"It's statements like this that validates everything that the RIAA claims."
Umm... no, it doesn't validate the RIAA's claims. Not quite anyway. Had the parent poster said that he would never pay $18 to download and burn 10 songs when he could get a CD for less (yes people, you CAN find CDs out there for $12-$15, quit shopping at the mall), he would have been making a good point. But his comment still echoes the viewpoint of most internet users -- when faced with the choice of going legit and overpaying for music, or grabbing it for free, they're gonna grab it for free. The music industry has done nothing to make their online offerings attractive yet (it needs to have some compelling reason to do it, be it extras or just plain cheaper than buying a CD). If the RIAA was complaining that nobody buys CDs anymore and then jacked up the price of a CD to $20-$25 (for a single CD, so $35-40 for a double), and people said "oh I'm never buying a CD again," it doesn't validate their claims. It's business 101. If people aren't flocking to your offerings, odds are you're doing something wrong.
What if you could search to find new blogs to read, by people you've never met, based on certain criteria? All stored in one big directory? I'm not even talking about searching for the daily smut written by some 22-year-old bicurious college student with a healthy sexual appetite, I'm talking about people who are fans of the same bands, the same shows, the same stuff as you. Maybe you could find people in your own area and make new friends and even start a club or something. Or maybe you're doing some research and want a first-hand account of something going on in some foreign country, that doesn't come from their local/national news media? One of the the early promises of the web was that suddenly, everyone was a publisher. Well, that's still somewhat true, but it's becoming less so by the day thanks to corporate interests. Blogs could bring that original potential back to the web, as they are a more appropriate place for people to write about the dumb things their cats do and what's going on in their lives. If Google does this right, it's gonna be incredible.
You can't copy the CSS. The keys (or something like that) are on a region of the DVD that no consumer DVD burner can write to. So we're back to square one.
Does anybody know of any websites that will be hosting copies of the superbowl ads? In years past, I've relied on AdCritic.com, but it seems they now require you to sign up for a $70/year subscription just to watch ads. They don't even have a cheaper monthly subscription, nor do I really want to pay to watch ads in the first place.
The rules on cellphones have nothing to do with potential RF interference with the instrumentation. Imagine, if you will, thousands of cell phones, thirty thousand feet up, each connecting to dozens of cells. The reason they ban cell phones on airplanes is because it just wreaks havoc on the cellular network (which in many places is overburdened as it is).
No, seriously folks. I know it would drain major resources from organizations that might be convinced to chip in (FSF, EFF, ACLU), but it's a pretty well-known fact that Super Bowl ads deliver great bang for the buck if you can afford it. Slashdotters care, but our numbers are limited. What we need is for someone to figure out how to squeeze the major details into 30 seconds, along with getting people riled up about it. Rallies and protests don't do shit. It needs to be professional and slick, or else the masses won't pay attention.
If Martin Luther King Jr. had ignored the gathering masses and had delivered his "I have a Dream" speech to the people standing behind him, nobody would have listened or cared. This is what's currently going on. We need to turn ourselves around and start speaking to the masses. We must awaken the collective consciousness. This Supreme Court case decision is a call to arms, and we need something (the commercial) to crystalize that in the minds of the masses.
If it is profound enough, it only needs to air once for it to remain in the minds of the masses. (remember the 1984 mac commercial? there's your proof) Who's up for it?
The real problem... is that you're a troll that has NO idea what you're talking about. WMV9 is an implementation of MPEG4. It's not a less capable video format because it's THE SAME FORMAT.
Nobody's claiming MPEG4 is free, either -- open, yes, but not free. Open means it's well documented and a reference implemenation is usually available, to anyone, for a published price. MPEG4 was created by the MPEG consortium - a group of companies that realize they can get a better end product if they pool their resources. Guess what! Research costs money! You wanna see your neat new codec? Sure, fine, but you gotta pay. They took the time and put up the money to develop and document it, why should they give it away for free? Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't believe in sharing. If they can sell licenses of WMV9 (an implementation) for half the cost of MPEG4 (a standard) licenses, MPEG will quickly cease to exist. Once MPEG is out of the way, MS can charge whatever they like to companies for the use of their products/codecs, whereas MPEG charges reasonably and non-discriminately (RAND licensing). And unlike MPEG, MS will eventually never make their implementation available to anyone else, no matter how much money they have.
What's in it for them? With the storage business having such a low profit margin, it would seem that there's nothing in it for them. Until you realize that once a few companies start doing it, the rest don't want to be caught with their pants down if the *AA come around with their team of lawyers. They probably figure it's just cheaper and easier to do this now (possibly also in preparation for Palladium) than to get tangled up in a huge legal battle later on.
You're both half-right. It's the equivalent of giving him the car for free, and him saying "how do I set the timing on the engine so it can start?" or "which fuse is for the lights?"
There's a certain level of basic familiarity people have with cars -- if it's a car, odds are you know where to put the key and how to drive the damn thing. Software isn't quite like that. Remember the first time you sat down at a UNIX box (command line, none of that easier GUI stuff for this analogy) and didn't know the first place to start? It's like having to pay for the man pages, and if you pay for them, you can't tell anyone else that "ls" lists your files.
Gran Turismo 3, the popular racing game on PS2, has something similar to the "age" thing you propose, except you don't get to choose a starting age or anything like that. When you get a car, it has a certain amount of horsepower. After a few races, the horsepower increases as the car is broken in. After a number of races, the amount of horsepower gradually decreases (as the engine starts to wear out). Sure, you can add engine mods and stuff, but the base HP level still goes down. I don't know if it eventually drops to 0, but it discourages you from using a supercar (if you win one) to win a bunch of the easier races that can be won with a lesser car -- especially if you need every last HP that engine has later on in the game.
Just my one cent. (taking off the one cent bonus since it doesn't have much to do with the article)
I go to RIT too. I'm not majoring in CS though (choosing instead to major in Imaging Science). Does this mean that I too can get a free copy of VS.NET? Or does this mean that I'm helping to subsidize you? You're not the only one paying RIT thousands of dollars a year -- it'd be nice if we could all share in the perks. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
This is what you sound like: "Hey, say what you want about slavery, but I got my chains for free!"
They sure do look impressive... if you like loads of gray on your screen and software that looks like it came straight from 1996! Plus the widgets don't look very nice. I realize they're pretty standard widgets, but I can't see any major corporations switching from Outlook to this, at least not at this stage. Some minor gripes and room for improvement (most of the details I'm mentioning are from the three_pane.jpg image, although they apply to most of them): the icons have got to improve, both in appearance and size -- your average business PC has more than enough horsepower to display more than 16 colors; the left pane should have a white background or at least a lighter shade of gray, to promote uniformity and separate it from the menubar/toolbars, etc. I love how WMs in linux are infinitely skinnable, yet they never seem to put in widgets that look good, they're just concerned about the damn titlebars. The scroll bar and the drop-down menu ("Private") just look out of place, as do the squares on the divider bars. I know I'll get modded down for this, but making software look good (it's not "pretty," it's professional) is damn important nowadays. If Mitch Kapor and his crew want their project to be taken seriously, they've got a long ways to go on their IM client (which could be developed into the gotta-have reason for OSAF if they only realized its potential) let alone the rest of the project, and they've gotta make it look slick without looking toyish. Just my $.02
I also have DishPVR. It works, it's easy to use, it's built into your receiver already. You've already paid for it and you won't be getting your money back anytime soon, and if anything goes wrong with the DishPVR, you just have to call them up and they'll replace it or fix it. So why bother spending an extra $500 on an open-source option when what you've already got and paid for works just fine?
If you don't like it, there's a lovely little preferences page where you can choose what topics you like and don't like. Many slashdotters currently consider Phoenix to be the best browser on Windows (well, that and Opera) since it's Mozilla without the bloat. And seeing as how most slashdotters are also running Windows, despite all the pro-linux talk around here (I'm guilty myself, though I do have my reasons), improvements become news. And when was the last time they released a version of IE? About a year ago? Slashdot does tend to post when major updates to IE are released too -- MS just calls them service packs and critical security updates, instead of a point release.
The original poster was commenting that there currently is no drop-in replacement for Access. You go on to say that it already has the functionality... and then say it requires an external database, and can't yet handle Access files. If you're starting from scratch, sure, that might be an okay solution. If you're already set-up, on the other hand, it isn't. I don't know about you, but to me, requiring an external database and not being able to read files created by the software you're replacing doesn't exactly qualify as a drop-in replacement.
Alright, I suppose I can see where you're coming from now. I'd love to know how much space holographic video would take up, but I doubt that will be coming out in the next 50 years, especially not at the consumer level, so there goes that theory. So you're right that it'll probably last at least a century. You are, however, incorrect on your math. You computed the size of an 8-bit grayscale video. The real size of the 24-bit uncompressed video would be around 301.75TB. 16,000x16,000 pixels/frame * 3 bytes/pixel * 60 frames/second * 7200 seconds = 301.75TB. And that doesn't include audio, although even 6 channel 96KHz 24-bit audio would only cost you 10.9GB for two hours. Of course, this is all in the world of the fanciful, where compression doesn't exist. We're likely to see fractal compression in common use in 50 years, which will allow for compression ratios of at least 30:1 at virtually perfect quality, so even those two hours of mind-boggling video would take up no more than 10TB. I'd love a drive that could write the 2.2GB/sec that uncompressed 244MPixel video would require. You'd surpass the old AVI file-size limitation in under a second.:)
A hundred years? What, will Moore's law slow down by a factor of two? 32 orders of magnitude gives us 32 doublings of current technology, or 32 cycles of Moore's law... at the current rate of roughly 18 months, that gives us 32 cycles * 1.5 years/cycle = 48 years. So it should hold us over til around 2050, although I seriously doubt that anyone (personal users, the fed's databases will need all the space they can get by then) will be using up all that storage. Unless we start talking about gigapixel video or digital holographic video storage or something along those lines.
Re:Washing machine, quit making long distance call
on
5 Predictions for 2012
·
· Score: 1
and repeat it back to you...
...often at a hefty fee. I was taking my car into the shop one morning and on the way, the check engine light came on, so I asked them to plug their little handheld unit into it, and they obliged (for free, because I'd be paying quite a bit for the service anyway). It took him no more than 30 seconds to tell me my oxygen sensor could be bad. I asked him how much they usually charge to do that, he told me $80. Give them a little more time to read each car, maybe say two minutes, and you've got something that'll make you $2400/hr. Let's hope Sears and Maytag aren't quite as greedy.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... no, it doesn't validate the RIAA's claims. Not quite anyway. Had the parent poster said that he would never pay $18 to download and burn 10 songs when he could get a CD for less (yes people, you CAN find CDs out there for $12-$15, quit shopping at the mall), he would have been making a good point. But his comment still echoes the viewpoint of most internet users -- when faced with the choice of going legit and overpaying for music, or grabbing it for free, they're gonna grab it for free. The music industry has done nothing to make their online offerings attractive yet (it needs to have some compelling reason to do it, be it extras or just plain cheaper than buying a CD). If the RIAA was complaining that nobody buys CDs anymore and then jacked up the price of a CD to $20-$25 (for a single CD, so $35-40 for a double), and people said "oh I'm never buying a CD again," it doesn't validate their claims. It's business 101. If people aren't flocking to your offerings, odds are you're doing something wrong.
What if you could search to find new blogs to read, by people you've never met, based on certain criteria? All stored in one big directory? I'm not even talking about searching for the daily smut written by some 22-year-old bicurious college student with a healthy sexual appetite, I'm talking about people who are fans of the same bands, the same shows, the same stuff as you. Maybe you could find people in your own area and make new friends and even start a club or something. Or maybe you're doing some research and want a first-hand account of something going on in some foreign country, that doesn't come from their local/national news media? One of the the early promises of the web was that suddenly, everyone was a publisher. Well, that's still somewhat true, but it's becoming less so by the day thanks to corporate interests. Blogs could bring that original potential back to the web, as they are a more appropriate place for people to write about the dumb things their cats do and what's going on in their lives. If Google does this right, it's gonna be incredible.
There are 3 kinds of people in the world. Those who know how to count, those who don't, and those who think stupid math jokes are funny.
Gives new meaning to calling it "suds"
You can't copy the CSS. The keys (or something like that) are on a region of the DVD that no consumer DVD burner can write to. So we're back to square one.
Yeah, I know I'm still waiting for my AMD Athlon.NET. ;)
So, any sites?
And posting on slashdot isn't?
The rules on cellphones have nothing to do with potential RF interference with the instrumentation. Imagine, if you will, thousands of cell phones, thirty thousand feet up, each connecting to dozens of cells. The reason they ban cell phones on airplanes is because it just wreaks havoc on the cellular network (which in many places is overburdened as it is).
If Martin Luther King Jr. had ignored the gathering masses and had delivered his "I have a Dream" speech to the people standing behind him, nobody would have listened or cared. This is what's currently going on. We need to turn ourselves around and start speaking to the masses. We must awaken the collective consciousness. This Supreme Court case decision is a call to arms, and we need something (the commercial) to crystalize that in the minds of the masses.
If it is profound enough, it only needs to air once for it to remain in the minds of the masses. (remember the 1984 mac commercial? there's your proof) Who's up for it?
Nobody's claiming MPEG4 is free, either -- open, yes, but not free. Open means it's well documented and a reference implemenation is usually available, to anyone, for a published price. MPEG4 was created by the MPEG consortium - a group of companies that realize they can get a better end product if they pool their resources. Guess what! Research costs money! You wanna see your neat new codec? Sure, fine, but you gotta pay. They took the time and put up the money to develop and document it, why should they give it away for free? Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't believe in sharing. If they can sell licenses of WMV9 (an implementation) for half the cost of MPEG4 (a standard) licenses, MPEG will quickly cease to exist. Once MPEG is out of the way, MS can charge whatever they like to companies for the use of their products/codecs, whereas MPEG charges reasonably and non-discriminately (RAND licensing). And unlike MPEG, MS will eventually never make their implementation available to anyone else, no matter how much money they have.
Is that kind of like token Tolkien?
...mmm, the smell of burning karma.
*ducks*
What's in it for them? With the storage business having such a low profit margin, it would seem that there's nothing in it for them. Until you realize that once a few companies start doing it, the rest don't want to be caught with their pants down if the *AA come around with their team of lawyers. They probably figure it's just cheaper and easier to do this now (possibly also in preparation for Palladium) than to get tangled up in a huge legal battle later on.
It's called a used Hyundai or Kia and two RealDolls. Face it, it's your only chance at getting a threesome.
There's a certain level of basic familiarity people have with cars -- if it's a car, odds are you know where to put the key and how to drive the damn thing. Software isn't quite like that. Remember the first time you sat down at a UNIX box (command line, none of that easier GUI stuff for this analogy) and didn't know the first place to start? It's like having to pay for the man pages, and if you pay for them, you can't tell anyone else that "ls" lists your files.
Just my one cent. (taking off the one cent bonus since it doesn't have much to do with the article)
This is what you sound like: "Hey, say what you want about slavery, but I got my chains for free!"
They sure do look impressive... if you like loads of gray on your screen and software that looks like it came straight from 1996! Plus the widgets don't look very nice. I realize they're pretty standard widgets, but I can't see any major corporations switching from Outlook to this, at least not at this stage. Some minor gripes and room for improvement (most of the details I'm mentioning are from the three_pane.jpg image, although they apply to most of them): the icons have got to improve, both in appearance and size -- your average business PC has more than enough horsepower to display more than 16 colors; the left pane should have a white background or at least a lighter shade of gray, to promote uniformity and separate it from the menubar/toolbars, etc. I love how WMs in linux are infinitely skinnable, yet they never seem to put in widgets that look good, they're just concerned about the damn titlebars. The scroll bar and the drop-down menu ("Private") just look out of place, as do the squares on the divider bars. I know I'll get modded down for this, but making software look good (it's not "pretty," it's professional) is damn important nowadays. If Mitch Kapor and his crew want their project to be taken seriously, they've got a long ways to go on their IM client (which could be developed into the gotta-have reason for OSAF if they only realized its potential) let alone the rest of the project, and they've gotta make it look slick without looking toyish. Just my $.02
I also have DishPVR. It works, it's easy to use, it's built into your receiver already. You've already paid for it and you won't be getting your money back anytime soon, and if anything goes wrong with the DishPVR, you just have to call them up and they'll replace it or fix it. So why bother spending an extra $500 on an open-source option when what you've already got and paid for works just fine?
If you don't like it, there's a lovely little preferences page where you can choose what topics you like and don't like. Many slashdotters currently consider Phoenix to be the best browser on Windows (well, that and Opera) since it's Mozilla without the bloat. And seeing as how most slashdotters are also running Windows, despite all the pro-linux talk around here (I'm guilty myself, though I do have my reasons), improvements become news. And when was the last time they released a version of IE? About a year ago? Slashdot does tend to post when major updates to IE are released too -- MS just calls them service packs and critical security updates, instead of a point release.
The original poster was commenting that there currently is no drop-in replacement for Access. You go on to say that it already has the functionality... and then say it requires an external database, and can't yet handle Access files. If you're starting from scratch, sure, that might be an okay solution. If you're already set-up, on the other hand, it isn't. I don't know about you, but to me, requiring an external database and not being able to read files created by the software you're replacing doesn't exactly qualify as a drop-in replacement.
Alright, I suppose I can see where you're coming from now. I'd love to know how much space holographic video would take up, but I doubt that will be coming out in the next 50 years, especially not at the consumer level, so there goes that theory. So you're right that it'll probably last at least a century. You are, however, incorrect on your math. You computed the size of an 8-bit grayscale video. The real size of the 24-bit uncompressed video would be around 301.75TB. 16,000x16,000 pixels/frame * 3 bytes/pixel * 60 frames/second * 7200 seconds = 301.75TB. And that doesn't include audio, although even 6 channel 96KHz 24-bit audio would only cost you 10.9GB for two hours. Of course, this is all in the world of the fanciful, where compression doesn't exist. We're likely to see fractal compression in common use in 50 years, which will allow for compression ratios of at least 30:1 at virtually perfect quality, so even those two hours of mind-boggling video would take up no more than 10TB. I'd love a drive that could write the 2.2GB/sec that uncompressed 244MPixel video would require. You'd surpass the old AVI file-size limitation in under a second. :)
A hundred years? What, will Moore's law slow down by a factor of two? 32 orders of magnitude gives us 32 doublings of current technology, or 32 cycles of Moore's law... at the current rate of roughly 18 months, that gives us 32 cycles * 1.5 years/cycle = 48 years. So it should hold us over til around 2050, although I seriously doubt that anyone (personal users, the fed's databases will need all the space they can get by then) will be using up all that storage. Unless we start talking about gigapixel video or digital holographic video storage or something along those lines.
...often at a hefty fee. I was taking my car into the shop one morning and on the way, the check engine light came on, so I asked them to plug their little handheld unit into it, and they obliged (for free, because I'd be paying quite a bit for the service anyway). It took him no more than 30 seconds to tell me my oxygen sensor could be bad. I asked him how much they usually charge to do that, he told me $80. Give them a little more time to read each car, maybe say two minutes, and you've got something that'll make you $2400/hr. Let's hope Sears and Maytag aren't quite as greedy.