Seriously. HDTV is on its way to taking over whether the market likes it or not; I can live with it, I acknowledge its advantages, I just wish that capitalism had been allowed to govern its adoption instead of Congress.
At least the need for a HD-DVD format is consumer-driven. I forget whether this particular format is compatible with existing DVD players or not, though.
But what's next? Is there even industry talk about a post-HDTV video format? 3D video, maybe? Lossless video compression? What will the industry R&D teams do once they've got HD-DVD out the door and China's manufacturing players for US$30 again?
you don't need more than 2 megapixels for an A4 print
This is true; however, as someone who's got a sizable archive of family digital photos, the extra megapixels are useful when you want to crop down a photo. If you start with a 2-MP file, you can make a good 4x6 print, but if you have to crop half of the picture away (or more) you won't have that print anymore.
If you love the work that you do and don't mind getting overly engrossed in it then it is not so bad working the long hours...provided that you're single, or don't care about your family, or otherwise have no social skills whatsoever.
Part of the reason I finally decided I wasn't cut out to be a programmer was because I felt guilty working overtime on projects while my wife and kids were expecting me back at home, and that wasn't even on a regular basis.
According to teh article it seems to stem more from Google linking to sites that have illegal copies of thier images and ways to illegally get into their site.
So do what everyone else does: use Google to find those sites, then send them cease-and-desist letters and cancel any passwords they list. Don't blame the messenger.
Special effects technology caught up with it. As the LotR movies effectively proved, computer-generated F/X are now at the point where absolutely anything you can draw on a page can now be animated realistically on the big screen.
That, and the entire comics industry is still recovering from the pro-artist anti-writer obsession that overwhelmed it in the 1990s. I still regard New Mutants #98 (the issue Rob Liefeld took over) as the point when Marvel Comics began its creative nosedive.
Watchmen can't be done in 90-120 minutes with Big Name Actors. Leastwise, it can't be done right, and if it can't be done right, it shouldn't be done at all.
To be fair, lots of fans said the same thing about The Lord of the Rings. And look what we got out of Peter Jackson's hard work.
You say Watchmen can't be done "right" on the big screen? Neither could LotR, and it wasn't. What we got instead was a lavish production which heavily altered the original books, but was still an excellent story in it own right. This was mainly because Jackson knew going in that turning the book accurately into a movie would be a cinematic disaster. Changes must be made to any story when it changes media, and purists who insist otherwise are usually seen as whiners.
Terry Gilliam isn't the end-all and be-all of offbeat filmmaking, you know. Just because he doesn't want to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
I'm just curious what the wi-fi communication does to the battery life on this thing. Anybody read numbers on the max. battery life playing with wi-fi and without?
Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using
That doesn't surprise me, once I think about it. Haven't all of those companies been stung by patent lawsuits in recent years, of one kind or another?
It makes sense that they'd want to invest in a company devoted to buying up unused patents, rather than waiting for the owners of those unused patents to jump out of the shadows and claim Apple or Microsoft is infringing on an unused idea they had fifteen years ago.
Since you own a PowerBook anyway, the Apple method would be to invest in an Airport card and a wireless Airport Express to send iTunes music to your stereo.
Spammers like this are essentially guilty of false advertising, concealing their identity, digital identity theft, and flagrant misuse of public and private networks.
They suck time and bandwidth from system administrators, sell products they know don't work as advertised, make it difficult or impossible for customers to seek restitution, and wreak havoc on the digital lives of those they impersonate.
They're liars, thieves, swindlers, frauds, cheats, conmen. And like anyone in those professions, they justify it by insisting they're just "honest businessmen" and "let the buyer beware".
In the old days, people like this got tarred and feathered and run out of town tied to the back of a horse. If they were lucky.
Nine years is just long enough to teach a valuable lesson, if you ask me. If we're lucky the technology will have outstripped his ability to take advantage of it by then and he can go back to practicing shell games on city street corners.
This is fantasy - we need new fantasy environments. Really alternate-reality stuff that veers between comic and wondrous.
And I love stories like that, too. But believe it or not, most people don't. They want stories that exist in a world they know, that they can understand without having to use much imagination. Tragic, I know, but there you have it.
Is that you can rip out the DRM. I refuse to buy anything that has DRM such that if the company goes under I'm stuck.
For the zillionth time, Slashdotters: if you're worried about the DRM, burn an audio CD-R as a backup. iTunes lets you do this, and it's pretty generous about it, too.
This is basically the same as whining that your product key for Windows is written down on a piece of paper, so if the paper gets lost or burned or chewed apart by rabid wolves, you're screwed for life. Just make a second copy, you nitwit.
People who know they'll enjoy the movie will still go to the theater or buy the DVD because shared copies lose a lot of quality compared to the theater version
This is true for you and me, but not for everyone. One of my friends, a professional married man with a cable modem, downloads and (sometimes) burns copies of movies by the dozen. Why? Because it's free, and he and his wife just want to watch the story -- they don't want to collect them, or enjoy them in top quality format. If it's fuzzy on a 20" computer screen, then that's good enough because hey, free is free.
Never underestimate what the general public will sacrifice in exchange for a few extra bucks in their pocket. (Let's take the second Bush Administration as a case in point....)
Only if you want to stick around for four more years of this shit only to vote again with no effect.
While I sympathize with your depression, I can't agree that you voted "with no effect" simply because your candidate lost. Ohio was/is a key competitive state, and every voter mattered regardless of who the vote was for.
The only way your vote could be said to have had "no effect" is if you deliberately spent it on a candidate who had no effect. I don't mean Nader; I mean a write-in for Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe or Kid Rock.
Besides, do you honestly intend to leave just because our national leader for the next four years isn't the guy you like best? The 2008 election should be a lot more interesting, with Bush no longer electable and Cheney's health likely keeping him from accepting his party's nomination. Meanwhile, despite a Republican-dominated Congress, we still have a three-branch government with a Supreme Court that's done a fairly good job of keeping conservative values in check lately, plus several Congresspersons who will be up for re-election in only two years and are therefore more suceptible to letter-writing and petition-waving than our one President is.
Bush is the President; he's not a tyrant with supreme authority over his people and the press. That means he doesn't have the ability to turn the entire country upside-down at the drop of a hat and without anyone else's approval.
So the Democrats lost. The best thing about our government is that there's always another election coming where things can change again.
of all manual hacker attacks that are successful, most of them happen on Linux, and Mac OS has the least of them. This does not mean that Mac OS is more secure.
They didn't say it was "most secure", they said it was "safest". That adjective takes security-through-obscurity into account.
It's kind of analogous to buying a home in a rural town vs. a downtown metropolitan area -- your neighbors leave their house unlocked all day, but since there's only about zero-point-two reported burglaries in a ten-mile radius every year, who really cares?
I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa).
Mainly it's because the brain becomes hardwired to a particular language over time. There's something like 400 phonemes (phonetic sounds) in all the languages that can exist, but no one language uses them. As a child learns a language, the brain literally configures itself to hear and speak those phonemes that it uses on a regular basis to the exclusion of the ones it doesn't.
For instance, adult Japanese who learn English may often pronounce an R sound when an L sound is intended--the Japanese language doesn't distinguish between the two, so a lifelong speaker of only Japanese has a very difficult time hearing the difference in others or in himself. Grammar is the same way.
The brain isn't so much like a CPU as a PLA, which the environment shapes and optimizes over time to its needs.
Granted some people like these new integrated all in one cellphone, photoholder, music player, portable video players, but I'm going to have to go with "more is less" in this case.
So would I, personally. But the market doesn't. Have you not noticed the phenomenal success of camera cell phones in the current market? Everybody buys the damn things, even though (as yet) they take screen-only low-res pictures and only one or two models have a flash to make them genuinely useful.
The reason, really, is that adding a camera to your cell phone doesn't take much extra space, internally, externally or on the keypad. Same with iPod Photo: it costs more money, sure, but the color screen hardly takes up extra space and the "Photos >" menu on the main screen is a whole extra line of text. It doesn't add bulk to the device, just cost.
If you can afford $300 for an iPod to begin with, then another $100 for real added value (assuming you take digital photos to use with it) is easier to justify. As always, Apple will listen to those who open their wallets.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I just don't care for photos on my iPod.
That's probably because you're not a photo buff. My wife, on the other hand, is. If she had one of these, she'd keep our entire (massive) family photo collection on it 24/7, show it to friends, put together slide shows to show on her parents' television, etc. etc. In fact, she'd probably never get around to using it to listen to music, except maybe a few Wiggles albums for our kids to listen to in the car.
I've decided to go with a used system and I'd like to know what kind of hardware people would recommend that I buy so that I can get a good feel for OS X?
I'm typing this on a 533MHz G4, souped up with a total of 640MB of RAM. While I don't have Panther yet (even though I'm told it would actually be faster than the Jaguar OS I'm running), it's fast enough for me to use iPhoto and iMovie on a regular basis.
I've used a 1.8GHz G5 for the same tasks, and while it's unquestionably faster, my G4 is far from slow. The difference between a three-second wait and a one-second wait for an application to boot up really isn't that important. You can safely buy a 1GHz+ G4 used and get an excellent OS X experience, or a 500MHz+ G4 and get a very good one.
It's Windows-only, but still cool enough for this Mac guy to find it intriguing.
From the sound of things, it does exactly what OS X Tiger's Spotlight search feature will do when it's released next year. Granted, Tiger's not a free upgrade, but by the time Google gets Desktop Search reworked for OS X it might well be too late for it to matter.
Question is, then: would Linux users benefit from a tool like this?
If WalMart doesn't stock an extremely wide range of music, it will not be taken seriously as a place to get music.
Have you ever lived near a Wal-Mart? It's NEVER stocked a wide range of music. It's never stocked a wide range of anything. It sells anyway because Wal-Mart (a) is everywhere, (b) is sells what's most popular, and (c) what it does sell, it sells cheaper than anyplace else, including Internet retailers.
Remember, the key word in "popular music" is "popular". So what if it's not a wide selection? If 95% of all shoppers save money on the 5% of all CDs Wal-Mart stocks, then thay will. The other 5% of all shoppers don't HAVE to take Wal-Mart seriously as a music store. Wal-Mart, in many non-urban parts of the US, is nearly the only place you can go to buy CDs anyhow, and if there is another music store in town it's vastly overpriced by comparison.
Don't think like a music connoisseur, think like a capitalist. The 95% that buys what's popular is all that matters to Wal-Mart's bottom line, and it's the same 95% that the record labels have built their entire industry around. If Wal-Marts across the country refuse to stock a label's new CDs, then those record companies lose a big chunk of their business. Certainly not enough to cripple them, but enough to hurt their quarterly sales. Wal-Mart has played this game of Chicken plenty of times before, and it's always the other guy that blinks.
It was hard to use with the default preferences, IMO. I don't even remember the specifics, but I first used Mosaic for thirty minutes and gave up on it; I first used Netscape 0.9 and became almost instantly obsessed. Somehow, it was just easier, more intuitive, and more comfortable to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. HDTV is on its way to taking over whether the market likes it or not; I can live with it, I acknowledge its advantages, I just wish that capitalism had been allowed to govern its adoption instead of Congress.
At least the need for a HD-DVD format is consumer-driven. I forget whether this particular format is compatible with existing DVD players or not, though.
But what's next? Is there even industry talk about a post-HDTV video format? 3D video, maybe? Lossless video compression? What will the industry R&D teams do once they've got HD-DVD out the door and China's manufacturing players for US$30 again?
you don't need more than 2 megapixels for an A4 print
This is true; however, as someone who's got a sizable archive of family digital photos, the extra megapixels are useful when you want to crop down a photo. If you start with a 2-MP file, you can make a good 4x6 print, but if you have to crop half of the picture away (or more) you won't have that print anymore.
If you love the work that you do and don't mind getting overly engrossed in it then it is not so bad working the long hours ...provided that you're single, or don't care about your family, or otherwise have no social skills whatsoever.
Part of the reason I finally decided I wasn't cut out to be a programmer was because I felt guilty working overtime on projects while my wife and kids were expecting me back at home, and that wasn't even on a regular basis.
According to teh article it seems to stem more from Google linking to sites that have illegal copies of thier images and ways to illegally get into their site.
So do what everyone else does: use Google to find those sites, then send them cease-and-desist letters and cancel any passwords they list. Don't blame the messenger.
What happened to reading a comic?
Special effects technology caught up with it. As the LotR movies effectively proved, computer-generated F/X are now at the point where absolutely anything you can draw on a page can now be animated realistically on the big screen.
That, and the entire comics industry is still recovering from the pro-artist anti-writer obsession that overwhelmed it in the 1990s. I still regard New Mutants #98 (the issue Rob Liefeld took over) as the point when Marvel Comics began its creative nosedive.
Watchmen can't be done in 90-120 minutes with Big Name Actors. Leastwise, it can't be done right, and if it can't be done right, it shouldn't be done at all.
To be fair, lots of fans said the same thing about The Lord of the Rings. And look what we got out of Peter Jackson's hard work.
You say Watchmen can't be done "right" on the big screen? Neither could LotR, and it wasn't. What we got instead was a lavish production which heavily altered the original books, but was still an excellent story in it own right. This was mainly because Jackson knew going in that turning the book accurately into a movie would be a cinematic disaster. Changes must be made to any story when it changes media, and purists who insist otherwise are usually seen as whiners.
Terry Gilliam isn't the end-all and be-all of offbeat filmmaking, you know. Just because he doesn't want to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
I'm just curious what the wi-fi communication does to the battery life on this thing. Anybody read numbers on the max. battery life playing with wi-fi and without?
Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using
That doesn't surprise me, once I think about it. Haven't all of those companies been stung by patent lawsuits in recent years, of one kind or another?
It makes sense that they'd want to invest in a company devoted to buying up unused patents, rather than waiting for the owners of those unused patents to jump out of the shadows and claim Apple or Microsoft is infringing on an unused idea they had fifteen years ago.
In the meantime, it makes sense to parlay information as a product
Damn the man that thought up parlay!
Yep, although the submitter never said he owned an iPod. Besides, that's a two-step process to get music from your laptop to your stereo.
Since you own a PowerBook anyway, the Apple method would be to invest in an Airport card and a wireless Airport Express to send iTunes music to your stereo.
Spammers like this are essentially guilty of false advertising, concealing their identity, digital identity theft, and flagrant misuse of public and private networks.
They suck time and bandwidth from system administrators, sell products they know don't work as advertised, make it difficult or impossible for customers to seek restitution, and wreak havoc on the digital lives of those they impersonate.
They're liars, thieves, swindlers, frauds, cheats, conmen. And like anyone in those professions, they justify it by insisting they're just "honest businessmen" and "let the buyer beware".
In the old days, people like this got tarred and feathered and run out of town tied to the back of a horse. If they were lucky.
Nine years is just long enough to teach a valuable lesson, if you ask me. If we're lucky the technology will have outstripped his ability to take advantage of it by then and he can go back to practicing shell games on city street corners.
This is fantasy - we need new fantasy environments. Really alternate-reality stuff that veers between comic and wondrous.
And I love stories like that, too. But believe it or not, most people don't. They want stories that exist in a world they know, that they can understand without having to use much imagination. Tragic, I know, but there you have it.
Is that you can rip out the DRM. I refuse to buy anything that has DRM such that if the company goes under I'm stuck.
For the zillionth time, Slashdotters: if you're worried about the DRM, burn an audio CD-R as a backup. iTunes lets you do this, and it's pretty generous about it, too.
This is basically the same as whining that your product key for Windows is written down on a piece of paper, so if the paper gets lost or burned or chewed apart by rabid wolves, you're screwed for life. Just make a second copy, you nitwit.
People who know they'll enjoy the movie will still go to the theater or buy the DVD because shared copies lose a lot of quality compared to the theater version
This is true for you and me, but not for everyone. One of my friends, a professional married man with a cable modem, downloads and (sometimes) burns copies of movies by the dozen. Why? Because it's free, and he and his wife just want to watch the story -- they don't want to collect them, or enjoy them in top quality format. If it's fuzzy on a 20" computer screen, then that's good enough because hey, free is free.
Never underestimate what the general public will sacrifice in exchange for a few extra bucks in their pocket. (Let's take the second Bush Administration as a case in point....)
Only if you want to stick around for four more years of this shit only to vote again with no effect.
While I sympathize with your depression, I can't agree that you voted "with no effect" simply because your candidate lost. Ohio was/is a key competitive state, and every voter mattered regardless of who the vote was for.
The only way your vote could be said to have had "no effect" is if you deliberately spent it on a candidate who had no effect. I don't mean Nader; I mean a write-in for Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe or Kid Rock.
Besides, do you honestly intend to leave just because our national leader for the next four years isn't the guy you like best? The 2008 election should be a lot more interesting, with Bush no longer electable and Cheney's health likely keeping him from accepting his party's nomination. Meanwhile, despite a Republican-dominated Congress, we still have a three-branch government with a Supreme Court that's done a fairly good job of keeping conservative values in check lately, plus several Congresspersons who will be up for re-election in only two years and are therefore more suceptible to letter-writing and petition-waving than our one President is.
Bush is the President; he's not a tyrant with supreme authority over his people and the press. That means he doesn't have the ability to turn the entire country upside-down at the drop of a hat and without anyone else's approval.
So the Democrats lost. The best thing about our government is that there's always another election coming where things can change again.
of all manual hacker attacks that are successful, most of them happen on Linux, and Mac OS has the least of them. This does not mean that Mac OS is more secure.
They didn't say it was "most secure", they said it was "safest". That adjective takes security-through-obscurity into account.
It's kind of analogous to buying a home in a rural town vs. a downtown metropolitan area -- your neighbors leave their house unlocked all day, but since there's only about zero-point-two reported burglaries in a ten-mile radius every year, who really cares?
One kid may yell in Spanish and get their answer in Hmoung - but they know what each other is saying.
Much the same way Han will shout instructions in English and understand Chewbacca's answer in Wookie without any difficulty.
I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa).
Mainly it's because the brain becomes hardwired to a particular language over time. There's something like 400 phonemes (phonetic sounds) in all the languages that can exist, but no one language uses them. As a child learns a language, the brain literally configures itself to hear and speak those phonemes that it uses on a regular basis to the exclusion of the ones it doesn't.
For instance, adult Japanese who learn English may often pronounce an R sound when an L sound is intended--the Japanese language doesn't distinguish between the two, so a lifelong speaker of only Japanese has a very difficult time hearing the difference in others or in himself. Grammar is the same way.
The brain isn't so much like a CPU as a PLA, which the environment shapes and optimizes over time to its needs.
Granted some people like these new integrated all in one cellphone, photoholder, music player, portable video players, but I'm going to have to go with "more is less" in this case.
So would I, personally. But the market doesn't. Have you not noticed the phenomenal success of camera cell phones in the current market? Everybody buys the damn things, even though (as yet) they take screen-only low-res pictures and only one or two models have a flash to make them genuinely useful.
The reason, really, is that adding a camera to your cell phone doesn't take much extra space, internally, externally or on the keypad. Same with iPod Photo: it costs more money, sure, but the color screen hardly takes up extra space and the "Photos >" menu on the main screen is a whole extra line of text. It doesn't add bulk to the device, just cost.
If you can afford $300 for an iPod to begin with, then another $100 for real added value (assuming you take digital photos to use with it) is easier to justify. As always, Apple will listen to those who open their wallets.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I just don't care for photos on my iPod.
That's probably because you're not a photo buff. My wife, on the other hand, is. If she had one of these, she'd keep our entire (massive) family photo collection on it 24/7, show it to friends, put together slide shows to show on her parents' television, etc. etc. In fact, she'd probably never get around to using it to listen to music, except maybe a few Wiggles albums for our kids to listen to in the car.
Different strokes for different folks, really.
I've decided to go with a used system and I'd like to know what kind of hardware people would recommend that I buy so that I can get a good feel for OS X?
I'm typing this on a 533MHz G4, souped up with a total of 640MB of RAM. While I don't have Panther yet (even though I'm told it would actually be faster than the Jaguar OS I'm running), it's fast enough for me to use iPhoto and iMovie on a regular basis.
I've used a 1.8GHz G5 for the same tasks, and while it's unquestionably faster, my G4 is far from slow. The difference between a three-second wait and a one-second wait for an application to boot up really isn't that important. You can safely buy a 1GHz+ G4 used and get an excellent OS X experience, or a 500MHz+ G4 and get a very good one.
It's Windows-only, but still cool enough for this Mac guy to find it intriguing.
From the sound of things, it does exactly what OS X Tiger's Spotlight search feature will do when it's released next year. Granted, Tiger's not a free upgrade, but by the time Google gets Desktop Search reworked for OS X it might well be too late for it to matter.
Question is, then: would Linux users benefit from a tool like this?
If WalMart doesn't stock an extremely wide range of music, it will not be taken seriously as a place to get music.
Have you ever lived near a Wal-Mart? It's NEVER stocked a wide range of music. It's never stocked a wide range of anything. It sells anyway because Wal-Mart (a) is everywhere, (b) is sells what's most popular, and (c) what it does sell, it sells cheaper than anyplace else, including Internet retailers.
Remember, the key word in "popular music" is "popular". So what if it's not a wide selection? If 95% of all shoppers save money on the 5% of all CDs Wal-Mart stocks, then thay will. The other 5% of all shoppers don't HAVE to take Wal-Mart seriously as a music store. Wal-Mart, in many non-urban parts of the US, is nearly the only place you can go to buy CDs anyhow, and if there is another music store in town it's vastly overpriced by comparison.
Don't think like a music connoisseur, think like a capitalist. The 95% that buys what's popular is all that matters to Wal-Mart's bottom line, and it's the same 95% that the record labels have built their entire industry around. If Wal-Marts across the country refuse to stock a label's new CDs, then those record companies lose a big chunk of their business. Certainly not enough to cripple them, but enough to hurt their quarterly sales. Wal-Mart has played this game of Chicken plenty of times before, and it's always the other guy that blinks.
What was wrong with Mosaic?
It was hard to use with the default preferences, IMO. I don't even remember the specifics, but I first used Mosaic for thirty minutes and gave up on it; I first used Netscape 0.9 and became almost instantly obsessed. Somehow, it was just easier, more intuitive, and more comfortable to use.