I tried a nice floor mat and for some reason found it made it harder to work, so your mileage may vary. I'm now mat-free but I wear comfortable shoes.
I also recommend doing a test run with boxes before your shell out for the full desk or attachment. I find I stand for 30-50% of the day on average, sometimes 100%, some times 0%.
Height of the desk makes a big difference - you want something that works for you both standing and sitting. I'm on the taller side and use the varidesk.com pro 36. My monitor is on a stand and still slightly shorter than ideal. My shorter colleagues fare better with the ergotron, which can adjust to a lower keyboard height when sitting.
Yes, I remember the "I'm not going to buy any music right now because nothing is compatible" stage well. My media experience with respect to music & movies sounds like yours. I don't buy movies anymore, but I still buy music. Mostly I use services such as spotify and netflix.
> I can't think of any precedent saying that having relatively painless DRM has resulted in better media access.
Netflix? Kindle books? Steam? Almost everyone I know uses the first two, and most don't even know there's DRM. However, if the DRM wasn't there, the studios/publishers would not have made their content available.
It's clear the studios are much more tech savvy then the music companies were, and much less likely to make the same DRM-free decision. I just don't see it happening (at least, not any in the next 5-10 years). It seems like the studios are still trying to prop up physical with UltraViolet (their attempt at DRM interoperability) rather than learning from the music industry's mistakes. They still have a chance to make it work, but it's certainly not there yet. If it fails, they are more likely to further fragment and do multiple, incompatible things rather than go DRM-free.
> The standard is a standardised API to an external encryption plugin.
Section 6 of the draft lays out a baseline called simple encryption: "This ensures that there is a common baseline level of protection that is guaranteed to be supported in all user agents, including those that are entirely open source. Thus, content providers that need only basic protection can build simple applications that will work on all platforms without needing to work with any content protection providers."
I get what you are saying, though - how successful this is will depend on what happens on the content decryption module side, and whether people opt to use the simple encryption option or not. No one is being forced to use this. Best case scenario, things become interoperable. Worst case, it's no different than today, because the Adobe analogy you use is exactly what we have with our various plug-ins and external apps.
> The web is no longer an open medium designed to be usable by anyone with any browser.
I don't understand how this changes anything. Aren't there already plug-ins and even HTML5/Javascript/CSS features that are browser or platform specific? If this gets adopted, will there be more or less content available in-browser? Most media services want to maximize their addressable user base, not minimize it, so interoperability is in their interest.
I think this is a reasonable application of the 80/20 rule: as media consumption becomes the 80%, browsers want to continue playing a central role, and that will be made easier by this.
Yes, I know I will be flamed for this, but I think the thing that is getting lost in the conversation is that we've all be using DRM for years, and the point of this is to increase interoperability. How many of us have netflix or amazon movie streaming? Buy kindle books? Use steam? Even the books downloadable from my library use some form of protection. Most people don't care, because those protections don't impact our typical usage patterns. But all of these services live in their own separate worlds, because they are not interoperable. Adding support for a common protection standard doesn't suddenly make it possible to encrypt movies or harder to download images on the net because that already exists today (and has for years)! The point is to end the balkanization of media players and let everything work in your vanilla browser. That sounds good to me.
I have had contact with Manu Sporny, and his portrait doesn't look like him. You can google him to see for yourself. Of course, I imagine this kind of tech will only get better...
I agree - it looks and works great. To me, it feels like a phone OS designed with the small form-factor in mind, rather than a porting of a "desktop icon" metaphor to a smaller screen. The home screen is designed to expose a number of things you want to do/see without requiring to navigate anywhere or launch an app. Simple things like the way the buttons feel and animate make the experience better. I find it both more enjoyable to use than Android and iPhone, and also snappier (using a Samsung phone, haven't used the Nokia). The main thing it lacks at the moment is the breadth of apps, but it's getting there. My normal phone is Android, but when I'm due for an update I'm likely to switch to WP.
Even the honor system won't work. Now that the on-line retailers like Amazon and iTunes have a cloud service that stores your purchases, the concept of deleting local copies doesn't work.
Anyone who works regularly with lawyers (as I do, (and I'm a geek (as demonstrated by these nested parens))) will know that it will take nothing short of full strength AI to replace them, lawyer jokes aside. There is so much nuance, subtlety, and tweaking of agreements that a using a simple computerized approach won't work for a substantial portion of what (say) normal corporate law firms do. If we magically move to a machine readable contract language, portions of contract verification might be automated, but certainly not the writing. And good luck getting lawyers to move to such a thing any time soon.
I have & like the Lowepro Fastpack 350, and I think it will meet your needs. There's a full sized laptop sleeve along the back. The bottom part of the compartment will hold a DSLR+lens and 4 other lenses or 2 lenses+flashes. The camera compartment can be opened from the side, so you can get your camera out without taking the backpack off. There's a side pouch that can be used to carry a tripod (be careful with the mesh) if you add a strap at the top, or you can strap it to the bottom/back. The top compartment is large enough to hold a light jacket + other random stuff (MP3 player, chargers, mouse, grad filters, cleaning gear, filters, etc). Take a look at the pictures on Amazon to get a better sense of the layout.
I visited a local photo store to check out options before ordering this one, which met my needs and was reasonably priced relative to the alternatives.
Arduino is great, I've got my own, but it seems like the choice you'd make if you were pursuing hobbyists instead of commercial device manufacturers. Am I wrong?
Spoken like someone with no knowledge of the actual negotiation. Why does Google need the labels to do a dropbox style locker in the first place? They've had Google Docs for a while now. Maybe what it means is they got caught with their pants down due to the Amazon launch, and felt pressure to get something out at I/O faster than they had expected, and when the labels didn't accept every term they offered, they just went without.
Of course a lawsuit may be coming, but the evidence suggests not. Other "dumb" lockers have been around for years. If Google starts using a single copy of a given track to serve everyone (as opposed to uploading each person's file) or does any number of other things that clearly require a license, then they'll be exposed.
There's a really good chance this resulted from automatic claiming tools that make use of things like acoustic fingerprints. YouTube or a filtering partner will have a catalog of Warner tracks that new uploads are checked against. Warner may not even have known about this until it blew up. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.
Explain this right to take someone else's work, which you have not paid for and have no rights to under the law, regardless of whether they want you to or not? Do you think that we can have a healthy society if the people bringing new creations into the world are forced to share their works at your whim and under your terms? Sure, some of us want to share what we do, because we know it will be reciprocated. But this has to be voluntary under the guidelines of the law.
Just because you can take something does not mean your are entitled to it.
New hardware is nice and all, but it's really of minor importance compared to the elements of the platform that should be there to help kids learn. I think there's a reason that the press never covers how fantastic and ground breaking the educational aspect is. The technology is interesting, but as far as I can tell, the educational aspect is an afterthought.
I also have a Chumby, and one thing going for this device is that it has a high WAF (or Wife Acceptance Factor, for you single people) if you set it up right. Ours is a clock part of the time, a photo frame, gets facebook and twitter updates so she can see what the family and friends are up to, panda cam & LOL cats for the kids, traffic update, two news feeds (NY times, CBS), a 5 day weather forecast, and a netflix queue widget. For a stay-at-home mom with two little kids, this is a great way to find out what's going on with the rest of the world that doesn't involve turning on the TV or sitting down at the computer.
Right, the industry already tracks all sold formats. What they're not tracking is (the gullible) people paying monthly p2p "subscriptions" or people paying usenet subscriptions. Those people are not buying music, they're buying access.
I've never used their platform. Can you be more specific about the services that you find beneficial and that make this a rights management instead of restrictions management system? Thanks!
I got to play with the Microsoft touch at CES. This is nothing like it. The MS table uses a camera underneath the screen, so it can do things like recognize physical objects. Imagine thumbing through artwork on the table, then putting your wireless MP3 player down on the table and dragging the artwork to it and having it wirelessly sync. Pretty cool, if you ask me. They demoed this at CES. Basically anything with a barcode can be recognized as a unique device. Without this type of physical object recognition, the Wii version is a poor substitute, besides the fact you can't actually use all 10 fingers (or 20, if there are two of you) at once.
Slashdot Mirror
(I'm standing as I type this)
I tried a nice floor mat and for some reason found it made it harder to work, so your mileage may vary. I'm now mat-free but I wear comfortable shoes.
I also recommend doing a test run with boxes before your shell out for the full desk or attachment. I find I stand for 30-50% of the day on average, sometimes 100%, some times 0%.
Height of the desk makes a big difference - you want something that works for you both standing and sitting. I'm on the taller side and use the varidesk.com pro 36. My monitor is on a stand and still slightly shorter than ideal. My shorter colleagues fare better with the ergotron, which can adjust to a lower keyboard height when sitting.
Yes, I remember the "I'm not going to buy any music right now because nothing is compatible" stage well. My media experience with respect to music & movies sounds like yours. I don't buy movies anymore, but I still buy music. Mostly I use services such as spotify and netflix.
> I can't think of any precedent saying that having relatively painless DRM has resulted in better media access.
Netflix? Kindle books? Steam? Almost everyone I know uses the first two, and most don't even know there's DRM. However, if the DRM wasn't there, the studios/publishers would not have made their content available.
It's clear the studios are much more tech savvy then the music companies were, and much less likely to make the same DRM-free decision. I just don't see it happening (at least, not any in the next 5-10 years). It seems like the studios are still trying to prop up physical with UltraViolet (their attempt at DRM interoperability) rather than learning from the music industry's mistakes. They still have a chance to make it work, but it's certainly not there yet. If it fails, they are more likely to further fragment and do multiple, incompatible things rather than go DRM-free.
> The standard is a standardised API to an external encryption plugin.
Section 6 of the draft lays out a baseline called simple encryption: "This ensures that there is a common baseline level of protection that is guaranteed to be supported in all user agents, including those that are entirely open source. Thus, content providers that need only basic protection can build simple applications that will work on all platforms without needing to work with any content protection providers."
I get what you are saying, though - how successful this is will depend on what happens on the content decryption module side, and whether people opt to use the simple encryption option or not. No one is being forced to use this. Best case scenario, things become interoperable. Worst case, it's no different than today, because the Adobe analogy you use is exactly what we have with our various plug-ins and external apps.
> The web is no longer an open medium designed to be usable by anyone with any browser.
I don't understand how this changes anything. Aren't there already plug-ins and even HTML5/Javascript/CSS features that are browser or platform specific? If this gets adopted, will there be more or less content available in-browser? Most media services want to maximize their addressable user base, not minimize it, so interoperability is in their interest.
As far as this being a corner case, maybe you have not seen the recent numbers on internet traffic (yes I know internet != web, but this is what people are doing). See: http://allthingsd.com/20130514/netflix-still-eats-a-third-of-the-web-every-night-amazon-hbo-and-hulu-trail-behind/
I think this is a reasonable application of the 80/20 rule: as media consumption becomes the 80%, browsers want to continue playing a central role, and that will be made easier by this.
Yes, I know I will be flamed for this, but I think the thing that is getting lost in the conversation is that we've all be using DRM for years, and the point of this is to increase interoperability. How many of us have netflix or amazon movie streaming? Buy kindle books? Use steam? Even the books downloadable from my library use some form of protection. Most people don't care, because those protections don't impact our typical usage patterns. But all of these services live in their own separate worlds, because they are not interoperable. Adding support for a common protection standard doesn't suddenly make it possible to encrypt movies or harder to download images on the net because that already exists today (and has for years)! The point is to end the balkanization of media players and let everything work in your vanilla browser. That sounds good to me.
I have had contact with Manu Sporny, and his portrait doesn't look like him. You can google him to see for yourself. Of course, I imagine this kind of tech will only get better...
Doesn't putting it in the public domain accomplish that? You could just include that as a comment in your code when you post?
I agree - it looks and works great. To me, it feels like a phone OS designed with the small form-factor in mind, rather than a porting of a "desktop icon" metaphor to a smaller screen. The home screen is designed to expose a number of things you want to do/see without requiring to navigate anywhere or launch an app. Simple things like the way the buttons feel and animate make the experience better. I find it both more enjoyable to use than Android and iPhone, and also snappier (using a Samsung phone, haven't used the Nokia). The main thing it lacks at the moment is the breadth of apps, but it's getting there. My normal phone is Android, but when I'm due for an update I'm likely to switch to WP.
Even the honor system won't work. Now that the on-line retailers like Amazon and iTunes have a cloud service that stores your purchases, the concept of deleting local copies doesn't work.
Anyone who works regularly with lawyers (as I do, (and I'm a geek (as demonstrated by these nested parens))) will know that it will take nothing short of full strength AI to replace them, lawyer jokes aside. There is so much nuance, subtlety, and tweaking of agreements that a using a simple computerized approach won't work for a substantial portion of what (say) normal corporate law firms do. If we magically move to a machine readable contract language, portions of contract verification might be automated, but certainly not the writing. And good luck getting lawyers to move to such a thing any time soon.
My interpretation is that it's freebase.com but with a different (easier?) API, loose (or absent) semantics, and no starting data.
I have & like the Lowepro Fastpack 350, and I think it will meet your needs. There's a full sized laptop sleeve along the back. The bottom part of the compartment will hold a DSLR+lens and 4 other lenses or 2 lenses+flashes. The camera compartment can be opened from the side, so you can get your camera out without taking the backpack off. There's a side pouch that can be used to carry a tripod (be careful with the mesh) if you add a strap at the top, or you can strap it to the bottom/back. The top compartment is large enough to hold a light jacket + other random stuff (MP3 player, chargers, mouse, grad filters, cleaning gear, filters, etc). Take a look at the pictures on Amazon to get a better sense of the layout.
I visited a local photo store to check out options before ordering this one, which met my needs and was reasonably priced relative to the alternatives.
See his book Emperor's New Mind. Most AI people viewed this skeptically back then, too.
http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0192861980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306449679&sr=8-1
Arduino is great, I've got my own, but it seems like the choice you'd make if you were pursuing hobbyists instead of commercial device manufacturers. Am I wrong?
"This can only mean..."
Spoken like someone with no knowledge of the actual negotiation. Why does Google need the labels to do a dropbox style locker in the first place? They've had Google Docs for a while now. Maybe what it means is they got caught with their pants down due to the Amazon launch, and felt pressure to get something out at I/O faster than they had expected, and when the labels didn't accept every term they offered, they just went without.
Of course a lawsuit may be coming, but the evidence suggests not. Other "dumb" lockers have been around for years. If Google starts using a single copy of a given track to serve everyone (as opposed to uploading each person's file) or does any number of other things that clearly require a license, then they'll be exposed.
Too much hot CO2, right?
There's a really good chance this resulted from automatic claiming tools that make use of things like acoustic fingerprints. YouTube or a filtering partner will have a catalog of Warner tracks that new uploads are checked against. Warner may not even have known about this until it blew up. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.
Explain this right to take someone else's work, which you have not paid for and have no rights to under the law, regardless of whether they want you to or not? Do you think that we can have a healthy society if the people bringing new creations into the world are forced to share their works at your whim and under your terms? Sure, some of us want to share what we do, because we know it will be reciprocated. But this has to be voluntary under the guidelines of the law.
Just because you can take something does not mean your are entitled to it.
New hardware is nice and all, but it's really of minor importance compared to the elements of the platform that should be there to help kids learn. I think there's a reason that the press never covers how fantastic and ground breaking the educational aspect is. The technology is interesting, but as far as I can tell, the educational aspect is an afterthought.
I also have a Chumby, and one thing going for this device is that it has a high WAF (or Wife Acceptance Factor, for you single people) if you set it up right. Ours is a clock part of the time, a photo frame, gets facebook and twitter updates so she can see what the family and friends are up to, panda cam & LOL cats for the kids, traffic update, two news feeds (NY times, CBS), a 5 day weather forecast, and a netflix queue widget. For a stay-at-home mom with two little kids, this is a great way to find out what's going on with the rest of the world that doesn't involve turning on the TV or sitting down at the computer.
Right, the industry already tracks all sold formats. What they're not tracking is (the gullible) people paying monthly p2p "subscriptions" or people paying usenet subscriptions. Those people are not buying music, they're buying access.
Amen to that!
I've never used their platform. Can you be more specific about the services that you find beneficial and that make this a rights management instead of restrictions management system? Thanks!
And while we're at it, can artificially created life have a soul? ;-)
I got to play with the Microsoft touch at CES. This is nothing like it. The MS table uses a camera underneath the screen, so it can do things like recognize physical objects. Imagine thumbing through artwork on the table, then putting your wireless MP3 player down on the table and dragging the artwork to it and having it wirelessly sync. Pretty cool, if you ask me. They demoed this at CES. Basically anything with a barcode can be recognized as a unique device. Without this type of physical object recognition, the Wii version is a poor substitute, besides the fact you can't actually use all 10 fingers (or 20, if there are two of you) at once.