So, when do you think they'll start shipping these monster pixel cameras with built in hard drives? I mean, at what point does the storage become more of an issue than the quality? I can get about 130 high quality JPEGs on a single-size CD in my Sony CD-1000, but TIFF images only store at 30/disk. This is the real bottleneck in the rush to better digital imaging. In the studio, you just hook the camera to a computer, but in the field you're either stuck carrying a laptop around with you or a bunch of media. The CDs are an ideal solution with reasonable resolution--2 megapixels with the Sony. This ceases to be an option with anything much denser and you start looking at something like the IBM minidrives. I don't plan on buying anything new till they solve this. For now, 2 megapixels is more than adequate.
I was thinking more of the first real CDs to use this format. You don't think this is just a foot in the door? Personally, if I want music I buy it. And it had damned well better play or the Federal Trade Commission is going to hear about it.
Especially if your audio goes directly to your stereo like mine does.
Seriously though, this isn't about copy protection. It's about blind greed. It's about incredible stupidity in the service of that blind greed. And, ultimately, it's about the corporate suicide that will result from that stupidity. Like, wouldn't it be interesting is everyone just stopped buying CDs for a month? Do you suppose it would wake the bastards out of their blind funk?
Don't throw it away. Take the damned thing back to the store and demand your money back. Jump up and down if you have to. Scream so loud the greedy bastards will hear you in their mansions. There is an implied warrantee of serviceability and if it doesn't work you don't have to pay for the bloody thing. Watch what happens when the retailers have a shit fit over the expense and hassle this causes them. DIVIDE AND CONQUER!
It's rarely taken note of, but there's a middle ground here, too; what my father used to call "grey areas" (he was a printer). Between getting lucky and fabricating events, there's the place in the continuum where you know something's being planned but choose not to do anything about it in the hope of benefiting from it. This is the variation that really scares me. By selectively acting and not acting on incoming intelligence, it would in theory be possible to shape events to one's liking--without actively planning anything, and thus a great danger of discovery. Funny how many liberals got shot during the 60s and how few conservatives. Just luck, or selective prevention?
I think it was Mr. Jefferson who said that, and what he meant, if I may be allowed to take a non-doctrinaire position here, was that a government that does its job well doesn't need to pass a continuous stream of hundreds of thousands of ridiculous laws meant solely to keep the horse in the barn from which it escaped last Thursday.
To put it simply for all the Luddites, why should the government have to enact laws specifying how pork should be inspected when it's already illegal to kill people? And the answer is: because the corporations have so corrupted the legal system that they now expect the government to do for free what the corporations should be doing themselves, i.e., making sure they are selling a safe product. This is the responsibility of the corporations, not of the Department of Animal Fat. A government that governed well would see that any head of any corporation that sold bad pork was duly punished, not for violating some overly complex set of inspection rules but for doing bodily harm to his fellow man. That would be governing best by governing least.
"We need a free flow of information and ideas to prevent the "Big Lie" Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels relied upon to permit the Holocaust to occur."
The problem is that without the benefit of hindsight you never really know just exactly WHAT the big lie is. Take your rational blinders off for a moment and ask yourself just exactly what event allowed George to launch his little campaign of world conquest. And then ask yourself just exactly what Chandra Levy could have learned from FBI committee member Condit that could have cost her her life. Paranoia? Or just a good nose for political rot?
Keep in mind that there are still doubts about who started the Reichstag fire, as there also are about the question of exactly who sank the Maine before the outbreak of the Spanish American War. There's a thin line between taking advantage of circumstances and creating those circumstances.
Don't get me wrong, you're probably right, but I can't quite get past the fact that these are people who are fabulously rich and their employees are even better off than most, so I can't see why they get so fanatical about it, unless they really do suspect that it's either feast or famine and any small concession to decency will lead to their downfall and total obliteration.
This is precisely what happened during the last period of global warming, from about 5000 to 3000BC, when most of North Africa was quite fertile, a period associated by some with Plato's tale of Atlantis, possibly the area south of the Atlas Mountains toward the Western Sahara fed by a river flowing south from the Atlas into the Rio del Oro. It remains to be seen whether that warming had anything to do with the advance of civilization at the time. It will also be interesting to see if the long dry river reappears.
Microsoft reminds me of a kid who keeps sticking his hand through a fence behind which a big dog is running around and barking. Every time the dog gets close the kid pulls his hand back just in time to avoid being bitten. It's one of any number of games collectively called chicken in which the object is to see how close you can get to catastrophe without being bitten. It tends to be a childhood distraction but folks like Eval Knieval have made a living at it well into middle age. Microsoft, which is to say Little Billy, has never really had the experience of being beaten at it, so he doesn't have the gut level understanding of being bitten that most normal people have. And then one day the kid jerks his hand back a split second too late, gets mauled by the big dog, and runs home crying to mommy.
Microsoft isn't evil. They're not really even greedy beyond all comprehension. They just can't get past their little obsessive compulsive need to stick their hand through the fence one more time and annoy the big Federal Antitrust dog. I just hope I live long enough to see the little snot-nosed twirp get his arm ripped out of its socket.;-)
The real problem with spell checkers is they lead to a generation of students who never put their noses inside of a dictionary, a good one of which provides a good deal more information, knowledge, and understanding than any simple electronic spelling device. Most poor spellers aren't so because they haven't memorized enough words. They don't know *why* words are spelled a particular way because they don't understand the principles and history of their language.
Is that why you see stuff on the net with words that are all spelled correctly but some of which are the WRONG word? We do still believe in the concept of wrong, don't we?
Considering the pathetic quality of most software I've seen lately, I'm not surprised at your response. You guys just don't give a damn anymore, do you?
These guys need to merge/linkup with peripheral manufacturers to offer X-ready (where X is the name of the alternate computer/OS package) peripherals for the new system. This is the bottleneck right now. The peripheral manufacturers won't supply timely (or at all) drivers for their equipment that works with Linux and other alternate systems. Supply a minimal number of printers/scanners/faxes that work out of the box with their computers. Not that I particularly like HP, but they would be an ideal partner in this.
Or even better--build one of those all purpose fax/copier/printer/scanner jobs that includes a free computer/OS in the package. The cost for the OS would be negligible, you could build the computer into the box to save on material costs, and have a keyboard/tablet hanging out the front that would double as the control panel.
So this is just another infinite loop error that happens to damage the hardware? Not that I'm a programmer or anything, but didn't somebody invent the idea of software counters a long time ago? What was it in Basic, add 1 if > 9000000 then goto end? I think the auto guy was right--lousy testing.
"Science has always been politicized. Today's environmentalists are no better and no different than the Pope persecuting Gallileo, and no more intelligent."
Pope=Reactionary establishment fanatic Galileo=Persecuted bearer of unpopular scientific truth
You really need to get your metaphors straight. Someone might think you were an idiot or something....:-)
Some good points mixed with a lot of trivial backbiting. It's a shame you can't just post your interesting observations without calling everyone in sight a fat cocksucker. Perhaps there should be a category for Controversial/with obscenities and one/without obscenities.
Yes, I have noticed an inordinate number of +5 Funnies that wouldn't get a laugh at a hyena ranch.
No, I don't think it's censorship. It's more like what you get with any nonprofit oligarchical organization. They tend to be run like the Chinese Communist Party, i.e., they just can't abide anybody who actually wants to belong to a democratic organization. How many nonprofits hold elections where there's only one candidate? And the reason is simple. They don't want anybody getting into office who actually disagrees with them. They are, after all, agenda based organizations. Sadly, Slashdot leans just far enough in that direction that it's easy to mistake them for Linux/Open Source proponents, anti-MS zealots, believers in the superiority of the engineering mentality, or other related biases. I'm not sure this is more than a perception, but it really wouldn't bother me if someone suggested they change their name to Slantdot.
No, this isn't a troll. If any of my fellow moderators/metamoderators think it is, you need to read the instructions again. "If all else fails, read the directions."
I didn't know that. I guess it all comes down to not being able to please everybody all the time on what is essentially a multi-purpose machine. What I have noticed is it's often the little things that get in the way rather than the obvious specs. For instance, a faulty splitter in the phone jack or a BIOS that's not set to the frequency of the RAM.
Do you realise how many people out there don't even know what defragging is? It's just hard to make a profit selling to the knowledgeable elite. Sony's failure to built a new long lens CD back camera is a good example of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you guys get tired of shooting fish in barrels? :-) I mean, Billy's minions are just so easy.
So, when do you think they'll start shipping these monster pixel cameras with built in hard drives? I mean, at what point does the storage become more of an issue than the quality? I can get about 130 high quality JPEGs on a single-size CD in my Sony CD-1000, but TIFF images only store at 30/disk. This is the real bottleneck in the rush to better digital imaging. In the studio, you just hook the camera to a computer, but in the field you're either stuck carrying a laptop around with you or a bunch of media. The CDs are an ideal solution with reasonable resolution--2 megapixels with the Sony. This ceases to be an option with anything much denser and you start looking at something like the IBM minidrives. I don't plan on buying anything new till they solve this. For now, 2 megapixels is more than adequate.
My first thought was, "What are these guys smoking? I WANT SOME!" :-)
I was thinking more of the first real CDs to use this format. You don't think this is just a foot in the door? Personally, if I want music I buy it. And it had damned well better play or the Federal Trade Commission is going to hear about it.
Especially if your audio goes directly to your stereo like mine does.
Seriously though, this isn't about copy protection. It's about blind greed. It's about incredible stupidity in the service of that blind greed. And, ultimately, it's about the corporate suicide that will result from that stupidity. Like, wouldn't it be interesting is everyone just stopped buying CDs for a month? Do you suppose it would wake the bastards out of their blind funk?
Don't throw it away. Take the damned thing back to the store and demand your money back. Jump up and down if you have to. Scream so loud the greedy bastards will hear you in their mansions. There is an implied warrantee of serviceability and if it doesn't work you don't have to pay for the bloody thing. Watch what happens when the retailers have a shit fit over the expense and hassle this causes them. DIVIDE AND CONQUER!
It's rarely taken note of, but there's a middle ground here, too; what my father used to call "grey areas" (he was a printer). Between getting lucky and fabricating events, there's the place in the continuum where you know something's being planned but choose not to do anything about it in the hope of benefiting from it. This is the variation that really scares me. By selectively acting and not acting on incoming intelligence, it would in theory be possible to shape events to one's liking--without actively planning anything, and thus a great danger of discovery. Funny how many liberals got shot during the 60s and how few conservatives. Just luck, or selective prevention?
The hobgoblin's name is Bain! You obviously don't play enough RPGs!
I think it was Mr. Jefferson who said that, and what he meant, if I may be allowed to take a non-doctrinaire position here, was that a government that does its job well doesn't need to pass a continuous stream of hundreds of thousands of ridiculous laws meant solely to keep the horse in the barn from which it escaped last Thursday.
To put it simply for all the Luddites, why should the government have to enact laws specifying how pork should be inspected when it's already illegal to kill people? And the answer is: because the corporations have so corrupted the legal system that they now expect the government to do for free what the corporations should be doing themselves, i.e., making sure they are selling a safe product. This is the responsibility of the corporations, not of the Department of Animal Fat. A government that governed well would see that any head of any corporation that sold bad pork was duly punished, not for violating some overly complex set of inspection rules but for doing bodily harm to his fellow man. That would be governing best by governing least.
A foolish consistency is the bain of little minds.
"We need a free flow of information and ideas to prevent the "Big Lie" Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels relied upon to permit the Holocaust to occur."
The problem is that without the benefit of hindsight you never really know just exactly WHAT the big lie is. Take your rational blinders off for a moment and ask yourself just exactly what event allowed George to launch his little campaign of world conquest. And then ask yourself just exactly what Chandra Levy could have learned from FBI committee member Condit that could have cost her her life. Paranoia? Or just a good nose for political rot?
Keep in mind that there are still doubts about who started the Reichstag fire, as there also are about the question of exactly who sank the Maine before the outbreak of the Spanish American War. There's a thin line between taking advantage of circumstances and creating those circumstances.
Do you really expect them to call it the Jingoism Act? ;-)
And people actually have the nerve to complain about my sig!
Don't get me wrong, you're probably right, but I can't quite get past the fact that these are people who are fabulously rich and their employees are even better off than most, so I can't see why they get so fanatical about it, unless they really do suspect that it's either feast or famine and any small concession to decency will lead to their downfall and total obliteration.
This is precisely what happened during the last period of global warming, from about 5000 to 3000BC, when most of North Africa was quite fertile, a period associated by some with Plato's tale of Atlantis, possibly the area south of the Atlas Mountains toward the Western Sahara fed by a river flowing south from the Atlas into the Rio del Oro. It remains to be seen whether that warming had anything to do with the advance of civilization at the time. It will also be interesting to see if the long dry river reappears.
Microsoft reminds me of a kid who keeps sticking his hand through a fence behind which a big dog is running around and barking. Every time the dog gets close the kid pulls his hand back just in time to avoid being bitten. It's one of any number of games collectively called chicken in which the object is to see how close you can get to catastrophe without being bitten. It tends to be a childhood distraction but folks like Eval Knieval have made a living at it well into middle age. Microsoft, which is to say Little Billy, has never really had the experience of being beaten at it, so he doesn't have the gut level understanding of being bitten that most normal people have. And then one day the kid jerks his hand back a split second too late, gets mauled by the big dog, and runs home crying to mommy.
;-)
Microsoft isn't evil. They're not really even greedy beyond all comprehension. They just can't get past their little obsessive compulsive need to stick their hand through the fence one more time and annoy the big Federal Antitrust dog. I just hope I live long enough to see the little snot-nosed twirp get his arm ripped out of its socket.
The real problem with spell checkers is they lead to a generation of students who never put their noses inside of a dictionary, a good one of which provides a good deal more information, knowledge, and understanding than any simple electronic spelling device. Most poor spellers aren't so because they haven't memorized enough words. They don't know *why* words are spelled a particular way because they don't understand the principles and history of their language.
Is that why you see stuff on the net with words that are all spelled correctly but some of which are the WRONG word? We do still believe in the concept of wrong, don't we?
Considering the pathetic quality of most software I've seen lately, I'm not surprised at your response. You guys just don't give a damn anymore, do you?
These guys need to merge/linkup with peripheral manufacturers to offer X-ready (where X is the name of the alternate computer/OS package) peripherals for the new system. This is the bottleneck right now. The peripheral manufacturers won't supply timely (or at all) drivers for their equipment that works with Linux and other alternate systems. Supply a minimal number of printers/scanners/faxes that work out of the box with their computers. Not that I particularly like HP, but they would be an ideal partner in this.
Or even better--build one of those all purpose fax/copier/printer/scanner jobs that includes a free computer/OS in the package. The cost for the OS would be negligible, you could build the computer into the box to save on material costs, and have a keyboard/tablet hanging out the front that would double as the control panel.
So this is just another infinite loop error that happens to damage the hardware? Not that I'm a programmer or anything, but didn't somebody invent the idea of software counters a long time ago? What was it in Basic, add 1 if > 9000000 then goto end? I think the auto guy was right--lousy testing.
"Science has always been politicized. Today's environmentalists are no better and no different than the Pope persecuting Gallileo, and no more intelligent."
:-)
Pope=Reactionary establishment fanatic
Galileo=Persecuted bearer of unpopular scientific truth
You really need to get your metaphors straight. Someone might think you were an idiot or something....
Some good points mixed with a lot of trivial backbiting. It's a shame you can't just post your interesting observations without calling everyone in sight a fat cocksucker. Perhaps there should be a category for Controversial/with obscenities and one /without obscenities.
Yes, I have noticed an inordinate number of +5 Funnies that wouldn't get a laugh at a hyena ranch.
No, I don't think it's censorship. It's more like what you get with any nonprofit oligarchical organization. They tend to be run like the Chinese Communist Party, i.e., they just can't abide anybody who actually wants to belong to a democratic organization. How many nonprofits hold elections where there's only one candidate? And the reason is simple. They don't want anybody getting into office who actually disagrees with them. They are, after all, agenda based organizations. Sadly, Slashdot leans just far enough in that direction that it's easy to mistake them for Linux/Open Source proponents, anti-MS zealots, believers in the superiority of the engineering mentality, or other related biases. I'm not sure this is more than a perception, but it really wouldn't bother me if someone suggested they change their name to Slantdot.
No, this isn't a troll. If any of my fellow moderators/metamoderators think it is, you need to read the instructions again. "If all else fails, read the directions."
Just my two pesos.
I didn't know that. I guess it all comes down to not being able to please everybody all the time on what is essentially a multi-purpose machine. What I have noticed is it's often the little things that get in the way rather than the obvious specs. For instance, a faulty splitter in the phone jack or a BIOS that's not set to the frequency of the RAM.
Do you realise how many people out there don't even know what defragging is? It's just hard to make a profit selling to the knowledgeable elite. Sony's failure to built a new long lens CD back camera is a good example of this.
Spoken like a true intellectual. Kindly go back to War Terror Maim Kill Arena, or whatever you were playing....