[the iPod shuttle is] already the de-facto standard in a market that's 2 months old.
This raises an interesting question about when a market is said to come into existence.
Is when it products are first offered for sale (in the case of micro-size flash MP3 players, this would be a couple of years ago)? Or is it when somebody finds a way to market the products that brings demand above a certain threshold (two months ago)? Did anyone bother to ADVERTISE the flash MP3 players they were selling a year ago?
Obviously they are full of crap, but how do we stop patent-whoring companies who can steamroller anyone using the US Court system?
By getting a court ruling that invalidates the patent.
This won't happen as long as the cost of arguing a patent case in court is prohibitively expensive to both individuals and corporations at the target end of these lawsuits. It's almost always cheaper just to settle the case, which does not do anything to settle the actual issues at the root of the problem.
your biggest obstacle is overcoming the idea that open source is the realm of teenage hackers and unstable processes.
In the corporate world, maybe, where closed-source corporations are waging their FUD campaign against the Open Threat. In the home computing market, on the other hand, I'd imagine that most people are not even familiar with the term "open source", nor what it entails or signifies.
providers of P2P networks providing reasonable safeguards against copyright infringement, which, like it or not, is the law of the land.
Not if they have "common carrier" status, it ain't.
Does the phone company have to take reasonable safeguards against the phone system being used to plot seditious acts? Does FedEx have to take reasonable safeguards that none of the millions of packages they deliver each day is full of bootlegged DVDs?
Why should a "P2P network" which simply assists users in connecting to other users be any different?
44% of the Supreme Court thought its fine to execute children.
What a provocative misstatement.
4 out of 9 justices believed that there was no distinction in the law as it's written between a person who committed a crime at the age of 18, and a person who committed a crime at the age of 17.
No one has suggested it's proper to strap an 8-year-old into an electric chair.
It's a shame that all these dupe posts are getting modded down. It's about time the Slashdot editors actually see what a mess Slashdot has become. They seem to post a dupe every day now.
Please, stop modding those posts down. This duplicate posting must stop.
I'm saying this on behalf of everyone who hates people who hate mobile phones.
YOU FUCK OFF!
Considering Slashdotters' usual perspective when it comes to technology, there seem to be a lot of you that are positively luddite when it comes to cellular telephony.
If you're coding for a platform where efficiency is so crucial that you have to hand-optimize every bit of performance out of your C code, you might as well just code in assembly language in the first place. Your custom-optimized C isn't going to port well to other platforms anyway, and you'll be thinking at such a low level anyway that the C language is little more than an intrusive syntax barrier to what you need to do.
In my experiences with OS/2 Warp, it was able to run 16-bit Windows crap flawlessly.
The problem was, by the mid-90's Microsoft had begun a shift to 32-bit code, with NT and Win95 introducting new APIs beyond those contained in OS/2. IBM never quite managed to keep up compatibility once users started using software more modern than Windows 3.1.
(Internet applications were an especially big nail in OS/2's coffin -- Netscape 2.x for Windows wouldn't run under OS/2, even after you shelled out $99 for the OS/2 native TCP stack, and there were no native OS/2 browsers, except for IBM's own limited-usefulness Web Explorer.)
[Dangermouse] is the DJ equivalent of a Score: 1 Slashdot comment in an RIAA rantfest and he's the future of music?
I'm guessing you haven't actually heard the Grey Album, or if you have you didn't like it for valid subjective reasons.
But objectively, the album is a significant accomplishment. Not only is it the latest in a line of legitimate and coherent works of art built entirely on borrowed source materials, but it also brought an entire sub-genre of hip-hop -- eg, mash-up -- into mainstream consciousness.
It changed the way I think about music, just a little, and I can't be the only listener that it had that effect on.
Hmm, I hope India has enough people to man those call centers.
We better all call up the Microsoft installation support line every half hour or so to check up on them. I mean, this new policy is going to drive MS's phone support expenses through the roof anyway, why not take it to its logical extreme?
Oh, the irony that you have used Slashdot as a pulpit to spout your acidic opinions about blogs and bloggers.
Your cardinal mistake, like Mr. Gorman's, is attributing any type of unity of tone or purpose to the entire blogosphere. Sure, some blogs are nothing more than repositories of biased rhetoric and masturbatory yellow "journalism". But on the other hand, some blogs are legitimate media watchdogs. Some blogs are "narrow-cast" news outlets for technology junkies. Some blogs are daily updates on what my cute little puppy is doing.
Bloggers are just people. And given the choice between reading a person's honest words and a cookie-cutter release from a press service which tries to excise all possible bias and humanity from its text, which do you think I'd prefer to read?
crappy sequel 'Sumper Mario Brothers 2' that according to rumors wasn't even created by nintendo (rumor has it that they just bought some game, changed the graphics and released it in Europe and USA as SMB2)
Rumors, nuthin'. It's well documented fact that Nintendo thought that the Japanese SMB2 wouldn't go over well in the US market -- the graphics were basically identical to the first game, which was by then several years old, and the sequel was more difficult, which would have been discouraging to the US market's large percentage of child gamers.
So Nintendo purchased the rights to another Japanese release, a disk-based game with a vaguely Arabian theme called Doki Doki Panic, and modified it to create the US version of SMB2. It was more than a mere graphics hack, too -- the music and some of the gameplay basics were altered as well, for example the original game did not allow the player to run faster than normal by holding down B.
Sorry, but none of that stuff you cited about copyright law (and got modded "Informative" for) is actually true, at least not in the US (or other countries party to the Berne Convention).
There are no minimum requirements on what a work must contain to be copyrightable, although doctrines of common sense do come into play when deciding cases of infringement. In reality, I COULD write and claim copyright on a book that contained only the word "the", and I could sue people for breach of copyright, but I would immediately have my cases thrown out on the grounds that others' use of the word "the" could not be proven to have been derived from my book.
Raw unadulterated silence IS content. Who are you to say it's not?
'One Minute's Silence' on the Planets' album, which I credit Batt/Cage just for a laugh.
And that's what lost the case for Batt. Album credits have legal significance; even though Cage was given co-credit "just for a laugh", the courts found that such attribution proved that Batt's minute of silence was derived from Cage's silent work.
This is what you get for not rioting in the streets when they announced that companies like Diebold were 'counting' your stinking votes.
Really. We were fools to actually believe that the company responsible for designing and building many of the ATM terminals we use reliably every day had any business designing and building electronic voting machines!
Nut up or shut up, loon. If you have proof that Diebold machines were used to compromise the election results, Bev Harris would love to know about it, and plenty of Congressmen on both sides of the aisle would love to know about it. Please note that a plausible, well-constructed theory alone is not proof, and an anecdote you heard about third-hand via some guy's blog is not proof.
Lithium Ion, for example...the wonder technology that lasts only a year or two.
Hey, feel free to stick with nickel cadmium technology instead... the wonder technology that may only last for hours or even minutes depening on the application, and once it's discharged once, you can't re-use it!
Li-Ion ain't so bad after all, huh?
Hard drives that suddenly aren't designed for "continuous or heavy duty use"
Oh, those are still available if you're willing to pay for them. The MTBF for a server-class drive hasn't decreased much. But for the consumer market, the manufacturers found that people would rather have a drive that cost 50 cents per gigabyte and lasted only 3 or 4 years before breaking, than one that would survive a nuclear apocalypse but cost twice as much, and adjusted their manufacturing processes accordingly.
The same thing is true of televisions and any other appliance. They could make a TV that will work perfectly for 20 years, but it probably will not incorporate all the latest technological advances, and/or it will cost you a lot more. If you're willing to make that trade-off, you will be accomodated.
Most people simply prefer cheap and disposable, it seems.
What more I want is the reliability and customer support of an Apple, rather than the post-point-of-sale neglect that Archos offers.
My Archos Gmini 400 has been silent for two months now, on account of a dead hard drive, and Archos customer support has been less than useless. I'd replace the drive myself if only I could find a supplier of the Toshiba 1.8" slim drive I need. Alas, it looks like their entire production run is being sold directly to Apple for the iPod line.
Buy Archos at your own risk. If it breaks, you're going to be SOL.
Slashdot Mirror
[the iPod shuttle is] already the de-facto standard in a market that's 2 months old.
This raises an interesting question about when a market is said to come into existence.
Is when it products are first offered for sale (in the case of micro-size flash MP3 players, this would be a couple of years ago)? Or is it when somebody finds a way to market the products that brings demand above a certain threshold (two months ago)? Did anyone bother to ADVERTISE the flash MP3 players they were selling a year ago?
I skipped going to Best Buy to pick it up because walmart.com said I could get it at Walmart for $14.88.
No it didn't. It said you could order it from Walmart.com for $14.88.
Obviously they are full of crap, but how do we stop patent-whoring companies who can steamroller anyone using the US Court system?
By getting a court ruling that invalidates the patent.
This won't happen as long as the cost of arguing a patent case in court is prohibitively expensive to both individuals and corporations at the target end of these lawsuits. It's almost always cheaper just to settle the case, which does not do anything to settle the actual issues at the root of the problem.
the more metadata you can take out of the file format and put into the file descriptors, the better.
So basically they're repeating the old MacOS mistake of having a data fork and a resource fork for every file?
How many external file utilities will need to be substantially rewritten to be compatible with WinFS?
your biggest obstacle is overcoming the idea that open source is the realm of teenage hackers and unstable processes.
In the corporate world, maybe, where closed-source corporations are waging their FUD campaign against the Open Threat. In the home computing market, on the other hand, I'd imagine that most people are not even familiar with the term "open source", nor what it entails or signifies.
Personally, I'm perfectly okay with that.
providers of P2P networks providing reasonable safeguards against copyright infringement, which, like it or not, is the law of the land.
Not if they have "common carrier" status, it ain't.
Does the phone company have to take reasonable safeguards against the phone system being used to plot seditious acts? Does FedEx have to take reasonable safeguards that none of the millions of packages they deliver each day is full of bootlegged DVDs?
Why should a "P2P network" which simply assists users in connecting to other users be any different?
44% of the Supreme Court thought its fine to execute children.
What a provocative misstatement.
4 out of 9 justices believed that there was no distinction in the law as it's written between a person who committed a crime at the age of 18, and a person who committed a crime at the age of 17.
No one has suggested it's proper to strap an 8-year-old into an electric chair.
It's a shame that all these dupe posts are getting modded down. It's about time the Slashdot editors actually see what a mess Slashdot has become. They seem to post a dupe every day now.
Please, stop modding those posts down. This duplicate posting must stop.
I'm saying this on behalf of everyone who hates people who hate mobile phones.
YOU FUCK OFF!
Considering Slashdotters' usual perspective when it comes to technology, there seem to be a lot of you that are positively luddite when it comes to cellular telephony.
Here's a list of PC games that are still not released for the consoles: Doom 3, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Far Cry, Painkiller.
Are any of these games worth the extra $2000 you'd have to spend to upgrade a modest but competent home computer to a bleeding-edge "gaming" computer?
If I answered "yes" to that question, I'd seriously reconsider what my priorities were.
Ended up writing my programs in assembler...
If you're coding for a platform where efficiency is so crucial that you have to hand-optimize every bit of performance out of your C code, you might as well just code in assembly language in the first place. Your custom-optimized C isn't going to port well to other platforms anyway, and you'll be thinking at such a low level anyway that the C language is little more than an intrusive syntax barrier to what you need to do.
In my experiences with OS/2 Warp, it was able to run 16-bit Windows crap flawlessly.
The problem was, by the mid-90's Microsoft had begun a shift to 32-bit code, with NT and Win95 introducting new APIs beyond those contained in OS/2. IBM never quite managed to keep up compatibility once users started using software more modern than Windows 3.1.
(Internet applications were an especially big nail in OS/2's coffin -- Netscape 2.x for Windows wouldn't run under OS/2, even after you shelled out $99 for the OS/2 native TCP stack, and there were no native OS/2 browsers, except for IBM's own limited-usefulness Web Explorer.)
(W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator
And (G)NU's (N)ot (U)nix, but do you think anyone who runs Emacs under Linux cares about that trivial distinction? (Besides RMS, boviously.)
For all practical purposes,
Linux = Linus's kernel + GNU utilities
and
Linux = Unix
[Dangermouse] is the DJ equivalent of a Score: 1 Slashdot comment in an RIAA rantfest and he's the future of music?
I'm guessing you haven't actually heard the Grey Album, or if you have you didn't like it for valid subjective reasons.
But objectively, the album is a significant accomplishment. Not only is it the latest in a line of legitimate and coherent works of art built entirely on borrowed source materials, but it also brought an entire sub-genre of hip-hop -- eg, mash-up -- into mainstream consciousness.
It changed the way I think about music, just a little, and I can't be the only listener that it had that effect on.
Umm no.
Doki Doki Panic was developed by Fuji TV and licensed to Nintendo. Check any webpage about the game, it says so on all of them.
Hmm, I hope India has enough people to man those call centers.
We better all call up the Microsoft installation support line every half hour or so to check up on them. I mean, this new policy is going to drive MS's phone support expenses through the roof anyway, why not take it to its logical extreme?
Oh, the irony that you have used Slashdot as a pulpit to spout your acidic opinions about blogs and bloggers.
Your cardinal mistake, like Mr. Gorman's, is attributing any type of unity of tone or purpose to the entire blogosphere. Sure, some blogs are nothing more than repositories of biased rhetoric and masturbatory yellow "journalism". But on the other hand, some blogs are legitimate media watchdogs. Some blogs are "narrow-cast" news outlets for technology junkies. Some blogs are daily updates on what my cute little puppy is doing.
Bloggers are just people. And given the choice between reading a person's honest words and a cookie-cutter release from a press service which tries to excise all possible bias and humanity from its text, which do you think I'd prefer to read?
crappy sequel 'Sumper Mario Brothers 2' that according to rumors wasn't even created by nintendo (rumor has it that they just bought some game, changed the graphics and released it in Europe and USA as SMB2)
Rumors, nuthin'. It's well documented fact that Nintendo thought that the Japanese SMB2 wouldn't go over well in the US market -- the graphics were basically identical to the first game, which was by then several years old, and the sequel was more difficult, which would have been discouraging to the US market's large percentage of child gamers.
So Nintendo purchased the rights to another Japanese release, a disk-based game with a vaguely Arabian theme called Doki Doki Panic, and modified it to create the US version of SMB2. It was more than a mere graphics hack, too -- the music and some of the gameplay basics were altered as well, for example the original game did not allow the player to run faster than normal by holding down B.
Microsoft has just been issued a patent for a method of producing no sound via a mp3 data stream.
Liar. Everyone knows that Microsoft's patent covers empty WMA audio streams only...
Sorry, but none of that stuff you cited about copyright law (and got modded "Informative" for) is actually true, at least not in the US (or other countries party to the Berne Convention).
There are no minimum requirements on what a work must contain to be copyrightable, although doctrines of common sense do come into play when deciding cases of infringement. In reality, I COULD write and claim copyright on a book that contained only the word "the", and I could sue people for breach of copyright, but I would immediately have my cases thrown out on the grounds that others' use of the word "the" could not be proven to have been derived from my book.
Raw unadulterated silence IS content. Who are you to say it's not?
'One Minute's Silence' on the Planets' album, which I credit Batt/Cage just for a laugh.
And that's what lost the case for Batt. Album credits have legal significance; even though Cage was given co-credit "just for a laugh", the courts found that such attribution proved that Batt's minute of silence was derived from Cage's silent work.
This is what you get for not rioting in the streets when they announced that companies like Diebold were 'counting' your stinking votes.
Really. We were fools to actually believe that the company responsible for designing and building many of the ATM terminals we use reliably every day had any business designing and building electronic voting machines!
Nut up or shut up, loon. If you have proof that Diebold machines were used to compromise the election results, Bev Harris would love to know about it, and plenty of Congressmen on both sides of the aisle would love to know about it. Please note that a plausible, well-constructed theory alone is not proof, and an anecdote you heard about third-hand via some guy's blog is not proof.
Lithium Ion, for example...the wonder technology that lasts only a year or two.
Hey, feel free to stick with nickel cadmium technology instead... the wonder technology that may only last for hours or even minutes depening on the application, and once it's discharged once, you can't re-use it!
Li-Ion ain't so bad after all, huh?
Hard drives that suddenly aren't designed for "continuous or heavy duty use"
Oh, those are still available if you're willing to pay for them. The MTBF for a server-class drive hasn't decreased much. But for the consumer market, the manufacturers found that people would rather have a drive that cost 50 cents per gigabyte and lasted only 3 or 4 years before breaking, than one that would survive a nuclear apocalypse but cost twice as much, and adjusted their manufacturing processes accordingly.
The same thing is true of televisions and any other appliance. They could make a TV that will work perfectly for 20 years, but it probably will not incorporate all the latest technological advances, and/or it will cost you a lot more. If you're willing to make that trade-off, you will be accomodated.
Most people simply prefer cheap and disposable, it seems.
What more do you want?
What more I want is the reliability and customer support of an Apple, rather than the post-point-of-sale neglect that Archos offers.
My Archos Gmini 400 has been silent for two months now, on account of a dead hard drive, and Archos customer support has been less than useless. I'd replace the drive myself if only I could find a supplier of the Toshiba 1.8" slim drive I need. Alas, it looks like their entire production run is being sold directly to Apple for the iPod line.
Buy Archos at your own risk. If it breaks, you're going to be SOL.
They took your standard lion and grafted four asses to it.
I believe you'll find that Voltron has prior art on this.