The New Jersey state legislature has proposed legislation designed to make repairing firearms so ridiculously burdensome that no one will do it.
Actually, the intent of the proposed legislation you linked to would appear to be to close a loophole in the proposed legislation about a ballistic identifier database (Assembly Bill No. 438 of 2002). The ballistics identifier law would have no teeth if a gun owner could just swap out a few parts and change the gun's distinctive properties, and that is where this bill fits in. The issue here isn't whether people should be allowed to repair their own guns, but whether they should have to register their guns in a ballistic identifier database.
As many people have mentioned, the site hosting this article is straining under the load of geeks looking for more material to turn into running gags. I think I managed to find the reason for this site's poor performance - a lack of high speed internet access.
a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year
you don't get to use this added bandwidth to make your Web pages larger until 2003
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line today. It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law.
...
Starting about 2003, high-end users will have speeds corresponding to a personal T-1 line.
...
Of course, low-end users will be on ISDN lines in 2003, so high-end users' megabit access will still not sanction bloated design. Looking even further ahead, Nielsen's Law does predict that the Web will be 57 times faster in ten years.
It is amazing how easy it is to get an accurate approximation of the trend of internet connectivity speed from seven data points representing one person's internet connection speed over a span of 15 years.
So the site might not be responding well right now, but at least we get broadband next year...
The Direct Marketing Association is threatening to sue to save U.S. consumers from the potential loss of buying opportunities.
So now we need to get a national "do not sue on my behalf" list before we can get a national "I don't want a fucking Disney vacation, you worthless low-life answering machine spamming piece of scum" list? Yeah, I know, then the lawyers will sue because of the "potential loss of lawsuit opportunities." How about just a "Go to hell, DMA!" list? "Potential loss of buying opportunities?" Wouldn't that apply to the time that is wasted by telemarketers trying to sell me something I don't want when I could be researching or buying something I do want? Can I sue the DMA for causing this "potential loss of buying opportunities?"
However what I remember is this fact: during the first run of Cowboy Bebop on CN it ran a 4 days a week run for 6 weeks. That adds up to 24...two episodes had to be skipped to fit.
As someone already pointed out, the first run of Cowboy Bebop was on Sundays and Thursdays, with two episodes each Sunday, rebroadcasted on Thursday. The other problem with your theory is that three episodes were cut. The other one was Waltz for Venus, which started with a hijacking. Considering that September 11, 2001 fell during the beginning of this run and the episodes that were cut featured hijackings and skyscrapers being blown up, the reason for the cuts is fairly obvious. Subsequent runs of Cowboy Bebop included all three of the "missing" episodes.
You may have confused the scheduling of Cowboy Bebop with the scheduling of Mobile Suit Gundam, which had its first run stopped right after September 11, 2001. Mobile Suit Gundam did air 4 or 5 days a week, and its first run lasted about 6 weeks. Unlike Cowboy Bebop though, the cut episodes (with one exception) were never aired (and won't be aired in the second run either).
One consequence of this ignorance of visual design? The implicit claim that every illustration can be epitomized in words. You could only make this claim if you were so visually unsophisticated that you couldn't differentiate one kind of illustration from another. Of course, this is hogwash: The reason why we use illustrations is because words (or numbers) are sometimes too hard to understand by themselves.
This is the problem I have with some accessibility guidelines - if a picture is worth a thousand words, they want that thousand words in a caption. My web site has hundreds of pictures, so I will never be in full compliance with these kinds of guidelines. My approach has been to add some basic descriptive text to a page with thumbnails, making the same text available to everyone. The text itself is used to tell a story, and the details from the pictures that are mentioned are selected based on their relevance to the story. The consequence of bringing my site into compliance with these unrealistic guidelines through special description tags would be less content available to general viewers, since the time to write the descriptions would be taken from the time I would use to add new content.
While my site is just a personal site that shouldn't necessarily be required to be accessible (though this leads into another topic for debate), I would imagine that this would be an issue at some level for most sites - how do you balance providing special content for the disabled and providing basic content to everyone?
Many other types of accommodations are commonly utilized by all types of people - wheelchair ramps and TV/video captions are good examples of this, and this would be the rough equivalent of navigation aids and ALT tags, which are the two main accessibility features that Joe Clark mentioned in his second answer. When you get into special HTML tags like full text descriptions of images, most people probably won't even realize that they exist, as is the case with things like radio reading services for the blind.
At this point, I have no idea where I'm going with this (my apologies for any accessibility issues regarding the lack of a concluding point). I started with one of this guy's points and mostly ended up at another one, so I guess he seems like a reasonable person.
When designing a site to be accessible by someone with a specific disability, certain key features are often obvious from the definition of the disability. However, it would seem to be a greater challenge to look at accessibility for the non-disabled, where there is no obvious starting point. Different people will have different expectations in terms of content and navigation, which can make accessible design difficult without a specific user base to test designs against. For example, the concept of hyperlinking comes naturally to some, but not others - some people wouldn't even think of clicking on something unless the words "CLICK HERE" are nearby, while other people might try to click on anything that is underlined or somehow set apart. How can you balance making things obvious to less web-inclined users and keeping things unobtrusive to more advanced users?
Crichton on copyright reform
on
Electronic Life
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is where Crichton discusses copyright. He takes the opinion that copyright will need serious reform as the amount of electronic content increases because of the simple fact that people want to copy (he cited the success of VHS over laserdisc to support this position). This jumped out at me because I read the book back when Napster was at its peak. Unfortunately, Crichton seems to have underestimated the power of the entertainment industry - the DMCA is almost the exact opposite of what he envisioned as the future of digital content. Maybe Crichton's next novel will be about a group of people who narrowly escape death while attempting to view copyrighted material they legally purchased...
When it comes to burning DVDs, iDVD 2 is designed to work only with the iMac and Power Mac G4 computers with SuperDrive. DVD Studio Pro can be used with the SuperDrive as well as with third-party DVD-R drives on Macintosh computers that don't ship with a DVD-R drive.
...
Can I use iDVD 2 with other CD-R or DVD-R drives?
No. iDVD 2 is designed to work only with the Apple SuperDrive available on certain configurations of iMac and Power Mac G4 computers.
Any Power Macintosh G4 or G4 iMac equipped with a built-in Apple SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW drive).
Minimum of 256MB of RAM installed with 384MB recommended.
Requires Mac OS X, v10.1.3 or later.
Apple is obviously trying to hide this information by putting it in plain sight, those damn sneaky bastards...
apple has a nifty os & apps just to sell the hardware. just like m$ has a crappy os to sell office software..
Yes, and McDonald's uses free toys to sell Happy meals, and Sports Illustrated uses the swimsuit issue to sell magazine subscriptions, and cereal manufacturers use toys and junk to sell puffed corn and/or colored marshmallows, etc. The difference between all of these (Apple included) and Microsoft is that freebies that people actually want are being used as a competitive advantage instead of monopoly power. And this is the way things are supposed to work - convince me to buy something by offering something I actually want. Apple clearly has it right, because lots of people seem to want to use iDVD. It's not Apple's fault that you went about getting it the wrong way.
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Right on! In other news, it is much fairer to charge students to enter public (taxpayer-funded) schools than it is to charge taxpayers the cost of maintaining the doors. And those damn drivers should have to pay a private company to get through intersections instead of having taxpayers pay for traffic signals on roads. Taxpayers might pay for all of these things, but we need to make sure that the actual users pay private companies for the right to use them. After all, the trivial cost of access is the real burden, not the research/development/construction/staffing/mainten ance costs...
Actually given a nice digital camera with a high resolution, you can generate perfectly fine images for OCRing.
I wasn't questioning the resolution of the camera, I was questioning the positioning of the book to get a good image. This would work easily if the book could be opened to lay flat, but otherwise it would require some apparatus to hold the book open, and even this won't work if the book can't be held open far enough with the page flat to get a good picture (as in the worst-case example I gave).
Scanning without damaging the book?
on
Just One Page a Day
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a few books that are old enough to be well out of copyright (and obscure enough not to be found online already), and for a while I have been considering typing them in. OCR would be a lot easier, but getting a good image from a flatbed scanner would seriously damage most of these books. Even a handheld scanner would be impractical in some cases, and a digital camera seems even less likely to work. Is there any reasonable way to scan in pages from something like a 100+ year old 1.5" thick wire-bound paperback book that only opens about 60 degrees before putting up a fight?
Taking over a single state by moving a lot of like-minded people into it seems like some kind of evil scheme from the Twilight Zone, even if the goal is positive (right, like it won't be corrupted somewhere along the way). This plan seems overly complicated, risky, and unlikely to succeed with only one state involved (remember what happened the last time a bunch of states tried to break away from the US?). I know I'm not willing to move somewhere just to be part of someone's pet project.
Instead, I propose a geek breeding program that will aim to increase the percentage of freedom-demanding geeks in the US to a level that will give them political power that could rival the MPAA/RIAA/Microsoft/etc. This will give geeks control at the state and federal levels, and will allow geeks to stay where they are (though some areas might be better left ungeekified).
Now, I realize that this won't be easy. It would require recruiting a large number of females to the geek cause of course, and they would also have to be encouraged to have sex with geeks. In the beginning, it may be necessary to have multiple partners in order to build up a large enough genetic base to prevent genetic abnormalities. Similarly, different types of geeks would need to interact in order to keep the deficiencies of particular geek types in check. Still, I think more than a few geeks would be willing to take a chance on this program just because of the prospect of having sex.
Sure, some geeks might not need or even want the help of such a breeding program, but everyone will need to make sacrifices if this is going to work. This is a better world we're talking about here, not just for us, but also for our children and our children's children. This sort of thing isn't going to just happen on its own, we will all have to band together in our common cause of helping geeks get laid, um, I mean freedom! Yeah, freedom, that's the real reason, sure...
(The above does not constitute an endorsement of any of the ideas expressed above. All stereotypes mentioned above are for hypothetical use only and are not intended as an accurate description of any individual or group of individuals. The author takes no responsibility for the results of the attempted implementation of the ideas expressed above, as they are provided for entertainment use only. Interpretations of the above may vary, please allow 6 to 8 weeks before deciding that your interpretation is accurate. All complaints should be formally typed, notarized, and deposited in the nearest trash receptacle. Any females interested in this program should contact the author directly. Any females offended by this program should reconsider their feelings until they can appreciate the creative value of the above, at which time they should contact the author directly. Please be willing to relocate to the state of the author's residence. There are no disclaimers beyond this point. Author reserves the right to place additional disclaimers beyond this point.)
Are there any real rules in Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge, other than the time limit, that are enforced? I can think of two other rules (captain and expert must stay in the build area, items in build area aren't open to scavenging), but they seem to be broken quite frequently. It would also seem to be a rule that tools and equipment provided for scavenging/construction, particularly the quadbikes, are off-limits as parts, but one episode featured a diving helmet made from a bottle from the water cooler (Did it become junk when it was emptied?).
There really isn't a name for us, we just fell through the cracks of gen x and gen y. Isn't that sad?
Um, no. It would be sad to be identified as a member of one of those generations. The Generation X/Y stereotypes are not exactly what I would consider positive. The only thing that would be worse is a combination of the two.
Can you imagine driving your (due to be paid off in 2020) Lexus home from your job as a l33t coder to the house you'll be working for the rest of your life to pay off, grabbing a Zima/Vibe/whatever from the fridge to go with the burger and fries you got from the drive-thru of the nearest fast food place, and watching MTV for a while before spending the rest of the evening playing some Playstation 2/Gamecube/X-Box game while listening to Britney Spears MP3s, until you get a text message on your cell phone that says "r u up 4 sum fun 2nite" or some such nonsense?
That sounds like the very definition of hell to me, so I don't mind at all that I'm not automatically associated with any of it...
We're a group a people without a definitnion that doesn't even fit in the previous generation that was known for having to self definition.
Which means that we should be allowed to have our own individual definitions without needing to be linked to a particular stereotype. Sounds good to me.
So... the problem is not that you can't get screenshots in the format of your choice. The problem is that you can't get screenshots in the format of your choice with one keystroke?
The problem is that Apple has made the process more difficult than it was previously.
Let me be the first to say that that's a stupid fucking thing to complain about.
It was an example of Apple forcing the user into a particular method of working instead of allowing the option a choice, which was the whole point of the article.
Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.1.5 wrote screen shots in TIFF format.
Actually, Mac OS X 10.1 can do TIFF, PNG, PICT, or JPEG. Like the double scroll arrows at both ends feature in 9, this feature was left without an Apple-provided way to configure it.
This is a completely workable solution to the problem.
No matter how "workable," it is still an extra step. The extra step is the problem.
It probably takes the same amount of time, give or take two seconds, as popping up a dialog box and asking you for your format of choice.
Dialog box? I'm afraid you've lost me here. Why would there be a dialog box involved? If you've already set the format of your choice in System Preferences, there would be no need for a dialog box.
What are you trying to do, exactly, that PDF isn't suitable for?
I don't use Preview to view or edit images; I prefer to choose the tools I use with images. Therefore, I always have the extra step of exporting from Preview before I can work with a screenshot, no matter what I want to do. Just what would PDF be suitable for besides basic viewing?
People often deride the absence of some feature or function of the Mac because they haven't looked for a way to do it.
So where is the feature to take screenshots in a format other than PDF? I am well aware of how to export from Preview, but that is not a solution, just a workaround. The real problem still exists.
Screen shots have to be written out in some lingua franca format. PDF is easier. If the shots got written out as TIFFs, what compression would you use? None? LZW? ZIP? You'd just have to end up converting the files to some other format anyway, inevitably.
Um, then why not let the user CHOOSE the destination format? It's not a difficult concept to understand. Any choice is arbitrary and will not suit some people (though PDF is more difficult to work with - it requires an export step just to get it into an editor!), so why not make one format the default (PDF) and give the user the option to change it? TinkerTool does this in 10.1, but in 10.2, Apple removed the functionality that made this possible.
Nobody wastes time and energy rearranging the buttons on their tape deck, or changing the way their pencil works. It's a tool, and you use it so you can get the real art done.
And just what are you supposed to do when the tool has a slight problem that makes it a pain to use? Think of how simple a pencil is, and now think of how many different kinds of pencils there are. If an artist doesn't like the way a pencil works, he can get a pencil that works better or change the one he has. Now scale that up to the complexity of an OS (much more complexity, very few choices). If I don't like having my screenshots come out as PDFs in 10.2 (TinkerTool could change this in 10.1), what are my options (besides going back to 10.1)? The truth of the matter is that nothing will be the best choice for everyone. I want my tools to be customized for how I work; I don't want some idiot in Cupertino deciding how I want to get things done. It seems like Apple is aiming for the market share of Linux and the user satisfaction of Windows, but still falling short on both counts...
(Note to moderators with the reading comprehension skills of a turnip (no offense to turnips): the above is not a troll or flamebait, it is just an honest description of the frustration that comes from watching your favorite tool do little things that really piss you off sometimes.)
As several people have said in response to your other post (which looks oddly similar to this one...), you don't agree because you are arguing a different issue. This isn't about getting rid of copyrights; it's about getting rid of unreasonably long copyright terms. This will not change anything for you, unless you manage to live for several decades after you die.
Even if the copyright term was cut way back to just 30 or 40 years, it should not have any effect on you. If you are poor living off of what you write today, how much will it be making you in 40 years? If you are still making a considerable amount of money in 40 years, you probably wouldn't be poor. Either way, copyright beyond this point does little more than restrict public access to this material.
As for the future of digital distribution, I think your vision of it is way off. In the somewhat unreasonable extreme case that there is no possibility of making money from writing, then people will only write if they are willing to give away their work for free, while making a living doing something else. There are already many people, including myself, who do this to some extent. If there is a demand for more than what is available for free, then there will be a market for paid writing. If there is not a demand, then why should some writers make money from something that nobody wants? (Yes, I know there are a lot of parallels to Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA/etc. here.)
So if, in the present situation, there is a demand for paid writing, why are you poor? The problem, as it is in several other content-driven markets, is that the market is saturated. Writing probably has the most saturated market because there are a couple thousand years of written works (in 100 years or so of commonly available printings) to compete with, most of which can be obtained at little or no cost. When you consider all the other forms of entertainment that compete with reading, it's amazing that anyone other than the widely popular authors can make a living at this.
Finally, to take a page from the anti-RIAA/MPAA arguments, just because you have been able to make a living at something, that doesn't mean you should always be able to do so. Markets change, and sometimes you get left behind. The.coms learned this the hard way. Calling your product "art" doesn't make you immune to economic realities.
In other words, they were formed to make sure the science of recording was optimally used by all companies, in formats that everyone could play.
Ah, the irony...
RIAA 1952: We make sure you can play your music.
RIAA 2002: We make sure you can play our music only if we're sure you're not an evil pirate.
What will the RIAA be like in 2052? "We make sure you are paying for our music, whether you listen to it or not." Or am I being just a bit too optimistic?
It's much like digital cable - the cable networks ratch up the price for...music channels?
Ratch? Did I miss another slang term while I was asleep? Kids today with their silly words, loud music, baggy pants... Why, in my day, we had to settle for real words when we wanted to say something, and we had to use a big heavy book to get them. Now it's all about "kewl" and "leet" and y r u ne 2 oic ratch... In all my 24 years I've never seen such abuse of the written word. Damn kids are trying to ruin it for everyone.
Anyway, just what is the typical price difference between digital cable and basic cable? Where I am, digital comes out to $3 or so more than basic plus a small package of basic channels they feel like charging a couple of dollars a month more for (like The History Channel is premium...).
So what's really keeping people from getting digital cable? In my case, the problem was scheduling. I could schedule an appointment for any weekday between 8am and 5pm. Wow, those are the exact hours I spend at work. Now that's convenience. I only upgraded to digital cable because I was going to be around during an available time slot anyway. Otherwise, I would still have analog, even if digital were cheaper.
Now, broadband is a bit expensive, with cable in my area inching closer and closer to DSL. I'm able to afford it without difficulty (having no life helps keep costs down), but the $100 cable bill each month still stings. I can't imagine that people with less income and more expenses (like kids) would be too thrilled about spending another $30-40 a month just to be able to watch bandwidth-hogging animations or to download their porn a little bit faster. Of course, this is no surprise to the majority of people here.
Oh well, at least the solution to all these problems is in sight. When all decent TV shows are canceled, all digital content is "managed," and every software manufacturer, media company, record exec, etc. has the right to hack into your computer, it will save me $100 a month. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to stockpiling TV shows and "digital content" in preparation for the information apocalypse...
Slashdot Mirror
The New Jersey state legislature has proposed legislation designed to make repairing firearms so ridiculously burdensome that no one will do it.
Actually, the intent of the proposed legislation you linked to would appear to be to close a loophole in the proposed legislation about a ballistic identifier database (Assembly Bill No. 438 of 2002). The ballistics identifier law would have no teeth if a gun owner could just swap out a few parts and change the gun's distinctive properties, and that is where this bill fits in. The issue here isn't whether people should be allowed to repair their own guns, but whether they should have to register their guns in a ballistic identifier database.
As many people have mentioned, the site hosting this article is straining under the load of geeks looking for more material to turn into running gags. I think I managed to find the reason for this site's poor performance - a lack of high speed internet access.
From Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth (1998):
Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line today. It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law.
Starting about 2003, high-end users will have speeds corresponding to a personal T-1 line.
Of course, low-end users will be on ISDN lines in 2003, so high-end users' megabit access will still not sanction bloated design. Looking even further ahead, Nielsen's Law does predict that the Web will be 57 times faster in ten years.
It is amazing how easy it is to get an accurate approximation of the trend of internet connectivity speed from seven data points representing one person's internet connection speed over a span of 15 years.
So the site might not be responding well right now, but at least we get broadband next year...
The Direct Marketing Association is threatening to sue to save U.S. consumers from the potential loss of buying opportunities.
So now we need to get a national "do not sue on my behalf" list before we can get a national "I don't want a fucking Disney vacation, you worthless low-life answering machine spamming piece of scum" list? Yeah, I know, then the lawyers will sue because of the "potential loss of lawsuit opportunities." How about just a "Go to hell, DMA!" list? "Potential loss of buying opportunities?" Wouldn't that apply to the time that is wasted by telemarketers trying to sell me something I don't want when I could be researching or buying something I do want? Can I sue the DMA for causing this "potential loss of buying opportunities?"
However what I remember is this fact: during the first run of Cowboy Bebop on CN it ran a 4 days a week run for 6 weeks. That adds up to 24...two episodes had to be skipped to fit.
As someone already pointed out, the first run of Cowboy Bebop was on Sundays and Thursdays, with two episodes each Sunday, rebroadcasted on Thursday. The other problem with your theory is that three episodes were cut. The other one was Waltz for Venus, which started with a hijacking. Considering that September 11, 2001 fell during the beginning of this run and the episodes that were cut featured hijackings and skyscrapers being blown up, the reason for the cuts is fairly obvious. Subsequent runs of Cowboy Bebop included all three of the "missing" episodes.
You may have confused the scheduling of Cowboy Bebop with the scheduling of Mobile Suit Gundam, which had its first run stopped right after September 11, 2001. Mobile Suit Gundam did air 4 or 5 days a week, and its first run lasted about 6 weeks. Unlike Cowboy Bebop though, the cut episodes (with one exception) were never aired (and won't be aired in the second run either).
Actually, I think it would go more like this:
One consequence of this ignorance of visual design? The implicit claim that every illustration can be epitomized in words. You could only make this claim if you were so visually unsophisticated that you couldn't differentiate one kind of illustration from another. Of course, this is hogwash: The reason why we use illustrations is because words (or numbers) are sometimes too hard to understand by themselves.
This is the problem I have with some accessibility guidelines - if a picture is worth a thousand words, they want that thousand words in a caption. My web site has hundreds of pictures, so I will never be in full compliance with these kinds of guidelines. My approach has been to add some basic descriptive text to a page with thumbnails, making the same text available to everyone. The text itself is used to tell a story, and the details from the pictures that are mentioned are selected based on their relevance to the story. The consequence of bringing my site into compliance with these unrealistic guidelines through special description tags would be less content available to general viewers, since the time to write the descriptions would be taken from the time I would use to add new content.
While my site is just a personal site that shouldn't necessarily be required to be accessible (though this leads into another topic for debate), I would imagine that this would be an issue at some level for most sites - how do you balance providing special content for the disabled and providing basic content to everyone?
Many other types of accommodations are commonly utilized by all types of people - wheelchair ramps and TV/video captions are good examples of this, and this would be the rough equivalent of navigation aids and ALT tags, which are the two main accessibility features that Joe Clark mentioned in his second answer. When you get into special HTML tags like full text descriptions of images, most people probably won't even realize that they exist, as is the case with things like radio reading services for the blind.
At this point, I have no idea where I'm going with this (my apologies for any accessibility issues regarding the lack of a concluding point). I started with one of this guy's points and mostly ended up at another one, so I guess he seems like a reasonable person.
When designing a site to be accessible by someone with a specific disability, certain key features are often obvious from the definition of the disability. However, it would seem to be a greater challenge to look at accessibility for the non-disabled, where there is no obvious starting point. Different people will have different expectations in terms of content and navigation, which can make accessible design difficult without a specific user base to test designs against. For example, the concept of hyperlinking comes naturally to some, but not others - some people wouldn't even think of clicking on something unless the words "CLICK HERE" are nearby, while other people might try to click on anything that is underlined or somehow set apart. How can you balance making things obvious to less web-inclined users and keeping things unobtrusive to more advanced users?
Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is where Crichton discusses copyright. He takes the opinion that copyright will need serious reform as the amount of electronic content increases because of the simple fact that people want to copy (he cited the success of VHS over laserdisc to support this position). This jumped out at me because I read the book back when Napster was at its peak. Unfortunately, Crichton seems to have underestimated the power of the entertainment industry - the DMCA is almost the exact opposite of what he envisioned as the future of digital content. Maybe Crichton's next novel will be about a group of people who narrowly escape death while attempting to view copyrighted material they legally purchased...
i did. and, of course, it's very tough to find some fine print that says it requires a super drive.
Yeah, very tough. I mean, you'd have to read the FAQ or the item description at the Apple Store.
From the iDVD FAQ:
When it comes to burning DVDs, iDVD 2 is designed to work only with the iMac and Power Mac G4 computers with SuperDrive. DVD Studio Pro can be used with the SuperDrive as well as with third-party DVD-R drives on Macintosh computers that don't ship with a DVD-R drive.
Can I use iDVD 2 with other CD-R or DVD-R drives?
No. iDVD 2 is designed to work only with the Apple SuperDrive available on certain configurations of iMac and Power Mac G4 computers.
From The Apple Store:
System Requirements
Apple is obviously trying to hide this information by putting it in plain sight, those damn sneaky bastards...
apple has a nifty os & apps just to sell the hardware. just like m$ has a crappy os to sell office software..
Yes, and McDonald's uses free toys to sell Happy meals, and Sports Illustrated uses the swimsuit issue to sell magazine subscriptions, and cereal manufacturers use toys and junk to sell puffed corn and/or colored marshmallows, etc. The difference between all of these (Apple included) and Microsoft is that freebies that people actually want are being used as a competitive advantage instead of monopoly power. And this is the way things are supposed to work - convince me to buy something by offering something I actually want. Apple clearly has it right, because lots of people seem to want to use iDVD. It's not Apple's fault that you went about getting it the wrong way.
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Right on! In other news, it is much fairer to charge students to enter public (taxpayer-funded) schools than it is to charge taxpayers the cost of maintaining the doors. And those damn drivers should have to pay a private company to get through intersections instead of having taxpayers pay for traffic signals on roads. Taxpayers might pay for all of these things, but we need to make sure that the actual users pay private companies for the right to use them. After all, the trivial cost of access is the real burden, not the research/development/construction/staffing/mainten ance costs...
I know everyone here has been anxiously awaiting a picture of my computer setup, so here you go.
Yeah, I know, it's not much, but I don't consider myself a true geek anyway. I just have enough computing equipment to get by.
Actually given a nice digital camera with a high resolution, you can generate perfectly fine images for OCRing.
I wasn't questioning the resolution of the camera, I was questioning the positioning of the book to get a good image. This would work easily if the book could be opened to lay flat, but otherwise it would require some apparatus to hold the book open, and even this won't work if the book can't be held open far enough with the page flat to get a good picture (as in the worst-case example I gave).
I have a few books that are old enough to be well out of copyright (and obscure enough not to be found online already), and for a while I have been considering typing them in. OCR would be a lot easier, but getting a good image from a flatbed scanner would seriously damage most of these books. Even a handheld scanner would be impractical in some cases, and a digital camera seems even less likely to work. Is there any reasonable way to scan in pages from something like a 100+ year old 1.5" thick wire-bound paperback book that only opens about 60 degrees before putting up a fight?
Isn't that like cutting off your leg because of an ingrown toenail?
Actually, it's more like cutting off your feet with a rusty pocketknife because they hurt when you walk barefoot on broken glass and rusty nails.
I don't know I would take this as a compliment. Maybe I'm just getting older, but I find that many Americans today have a short attention
I disagree. Sure, the above is all I read of your comment before moving on, but that doesn't prove anyth...
Taking over a single state by moving a lot of like-minded people into it seems like some kind of evil scheme from the Twilight Zone, even if the goal is positive (right, like it won't be corrupted somewhere along the way). This plan seems overly complicated, risky, and unlikely to succeed with only one state involved (remember what happened the last time a bunch of states tried to break away from the US?). I know I'm not willing to move somewhere just to be part of someone's pet project.
Instead, I propose a geek breeding program that will aim to increase the percentage of freedom-demanding geeks in the US to a level that will give them political power that could rival the MPAA/RIAA/Microsoft/etc. This will give geeks control at the state and federal levels, and will allow geeks to stay where they are (though some areas might be better left ungeekified).
Now, I realize that this won't be easy. It would require recruiting a large number of females to the geek cause of course, and they would also have to be encouraged to have sex with geeks. In the beginning, it may be necessary to have multiple partners in order to build up a large enough genetic base to prevent genetic abnormalities. Similarly, different types of geeks would need to interact in order to keep the deficiencies of particular geek types in check. Still, I think more than a few geeks would be willing to take a chance on this program just because of the prospect of having sex.
Sure, some geeks might not need or even want the help of such a breeding program, but everyone will need to make sacrifices if this is going to work. This is a better world we're talking about here, not just for us, but also for our children and our children's children. This sort of thing isn't going to just happen on its own, we will all have to band together in our common cause of helping geeks get laid, um, I mean freedom! Yeah, freedom, that's the real reason, sure...
(The above does not constitute an endorsement of any of the ideas expressed above. All stereotypes mentioned above are for hypothetical use only and are not intended as an accurate description of any individual or group of individuals. The author takes no responsibility for the results of the attempted implementation of the ideas expressed above, as they are provided for entertainment use only. Interpretations of the above may vary, please allow 6 to 8 weeks before deciding that your interpretation is accurate. All complaints should be formally typed, notarized, and deposited in the nearest trash receptacle. Any females interested in this program should contact the author directly. Any females offended by this program should reconsider their feelings until they can appreciate the creative value of the above, at which time they should contact the author directly. Please be willing to relocate to the state of the author's residence. There are no disclaimers beyond this point. Author reserves the right to place additional disclaimers beyond this point.)
Are there any real rules in Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge, other than the time limit, that are enforced? I can think of two other rules (captain and expert must stay in the build area, items in build area aren't open to scavenging), but they seem to be broken quite frequently. It would also seem to be a rule that tools and equipment provided for scavenging/construction, particularly the quadbikes, are off-limits as parts, but one episode featured a diving helmet made from a bottle from the water cooler (Did it become junk when it was emptied?).
There really isn't a name for us, we just fell through the cracks of gen x and gen y. Isn't that sad?
Um, no. It would be sad to be identified as a member of one of those generations. The Generation X/Y stereotypes are not exactly what I would consider positive. The only thing that would be worse is a combination of the two.
Can you imagine driving your (due to be paid off in 2020) Lexus home from your job as a l33t coder to the house you'll be working for the rest of your life to pay off, grabbing a Zima/Vibe/whatever from the fridge to go with the burger and fries you got from the drive-thru of the nearest fast food place, and watching MTV for a while before spending the rest of the evening playing some Playstation 2/Gamecube/X-Box game while listening to Britney Spears MP3s, until you get a text message on your cell phone that says "r u up 4 sum fun 2nite" or some such nonsense?
That sounds like the very definition of hell to me, so I don't mind at all that I'm not automatically associated with any of it...
We're a group a people without a definitnion that doesn't even fit in the previous generation that was known for having to self definition.
Which means that we should be allowed to have our own individual definitions without needing to be linked to a particular stereotype. Sounds good to me.
Can't the judge just download a copy off Kazaa?
So... the problem is not that you can't get screenshots in the format of your choice. The problem is that you can't get screenshots in the format of your choice with one keystroke?
The problem is that Apple has made the process more difficult than it was previously.
Let me be the first to say that that's a stupid fucking thing to complain about.
It was an example of Apple forcing the user into a particular method of working instead of allowing the option a choice, which was the whole point of the article.
Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.1.5 wrote screen shots in TIFF format.
Actually, Mac OS X 10.1 can do TIFF, PNG, PICT, or JPEG. Like the double scroll arrows at both ends feature in 9, this feature was left without an Apple-provided way to configure it.
This is a completely workable solution to the problem.
No matter how "workable," it is still an extra step. The extra step is the problem.
It probably takes the same amount of time, give or take two seconds, as popping up a dialog box and asking you for your format of choice.
Dialog box? I'm afraid you've lost me here. Why would there be a dialog box involved? If you've already set the format of your choice in System Preferences, there would be no need for a dialog box.
What are you trying to do, exactly, that PDF isn't suitable for?
I don't use Preview to view or edit images; I prefer to choose the tools I use with images. Therefore, I always have the extra step of exporting from Preview before I can work with a screenshot, no matter what I want to do. Just what would PDF be suitable for besides basic viewing?
People often deride the absence of some feature or function of the Mac because they haven't looked for a way to do it.
So where is the feature to take screenshots in a format other than PDF? I am well aware of how to export from Preview, but that is not a solution, just a workaround. The real problem still exists.
Screen shots have to be written out in some lingua franca format. PDF is easier. If the shots got written out as TIFFs, what compression would you use? None? LZW? ZIP? You'd just have to end up converting the files to some other format anyway, inevitably.
Um, then why not let the user CHOOSE the destination format? It's not a difficult concept to understand. Any choice is arbitrary and will not suit some people (though PDF is more difficult to work with - it requires an export step just to get it into an editor!), so why not make one format the default (PDF) and give the user the option to change it? TinkerTool does this in 10.1, but in 10.2, Apple removed the functionality that made this possible.
Nobody wastes time and energy rearranging the buttons on their tape deck, or changing the way their pencil works. It's a tool, and you use it so you can get the real art done.
And just what are you supposed to do when the tool has a slight problem that makes it a pain to use? Think of how simple a pencil is, and now think of how many different kinds of pencils there are. If an artist doesn't like the way a pencil works, he can get a pencil that works better or change the one he has. Now scale that up to the complexity of an OS (much more complexity, very few choices). If I don't like having my screenshots come out as PDFs in 10.2 (TinkerTool could change this in 10.1), what are my options (besides going back to 10.1)? The truth of the matter is that nothing will be the best choice for everyone. I want my tools to be customized for how I work; I don't want some idiot in Cupertino deciding how I want to get things done. It seems like Apple is aiming for the market share of Linux and the user satisfaction of Windows, but still falling short on both counts...
(Note to moderators with the reading comprehension skills of a turnip (no offense to turnips): the above is not a troll or flamebait, it is just an honest description of the frustration that comes from watching your favorite tool do little things that really piss you off sometimes.)
As several people have said in response to your other post (which looks oddly similar to this one...), you don't agree because you are arguing a different issue. This isn't about getting rid of copyrights; it's about getting rid of unreasonably long copyright terms. This will not change anything for you, unless you manage to live for several decades after you die.
Even if the copyright term was cut way back to just 30 or 40 years, it should not have any effect on you. If you are poor living off of what you write today, how much will it be making you in 40 years? If you are still making a considerable amount of money in 40 years, you probably wouldn't be poor. Either way, copyright beyond this point does little more than restrict public access to this material.
As for the future of digital distribution, I think your vision of it is way off. In the somewhat unreasonable extreme case that there is no possibility of making money from writing, then people will only write if they are willing to give away their work for free, while making a living doing something else. There are already many people, including myself, who do this to some extent. If there is a demand for more than what is available for free, then there will be a market for paid writing. If there is not a demand, then why should some writers make money from something that nobody wants? (Yes, I know there are a lot of parallels to Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA/etc. here.)
So if, in the present situation, there is a demand for paid writing, why are you poor? The problem, as it is in several other content-driven markets, is that the market is saturated. Writing probably has the most saturated market because there are a couple thousand years of written works (in 100 years or so of commonly available printings) to compete with, most of which can be obtained at little or no cost. When you consider all the other forms of entertainment that compete with reading, it's amazing that anyone other than the widely popular authors can make a living at this.
Finally, to take a page from the anti-RIAA/MPAA arguments, just because you have been able to make a living at something, that doesn't mean you should always be able to do so. Markets change, and sometimes you get left behind. The .coms learned this the hard way. Calling your product "art" doesn't make you immune to economic realities.
Ah, the irony...
RIAA 1952: We make sure you can play your music.
RIAA 2002: We make sure you can play our music only if we're sure you're not an evil pirate.
What will the RIAA be like in 2052? "We make sure you are paying for our music, whether you listen to it or not." Or am I being just a bit too optimistic?
Ratch? Did I miss another slang term while I was asleep? Kids today with their silly words, loud music, baggy pants... Why, in my day, we had to settle for real words when we wanted to say something, and we had to use a big heavy book to get them. Now it's all about "kewl" and "leet" and y r u ne 2 oic ratch... In all my 24 years I've never seen such abuse of the written word. Damn kids are trying to ruin it for everyone.
Anyway, just what is the typical price difference between digital cable and basic cable? Where I am, digital comes out to $3 or so more than basic plus a small package of basic channels they feel like charging a couple of dollars a month more for (like The History Channel is premium...).
So what's really keeping people from getting digital cable? In my case, the problem was scheduling. I could schedule an appointment for any weekday between 8am and 5pm. Wow, those are the exact hours I spend at work. Now that's convenience. I only upgraded to digital cable because I was going to be around during an available time slot anyway. Otherwise, I would still have analog, even if digital were cheaper.
Now, broadband is a bit expensive, with cable in my area inching closer and closer to DSL. I'm able to afford it without difficulty (having no life helps keep costs down), but the $100 cable bill each month still stings. I can't imagine that people with less income and more expenses (like kids) would be too thrilled about spending another $30-40 a month just to be able to watch bandwidth-hogging animations or to download their porn a little bit faster. Of course, this is no surprise to the majority of people here.
Oh well, at least the solution to all these problems is in sight. When all decent TV shows are canceled, all digital content is "managed," and every software manufacturer, media company, record exec, etc. has the right to hack into your computer, it will save me $100 a month. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to stockpiling TV shows and "digital content" in preparation for the information apocalypse...