the dog she wanted in the first place.
At BJ's club, canon's 3e cartridges (fairly common) cost about $11 for B&W, and about $25 for all 3 color cartridges.
Note the color cartridges are discrete, which is slightly cheaper in the long run.
"one of those problems has been their entry into the high-end electronics market, which has gone over like a lead balloon"
I have no idea if that's really true. But my experience at Wal-Mart has been that if you buy stuff that is generic and can be stamped out in china by one of a hundred factories, then Wal-Mart can be cheap. But when you compare prices on things that you can buy at Best Buy, Circuit City, Amazon, or any place that discounts high-end electronics, then Wal-Mart is often the most expensive place to purchase stuff.
And don't you think that if someone is going to spend $500 on electronics, they'll at least go to Amazon to check the price? It only takes 30 seconds.
I mean, if I can find it doing a 30 second search over at Sony, why can't the author, rather than implying that Blu-Ray players will be $1000 until 2008. The Sony BDP-S300 is due to be released in Summer 2007.
y /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-S tart?ProductSKU=BDPS300
Here:
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinit
Consumer Reports doesn't come to quite the same conclusion.
m puters/printers/printer-inks-7-06/off-brand-inks/0 607_printer-inks_off-brand-inks.htm?resultPageInde x=1&resultIndex=2&searchTerm=printer%20cartridge
m puters/printers/printer-inks-7-06/overview/0607_pr inter-inks_ov.htm
First off, they've received a lot of unusable 3rd party cartridges:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-co
And here, their recommendation is that the replacement inks are not quite as thrifty as they appear:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-co
My experience is that I bought cheap replacement ink for a Canon printer, and it clogged the print heads, didn't last as long, and produced poor quality color. I ended up throwing them out. Instead, I shop at the warehouse clubs where you can typically save 33-50% on name brand inks.
I prefer Canon because it allows you to replace individual ink tanks (which can be slightly thrifter). HP tends to do all-in-ones, which is bad if they mix Black, since you'll go through black 2-3x as fast. Overall, HP's tend to be expensive to run for that reason. In fact, with HP's your best bet is to wait until the computer stores sell new HP printers for $15 after rebate, use up the ink and then throw away the printer. It feels terribly wasteful to do that, but the ink is so expensive for HP's that it's really the most economical way to own them.
Epson is worse, mainly because the ones I've owned tended to clog their print heads if you let them sit for more than a week or two. Then you run 2-3 cleaning cycles which used up the ink even faster. Back in the day of tractor feeds and impact printers, the joke was "Epson" was a Japanese word that meant "Paper Jam". I hope they've fixed that.
"Well, what a coincidence, so did all the CPU drivers; what are the odds, eh? "
But there's also a rubber band on the computer's car, no matter how well the computer drives and how badly you drive, you generally can catch up.
In a real race, if you run a terrible lap, you're 20-40 seconds behind. You have no chance of catching up. You're done. Unless it's NASCAR, there's no reason to run the rest of the race, and even in NASCAR, the only reason you run is because you get points for lapping.
Imagine making a space game where each move took months and years because space is really really big (you have no idea...).
So what's the right answer? Something completely accurate and deadly dull, or something that's silly and fun? This the age-old debate over computer game design.
If you print a lot of color and can afford it, get a color laser printer. It's significantly cheaper to operate than any ink jet.
Regardless of your technology choice, don't purchase an HP.
There are lots of excellent choices out there. I'm not sure why you'd choose HP.
"If they can remove the artist from the equation and make themselves feel like they're fighting a bad guy, they feel less guilty and ashamed for FUCKING OVER artists and their rights."
I agree... you'd think the RIAA would feel a little ashamed about screwing the artists, but as you say, they don't feel very guilty at all.
"They should prioritize their kids and raise them in the same way their parents did. "
Almost all parents do. And I think you'll find, if you look, is that in the past, when you were old enough to do work (which was probably as young as 6 or 8), you were sent to work from sun-up to sun-down in the fields. Or perhaps the 10 year old girl would be responsible for raising the children while mom worked in the fields. And parents did that because they themselves worked from sun-up to sun-down.
Life has been very hard for almost everyone for most of recorded history. The Ozzie and Harriet notion of child rearing is a post WW 2 phenomenon.
And parents today, as in generations past, do their best to raise their kids with the tools and time they have.
It's a done deal (I think) that they'll remove PS2 hardware emulation to cut costs.
I think for the most part the analysts are lying when they say Microsoft or Sony is losing hundreds of dollars on each console. When you look into all these pricings, they generally including costs that are comparable to retail.
3 30,00.htm
Not to mention that when you look at this article:
http://www.ps3focus.com/archives/167
It claimed a $100 loss if Sony sold at $500. But the retail is closer to $600 suggesting at worst Sony is breaking even.
But then you look at this article:
http://news.cnet.co.uk/gamesgear/0,39029682,49285
Which suggests at $600 Sony is losing $240.
I say it's all nonsense. I think Sony & Microsoft like this analysis of pricing because people lap it up and think "Oh gee, for $600, I'm getting something worth almost twice as much! What a deal!". It plays on greed.
The only people who know how much the console makes (or doesn't make) aren't saying. Everybody else is talking out of their ass. Everybody.
"Running the cheaper Basic or Premium versions would be a violation of their user agreement."
Yea, and we shouldn't rip that sticker off the mattress either.
But I don't think it was a nefarious plot; I just thought the bandwidth from my house back to Comcast was so slow that it didn't support VOIP very well. When I switched to FIOS it worked very well, except when I'm downloading a lot of stuff and the bandwidth gets saturated very quickly.
Comcast may be a lot of things, but I don't think they're smoothly run enough to support a conspiracy like this. And even if you accept Comcast is lowering the priority of Vonage packets, Vonage should disguise their packets better so it's harder for Comcast to spot the app running.
I decided to look for the 20G model since I saw the HD was user replaceable. The WiFi is nice, but I have no need.
But when I tried to buy one, none were available anywhere. I've never seen one at retail.
So it's too bad really... I figured on using the additional $100 to upgrade the HD, making the PS3 a good media extender. But it's pretty clear the 20G model was always the model for price comparison, and I believe it became a casualty of sonhy trying to get a bit rational about distributio of the PS3.
I think we'll see a reduced price PS3 by the fall in the United States, but it will not have hardware emulation for PS2. They'll do the same they did for the European release of the PS3 and use software emulation (perhaps making the early PS3's slightly more desirable?). It's going to be a tough year for Sony Games.
Maybe, just maybe, he should have ignored it to begin with.
And the reason I say that is not just for the practical reasons, but to teach his students the same thing. It's awfully hard to tell a bunch of guys to "just let it go, just let it drop" when you won't do the same thing.
The end result is a lot of lawsuits. What did the principal gain from all of this? Does he even have his dignity left at this point? All because he couldn't follow the advice that any parents tells their 8 year old. Ignore it.
"It would keep some of the whiny teenager off the servers."
They don't want to kill off the business....