...when we still have science teachers denying evolution and the occasional history teacher downplaying the Holocaust? Let's get those educational issues straightened out first, and then we can worry about Linux which, let's be honest, is far less essential to the average high school diploma.
Now they can focus on getting television episodes and movies unlocked.
Highly desirable, but unlike the music issue, I don't think there's any competition here--nobody I know of is offering (major) commercial video that can be downloaded and then burned to standard VCD or DVD.
-What about TV show and movie purchases? What level of DRM can be expected there (I don't know level of DRM applies now, so feel free to call me a clod who's talking out of an orifice other than stdout ). The verbiage seems to very carefully mention "songs" only, no other iTunes available media.
Movies still have basic DRM, tv shows too -- you can back them up in their current format, but burning to a standard SVCD, VCD or DVD format is prohibited.
-What about my current iTunes song library? Will the DRM magically disappear with my next update? Do I need to download my library again, (and thereby lose the totally pointless play count next to my songs? What will I do? That's how I keep score damnit!)
As others (and the Apple website) have pointed out, you can/will be able to upgrade to DRM-free for something like 30% of the price of each song or album. Of course, burning to a CD and re-ripping is still free.
I think it really depends on when you first started watching it.
I actually own a t-shirt declaring that "You never forget your first Doctor."
Mine was Tom Baker, but to be honest, I think David Tennant has him beat based on pure manic energy. Plus I enjoy watching the show so much more now that it actually has a real budget for effects and location shooting.
Be honest... Doctor Who has been moving towards being a lame version of Buffy the vampire slayer
As opposed to the previous incarnation, which was largely a lame version of "Star Trek"?
Shocking, I know, to find out that networks think they need younger actors to attract younger viewers. One wonders what this world is coming to when kids would rather watch "Big Brother" than a pentagenarian traveling through time and space in a big blue police phone box....
...which is okay, since neither one of us is using any.
Always makes me wonder: when was the last time anybody actually "dialed" a phone? And someday kids will wonder why it's called "YouTube" when they've only ever watched it on a thin, flat LCD screen....
According to my calculations, no battery is required and this article poses an excellent solution, with a few minor modifications and innovations.
Humor aside, has anyone told these researchers that their technology is useless for the younger generation which spends more time texting than talking?
I thought I heard recently that the financial crisis has crashed the price of scrap metal in general. Anyone know if this has had an impact on the theft of same?
Imagine you were anxious to go out on Black Friday and buy some toys, electronics, etc. on the cheap. Then you get to the stores too late, and everything you wanted to get cheap is gone. Now what?
Answer: you go online and buy it instead, because it's still cheaper than shopping every chain store in town.
Of course, "Cyber Monday" made more sense in the years when most shoppers had little or no internet access at home. Nowadays the "Cyber Monday" shoppers are just as likely to start their online shopping from home on Saturday or Sunday, if not by Friday afternoon.
What I don't understand is why there are no Hollywood studios like Apple. There's one guy at the top, and if he thinks it sucks, then it doesn't go.
Because then all the movies they made would look the same, that's why.
But how about Steve Jobs' own Hollywood studio, Pixar? I think John Lassetter has done a brilliant job as a director and executive producer there, and the studio has yet to release a single film that is anything less than brilliant.
Last night, A&E or some station was reviewing the "AFI ten top ten" movies, and I was flicking through as they covered science fiction. "2001" was at the top of the list, but it was mentioned that when the finished film was screened for the investor, he was appalled that all his money had been used to make such a bad film.
In his defense, he was right about one thing: "2001" the movie is almost incomprehensible, especially the ending, if you don't also read "2001" the novel. My brother is an English teacher who built a special sci-fi curriculum for his school, and when they cover "2001" they watch the movie and read the book in tandem. It was an innovative and awkward way to make both, which is why nobody else ever did it.
P.S.: while I'm glad "2001" and "2010" were the only Hollywood films to correctly depict outer space as soundless, it makes for crappy cinema when you do so, and as a moviegoer I'm glad they were the last ones to do it.
Why do film makers always do such a bad job with sci-fi classics?
Because most sci-fi classics are built around a clever idea, rather than a lot of action and explosions. Compare the DVD sales for "The Matrix" to those for "A.I." and you'll see what I mean.
Remember the "Foundation" books at all? Each one was actually a pair of stories, characters almost never carried from one story to the next, and while there is a lot of continuity to the story, there's very little continuity to the people. Centuries pass between one story and the next. Why do you think the movie of "I, Robot" bore so little resemblance to the book with the same name? "I, Robot" the novel was actually a collection of short stories which had no characters, let alone settings, in common.
Combine that with the fact that, while Asimov was undoubtedly one of the best idea men in science fiction, he was a lousy character writer. He enjoyed writing non-fiction more than fiction, on the whole. Worse yet for Hollywood, Asimov hardly ever wrote any kind of action into his stories -- the tension was almost always intellectual, which makes for bad movies.
Asimov's writing is being made into movies left and right for two simple reasons: his name is bankable, and he's dead and unable to interfere with the scriptwriting process.
But in this sci-fi fan's opinion, while Asimov's ideas were great, his storywriting itself was lacking. (I'm reading a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories, and without fail I'm enjoying his better than I ever did Asimov's.) Any Asimov stories that make it to the screen will have to be rewritten at least as extensively as "I, Robot," which nearly defeats the point.
Asimov's ideas have become the foundation (pun not intended) of almost everything that science fiction is today. Almost anytime you see or read about a robot or android that's not trying to pull a Skynet on humanity, it's derived from Asimov's three laws. Even Terry Pratchett's golems owe part of their inspiration to Asimov. Let him live forever that way, not as the basis for a series of bad Hollywood flicks.
No, Dune is the classic slow-starter. Anathem is the latest in a string.
I think it's a best-seller thing, really -- whenever a writer becomes suddenly, unexpectedly popular, his books increase in words and in mass along a staggering curve. (Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and now Neal Stephenson.)
I don't know if the editors are afraid to infringe on a popular writer's success, or if they're just trying to get as much money out of his fans as possible by selling us bigger books with the same content.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the editors are just being lazy -- when publishing an untested author, a company will want to keep the story trim and easy to digest to avoid turning off readers. Once it's clear readers will buy an author's books regardless of the length, they let the writer go wild and focus their attention on less-successful authors.
The onus, then, falls on the author to keep his own books as succinct as the story requires (but no more). In my opinion, once you've sold and movie-optioned your first bestseller, you've got the time and money to edit your own work.
But I think you have to admit that many aspects of computer science *today* are very far removed from actual mathematical calculations or even mathematical ability (e.g., you don't have to take calculus to write a PHP script).
With all due respect (and speaking as an ex-web programmer myself), PHP scripting is about as far removed from computer science as carpentry is from the logging industry. You have to know the difference between an efficient and an inefficient algorithm, but it's a far cry from optimizing the script interpreter itself.
that's a lot of smart programmers. I don't think most programmers go through all that higher level math, and I'm not sure most mathematicians know how to program. No wonder it's expensive
That's funny; I've always believed computer science to be just a highly applied form of abstract mathematics. And, of course, there's the simple fact that electronic computers were invented to speed up mathematical computations -- "computer" used to be a job description, remember?
It's true that most programmers don't bother with high-level math -- although they'd better pass calculus if they want to understand O(n) vs. O(log(n)) -- and most mathematicians don't bother with high-level programming languages. But I've always found that the two careers employ nearly the same sort of minds, and that proving mathematical theorems was almost the same sort of thinking as writing software functions.
Back on topic -- I guess what impressed me about Mathematica 7 was the wealth of added features to make it directly useable to all sorts of scientists whose fields are heavy on advanced math, by including not just the functions they use most, but the data as well. It may not have much relevance to a software developer, but I'm sure the electrical engineers who build the micro-hardware could find one or two uses for it.
No advertising here, just a happy math nerd who was recently investigating alternatives like Maxima and SciLab himself recently, and was impressed that the new version of Mathematica leapfrogged them all by doing much more instead of just doing what it does faster.
(This despite the fact that Mathematica is, and nearly always has been, far more number-crunching power than I've ever needed in my academic or professional career.)
Like outsourcing patent examiners after the fact that the real patent examiners have failed to do their job and issued a patent for something that had prior art.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the patent examiner's job is to check for prior art. Scanning the entire patent library for prior art is a non-trivial task which cannot be automated or done properly in a hurry.
It's actually the responsibility of the person submitting the patent, and if they're wrong, they're vulnerable to expensive lawsuits from anyone who does hold prior art. The third possibility, however, is that prior art exists but isn't patented -- meaning the patent examiner wouldn't be able to find it in their library anyway. That means the patent submitter is not as likely to be charged with wrongdoing, but the patent will remain in force until someone takes the time to point it out.
That's like saying the Encyclopedia Brittannica can't enforce copyright on its stories, because they don't own the facts.
In other words: no, OCLC doesn't own the books, or the facts about them, but they do own the database.
But that's not even the issue (although you're forgiven for having to dig around to find the real issue, since the article summary above doesn't really say it). It's the fact that OCLC wants to be the only records database out there, and is trying to use legal force to stop libraries from sharing their records with anybody else.
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...when we still have science teachers denying evolution and the occasional history teacher downplaying the Holocaust? Let's get those educational issues straightened out first, and then we can worry about Linux which, let's be honest, is far less essential to the average high school diploma.
Unlocked music from iTunes, finally.
Now they can focus on getting television episodes and movies unlocked.
Highly desirable, but unlike the music issue, I don't think there's any competition here--nobody I know of is offering (major) commercial video that can be downloaded and then burned to standard VCD or DVD.
Two semi-glaring points:
-What about TV show and movie purchases? What level of DRM can be expected there (I don't know level of DRM applies now, so feel free to call me a clod who's talking out of an orifice other than stdout ). The verbiage seems to very carefully mention "songs" only, no other iTunes available media.
Movies still have basic DRM, tv shows too -- you can back them up in their current format, but burning to a standard SVCD, VCD or DVD format is prohibited.
-What about my current iTunes song library? Will the DRM magically disappear with my next update? Do I need to download my library again, (and thereby lose the totally pointless play count next to my songs? What will I do? That's how I keep score damnit!)
As others (and the Apple website) have pointed out, you can/will be able to upgrade to DRM-free for something like 30% of the price of each song or album. Of course, burning to a CD and re-ripping is still free.
I think it really depends on when you first started watching it.
I actually own a t-shirt declaring that "You never forget your first Doctor."
Mine was Tom Baker, but to be honest, I think David Tennant has him beat based on pure manic energy. Plus I enjoy watching the show so much more now that it actually has a real budget for effects and location shooting.
Be honest... Doctor Who has been moving towards being a lame version of Buffy the vampire slayer
As opposed to the previous incarnation, which was largely a lame version of "Star Trek"?
Shocking, I know, to find out that networks think they need younger actors to attract younger viewers. One wonders what this world is coming to when kids would rather watch "Big Brother" than a pentagenarian traveling through time and space in a big blue police phone box....
The question on my mind (and on many others I'm guessing) is why you would need a true RNG, and not a pseudo RNG.
It's widely agreed among computer scientists that the generation of truly random numbers is far too important to be left to chance.
This idea has it's ups and downs.
Much like the apostrophe.
It is hard to explain on paper,
...which is okay, since neither one of us is using any.
Always makes me wonder: when was the last time anybody actually "dialed" a phone? And someday kids will wonder why it's called "YouTube" when they've only ever watched it on a thin, flat LCD screen....
I prefer to imagine the soothing, comforting voice of Morgan Freeman, myself. I think it might be some sort of condition I have.
According to my calculations, no battery is required and this article poses an excellent solution, with a few minor modifications and innovations.
Humor aside, has anyone told these researchers that their technology is useless for the younger generation which spends more time texting than talking?
I thought I heard recently that the financial crisis has crashed the price of scrap metal in general. Anyone know if this has had an impact on the theft of same?
I'd like to explain it, but i'm just not sure.
Imagine you were anxious to go out on Black Friday and buy some toys, electronics, etc. on the cheap. Then you get to the stores too late, and everything you wanted to get cheap is gone. Now what?
Answer: you go online and buy it instead, because it's still cheaper than shopping every chain store in town.
Of course, "Cyber Monday" made more sense in the years when most shoppers had little or no internet access at home. Nowadays the "Cyber Monday" shoppers are just as likely to start their online shopping from home on Saturday or Sunday, if not by Friday afternoon.
What I don't understand is why there are no Hollywood studios like Apple. There's one guy at the top, and if he thinks it sucks, then it doesn't go.
Because then all the movies they made would look the same, that's why.
But how about Steve Jobs' own Hollywood studio, Pixar? I think John Lassetter has done a brilliant job as a director and executive producer there, and the studio has yet to release a single film that is anything less than brilliant.
Last night, A&E or some station was reviewing the "AFI ten top ten" movies, and I was flicking through as they covered science fiction. "2001" was at the top of the list, but it was mentioned that when the finished film was screened for the investor, he was appalled that all his money had been used to make such a bad film.
In his defense, he was right about one thing: "2001" the movie is almost incomprehensible, especially the ending, if you don't also read "2001" the novel. My brother is an English teacher who built a special sci-fi curriculum for his school, and when they cover "2001" they watch the movie and read the book in tandem. It was an innovative and awkward way to make both, which is why nobody else ever did it.
P.S.: while I'm glad "2001" and "2010" were the only Hollywood films to correctly depict outer space as soundless, it makes for crappy cinema when you do so, and as a moviegoer I'm glad they were the last ones to do it.
Why do film makers always do such a bad job with sci-fi classics?
Because most sci-fi classics are built around a clever idea, rather than a lot of action and explosions. Compare the DVD sales for "The Matrix" to those for "A.I." and you'll see what I mean.
Remember the "Foundation" books at all? Each one was actually a pair of stories, characters almost never carried from one story to the next, and while there is a lot of continuity to the story, there's very little continuity to the people. Centuries pass between one story and the next. Why do you think the movie of "I, Robot" bore so little resemblance to the book with the same name? "I, Robot" the novel was actually a collection of short stories which had no characters, let alone settings, in common.
Combine that with the fact that, while Asimov was undoubtedly one of the best idea men in science fiction, he was a lousy character writer. He enjoyed writing non-fiction more than fiction, on the whole. Worse yet for Hollywood, Asimov hardly ever wrote any kind of action into his stories -- the tension was almost always intellectual, which makes for bad movies.
Asimov's writing is being made into movies left and right for two simple reasons: his name is bankable, and he's dead and unable to interfere with the scriptwriting process.
But in this sci-fi fan's opinion, while Asimov's ideas were great, his storywriting itself was lacking. (I'm reading a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories, and without fail I'm enjoying his better than I ever did Asimov's.) Any Asimov stories that make it to the screen will have to be rewritten at least as extensively as "I, Robot," which nearly defeats the point.
Asimov's ideas have become the foundation (pun not intended) of almost everything that science fiction is today. Almost anytime you see or read about a robot or android that's not trying to pull a Skynet on humanity, it's derived from Asimov's three laws. Even Terry Pratchett's golems owe part of their inspiration to Asimov. Let him live forever that way, not as the basis for a series of bad Hollywood flicks.
Anathem is the classic slow starter.
No, Dune is the classic slow-starter. Anathem is the latest in a string.
I think it's a best-seller thing, really -- whenever a writer becomes suddenly, unexpectedly popular, his books increase in words and in mass along a staggering curve. (Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and now Neal Stephenson.)
I don't know if the editors are afraid to infringe on a popular writer's success, or if they're just trying to get as much money out of his fans as possible by selling us bigger books with the same content.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the editors are just being lazy -- when publishing an untested author, a company will want to keep the story trim and easy to digest to avoid turning off readers. Once it's clear readers will buy an author's books regardless of the length, they let the writer go wild and focus their attention on less-successful authors.
The onus, then, falls on the author to keep his own books as succinct as the story requires (but no more). In my opinion, once you've sold and movie-optioned your first bestseller, you've got the time and money to edit your own work.
How many people are going to sit there yakking while their food goes cold? Not too many.
Your pro-eating, anti-yakking bias clearly identifies you as a sexist male.
But I think you have to admit that many aspects of computer science *today* are very far removed from actual mathematical calculations or even mathematical ability (e.g., you don't have to take calculus to write a PHP script).
With all due respect (and speaking as an ex-web programmer myself), PHP scripting is about as far removed from computer science as carpentry is from the logging industry. You have to know the difference between an efficient and an inefficient algorithm, but it's a far cry from optimizing the script interpreter itself.
Let me know when it leapfrogs them in openness.
Sorry, but as a mathematician and a teacher it's more important to me that a CAS application be (1) instructive and (2) correct.
that's a lot of smart programmers. I don't think most programmers go through all that higher level math, and I'm not sure most mathematicians know how to program. No wonder it's expensive
That's funny; I've always believed computer science to be just a highly applied form of abstract mathematics. And, of course, there's the simple fact that electronic computers were invented to speed up mathematical computations -- "computer" used to be a job description, remember?
It's true that most programmers don't bother with high-level math -- although they'd better pass calculus if they want to understand O(n) vs. O(log(n)) -- and most mathematicians don't bother with high-level programming languages. But I've always found that the two careers employ nearly the same sort of minds, and that proving mathematical theorems was almost the same sort of thinking as writing software functions.
Back on topic -- I guess what impressed me about Mathematica 7 was the wealth of added features to make it directly useable to all sorts of scientists whose fields are heavy on advanced math, by including not just the functions they use most, but the data as well. It may not have much relevance to a software developer, but I'm sure the electrical engineers who build the micro-hardware could find one or two uses for it.
No advertising here, just a happy math nerd who was recently investigating alternatives like Maxima and SciLab himself recently, and was impressed that the new version of Mathematica leapfrogged them all by doing much more instead of just doing what it does faster.
(This despite the fact that Mathematica is, and nearly always has been, far more number-crunching power than I've ever needed in my academic or professional career.)
Like outsourcing patent examiners after the fact that the real patent examiners have failed to do their job and issued a patent for something that had prior art.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the patent examiner's job is to check for prior art. Scanning the entire patent library for prior art is a non-trivial task which cannot be automated or done properly in a hurry.
It's actually the responsibility of the person submitting the patent, and if they're wrong, they're vulnerable to expensive lawsuits from anyone who does hold prior art. The third possibility, however, is that prior art exists but isn't patented -- meaning the patent examiner wouldn't be able to find it in their library anyway. That means the patent submitter is not as likely to be charged with wrongdoing, but the patent will remain in force until someone takes the time to point it out.
That's like saying the Encyclopedia Brittannica can't enforce copyright on its stories, because they don't own the facts.
In other words: no, OCLC doesn't own the books, or the facts about them, but they do own the database.
But that's not even the issue (although you're forgiven for having to dig around to find the real issue, since the article summary above doesn't really say it). It's the fact that OCLC wants to be the only records database out there, and is trying to use legal force to stop libraries from sharing their records with anybody else.