Re:iPod Sacrifices Features, Affordability For Siz
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Neuros Review
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· Score: 1
Yes, iPods are smaller than many other disk-based MP3 players, but they achieve this compactness by sacrificing features and expandability. They cost around 50% more than equivalently featured MP3 hard drive players.
Um equivalently featured? One of the major features of the iPod is the size. Beyond that, I have yet to see any mp3 player that has as elegant a solution to navigation.
They have no digital line-in recording, no mic facility, no FM radio, and no easy way for users to replace or expand the device's batteries or hard drive.
True, and for the majority of people out there, an mp3 player is supposed to play mp3s, not act like a bunch of other things. Also, how many players allow expanding batteries?
Unlike most of the new generation media players they also feature no MPEG 4 video playback or recording.
Right, video on a 2" is useful. Again, this is an mp3 player, not a video camera.
They have a weird, all-or-nothing metadata approach to storing music that forces you to use the moderately featured iTunes freeware to utilise the iPod to its fullest instead of being able to use some other full-featured, non-freeware media jukebox software.
This is where I decided I had to reply. iTunes is far and away the best music manager/player that I've ever used, and beyond that it is *free*. Apple again shows that they just seem to get it. iTunes makes managing a huge collection trivial in ways that are so easy it's silly. I looked and looked for a system that could deal with a large library (3000 ish songs) in a useful, *quick* manner and never found one. Then I got iTunes and realized the search was over. On-the-fly searching through 3000 songs? Integrated ripping, tagging, & burning all well done. (For example, when editing the tags, you have type-ahead completion for artist & album.) I'm honestly curious what mp3 manager you use that makes iTunes look moderately featured. As for your dig about freeware vs non-freeware, I don't understand. The implication is that being freeware makes it inferior in some way, surely this isn't what you mean.
On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily.
The latter of which matters to me, the former of which matters to a *lot* of people.
think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturer's media player offerings.
My god, it's an mp3 player. Period. And a damn good one. This isn't like learning to ride a bike, this is listening to music. Sometimes you get a product right and don't need to continually add bells and whistles. I have yet to see very many overly compelling features anywhere else (the fm transmitter might be the exception, though I'm happier with one I can remove like an iTrip than one permanently adding weight). Some of us want a great mp3 player that doesn't think it needs to be a geek swiss-army knife.
The bad part about Tivo is that it absolutely will not function without the guide service that you pay them for.
Bzzz, wrong. Tivo works just fine without the service, albeit as little more than a vcr. You can program it to record by day/time just like a vcr, and it will still pause, FF, etc.
I wonder if this a response to iLeech, iTunesDL, and the like. These let you connect to iTunes as if streaming and save the files as.mp3s ripe to insert into your own collection.
It just seems that streaming isn't really the problem...you can listen to streams any number of other ways, from countless other sources. To be able to (easily & painlessly) grab anyone's public iTunes shares as usable.mp3s strikes me as far, far more offensive to those in power. In fact it flies directly in the face of allowing iTunes to stream but not really share files...
So you don't gain anything by doing DRM half-fast, except curtailing fair use.
That's just not true (and i think the term is half-assed). You only need it to be somewhat inconvenient to prevent most people from doing it. If you combine that with a system that is relatively unobtrusive (like Apple's), you are in pretty good shape. People on the whole won't burn then re-rip just so they can seed kazaa.
Think about trespassing signs...they will deter a lot of people from going somewhere, but not everyone. So then you put up a chain-link fence, and that stops a lot more people. Of course there are those who will bring wire cutters and still get through, but you've eliminated the huge majority of potential trespassers. Like DRM, it isn't perfect, but it is good enough.
It's simple, and it's amazing nobody gets it: cut the DRM crap, and people will pay for the convenience and legitimacy.
It's simple, and it's amazing nobody gets it: Music companies need the DRM crap, and won't let anything without it make it big. Given the iTunes sales numbers, it seems people are paying for convenience and legitimacy despite the (minimal) DRM.
Seriously, as much as you'd like a totally unencumbered, perfect digital reproduction for a cheap price, that is not going to happen. Apple's deal is the most reasonable thing yet, and their sales numbers show that. They managed to get a system that is easy *enough*, cheap *enough*, user-friendly *enough* that people like it, while it is DRM'd *enough* for the record companies to deal with.
And here's the thing about DRM that apple seems to get (& perhaps even managed to persuade the recording industry of): It doesn't need to be perfect. You don't need to clamp down the file with the digital equivalent of a 1000-pound weight. All you really need to do is make it slightly inconvenient to bypass. You won't stop the hard-core people who have some deisire to 'screw The Man,' but you will never be able to do that (as is pointed out after every fricking article here). You only need to stop the masses for the tactic to be effective.
In a way, it's like speed limits (or all laws), you can't slow everyone down. Yet speed limits *do* lower the average speed very effectively, by targeting the masses and ignoring the corner cases.
Ironically, the appeal of the Apple music store is that you "own" the titles that you buy for
You don't own them, Apple dictate what you can and cannot do with each track.
Hence the "" around own. The point is that you have the file, period. It won't expire, won't stop working when microsoft decides to do x, y, or z. You don't own the music, but you don't own the music if it's on a CD either. You own a copy of it. Moreover, the limits apple puts on your capabilities are stomachable to most people.
I can't use the devices I want to
Many more players support WMA than Apples DRM wrapped AAC, in fact, with Apple you can use the iPod and that's it.
First of all, how many of those players do you think will be compatible with this new windows DRM? Sure firmware upgrade, but that argument works both ways. Second, which mp3 player is the most popular now? Third if you are so inclined, burn, re-rip, and you can put it on *any* player you want.
Basically there are arguments for both a tethered system and for a more apple-like system. Which will succeed depends on what people feel more comfortable with. It seems from the experiences of all available digital music distributors so far, tethering and limited time use seem to be the less preferred (remember DivX?).
And think about how the net is making all this possible. As high-speed increases, we get fast downloads of large volumes of data, streamed video or audio.
I agree, the net is allowing communication to occur on a much better level than before. Things that were difficult or impossible before are now easy and commonplace. I am not suggesting the net is *bad* for research.
Seriously, if the scientific community could be completely open about things, such as say AIDS... a global open net discussion might come up with a solution (provided they can adequately filter the trolls).
The scientific community is much, much more open than nearly anything else. Check out PubMed. A quick search on 'HIV' returns justover 125,000 articles. Now mind you, this isn't like google, those 125,000 are *published* articles in (mostly) peer-reviewed journals, not some half-assed web-page set up 3 years ago and not touched since. If you think the scientific community is anything but open, you have not had much interaction with it at all. Science requires openness to exist, and Academic Science requires publication to survive (try getting funding without publishing...). As for your global open net discussion, the problem is that filtering the trolls and useless suggestions would eliminate 99.9% of the traffic, and leave pretty much only those in the field who are already having plenty of discussions. Science prevents participation only based on familiarity and knowledge.
yep. thats the problem with all this research....everyone who does it doesnt share their results.
Alright, I call bullshit on this. First off, you are reading about aren't you? They *are* sharing results, and better than that, they are talking to wide circulation general press. This means their research is exposed to an audience greater than the same conference crowd that they run in.
wheres the models for the function reponse of the rat neurons ? the electrical interface to the cells ? the procesedure and problems encountered ?
Well for a first approximation, at least look at the guy's web page. Notice the section labeled publications & abstracts. Secondly, if you are actually interested on a real level, talk to the guy. I am sure he would love to talk about his research (thats one thing that always tickles scientists, especially academics).
By the time anyone publishes results its years and progress has already moved on.
Welcome to manuscript writing, submitting, responding to reviews, re-submitting, publishing. It is slow by its very nature. You can't help it, and actually it's a damn good thing, peer-review is what makes science valid and useful. Without that science becomes nothing but bad journalism (remember cold fusion?).
the scientific system should be overhauled methinks.
Ok, what is your suggestion? Until you have an idea how to improve, your bitching is basically meaningless blather.
this research is critical and interesting enough that lots of people would be ahppy to contribute significantly if it was easy to obtain.
Ok, first of all while this research is certainly interesting, good basic research, a good foundation for the future, critical i think not. HIV research, cancer research, public safety research, hell, the stuff my lab does are all far, far more critical. As for many people contributing significantly, that can work for open source coding. It's quite different doing science. There is a reason you spend an extra 5 years in grad school after college before you really start contributing to these kinds of topics. They are complex and difficult to understand, they require a great level of scientific understanding and experience. And here's the thing, if it was easy to obtain, then it wouldn't require high-level research to examine it.
a coupla thousand geeks playing with biological-electronic hybrids could do more than a bunch of researchers at a single university or two.
Yeah, right. You've no clue how complex, difficult, and expensive this kind of research is. Have you ever grown neuronal cells? It's quite a bit harder than raising a bunch of sea monkeys. Even supposing you could package a Pocket Pal Rat-brain-cell-silicon-interface system, you still have to have the understanding of what the hell is actually going on. This isn't your high-school science fair project.
High-level research is high-level for a reason. Science is hard.
Dark Side of the Moon for instance goes for $15. "Aha!" you say, "I'll just buy the single tracks separately!"
No.
You can't. They deliberately prevent you from buying two tracks from the album, just to get you to pay an inflated price.
Sure, but then pick another album, say liz phair's _exile in guyville_ which is listed on the dark side of the moon page as a 'consumers also bought these:' where you get 18 songs for 11.99. As you said in your first line, depends on the album, sometimes you get the shaft, more often you get a deal.
What does this mean? It means the camel's nose is already under the tent with respect to playing with the prices. Soon we'll see certain singles going for $1.50. Then we'll see certain singles you'll have to buy in combination with other singles. Then finally we'll see singles you have to buy the whole album before you get to listen, and we'll have come full circle.
Good god, the service has been available for less than a day and already you are damning it as a the product of some scheming, conniving, mustache twisting evil scoundrel. Give a chance, try it out, it's nearly a miracle something like it even exists given the anal tightness of the RIAA. So while better systems do exist in theory, this one actually let's me buy things now.
Dark Side of the Moon for instance goes for $15. "Aha!" you say, "I'll just buy the single tracks separately!"
No.
You can't. They deliberately prevent you from buying two tracks from the album, just to get you to pay an inflated price.
What does this mean? It means the camel's nose is already under the tent with respect to playing with the prices. Soon we'll see certain singles going for $1.50. Then we'll see certain singles you'll have to buy in combination with other singles. Then finally we'll see singles you have to buy the whole album before you get to listen, and we'll have come full circle.
You don't have to be political to enjoy a nice pair of new running shoes (made, possibly, with child labour), medical advances (made possible to some degree due to research done via unanesthesized vivisection of Jews by Nazis during WWII), or "free" health care (paid by tax dollars taken from those who now can't pay for their medical needs not covered by the "free" program).
You don't have to, certainly, but you should.
While I don't necessarily disagree with this, there comes a point where you have to actually live. You can involve yourself in ethical discourse on Linux, those running shoes, the hamburger you had for lunch, the gas mileage of the car you drive, ad infintium. The problem is that, given limited time, you can easily prevent yourself from accomplishing anything simply by discussing too much.
Additionally, there is an aspect of pragmatism that must be applied. Say your shoes are made by child labor, then you buy shoes from a different company. Except that company pollutes into drinking water of the 3rd world country it is located in (& doesn't use child labor in). Ok, so go for another company which only has factories in a 1st world country & must therefore follow strict guidlines. Except that company doesn't provide benefits of same-sex partners (which you consider an important ethical obligation). You can easily run out of choices for your shoe company.
With shoes, this is not really *that* big of a problem. You could probably hunker down and make some shoes yourself. But when it comes to medical techniques, you really are going to be hard pressed to do it yourself. So, while it maybe the moral, ethical thing to do (avoiding the products of, say, nazi scientific advancement), there are other important aspects of the decision. Pragmatism is an important factor that must be weighed against the ethical factors.
As for this topic of Linux & DRM, it seems to me that is very much what Linus is doing. He is starting a discussion on the topic, allowing for the type of discussion that really *should* happen.
I mean after all that burger is just an advertisement for errrr
Ironically enough, your example is a good counter-example. When I did my fast-food time at mcd's, I asked the manager about this. 'How can you make money on those deals?' (it was $0.25 for a big mac deal specifically). He told me that the sandwiches are there mostly to get people in to the store. They make the majority of their profits on drinks & frys.
A way to make new pets, better people or 4-assed monkeys. This is unlikely to make any multi-celled organism, much less one you can even see by eye.
Anything to do with nanotechnology, this is molecular biology as has been done for years.
Anything useful to make a weapon. That can be done today so, so much easier in any decent biochemistry lab.
Anything really novel technique- or theory- wise
What this is:
A mixture of known techniques, a new machine, and ego. The likelihood of their accomplishing their stated goal isn't any better than, say, directed-evolution (which is currently a feasible technique).
Newsworthy mostly due to Venter's name. There are plenty of wacky, grandiose proposals with more upside, and a better chance of success around, they just lack a widely known scientist championing them.
A misnomer in description. They aren't making new genes in the sense of a new protein structure (or if they are, then the 10 year timetable is completely laughable). They are taking known genes are putting them together as they see fit.
ctually, the irony of your statement is that we're going to need better nano-technology to complete the task.
No. Nanotechnology is completely uninvolved in this. These guys are chemists, biochemists & geneticists not engineers.
As enthusiastic as these companies are, the problems in intentionally constructing a DNA molecule letter by letter are huge: notably, if you screw up in one spot, you can have tremendous problems.
No. Making DNA base by base is not difficult at all, and has not been for many years. DNAsynthesizers can churn out oligos of good purity of lengths into the 100s of bases. Need longer? Make ligatable overhangs and have an enzyme put them together, ligation techniques are trivial molecular biology. As for mistakes, of course they happen, but any scientist worth her salt would sequence it along the way. Remember that Human genome project thing? That was just a lot of DNA sequencing. The machine mentioned in the long article as a long seqeunce synthesizer is just a robotic version of a bench biochemist doing what i described.
Further, there's no "spell check" for them, using current methods. They wouldn't know they had a problem until they start letting it reproduce, only to find that they have an [apparently] inexplicably error, possibly making the organism unviable.
No spell check of making sequences? True, sort of. During the synthesis there isn't, but sequencing it post symthesis is absolutely trivial.
Whats needed is sophisticated enough nanobots that will be able to not only perform the construction of the DNA, but to "spell check" it by running up and down its length continually, comparing it against the desired pattern
Ugh!These are called enzymes. Nanobots as normally pictured (a little robot with arms and pincers etc etc) are just pure science fiction. This is one of the worst areas of pop science literature.
This project is simply a lot of molecular biology, nothing novel in the techniques. What's new is trying to design a genome by hand as opposed to letting nature do it. I am skeptical that 1. it will work (beyond copying known genes), and moreover, 2. it will be even close to what evolution can/has accomplished.
What got kind of mushed together in the articles is a totally different aspect, that of non-natural amino acids. Peter Schultz;s lab (which is just down the hall from me) has created a system where a bacteria can incorporate an amino acid that is not one of the twenty used in natural proteins. You can add amino acids with all kinds of novel chemical groups and see if you can evolve proteins/organisms to work better with this expanded toolkit. Pretty cool.
SARS is likely to be as bad as a smallpox epidemic.
Hold on there nostradamus, how on earth could you have an rational basis for that kind of claim?
I predict that this virus will hit Silicon Valley hard; I've seen a lot of techies, especially foreign 'guests', just not practicing simple hygiene like washing hands coming out of the restrooms, sneezing widely into the air, etc.
Nice vague tinge of racism.
Also, the disease hit China, and so much manufacturing is now there, so there are plenty of chances for it to be contracted and brought back to the US. I think we have a real problem coming.
Except everything so far suggests this virus (if it is) requires close respiratory contact with infected people. Breathing on a tv that will be boxed, packaged, shipped and left on a ship for weeks hardly counts as close respiratory contact.
I suspect SARS is a two-component disease; first you are hit with the new mutant virus, which sets up your immune system to fail to handle certain things, then the second virus characterizing this disease attacks you unhampered.
Again, on what basis do you make these wild-ass statements? Do you work in a research lab studying SARS? When those researching this aren't even ready to make this kind of statement (they say it's possible, but by no means proven, and always stated as 'might,' 'could,' 'would be unusual,' &c. ), how are your prescient enough to?
We do not have any effective way to combat that.
True, just like we don't have any effective way to handle the vast majority of viral infections we get. We let our immune system go at it, and more often than not we get better.
This (I think) is sort of similar to the problems that were raised with using cameras to spot traffic violations. Early on, the cameras would record the license number of a violator (who had, for example, run a red light) and the send the registered owner of the car a ticket. The problem is/was that the violation was commited by a driver who wasn't necessarily the owner of the car.
I think the police solved this problem by photographing both the license plate and the driver-- the photo of the driver can be compared to an existing photo of the registered owner. If they match, ticket time...
Actually, at least here in san diego, that's not the case at all. Many intersections have red-light cameras that just photograph the license plate. The argument is, regardless of who is driving, the person who registers it is responsible for the car. In other places, you can get out of the ticket with a sworn affadavit that you weren't driving at that time
The cameras here were stopped, but that was due to a totally different legal issue. There were some cameras that were claimed to be timed improperly, such that non-offenders were being caught. This blew up into a legal & PR nightmare and the cameras got switched off & as far as I know, haven't been turned back on yet.
AFM is basically dragging a pointer over a surface, and using a laser and fancy equipment to measure how much the pointer moves up down. This up and down motion is an indication of the height of the surface. In a way, it is very much like using your fingers to read braille. You run your fingers over a surface, and where the dots are raised, your nerves notice it, fire and you feel height.
With AFM, the finger is a little beam with a probe (often times a carbon nanotube) hanging down, running along the surface. On the top of the beam there is a mirror that reflects a laser beam onto a detector. As the surface height increases, the tip moves up, forcing the beam to flex just a little bit. This flex changes the mirror and thus the laser beam reflects to a different part of the detector. Raster scan a sample, and you get an x,y, and now z (height) value, so you have a 3d image of the sample.
If I read this correctly, the discovery is that the shape of beam that holds the tip, which is currently a V shape, works better when it is flat. The V-shape makes a beam stronger, and less likely to twist...or at least it was thought to. Intuitively, this makes sense. Fold a rectangular piece of paper into a V along the long axis. It seems stronger and more stable than if you just hold the unfolded paper out. Apparently, though, this is not the case with AFM cantilevers. Why this is the case is not mentioned, nor do I have any idea.
The reason this was not discovered is likely many reasons. First, it is obvious that a V-shape is stronger and more stable. That this is an incorrect assumption was probably not really even considered. It's as if you were building a computer, and everyone knows that a faster processor makes a faster computer. So you use the fasted one you can find. Except, in this certain circumstance a slower processor works better.
As for the effect of this, it really likely does not invalidate many experiments. It is a technical issue, not a new theory. It just means that you were not getting as much information as you could have from your machine.
I think it's just pointing out that we made our own bed, and now have to lie in it. Rather than promote a democratic leadership, we installed a dictator who seemed to be our pal at the time (and by pal, I mean an enemy of our enemy). But once he stopped being our lackey, we decide he is the embodiment of evil (despite the fact that he was equally disgusting all along).
When I hear that sort of argument, I usually just think: "Yea, well, so we own him and can kill him if we wish."
And that attitude, actually, is a large part of why so very many people dislike our country.
Ok fine, let's go with your analogy. The fact remains you are still paying for two very different products.
One is a physical object you can hold. One is a printed at extremely high resolution on a lasting media complete with a protective hard cover. Something that requires a decent cost to produce. Something you can give to your friend, and then to your mom. Something you could rip up and use as toilet paper if you really needed to.
A text email is entirely different. It cost next to nothing to produce. It is displayed at whatever crappy resolution your computer happens to be. You can read it. You could save it, but you are providing the physical resource for that. You could print it, but same thing applies. You could forward it to your friend & mom, but probably not legally (at least based on what the analogy is to). You really don't own any physical thing now that you didn't before.
Selling different things to different people who want different things is wise business sense. But to charge the equivalent for these two different things would offend most people's sense of fairness.
If I sell you a hardcover copy of a good book(240 pages) for $20, and then tell you or you could pay 8.3 cents for me to email you an individual page of text, what would you do? Is one of those options not a better deal?
Slashdot Mirror
Um equivalently featured? One of the major features of the iPod is the size. Beyond that, I have yet to see any mp3 player that has as elegant a solution to navigation.
They have no digital line-in recording, no mic facility, no FM radio, and no easy way for users to replace or expand the device's batteries or hard drive.
True, and for the majority of people out there, an mp3 player is supposed to play mp3s, not act like a bunch of other things. Also, how many players allow expanding batteries?
Unlike most of the new generation media players they also feature no MPEG 4 video playback or recording.
Right, video on a 2" is useful. Again, this is an mp3 player, not a video camera.
They have a weird, all-or-nothing metadata approach to storing music that forces you to use the moderately featured iTunes freeware to utilise the iPod to its fullest instead of being able to use some other full-featured, non-freeware media jukebox software.
This is where I decided I had to reply. iTunes is far and away the best music manager/player that I've ever used, and beyond that it is *free*. Apple again shows that they just seem to get it. iTunes makes managing a huge collection trivial in ways that are so easy it's silly. I looked and looked for a system that could deal with a large library (3000 ish songs) in a useful, *quick* manner and never found one. Then I got iTunes and realized the search was over. On-the-fly searching through 3000 songs? Integrated ripping, tagging, & burning all well done. (For example, when editing the tags, you have type-ahead completion for artist & album.) I'm honestly curious what mp3 manager you use that makes iTunes look moderately featured. As for your dig about freeware vs non-freeware, I don't understand. The implication is that being freeware makes it inferior in some way, surely this isn't what you mean.
On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily.
The latter of which matters to me, the former of which matters to a *lot* of people.
think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturer's media player offerings.
My god, it's an mp3 player. Period. And a damn good one. This isn't like learning to ride a bike, this is listening to music. Sometimes you get a product right and don't need to continually add bells and whistles. I have yet to see very many overly compelling features anywhere else (the fm transmitter might be the exception, though I'm happier with one I can remove like an iTrip than one permanently adding weight). Some of us want a great mp3 player that doesn't think it needs to be a geek swiss-army knife.
-Ted
Bzzz, wrong. Tivo works just fine without the service, albeit as little more than a vcr. You can program it to record by day/time just like a vcr, and it will still pause, FF, etc.
-Ted
-Ted
It just seems that streaming isn't really the problem...you can listen to streams any number of other ways, from countless other sources. To be able to (easily & painlessly) grab anyone's public iTunes shares as usable .mp3s strikes me as far, far more offensive to those in power. In fact it flies directly in the face of allowing iTunes to stream but not really share files...
-Ted
That's just not true (and i think the term is half-assed). You only need it to be somewhat inconvenient to prevent most people from doing it. If you combine that with a system that is relatively unobtrusive (like Apple's), you are in pretty good shape. People on the whole won't burn then re-rip just so they can seed kazaa.
Think about trespassing signs...they will deter a lot of people from going somewhere, but not everyone. So then you put up a chain-link fence, and that stops a lot more people. Of course there are those who will bring wire cutters and still get through, but you've eliminated the huge majority of potential trespassers. Like DRM, it isn't perfect, but it is good enough.
-Ted
It's simple, and it's amazing nobody gets it: Music companies need the DRM crap, and won't let anything without it make it big. Given the iTunes sales numbers, it seems people are paying for convenience and legitimacy despite the (minimal) DRM.
Seriously, as much as you'd like a totally unencumbered, perfect digital reproduction for a cheap price, that is not going to happen. Apple's deal is the most reasonable thing yet, and their sales numbers show that. They managed to get a system that is easy *enough*, cheap *enough*, user-friendly *enough* that people like it, while it is DRM'd *enough* for the record companies to deal with.
And here's the thing about DRM that apple seems to get (& perhaps even managed to persuade the recording industry of): It doesn't need to be perfect. You don't need to clamp down the file with the digital equivalent of a 1000-pound weight. All you really need to do is make it slightly inconvenient to bypass. You won't stop the hard-core people who have some deisire to 'screw The Man,' but you will never be able to do that (as is pointed out after every fricking article here). You only need to stop the masses for the tactic to be effective.
In a way, it's like speed limits (or all laws), you can't slow everyone down. Yet speed limits *do* lower the average speed very effectively, by targeting the masses and ignoring the corner cases.
-Ted
You don't own them, Apple dictate what you can and cannot do with each track.
Hence the "" around own. The point is that you have the file, period. It won't expire, won't stop working when microsoft decides to do x, y, or z. You don't own the music, but you don't own the music if it's on a CD either. You own a copy of it. Moreover, the limits apple puts on your capabilities are stomachable to most people.
I can't use the devices I want to
Many more players support WMA than Apples DRM wrapped AAC, in fact, with Apple you can use the iPod and that's it.
First of all, how many of those players do you think will be compatible with this new windows DRM? Sure firmware upgrade, but that argument works both ways. Second, which mp3 player is the most popular now? Third if you are so inclined, burn, re-rip, and you can put it on *any* player you want.
Basically there are arguments for both a tethered system and for a more apple-like system. Which will succeed depends on what people feel more comfortable with. It seems from the experiences of all available digital music distributors so far, tethering and limited time use seem to be the less preferred (remember DivX?).
-Ted
I agree, the net is allowing communication to occur on a much better level than before. Things that were difficult or impossible before are now easy and commonplace. I am not suggesting the net is *bad* for research.
Seriously, if the scientific community could be completely open about things, such as say AIDS... a global open net discussion might come up with a solution (provided they can adequately filter the trolls).
The scientific community is much, much more open than nearly anything else. Check out PubMed. A quick search on 'HIV' returns justover 125,000 articles. Now mind you, this isn't like google, those 125,000 are *published* articles in (mostly) peer-reviewed journals, not some half-assed web-page set up 3 years ago and not touched since. If you think the scientific community is anything but open, you have not had much interaction with it at all. Science requires openness to exist, and Academic Science requires publication to survive (try getting funding without publishing...). As for your global open net discussion, the problem is that filtering the trolls and useless suggestions would eliminate 99.9% of the traffic, and leave pretty much only those in the field who are already having plenty of discussions. Science prevents participation only based on familiarity and knowledge.
-Ted
Alright, I call bullshit on this. First off, you are reading about aren't you? They *are* sharing results, and better than that, they are talking to wide circulation general press. This means their research is exposed to an audience greater than the same conference crowd that they run in.
wheres the models for the function reponse of the rat neurons ? the electrical interface to the cells ? the procesedure and problems encountered ?
Well for a first approximation, at least look at the guy's web page. Notice the section labeled publications & abstracts. Secondly, if you are actually interested on a real level, talk to the guy. I am sure he would love to talk about his research (thats one thing that always tickles scientists, especially academics).
By the time anyone publishes results its years and progress has already moved on.
Welcome to manuscript writing, submitting, responding to reviews, re-submitting, publishing. It is slow by its very nature. You can't help it, and actually it's a damn good thing, peer-review is what makes science valid and useful. Without that science becomes nothing but bad journalism (remember cold fusion?).
the scientific system should be overhauled methinks.
Ok, what is your suggestion? Until you have an idea how to improve, your bitching is basically meaningless blather.
this research is critical and interesting enough that lots of people would be ahppy to contribute significantly if it was easy to obtain.
Ok, first of all while this research is certainly interesting, good basic research, a good foundation for the future, critical i think not. HIV research, cancer research, public safety research, hell, the stuff my lab does are all far, far more critical. As for many people contributing significantly, that can work for open source coding. It's quite different doing science. There is a reason you spend an extra 5 years in grad school after college before you really start contributing to these kinds of topics. They are complex and difficult to understand, they require a great level of scientific understanding and experience. And here's the thing, if it was easy to obtain, then it wouldn't require high-level research to examine it.
a coupla thousand geeks playing with biological-electronic hybrids could do more than a bunch of researchers at a single university or two.
Yeah, right. You've no clue how complex, difficult, and expensive this kind of research is. Have you ever grown neuronal cells? It's quite a bit harder than raising a bunch of sea monkeys. Even supposing you could package a Pocket Pal Rat-brain-cell-silicon-interface system, you still have to have the understanding of what the hell is actually going on. This isn't your high-school science fair project.
High-level research is high-level for a reason. Science is hard.
-Ted
Dark Side of the Moon for instance goes for $15. "Aha!" you say, "I'll just buy the single tracks separately!"
No.
You can't. They deliberately prevent you from buying two tracks from the album, just to get you to pay an inflated price.
Sure, but then pick another album, say liz phair's _exile in guyville_ which is listed on the dark side of the moon page as a 'consumers also bought these:' where you get 18 songs for 11.99. As you said in your first line, depends on the album, sometimes you get the shaft, more often you get a deal.
What does this mean? It means the camel's nose is already under the tent with respect to playing with the prices. Soon we'll see certain singles going for $1.50. Then we'll see certain singles you'll have to buy in combination with other singles. Then finally we'll see singles you have to buy the whole album before you get to listen, and we'll have come full circle.
Good god, the service has been available for less than a day and already you are damning it as a the product of some scheming, conniving, mustache twisting evil scoundrel. Give a chance, try it out, it's nearly a miracle something like it even exists given the anal tightness of the RIAA. So while better systems do exist in theory, this one actually let's me buy things now.
-Ted
Dark Side of the Moon for instance goes for $15. "Aha!" you say, "I'll just buy the single tracks separately!"
No.
You can't. They deliberately prevent you from buying two tracks from the album, just to get you to pay an inflated price.
What does this mean? It means the camel's nose is already under the tent with respect to playing with the prices. Soon we'll see certain singles going for $1.50. Then we'll see certain singles you'll have to buy in combination with other singles. Then finally we'll see singles you have to buy the whole album before you get to listen, and we'll have come full circle.
You don't have to, certainly, but you should.
While I don't necessarily disagree with this, there comes a point where you have to actually live. You can involve yourself in ethical discourse on Linux, those running shoes, the hamburger you had for lunch, the gas mileage of the car you drive, ad infintium. The problem is that, given limited time, you can easily prevent yourself from accomplishing anything simply by discussing too much.
Additionally, there is an aspect of pragmatism that must be applied. Say your shoes are made by child labor, then you buy shoes from a different company. Except that company pollutes into drinking water of the 3rd world country it is located in (& doesn't use child labor in). Ok, so go for another company which only has factories in a 1st world country & must therefore follow strict guidlines. Except that company doesn't provide benefits of same-sex partners (which you consider an important ethical obligation). You can easily run out of choices for your shoe company.
With shoes, this is not really *that* big of a problem. You could probably hunker down and make some shoes yourself. But when it comes to medical techniques, you really are going to be hard pressed to do it yourself. So, while it maybe the moral, ethical thing to do (avoiding the products of, say, nazi scientific advancement), there are other important aspects of the decision. Pragmatism is an important factor that must be weighed against the ethical factors.
As for this topic of Linux & DRM, it seems to me that is very much what Linus is doing. He is starting a discussion on the topic, allowing for the type of discussion that really *should* happen.
-Ted
I'm just sure this is related.
-Ted
Ironically enough, your example is a good counter-example. When I did my fast-food time at mcd's, I asked the manager about this. 'How can you make money on those deals?' (it was $0.25 for a big mac deal specifically). He told me that the sandwiches are there mostly to get people in to the store. They make the majority of their profits on drinks & frys.
-Ted
-Ted
A way to make new pets, better people or 4-assed monkeys. This is unlikely to make any multi-celled organism, much less one you can even see by eye.
Anything to do with nanotechnology, this is molecular biology as has been done for years.
Anything useful to make a weapon. That can be done today so, so much easier in any decent biochemistry lab.
Anything really novel technique- or theory- wise
What this is:
A mixture of known techniques, a new machine, and ego. The likelihood of their accomplishing their stated goal isn't any better than, say, directed-evolution (which is currently a feasible technique).
Newsworthy mostly due to Venter's name. There are plenty of wacky, grandiose proposals with more upside, and a better chance of success around, they just lack a widely known scientist championing them.
A misnomer in description. They aren't making new genes in the sense of a new protein structure (or if they are, then the 10 year timetable is completely laughable). They are taking known genes are putting them together as they see fit.
-Ted
ctually, the irony of your statement is that we're going to need better nano-technology to complete the task.
No. Nanotechnology is completely uninvolved in this. These guys are chemists, biochemists & geneticists not engineers.
As enthusiastic as these companies are, the problems in intentionally constructing a DNA molecule letter by letter are huge: notably, if you screw up in one spot, you can have tremendous problems.
No. Making DNA base by base is not difficult at all, and has not been for many years. DNA synthesizers can churn out oligos of good purity of lengths into the 100s of bases. Need longer? Make ligatable overhangs and have an enzyme put them together, ligation techniques are trivial molecular biology. As for mistakes, of course they happen, but any scientist worth her salt would sequence it along the way. Remember that Human genome project thing? That was just a lot of DNA sequencing. The machine mentioned in the long article as a long seqeunce synthesizer is just a robotic version of a bench biochemist doing what i described.
Further, there's no "spell check" for them, using current methods. They wouldn't know they had a problem until they start letting it reproduce, only to find that they have an [apparently] inexplicably error, possibly making the organism unviable.
No spell check of making sequences? True, sort of. During the synthesis there isn't, but sequencing it post symthesis is absolutely trivial.
Whats needed is sophisticated enough nanobots that will be able to not only perform the construction of the DNA, but to "spell check" it by running up and down its length continually, comparing it against the desired pattern
Ugh!These are called enzymes. Nanobots as normally pictured (a little robot with arms and pincers etc etc) are just pure science fiction. This is one of the worst areas of pop science literature.
This project is simply a lot of molecular biology, nothing novel in the techniques. What's new is trying to design a genome by hand as opposed to letting nature do it. I am skeptical that 1. it will work (beyond copying known genes), and moreover, 2. it will be even close to what evolution can/has accomplished.
What got kind of mushed together in the articles is a totally different aspect, that of non-natural amino acids. Peter Schultz;s lab (which is just down the hall from me) has created a system where a bacteria can incorporate an amino acid that is not one of the twenty used in natural proteins. You can add amino acids with all kinds of novel chemical groups and see if you can evolve proteins/organisms to work better with this expanded toolkit. Pretty cool.
-Ted
I'm not sure who this is more of a statement on, but when I see PCP, doctors aren't the first thing I think of.
-Ted
Hold on there nostradamus, how on earth could you have an rational basis for that kind of claim?
I predict that this virus will hit Silicon Valley hard; I've seen a lot of techies, especially foreign 'guests', just not practicing simple hygiene like washing hands coming out of the restrooms, sneezing widely into the air, etc.
Nice vague tinge of racism.
Also, the disease hit China, and so much manufacturing is now there, so there are plenty of chances for it to be contracted and brought back to the US. I think we have a real problem coming.
Except everything so far suggests this virus (if it is) requires close respiratory contact with infected people. Breathing on a tv that will be boxed, packaged, shipped and left on a ship for weeks hardly counts as close respiratory contact.
I suspect SARS is a two-component disease; first you are hit with the new mutant virus, which sets up your immune system to fail to handle certain things, then the second virus characterizing this disease attacks you unhampered.
Again, on what basis do you make these wild-ass statements? Do you work in a research lab studying SARS? When those researching this aren't even ready to make this kind of statement (they say it's possible, but by no means proven, and always stated as 'might,' 'could,' 'would be unusual,' &c. ), how are your prescient enough to?
We do not have any effective way to combat that.
True, just like we don't have any effective way to handle the vast majority of viral infections we get. We let our immune system go at it, and more often than not we get better.
-Ted
I think the police solved this problem by photographing both the license plate and the driver-- the photo of the driver can be compared to an existing photo of the registered owner. If they match, ticket time...
Actually, at least here in san diego, that's not the case at all. Many intersections have red-light cameras that just photograph the license plate. The argument is, regardless of who is driving, the person who registers it is responsible for the car. In other places, you can get out of the ticket with a sworn affadavit that you weren't driving at that time
The cameras here were stopped, but that was due to a totally different legal issue. There were some cameras that were claimed to be timed improperly, such that non-offenders were being caught. This blew up into a legal & PR nightmare and the cameras got switched off & as far as I know, haven't been turned back on yet.
-Ted
15" LCD=$299.95
-Ted
With AFM, the finger is a little beam with a probe (often times a carbon nanotube) hanging down, running along the surface. On the top of the beam there is a mirror that reflects a laser beam onto a detector. As the surface height increases, the tip moves up, forcing the beam to flex just a little bit. This flex changes the mirror and thus the laser beam reflects to a different part of the detector. Raster scan a sample, and you get an x,y, and now z (height) value, so you have a 3d image of the sample.
If I read this correctly, the discovery is that the shape of beam that holds the tip, which is currently a V shape, works better when it is flat. The V-shape makes a beam stronger, and less likely to twist...or at least it was thought to. Intuitively, this makes sense. Fold a rectangular piece of paper into a V along the long axis. It seems stronger and more stable than if you just hold the unfolded paper out. Apparently, though, this is not the case with AFM cantilevers. Why this is the case is not mentioned, nor do I have any idea.
The reason this was not discovered is likely many reasons. First, it is obvious that a V-shape is stronger and more stable. That this is an incorrect assumption was probably not really even considered. It's as if you were building a computer, and everyone knows that a faster processor makes a faster computer. So you use the fasted one you can find. Except, in this certain circumstance a slower processor works better.
As for the effect of this, it really likely does not invalidate many experiments. It is a technical issue, not a new theory. It just means that you were not getting as much information as you could have from your machine.
-Ted
When I hear that sort of argument, I usually just think: "Yea, well, so we own him and can kill him if we wish."
And that attitude, actually, is a large part of why so very many people dislike our country.
-Ted
One is a physical object you can hold. One is a printed at extremely high resolution on a lasting media complete with a protective hard cover. Something that requires a decent cost to produce. Something you can give to your friend, and then to your mom. Something you could rip up and use as toilet paper if you really needed to.
A text email is entirely different. It cost next to nothing to produce. It is displayed at whatever crappy resolution your computer happens to be. You can read it. You could save it, but you are providing the physical resource for that. You could print it, but same thing applies. You could forward it to your friend & mom, but probably not legally (at least based on what the analogy is to). You really don't own any physical thing now that you didn't before.
Selling different things to different people who want different things is wise business sense. But to charge the equivalent for these two different things would offend most people's sense of fairness.
-Ted
Here's the thing: You aren't buying the same egg.
If I sell you a hardcover copy of a good book(240 pages) for $20, and then tell you or you could pay 8.3 cents for me to email you an individual page of text, what would you do? Is one of those options not a better deal?
-Ted