I am going to defend the music industry here, not that I think they are right, not that I think Apple is right, but simply that I do agree that the people who make the music, or their agents, do have broad power to do with the music as they please. If we, as the music fan, don't like what they do with the music, or how they use the money, then don't buy the music. No one is forcing anyone to buy this music, in any particular form. There is a lot of good music out there, and each one of us does have a choice.
That said music has always had a inherently time and space limited factor, although that factor has grown less important, and clearly certain people have learned to capitalize on that change, and others have clearly suffered. At a live performance, the music lasted as long as the performance, and only so far as the sound and view would carry. This meant many people were performers, and many people benefited. Concert promoters did well, and so did performers. With the advent of recordings, the wax cylinder was still a rather time limited, expensive to record, low quality medium. People still wanted to hear live music, and people still had to replaced the cylinders. Even with the advent of vinyl, these would only last a generation. The record broke the time and space barriers, but still held the same hope of the live perfomance, that people would pay again and again for the same, or at least similar, music. Compilations, box sets, reissue, all to get back to the good old days of selling the same music.
Now a single download could be all that might be recovered from recoding a song. DRM is nasty, but it does impose the time and space that is even present on a CD. It can be argued that DRM free music might make more than the would make otherwise, but certainly less than had been expected in the past. For instance, even if I buy every song I own, I have no reason to buy a greatest hit. Ever.
So, what does this mean. That EMI will sell it's library to anyone willing to buy it lock stock and barrel. EMI is not in the business of giving away music, but if anyone else wishes to, they may. EMI likely believes that the days of mega bands and mega hits are numbered. These are mostly for kids anyway, and kids now figure out what is cool on myspace, not MTV, if MTV was ever a place to be cool.The business model of brainwashing kids to believe an album will make then a better person is over, because the acquisition of the album no longer involves money to the label. It is like porn. None of the magazines are making as much money because people are given the hardcore stuff away for free. No magazine had to pay Britney to flash, and no magazine got the full benefit of the exclusive.
So Apple, and everyone else, has a DRM to give the music some time limited quality. Apple got lucky and this worked to it's advantage. Some of this si just elements of a yound industry, i.e. digital music distribution. I suspect much of this will go the way of wax cylinders and 8-tracks, and we will be looked down on for wasting money on such things.
OTOH, I have no faith that the music industry will come up with the solution. I believe it is the industry greed that got it into this position, and greed that will keep it running in circles. The LP was a special delivery system. The record that would scratch, and the album art that was often more valuable than the record. With the CD, the labels just saw a cheaper product that would have a higher markup. The continuously cut costs, until the CD was nothing more than a way to listen to store bought music, with no compelling value added. It is any wonder that everyone jumped to the cheaper alternative? For most music, the MP3 is not noticeably inferior, without the inconvince of a CD. Sure some still try to add to the experience, but really, who is going to trust non music content from a CD?
When a company is willing to stand behind the product, and has confidence in the value, a company more often than not hires salespeople, perhaps on commission, but hires the people so there is a clear legal line between the customer and firm. This legal line has legal ramifications, and opens the firm to certain legal liabilities if the actual selling firm does not provide the specified product with the specified terms. IANAL, but my comprehension is that one way to limit such liabilities is to use a MLM marketing scheme. An individual, with no formal sales relationship to the company, sells the product. The company cannot be held liable for the behavior of such individuals, and if promises are made, the firm cannot be held liable. In many cases, the individual marketer often is contractual obligated to pay all legal costs if an even does arise, not only for the marketer, but also for company.
This is my feeling. If a product is good, and a firm has faith in it, then the firm will also want to put the best face on the product, which means controlling the sales force. OTOH, if a firm is just out to make a quick buck, and has no concern about long term service, then it matters not it if a convicting escaped child murderer is selling the product. That person will sell it to a few other child-murderers, the company will make the money, and will claim innocence later, and probably take credit for employing and rehabilitating the child murdering population when no one else would.
I can see some things are ok for this. Household products, not a big deal. Electricity, ok if you want to risk have no electricity for a few days. But modification to ones home? What happens when the roof caves in? Is the person who sold you the plan going to pay? If the firm going to pay? Are you going to have a place to live. In all cases, I think the answer is nay.
Good idea, bad ideal. Solar panels are a good idea. Installing solar panel on your house, with a company that uses known tactics to reduce liability to zero, bad idea.
The power management center is a lot better and simpler to use - I unplug my laptop and in two clicks I'm in low power mode
So are you telling me that Windows is not intelligent enough to know if the computer is plugged in or not? Why must you manually tell such an advanced OS that the computer is unplugged?
This is really quite relevant. I wonder what percentage of people actually pay significant money for mobile phones, as opposed to getting on for almost nothing with a two year contract. Is there a survey that shows the percent sales as opposed to cost. The reality is that this is the same thing that Apple does with computers. You can get a computer for $500, but people seem to paying $2000 for a Mac Pro.
I can't think of why anyone would pay for a few hundred dollars for a phone, even if it did have a PDA, unless it was business thing. But I see all these people with blackberries and other expensive phones. People in the 15-25 age range, without businesses, without any carreers set. They just wanted a cool phone and got the money.
Most agree the price point is going to be a hard sell. Most agree that Jobs stated that he was targeted 1% of the huge market was a silly statement. A more honest statement is that he wishes to be the dominant phone for the 5% of phone users that will pay that much for a phone. It may still be 1% of the total, but he had better target the proper 1%. So the real question that needs to be asked is that, of those that have paid for premium phones, how many are going to consider the iPhone when they upgrade.
I have been saying this since the late 90's. Why put a full featured computer out in a plant or in the production floor, with full entertainment capability, when all one really needs is an input terminal. Of course if one uses MS products, then one has to use MS Windows, and one is stuck putting a full featured computer with a licensed copy of windows . It would be much better if one could use MS products to create a server application that would uses a generic browser frontend, on whatever machine was available. Of course such a situation may be why so many MS products create IE only interfaces. It fair, but may be another reason to move from MS tools.
In all fairness to the microcomputer, terminals are likely to be at least as expensive as computer, although the computer has about a fraction of the lifetime.
The implications might be greater than this, depending on how the paper is made. There has been increasing demand for reduction of waste and reduction of risk. For instance, I feel it is worth using the Tektronix solid ink technology, now xerox, due to the fact that is no cartridge to deal with. Likewise, on low volume duplicating machines, inks are soy based. one of the remaining issues are toner based machines. Toner is not cheap, and cartridges are becoming more complex and wasteful.
if the paper is not toxic, and is still recyclable, and is only a little more expensive that normal paper, then it could be of great benefit to end users. It seems that toner costs a cent or two per page, so if the cost of a ream of paper increases from $2 to $6, then one can still expect a saving on consumables, not to mention the ability to reuse the paper.
Of course this level of saving is probably too much to expect. I suspect the pricing will be more like $15-$20, which will limit the papers use.
Large users likely won't trust Google. Before I trust google with anything, I would want to know a bit more how they will use the data, how it will be archived, and if it will be deleted everywhere at some point after I delete a file.
OTOH, for small businesses that want to keep costs down, this will be useful. One will not need as powerful computers, one will not need in house servers, or rented off site servers, and one will not need to generate a backup plan. I recall at one point when I was backing up a couple servers, the annual cost in tapes and time was a more than the $600 google fee.
Of course, questions remain. For instance who owns the data? Can it be saved to a MS or ODT format? And, of course, when the FBI, or even the local competitor, sends a subpoena will all data ever stored be immediately released.
It seems to me the difference is competition and the benefits of competition. Apple has been forced to innovate and pass the benefits and savings onto the customers. OTOH, the old AT&T justifiable charged customer for innovative service, but never seemed to pass savings onto the customer, and always seemed to be more concerned with charging for the privilege to make a call rather than charging for service rendered. For instance, even though addtional phones in a house incurred no additional load on the line, AT&T wanted the consumer to pay for the privilege to have a second phone, and I do not mean a second phone line.
We see the same thing here. Instead of just treating data like voice, and charging a fix amount for fixed amount of data, the phone companies want to further monitized data, not in any way that beneficial to the customer, but merely to generate additional revenue, often at the expense of the customer. It is like MS, forcing everyone to MSN just for the privilege of using a browser that is already paid for through the acquisition of the OS.
But Apple is really doing no different. Safari and iTunes is a brand that Apple needs to build, and if the mobile standard is Safari, then that will be a great feather in the Apple hat, and a great defeat for MS. The thing is, that this is healthy competition. Just like the AT&T breakup let us have more than one phone in our house, and brought long distance rate to criminally low levels, something like this, along with carry along phone numbers, could allow to buy phones, and then choose a carrier. Wow.
Even still, it's nothing to get too worked up about... If it did hit, it could trigger a tsunami that would do an untold amount of damage to the California... Despite the low level of the threat...
Furthermore, the low cost has nothing to do with DRM, but changing attitudes and competition. I recall when a movie cost 50-100 dollars, or $150 in todays money. Why is this so? I believe that originally all movies were priced assuming that some would be shown publicly, and to compensate for that the prices were high. Then renting came along, and the fact that someone else was making a profit on the product forced prices to decrease. The only purpose of DRM on VHS was to impose the implicit licensing limitation that the "owner" had the right to view the movie only as long as the media was viable.
With the DVD everything changed, and this proves that DRM does not provide value for the customer. DVDs, even those that contain no significant extra content, are more expensive than a tape, even though the process for the DVD is no more expensive for tape, and shipping for the DVD is less. The DVD is the most secure consumer format, almost no casual piracy happens, yet the consumer is forced to pay more for product that is essentially dead stock than a music release with a new, previously unreleased product. If DRM increased consumer value, then most DVDs would sell for $15.
Yet DVDs are not decreasing in price due to DRM, but again due to compition, mostly through places like Netflix, and now on demand download. Sure everyone would want to blame online piracy, but industry survey show that minority has downloaded media, and the standard for counting those downloads is:one over the past year".
In fairness the presence of DRM probably does reduce the unauthorized casual distribution of content, and even may place a picket fence between the content and professional copyist, but as the parent say the biggest reason is to enforce licensing restriction, which is to say make the business model predictable enough so that middle management is comfortable enough putting forth a minimal effort to create the product.
I think this has to do with Vista readiness for prime time. What is easy to do is to get code ready for use with a limited audience. For instance, a corporation with support covered by a predetermined contract, or OEM who cover their own testing and support. What is quite different is Vista running on a generic machine, something that I think will never happen. Another data point are reviewers that have trouble getting a copy of Vista, something that can neither be a cost or supply issue. It can only be that Vista cannot reliably run on a generic PC.
Therefore, the push is going to be towards the Dell, HP, Toshiba, and the like. If nothing else, the prices structure clearly shows that they have no interest in selling upgrades, except at the basic level where the OS is doing so little any device will work. I think MS has looked at the rate of upgrades, and decided, as so many has done in the past, that fully supporting legacy hardware is not nost justified. My only struggle in all this is that the next time I am forced to buy a PC, it will run Vista and not XP.
The iPhone, if it ever shows up, should evolve into a Newton replacement. The application issues aside, there is no reason it should not be a fully functional table Mac. All they need to do is sandbox the application side of the device.
The price is the key issue. The cheap versions are of confusing fuctionality, and the cost of the full version, often bought by people who don't need it, but hate to buy limited versions, are astronomical. The cost of the OS is now more than the computer it runs on(And don't say that good PCs are $1000, because that is the cost of Apple, and we all know that Apples are at least twice the price of the PC).
OTOH, cost may only be half the issue. When XP came out, MS did not have a mature mainstream OS. Many were able to NT, but many other were still on 98, or, even worse, ME. Only a limited number of people were on 2000. When XP was released, the market was desperate for an OS that just worked, and, after a couple years, XP did mostly just work. Only the die hards stay with 2000.
If we go even deeper, we know that Vista should be an inferior product, if not a total failure. MS does come out with consecutive reliable OS. Perhaps Vista 3.11 will meet expectations, but not Vista 1.00.
Mac OS was originally designed for a very small screen. The OS itself still works best, in my opinion, on a small screen. I find that I prefer X Windows on my larger screen.
What does appear to be true is the Apple application make more liberal use of space,assuming a big screen. For instance iMovie wastes an enormous amount of space. Itunes is not so bad, but the borders are in some contexts quite large. Safari is the exception, but most web pages now are exersises in the frivolous use of screen real estate.
I would think the OS itself could be put back on an 640X480 screen with few changes. However, the current culture of application GUI development has to change. A large matter, really, is hte culture of application development, and the assumption that the user has relatively unlimited resources.
While it is clear the so-called Open XML is owned, controlled, and licensed by MS, is ODF actually owned by OO.org. And, if so, will OO.org use it to limit users ability to migrate data? The reason why so many people are against any MS format is that MS will actively limit the ability for the user to use the data. For instance, it could be that a user that does not license a copy of MS Word does not have the right to use a particular format.
In fact the ODF format appears free of any such encumbrance, and SUN, which contributed much of it, has pledged it to remain unencumbered. Therefore, this seems like simple marketplace economics. If one has two products, and one is somewhat better but has a high real cost of acquisition, and the other is slightly worse but has a significantly less real cost of acquisition, the the market will choose the later. MS understands this, as cheap products is why people bought MS instead of IBM, and why MS continues to pay huge sums of money to create favorable TCO reports. There, this MS rant is simply an attempt to distract technical staff from the real issue, which is that future growth will be limited for benefits that are not always clear.
Another point is that any paper should be extremely suspect until duplicated. For an average person, scientific papers are often misinterpreted as declaration for on high. The high level results are reported without any indication of process. For a scientist, the opposite seems true. These papers are read for the process, In fact I would wager that the ability for a person skilled in the craft to reproduce the process from the paper is likely a more important criteria than the "truth" of the conclusions.
This difference in priorities is what causes such a disconnect between the science and non science communities, and in fact is one of the greatest challenges in teaching science. The public or the students wants to simply know "the answer", whereas the scientist is more concerned with how the answer was realized, and with which other problems such a process might help. it is also the argument between science and some fundamentalist religious folks. The later are say "god is the answer", the former is saying "science is the solution", neither necessarily talking about the same thing, but niether cognizant enough of the differences to intelligently diffuse the debate.
Wal*mart has been actively trying to reach a more sophisticated audience, with little success. They have had some success attracting people who, for instance, might want to buy some disposable furnishing for their second houses, Wal*mart has not been able to attract even the premium of target. The compete only on price, and competing on price is a losing proposition. Economies of scale can only do so much, and at some point the necessary overhead overwhelms all other efficiencies
So, this download thing can best be seen as another way to attract the sophisticated customer. Downloads are a premium service, purchased by those that have income sufficient to not wait for sales. Also, the customer has to have a computer that can play movies, which includes most Apples(at least since 1998), but not all PC.
So what walmart has done to once again alianate some of the customer that they want desperately to attract, those customers that will shop for convenience and not for price. If a person will download a movie, perhaps they will go to the store and buy some electronics. Certainly the slashwinnies would fit into this category. Wal*mart has not only lost a sale, but an opportunity to gain a desirable customer. Instead there is no reason not to continue ordering online.
In any case, there is no additional protection for the DRM. The people who want to hack the system will get a copy of IE and download the movie. By using MS DRM, they guarantee a crack as everyone wants to crack MS DRM, and every version has been cracked, just like every version of Apple DRM. So, by your logic, for every person who does not have IE, a potential sale has been lost, not to mention a potential long term customer. And the sales due to copying has already been lost, but results in a loss of $0.00.
Ethanol is only synonymous with corn and grain because the US has a corn and grain culture. Ethanol provided an economical use for the otherwise unwanted grain. We could pay for land to remain fallow, but that is not the cowboy way.
Corn ethanol is likely to save no greenhouse gasses over petrol, and only benefit is that it is renewable. A more likely candidate for ethanol is sugar cane which at one time was grown in great quantities in the south. More suitable may be the various wild plants that can save 50-100% of the greenhouse gasses over petrol. Of course you last point is correct. Most of these plants can only produce 20 or so barrels per acre.
OTOH, there are about 12 million acres of corn in Iowa. If these fields were allowed to produce grases for ethanol, then we would have 240 milion barrels of ethanol, at a 100% greenhouse gas savings, then we would have enough to replace about 3% of our petrol. Compare this with the 500 barrels per year that the Artic wildlife refuge might produce eventually.
Let us stipulate that as the world changes, what is acceptable and not acceptable also changes. Let us also stipulate that while it is usually best to let parent raise their children, there are times when laws do interfere with that freedom. For instance, it is quite traditional for older siblings to babysit for younger siblings while the parent works, but we do take parents to court when such duties interfere with school.
Now, it is not uncommon for adolescents to engage in sexual play, up to and including penetration of every conceivable orifice. For the most part everything goes well, and the problems are minimized, especially when such activity is kept in the community. However, in recent time as there has been more motion, we have had an increased in activity of persons claiming to be involving in such activity against their will, for example date rape. Now, one can ask if a person seems to be willing, and agrees to a situation in which such activity is likely to occur, when they later on can say they did not want it to occur. OTOH, is can be asked if all parties really intended for sexual penetration to occur. The current law seems to side on the side of those that claim consent must be given at the time, not by inference. This is a change in the rules, a change that people are still adapting to, and change that children must be trained to include in their mating calculations. It mostly comes from the fact that while we are much more open about sex, the economics of sex has changed.
These pictures are the same thing. They were clearly snapped as a bit of youthful play, and of course all parties are going to promise to keep them secret, but what are those promises worth? In the old days the worse that could happen is that they would be spread around the school, and then likely found out, and all copies collected. Such a thing would be a learning experience that would serve the children well all their lives, with minimal damage.
But the economics has changed. One part of the couple catches another holding hands with a third party, and the photo goes onto mobog, or youtube, ptube, or anywhere. The person cannot go anywhere in the city without recognition. Such a photo is likely never to completely disappear. This is certainly extreme, but changes times requires changing behavior. I think it can be argued that taking naked pictures of oneself and then distributing them is beyond the norms of society. It has little to do the fact they are children. What are we to say to 18 year old that has her naked body plastered over the internet. If we set a precedent that such behavior is risky, we can at least say we warned her. What are we to say to all the kids now that will be trying to get a job in four years, and have to contend with the fact that certain youthful indiscretions still show up on search engines?
Certain things, even things like this that are not really in any significant way bad, are still things that can be defensible discouraged. Like date rape, if the photos appear on the internet, I am sure the wounded party would consider the act actionable, even though it can rightfully be said that the photos were exchanged without any explicit limitations on use. The best that might be argued is a violation of copyright.
This can all be summerized with one quote from CasaBlanca: I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.
You see, all the examples given are parasites, companies that take more than they give, push wealth to the few, thus denying the majority the ability to innovate. And in this way they are all mostly the same. We have the robber barons spending money on houses and wives and mistresses instead of technology. That is why we build cars that no one wants to buy, and have a generation that looks to service jobs and easy money instead of engineers. We will see the roaring 20's all over again.
But I will say that MS grew to dominance because it was a cut rate parasite, and may not survive because it cannot deliver a product that people will pay a premium price for. It is like Wal*Mart trying to sell escargot in an attempt to move beyond their traditional customer base. OTOH, Apple has been anything but a cut rate parasite. What Apple is doing, which is different from traditional MS, is to move into the consumer market. And while MS has gotten a good market share by selling a game system at a cut rate price, Apple has dominated music player market by selling a player at premium price. Even MS realizes the inferiority of it's brand by pricing the arguably superior Zune below the Apple product.
So, while MS is seen merely as cut rate parasite that is occasionally useful, Apple is one of those few types of ladybugs that feast on plants, destructive, but too pretty to banish.
We know that we can build equal equipment cheaper and faster, but just think of the children of the KBR executives that will not receive a tropical island for christmas because some do goodder was more interested in protecting troops than Haliburton profits. I mean, my god, if our desire was to simply stop terrorism we would have another president right now, and probably would have put bin laden on trail rather than hussain.
#4 and 5 is where many people miss the boat, and really shows whether they are more interesting in showing security rather than creating security. For instance, some of the new immigration laws at the state level are frankly discussed as unenforceable. They are nearly 100% ineffective as a physical deterrent, and are only mildly effective as a physiological deterrent. This is not so bad in itself, but such laws create additional real and psychological risks, which may significantly outweigh any possible benefits. For example, laws that cannot or are not enforced reduce the confidence in the integrity of the overall legal framework and open up the law to selective enforcement, which reduces the sense of impartiality and can be a vector of corruption.
I apologize for the mix up. The tracker project is not on sourceforge. The software is at
Tracker open source phyiscs . It is more sophisticated in that is it not limited to static situation, but can track motion. I don't think it does the transformations automatically.
What I was thinking of was the Physmo project on sourceforge. It has some nice features, but the last version I used had more stability issues than tracker.
When asked why math helps, this is the the sort of situation I point to. What this software does is nothing more than apply similarity. Researchers have been doing this for years by placing a rule in every photo so that, no matter how the photo is resized, the dimensions are always knows. Measure the line, measure the feature, divide the two, and multiply by the length of the line. In any case, more sophisticated software is available for free, like tracker at sourceforge.
But what really gets me is the claim in the advert, claims that hyperbolic if not outright lies. I can easily construct a photo in which a house appears to be the same dimensions of the squares. One more effective way to do what the software is proposing is to know the dimensions of a feature that is part of the object you wish to measure, and use similarity to approximate the dimensions of the smaller or larger object.
The fact that this does not effect MS Office 2007 merely indicates that MS has closed previously exploitable holes, and the pros have not had time to package current exploits into the framework needed by the script kiddies. Even if we see fewer attacks in the future, that could still mean several different things. It could mean that MS Office 2007 is more secure. It could mean a growing competence by users to compensate for MS failure to provide a secure system. Or it could mean that such exploits have become so monetized that the pros are not wasting the secrets on script kiddies, but rather using the exploits to covertly control a users machines. This is precisely what happened in the old days when viruses stopped simply reformatting your disk and began to concentrate on real long term damage.
Slashdot Mirror
That said music has always had a inherently time and space limited factor, although that factor has grown less important, and clearly certain people have learned to capitalize on that change, and others have clearly suffered. At a live performance, the music lasted as long as the performance, and only so far as the sound and view would carry. This meant many people were performers, and many people benefited. Concert promoters did well, and so did performers. With the advent of recordings, the wax cylinder was still a rather time limited, expensive to record, low quality medium. People still wanted to hear live music, and people still had to replaced the cylinders. Even with the advent of vinyl, these would only last a generation. The record broke the time and space barriers, but still held the same hope of the live perfomance, that people would pay again and again for the same, or at least similar, music. Compilations, box sets, reissue, all to get back to the good old days of selling the same music.
Now a single download could be all that might be recovered from recoding a song. DRM is nasty, but it does impose the time and space that is even present on a CD. It can be argued that DRM free music might make more than the would make otherwise, but certainly less than had been expected in the past. For instance, even if I buy every song I own, I have no reason to buy a greatest hit. Ever.
So, what does this mean. That EMI will sell it's library to anyone willing to buy it lock stock and barrel. EMI is not in the business of giving away music, but if anyone else wishes to, they may. EMI likely believes that the days of mega bands and mega hits are numbered. These are mostly for kids anyway, and kids now figure out what is cool on myspace, not MTV, if MTV was ever a place to be cool.The business model of brainwashing kids to believe an album will make then a better person is over, because the acquisition of the album no longer involves money to the label. It is like porn. None of the magazines are making as much money because people are given the hardcore stuff away for free. No magazine had to pay Britney to flash, and no magazine got the full benefit of the exclusive.
So Apple, and everyone else, has a DRM to give the music some time limited quality. Apple got lucky and this worked to it's advantage. Some of this si just elements of a yound industry, i.e. digital music distribution. I suspect much of this will go the way of wax cylinders and 8-tracks, and we will be looked down on for wasting money on such things.
OTOH, I have no faith that the music industry will come up with the solution. I believe it is the industry greed that got it into this position, and greed that will keep it running in circles. The LP was a special delivery system. The record that would scratch, and the album art that was often more valuable than the record. With the CD, the labels just saw a cheaper product that would have a higher markup. The continuously cut costs, until the CD was nothing more than a way to listen to store bought music, with no compelling value added. It is any wonder that everyone jumped to the cheaper alternative? For most music, the MP3 is not noticeably inferior, without the inconvince of a CD. Sure some still try to add to the experience, but really, who is going to trust non music content from a CD?
This is my feeling. If a product is good, and a firm has faith in it, then the firm will also want to put the best face on the product, which means controlling the sales force. OTOH, if a firm is just out to make a quick buck, and has no concern about long term service, then it matters not it if a convicting escaped child murderer is selling the product. That person will sell it to a few other child-murderers, the company will make the money, and will claim innocence later, and probably take credit for employing and rehabilitating the child murdering population when no one else would.
I can see some things are ok for this. Household products, not a big deal. Electricity, ok if you want to risk have no electricity for a few days. But modification to ones home? What happens when the roof caves in? Is the person who sold you the plan going to pay? If the firm going to pay? Are you going to have a place to live. In all cases, I think the answer is nay.
Good idea, bad ideal. Solar panels are a good idea. Installing solar panel on your house, with a company that uses known tactics to reduce liability to zero, bad idea.
So are you telling me that Windows is not intelligent enough to know if the computer is plugged in or not? Why must you manually tell such an advanced OS that the computer is unplugged?
I can't think of why anyone would pay for a few hundred dollars for a phone, even if it did have a PDA, unless it was business thing. But I see all these people with blackberries and other expensive phones. People in the 15-25 age range, without businesses, without any carreers set. They just wanted a cool phone and got the money.
Most agree the price point is going to be a hard sell. Most agree that Jobs stated that he was targeted 1% of the huge market was a silly statement. A more honest statement is that he wishes to be the dominant phone for the 5% of phone users that will pay that much for a phone. It may still be 1% of the total, but he had better target the proper 1%. So the real question that needs to be asked is that, of those that have paid for premium phones, how many are going to consider the iPhone when they upgrade.
In all fairness to the microcomputer, terminals are likely to be at least as expensive as computer, although the computer has about a fraction of the lifetime.
if the paper is not toxic, and is still recyclable, and is only a little more expensive that normal paper, then it could be of great benefit to end users. It seems that toner costs a cent or two per page, so if the cost of a ream of paper increases from $2 to $6, then one can still expect a saving on consumables, not to mention the ability to reuse the paper.
Of course this level of saving is probably too much to expect. I suspect the pricing will be more like $15-$20, which will limit the papers use.
OTOH, for small businesses that want to keep costs down, this will be useful. One will not need as powerful computers, one will not need in house servers, or rented off site servers, and one will not need to generate a backup plan. I recall at one point when I was backing up a couple servers, the annual cost in tapes and time was a more than the $600 google fee.
Of course, questions remain. For instance who owns the data? Can it be saved to a MS or ODT format? And, of course, when the FBI, or even the local competitor, sends a subpoena will all data ever stored be immediately released.
We see the same thing here. Instead of just treating data like voice, and charging a fix amount for fixed amount of data, the phone companies want to further monitized data, not in any way that beneficial to the customer, but merely to generate additional revenue, often at the expense of the customer. It is like MS, forcing everyone to MSN just for the privilege of using a browser that is already paid for through the acquisition of the OS.
But Apple is really doing no different. Safari and iTunes is a brand that Apple needs to build, and if the mobile standard is Safari, then that will be a great feather in the Apple hat, and a great defeat for MS. The thing is, that this is healthy competition. Just like the AT&T breakup let us have more than one phone in our house, and brought long distance rate to criminally low levels, something like this, along with carry along phone numbers, could allow to buy phones, and then choose a carrier. Wow.
Even still, it's nothing to get too worked up about... If it did hit, it could trigger a tsunami that would do an untold amount of damage to the California ... Despite the low level of the threat...
With the DVD everything changed, and this proves that DRM does not provide value for the customer. DVDs, even those that contain no significant extra content, are more expensive than a tape, even though the process for the DVD is no more expensive for tape, and shipping for the DVD is less. The DVD is the most secure consumer format, almost no casual piracy happens, yet the consumer is forced to pay more for product that is essentially dead stock than a music release with a new, previously unreleased product. If DRM increased consumer value, then most DVDs would sell for $15.
Yet DVDs are not decreasing in price due to DRM, but again due to compition, mostly through places like Netflix, and now on demand download. Sure everyone would want to blame online piracy, but industry survey show that minority has downloaded media, and the standard for counting those downloads is :one over the past year".
In fairness the presence of DRM probably does reduce the unauthorized casual distribution of content, and even may place a picket fence between the content and professional copyist, but as the parent say the biggest reason is to enforce licensing restriction, which is to say make the business model predictable enough so that middle management is comfortable enough putting forth a minimal effort to create the product.
Therefore, the push is going to be towards the Dell, HP, Toshiba, and the like. If nothing else, the prices structure clearly shows that they have no interest in selling upgrades, except at the basic level where the OS is doing so little any device will work. I think MS has looked at the rate of upgrades, and decided, as so many has done in the past, that fully supporting legacy hardware is not nost justified. My only struggle in all this is that the next time I am forced to buy a PC, it will run Vista and not XP.
The iPhone, if it ever shows up, should evolve into a Newton replacement. The application issues aside, there is no reason it should not be a fully functional table Mac. All they need to do is sandbox the application side of the device.
OTOH, cost may only be half the issue. When XP came out, MS did not have a mature mainstream OS. Many were able to NT, but many other were still on 98, or, even worse, ME. Only a limited number of people were on 2000. When XP was released, the market was desperate for an OS that just worked, and, after a couple years, XP did mostly just work. Only the die hards stay with 2000.
If we go even deeper, we know that Vista should be an inferior product, if not a total failure. MS does come out with consecutive reliable OS. Perhaps Vista 3.11 will meet expectations, but not Vista 1.00.
What does appear to be true is the Apple application make more liberal use of space,assuming a big screen. For instance iMovie wastes an enormous amount of space. Itunes is not so bad, but the borders are in some contexts quite large. Safari is the exception, but most web pages now are exersises in the frivolous use of screen real estate.
I would think the OS itself could be put back on an 640X480 screen with few changes. However, the current culture of application GUI development has to change. A large matter, really, is hte culture of application development, and the assumption that the user has relatively unlimited resources.
While it is clear the so-called Open XML is owned, controlled, and licensed by MS, is ODF actually owned by OO.org. And, if so, will OO.org use it to limit users ability to migrate data? The reason why so many people are against any MS format is that MS will actively limit the ability for the user to use the data. For instance, it could be that a user that does not license a copy of MS Word does not have the right to use a particular format.
In fact the ODF format appears free of any such encumbrance, and SUN, which contributed much of it, has pledged it to remain unencumbered. Therefore, this seems like simple marketplace economics. If one has two products, and one is somewhat better but has a high real cost of acquisition, and the other is slightly worse but has a significantly less real cost of acquisition, the the market will choose the later. MS understands this, as cheap products is why people bought MS instead of IBM, and why MS continues to pay huge sums of money to create favorable TCO reports. There, this MS rant is simply an attempt to distract technical staff from the real issue, which is that future growth will be limited for benefits that are not always clear.
This difference in priorities is what causes such a disconnect between the science and non science communities, and in fact is one of the greatest challenges in teaching science. The public or the students wants to simply know "the answer", whereas the scientist is more concerned with how the answer was realized, and with which other problems such a process might help. it is also the argument between science and some fundamentalist religious folks. The later are say "god is the answer", the former is saying "science is the solution", neither necessarily talking about the same thing, but niether cognizant enough of the differences to intelligently diffuse the debate.
So, this download thing can best be seen as another way to attract the sophisticated customer. Downloads are a premium service, purchased by those that have income sufficient to not wait for sales. Also, the customer has to have a computer that can play movies, which includes most Apples(at least since 1998), but not all PC.
So what walmart has done to once again alianate some of the customer that they want desperately to attract, those customers that will shop for convenience and not for price. If a person will download a movie, perhaps they will go to the store and buy some electronics. Certainly the slashwinnies would fit into this category. Wal*mart has not only lost a sale, but an opportunity to gain a desirable customer. Instead there is no reason not to continue ordering online.
In any case, there is no additional protection for the DRM. The people who want to hack the system will get a copy of IE and download the movie. By using MS DRM, they guarantee a crack as everyone wants to crack MS DRM, and every version has been cracked, just like every version of Apple DRM. So, by your logic, for every person who does not have IE, a potential sale has been lost, not to mention a potential long term customer. And the sales due to copying has already been lost, but results in a loss of $0.00.
Corn ethanol is likely to save no greenhouse gasses over petrol, and only benefit is that it is renewable. A more likely candidate for ethanol is sugar cane which at one time was grown in great quantities in the south. More suitable may be the various wild plants that can save 50-100% of the greenhouse gasses over petrol. Of course you last point is correct. Most of these plants can only produce 20 or so barrels per acre.
OTOH, there are about 12 million acres of corn in Iowa. If these fields were allowed to produce grases for ethanol, then we would have 240 milion barrels of ethanol, at a 100% greenhouse gas savings, then we would have enough to replace about 3% of our petrol. Compare this with the 500 barrels per year that the Artic wildlife refuge might produce eventually.
Now, it is not uncommon for adolescents to engage in sexual play, up to and including penetration of every conceivable orifice. For the most part everything goes well, and the problems are minimized, especially when such activity is kept in the community. However, in recent time as there has been more motion, we have had an increased in activity of persons claiming to be involving in such activity against their will, for example date rape. Now, one can ask if a person seems to be willing, and agrees to a situation in which such activity is likely to occur, when they later on can say they did not want it to occur. OTOH, is can be asked if all parties really intended for sexual penetration to occur. The current law seems to side on the side of those that claim consent must be given at the time, not by inference. This is a change in the rules, a change that people are still adapting to, and change that children must be trained to include in their mating calculations. It mostly comes from the fact that while we are much more open about sex, the economics of sex has changed.
These pictures are the same thing. They were clearly snapped as a bit of youthful play, and of course all parties are going to promise to keep them secret, but what are those promises worth? In the old days the worse that could happen is that they would be spread around the school, and then likely found out, and all copies collected. Such a thing would be a learning experience that would serve the children well all their lives, with minimal damage.
But the economics has changed. One part of the couple catches another holding hands with a third party, and the photo goes onto mobog, or youtube, ptube, or anywhere. The person cannot go anywhere in the city without recognition. Such a photo is likely never to completely disappear. This is certainly extreme, but changes times requires changing behavior. I think it can be argued that taking naked pictures of oneself and then distributing them is beyond the norms of society. It has little to do the fact they are children. What are we to say to 18 year old that has her naked body plastered over the internet. If we set a precedent that such behavior is risky, we can at least say we warned her. What are we to say to all the kids now that will be trying to get a job in four years, and have to contend with the fact that certain youthful indiscretions still show up on search engines?
Certain things, even things like this that are not really in any significant way bad, are still things that can be defensible discouraged. Like date rape, if the photos appear on the internet, I am sure the wounded party would consider the act actionable, even though it can rightfully be said that the photos were exchanged without any explicit limitations on use. The best that might be argued is a violation of copyright.
You see, all the examples given are parasites, companies that take more than they give, push wealth to the few, thus denying the majority the ability to innovate. And in this way they are all mostly the same. We have the robber barons spending money on houses and wives and mistresses instead of technology. That is why we build cars that no one wants to buy, and have a generation that looks to service jobs and easy money instead of engineers. We will see the roaring 20's all over again.
But I will say that MS grew to dominance because it was a cut rate parasite, and may not survive because it cannot deliver a product that people will pay a premium price for. It is like Wal*Mart trying to sell escargot in an attempt to move beyond their traditional customer base. OTOH, Apple has been anything but a cut rate parasite. What Apple is doing, which is different from traditional MS, is to move into the consumer market. And while MS has gotten a good market share by selling a game system at a cut rate price, Apple has dominated music player market by selling a player at premium price. Even MS realizes the inferiority of it's brand by pricing the arguably superior Zune below the Apple product.
So, while MS is seen merely as cut rate parasite that is occasionally useful, Apple is one of those few types of ladybugs that feast on plants, destructive, but too pretty to banish.
We know that we can build equal equipment cheaper and faster, but just think of the children of the KBR executives that will not receive a tropical island for christmas because some do goodder was more interested in protecting troops than Haliburton profits. I mean, my god, if our desire was to simply stop terrorism we would have another president right now, and probably would have put bin laden on trail rather than hussain.
#4 and 5 is where many people miss the boat, and really shows whether they are more interesting in showing security rather than creating security. For instance, some of the new immigration laws at the state level are frankly discussed as unenforceable. They are nearly 100% ineffective as a physical deterrent, and are only mildly effective as a physiological deterrent. This is not so bad in itself, but such laws create additional real and psychological risks, which may significantly outweigh any possible benefits. For example, laws that cannot or are not enforced reduce the confidence in the integrity of the overall legal framework and open up the law to selective enforcement, which reduces the sense of impartiality and can be a vector of corruption.
What I was thinking of was the Physmo project on sourceforge. It has some nice features, but the last version I used had more stability issues than tracker.
Both are in java.
But what really gets me is the claim in the advert, claims that hyperbolic if not outright lies. I can easily construct a photo in which a house appears to be the same dimensions of the squares. One more effective way to do what the software is proposing is to know the dimensions of a feature that is part of the object you wish to measure, and use similarity to approximate the dimensions of the smaller or larger object.
The fact that this does not effect MS Office 2007 merely indicates that MS has closed previously exploitable holes, and the pros have not had time to package current exploits into the framework needed by the script kiddies. Even if we see fewer attacks in the future, that could still mean several different things. It could mean that MS Office 2007 is more secure. It could mean a growing competence by users to compensate for MS failure to provide a secure system. Or it could mean that such exploits have become so monetized that the pros are not wasting the secrets on script kiddies, but rather using the exploits to covertly control a users machines. This is precisely what happened in the old days when viruses stopped simply reformatting your disk and began to concentrate on real long term damage.