Safari is so broken I never use it. Periodically it reaches a point where all future attempts to connect to a web site fail with Safari hanging indefinitely as if waiting for a response from the server. Happens on a friend's Mac too.
That's weird, because I use Safari all the time, and so does my family. My teenage daughter, whose surfing habits are heavy on MySpace and YouTube, never encounters any insurmountable problems with either.
There's only one website I've visited more than once with serious Safari problems, and since its news content is far from exclusive, I tend to just ignore it. (Point of fact: that website's custom HTML is so ghastly and overwrought, and pages take so long to load even in Firefox, I've actually offered to fix their code myself.)
The point of DRM is to keep someone from making full use of some data they have, and I can't imagine what's good about that. It's certainly bad when it keeps me from putting my music on all my devices.
The problem is that many people fail to see that locking WMA files to Microsoft Plays For Sure devices is essentially no different than locking your DVD purchases to a DVD player.
But do we want to live in a society where the New York Times can't get a copy of the Pentagon Papers?
So, classified government documents are inherently evil, too?
DRM is a necessary evil. If you want to own a copy of someone else's intellectual property, you can either steal it, copy it, or buy it with a few restrictions. Those restrictions can be either implicit (you can't play cassette tapes in a CD player) or explicit (DRM software). The intellectual property isn't anything you have a human right to, so if you don't like the restritions, don't make the purchase. It's that simple.
I think the reason I just stated should be considered as a reason why the buy-the-movie services may not work so well.
It works very well, provided you're the type of movie fan who likes bonus discs full of extra commentaries, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and how-they-made-it effects shows that go with your favorite films.
When DVDs were first introduced, practically everybody made those bonus discs and content to go with their films (whether it was justified or not). Nowadays it's a rarity, and you're lucky to even get a piece of paper inside the DVD case with a track listing.
Often, of course, this approach is taken for films that don't sell very well. But more and more I see blockbuster movies coming out in a cheaper single-disc version (which is often the only one video stores carry, incidentally) and a $5-more-expensive bonus-disc version for the fans that want extra content. Bonus content is no longer a free bonus.
When buying a DVD isn't much better than buying a videotape or watching it on TV with commercials, then I agree, it doesn't work so well. But if you like that bonus can't-see-anywhere-else content, DVDs have a distinct advantage. The problem is that that content isn't as cheap as it used to be, so even fans (like me) aren't buying it as often as they used to.
Re:not directly related to halloween history, but.
on
Halloween Roundup
·
· Score: 1
while some christians may be uptight about halloween
If you meet anyone like that, just tell them "Happy Reformation Day" and suggest they dress up as Martin Luther.
If they're actually Catholic instead of just Fundie Baptist, you'll have the added benefit of outright offending them instead of just making them uptight.
Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was.
Having been through the MtG additiction twice, I've decided staying away from this CCQ is a good idea."
If the editors can't it right, who can?
No no, I think it's a new word. An "additiction" is when you get so miserably hooked on it your face starts to twitch when you realize your dealer--sorry, the card manufacturers--has upped the price again.
So the writer of this article is upset that vanity items cost too much? Hello?
Listen, you have NO IDEA how much I had to pay for this Prada mousepad and Armani leather wrist rest so that I could play WoW in the sort of luxury I deserve. It's not like I have a lot of spare cash left over for my virtual accoutrements as well.
I simply have to agree. The article starts with this comment:
I, like many people that purchased the World of Warcraft Collectable Card Game, have no interest in playing the game. What we are after is the brilliant in-game promotional items stuffed into random packages
So he's already admitted he's not buying the Collectible Card Game for the Game; he's only interested in the Collectible Cards.
Want an Ogre trinket? No problem, it is only going to cost you $2,100.00. Bear in mind that these items are purely for show off purposes and give no in-game advantage to players.
Well then, if they don't help you win the game and only offer you a bunch of "bling", why bother?
I'll grant you, $2100 is a lot of cash for some bling. But complaining that fashion costs too much is a waste of time from the very beginning.
What about plastic surgery? Identical twins? Even a close sibling could be similar enough to fool software in some cases.
On the other hand, fingerprints are completely unique, even between identical twins, and (last I heard) unchangeable. Researchers would be better off spending time on improving fingerprint-scanning technology for identification purposes, although clearly face scanning would be even less intrusive for other tasks.
You're not allowed to burn downloaded videos to a video DVD, but you can back them up as a file to a DVD and play it again on iTunes.
This is a restriction imposed on Apple by the video owners, and was pretty much the only way they could get video on the iTunes Store at all. Hopefully they're still negotiating to have that particular block removed.
Have you SEEN the Mac Pro? I know a lot of people like it, but I really don't. I think it's rather utliarian, grey and ugly.
So give Apple props for the iMac design instead. Widescreen LCD, computer hardware built into the box with the screen, tiny iSight camera right at the top, and if you spring a few bucks more, wireless keyboard and mouse too. The only thing you need a cable for is power.
You probably think it's bland, white and ugly, too. But you can't deny it's the most elegantly designed PC for sale anywhere.
I've got a life to lead: Books to read, a day job, my infant son to hang out with, other games beckoning. That's why I've collected a shockingly large mausoleum of unfinished games over the years.
I have the same problem, with a simple solution: I don't buy those games. Actually, I don't buy many games at all, but the ones I do buy or play are the arcade-style and puzzle games. Games like Tetris, Bejeweled, Pac-Man, or Arkanoid are perfect for times when I only want to spend a few minutes per game. (This also appeals strongly to my attention-deficited brain, but that's currently beside the point.)
Games that take forty hours to play are asking more of me than my current lifestyle can afford. So I just don't buy 'em. Sounds more to me like this guy has an old habit he just doesn't want to kick.
You say: But the thing is the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do.
But then: Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomena, Plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.
As if college students haven't had it drummed into them since their earliest schooling days that cheating is wrong.
Or are you trying to say that professional journalists are, by their training, somehow morally superior to the "common man"? Either way, your reasoning is poor.
Pretending that 99% of journalists are honest is like saying 99% of office workers never steal pens. Stop using Perry White and Clark Kent as your typical journalists and keep in mind J. Jonah Jameson as well.
Tell anyone you know, hardcore or casual gamer, about the Wii and they'll say "But Nintendo just makes kids games."
How can you call Metroid Prime a kids' game?
No, they mainly make "family games." As in, games you can be an adult and enjoy and still play it with your kids.
The problem is people who think that there are only two kinds of games: kids' games and "mature games". To be a mature game you need to have blood, bullets, vehicle crashes, or all three. These things have nothing whatsoever to do with gameplay, they just distinguish the gamer from the preteen set. Supposedly.
What if someone whose Samsung phone broke made that video versus a rival company making it. Would it matter? I don't think so. Because again, SOMEONE had to have problems with that phone breaking.
I must not feed the troll. I must not feed the troll. I must not... oh, the heck with it.
Your logic is impeccable. "Someone, somewhere MUST have had a Samsung phone break in half, ergo the video of the phone breaking in half is REAL even if it was rigged."
Unfortunately, you're proceeding from a completely imagined starting point. You might as well say there MUST be real aliens mutilating cattle out there somewhere, or there MUST have been an imposter doubling for George Washington, because, well, these stories COULDN'T have started from nothing, could they? People just aren't that creative.
Here, I'm going to photoshop your face onto a convenience store robber. There, that shows you MUST be a robber, because I could NEVER have made that picture up out of nothing, right? It MUST have some basis in fact SOMEWHERE, or I never would have thought of it.
I think the (legitimate) gripe about this particular site was the garrish design. The whole thing is very, very 1990s-college-freshman in the way it looks.
Interesting that they did a preview of a product they're not ready to formally announce yet. Rather uncharacteristic
It's been pointed out that the only reason most iTMS users would buy full-length movies online is so they could watch them on their TV set. Since DVD burning isn't an option (yet?), Apple had to announce their intended set-top box to give the movie announcement some real weight..................
Why is it that we eagerly participate in a mad rush to publicize every single product at every single Apple PR event? No one else *ever* gets that kind of coverage.
Two reasons. One: we love new iPods. and Two: Apple nearly wrote the book on this sort of marketing technique, and we still love to fall for it every single time.
Slashdot Mirror
Safari is so broken I never use it. Periodically it reaches a point where all future attempts to connect to a web site fail with Safari hanging indefinitely as if waiting for a response from the server. Happens on a friend's Mac too.
That's weird, because I use Safari all the time, and so does my family. My teenage daughter, whose surfing habits are heavy on MySpace and YouTube, never encounters any insurmountable problems with either.
There's only one website I've visited more than once with serious Safari problems, and since its news content is far from exclusive, I tend to just ignore it. (Point of fact: that website's custom HTML is so ghastly and overwrought, and pages take so long to load even in Firefox, I've actually offered to fix their code myself.)
Reminder to self: don't feed the trolls anymore.
The point of DRM is to keep someone from making full use of some data they have, and I can't imagine what's good about that. It's certainly bad when it keeps me from putting my music on all my devices.
The problem is that many people fail to see that locking WMA files to Microsoft Plays For Sure devices is essentially no different than locking your DVD purchases to a DVD player.
But do we want to live in a society where the New York Times can't get a copy of the Pentagon Papers?
So, classified government documents are inherently evil, too?
DRM is a necessary evil. If you want to own a copy of someone else's intellectual property, you can either steal it, copy it, or buy it with a few restrictions. Those restrictions can be either implicit (you can't play cassette tapes in a CD player) or explicit (DRM software). The intellectual property isn't anything you have a human right to, so if you don't like the restritions, don't make the purchase. It's that simple.
I think the reason I just stated should be considered as a reason why the buy-the-movie services may not work so well.
It works very well, provided you're the type of movie fan who likes bonus discs full of extra commentaries, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and how-they-made-it effects shows that go with your favorite films.
When DVDs were first introduced, practically everybody made those bonus discs and content to go with their films (whether it was justified or not). Nowadays it's a rarity, and you're lucky to even get a piece of paper inside the DVD case with a track listing.
Often, of course, this approach is taken for films that don't sell very well. But more and more I see blockbuster movies coming out in a cheaper single-disc version (which is often the only one video stores carry, incidentally) and a $5-more-expensive bonus-disc version for the fans that want extra content. Bonus content is no longer a free bonus.
When buying a DVD isn't much better than buying a videotape or watching it on TV with commercials, then I agree, it doesn't work so well. But if you like that bonus can't-see-anywhere-else content, DVDs have a distinct advantage. The problem is that that content isn't as cheap as it used to be, so even fans (like me) aren't buying it as often as they used to.
while some christians may be uptight about halloween
If you meet anyone like that, just tell them "Happy Reformation Day" and suggest they dress up as Martin Luther.
If they're actually Catholic instead of just Fundie Baptist, you'll have the added benefit of outright offending them instead of just making them uptight.
Do you have concrete links and facts to support your observation?
This is Slashdot. What do YOU think?
Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was.
So, did they jump on too soon, or too late?
VNUnet article
Apple Insider post
Apple's Developer Overview site
Having been through the MtG additiction twice, I've decided staying away from this CCQ is a good idea."
If the editors can't it right, who can?
No no, I think it's a new word. An "additiction" is when you get so miserably hooked on it your face starts to twitch when you realize your dealer--sorry, the card manufacturers--has upped the price again.
So the writer of this article is upset that vanity items cost too much? Hello?
Listen, you have NO IDEA how much I had to pay for this Prada mousepad and Armani leather wrist rest so that I could play WoW in the sort of luxury I deserve. It's not like I have a lot of spare cash left over for my virtual accoutrements as well.
So he's already admitted he's not buying the Collectible Card Game for the Game; he's only interested in the Collectible Cards.
Well then, if they don't help you win the game and only offer you a bunch of "bling", why bother?
I'll grant you, $2100 is a lot of cash for some bling. But complaining that fashion costs too much is a waste of time from the very beginning.
What about plastic surgery? Identical twins? Even a close sibling could be similar enough to fool software in some cases.
On the other hand, fingerprints are completely unique, even between identical twins, and (last I heard) unchangeable. Researchers would be better off spending time on improving fingerprint-scanning technology for identification purposes, although clearly face scanning would be even less intrusive for other tasks.
Still, entropy will win in the end, and we will all die sooner or later, no matter how advanced medicine has become.
Says you. Death's a mug's game. The only reason anybody dies is because everybody else is doing it, I say.
where the group in power is the group with money
For my next amazing trick, I will demonstrate that 2 = 2.
Products designed to have a short life span.
I don't get why this is on there. I've always felt that one of the best things about Apple products is that they're designed to last.
You're not allowed to burn downloaded videos to a video DVD, but you can back them up as a file to a DVD and play it again on iTunes.
This is a restriction imposed on Apple by the video owners, and was pretty much the only way they could get video on the iTunes Store at all. Hopefully they're still negotiating to have that particular block removed.
Have you SEEN the Mac Pro? I know a lot of people like it, but I really don't. I think it's rather utliarian, grey and ugly.
So give Apple props for the iMac design instead. Widescreen LCD, computer hardware built into the box with the screen, tiny iSight camera right at the top, and if you spring a few bucks more, wireless keyboard and mouse too. The only thing you need a cable for is power.
You probably think it's bland, white and ugly, too. But you can't deny it's the most elegantly designed PC for sale anywhere.
I've got a life to lead: Books to read, a day job, my infant son to hang out with, other games beckoning. That's why I've collected a shockingly large mausoleum of unfinished games over the years.
I have the same problem, with a simple solution: I don't buy those games. Actually, I don't buy many games at all, but the ones I do buy or play are the arcade-style and puzzle games. Games like Tetris, Bejeweled, Pac-Man, or Arkanoid are perfect for times when I only want to spend a few minutes per game. (This also appeals strongly to my attention-deficited brain, but that's currently beside the point.)
Games that take forty hours to play are asking more of me than my current lifestyle can afford. So I just don't buy 'em. Sounds more to me like this guy has an old habit he just doesn't want to kick.
You say: But the thing is the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do.
But then: Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomena, Plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.
As if college students haven't had it drummed into them since their earliest schooling days that cheating is wrong.
Or are you trying to say that professional journalists are, by their training, somehow morally superior to the "common man"? Either way, your reasoning is poor.
Pretending that 99% of journalists are honest is like saying 99% of office workers never steal pens. Stop using Perry White and Clark Kent as your typical journalists and keep in mind J. Jonah Jameson as well.
Tell anyone you know, hardcore or casual gamer, about the Wii and they'll say "But Nintendo just makes kids games."
How can you call Metroid Prime a kids' game?
No, they mainly make "family games." As in, games you can be an adult and enjoy and still play it with your kids.
The problem is people who think that there are only two kinds of games: kids' games and "mature games". To be a mature game you need to have blood, bullets, vehicle crashes, or all three. These things have nothing whatsoever to do with gameplay, they just distinguish the gamer from the preteen set. Supposedly.
What if someone whose Samsung phone broke made that video versus a rival company making it. Would it matter? I don't think so. Because again, SOMEONE had to have problems with that phone breaking.
I must not feed the troll. I must not feed the troll. I must not... oh, the heck with it.
Your logic is impeccable. "Someone, somewhere MUST have had a Samsung phone break in half, ergo the video of the phone breaking in half is REAL even if it was rigged."
Unfortunately, you're proceeding from a completely imagined starting point. You might as well say there MUST be real aliens mutilating cattle out there somewhere, or there MUST have been an imposter doubling for George Washington, because, well, these stories COULDN'T have started from nothing, could they? People just aren't that creative.
Here, I'm going to photoshop your face onto a convenience store robber. There, that shows you MUST be a robber, because I could NEVER have made that picture up out of nothing, right? It MUST have some basis in fact SOMEWHERE, or I never would have thought of it.
http://www.kwota.net/cdc/default.htm
Kee-reist, that site literally makes my eyes hurt like they're trying to retreat into my skull. I am not kidding. I can still feel it.
what's so terrible for this particular source?
I think the (legitimate) gripe about this particular site was the garrish design. The whole thing is very, very 1990s-college-freshman in the way it looks.
Interesting that they did a preview of a product they're not ready to formally announce yet. Rather uncharacteristic
It's been pointed out that the only reason most iTMS users would buy full-length movies online is so they could watch them on their TV set. Since DVD burning isn't an option (yet?), Apple had to announce their intended set-top box to give the movie announcement some real weight..................
Apple also posted Quicktime videos of their new "iPod nano rave" commercials. Tres trippy.
Why is it that we eagerly participate in a mad rush to publicize every single product at every single Apple PR event? No one else *ever* gets that kind of coverage.
Two reasons. One: we love new iPods. and Two: Apple nearly wrote the book on this sort of marketing technique, and we still love to fall for it every single time.