They don't sell one for $200, but they do sell one for $249. It's absolutely tiny, weighs nothing, and comes in five colors.
And yes, it is selling like hotcakes.
As far as why they're not selling a 15 gig white iPod, I'm sure there are a few reasons:
- 15 gig drives probably cost about the same as 20 gig drives. - Offering two products which are very close in features tends to confuse the market. - A 15 gig model that was much cheaper than the current 20 gig version would probably undercut the mini's market.
If you're so price-sensitive that you can't spring for the extra $49 that a mini would cost you, then probably:
- You shouldn't be spending money on a portable music player anyway. - You should check out eBay. - You might want to take a look at some cheaper knockoff devices.
Re:the real reason to be on the math team...
on
Is Math A Sport?
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· Score: 1
free donuts!
Maybe that was the best reason to be on the math team in your high school. In mine, the best reason was......the girls.
I'm wondering if there's any chance of seeing an iMac with a no-monitor option.
Absolutely. And something that'll be nice about the version without a monitor is that you'll have some extra expansion options. Looks like a nice machine.
I'm wondering if there's any chance of seeing an iMac with a no-monitor option.
Absolutely. And something that'll be nice about the version without a monitor is that you'll have some extra expansion options. Looks like a nice machine.
$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
IANACPA, but I'd expect that a corporation would count R&D as an expense, and therefore someething that's deducted from revenue along with all the other expenses like payroll, raw materials, rent, equipment, taxes, beer bashes, corporate jet, marketing, legal expenses, warehouses, etc. Profit is what's left over after you subtract all those things from revenue.
According to it's annual report, Apple spent $471 million on R&D in 2003. I couldn't find any statement of R&D expenses in Dell's 2003 annual report, but I did learn that Dell had about $35 billion in revenue for that year. Fool.com tells us that Dell spends about 2% of sales on R&D, and if we agree that most of Dell's revenue comes from sales, we can guess that Dell probably spends around $700 million a year on R&D.
So yes, Apple's $61 million profit for the quarter wouldn't put much of a dent in Dell's R&D budget, but neither would it come even close to covering Apple's R&D.
Any thoughts on how long apple can keep up results this mediocre?
If they want to run the company like a Dell, not very long at all. But given that Apple is not Dell, and that people have been unsuccessfully predicting its demise since the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, I think they can keep it up for quite a while. And I hope they do, as Apple has been the most important innovator in the personal computer market for the last 28 years.
I don't read the disclaimer as applying to the tag. Despite my being neither Jewish nor stinky, I find the tag highly offensive. Why would an uncircumsized Jew be any more stinky a fucker than, say, an uncircumsized Protestant?
I am not the thought police. I am not necessarily politically correct. I don't care what goes on in your nasty little brain. But when you express something tasteless in public, you should expect people to react to it, and that's what I'm doing.
I don't know if that's true or not, but you can definitely teach people not to be creative. And that's just exactly what we're doing when we don't give our kids enough art, music, math, and language education.
You either are, or are not.
Maybe, but I tend to think that mostly everyone is born with a creative brain. Some kids grow up learning that it's okay and fun and good to think outside the box and are encouraged to solve their own problems in their own ways. Others grow up getting smacked for coloring outside the lines and are told not to think for themselves.
That said, I think there are a few useful tools to aid the creative process, writing, drawing, music, etc., but I don't believe there are many, if any, tools to enhance the creative process. Maybe computers can't do that.
I'm not sure what the differences is between "aid" and "enhance" above, but one way that computers can aid/enhance the creative process is to stop impeding it. There's probably a whole book to be written on this topic (and Kay might be the guy to do it), but in short I think that software often tends to get in the way more than it helps.
In the beginning, there were assorted ridiculous input systems such as punch cards, paper tapes, and (ha!) rows of switches. Computers weren't much fun to use, and way too expensive for most creative endeavors. (That's not to say that the pioneers of our industry weren't creative.) And then came terminals and command lines, and life was good! Much better than before, but still so expensive that you had to be a really smart and already creative college kid just to get to use one for a bit. (Read Steven Levy's "Hackers" for more on this.) Then came personal computers, which were relatively affordable and inspired all sorts of creativity.
But still, we were stuck with the command line, and you pretty much needed to learn all about "right" and "wrong" ways to do things, and if you did something "wrong" the computer normally did something unfriendly. (Note that text adventure games were wildly popular during this time, possibly because they encouraged one to explore a new world, and aside from maybe getting temporarily killed there wasn't much that you could do that was "wrong.") When GUI's first came into public consciousness with the Apple Lisa (there were others, but a normal person might actually have a shot at touching a Lisa), there was a lot of interest because with this strange new computing paradigm, you could tell the computer to do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, and there was little that you could do that was "wrong." At $10,000, though, Lisa's were too expensive for most folk. Then the Mac came along and people loved it. It was relatively affordable, and easy to use, and people (Microsoft included) did all sorts of interesting things with it. Even with just two apps, MacWrite and MacPaint, people were transfixed for hours just playing and creating and exploring. About the worst thing you could do resulted in having to swap the floppy disk five or ten times.
These days, computers are a lot more difficult and scary to use. No, don't open that attachment! You never know, it might contain a virus. Don't plug you computer into the network if you don't know the "right" way to do it, because hackers might take over your computer. Why did you set up your document like that? You've got it all wrong. Which of these 300 different commands that do a very specific thing do you want, and in what order?
Tools which inspire creativity are simple ones which don't have a "right" and "wrong" way to use them. Tools like Logo and MacPaint and paintbrushes and drums. You get that sort of (software) tool most often in the early and middle phases of a products life, when a product is implemented enough to be useful, but before the manufacturer needs to justify the next seven updates and throws in all manner of kitchen sink features.
Back in the 80's, I remember mom&pop comic stores all over the place. Most of 'em seemed to last a few years, and then went under. Given all the speculation in the comic book market, some of us thought that comic books were the modern day equivalent of tulip bulbs (remember, we hadn't yet seen what would happen in the 90's with dot-coms).
And then the Internet came along, and either the bottom dropped out of the comic book market, or else comics were just so completely overshadowed by the net that they dropped completely off my radar. I'd be surprised if it wasn't both, as most of my comic-collecting friends became instant Internet fiends and really didn't have time for comics.
Things in the comic world seem to be picking up again judging by the number of comics-inspired movies that have come along in recent years. But I still don't see any comic shops opening up, and I don't know anyone who collects anymore. Given that, I'm pretty sure that comics won't supplant novels anytime soon.
Maybe movies are another good indication of that. Yes, there seem to be more comics-inspired movies lately, but if you compare the number of movies based on comics over the last n years to the number based on novels in that same period, I think you'll find that movies based on novels outnumber those based on comics by about 25:1.
You need the 'i.e.' in order to have enough e's. Besides, if it's not supposed to be part of the anagram, what the hell is it doing there at all? It makes no sense. However, that makes too many i's, which was my original point: 'i.e. the alias man' is NOT an anagram of 'alan smithee' as the OP asserted.
As a Mac/Unix programmer, I'd love to find a job in or around Seattle. But for obvious reasons, almost everything up there is Windows-oriented. As far as I can tell, jobs for someone with my set of skills are few and far between.
From my point of view, it's Microsoft that's bad for the job market.
Fun fact: "Alan Smithee" is an anagram of 'i.e., the alias man.'
alan smithee --- the alias man.
It's hard to disagree that the i's there are the same, but you left off the initial 'i.e.' Which doesn't really change anything except the particular letter which doesn't match up. Try counting the e's in your version:
As far as I can tell, the major accomplishment of this section of the act is that it forces all would-be terrorists to buy books at bricks-n-mortar bookstores rather than online, and to pay cash. Heck, they can even get a discount using the store's discount card, so long as they're careful to use an phony name when they sign up.
Or, they can simply do all their reading in the library and never check books out.
It would be nice if Congress would at least amend the act to require some degree of transparency. We should be able to learn stuff like how often this particular power is used. We should be able to know whether the FBI is building a huge database of all our book purchases, or if they've only used it on three dozen separate occasions.
I honestly don't care if the government checks on my reading habits. Who cares?
You might, if you were reading something other than computer books.
Maybe you're gay (or not even sure what you are) and still in the closet, unhappy and scared, and not sure how to deal.
Maybe you think you might be pregnant and want to know what to expect (or indeed how to tell for sure), but you're not comfortable telling anyone else yet.
Maybe you've got a potentially huge, ground-breaking idea, but you need more solid information first, and you don't necessarily want anyone watching your reading habits and putting 2 and 2 together.
Maybe your grandfather could have been a Nazi, and you're trying to find out more, but you're not exactly comfortable being open about that possibility.
If you are doing something that requires you to hide it from the government, your breaking the law, and deserve to be caught.
So according to you, every person who works for "the government" is completely trustworthy, protects personal data perfectly, and doesn't know a thing about you. Furthermore government agencies never share information with each other or with the companies they contract to implement nearly all of their systems.
Indeed. You really ought to try reading something other than computer books. You might start with a newspaper.
P2P has obviously become strongly associated with music swapping, so it's easy to see why Senator Hatch and his sponsors seem to think that stopping the technology will stop music swapping. But he's sadly mistaken, and this would seem a very poorly considered piece of legislation.
Is there an important difference between P2P networks and, say, everyone running a copy of Apache and having Google index every machine? Yeah, sure, it's a little different, but the effect is the same. Every copy of MacOS X includes Apache, and if all P2P software went away tomorrow, I'll bet Apache would be put to service doing the same sorts of stuff.
Is there an essential difference between P2P networks and distributed file systems like AFS? Not, I think, when it comes to providing an ability to share information.
So as soon as you start legislating against certain technology to try to stop some social misbehavior, you're into a great big game of Whack-A-Mole. And the more you keep at it, prohibiting first one technology and then several others, the more damage you do. What's more, if you go after the vendors, you can really only succeed in driving the technology underground and making criminals out of all the people who are smart enough to understand it and want to tap into its power.
But there are two sides to this story, and those who swap music illegally are as guilty of ruining things for the rest of us as Hatch and the RIAA. By flouting the law, illegal music swappers make existing law seem ineffective and force copyright owners to look for new ways to protect their copyrights.
If you find yourself rationalizing the trading of copyrighted music over P2P networks, you are the problem. If you're trading stuff that someone else owns over the net (or anywhere else) then you are a criminal. If you don't like the way the law is written, then do something about it. But if you just go ahead and break the laws you don't agree with, you're the reason that we keep getting more stupid laws (and laws that are more stupid).
But they give away free tools to further lock people in to their proprietary media formats and media players and the services for their proprietary OSes!
Proprietary media formats? Like UFS, Samba, AAC, MPEG-4, PDF, and XML?
Media players? The only thing proprietary about the formats that iPod plays is the FairPlay DRM, and that's only there to make the record companies comfortable enough to buy into iTMS. But you can play AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV, etc... And you can load it from a Mac, Windows, or anything that will talk to a FireWire device.
I'm not sure what services for the OS you're talking about, but a significant portion of the OS itself is open source.
There's nothing about any of this that 'locks you in to their proprietary' anything. Use what you want, don't use what you don't want.
Could the reporter not do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations?
I'm pretty sure that the "reporter" did not want to do any back-of-the-envelope calculations. The column gives the reader a strong impression that there's something wrong with the iPod and iTMS. Stross gives a flawed explanation of music compression, and then proceeds to single out Apple as though they're the only ones that distribute compressed music. He never bothers to explain that all the online music distributors sell music compressed to about the same degree with lossy techniques. He doesn't mention that iTMS sells tracks compressed with AAC as opposed to the WMA tracks everyone else sells, and that AAC arguably gives better fidelity than WMA.
After reading Stross' column last night, I did a little test. I listened several times to Cowboy Junkies' "Mining for Gold" on my copy of the "The Trinity Sessions" CD. The track is just Margo Timmins singing a capella for a minute and a half in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, and was recorded with a single microphone. Listening to the CD version with a good pair of headphones you can hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I then ripped the track onto my PowerBook at 128 kbits/sec and listened to that. With a good pair of headphones, you could hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I'm sure that an editor of Stereophile magazine would know better what to look for to discern the difference between the CD track and the compressed version, but for practical purposes the two versions are indistiguishable.
It's clear that Stross has some sort of bone to pick with Apple, or else is completely unqualified to write about these things. Either way, this is one column that certainly never should have been printed in the NY Times.
I think the thing that bothers me most about this piece is that the NY Times published it without making it clear whether it's news or opinion or what. It's published under the heading "Digital Domain," but that alone is not enough to tell me what the nature of the writing is.
RFID scanning is the equilvilent of an illegal search.
No, it's not. In the case of baggage handling, a "search" would mean opening your luggage and looking through its contents. Or, in your paranoid world, not opening your luggage and scanning for RFID tags attached to each item inside. Airlines and the TSA are already allowed (indeed, required) to screen bags, and that may mean opening them, scanning them, whatever. So anyway you slice it, it's not illegal.
Delta is surely not planning on scanning for RFID tags on stuff you bought at Walmart. They're scanning for the tag that they attached (temporarily) to your bag when you checked it, just as they currently scan the barcoded label that they attach now. It's how they know where each bag needs to go. When you pick up your bag at the luggage claim, you can remove the baggage check label and toss it (and the RFID chip it contains) in the trash.
So it's really not a search at all. It's just a luggage tracking system.
RFID offers minimal advantages over barcodes for inventory purposes and does nothing for supply chains
Maybe, maybe not. But we're not talking about an inventory or supply chain application. We're talking about many thousands of items, all of which need to be sorted and transported to various destinations, and then returned to their respective owners with minimal loss or damage.
The current system works pretty well... I've often had to run from one gate to another to catch a connecting flight, and somehow my bag always seems to make the connection without breaking a sweat. So I'd agree that bar codes work pretty well.
But RFID tags do offer a signifcant advantage in that they don't have to be oriented toward the scanner. They work better than bar codes because handlers don't have to scan the items by hand, or else be careful to place them on the conveyor a certain way, or whatever. Also, you can probably put an RFID scanner planes (if the FAA doesn't think it'll cause navigation problems!) and know for certain whether a bag made it onto a plane or not.
RFID may also prevent baggage theft. Imagine that after you pick up your checked bag, you pass a RFID-scanning gate that reads both the tag on your bag and the tag on your boarding pass. If they're not both related to the same customer, a nearby security guard is alerted and comes over to check that you really the owner. It's the same thing they already *could* do with the bar coded tags, but they generally don't because it would require a lot of human labor.
There are appropriate uses and inappropriate uses for most technologies. Cameras, computers, GPS, mobile phones, biotechnology, whatever. If you're worried about privacy, trying to defeat any one technology (or even all technology) is like sticking your finger in the dike. You'd be much better off spending your time working to limit the kinds and amounts of information that any organization can collect about you, and they ways they can use that information.
There are precedents for that. We've got some pretty tough laws which limit the ways that health information can be used, and who can share it with whom. There's no reason that travel information, credit information, etc., can't be regulated the same way.
$25 million doesn't seem like all that large an investment, IMO. What does a single plane cost, after all? My guess is that they'll save $25 million over a few years just in terms of saved labor.
And with their newly aggrandized objective to ensure "complete astronaut safety,"
You've got to understand that when Bush says something like that, he doesn't really mean "completely." If you take the words "complete astronaut safety" literally, it's obviously a ridiculous concept. We're talking about going to Mars for heaven's sake! I can't drive to work in "complete" safety. How the heck are we going to propel several people several dozen miles per second to land for the first time in history on a planet with no breathable atmosphere in "complete" safety? I can only quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Bush says stuff like this all the time. Here's another example from a 2002 speech he gave on education:
"We must make sure that every child enter school ready to learn -- every child -- not just one, not just a few, but every, single child. We've got to make sure that every child starts at the same point."
Now I ask you, how likely is it that this president is actually going to make sure that "every, single child" enters school "ready to learn"? A short drive around any city will show you that we'd be doing very well just to make sure that "every, single child" has a safe place to sleep.
Bush is a man of extremes and absolutes. It actually works out well for him much of the time, as it leads to a simple message that makes people feel good and often gets picked up in media. But you've got to remember that his words don't mean what you think they do, and you've got to look a little deeper.
After all why would they need Rendevous on non-mac platformsm, unless they were planning on selling a networking device that hooks up to the home network?
- Because in the world of protocols, your "standard" isn't actually a standard unless you can get other people to follow it. Making it easy for others to follow you gives you influence the industry.
- Because Apple would rather live in an open world than in a Microsoft world. (Don't forget, Rendezvous is *not* an Apple invention. It's Apple's name for "zero-conf," and Apple never claimed to have invented it. Apple just made it popular.)
- Because Apple's not selling Rendezvous anyway. They're selling computers, and people will buy Apple computers if they play nicely with others, and if it's easy for others to play nicely with them.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't sell one for $200, but they do sell one for $249. It's absolutely tiny, weighs nothing, and comes in five colors.
And yes, it is selling like hotcakes.
As far as why they're not selling a 15 gig white iPod, I'm sure there are a few reasons:
- 15 gig drives probably cost about the same as 20 gig drives.
- Offering two products which are very close in features tends to confuse the market.
- A 15 gig model that was much cheaper than the current 20 gig version would probably undercut the mini's market.
If you're so price-sensitive that you can't spring for the extra $49 that a mini would cost you, then probably:
- You shouldn't be spending money on a portable music player anyway.
- You should check out eBay.
- You might want to take a look at some cheaper knockoff devices.
free donuts!
...the girls.
Maybe that was the best reason to be on the math team in your high school. In mine, the best reason was...
I'm wondering if there's any chance of seeing an iMac with a no-monitor option.
Absolutely. And something that'll be nice about the version without a monitor is that you'll have some extra expansion options. Looks like a nice machine.
There's a picture right here.
I'm wondering if there's any chance of seeing an iMac with a no-monitor option.
Absolutely. And something that'll be nice about the version without a monitor is that you'll have some extra expansion options. Looks like a nice machine.
There's a picture right here.
$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
IANACPA, but I'd expect that a corporation would count R&D as an expense, and therefore someething that's deducted from revenue along with all the other expenses like payroll, raw materials, rent, equipment, taxes, beer bashes, corporate jet, marketing, legal expenses, warehouses, etc. Profit is what's left over after you subtract all those things from revenue.
According to it's annual report, Apple spent $471 million on R&D in 2003. I couldn't find any statement of R&D expenses in Dell's 2003 annual report, but I did learn that Dell had about $35 billion in revenue for that year. Fool.com tells us that Dell spends about 2% of sales on R&D, and if we agree that most of Dell's revenue comes from sales, we can guess that Dell probably spends around $700 million a year on R&D.
So yes, Apple's $61 million profit for the quarter wouldn't put much of a dent in Dell's R&D budget, but neither would it come even close to covering Apple's R&D.
Any thoughts on how long apple can keep up results this mediocre?
If they want to run the company like a Dell, not very long at all. But given that Apple is not Dell, and that people have been unsuccessfully predicting its demise since the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, I think they can keep it up for quite a while. And I hope they do, as Apple has been the most important innovator in the personal computer market for the last 28 years.
It's fine to have a chip implanted to get access to a crime database.
It's not fine to have to have a chip implanted when you're added to a crime database.
I don't read the disclaimer as applying to the tag. Despite my being neither Jewish nor stinky, I find the tag highly offensive. Why would an uncircumsized Jew be any more stinky a fucker than, say, an uncircumsized Protestant?
I am not the thought police. I am not necessarily politically correct. I don't care what goes on in your nasty little brain. But when you express something tasteless in public, you should expect people to react to it, and that's what I'm doing.
You can't teach anyone to be creative.
I don't know if that's true or not, but you can definitely teach people not to be creative. And that's just exactly what we're doing when we don't give our kids enough art, music, math, and language education.
You either are, or are not.
Maybe, but I tend to think that mostly everyone is born with a creative brain. Some kids grow up learning that it's okay and fun and good to think outside the box and are encouraged to solve their own problems in their own ways. Others grow up getting smacked for coloring outside the lines and are told not to think for themselves.
That said, I think there are a few useful tools to aid the creative process, writing, drawing, music, etc., but I don't believe there are many, if any, tools to enhance the creative process. Maybe computers can't do that.
I'm not sure what the differences is between "aid" and "enhance" above, but one way that computers can aid/enhance the creative process is to stop impeding it. There's probably a whole book to be written on this topic (and Kay might be the guy to do it), but in short I think that software often tends to get in the way more than it helps.
In the beginning, there were assorted ridiculous input systems such as punch cards, paper tapes, and (ha!) rows of switches. Computers weren't much fun to use, and way too expensive for most creative endeavors. (That's not to say that the pioneers of our industry weren't creative.) And then came terminals and command lines, and life was good! Much better than before, but still so expensive that you had to be a really smart and already creative college kid just to get to use one for a bit. (Read Steven Levy's "Hackers" for more on this.) Then came personal computers, which were relatively affordable and inspired all sorts of creativity.
But still, we were stuck with the command line, and you pretty much needed to learn all about "right" and "wrong" ways to do things, and if you did something "wrong" the computer normally did something unfriendly. (Note that text adventure games were wildly popular during this time, possibly because they encouraged one to explore a new world, and aside from maybe getting temporarily killed there wasn't much that you could do that was "wrong.") When GUI's first came into public consciousness with the Apple Lisa (there were others, but a normal person might actually have a shot at touching a Lisa), there was a lot of interest because with this strange new computing paradigm, you could tell the computer to do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, and there was little that you could do that was "wrong." At $10,000, though, Lisa's were too expensive for most folk. Then the Mac came along and people loved it. It was relatively affordable, and easy to use, and people (Microsoft included) did all sorts of interesting things with it. Even with just two apps, MacWrite and MacPaint, people were transfixed for hours just playing and creating and exploring. About the worst thing you could do resulted in having to swap the floppy disk five or ten times.
These days, computers are a lot more difficult and scary to use. No, don't open that attachment! You never know, it might contain a virus. Don't plug you computer into the network if you don't know the "right" way to do it, because hackers might take over your computer. Why did you set up your document like that? You've got it all wrong. Which of these 300 different commands that do a very specific thing do you want, and in what order?
Tools which inspire creativity are simple ones which don't have a "right" and "wrong" way to use them. Tools like Logo and MacPaint and paintbrushes and drums. You get that sort of (software) tool most often in the early and middle phases of a products life, when a product is implemented enough to be useful, but before the manufacturer needs to justify the next seven updates and throws in all manner of kitchen sink features.
Friends, it's time to demand simpl
Hope someone mods parent flamebait immediately, mainly for the tagline.
Back in the 80's, I remember mom&pop comic stores all over the place. Most of 'em seemed to last a few years, and then went under. Given all the speculation in the comic book market, some of us thought that comic books were the modern day equivalent of tulip bulbs (remember, we hadn't yet seen what would happen in the 90's with dot-coms).
And then the Internet came along, and either the bottom dropped out of the comic book market, or else comics were just so completely overshadowed by the net that they dropped completely off my radar. I'd be surprised if it wasn't both, as most of my comic-collecting friends became instant Internet fiends and really didn't have time for comics.
Things in the comic world seem to be picking up again judging by the number of comics-inspired movies that have come along in recent years. But I still don't see any comic shops opening up, and I don't know anyone who collects anymore. Given that, I'm pretty sure that comics won't supplant novels anytime soon.
Maybe movies are another good indication of that. Yes, there seem to be more comics-inspired movies lately, but if you compare the number of movies based on comics over the last n years to the number based on novels in that same period, I think you'll find that movies based on novels outnumber those based on comics by about 25:1.
You need the 'i.e.' in order to have enough e's. Besides, if it's not supposed to be part of the anagram, what the hell is it doing there at all? It makes no sense. However, that makes too many i's, which was my original point: 'i.e. the alias man' is NOT an anagram of 'alan smithee' as the OP asserted.
As a Mac/Unix programmer, I'd love to find a job in or around Seattle. But for obvious reasons, almost everything up there is Windows-oriented. As far as I can tell, jobs for someone with my set of skills are few and far between.
From my point of view, it's Microsoft that's bad for the job market.
Fun fact: "Alan Smithee" is an anagram of 'i.e., the alias man.'
alan smithee --- the alias man.
It's hard to disagree that the i's there are the same, but you left off the initial 'i.e.' Which doesn't really change anything except the particular letter which doesn't match up. Try counting the e's in your version:
alan smithee --- the alias man.
Someone break out the -1 Dumb mod, please.
Indeed.
Fun fact: "Alan Smithee" is an anagram of 'i.e., the alias man.'
Um, no it's not. Count the i's in each.
As far as I can tell, the major accomplishment of this section of the act is that it forces all would-be terrorists to buy books at bricks-n-mortar bookstores rather than online, and to pay cash. Heck, they can even get a discount using the store's discount card, so long as they're careful to use an phony name when they sign up.
Or, they can simply do all their reading in the library and never check books out.
It would be nice if Congress would at least amend the act to require some degree of transparency. We should be able to learn stuff like how often this particular power is used. We should be able to know whether the FBI is building a huge database of all our book purchases, or if they've only used it on three dozen separate occasions.
I honestly don't care if the government checks on my reading habits. Who cares?
You might, if you were reading something other than computer books.
Maybe you're gay (or not even sure what you are) and still in the closet, unhappy and scared, and not sure how to deal.
Maybe you think you might be pregnant and want to know what to expect (or indeed how to tell for sure), but you're not comfortable telling anyone else yet.
Maybe you've got a potentially huge, ground-breaking idea, but you need more solid information first, and you don't necessarily want anyone watching your reading habits and putting 2 and 2 together.
Maybe your grandfather could have been a Nazi, and you're trying to find out more, but you're not exactly comfortable being open about that possibility.
If you are doing something that requires you to hide it from the government, your breaking the law, and deserve to be caught.
So according to you, every person who works for "the government" is completely trustworthy, protects personal data perfectly, and doesn't know a thing about you. Furthermore government agencies never share information with each other or with the companies they contract to implement nearly all of their systems.
Indeed. You really ought to try reading something other than computer books. You might start with a newspaper.
P2P has obviously become strongly associated with music swapping, so it's easy to see why Senator Hatch and his sponsors seem to think that stopping the technology will stop music swapping. But he's sadly mistaken, and this would seem a very poorly considered piece of legislation.
Is there an important difference between P2P networks and, say, everyone running a copy of Apache and having Google index every machine? Yeah, sure, it's a little different, but the effect is the same. Every copy of MacOS X includes Apache, and if all P2P software went away tomorrow, I'll bet Apache would be put to service doing the same sorts of stuff.
Is there an essential difference between P2P networks and distributed file systems like AFS? Not, I think, when it comes to providing an ability to share information.
So as soon as you start legislating against certain technology to try to stop some social misbehavior, you're into a great big game of Whack-A-Mole. And the more you keep at it, prohibiting first one technology and then several others, the more damage you do. What's more, if you go after the vendors, you can really only succeed in driving the technology underground and making criminals out of all the people who are smart enough to understand it and want to tap into its power.
But there are two sides to this story, and those who swap music illegally are as guilty of ruining things for the rest of us as Hatch and the RIAA. By flouting the law, illegal music swappers make existing law seem ineffective and force copyright owners to look for new ways to protect their copyrights.
If you find yourself rationalizing the trading of copyrighted music over P2P networks, you are the problem. If you're trading stuff that someone else owns over the net (or anywhere else) then you are a criminal. If you don't like the way the law is written, then do something about it. But if you just go ahead and break the laws you don't agree with, you're the reason that we keep getting more stupid laws (and laws that are more stupid).
Friends, it's clear from Secunia's own data that we should all switch back to MacOS 9, since Secunia knows of only one security issue for that OS.
Friends, you just can't argue with pie charts.
But they give away free tools to further lock people in to their proprietary media formats and media players and the services for their proprietary OSes!
Proprietary media formats? Like UFS, Samba, AAC, MPEG-4, PDF, and XML?
Media players? The only thing proprietary about the formats that iPod plays is the FairPlay DRM, and that's only there to make the record companies comfortable enough to buy into iTMS. But you can play AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV, etc... And you can load it from a Mac, Windows, or anything that will talk to a FireWire device.
I'm not sure what services for the OS you're talking about, but a significant portion of the OS itself is open source.
There's nothing about any of this that 'locks you in to their proprietary' anything. Use what you want, don't use what you don't want.
It's not a /. contributor that really misleads, but the column (and Stross, it's author) itself.
Could the reporter not do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations?
I'm pretty sure that the "reporter" did not want to do any back-of-the-envelope calculations. The column gives the reader a strong impression that there's something wrong with the iPod and iTMS. Stross gives a flawed explanation of music compression, and then proceeds to single out Apple as though they're the only ones that distribute compressed music. He never bothers to explain that all the online music distributors sell music compressed to about the same degree with lossy techniques. He doesn't mention that iTMS sells tracks compressed with AAC as opposed to the WMA tracks everyone else sells, and that AAC arguably gives better fidelity than WMA.
After reading Stross' column last night, I did a little test. I listened several times to Cowboy Junkies' "Mining for Gold" on my copy of the "The Trinity Sessions" CD. The track is just Margo Timmins singing a capella for a minute and a half in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, and was recorded with a single microphone. Listening to the CD version with a good pair of headphones you can hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I then ripped the track onto my PowerBook at 128 kbits/sec and listened to that. With a good pair of headphones, you could hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I'm sure that an editor of Stereophile magazine would know better what to look for to discern the difference between the CD track and the compressed version, but for practical purposes the two versions are indistiguishable.
It's clear that Stross has some sort of bone to pick with Apple, or else is completely unqualified to write about these things. Either way, this is one column that certainly never should have been printed in the NY Times.
I think the thing that bothers me most about this piece is that the NY Times published it without making it clear whether it's news or opinion or what. It's published under the heading "Digital Domain," but that alone is not enough to tell me what the nature of the writing is.
RFID scanning is the equilvilent of an illegal search.
No, it's not. In the case of baggage handling, a "search" would mean opening your luggage and looking through its contents. Or, in your paranoid world, not opening your luggage and scanning for RFID tags attached to each item inside. Airlines and the TSA are already allowed (indeed, required) to screen bags, and that may mean opening them, scanning them, whatever. So anyway you slice it, it's not illegal.
Delta is surely not planning on scanning for RFID tags on stuff you bought at Walmart. They're scanning for the tag that they attached (temporarily) to your bag when you checked it, just as they currently scan the barcoded label that they attach now. It's how they know where each bag needs to go. When you pick up your bag at the luggage claim, you can remove the baggage check label and toss it (and the RFID chip it contains) in the trash.
So it's really not a search at all. It's just a luggage tracking system.
RFID offers minimal advantages over barcodes for inventory purposes and does nothing for supply chains
Maybe, maybe not. But we're not talking about an inventory or supply chain application. We're talking about many thousands of items, all of which need to be sorted and transported to various destinations, and then returned to their respective owners with minimal loss or damage.
The current system works pretty well... I've often had to run from one gate to another to catch a connecting flight, and somehow my bag always seems to make the connection without breaking a sweat. So I'd agree that bar codes work pretty well.
But RFID tags do offer a signifcant advantage in that they don't have to be oriented toward the scanner. They work better than bar codes because handlers don't have to scan the items by hand, or else be careful to place them on the conveyor a certain way, or whatever. Also, you can probably put an RFID scanner planes (if the FAA doesn't think it'll cause navigation problems!) and know for certain whether a bag made it onto a plane or not.
RFID may also prevent baggage theft. Imagine that after you pick up your checked bag, you pass a RFID-scanning gate that reads both the tag on your bag and the tag on your boarding pass. If they're not both related to the same customer, a nearby security guard is alerted and comes over to check that you really the owner. It's the same thing they already *could* do with the bar coded tags, but they generally don't because it would require a lot of human labor.
There are appropriate uses and inappropriate uses for most technologies. Cameras, computers, GPS, mobile phones, biotechnology, whatever. If you're worried about privacy, trying to defeat any one technology (or even all technology) is like sticking your finger in the dike. You'd be much better off spending your time working to limit the kinds and amounts of information that any organization can collect about you, and they ways they can use that information.
There are precedents for that. We've got some pretty tough laws which limit the ways that health information can be used, and who can share it with whom. There's no reason that travel information, credit information, etc., can't be regulated the same way.
$25 million doesn't seem like all that large an investment, IMO. What does a single plane cost, after all? My guess is that they'll save $25 million over a few years just in terms of saved labor.
You've got to understand that when Bush says something like that, he doesn't really mean "completely." If you take the words "complete astronaut safety" literally, it's obviously a ridiculous concept. We're talking about going to Mars for heaven's sake! I can't drive to work in "complete" safety. How the heck are we going to propel several people several dozen miles per second to land for the first time in history on a planet with no breathable atmosphere in "complete" safety? I can only quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Bush says stuff like this all the time. Here's another example from a 2002 speech he gave on education:
Now I ask you, how likely is it that this president is actually going to make sure that "every, single child" enters school "ready to learn"? A short drive around any city will show you that we'd be doing very well just to make sure that "every, single child" has a safe place to sleep.
Bush is a man of extremes and absolutes. It actually works out well for him much of the time, as it leads to a simple message that makes people feel good and often gets picked up in media. But you've got to remember that his words don't mean what you think they do, and you've got to look a little deeper.
After all why would they need Rendevous on non-mac platformsm, unless they were planning on selling a networking device that hooks up to the home network?
- Because in the world of protocols, your "standard" isn't actually a standard unless you can get other people to follow it. Making it easy for others to follow you gives you influence the industry.
- Because Apple would rather live in an open world than in a Microsoft world. (Don't forget, Rendezvous is *not* an Apple invention. It's Apple's name for "zero-conf," and Apple never claimed to have invented it. Apple just made it popular.)
- Because Apple's not selling Rendezvous anyway. They're selling computers, and people will buy Apple computers if they play nicely with others, and if it's easy for others to play nicely with them.