You guys need to read up a little more on MP3Pro. The point of it is that it fills in the missing overtones and sound quality that is lost when you get down to 64K, meaning that it should have a comparable sound to a normal MP3 file recorded at 128K.
As for "Why would you want to use that, when you could create 128K ogg files that were much higher quality ?", there's this little thing called "storage." Perhaps you've heard of it? It means you can store a whole lot more songs in the same space if they have a lower bitrate.
The primary differences between Gaim and Trillian, as far as I can tell, are 1.)Gaim is not available for Windows. and 2.)Trillian allows you to sign on under more than one account for each protocol without opening a new session of the application.
Number two is a big deal to me, as I use multiple AIM and MSN Messenger accounts for privacy reasons and to separate my IM traffic into categories. Did someone get my screen name from my website or my livejournal, for example? I can tell easily because I list a different screen name at each. Also, the ability to join multiple IRC chat rooms simultaneously without opening a new session of the app is very handy at times.
Doom 3 was definately[sic] all that anyone could talk about, so it was the leader in hype.
Not that it's terribly important to the topic at hand, but I beg to differ. Perhaps Doom III was the leader in hype, but it was far from being "all that anyone could talk about." Check out the popular gaming and game-related sites like Penny Arcade. What I heard most out of them was how delicious the new Zelda game looked. Doom might have won the hype war, but Zelda definitely got plenty of attention.
Just to clarify, putting Shake and Rayz into a "suite" would be pointless since they both do essentially the same thing. Until they were both bought out by Apple, they were direct competitors. What we can expect to see is a new compositing package that incorporates the "best" (read: Apple's favorite) features of each package. Whether they'll call it Shake, Rayz, or some new name (Rake?) is anybody's guess.
Since both Shake and Rayz are high-end compositing packages running in the $5000 plus per seat range, I wonder if Apple has any intention of making a simplified version for home users to compete with After Effects in the $500 range. iComposite, anyone?
tell the 90% of people who use Windows because that they're not prisoners of a monopoly. I think you'll find that difficult to argue.
What you're overlooking is that Quicktime is NOT the dominant media format or player. You see many more.avi and.mpeg movies than you see.mov files almost anywhere you look.
The difference is that televisions are made by more than one company, and are based on open standards.
Do you complain that, in order to use a Zip disk, you have to pay for a drive manufactured by Iomega? This is not the only example of a single company controlling a medium. If Quicktime ever becomes a pay-only product, then it will lose market share as its free competitors proliferate. Fewer people will install Quicktime, fewer producers of content will want to create in quicktime. I already don't use quicktime to produce movies for the web because I know Linux users can't view them.
There is no problem here, except for the large number of people determined to find problems everywhere. Oh wait, that's what slashdot is for, isn't it?
First of all, I wasn't blaming my problem on porn, I was answering a question. The question was, in essence, "isn't it ridiculous to think that a porn addiction could be a problem." My answer was "no, it's not ridiculous at all."
As for Ted Bundy, if you actually read the interview, you'd know that he didn't blame porn for anything. Watching the interview on video is very sobering as you see that this man knew exactly what he did, how he did it, and why it was wrong. He never once tried to say that what he did wasn't wrong. Consider this: by the time the interview was conducted, Ted Bundy knew that he was never going to be spared, and yet he underwent a transformation of character anyway. Sure, we see criminals change their faces all the time for the parole board, but he had nothing to gain from faking a change of heart. No power on this earth was going to reverse his execution order. Taking that into consideration, try reading (or better yet, listening) to what he had to say shortly before his death, and then tell me that he was looking for a convenient excuse for being a murderer.
Yes and yes. Somebody thought your post was funny, but it is frightfully accurate. When I was younger, I was addicted to porn. I would go online to get it until I got caught by my parents who took my computer privileges away. After that, I turned to shoplifting to obtain my porn fix. I didn't have friends who would get porn for me, and I was too young to buy it. Eventually I got caught and arrested for stealing a porno mag. Fortunately the very reason that I couldn't buy the magazine, my minor status, also kept it from going on my permanent record.
I'm more under control now, but if you want to know some more about porn addiction, check out psychologist James Dobson's death row interview with serial killer Ted Bundy, taken less than an hour before the infamous man's execution. Do a google search for Ted Bundy, Pornography, and James Dobson to get more details. You might be surprised to learn how Ted Bundy felt about pornography.
I'd like to say first and foremost that I don't have any problem with what the Authors' Guild is doing from a legal or economic perspective. They are exercising a perfectly reasonable attempt at a boycott.
However, I do have a problem with the attitude that everyone should buy a new copy of the book even when there are used copies available. I'd think that authors of all people would be better educated on the negative effects this type of consumerism has on our environment. More new books means more trees cut down to print them. Nowhere to sell your used books means more books in the landfill.
On a not-entirely-related issue, if the Author's Guild is concerned about losing royalties, maybe they should take it up with the publishers. It is the publishers that screw artists out of their profits, not the booksellers. For more about how the internet has the potential to liberate artists of all kinds from the yoke of the big publishing houses, check out Scott McCloud's various writings on the subject.
I agree that gaming is somewhat polarized between the realistic and the fantastic. I aslo agree that the less realistic games often are more engaging than the technological wonders. I really enjoyed the Zelda 64 games, for example, a great deal more than I enjoyed a game like Goldeneye, despite being extremely impressed by the AI when Goldeneye first came out.
However, the realism games are headed towards a different end, I believe. While the fantasy games may be more fun now, down the road it will be the ancestors of today's realism games that give us virtual reality. As designers come up with new subtlety to the environments and character interactions in their games, they get closer to the day when everyone can have their own personal holodeck. When that day comes, an engaging plot won't be nearly as important to consumers as an immersive and completely flexible virtual world in which they can explore and interact. Think of how many people play the practically plotless Ultima Online simply because they enjoy "existing" in that world. How much more would people want to buy a place in a realistic fantasy world that was almost indistinguishable from reality? I admit, the concept is a little scary, and I'm not necessarily condoning it, but it's something to consider.
I can see why sometimes you'd want the reply at the bottom instead of the top, but most of the time there's no good reason. If I sent the original message, I know what I wrote, so why would I want to scroll down through my entire message just to get to the reply? That's just a waste of time. Reply at the bottom would be a useful option for situations where the replies were being read by third parties who want to read the entire thread in the most recent reply. For ordinary two-party replies, however, it's just a pain in the butt.
This is a very elitist perspective, if you ask me. Sure, it's annoying to get poorly designed e-mail messages, or messages that are impossible to open, but do you really think the solution is to make it harder to create these messages? That is absolutely pointless. What user is going to buy a program that makes something that they take for granted more difficult? Sure, you'll buy it, but you already know how to make standards-conforming messages. The people who need it the most are the ones who won't buy it because it has fewer "features."
In my experience, the best way to teach people how to write clean e-mails, html, code, etc. is to let them do it however they want at first and then deal with the consequences. "What, you couldn't open my e-mail? Why not?" The next time, they'll do it better, without someone saying, "I'm sorry, you're stupid and we're afraid you'd do bad things with this feature, so we're eliminating it."
Re:This is a trojan horse, plain and simple.
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 1
If you read the article, you'll notice that the antispyware does not disable the spyware. It just alerts the user to the presence of the spyware, which they should be able to find out anyway if they know their system well enough.
Continuing down this train of thought, I'd say that paying for cable TV is more comparable to paying for broadband internet access. Sure, you can use your rabbit-ears antenna if you want and not pay a dime, but you're only getting a few channels at best. Similarly, you could (until recently) get NetZero or some similar free web access at no charge, but you were limited to 56k connections, shakey connections, and ad windows.
It's when you start charging for specific content that the analogy breaks down. Only a handful of "premium" television channels charge for access specifically to their own content. They have the advantage of being the only options offered by your local cable provider. However, as Piro reminded us, all websites are equally accessible. There is no HBO or Showtime of the web, by which I mean sites that provide content that is in demand but unavailable anywhere else to the extent that people would happily start paying even though they are used to getting it free.
The only business model that's been successful in this regard has been porn. Why? Because the web is the safest, most anonymous way to access it. With normal movies or magazines, nobody's embarrassed to buy them from the store, so the Web is competing with traditional media for customers. With porn, anybody can access XXX content from the privacy of their own home, and they are often willing to pay $20-$30 a month for that luxury. Until the web can provide content across the board that is of comparable quality AND easier to access than traditional media, they won't find as many paying customers as they dream of having.
That's not the point, my friend. The problem with a lack of advertising wasn't so much that people who wanted to see the show couldn't find out when it was on. The problem was that people stopped thinking about the show when they stopped advertising it. That's poison to a television series, since the show wasn't generating enough buzz on its own. To be successful, a prime-time series must be thought about more than its competition, and Fox wasn't even trying once the series actually premiered.
Re:My favorite part...
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 1
Okay, I know it's a troll but really! They stopped showing up gradually after Jim Henson, the voice of Ernie, died.
Well put. Another thing it makes me wonder about is how this unrest compares to the unrest in Ireland. To all appearances, Ireland's battle is about territory, but it also has strong religious overtones (Catholic vs. Protestant). Is that why they've kept the fighting in the British Isles instead of attacking England's supporters?
Perhaps we could compare our foreign policy in the Middle East to our foreign policy in Ireland to find clues on how to proceed.
People with a nice live, food, a house, and a future don't want to blow things up.
Bin Laden is very wealthy. I'll agree that the common soldier in his crusade is probably not all that well-off financially, but at the heart of the terrorism is religious fanatacism. Anyone who believes that you are evil incarnate will readily accept your goodwill offerings then shoot you in the head without a second thought. I think Americans, especially those without a strong religious background, do not understand the concept of pure evil. Those who do understand it realize that anyone who thinks they have identified it will go to any length to destroy it. Unfortunately, these terrorists have determined that the USA is pure evil. No amount of diplomacy will change that.
That's one of the more ridiculous suggestions I've heard in a long time. If acquiring personal firearms were easy, the hijacked plane would be full of armed passengers who would, guns-a-blazin', stop the (legally) armed hijacker?
Try thinking with your brain instead of with your inflated sense of personal judgement.
Not only do Google's results contain all of your search terms, but Google also analyzes the proximity of those terms within the page. Google prioritizes results according to how closely your individual search terms appear and favors results that have your search terms near each other. Because of this, the result is much more likely to be relevant to your query.
So it sounds like theoretically the NEAR operator should be unnecessary.
Just to remind everybody, this movie was based more upon the original novel than the first movie. This story did not come out of Tim Burton's head, nor did the script writers invent it, so they can only take some of the blame for the ending which does, in fact, go along with the ending of the novel. Of course, the movie made it much more melodramatic, and matching the book's ending exactly may have had a more chilling effect, but at least the rest of the movie had fewer plot holes than the book.
Regarding the kiss, I was disappointed that the filmmakers passed up one of the more entertaining lines from the book. There is a scene in the novel where the narrator and Ari seem as though they are about to kiss, but at the last second, Ari pulls back and says "I'm sorry, I can't. You're just too ugly!" That would have been better than the somewhat stomach-turning kiss that made it into the move, IMHO.
If you do that, you will never hear a song critical of Napster, or critical of Napster's business partners. In fact, you won't hear anything unless Napster approves of it.
That's certainly a possibility, but my prediction is that the whole process of validating songs would be such a pain in the ass that they wouldn't have time to screen songs based on content, only based on legality. In the end, it wouldn't matter. If Napster tried to censor the material, they'd lose more users than they already have, and considering that they aren't the only game in town, I say let 'em censor away. I'll simply go elsewhere.
There is an alternative to shutting down completely that will still comply with the order. If Napster switched to opt-in filtering instead of opt-out, the ruling could be obeyed without maintaining a perfect database of all copyrighted material. If a musician wants his or her music to be distributed via Napster, they send notification to Napster, along with the necessary information to identify the music to the filters, and the music is allowed to be shared. If at some point in the future, a record company wants its artists to be available on Naptster, it tells Napster to allow it and presto! The files are available to be shared.
I know this system would be a pain in the tuckus. It would involve Napster officials checking every submitted song to make sure that the submittor actually held rights to the music, or that nobody held rights to it. There would be the real potential of songs getting wrongfully blocked. But as Maxomenos pointed out, the alternative is total shutdown.
This question has no "right" answer as there are many people on both sides of the issue. The question of what programming language should be used as an introduction to CS is sort of like whether a high school student should be taught to drive using a manual or an automatic transmission.
On the one hand, if you start the students in the more complex stick shift (C or C++), switching to an automatic (Java and similar languages) will be easy later on.
On the other hand, you might want to start on an automatic (Java) because the complexity of the manual (C) is overwhelming to the beginner and can result in more mistakes, more frustration, and a slower learning curve. Starting with a system that takes care of some of the details for you allows you to learn the fundamentals of steering, braking, parking, and traffic laws before you add the more difficult element of shifting gears.
Both sides of the issue are valid. I tend to lean towards the second, but I am not a computer scientist, and I never intended to be one.
I'd like to see Dr. Shorter tell my wife that the pain is all in her head. You'd have to surgically remove her hands from his throat.
This is exactly the problem that the article is addressing. People are so defensive that they refuse to believe that any pain could be caused by faulty signals in their brain instead of physical injury. Perhaps your wife's pain is from damage to her body, perhaps not. But being completely unwilling to even consider that the pain might be psychological is just ignorant and stubborn and could potentially cut off possibilities for relief of the pain. I mean this as no offense to you or your wife, as the attitude is very common, but it is an attitude that must be combatted.
Carpal tunnel syndrome is very different from the common cold in this respect.
First, the common cold has been a "popular" illness for generations, and cannot be attributed to current trends in hypochondria. Also relevant is that most people aren't afraid of the common cold. Hysteria-related illnesses usually result from a public fear of a real illness that has the potential to do permanent harm to a person.
Second, carpal tunnel is not supposed to just "go away." Carpal tunnel does permanent damage to the tendons in your wrist, and these can often only be repaired through surgery. The common cold is a virus, one which our immune system knows how to deal with, so it goes away with time.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys need to read up a little more on MP3Pro. The point of it is that it fills in the missing overtones and sound quality that is lost when you get down to 64K, meaning that it should have a comparable sound to a normal MP3 file recorded at 128K.
As for "Why would you want to use that, when you could create 128K ogg files that were much higher quality ?", there's this little thing called "storage." Perhaps you've heard of it? It means you can store a whole lot more songs in the same space if they have a lower bitrate.
The primary differences between Gaim and Trillian, as far as I can tell, are
1.)Gaim is not available for Windows.
and
2.)Trillian allows you to sign on under more than one account for each protocol without opening a new session of the application.
Number two is a big deal to me, as I use multiple AIM and MSN Messenger accounts for privacy reasons and to separate my IM traffic into categories. Did someone get my screen name from my website or my livejournal, for example? I can tell easily because I list a different screen name at each. Also, the ability to join multiple IRC chat rooms simultaneously without opening a new session of the app is very handy at times.
Not that it's terribly important to the topic at hand, but I beg to differ. Perhaps Doom III was the leader in hype, but it was far from being "all that anyone could talk about." Check out the popular gaming and game-related sites like Penny Arcade. What I heard most out of them was how delicious the new Zelda game looked. Doom might have won the hype war, but Zelda definitely got plenty of attention.
Just to clarify, putting Shake and Rayz into a "suite" would be pointless since they both do essentially the same thing. Until they were both bought out by Apple, they were direct competitors. What we can expect to see is a new compositing package that incorporates the "best" (read: Apple's favorite) features of each package. Whether they'll call it Shake, Rayz, or some new name (Rake?) is anybody's guess.
Since both Shake and Rayz are high-end compositing packages running in the $5000 plus per seat range, I wonder if Apple has any intention of making a simplified version for home users to compete with After Effects in the $500 range. iComposite, anyone?
The difference is that televisions are made by more than one company, and are based on open standards.
Do you complain that, in order to use a Zip disk, you have to pay for a drive manufactured by Iomega? This is not the only example of a single company controlling a medium. If Quicktime ever becomes a pay-only product, then it will lose market share as its free competitors proliferate. Fewer people will install Quicktime, fewer producers of content will want to create in quicktime. I already don't use quicktime to produce movies for the web because I know Linux users can't view them.
There is no problem here, except for the large number of people determined to find problems everywhere. Oh wait, that's what slashdot is for, isn't it?
As for Ted Bundy, if you actually read the interview, you'd know that he didn't blame porn for anything. Watching the interview on video is very sobering as you see that this man knew exactly what he did, how he did it, and why it was wrong. He never once tried to say that what he did wasn't wrong. Consider this: by the time the interview was conducted, Ted Bundy knew that he was never going to be spared, and yet he underwent a transformation of character anyway. Sure, we see criminals change their faces all the time for the parole board, but he had nothing to gain from faking a change of heart. No power on this earth was going to reverse his execution order. Taking that into consideration, try reading (or better yet, listening) to what he had to say shortly before his death, and then tell me that he was looking for a convenient excuse for being a murderer.
I'm more under control now, but if you want to know some more about porn addiction, check out psychologist James Dobson's death row interview with serial killer Ted Bundy, taken less than an hour before the infamous man's execution. Do a google search for Ted Bundy, Pornography, and James Dobson to get more details. You might be surprised to learn how Ted Bundy felt about pornography.
However, I do have a problem with the attitude that everyone should buy a new copy of the book even when there are used copies available. I'd think that authors of all people would be better educated on the negative effects this type of consumerism has on our environment. More new books means more trees cut down to print them. Nowhere to sell your used books means more books in the landfill.
On a not-entirely-related issue, if the Author's Guild is concerned about losing royalties, maybe they should take it up with the publishers. It is the publishers that screw artists out of their profits, not the booksellers. For more about how the internet has the potential to liberate artists of all kinds from the yoke of the big publishing houses, check out Scott McCloud's various writings on the subject.
However, the realism games are headed towards a different end, I believe. While the fantasy games may be more fun now, down the road it will be the ancestors of today's realism games that give us virtual reality. As designers come up with new subtlety to the environments and character interactions in their games, they get closer to the day when everyone can have their own personal holodeck. When that day comes, an engaging plot won't be nearly as important to consumers as an immersive and completely flexible virtual world in which they can explore and interact. Think of how many people play the practically plotless Ultima Online simply because they enjoy "existing" in that world. How much more would people want to buy a place in a realistic fantasy world that was almost indistinguishable from reality? I admit, the concept is a little scary, and I'm not necessarily condoning it, but it's something to consider.
I can see why sometimes you'd want the reply at the bottom instead of the top, but most of the time there's no good reason. If I sent the original message, I know what I wrote, so why would I want to scroll down through my entire message just to get to the reply? That's just a waste of time. Reply at the bottom would be a useful option for situations where the replies were being read by third parties who want to read the entire thread in the most recent reply. For ordinary two-party replies, however, it's just a pain in the butt.
In my experience, the best way to teach people how to write clean e-mails, html, code, etc. is to let them do it however they want at first and then deal with the consequences. "What, you couldn't open my e-mail? Why not?" The next time, they'll do it better, without someone saying, "I'm sorry, you're stupid and we're afraid you'd do bad things with this feature, so we're eliminating it."
If you read the article, you'll notice that the antispyware does not disable the spyware. It just alerts the user to the presence of the spyware, which they should be able to find out anyway if they know their system well enough.
It's when you start charging for specific content that the analogy breaks down. Only a handful of "premium" television channels charge for access specifically to their own content. They have the advantage of being the only options offered by your local cable provider. However, as Piro reminded us, all websites are equally accessible. There is no HBO or Showtime of the web, by which I mean sites that provide content that is in demand but unavailable anywhere else to the extent that people would happily start paying even though they are used to getting it free.
The only business model that's been successful in this regard has been porn. Why? Because the web is the safest, most anonymous way to access it. With normal movies or magazines, nobody's embarrassed to buy them from the store, so the Web is competing with traditional media for customers. With porn, anybody can access XXX content from the privacy of their own home, and they are often willing to pay $20-$30 a month for that luxury. Until the web can provide content across the board that is of comparable quality AND easier to access than traditional media, they won't find as many paying customers as they dream of having.
That's not the point, my friend. The problem with a lack of advertising wasn't so much that people who wanted to see the show couldn't find out when it was on. The problem was that people stopped thinking about the show when they stopped advertising it. That's poison to a television series, since the show wasn't generating enough buzz on its own. To be successful, a prime-time series must be thought about more than its competition, and Fox wasn't even trying once the series actually premiered.
Okay, I know it's a troll but really! They stopped showing up gradually after Jim Henson, the voice of Ernie, died.
Perhaps we could compare our foreign policy in the Middle East to our foreign policy in Ireland to find clues on how to proceed.
Bin Laden is very wealthy. I'll agree that the common soldier in his crusade is probably not all that well-off financially, but at the heart of the terrorism is religious fanatacism. Anyone who believes that you are evil incarnate will readily accept your goodwill offerings then shoot you in the head without a second thought. I think Americans, especially those without a strong religious background, do not understand the concept of pure evil. Those who do understand it realize that anyone who thinks they have identified it will go to any length to destroy it. Unfortunately, these terrorists have determined that the USA is pure evil. No amount of diplomacy will change that.
Try thinking with your brain instead of with your inflated sense of personal judgement.
So it sounds like theoretically the NEAR operator should be unnecessary.
Regarding the kiss, I was disappointed that the filmmakers passed up one of the more entertaining lines from the book. There is a scene in the novel where the narrator and Ari seem as though they are about to kiss, but at the last second, Ari pulls back and says "I'm sorry, I can't. You're just too ugly!" That would have been better than the somewhat stomach-turning kiss that made it into the move, IMHO.
I know this system would be a pain in the tuckus. It would involve Napster officials checking every submitted song to make sure that the submittor actually held rights to the music, or that nobody held rights to it. There would be the real potential of songs getting wrongfully blocked. But as Maxomenos pointed out, the alternative is total shutdown.
On the one hand, if you start the students in the more complex stick shift (C or C++), switching to an automatic (Java and similar languages) will be easy later on.
On the other hand, you might want to start on an automatic (Java) because the complexity of the manual (C) is overwhelming to the beginner and can result in more mistakes, more frustration, and a slower learning curve. Starting with a system that takes care of some of the details for you allows you to learn the fundamentals of steering, braking, parking, and traffic laws before you add the more difficult element of shifting gears.
Both sides of the issue are valid. I tend to lean towards the second, but I am not a computer scientist, and I never intended to be one.
This is exactly the problem that the article is addressing. People are so defensive that they refuse to believe that any pain could be caused by faulty signals in their brain instead of physical injury. Perhaps your wife's pain is from damage to her body, perhaps not. But being completely unwilling to even consider that the pain might be psychological is just ignorant and stubborn and could potentially cut off possibilities for relief of the pain. I mean this as no offense to you or your wife, as the attitude is very common, but it is an attitude that must be combatted.
First, the common cold has been a "popular" illness for generations, and cannot be attributed to current trends in hypochondria. Also relevant is that most people aren't afraid of the common cold. Hysteria-related illnesses usually result from a public fear of a real illness that has the potential to do permanent harm to a person.
Second, carpal tunnel is not supposed to just "go away." Carpal tunnel does permanent damage to the tendons in your wrist, and these can often only be repaired through surgery. The common cold is a virus, one which our immune system knows how to deal with, so it goes away with time.