I would say what was really needed was print clarity on par with paper, which this has acheived. Most people don't mark up their books, they just read them. And dead tree books don't have backlights, do they?
The main flaw in this product, as I see it, doesn't lie in the product itself but in the available media. DRMed content that you can't share with others, for the same cost as a hardcover book? Yeah, right.
How the hell are you a customer if you refuse to view the ads? We're supposed to spend time and money to makes sure that self-important leeches like you can see our content? For what? Where is the benefit to us?
Let me clarify that we don't actively block our content from people who can't view the ads. That would be a waste of time and money. But to go out of our way so "just_another_sean" who's so frickin l33t that he's got his Firefox adblockers and flash and js disablers installed and is gleefully laughing at his free ride can get the full experience of our sites? Naw.
My company uses a very popular ad system that relies on javascript to function. If the user doesn't have javascript turned on, then they can't see our ads. If they can't see our ads, then... we really don't care if the site doesn't work for them.
For all of you who've got adblockers on and javascript and flash turned off, welcome to the beginning of the end. I hope you enjoy cruising the crusty bowels of the Internet while the rest of us enjoy Flickr and the rest of the really tasty web 2.0 apps that are coming down the pipe.
If you're suggesting that there are people who honestly believe in the principal argument of ID (that there are elements of nature that are irreducably complex and thus must have been created by a designer of some kind) without any sort of agenda beyond the search for answers about our universe, I would agree with that.
Are you honestly presenting the flaws in your elementary and high school education as an argument? Actively hide, are you joking? Nobody is engaged in a conspiracy to hide the gaps in our knowledge. There are scientists toiling away to understand and explain those gaps.
Its foolish to champion equal-time without regard for the basic legitimacy of each side on its own. Let's take this debate for example:
Your mother is one of the greatest mass murderers in history (apologies if you mother is dead and/or a saint).
My evidence is the number of unsolved murders in her area and the amount of time she was unaccounted for.
Shall we debate this in the public arena without any examination of my motives, background, or the basic facts of my argument? Shall my assertion that your mother is a killer be given the same weight and time as your counter-argument (assuming you have one)?
Sure thing. Here's a link to the judges decision in the Dover ID trial. It's a PDF, and somewhat long, but a very good read. The basic finding was that the school board was motivated not by a desire for free debate but by their own religious beliefs.
I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth. It's very enlightened how you read the bible, and I'm personally very proud of you for your open-mindedness. However, the ID "camp" sees evolution as a clear contradiction of their religious beliefs, and have chosen to fight it through the creation of a fictitious scientific movement.
I'm glad that a real scientist like you is taking the time to attempt to heal the rift between science and religion.
Sorry, sarcasm tends to spring to mind whenever I read posts like yours. I understand that you are attempting to be a peacemaker, but what are you defending?/.'s rampant anti-religion bias in annoying, but those comments weren't about "RELIGION", they we're about Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is a political movement designed to instill doubt in the scientific method, doubt which certain Fundamentalist Christians wish to exploit in order to spread their particular brand of christianity. Nothing more, nothing less. They are exactly what you are rallying against, a group of people who cannot see science co-exist with religion. To them, evolution denies faith, and therefore must be eradicated.
So thank you for holding up the middle so heroically, but perhaps you should direct your energy elsewhere. There is no horde of Atheists on the verge of outlawing religion. The opposite seems far more likely.
Intelligent Design has been shown to be a religiously motivated political movement. There are no "good ID" people tirelessly toiling away to find evidence of a designer. All of the work of the Intelligent Design movement involves two things:
1. Finding "gaps" in science that they can exploit.
2. Promoting the ID worldview in public life through political lobying on the local and national level.
To say that there are "good ID" people out there doing honest work to further the scope of human knowledge is to reward their dishonesty.
It's a poorly written, poorly reasoned screed, similar in content and quality to a high school writting assignment about how the "evil RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft are doomed. I can't understand for the life of me why it was posted to the front page.
When they started pushing.mobi as the mobile TLD, I thought they were joking. Type MORE letters on my phone? A.m TLD (and really, any of the other single letter TLDs) is a much better choice.
"If you're talking about a video iPod, what would drive the demand? Music videos? You have a whole generation of people already conditioned to getting those for free," said GartnerG2 research analyst Mike McGuire.
Uh, hello? Apple makes money on the iPods! If there a big suppy of free music videos for people to watch online (and there is) so much the better!
I could be a research analyst, if that's the kind of insight they bring to the table.
Eskimos(or any other natives that live in extreme climates) buy refridgerators to prevent their food from getting freezer burn. They insulate the food from the extreme cold outside.
These kinds of posts are pure karma-whoring, and I wish people would stop modding them up.
Cellphone, iPods, Gameboys, PDAs, and digital cameras all share the following components:
Display
CPU
User input device(scroll wheel, buttons, etc)
They are basically computers. You never hear someone exclaim, "I don't want a device that does everything. I want a good wordprocessor, a good video game machine, a good webbrowser, etc" or if you do, you probably roll your eyes at the poor ludite.
The idea that for some reason these devices must remain separate is ludicrous. What you should be shrilly demanding is a device that does everything WITH a great UI.
First of all, let's have a quick chuckle over "Apple's recent application for a patent on the phrase 'iPodcast.'" and move on:)
I noticed that iTunes could handle "video podcasts" in the last version (4.7?) and there's a little writeup of the capability paired with del.ici.us over at lifehacker:
Does it mean that a video iPod is "on the way"? Not neccesarily. iTunes has had the ability to play video for a while, and podcasting video is not much different from podcasting audio. Parse
the rss, download the associated media, add to a special playlist. I think the feature was added as an afterthought or experiment: "hey, we can add a couple lines and support this!".
The video iPod remains the white whale of Apple enthusiasts. Often speculated about, never seen.
How is it overboard? I think it's a great feature. The little "sliding over" animation makes the transition to the interface less jarring. It's a visual cue to the user that the are seeing something that was hidden. If it just appeared, they might think the page had reloaded. And page reloads for interfaces like this are what google and the rest of the modern webdev world is trying to get away from.
[09:38] spyrral@mac.com: dude, this slashdot convo is surreal [09:38] spyrral@mac.com: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/21/ 1341215&tid=209 [09:55] ephardtthatcher: what's the big deal? [09:55] spyrral@mac.com: it's an argument about chinese gold farming [09:55] spyrral@mac.com: straight cyberpunk [09:56] ephardtthatcher: hahaha [09:56] ephardtthatcher: amazing [09:57] spyrral@mac.com: the funny thing is, I read a short story about this basic subject that was set like 10 years in the future. [09:57] spyrral@mac.com: you know what's next right? [09:57] spyrral@mac.com: vigilante anti-farming groups [09:57] spyrral@mac.com: then labor organisers [09:58] spyrral@mac.com: the the farming companies start hiring mercs to protect the farmers [09:58] spyrral@mac.com: oh god [09:58] spyrral@mac.com: I'm rock hard. [09:59] ephardtthatcher: Anda's Game? [09:59] ephardtthatcher: I loved that story.
I found your post, with it's tired references to big eyes and tentacles, to be very condescending. But you are correct that my post was heavy on the attack, and low on the content.
"generally accepted by the American public" is a somewhat vague criteria. I mean, Yugio and Pokemon are both anime, and every kid (and their poor parents) has heard of that! Best Buy has a huge selection of Anime, it's carried in every video store. There's an Anime cable channel, and more on the way. What's your criteria?
That being said, the market for Anime may very well be saturated at this point.
The Japanese DVD market is quite different from ours. It's mostly a rental market, which some have explained as being due to the space requirements of a DVD collection. A DVD there costs the equivalent of 3 times or more what it would cost here. Remember when buying a movie on VHS would cost you $100? Not quite that bad, but close.
Some American fans do buy Japanese imports, but it's very rare. The fansubs fill a void between when a show airs in Japan and when it's translated and released in the US. There's evidence that they have some effect on sales, but positive or negative is hard to determine.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say what was really needed was print clarity on par with paper, which this has acheived. Most people don't mark up their books, they just read them. And dead tree books don't have backlights, do they?
The main flaw in this product, as I see it, doesn't lie in the product itself but in the available media. DRMed content that you can't share with others, for the same cost as a hardcover book? Yeah, right.
Please explain to me how not expending time and money on users who do not bring in revenue is a losing strategy for a company.
How the hell are you a customer if you refuse to view the ads? We're supposed to spend time and money to makes sure that self-important leeches like you can see our content? For what? Where is the benefit to us?
Let me clarify that we don't actively block our content from people who can't view the ads. That would be a waste of time and money. But to go out of our way so "just_another_sean" who's so frickin l33t that he's got his Firefox adblockers and flash and js disablers installed and is gleefully laughing at his free ride can get the full experience of our sites? Naw.
My company uses a very popular ad system that relies on javascript to function. If the user doesn't have javascript turned on, then they can't see our ads. If they can't see our ads, then ... we really don't care if the site doesn't work for them.
For all of you who've got adblockers on and javascript and flash turned off, welcome to the beginning of the end. I hope you enjoy cruising the crusty bowels of the Internet while the rest of us enjoy Flickr and the rest of the really tasty web 2.0 apps that are coming down the pipe.
My Firefox tab says "Slashdot | Google Re-Opens Anal"
If you're suggesting that there are people who honestly believe in the principal argument of ID (that there are elements of nature that are irreducably complex and thus must have been created by a designer of some kind) without any sort of agenda beyond the search for answers about our universe, I would agree with that.
Are you honestly presenting the flaws in your elementary and high school education as an argument? Actively hide, are you joking? Nobody is engaged in a conspiracy to hide the gaps in our knowledge. There are scientists toiling away to understand and explain those gaps.
Its foolish to champion equal-time without regard for the basic legitimacy of each side on its own. Let's take this debate for example:
Your mother is one of the greatest mass murderers in history (apologies if you mother is dead and/or a saint).
My evidence is the number of unsolved murders in her area and the amount of time she was unaccounted for.
Shall we debate this in the public arena without any examination of my motives, background, or the basic facts of my argument? Shall my assertion that your mother is a killer be given the same weight and time as your counter-argument (assuming you have one)?
Sure thing. Here's a link to the judges decision in the Dover ID trial. It's a PDF, and somewhat long, but a very good read. The basic finding was that the school board was motivated not by a desire for free debate but by their own religious beliefs.
I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth. It's very enlightened how you read the bible, and I'm personally very proud of you for your open-mindedness. However, the ID "camp" sees evolution as a clear contradiction of their religious beliefs, and have chosen to fight it through the creation of a fictitious scientific movement.
I'm glad that a real scientist like you is taking the time to attempt to heal the rift between science and religion.
/.'s rampant anti-religion bias in annoying, but those comments weren't about "RELIGION", they we're about Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is a political movement designed to instill doubt in the scientific method, doubt which certain Fundamentalist Christians wish to exploit in order to spread their particular brand of christianity. Nothing more, nothing less. They are exactly what you are rallying against, a group of people who cannot see science co-exist with religion. To them, evolution denies faith, and therefore must be eradicated.
Sorry, sarcasm tends to spring to mind whenever I read posts like yours. I understand that you are attempting to be a peacemaker, but what are you defending?
So thank you for holding up the middle so heroically, but perhaps you should direct your energy elsewhere. There is no horde of Atheists on the verge of outlawing religion. The opposite seems far more likely.
Intelligent Design has been shown to be a religiously motivated political movement. There are no "good ID" people tirelessly toiling away to find evidence of a designer. All of the work of the Intelligent Design movement involves two things:
1. Finding "gaps" in science that they can exploit.
2. Promoting the ID worldview in public life through political lobying on the local and national level.
To say that there are "good ID" people out there doing honest work to further the scope of human knowledge is to reward their dishonesty.
This Joystiq article from over a year ago new-nes-console-knockoff-is-a-lemon seems to indicate that the NEX is not all it's cracked up to be.
It's a poorly written, poorly reasoned screed, similar in content and quality to a high school writting assignment about how the "evil RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft are doomed. I can't understand for the life of me why it was posted to the front page.
When they started pushing .mobi as the mobile TLD, I thought they were joking. Type MORE letters on my phone? A .m TLD (and really, any of the other single letter TLDs) is a much better choice.
The ads are provided by a company called Massive. The ads themselves may or may not be so large as to be considered massive.
FYI, the obvious joke is about masturbation.
"If you're talking about a video iPod, what would drive the demand? Music videos? You have a whole generation of people already conditioned to getting those for free," said GartnerG2 research analyst Mike McGuire. Uh, hello? Apple makes money on the iPods! If there a big suppy of free music videos for people to watch online (and there is) so much the better! I could be a research analyst, if that's the kind of insight they bring to the table.
Eskimos(or any other natives that live in extreme climates) buy refridgerators to prevent their food from getting freezer burn. They insulate the food from the extreme cold outside.
- Display
- CPU
- User input device(scroll wheel, buttons, etc)
They are basically computers. You never hear someone exclaim, "I don't want a device that does everything. I want a good wordprocessor, a good video game machine, a good webbrowser, etc" or if you do, you probably roll your eyes at the poor ludite. The idea that for some reason these devices must remain separate is ludicrous. What you should be shrilly demanding is a device that does everything WITH a great UI.First of all, let's have a quick chuckle over "Apple's recent application for a patent on the phrase 'iPodcast.'" and move on :)
h ow-to-find-and-add-media-to-your-itunes-library-wi th-delicious-110812.php
I noticed that iTunes could handle "video podcasts" in the last version (4.7?) and there's a little writeup of the capability paired with del.ici.us over at lifehacker:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/entertainment/
Does it mean that a video iPod is "on the way"? Not neccesarily. iTunes has had the ability to play video for a while, and podcasting video is not much different from podcasting audio. Parse
the rss, download the associated media, add to a special playlist. I think the feature was added as an afterthought or experiment: "hey, we can add a couple lines and support this!".
The video iPod remains the white whale of Apple enthusiasts. Often speculated about, never seen.
...you mean Mazda experimenting with using USB drives as a key in a concept car, then yes.
Have you tried posting a story to /.? That would definately get you in touch with a large number of linux devs.
How is it overboard? I think it's a great feature. The little "sliding over" animation makes the transition to the interface less jarring. It's a visual cue to the user that the are seeing something that was hidden. If it just appeared, they might think the page had reloaded. And page reloads for interfaces like this are what google and the rest of the modern webdev world is trying to get away from.
That is weird. I'm using 1.0.5 on Win XP Pro, and all the dhtml works fine for me. What extensions are you running, if you don't mind my asking?
[09:38] spyrral@mac.com: dude, this slashdot convo is surreal/ 1341215&tid=209
[09:38] spyrral@mac.com: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/21
[09:55] ephardtthatcher: what's the big deal?
[09:55] spyrral@mac.com: it's an argument about chinese gold farming
[09:55] spyrral@mac.com: straight cyberpunk
[09:56] ephardtthatcher: hahaha
[09:56] ephardtthatcher: amazing
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: the funny thing is, I read a short story about this basic subject that was set like 10 years in the future.
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: you know what's next right?
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: vigilante anti-farming groups
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: then labor organisers
[09:58] spyrral@mac.com: the the farming companies start hiring mercs to protect the farmers
[09:58] spyrral@mac.com: oh god
[09:58] spyrral@mac.com: I'm rock hard.
[09:59] ephardtthatcher: Anda's Game?
[09:59] ephardtthatcher: I loved that story.
Probably not. The initial capacity will only be about 80 gigs.
I found your post, with it's tired references to big eyes and tentacles, to be very condescending. But you are correct that my post was heavy on the attack, and low on the content.
"generally accepted by the American public" is a somewhat vague criteria. I mean, Yugio and Pokemon are both anime, and every kid (and their poor parents) has heard of that! Best Buy has a huge selection of Anime, it's carried in every video store. There's an Anime cable channel, and more on the way. What's your criteria?
That being said, the market for Anime may very well be saturated at this point.
The Japanese DVD market is quite different from ours. It's mostly a rental market, which some have explained as being due to the space requirements of a DVD collection. A DVD there costs the equivalent of 3 times or more what it would cost here. Remember when buying a movie on VHS would cost you $100? Not quite that bad, but close.
Some American fans do buy Japanese imports, but it's very rare. The fansubs fill a void between when a show airs in Japan and when it's translated and released in the US. There's evidence that they have some effect on sales, but positive or negative is hard to determine.