What is? The fact that on an iTunes phone you can't use an transfered mp3 as a ringtone!
That is so much more obviously a needlessly cripling item, similar to camera phones with mini-cd cards that don't let you transfer photos to your computer using it!
If apple is to change something, change these silly restrictions first. 100 songs is a good start for my mp3 player, just get with the basic functionality so it is not so obviously crippled first. Then I'll complain about 100 songs.
The internet succeeded because of the lack of regulation. This was a tradeoff. The incredible value of not having to sign contracts to do everything, be able to innovate much more freely etc. The downside, piracy, websites that spew hate and all the rest.
I'm just curious if some group on the UN level asserts much stronger control over the net, it is such an obvious place to control things, could see a ton of impacts. Connect with WTO as a natural partner in the fight and voila.
The big big issue in this is the order in which discovery is occuring.
In a normal court case, when you file the case you need to identify with specificity what your claim is.
In this case, at a minimum, SCO should have detailed, with specificity, what code they beleive is copyright / contract violated and why during the discovery process by now.
This 2.7 thing is a nitpick honestly. The fact that IBM probably has only a limited clue on the details of the copyright and contract claims is a much much bigger deal.
These claims need to be detailed so they can be addressed. They need to identify WHAT Sco says it owns, WHICH contract provision were violated etc.
Surprised there hasn't been more of an effort in this area, and am almost certain that whatever SCO comes with up will continue to be vague. Make that a predicition, IBM will file a motion for clarification after fact discovery ends. They should be getting this on the judges radar NOW however.
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The RadRails IDE is built on the Eclipse RCP, and includes plugins from RDT and Subclipse. The RadRails tools are also available as Eclipse plugins.
I was really thinking of lightweight *relative* to the mozilla suite, or to the article's description of a combined email / calendering web app. But you make a very good point.
Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is doing what it always does. Keep a lightweight email client around, but for those who want/need calander, they can install an extension to give it to them. A lot of good ideas show up in this.
Futher, this is not a Mozilla Foundation annoucement.
Q. Will this be Mozilla Lightning(TM)? Is this an official Mozilla Foundation product? A. "Lightning" is simply a project code name to keep from having to type or say "Thunderbird extension for tightly-integrated calendar functionality" all the time. The Mozilla Foundation has not yet announced any plans to add Lightning to its set of supported products under any name; indeed, such an announcement would be premature, as the exact composition of Lightning is still very much under discussion.
When your "technical specs" are filled with marketing buzzwords, you KNOW you are in trouble.
These look like multi core CPUs with modified Altivec instructions to handle some extra elements.
My impression is that this is an optimized chip for situations where you have a known compiler (no branch prediction) plus known hardware and workload (games + gpu).
So they are likely to get swank game performance, but not sure this is a revolution as much as a nice optimization for a specific tasks.
Hey, I hate games like San Andreas because I do think they desesentize violent behavior.
Ignoring the issue that killing people seems OK but having sex is not in the public mind, this content is only accessible if you troll the internet and download a mod.
While trying to get the mod you will likely have to wade through tons of actual porn, not just pixalated cartoon stuff.
I mean, this game as packaged, you can't access this content. If you have enough access to the net to get this, it would seem pixalated porn should be the least of your parents worries.
"The Carbon is the second-best-selling midsized player, behind only the iPod mini."
"Early reviews of Sony's newest set of flash-based players say it's a strong contender to take on the iPod shuffle."
"The Gmini 400, launched last September, has outsold the Apple iPod in the 20-GB category in Europe."
"It comes second only to Apple in total market share for MP3 players."
Amazing, they are all beating or close to beating apple it in various ways, or at least that's what the quotes imply. I suspect that apple still ships a ton of players and makes more bucks doing so.
I headed over to one site to find it supports lots of WMA music, which no doubt comes with loads of DRM attached. And it reminded me.
Apple's ipod succeeds because of iTunes, and access to a large library of music that has reasonable DRM for most users. Yahoo is busy shipping Yahoo Messenger with their offering. The subscription WMA offerings were so painful when I tried them ages ago, though I'm sure they are better now.
I don't know about coming down like a ton of bricks. I think they key thing to resolve is if SCO disclaims the GPL or not. You just can't have it both way.
SCO has very publically disclaimed the GPL. Letters to congress, letters to fortune 1500, and in sworn statements in court.
"The GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws, and IBM's claims based thereon, or related thereto, are barred."
Given this position, isn't there standing for a contributor to actually litigate the validity of the GPL? You've got a company that has disclaimed the GPL, but still uses the software.
That's not the way it works, you can't have it both ways. Either you agree to play fair, or you have to create your own software, not take others.
And of course, the PR spin on this being "consistent" is hillarious.
yeah, I realize that. If ATI was demonstrating they were omitting items despite having them mastered I wouldn't have mentioned it, as you point out little usage in the past (though I do think having sm3 helps future proof 6800 series cards a touch).
But looking at their huge hype around crossfire which is just now coming out (SLI is pretty old tech at this point), it feels to me like they are playing catchup in these little feature mixes.
They also have had some stronger areas I skipped over, their all in wonder product has always sold well.
Shader replacement is not a big issue if output is identical, they are strong on the compiler side. Of course, trouble if it isn't. What do you call Catalyst AI...
The 7800 performs significantly better than 6800. In fact, reading through the (many) reviews that all popped up with NDA's expiring, in higher res / anti-aliasing a single 7800 is beating dual 6800's SLI. Of course, choice of benchmark affects these results, but it does look like a generational increase in speed.
In addition, it uses LESS POWER. No one seems to be mentioning this, but these cards suck up rediculous amounts of power. This bodes well for cheaper versions.
And cheaper versions are going to be coming, this release is for the insane gaming crowd that is already spending $1k on SLI setups. The price/value at this point is not the point, it is just about how fast you can go.
ATI feels like they are a generation behind to me. They are coming out with first gen SLI, first gen Shader 3, while Nvidia is already on their second spins.
The key of course is when they release their next gen part (and by this I mean actual retail volume, not a paper launch). In six months another cycle of cards will be coming through, so one has to be careful to compare apples to apples.
Plus of course there is the nice AMD64 and Linux support (not perfect, but good) from Nvidia. Bottom line, will wait to see the ATI part, and how available it actually is, before singing its praises.
In this case, messenger is a pack-in. Ie, you can uninstall it. And its features only lightly overlap with "music engine". All programs are combinations of features, the point here is this a good combo, and is it driven by customer or marketing needs. I don't think it is.
I completely agree. It is matters of degree. But Yahoo Messenger is much less related to a Music Engine than quicktime is. And you can get betters apps to share your now playing feature.
And finally, it is a matter of evaluating how useful to someone something is. I'd bet there are more folks with ipods than yahoo messenger.
Fair enough though...
(in fact, Yahoo's music engine also requires windows media)
Sigh, that is exactly the problem. They claim they are "integrated" the same way Microsoft claims you can't have a web browser outside of the core operating system.
In both cases, these claims are more or less bogus.
There are two sets of features here. Playing music, and chatting with your IM buddies.
In this case, tons of software exists that is much more flexiable for the second option. For example
"AMIP integrates with IRC (mIRC, PIRCH, Klient, Bersirc) clients, IM and Blog clients. It can also post currently hearing song information to your site via FTP or HTTP GET and POST. AMIP can be used to generate Dynamic Image Signatures, such signatures can be used in forums, blogs or on your web site." Heck it works with Winamp, iTunes and more.
If I wanted these crappy Music Engine features I'd download them myself for goodness sakes, the reason they force people to download them is that they wouldn't otherwise.
No doubt they will soon have us downloading integrated and ad-supported weather bug functionality... Gack. Give me iTunes.
What Yahoo still seems to be missing is that brand really matters. And brand is related to trust and doing the right thing by customers.
Take their Yahoo! music engine for example. A nice piece of software. But I, along with many I'd hope, are tired of downloading software to find it installs lots of other largely bugus but "required" junk. This is exactly the adware phenomenon that drives people nuts.
Of course, the Yahoo Music engine REQUIRES yahoo messenger to play music as a dependency (and no doubt will add more "requirements" in the future to increase revenue). Obviously, they saw a chance to push garbage that people wouldn't otherwise download.
In the end, this reflects on your brand. Either you are the company that respects my communication preferences, or you "update" them, and set them all to send me spam, and claim it is in enhancement (Yahoo).
Either you provide me with a cool music engine, or you "enhance" it with unrelated downloads.
Bottom line, many of us don't have the time or interest to sort out if we are going to get screwed over. The $6/month for the music engine is irrelevant actually for me, that is free. But the trust / hassle, and just being able to get what I want without tons of junk, that matters a lot.
If my mother, who is not as quickly able to uninstall stuff, downloads music engine, and then has messenger sitting forever in her taskbar, that sucks. Thankfully, I can tell her to download itunes, and she will have a clean and good experience. Neither she nor the queen of england want to be bothered with Yahoo! Messenger crap.
Pretty soon, folks like my mom, and myself, will trust Apple / Google, and when they release stuff, be happy to try it on the premise we are less likely to be screwed. Yahoo has a history in the other direction.
So I don't begrude Yahoo it's right to bundle a nice music engine with whatever other stuff it wants to load it with. I just don't understand it. In the end, the company that develops products to deliver junk as its goal will fail to a company that developes a product that delivers what people want. I mean, are you putting together a music service or not? If so, focus on the damn music part.
Long term I think this brand power will really matter, and Yahoo's history relative to Google put google in a good spot.
These CD's are actually using WMA in data mode or whatever the equivalent is.
From the article: "Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied."
So you don't really get to burn a CD that can be used with your Ipod, old CD player on boat.
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What is? The fact that on an iTunes phone you can't use an transfered mp3 as a ringtone!
That is so much more obviously a needlessly cripling item, similar to camera phones with mini-cd cards that don't let you transfer photos to your computer using it!
If apple is to change something, change these silly restrictions first. 100 songs is a good start for my mp3 player, just get with the basic functionality so it is not so obviously crippled first. Then I'll complain about 100 songs.
- August
The internet succeeded because of the lack of regulation. This was a tradeoff. The incredible value of not having to sign contracts to do everything, be able to innovate much more freely etc. The downside, piracy, websites that spew hate and all the rest.
I'm just curious if some group on the UN level asserts much stronger control over the net, it is such an obvious place to control things, could see a ton of impacts. Connect with WTO as a natural partner in the fight and voila.
The big big issue in this is the order in which discovery is occuring.
In a normal court case, when you file the case you need to identify with specificity what your claim is.
In this case, at a minimum, SCO should have detailed, with specificity, what code they beleive is copyright / contract violated and why during the discovery process by now.
This 2.7 thing is a nitpick honestly. The fact that IBM probably has only a limited clue on the details of the copyright and contract claims is a much much bigger deal.
These claims need to be detailed so they can be addressed. They need to identify WHAT Sco says it owns, WHICH contract provision were violated etc.
Surprised there hasn't been more of an effort in this area, and am almost certain that whatever SCO comes with up will continue to be vague. Make that a predicition, IBM will file a motion for clarification after fact discovery ends. They should be getting this on the judges radar NOW however.
Interesting case though.
Here's a deal of unknown value (for answers.com it obviously has value, market cap went up $8m on annoucement).
Folks like google offer to host, but don't seem to be taken up on the offer:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting
Does the board just want more $$ to play with (in other words, hosting doesn't give them the money they want to have the pleasure of spending)?
Uses RDT plus others, and a nice, clean install.
Very true!
I was really thinking of lightweight *relative* to the mozilla suite, or to the article's description of a combined email / calendering web app. But you make a very good point.
Thunderbird is doing what it always does. Keep a lightweight email client around, but for those who want/need calander, they can install an extension to give it to them. A lot of good ideas show up in this.
Futher, this is not a Mozilla Foundation annoucement.
A good wiki page on it all is here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning
When your "technical specs" are filled with marketing buzzwords, you KNOW you are in trouble.
These look like multi core CPUs with modified Altivec instructions to handle some extra elements.
My impression is that this is an optimized chip for situations where you have a known compiler (no branch prediction) plus known hardware and workload (games + gpu).
So they are likely to get swank game performance, but not sure this is a revolution as much as a nice optimization for a specific tasks.
My understanding is that the Miro CEO appointed all or most of the board members of the foundation, without much community involvement.
This contrasts with most open source foundations where the folks developing the code or trusted parties end up as the board.
It was interesting. When I saw that lloyds was offering this I was surprised, as I thought they'd almost been bankrupted in the past.
Their main website and about us timeline make no mention of any major financial issues (were covered by Time / BW etc at the time).
A little digging of course did turn up an interesting read.
http://www.truthaboutlloyds.com/fraud.html
Still, nice to see insurance coming out for this type of thing. Hopefully some more players get involved in the future.
Hey, I hate games like San Andreas because I do think they desesentize violent behavior.
Ignoring the issue that killing people seems OK but having sex is not in the public mind, this content is only accessible if you troll the internet and download a mod.
While trying to get the mod you will likely have to wade through tons of actual porn, not just pixalated cartoon stuff.
I mean, this game as packaged, you can't access this content. If you have enough access to the net to get this, it would seem pixalated porn should be the least of your parents worries.
"The Carbon is the second-best-selling midsized player, behind only the iPod mini."
"Early reviews of Sony's newest set of flash-based players say it's a strong contender to take on the iPod shuffle."
"The Gmini 400, launched last September, has outsold the Apple iPod in the 20-GB category in Europe."
"It comes second only to Apple in total market share for MP3 players."
Amazing, they are all beating or close to beating apple it in various ways, or at least that's what the quotes imply. I suspect that apple still ships a ton of players and makes more bucks doing so.
I headed over to one site to find it supports lots of WMA music, which no doubt comes with loads of DRM attached. And it reminded me.
Apple's ipod succeeds because of iTunes, and access to a large library of music that has reasonable DRM for most users. Yahoo is busy shipping Yahoo Messenger with their offering. The subscription WMA offerings were so painful when I tried them ages ago, though I'm sure they are better now.
I don't know about coming down like a ton of bricks. I think they key thing to resolve is if SCO disclaims the GPL or not. You just can't have it both way.
SCO has very publically disclaimed the GPL. Letters to congress, letters to fortune 1500, and in sworn statements in court.
"The GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws, and IBM's claims based thereon, or related thereto, are barred."
Given this position, isn't there standing for a contributor to actually litigate the validity of the GPL? You've got a company that has disclaimed the GPL, but still uses the software.
That's not the way it works, you can't have it both ways. Either you agree to play fair, or you have to create your own software, not take others.
And of course, the PR spin on this being "consistent" is hillarious.
yeah, I realize that. If ATI was demonstrating they were omitting items despite having them mastered I wouldn't have mentioned it, as you point out little usage in the past (though I do think having sm3 helps future proof 6800 series cards a touch).
But looking at their huge hype around crossfire which is just now coming out (SLI is pretty old tech at this point), it feels to me like they are playing catchup in these little feature mixes.
They also have had some stronger areas I skipped over, their all in wonder product has always sold well.
Shader replacement is not a big issue if output is identical, they are strong on the compiler side. Of course, trouble if it isn't. What do you call Catalyst AI...
Anyways, interesting stuff.
Lots of somewhat bogus postings.
The 7800 performs significantly better than 6800. In fact, reading through the (many) reviews that all popped up with NDA's expiring, in higher res / anti-aliasing a single 7800 is beating dual 6800's SLI. Of course, choice of benchmark affects these results, but it does look like a generational increase in speed.
In addition, it uses LESS POWER. No one seems to be mentioning this, but these cards suck up rediculous amounts of power. This bodes well for cheaper versions.
And cheaper versions are going to be coming, this release is for the insane gaming crowd that is already spending $1k on SLI setups. The price/value at this point is not the point, it is just about how fast you can go.
ATI feels like they are a generation behind to me. They are coming out with first gen SLI, first gen Shader 3, while Nvidia is already on their second spins.
The key of course is when they release their next gen part (and by this I mean actual retail volume, not a paper launch). In six months another cycle of cards will be coming through, so one has to be careful to compare apples to apples.
Plus of course there is the nice AMD64 and Linux support (not perfect, but good) from Nvidia. Bottom line, will wait to see the ATI part, and how available it actually is, before singing its praises.
In this case, messenger is a pack-in. Ie, you can uninstall it. And its features only lightly overlap with "music engine". All programs are combinations of features, the point here is this a good combo, and is it driven by customer or marketing needs. I don't think it is.
I messenger a pack-in or a requirement? If a pack-in, that's seems even more pathetic.
I completely agree. It is matters of degree. But Yahoo Messenger is much less related to a Music Engine than quicktime is. And you can get betters apps to share your now playing feature.
And finally, it is a matter of evaluating how useful to someone something is. I'd bet there are more folks with ipods than yahoo messenger.
Fair enough though...
(in fact, Yahoo's music engine also requires windows media)
Sigh, that is exactly the problem. They claim they are "integrated" the same way Microsoft claims you can't have a web browser outside of the core operating system.
In both cases, these claims are more or less bogus.
There are two sets of features here. Playing music, and chatting with your IM buddies.
In this case, tons of software exists that is much more flexiable for the second option. For example
http://amip.tools-for.net/index.php?content=about
"AMIP integrates with IRC (mIRC, PIRCH, Klient, Bersirc) clients, IM and Blog clients. It can also post currently hearing song information to your site via FTP or HTTP GET and POST. AMIP can be used to generate Dynamic Image Signatures, such signatures can be used in forums, blogs or on your web site." Heck it works with Winamp, iTunes and more.
If I wanted these crappy Music Engine features I'd download them myself for goodness sakes, the reason they force people to download them is that they wouldn't otherwise.
No doubt they will soon have us downloading integrated and ad-supported weather bug functionality... Gack. Give me iTunes.
Sigh...
What Yahoo still seems to be missing is that brand really matters. And brand is related to trust and doing the right thing by customers.
Take their Yahoo! music engine for example. A nice piece of software. But I, along with many I'd hope, are tired of downloading software to find it installs lots of other largely bugus but "required" junk. This is exactly the adware phenomenon that drives people nuts.
Of course, the Yahoo Music engine REQUIRES yahoo messenger to play music as a dependency (and no doubt will add more "requirements" in the future to increase revenue). Obviously, they saw a chance to push garbage that people wouldn't otherwise download.
In the end, this reflects on your brand. Either you are the company that respects my communication preferences, or you "update" them, and set them all to send me spam, and claim it is in enhancement (Yahoo).
Either you provide me with a cool music engine, or you "enhance" it with unrelated downloads.
Bottom line, many of us don't have the time or interest to sort out if we are going to get screwed over. The $6/month for the music engine is irrelevant actually for me, that is free. But the trust / hassle, and just being able to get what I want without tons of junk, that matters a lot.
If my mother, who is not as quickly able to uninstall stuff, downloads music engine, and then has messenger sitting forever in her taskbar, that sucks. Thankfully, I can tell her to download itunes, and she will have a clean and good experience. Neither she nor the queen of england want to be bothered with Yahoo! Messenger crap.
Pretty soon, folks like my mom, and myself, will trust Apple / Google, and when they release stuff, be happy to try it on the premise we are less likely to be screwed. Yahoo has a history in the other direction.
So I don't begrude Yahoo it's right to bundle a nice music engine with whatever other stuff it wants to load it with. I just don't
understand it. In the end, the company that develops products to deliver junk as its goal will fail to a company that developes a product that delivers what people want. I mean, are you putting
together a music service or not? If so, focus on the damn music part.
Long term I think this brand power will really matter, and Yahoo's history relative to Google put google in a good spot.
There is a new API for extension devs who can now implement all sorts of history related improvements.
So something like this may happen sooner then the above post would indicate.
Agreed.
What apple realized was give folks a way to get stuff reasonably priced, and the folks out of college will happy to pay for it. Our time is limited.
Of course, if you can only burn a WMA disk, the the disk must not be a CD to start with, but just a WMA disk? Less and less fun.
Google's product has been out for a period of time already.
Virtual Earth still appears to be unavailable to users.
These CD's are actually using WMA in data mode or whatever the equivalent is.
From the article:
"Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied."
So you don't really get to burn a CD that can be used with your Ipod, old CD player on boat.
Am I missing something?