1) There will be no overlap between the services, so I either need both or I only get half the songs.
2) If they expire when the service is cancelled, I take it that I can't burn a CD for my stereo, my portable CD player, or my car.
What a shitty service. I will not be subscribing until it improves substantially. And if they want a LOT of people to subscribe, they had better move to a value ADDED business plan. If it just equals free sharing services, there wont be a lot of interest. They need to have some kinds of features that set it apart, as well as making it just as good as the free sharing services.
But, I don't think that the music labels want to do this. Intead, this service will be used in court as a weapon against better sharing services. (ie "see, there's no reason to steal music, we have this crappy legal service that can be used instead!")
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Can't you see that a vehicle which uses Dynamic Stability to be driven as an extension of your own body movements is a great innovation?
Not really, it just seems like a way to waste money. If this was some kind of research project to develop stable gryos for other applications (which it may prove useful for afterall), then we would all applaud it. But so WHAT if it can stand up on its own? So WHAT if it has a turning radius of zero?
Its three thousand dollars. It probably goes much slower than an electric bike (~20 mph) and probably has heavy batteries, just like an electric bike. It will be stolen within a weeks time if you leave it anywhere but locked in your garage (no matter what spiffy lock you use in public).
This is not revolutionary, although it seems to be quite a feat of engineering. What will be great are things like fuel cells instead of batteries. Weight is a real problem with any bike/scooter/moped powered by batteries. It will be revolutionary when you can buy something with this much electronics for a few hundred dollars. For now, I'm only slightly impressed.
This thing is probably expensive and weighs a ton. Oooh, it stands up on its own, how have I lived without it! If you want an electric personal transportation device, TH!NK about one of these instead.
Yes, and one thing about these bundles...there is no discount for buying games and controllers along with it. You pay full price for everything, you just have to lay out 500 isntead of 300 all at once. But, again...my friend has a bunch of kids, so she bought the console 4 games, and 3 extra controllers, plus the warranty (good idea since the xbox has a hard drive which is probably the most likely thing to go wrong). The package required three games and an accessory (maybe it was two accessories), so she needed more than that anyway.
And like you say...who wants an xbox without a football game, a shooter, and a racing or RPG game plus an extra controller for your friends? The DVD kit is probably popular too.
What microsoft is going is selling most consoles as part of a package....meaning, you have to get some number of games and accessories at the same time. This is no doubt the most profitable way to sell them.
A friend that was visiting about two weeks ago bought one for her kids...she has lots of them, so getting 3 games and an accessory was no problem along with the console, but this bumps the total price to $500.
Still, its interesting that they're available this year at all. Remember PS2 last year? Impossible to find!
Please tell me that YOU didn't put that in Michael! Are slashdot editors reforming their ways? Is there proofreading and grammar checking in our future? Will a SECOND editor be consulted on the editorial comments added to a story before it is posted?
Oh, good idea. Only the most deserving people should be defending against being screwed by the DMCA. After all, we might as well wait a few years until the DMCA has been used to destroy all academic research, and the RIAA/MPAA has complete control of the world, and THEN decide to bring a case.
Seriously, you should either thank your lucky stars that the EFF is doing this, since they're the ONLY people fighting these cases. And the challenges for civil rights were after many years of black people being screwed. Remember slavery? Segregation was pretty deeply entreanched in our society by then.
The DMCA is new. It needs to be challenged NOW, before it gets to be established law. Just because some moron judge didn't even listen to arguments doesn't mean that the EFF shouldn't sue. Ed felten is a legitimate researcher, and he is plenty sympatheic if that is your concern. Eventually, the EFF will get their day in court, try their case, and then we will see.
In the mean time, start litigating this stuff yourself or stop complaining if the only people who have the dollars and time to do it have a small setback.
Do you seperate your M&M's into groups of colors, and carefully eat them in order to keep an equal number of each color at all times? No one wants to have to remember whether the group/company they're looking for is registered as a trademark or first come first serve, etc. We don't need any pain-in-the-ass buerocracy that will determine if we're truly deserving of a specific TLD either. This just makes things confusing and annoying.
I think the big secret about the TLD system is that it isn't pefect, but it works as well as any other system would. Your system would not stop the lawsuits due to trademark confusion just because someone registered it as mcdonalds.fcfs.com instead of mcdonalds.tm.com. The only real problem with the DSN system is that it is hard to get the exact name you want. But that is going to be the case with any number of TLDs I believe, because people will buy them up either way.
Making people prove they deserve a domain is even worse....it takes time, and would be an anchor on the internet. I don't want to have to wait 2 weeks to get some pinhead to approve my registration application.
Unfortunately, big corporations have an advantage over an individual. Such is life.
I haven't seen anyone mention PVCS which is made by Merant. I used it this past summer on a project and it was great. It has a nice permissions system, and it has an interface in your web browser that looks like windows explorer. You can make complex folder systems, and it will mark things read only when you check them in, etc.
Ease of use was definitely the biggest reason I liked it. Check them out if you're shopping around.
1) You must know the people you work with for a while. A lot of IT people work with people for short chunks of time, then move on to the next project.
2) Well, chemistry. Lets face it, if you get along really well with your work people then you may well socialize outside work.
I was an intern this summer at a large company, and was working in a room with 6 other people. I think it was an unusual room in that we all got along really really well. We ate lunch together every day if possible, oftentimes people saw each other on the weekends, one day we went boating with our team lead, etc. This group, even though projects only last 4 months, had been together for about a year at that point, which was also unusual.
Police and firemen, etc. have this reputation for that kind of thing, but I think its really a product of your work environment. Socializing with their work mates and the community is mostly what they do, and the real firefighting and arresting people work is probably a very small portion of their time. IT in general isn't quite as good of an environment, but really its what you make of it.
First, if I go to a website and it tells me "Sorry, to read that article you need to send a micropayment of $0.03" I'm just going to head on out. This would have to be used by some major sites to ever get people to sign up in significant numbers, I think. Say MSNBC charges me for articles, or Yahoo charges for searching. That might get people to sign up for it....or, in my case I would just start using FoxNews and google. The point is, as long as there is a site with generally the same content that isn't using micropayments, I'm not going to bother.
Next, from the merchants point of view, how much is this going to cost me to accept micropayments? Its free for buyers, but there must be fees for sellers. Their website doesn't happen to mention any of this. To me, that indicates that maybe it isn't all that great a deal.
micropayments are a nice idea, but I think that it will never work.
Here's my proposal....we can all use our idle CPU cycles to send out massive amounts of spam preaching love and tolerance, and for the hungry people techniques for good agriculture.
All the worlds problems solved, just like that!
I haven't been able to nail it down
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 5, Funny
Well, I consider myself to be pretty far left, but I don't understand the big deal about globalism. It just seems like an excuse for some people to riot. Perhaps I just don't understand it....it seems like people are upset that loans to poor countries aren't being forgiven. Since they were loans and not gives, that seems like its expected.
I'm sure its much more complicated than that, but whatever their message is it isn't getting out. Protestors in seattle just looked like hooligans.
KaZaA has banner ads too, but they're barely noticable. Its not open source either. BUT, I suggest this because sometimes you just want what works, and my experience with kazaa has been great. I thought that napster pretty much sucked...it had a bad interface, my connections were unreliable, and I would get bad download speeds. Half the time I would end up with a partially recorded song once the file was downloaded. So far, kazaa has been fast, I always get the whole thing, and they have a much better selection and quantity than AIMster, etc.
So, I can see why a lot of people want to use limewire...but if this spyware thing rules it out for you, give kazaa a shot.
Windows makes it easy to install a "default" configuration, but makes it difficult for the user/administrator to fine-tune the configuration or to make it do something even slightly unusual
Well, for the average person there is no need for anything but a default installation. Honestly, as a user of both Windows and Linux and a computer person, I haven't really needed to do that much to windows, and when I have it has been because of a specific piece of hardware or software and I've had instructions on what to do. I'm not really sure about how to play with the registry or anything, but I've never needed to either.
These Linux is hard to install arguments are a red herring. It's true that most users could not install Linux without help, it's also true most users could not install Windows without help.
I would have agreed with this if it were win98, but only somewhat. Windows for me used to always be a pain in the ass to install. But, someone gave me a free copy of Win2k a while back, and when I installed it I had to do absolutely nothing. There were no prompts, nothing. It just installed without a hitch, which I've never had from microsoft before. I assume XP is as polished on the install. Of course, its a purely default installation, but at least it was no problem.
I think a top priority for linux needs to be supporting hardware and making it easy to install new hardware. I think its easy to use linux, but sometimes getting the system configured for a new piece of hardware is a several day process for me involving a lot of web searching and frustration. It shouldn't be that way.
Unless you have some legal claim to the name, I don't think there's much hope for you getting it back.
I think that a legal claim on a radio stations call letters and numbers is pretty obvious. This is not some ambiguous name like "clearwater," its pretty specific to that one radio station.
If the person who registered it wants to start a community site to discuss whats on that station, then MAYBE they would have a chance. But really, its a porn site now. So obviously, a legal claim has a good chance.
On the other hand, even though taking it back from someone after you've let it expire seems crappy, kdhxfm88.org isn't likely to be a domain that is useful to anyone but that radio station. If another station has those same call letters and number (which would defeat the purpose of call letters) then this guy is out of luck.
But if they accidentally let it expire and some squatter snapped it up, then they should get it back.
EFF didn't get involved in the Yahoo case because Yahoo has about 5 million lawyers who can handle it just fine. They're busy defending Prof. Felten, who doesn't have billions of dollars and a gigantic company to throw his weight around with.
For US sites, but the problem is that I think France could still fine/punish any Yahoo entity that is located IN france. All this does is say that if they send over a big fine to California, a judge there isn't going to make them pay it.
So, I suppose what this does is make Yahoo move any business interests located physically within france to somewhere else. Which is fine, because I doubt all of europe wants to exclude large portions of the internet sector from doing business within their borders.
2) large customers get benefits, real or imagined, from being a good customer of a company like microsoft
2) Bill Gates
working at a certain large company, there was a new project that the software development folks were working on planning. The business customer demanded.NET be used. This was before it was even released. At this point, the tech architect was willing to use windows, but just wanted to use regular microsoft products that had been out and that the developers were already familiar with. Finally, it looked like they were going to win and the customer would just have to go with it. Then, Bill Gates had the CIO fly out to meet with him, and within a few hours,.NET was back.
One of Linux's weak points is that in the world of big business, there aren't people that can leverage a new product like Microsoft can. I guess most people here would say thats a good thing, but it isn't helping fortune 500 companies choose to ditch microsoft.
A 100MB drive right now is about $180. A 10 petabyte drive would be how much? Oh, more than anyone on earth could afford. Not to mention all the technical barriers....
This is just geek fodder....Hey, we're using 48bit addressing. Which means you can have 10 petabytes of pr0n now!!! It just sounds cool is all, it doesn't mean anything practical.
But, impracticality is much more interesting, isn't it?
Is to do something else. I find myself in the exact same situation as you. And its even worse when I do summer internships. It takes something I enjoyed and turns it into mind-numbing god-awful work. I hate it.
So, my plan is to apply to law school. I'm still very interested in tech related constitutional issues. This may be something to think about for you as well....IP, contract law, first amendment stuff with filter, there is really a lot going on an a lawyer that understands this stuff should be kind of useful.
So, just an idea....maybe go into a field that doesn't pay very well. You live like a dirt poor college student now, just keep doing it for a while and save aggressively so you can switch to something else later with no regrets.
Those three points are EXACTLY correct. This is similar to how Ford's software development division works. They have a 4 month development cycle, and vary the resources and scope of the project to fit it in. Basically, someone comes in with a project and they figure out exactly what must be done. Then you prioritize the features, break it up into chunks that can be completed in 4 months, and allocate enough people to cover all of the chunks.
Of course, the hardest part here is defining the requirements exactly. And, the business customers aren't much help. Usually they have a vague description of the project, and don't really want to make the effort to define it adequately. So, when its contracted out to compuware, IBM, or someone, they are often times forced to bid without really knowing exactly. I think this is the real reason that projects so often run over budget, over schedule, or are just crappy products.
Thats not correct....the vast vast majority of SUVs are built on truck frames. Only a few of the newer models like Escape and CRV are built on car chassis. Almost everything compact and up is built on a truck chassis. Believe it or not, in these days of tank-like Yukons, the explorer is considered a compact SUV, so truck chassis probably make up a good 80%+ of the SUV's.
You are right that the car chassis isn't that important for rollover I think, its really just that the small SUVs aren't as tall. The car chassis makes them better for both vehicles in an accident though, in terms of crushing.
By the way, trucks have one of the worst rollover rates. This is a combination of them being tallish, and the characteristics of the average driver of pickups (as in, they drive more recklessly).
What really pisses me off is when they display that huge map of the counties in their viewing area, each color coded for the current weather when its storming. I mean, if there's a tornado, fine. But those maps for "severe" weather is irritating. And its even worse when they break into programming to tell me "Its raining really hard in a county no where near you!!!"
If there's a tornado, I would like to be warned. But if I'm watching TV its going to take some seriously hardcore rain to harm me INSIDE MY HOUSE! So no thanks on the "its raining" maps.
Slashdot Mirror
2) If they expire when the service is cancelled, I take it that I can't burn a CD for my stereo, my portable CD player, or my car.
What a shitty service. I will not be subscribing until it improves substantially. And if they want a LOT of people to subscribe, they had better move to a value ADDED business plan. If it just equals free sharing services, there wont be a lot of interest. They need to have some kinds of features that set it apart, as well as making it just as good as the free sharing services.
But, I don't think that the music labels want to do this. Intead, this service will be used in court as a weapon against better sharing services. (ie "see, there's no reason to steal music, we have this crappy legal service that can be used instead!")
Not really, it just seems like a way to waste money. If this was some kind of research project to develop stable gryos for other applications (which it may prove useful for afterall), then we would all applaud it. But so WHAT if it can stand up on its own? So WHAT if it has a turning radius of zero?
Its three thousand dollars. It probably goes much slower than an electric bike (~20 mph) and probably has heavy batteries, just like an electric bike. It will be stolen within a weeks time if you leave it anywhere but locked in your garage (no matter what spiffy lock you use in public).
This is not revolutionary, although it seems to be quite a feat of engineering. What will be great are things like fuel cells instead of batteries. Weight is a real problem with any bike/scooter/moped powered by batteries. It will be revolutionary when you can buy something with this much electronics for a few hundred dollars. For now, I'm only slightly impressed.
This thing is probably expensive and weighs a ton. Oooh, it stands up on its own, how have I lived without it! If you want an electric personal transportation device, TH!NK about one of these instead.
And like you say...who wants an xbox without a football game, a shooter, and a racing or RPG game plus an extra controller for your friends? The DVD kit is probably popular too.
A friend that was visiting about two weeks ago bought one for her kids...she has lots of them, so getting 3 games and an accessory was no problem along with the console, but this bumps the total price to $500.
Still, its interesting that they're available this year at all. Remember PS2 last year? Impossible to find!
It truly is a new era!
Seriously, you should either thank your lucky stars that the EFF is doing this, since they're the ONLY people fighting these cases. And the challenges for civil rights were after many years of black people being screwed. Remember slavery? Segregation was pretty deeply entreanched in our society by then.
The DMCA is new. It needs to be challenged NOW, before it gets to be established law. Just because some moron judge didn't even listen to arguments doesn't mean that the EFF shouldn't sue. Ed felten is a legitimate researcher, and he is plenty sympatheic if that is your concern. Eventually, the EFF will get their day in court, try their case, and then we will see.
In the mean time, start litigating this stuff yourself or stop complaining if the only people who have the dollars and time to do it have a small setback.
I think the big secret about the TLD system is that it isn't pefect, but it works as well as any other system would. Your system would not stop the lawsuits due to trademark confusion just because someone registered it as mcdonalds.fcfs.com instead of mcdonalds.tm.com. The only real problem with the DSN system is that it is hard to get the exact name you want. But that is going to be the case with any number of TLDs I believe, because people will buy them up either way.
Making people prove they deserve a domain is even worse....it takes time, and would be an anchor on the internet. I don't want to have to wait 2 weeks to get some pinhead to approve my registration application.
Unfortunately, big corporations have an advantage over an individual. Such is life.
Ease of use was definitely the biggest reason I liked it. Check them out if you're shopping around.
1) You must know the people you work with for a while. A lot of IT people work with people for short chunks of time, then move on to the next project.
2) Well, chemistry. Lets face it, if you get along really well with your work people then you may well socialize outside work.
I was an intern this summer at a large company, and was working in a room with 6 other people. I think it was an unusual room in that we all got along really really well. We ate lunch together every day if possible, oftentimes people saw each other on the weekends, one day we went boating with our team lead, etc. This group, even though projects only last 4 months, had been together for about a year at that point, which was also unusual.
Police and firemen, etc. have this reputation for that kind of thing, but I think its really a product of your work environment. Socializing with their work mates and the community is mostly what they do, and the real firefighting and arresting people work is probably a very small portion of their time. IT in general isn't quite as good of an environment, but really its what you make of it.
Next, from the merchants point of view, how much is this going to cost me to accept micropayments? Its free for buyers, but there must be fees for sellers. Their website doesn't happen to mention any of this. To me, that indicates that maybe it isn't all that great a deal.
micropayments are a nice idea, but I think that it will never work.
All the worlds problems solved, just like that!
I'm sure its much more complicated than that, but whatever their message is it isn't getting out. Protestors in seattle just looked like hooligans.
So, I can see why a lot of people want to use limewire...but if this spyware thing rules it out for you, give kazaa a shot.
Well, for the average person there is no need for anything but a default installation. Honestly, as a user of both Windows and Linux and a computer person, I haven't really needed to do that much to windows, and when I have it has been because of a specific piece of hardware or software and I've had instructions on what to do. I'm not really sure about how to play with the registry or anything, but I've never needed to either.
These Linux is hard to install arguments are a red herring. It's true that most users could not install Linux without help, it's also true most users could not install Windows without help.
I would have agreed with this if it were win98, but only somewhat. Windows for me used to always be a pain in the ass to install. But, someone gave me a free copy of Win2k a while back, and when I installed it I had to do absolutely nothing. There were no prompts, nothing. It just installed without a hitch, which I've never had from microsoft before. I assume XP is as polished on the install. Of course, its a purely default installation, but at least it was no problem.
I think a top priority for linux needs to be supporting hardware and making it easy to install new hardware. I think its easy to use linux, but sometimes getting the system configured for a new piece of hardware is a several day process for me involving a lot of web searching and frustration. It shouldn't be that way.
I think that a legal claim on a radio stations call letters and numbers is pretty obvious. This is not some ambiguous name like "clearwater," its pretty specific to that one radio station.
If the person who registered it wants to start a community site to discuss whats on that station, then MAYBE they would have a chance. But really, its a porn site now. So obviously, a legal claim has a good chance.
But if they accidentally let it expire and some squatter snapped it up, then they should get it back.
Nothing to see here, move along....
So, I suppose what this does is make Yahoo move any business interests located physically within france to somewhere else. Which is fine, because I doubt all of europe wants to exclude large portions of the internet sector from doing business within their borders.
2) large customers get benefits, real or imagined, from being a good customer of a company like microsoft
2) Bill Gates
working at a certain large company, there was a new project that the software development folks were working on planning. The business customer demanded
One of Linux's weak points is that in the world of big business, there aren't people that can leverage a new product like Microsoft can. I guess most people here would say thats a good thing, but it isn't helping fortune 500 companies choose to ditch microsoft.
This is just geek fodder....Hey, we're using 48bit addressing. Which means you can have 10 petabytes of pr0n now!!! It just sounds cool is all, it doesn't mean anything practical.
But, impracticality is much more interesting, isn't it?
So, my plan is to apply to law school. I'm still very interested in tech related constitutional issues. This may be something to think about for you as well....IP, contract law, first amendment stuff with filter, there is really a lot going on an a lawyer that understands this stuff should be kind of useful.
So, just an idea....maybe go into a field that doesn't pay very well. You live like a dirt poor college student now, just keep doing it for a while and save aggressively so you can switch to something else later with no regrets.
Of course, the hardest part here is defining the requirements exactly. And, the business customers aren't much help. Usually they have a vague description of the project, and don't really want to make the effort to define it adequately. So, when its contracted out to compuware, IBM, or someone, they are often times forced to bid without really knowing exactly. I think this is the real reason that projects so often run over budget, over schedule, or are just crappy products.
You are right that the car chassis isn't that important for rollover I think, its really just that the small SUVs aren't as tall. The car chassis makes them better for both vehicles in an accident though, in terms of crushing.
By the way, trucks have one of the worst rollover rates. This is a combination of them being tallish, and the characteristics of the average driver of pickups (as in, they drive more recklessly).
If there's a tornado, I would like to be warned. But if I'm watching TV its going to take some seriously hardcore rain to harm me INSIDE MY HOUSE! So no thanks on the "its raining" maps.