BTW, there are DC transformers known as flyback converters. Look it up on wikipedia.
Yes. They work by converting the DC to AC by switching, passing it through a transformer, then rectifying it back to DC. Look it up on Wikipedia.
So they're not DC transformers, they're DC-DC converters...
(Why yes, as a matter of fact I do know a lot about AC to AC, AC to DC, DC to AC, and DC to DC power conversion - at least, up to the 10's of kilowatts level...)
Brilliant! So, when someone BUYS copyrighted content from ITunes, or Amazon, or some other content provider, AT&T's filter will detect it and block it.
I suspect that's more likely to be the point of the exercise.
AT&T will sell / lease this service to other - media company related - ISPs. "Want to download a movie from iTunes, Amazon, or even TPB? Sorry, not if it's one of ours - but here's a link to our video store..."
The solution advertisers will come up with is to be more devious. More ads in more annoying places, that are harder to avoid. Mass astroturfing, product placement, adware etc.
Really, the solution is simple and it's in our very hands. If you can put on a pair of gloves, or wear a watch without it falling onto the ground as you walk, you have the tools to stop this sort of crap.
Put simply, it is this: If you know or meet someone in advertising or marketing, punch them in the face as hard as you can.
No, this isn't some Bill Hicks-like rant. Just think about how all-pervasive advertising and marketing is - it's everywhere, it's inescapable, and it serves no purpose other than to separate you from your money. On top of that, in every waking moment - from the minute you get up and put on your clothes or make your breakfast, to the second you turn out the light at night - in a million different little ways, it impinges on your mental environment. In itself 99% of it is of no benefit to you, it's existence is detrimental to society as a whole, and there's a whole industry devoted to finding ways of force-feeding you more of it. In modern society, about the only thing you encounter more often than advertising is air molecules.
The only way they'll stop hurting you is if you hurt them first. Remember that next time you find yourself idly whistling a jingle...
Whatever happened to the fine hacker tradition of hunting down disposable toy techno-crap to play with, laugh at, or try to install Linux on? Don't people climb out of their moms' basement, emerging blinky and bleary-eyed into the gaze of the big burning ball in the sky, and head off to the nearest it'll-be-gone-next-week cheapjack Chinese-junk-import store to search for crap like this anymore?
Don't tell me - you all sit back and wait for the brave, brave few to venture into the outside world, find the latest $5 digital photo frame or $10 all-region all-format DVD player, and generate enough buzz that it gets picked up by ThinkGeek where you can mail-order it for a 200% markup over the junkstore price. Amirite?
If you had ventured out, you'd have seen junk like this everywhere.
Check out thisguy'svideoreviews. You too could be that funny - if only you'd previously known crap like this existed.
Don't they teach any rhetorical methods besides that, bad car analogies, and 'ad-hominem attacks: recognising, how-to' in US schools?
I mean, I know more illustrative and comparative devices than that - and I come from a country where "get fucked, arsehole" is considered both an appropriate debating response and witty repartee...
I'm old enough to remember when TV had none of that shit - just the show, on screen.
When networks started watermarking their programmes, some people yelled "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most said "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
When networks started using animated watermarks on their programmes, some people yelled "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most said "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
When networks started running advertising banners over their programmes, some people yelled "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most said "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
Now networks run advertising banners with sound over their programmes, some people are yelling "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most are saying "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
Makes you wonder how much worse the next thing is going to be...
(FWIW, in Australia banners w/sound are uncommon, but I have seen them. More interesting are the guidelines as to what does and doesn't constitute an ad; guidelines developed by the networks and defined by industry policy, not law, in our deregulated TV advertising market. For instance, provided something doesn't cover the full screen, it's not considered an ad.
I'm awaiting with dread the day of the 719x575 "banner", with a single pixel of programme content in the centre of the screen.
Next time I meet an advertising, branding, or commercial television executive, I'm going to punch them in the face as hard as I can. Sure, I'll get done for assault - but I imagine it'll be a most cathartic experience...
Oh, and Shaun Brown? I'm going to punch you twice...)
Interesting thought: What if Apple sold an "unlocked" version of OS X as a one-time, this-version-only, unsupported (but tested to run on a handful of popular Dell / IBM / Toshiba systems), try-it-on-your-current-hardware special offer? Sort of like a software-only Mac Mini?
Currently it's cheap enough (compared to Vista) that people would buy it to try it, and Apple have a huge warchest to get them through any lean hardware sales this might cause. The only major downside I see is that they'd have to be pretty confident their next (Apple hardware only) version had enough features to encourage people to pony up the the extras to buy a Mac.
Even as a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who thinks that freeing up OS X to run on non-Apple hardware would sound the death-knell of the company, I reckon that'd be an interesting experiment...
So, obviously, a bricks-and-mortar store that actually carries stock and has it on display has some value to you - otherwise you wouldn't bother going in there to play with an item before buying it on-line.
Yup, I know, I do it too - it's just that I don't pretend it has no value. Now, whether value(touch_and_hold + take_it_home_now) >= (cost_@_B&M_store - cost_@_online_store) is a different thing...
Interestingly, there's something else all the "it's fair use!" crowd may be forgetting: In some jurisdictions (and here I admit I don't know the sitch in the US) it's not just how much of the original you use in your derivative work (e.g. the 10% rule), but how much of your derivative contains the original work.
In such places, a 30 second music clip itself might not be infringing - but if it comprises 100% of your sound track, it almost certainly is. There's often also other formulas and scaling factors involved e.g. what portion of the whole does the soundtrack make up (30% is often used), is it used as background / incidental music or integral to the scene, etc, etc.
It's not quite as simple as "< 10% is fair use, dude!"...
[Librans] have good critical faculty and are able to stand back and look impartially at matters which call for an impartial judgment to be made on them. But they do not tolerate argument from anyone who challenges their opinions, for once they have reached a conclusion, its truth seems to them self-evident; and among their faults is an impatience of criticism and a greed for approval.
It also shares a birthday with Johnny Carson and Charles Atlas...
I cannot believe anyone would dare mention Windows 98 or ME as actual releases of windows.
Win98 was a legitimate release - ask anybody who wanted to use USB devices on Win95. And, even then, they had to wait for SE to get decent USB support. Remember 98SE? Now, there's a good example of being forced to pay for a bugfix release...
(Yes, a lot of upgrades in SE were available as patches for 98. Unfortunately, the USB stuff wasn't among them; not legitimately anyway.)
And, terrible as it was, how can you say ME wasn't a release? It supplanted 98SE, and stayed as the only available "home" version of the OS until XP was released. Thankfully, that wasn't too long at all. I'm told it even had "features", though all I ever saw were bugs.
What was that quote? Something like "users have problems installing it, getting it to run, getting it to work with hardware or software, and getting it to stop".
(Still shuddering at installing Stingray ADSL modem drivers on 64 meg RAM machines when WinME was current, GDI and drivers-in-low-memory-only limitations and all. I nearly cried when I realised ME would silently ditch drivers when it ran low on memory...)
What really killed MS was releasing the god awful beta packages in the late 90's.
You don't stop selling your current version when you release a new beta...
Given this history, Vista is released as expected...
At the moment the only difference between Vista and ME is that they haven't stopped selling XP, like they stopped selling 98SE when ME came out...
The Codex Alientarius food rules have been written by pro-pharmacutical and pro-chemical interests in Germany and Europe and the power of the WTO is being used to force those rules on unwilling American consumers and voters.
Well, it'll make a nicely ironic change for all of us in other countries who have had rules bought by pro-pharmaceutical, pro-chemical, pro-media, pro-advertising, and pro-"free"-market interests in America forced on us...
The voters need to wake up to how the World Trade Organization (WTO) is overriding U.S. Sovereignty and start another grass roots movement to tackle issues such as Codex Alimentarius.
You're missing the important point, though - the U.S. government agreed to the WTO 'overriding' their sovereignty the moment they became a member! Don't like it? Then go back to your pre-WWII isolationist ways (which, strictly speaking, weren't particularly isolationist anyway, but still...) - large swathes of the rest of the world will thank you for it.
Now, I don't deny you have a legitimate beef - but it's with your government, not the WTO. Please do something about it now, or I'm betting someone else will within the next 100 years or so...
(Typing that is like ashes in my mouth - I'm no fan of the WTO either. But the first step in fighting an enemy is identifying who your enemy actually is.)
The Internet has created a paradigm shift... The Internet destroyed that paradigm... apply laws built for the old paradigm to the new paradigm... new laws for the new paradigm... the old geography-based paradigm
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
An increase in scope is not a "paradigm shift". A sudden increase in scope might appear to be one, but even that's not the case here - as you yourself mentioned, phone calls and broadcast television existed before the internet. Not to mention all the other forms of one-to-one and mass communications we've have for a century or two - newspapers, mail, radio, telex, telegraph,...
Really, you should try reading books that aren't by Gibson or Doctrow...
Just out of curiosity, how close are we to being able to superimpose a digital representation of Kirk from the original series onto an actor?
What, you can't wait 20 years for the Re-Imagined Special Edition Director's Cut?
(I hear, as an added bonus, Checkov will be replaced by the original CGI models of Jar Jar, with the voice provided by a computerised vocal tract model of Hattie McDaniel...)
Worse than that - it's not that they put out CDs of it, it's that there's a whole distribution mechanism set up to distribute it!
It used to be done over the 'phone lines, fed from a central point with distribution amps and splitters at every telephone exchange, feeding out to premises to hook into their telephone hold systems and background music PAs and elevators. Muzac (owned by Muzac, natch) and Better Music (owned by one of the local radio networks, if memory serves) were the big two here.
Nowadays it's all done via satellite or FM radio subcarrier distribution.
But, when comparing Mac market share to Linux market share, you've got to remember this:
Mac users won't touch your product unless it supports the Mac out of the box
As soon as the first blog post containing the line "And, guess what? It runs Linux!" appears, Linux users will start buying your product - and somebody will be working on an app / driver to make it work.
Why do the work of writing an app, when you know a bunch of naïve idealists will gladly do it for you?
The only real downside is you end up with a bunch of petulant whingers when you change your hardware / protocol. And, even then, they're dumb enough to quickly get right back to the hard work of supporting your product for you!
Yeah, it's almost as if we prefer to shop with vendors that offer good support to their customers up front...
Yeah, but face it - the product is shiny and cool; you're going to buy it anyway.
Or are you going to give up your TomToms and Linksys routers and Canon cameras and Tivos and... ?
It's great to have ideals; it hurts when others don't abide by them; and it's hard to maintain them when they come up against something you really really want...
And, (playing Devil's advocate here...), only 1 of those has anything to do with MS. Take out all the non-MS stuff, and you have the same situation as when I bought my first OS X Mac:
1) Install OS X 2) Wait while it downloads a crapload of updates.
(Yes, I had to do the OS X install when I bought a G4 eMac. OS X may come pre-installed now; it certainly did on my MacBook, but I don't know about the desktop machines. Still, even with the MacBook, I had to download a crapload of updates...)
I came in here to make this exact same point but, having not read the article (like a good/.'er...), I changed my mind.
Apple make computers; Microsoft don't.
There's a world of difference between Apple supplying a copy of OS X with every computer they make and sell, and Microsoft strongarming 3rd-party manufacturers into pre-installing a copy of Windows with every computer they sell. This, I think, is what the EU is on about. Bundling isn't the fundamental problem, nor is an effective monopoly. How they got there, and how they keep themselves there, is the problem.
Now, discuss this while I sit back and try to think of a poor car analogy...
The fact that people are willing to buy something that officially can't have new software written for it suggests they are not very serious technical people.
No; as someone who has spent 20+ years behind a soldering iron and keyboard, I'd say all it suggests is they're not very serious Open Source people. Like their committment to Sparkle Motion, their committment to Open Source is... Look! Shiny!
It's as if they want some of the kudos that goes with RMS, but not the smell...
(Seriously though - auto-complete / predictive text is a feature somebody wants?! Why not go the whole hog and just feck it up by licencing T9? I'd much rather have the nice Apple-style error highlighting, coupled with an easy way - fingernail tap? - of bringing up the suggested words list. But, then, I can spell already...)
... she went along to an airport, dressed up like a bomb, to stir the shit a bit - and the shit turned out to be a little deeper and ickier than she thought.
This isn't a first amendment / free speech / free expression issue, it's a "I got caught doing something stupid, now I'm angry I got caught" issue.
I haven't read your constitution in a few years, but I don't remember that one being covered in there...
Slashdot Mirror
So they're not DC transformers, they're DC-DC converters
(Why yes, as a matter of fact I do know a lot about AC to AC, AC to DC, DC to AC, and DC to DC power conversion - at least, up to the 10's of kilowatts level...)
"-1, Troll"? Somebody in advertising got mod points...
AT&T will sell / lease this service to other - media company related - ISPs. "Want to download a movie from iTunes, Amazon, or even TPB? Sorry, not if it's one of ours - but here's a link to our video store..."
Put simply, it is this: If you know or meet someone in advertising or marketing, punch them in the face as hard as you can.
No, this isn't some Bill Hicks-like rant. Just think about how all-pervasive advertising and marketing is - it's everywhere, it's inescapable, and it serves no purpose other than to separate you from your money. On top of that, in every waking moment - from the minute you get up and put on your clothes or make your breakfast, to the second you turn out the light at night - in a million different little ways, it impinges on your mental environment. In itself 99% of it is of no benefit to you, it's existence is detrimental to society as a whole, and there's a whole industry devoted to finding ways of force-feeding you more of it. In modern society, about the only thing you encounter more often than advertising is air molecules.
The only way they'll stop hurting you is if you hurt them first. Remember that next time you find yourself idly whistling a jingle...
Nerd-rage at its finest. This is nothing new.
Whatever happened to the fine hacker tradition of hunting down disposable toy techno-crap to play with, laugh at, or try to install Linux on? Don't people climb out of their moms' basement, emerging blinky and bleary-eyed into the gaze of the big burning ball in the sky, and head off to the nearest it'll-be-gone-next-week cheapjack Chinese-junk-import store to search for crap like this anymore?
Don't tell me - you all sit back and wait for the brave, brave few to venture into the outside world, find the latest $5 digital photo frame or $10 all-region all-format DVD player, and generate enough buzz that it gets picked up by ThinkGeek where you can mail-order it for a 200% markup over the junkstore price. Amirite?
If you had ventured out, you'd have seen junk like this everywhere.
Check out this guy's video reviews. You too could be that funny - if only you'd previously known crap like this existed.
Christ, I'm sick of that particular analogy.
Don't they teach any rhetorical methods besides that, bad car analogies, and 'ad-hominem attacks: recognising, how-to' in US schools?
I mean, I know more illustrative and comparative devices than that - and I come from a country where "get fucked, arsehole" is considered both an appropriate debating response and witty repartee...
I'm old enough to remember when TV had none of that shit - just the show, on screen.
When networks started watermarking their programmes, some people yelled "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most said "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
When networks started using animated watermarks on their programmes, some people yelled "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most said "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
When networks started running advertising banners over their programmes, some people yelled "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most said "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
Now networks run advertising banners with sound over their programmes, some people are yelling "Fuck that, it's terrible!", but most are saying "huh, who cares, it can't get any worse..."
Makes you wonder how much worse the next thing is going to be...
(FWIW, in Australia banners w/sound are uncommon, but I have seen them. More interesting are the guidelines as to what does and doesn't constitute an ad; guidelines developed by the networks and defined by industry policy, not law, in our deregulated TV advertising market. For instance, provided something doesn't cover the full screen, it's not considered an ad.
I'm awaiting with dread the day of the 719x575 "banner", with a single pixel of programme content in the centre of the screen.
Next time I meet an advertising, branding, or commercial television executive, I'm going to punch them in the face as hard as I can. Sure, I'll get done for assault - but I imagine it'll be a most cathartic experience...
Oh, and Shaun Brown? I'm going to punch you twice...)
Interesting thought: What if Apple sold an "unlocked" version of OS X as a one-time, this-version-only, unsupported (but tested to run on a handful of popular Dell / IBM / Toshiba systems), try-it-on-your-current-hardware special offer? Sort of like a software-only Mac Mini?
Currently it's cheap enough (compared to Vista) that people would buy it to try it, and Apple have a huge warchest to get them through any lean hardware sales this might cause. The only major downside I see is that they'd have to be pretty confident their next (Apple hardware only) version had enough features to encourage people to pony up the the extras to buy a Mac.
Even as a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who thinks that freeing up OS X to run on non-Apple hardware would sound the death-knell of the company, I reckon that'd be an interesting experiment...
So, obviously, a bricks-and-mortar store that actually carries stock and has it on display has some value to you - otherwise you wouldn't bother going in there to play with an item before buying it on-line.
Yup, I know, I do it too - it's just that I don't pretend it has no value. Now, whether value(touch_and_hold + take_it_home_now) >= (cost_@_B&M_store - cost_@_online_store) is a different thing...
"I'm sorry Clive, but that's actually the plot of 'The Gods Themselves' by Isaac Asimov. What were you really doing?"
"Uh... I've been sodomising a dachshund in a motel room full of drunken German businessmen..."
Interestingly, there's something else all the "it's fair use!" crowd may be forgetting: In some jurisdictions (and here I admit I don't know the sitch in the US) it's not just how much of the original you use in your derivative work (e.g. the 10% rule), but how much of your derivative contains the original work.
In such places, a 30 second music clip itself might not be infringing - but if it comprises 100% of your sound track, it almost certainly is. There's often also other formulas and scaling factors involved e.g. what portion of the whole does the soundtrack make up (30% is often used), is it used as background / incidental music or integral to the scene, etc, etc.
It's not quite as simple as "< 10% is fair use, dude!"...
[Librans] have good critical faculty and are able to stand back and look impartially at matters which call for an impartial judgment to be made on them. But they do not tolerate argument from anyone who challenges their opinions, for once they have reached a conclusion, its truth seems to them self-evident; and among their faults is an impatience of criticism and a greed for approval.
It also shares a birthday with Johnny Carson and Charles Atlas...
(Yes, a lot of upgrades in SE were available as patches for 98. Unfortunately, the USB stuff wasn't among them; not legitimately anyway.)
And, terrible as it was, how can you say ME wasn't a release? It supplanted 98SE, and stayed as the only available "home" version of the OS until XP was released. Thankfully, that wasn't too long at all. I'm told it even had "features", though all I ever saw were bugs.
What was that quote? Something like "users have problems installing it, getting it to run, getting it to work with hardware or software, and getting it to stop".
(Still shuddering at installing Stingray ADSL modem drivers on 64 meg RAM machines when WinME was current, GDI and drivers-in-low-memory-only limitations and all. I nearly cried when I realised ME would silently ditch drivers when it ran low on memory...)You don't stop selling your current version when you release a new beta...At the moment the only difference between Vista and ME is that they haven't stopped selling XP, like they stopped selling 98SE when ME came out...
So, how's that privatized government of yours working out?
Now, I don't deny you have a legitimate beef - but it's with your government, not the WTO. Please do something about it now, or I'm betting someone else will within the next 100 years or so...
(Typing that is like ashes in my mouth - I'm no fan of the WTO either. But the first step in fighting an enemy is identifying who your enemy actually is.)
An increase in scope is not a "paradigm shift". A sudden increase in scope might appear to be one, but even that's not the case here - as you yourself mentioned, phone calls and broadcast television existed before the internet. Not to mention all the other forms of one-to-one and mass communications we've have for a century or two - newspapers, mail, radio, telex, telegraph,
Really, you should try reading books that aren't by Gibson or Doctrow...
(I hear, as an added bonus, Checkov will be replaced by the original CGI models of Jar Jar, with the voice provided by a computerised vocal tract model of Hattie McDaniel...)
Worse than that - it's not that they put out CDs of it, it's that there's a whole distribution mechanism set up to distribute it!
It used to be done over the 'phone lines, fed from a central point with distribution amps and splitters at every telephone exchange, feeding out to premises to hook into their telephone hold systems and background music PAs and elevators. Muzac (owned by Muzac, natch) and Better Music (owned by one of the local radio networks, if memory serves) were the big two here.
Nowadays it's all done via satellite or FM radio subcarrier distribution.
- Mac users won't touch your product unless it supports the Mac out of the box
- As soon as the first blog post containing the line "And, guess what? It runs Linux!" appears, Linux users will start buying your product - and somebody will be working on an app / driver to make it work.
Why do the work of writing an app, when you know a bunch of naïve idealists will gladly do it for you?The only real downside is you end up with a bunch of petulant whingers when you change your hardware / protocol. And, even then, they're dumb enough to quickly get right back to the hard work of supporting your product for you!
Or are you going to give up your TomToms and Linksys routers and Canon cameras and Tivos and
It's great to have ideals; it hurts when others don't abide by them; and it's hard to maintain them when they come up against something you really really want...
And, (playing Devil's advocate here...), only 1 of those has anything to do with MS. Take out all the non-MS stuff, and you have the same situation as when I bought my first OS X Mac:
1) Install OS X
2) Wait while it downloads a crapload of updates.
(Yes, I had to do the OS X install when I bought a G4 eMac. OS X may come pre-installed now; it certainly did on my MacBook, but I don't know about the desktop machines. Still, even with the MacBook, I had to download a crapload of updates...)
I came in here to make this exact same point but, having not read the article (like a good /.'er...), I changed my mind.
Apple make computers; Microsoft don't.
There's a world of difference between Apple supplying a copy of OS X with every computer they make and sell, and Microsoft strongarming 3rd-party manufacturers into pre-installing a copy of Windows with every computer they sell. This, I think, is what the EU is on about. Bundling isn't the fundamental problem, nor is an effective monopoly. How they got there , and how they keep themselves there , is the problem.
Now, discuss this while I sit back and try to think of a poor car analogy...
It's as if they want some of the kudos that goes with RMS, but not the smell...
(Seriously though - auto-complete / predictive text is a feature somebody wants?! Why not go the whole hog and just feck it up by licencing T9? I'd much rather have the nice Apple-style error highlighting, coupled with an easy way - fingernail tap? - of bringing up the suggested words list. But, then, I can spell already...)
... she went along to an airport, dressed up like a bomb, to stir the shit a bit - and the shit turned out to be a little deeper and ickier than she thought.
This isn't a first amendment / free speech / free expression issue, it's a "I got caught doing something stupid, now I'm angry I got caught" issue.
I haven't read your constitution in a few years, but I don't remember that one being covered in there...
We actually were invaded by New Zealand. Russell Crowe, Sam Neil, John Clarke, Crowded House...