And a while after that, there was Masterpieces of Infocom, which didn't even come with a book, just a CD with I think all but one of the text games, and a whole lot of PDF.
Liquid Audio did support the Mac. Of course, they dropped Mac support for version six; they never supported OS X; and the download link on this page no longer actually gets you to a Mac version. But this has more to do with the company's having become completely irrelevant than with Mac support per se.
Platform support isn't the reason Liquid Audio failed.
Metro ("Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper") recently did an article about environmentally friendly cars, including an evaluation of several models. It's not Consumer Reports, but it does have some interesting points, like the fact that the Civic Hybrid pollutes exactly as much as a regular old Civic EX.
A generation of college students and Internet users has been hurtling headlong toward worse audio quality, because quality is less important to them than bandwidth, file size, and ease of sharing. Even leaving aside the issues of restricted sharing and archiving, what's going to compel a mass market to adopt a more expensive medium whose primary selling point is better audio quality (and only if you have the right equipment)?
Re:Are we comparing apples to oranges?
on
The Empire Stumbles
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· Score: 2, Informative
A good start is the all-time domestic box office, adjusted for inflation. Spider-man is #53; Star Wars episodes 1-4 are all in the top 20; episode 5 isn't on the list yet; #1 is still Gone With The Wind. (What does that say about generations?)
This statistic is flawed too (moviegoing behavior has changed, Americans have grown richer in comparison with the rest of the world, older movies have had more time to make their money, etc.) but it's fun.
I don't think Nielsen is limiting his scope to the PC. It's hard to tell because he doesn't say why each of his picks makes the list, but each of his choices for the current decade has a strong investment in ubiquitous computing, as well as speech understanding and generation, which have obvious implications for mobile phone interfaces.
Yahoo provides results from its own hierarchical database first. If it can't find anything, or you click "web pages" (as opposed to "web sites"), then it shows Google results.
Well, it's still not a complete sentence; and... the page I got has an empty A tag in the source where your [theglobeandmail.com] is. It's not a browser problem.
Actually I think that's a red herring. I don't care whether new laws would have prevented the WTC attack; the fact is, that attack is over. Nothing we can do will prevent it from having happened. What I'm worried about is preventing the next attack.
This is not to say I'm willing to accept any restriction that might prevent a possible avenue of attack. But we need to weigh the expected *future* benefits of such restrictions against the expected drawbacks. It doesn't help to legislate a closed barn door when the horses are already gone.
(BTW I think the main thing that will prevent another attack of exactly this form is not law at all. I don't believe an airplane full of passengers will ever again let a few people with knives decide where to crash the plane. See Flight 93 for an example.)
Interesting. You say "if that's what it takes then I'm for it". I.e., if the FBI needs more wiretapping to get us through this war, then give it to them. But you're suspicious that the FBI is just pushing "the same agenda that they've been pushing for the past few years."
But what if, in fact, we've been in this war for some time? That seems to be bin Laden's opinion. I'd claim that to whatever extent we're in a war now, we've been in it at least since the World Trade Center bombing of 1993.
And, you know, what if the FBI knew we've been at war, and that's the reason they've been pushing this agenda for years? If it's okay for the FBI to get it during "wartime", then is it possible they've been right all along?
Just thinking out loud--I don't have an opinion on this question yet.
Only ideological material that fits within the agenda of the given elite will get full play in the media
There's something valuable in between "full play" and complete censorship.
Lessig's piece got published in the New York Times. I don't think it "fits within the agenda" of the DMCA's supporters. I'm glad it got published. I'm glad it's getting read.
Maybe it's not as much range of opinion, or not as widely disseminated, as you'd like to see, or as I would. But I don't buy the claim that trying to make a case in the media is utterly futile.
The problem with this stems from the fact that not everyone assigns the same value to content.
Not everyone assigns the same value to candy bars either. So if a candy bar is 75 cents, some people will pay 75 cents, and some people won't buy any. (And some people will shoplift.)
What's special about "content" that we need to find a way around the same supply-and-demand pricing issues that exist in every other market?
Yes, it's their privilege, as long as the courts continue to interpret copyright law in that way. I'm not arguing that... today.
My point was just that it's not fair to say "Why didn't Napster just cut a deal with the record labels?" If the labels were willing to make such a deal the Internet music landscape would be very different.
I've thought from the start that Napster should have cut a deal with the corps to be thier digital music distribution channel, but it didn't happen that way, instead the RIAA and Napster got nasty with each other and the Napster users are hurt.
I bet Napster would've loved to cut a deal. The problem is, if you went to the labels and said "Let's distribute music over the Internet" they would hem and haw and demand that you be "secure" and be afraid of letting the distribution channel be controlled by anyone but themselves. Basically they'd stall and ignore you and hope the whole subject went away.
So the only way Napster could get the labels' attention--and mp3.com before them--was to just make the service and present it as a fait accompli. Then the labels were at least awakened to the fact that digital distribution was going to happen, one way or another. But they still didn't want to give these startups power over a distribution channel, so instead of cutting a deal, they sued. These lawsuits are another stalling tactic, another way to keep things uncertain until the labels can get their own distribution channels in place.
Leaving aside the idea of introducing artificial adjustments for processor speed, I agree that comparisons between machines with similar processor speeds would be interesting.
It sounds like Jay would be happy to publish results from such tests, if someone else were to supply them. I think he just doesn't happen to have any matching machines.
Yeah, but look, an animated movie is always dubbed--that's just how animation is. It'll be dubbed in English and probably in Japanese too. It's just a question of whether the Japanese dubbing will be worse.
The idea of re-rendering for both languages is akin to having the actors deliver their performances twice, once for each language. But you don't have to hunt around for bilingual actors, because you don't lose any authenticity in using different actors for the two languages.
For those of you in the SF bay area (or Palm Springs), Computer Recycling Center is a good way to get rid of equipment you don't want. As the article mentions, they do their best to redistribute computers to organizations that need them. But even if a computer no longer works, they'll salvage parts from it for reuse, and recycle what they can of what remains.
Or was it the critics who claim that the moment Amazon started charging profitable prices the customer base would vanish because there is no such thin as "a good location" in cyberspace.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Democrats won the presidency and control of the Senate, the House would still be Republican. Works either way.
And a while after that, there was Masterpieces of Infocom, which didn't even come with a book, just a CD with I think all but one of the text games, and a whole lot of PDF.
Wait, so, he claimed to be an American and normal, but it turns out he's really a history teacher?
Liquid Audio did support the Mac. Of course, they dropped Mac support for version six; they never supported OS X; and the download link on this page no longer actually gets you to a Mac version. But this has more to do with the company's having become completely irrelevant than with Mac support per se.
Platform support isn't the reason Liquid Audio failed.
Metro ("Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper") recently did an article about environmentally friendly cars, including an evaluation of several models. It's not Consumer Reports, but it does have some interesting points, like the fact that the Civic Hybrid pollutes exactly as much as a regular old Civic EX.
A generation of college students and Internet users has been hurtling headlong toward worse audio quality, because quality is less important to them than bandwidth, file size, and ease of sharing. Even leaving aside the issues of restricted sharing and archiving, what's going to compel a mass market to adopt a more expensive medium whose primary selling point is better audio quality (and only if you have the right equipment)?
A good start is the all-time domestic box office, adjusted for inflation. Spider-man is #53; Star Wars episodes 1-4 are all in the top 20; episode 5 isn't on the list yet; #1 is still Gone With The Wind. (What does that say about generations?)
This statistic is flawed too (moviegoing behavior has changed, Americans have grown richer in comparison with the rest of the world, older movies have had more time to make their money, etc.) but it's fun.
I don't think Nielsen is limiting his scope to the PC. It's hard to tell because he doesn't say why each of his picks makes the list, but each of his choices for the current decade has a strong investment in ubiquitous computing, as well as speech understanding and generation, which have obvious implications for mobile phone interfaces.
Yes, that paper mentions in passing that MS invented the wheel mouse. I think we were talking about Microsoft, though, not Mouse Systems.
What was it that Zittrain said that you objected to?
Campbell, were he alive and posting to Slashdot, would likely point out the myth of a Beowulf cluster of these.
That reload will cost you half a penny. I say go ahead and splurge.
Yahoo provides results from its own hierarchical database first. If it can't find anything, or you click "web pages" (as opposed to "web sites"), then it shows Google results.
Well, it's still not a complete sentence; and... the page I got has an empty A tag in the source where your [theglobeandmail.com] is. It's not a browser problem.
Actually I think that's a red herring. I don't care whether new laws would have prevented the WTC attack; the fact is, that attack is over. Nothing we can do will prevent it from having happened. What I'm worried about is preventing the next attack.
This is not to say I'm willing to accept any restriction that might prevent a possible avenue of attack. But we need to weigh the expected *future* benefits of such restrictions against the expected drawbacks. It doesn't help to legislate a closed barn door when the horses are already gone.
(BTW I think the main thing that will prevent another attack of exactly this form is not law at all. I don't believe an airplane full of passengers will ever again let a few people with knives decide where to crash the plane. See Flight 93 for an example.)
Interesting. You say "if that's what it takes then I'm for it". I.e., if the FBI needs more wiretapping to get us through this war, then give it to them. But you're suspicious that the FBI is just pushing "the same agenda that they've been pushing for the past few years."
But what if, in fact, we've been in this war for some time? That seems to be bin Laden's opinion. I'd claim that to whatever extent we're in a war now, we've been in it at least since the World Trade Center bombing of 1993.
And, you know, what if the FBI knew we've been at war, and that's the reason they've been pushing this agenda for years? If it's okay for the FBI to get it during "wartime", then is it possible they've been right all along?
Just thinking out loud--I don't have an opinion on this question yet.
Only ideological material that fits within the agenda of the given elite will get full play in the media
There's something valuable in between "full play" and complete censorship.
Lessig's piece got published in the New York Times. I don't think it "fits within the agenda" of the DMCA's supporters. I'm glad it got published. I'm glad it's getting read.
Maybe it's not as much range of opinion, or not as widely disseminated, as you'd like to see, or as I would. But I don't buy the claim that trying to make a case in the media is utterly futile.
The problem with this stems from the fact that not everyone assigns the same value to content.
Not everyone assigns the same value to candy bars either. So if a candy bar is 75 cents, some people will pay 75 cents, and some people won't buy any. (And some people will shoplift.)
What's special about "content" that we need to find a way around the same supply-and-demand pricing issues that exist in every other market?
Yes, it's their privilege, as long as the courts continue to interpret copyright law in that way. I'm not arguing that... today.
My point was just that it's not fair to say "Why didn't Napster just cut a deal with the record labels?" If the labels were willing to make such a deal the Internet music landscape would be very different.
I've thought from the start that Napster should have cut a deal with the corps to be thier digital music distribution channel, but it didn't happen that way, instead the RIAA and Napster got nasty with each other and the Napster users are hurt.
I bet Napster would've loved to cut a deal. The problem is, if you went to the labels and said "Let's distribute music over the Internet" they would hem and haw and demand that you be "secure" and be afraid of letting the distribution channel be controlled by anyone but themselves. Basically they'd stall and ignore you and hope the whole subject went away.
So the only way Napster could get the labels' attention--and mp3.com before them--was to just make the service and present it as a fait accompli. Then the labels were at least awakened to the fact that digital distribution was going to happen, one way or another. But they still didn't want to give these startups power over a distribution channel, so instead of cutting a deal, they sued. These lawsuits are another stalling tactic, another way to keep things uncertain until the labels can get their own distribution channels in place.
Here's a challenge: Try finding a commercial web site that gives credit to the individuals who created it.
Leaving aside the idea of introducing artificial adjustments for processor speed, I agree that comparisons between machines with similar processor speeds would be interesting.
It sounds like Jay would be happy to publish results from such tests, if someone else were to supply them. I think he just doesn't happen to have any matching machines.
Yeah, but look, an animated movie is always dubbed--that's just how animation is. It'll be dubbed in English and probably in Japanese too. It's just a question of whether the Japanese dubbing will be worse.
The idea of re-rendering for both languages is akin to having the actors deliver their performances twice, once for each language. But you don't have to hunt around for bilingual actors, because you don't lose any authenticity in using different actors for the two languages.
For those of you in the SF bay area (or Palm Springs), Computer Recycling Center is a good way to get rid of equipment you don't want. As the article mentions, they do their best to redistribute computers to organizations that need them. But even if a computer no longer works, they'll salvage parts from it for reuse, and recycle what they can of what remains.
Or was it the critics who claim that the moment Amazon started charging profitable prices the customer base would vanish because there is no such thin as "a good location" in cyberspace.
Of course there is.