While this artist is greatly derided, it never seems to occur to the elitist music enthusiasts that she is popular for a very good reason.
Apart from her well publicised efforts to reduice crime and terrorism, Britney has also achieved multiple platinum sales several times, and is regularly nominated for prestigious awards such as the grammy's and MTV music awards.
Sadly, a lot of peopel hate success, and jealously deride both her and her fans.
Useability; A mouse is the wrong shape
on
3D Mouse
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I was working as part of a research project for 3D (as well as 4D, 5D and 6D) designs for better comuter input devices. What we found was that a mouse is the wrong design.
Firstly, It quite simply doesn't make sense. Mice don't fly unless you throw them. This cognitive dissonance causes users considerable problems.
We solved this quire easily by replacing the "mouse" with a "bat".
Secondly, it creates arm ache. Holding the bat up for several hours just isn't possible. This was solved by the simple and rather crude device of a counterweighted piece of string on a pully on the ceiling. Of course, this isn't goinf to be suitable for a home user. I suggest we'll probably need some sort of rotor assembly to avoid the tangle of strings and wires.
It appears that no other researchers have even looked into our research, preferring to reinvent the wheel at every step.
I'm so sick of people comparing music downloads with stealing a car.
I pointyou to my other post on this matter. Of course, by the same argument, you could probably accuse Walmart of stealing from their competition. That has the same negative effects as piracy as well.
As for your other point, I simply don't think doing nothing is the answer. It's a bad idea to encourage widescale flouting of the law.
The current copyright laws are insufficient. They are being flouted by far too many people. What are the options?
Do nothing:
The problem is, the law is being broken. Either the laws are bad or the people are bad. Neither of these is a state of affairs that should be encouraged.
Outlaw the technology:
Dangerous. And will fail to address the problem. People will get hold of the technology from somewhere.
Abolish copyright:
While music would continue to be created, it is unlikely that there would be as much. Musicians would not be able to survive off record sales, and since they wouldn't be so willing to pay for a recording studio, the quality would go down. Is this what we want?
Legalise file non-profit file sharing
Well, this could work. It's counter to common sense though, and there is the very real possibility that people will decide to stop paying for music, leading to the same problems as abolishing copyright.
Charge a levy on file sharing apps
Could work. Seem a little impractical, and hard to come up with a fair way to distribute the money.
Whereby, if someone uses that stupid shoplifting analogy to compare to copyright infringement, they get sentenced to 1000 years and regular beatings with a baseball bat.
I suspect the hard drive is the most likely part to break, what with it having moving parts. But it should be simple enough to make sure that any computer that is expected to run the same software for over 200 years also has no moving parts, as long as nobody needs to store a lot of data.
Well, yes, but I was talking about normal usage. Chips will also go wrong if you hit them hard enough with a hammer.
Of course, it is perfectly possible to get a reasonably fast CPU that doesn't need a heatsink. Hell, for a lot of applications, you can use a Z80, but aven a 486 will run withough any cooling, and that's easily good enough for Linux.
Depends on how it's done. Since I work for a company that has a sports database as a major component of it's product, and at least one competitor, I think it's quite important that they don't get it for free.
As long as other people are entitled to produce their own databases (which may or may not end up identical), the free products will still happen. And if they're good enough, they will happen. Take Freedb for example.
11! And I'm not so sure the limit wasn't actually 19. But having more than 11 frames on your front page is impressively stupid, even for the Royal Mail.
There are people that will argue that more than 1 is excessive. (Personally, I think they have a point)
Oh, their latest thing is now you have to register with them to look up a postcode. A postcode! You know, those things they're always moaning that people don't use? Register? Way to raise the barrier! I wonder how many people get to the form, and think "Sod it!" and just chuck the letter/parcel in the postbox with no postcode.
Ah yes... Apparently to prevent people (and businesses) from doing too many searches. Not quite sure why this is a problem, but apparantly it is.
Of course, they could simply ask for an email address and a password. They don't need to know my name. Or a simpler solution would be to just ask for an email address and send to that.
More people should take a leaf out of BBC News. Although they do have a fixed page width, and tables and other nastiness, they still include a low graphics version
The Odeon website is one of the crappiest sites I've ever seen for such a high profile company.
You should have seen the old site (1999 or thereabouts). It's rare to have a site that takes several minutes just to load a page. Usually they time out. This one required about 4 links (at a couple of minuites per click) to try to book a film, after which it would give a screen telling me what server it was using (Apache on win32 if you're interested)..
I sent a email bitching specifically complaining about them ordering Matthew Somerville to take his site down, the general crapness of their site (not quite in those words, but I was very blunt), and mentioning that I will boycott their cinemas until they have a useable website, or the accesible site returns.
The problem is, that the Odeon werbsite is so horribly painfully unpleasant to use. It's hideous. It's probably the worst website I've ever used.
Somerville produced a site that was actually pleasant to use. It actually made me willing to use the web to check Odeon's times.
While Odeon is legally in the right, the accesible site was not actually doing any direct harm. They were not making money from their website. They sell cinema tickets to make money. The question is not whether he was breaking the law, but whether he was actually causing harm to Odeon.
His skills seem to be in siezing advantage in the present rather than predicting the future. This doesn't seem to have done any harm to his career, but really we shouldn't consider him a prophet.
Slashdot Mirror
The public are not always right. They love movies like Independence Day.
Were the public somehow wrong to like that film? Why? Did they not enjoy it?
The real measure of critical success is the test of time.
The real measure of actual success is number of sales.
Uh, no. She's hated because her music is dreadful - it's like hearing a cat being disembowled.
Rubbish. If it was that bad, nobody would buy it.
All that the platnums prove is that the pop-music buying public has so little taste that they will buy whatever crap is shoved down their throats.
They have litle taste!? Are you the judge of what is and isn't good taste? Here was I thinking it was a matter of taste.
For 10 dollars I would have told you that you can't hold something in the air for several hours without getting tired,
For 10 dollars?
Really? With Empirical proof, and studies determining exactly how long people can spend? Or would you just have guessed?
and that a new product deserves a new name.
Well, yes, it deserves a new name, but that's normally a marketing thing. We found is needs a new name.
While this artist is greatly derided, it never seems to occur to the elitist music enthusiasts that she is popular for a very good reason.
Apart from her well publicised efforts to reduice crime and terrorism, Britney has also achieved multiple platinum sales several times, and is regularly nominated for prestigious awards such as the grammy's and MTV music awards.
Sadly, a lot of peopel hate success, and jealously deride both her and her fans.
I was working as part of a research project for 3D (as well as 4D, 5D and 6D) designs for better comuter input devices. What we found was that a mouse is the wrong design.
Firstly, It quite simply doesn't make sense. Mice don't fly unless you throw them. This cognitive dissonance causes users considerable problems. We solved this quire easily by replacing the "mouse" with a "bat".
Secondly, it creates arm ache. Holding the bat up for several hours just isn't possible. This was solved by the simple and rather crude device of a counterweighted piece of string on a pully on the ceiling. Of course, this isn't goinf to be suitable for a home user. I suggest we'll probably need some sort of rotor assembly to avoid the tangle of strings and wires.
It appears that no other researchers have even looked into our research, preferring to reinvent the wheel at every step.
Who else can get a bucketload of free publicity, and then get paid $20 million for it!
OH yes please, thank you, so that I might finally have a legal reason for beating Miss Spears into a bloody pulp
Oh, just do it anyway.
I keep hearing about this goggle company.
What exactly is it they do?
I'm so sick of people comparing music downloads with stealing a car.
I pointyou to my other post on this matter. Of course, by the same argument, you could probably accuse Walmart of stealing from their competition. That has the same negative effects as piracy as well.
As for your other point, I simply don't think doing nothing is the answer. It's a bad idea to encourage widescale flouting of the law.
The current copyright laws are insufficient. They are being flouted by far too many people. What are the options?
Do nothing:
The problem is, the law is being broken. Either the laws are bad or the people are bad. Neither of these is a state of affairs that should be encouraged.
Outlaw the technology:
Dangerous. And will fail to address the problem. People will get hold of the technology from somewhere.
Abolish copyright:
While music would continue to be created, it is unlikely that there would be as much. Musicians would not be able to survive off record sales, and since they wouldn't be so willing to pay for a recording studio, the quality would go down. Is this what we want?
Legalise file non-profit file sharing
Well, this could work. It's counter to common sense though, and there is the very real possibility that people will decide to stop paying for music, leading to the same problems as abolishing copyright.
Charge a levy on file sharing apps
Could work. Seem a little impractical, and hard to come up with a fair way to distribute the money.
So, what is the answer?
The stupid analogy act.
Whereby, if someone uses that stupid shoplifting analogy to compare to copyright infringement, they get sentenced to 1000 years and regular beatings with a baseball bat.
I can see how this could be a problem. Of course it depends on the application (assuming the program is stored in ROM).
Of course, there is reliable solid state memory. I wonder how long that will hold data for in practice.
That's not too bad though. You can never have too much whitespace.
I think perhaps they're putting that theory to the test.
My PC doesn't have a fan.
I suspect the hard drive is the most likely part to break, what with it having moving parts. But it should be simple enough to make sure that any computer that is expected to run the same software for over 200 years also has no moving parts, as long as nobody needs to store a lot of data.
Well, yes, but I was talking about normal usage. Chips will also go wrong if you hit them hard enough with a hammer.
Of course, it is perfectly possible to get a reasonably fast CPU that doesn't need a heatsink. Hell, for a lot of applications, you can use a Z80, but aven a 486 will run withough any cooling, and that's easily good enough for Linux.
How often do chips go wrong?
Depends on how it's done. Since I work for a company that has a sports database as a major component of it's product, and at least one competitor, I think it's quite important that they don't get it for free.
As long as other people are entitled to produce their own databases (which may or may not end up identical), the free products will still happen. And if they're good enough, they will happen. Take Freedb for example.
11! And I'm not so sure the limit wasn't actually 19. But having more than 11 frames on your front page is impressively stupid, even for the Royal Mail.
There are people that will argue that more than 1 is excessive. (Personally, I think they have a point)
Oh, their latest thing is now you have to register with them to look up a postcode. A postcode! You know, those things they're always moaning that people don't use? Register? Way to raise the barrier! I wonder how many people get to the form, and think "Sod it!" and just chuck the letter/parcel in the postbox with no postcode.
Ah yes... Apparently to prevent people (and businesses) from doing too many searches. Not quite sure why this is a problem, but apparantly it is.
Of course, they could simply ask for an email address and a password. They don't need to know my name. Or a simpler solution would be to just ask for an email address and send to that.
More people should take a leaf out of BBC News. Although they do have a fixed page width, and tables and other nastiness, they still include a low graphics version
The Odeon website is one of the crappiest sites I've ever seen for such a high profile company.
You should have seen the old site (1999 or thereabouts). It's rare to have a site that takes several minutes just to load a page. Usually they time out. This one required about 4 links (at a couple of minuites per click) to try to book a film, after which it would give a screen telling me what server it was using (Apache on win32 if you're interested)..
I sent a email bitching specifically complaining about them ordering Matthew Somerville to take his site down, the general crapness of their site (not quite in those words, but I was very blunt), and mentioning that I will boycott their cinemas until they have a useable website, or the accesible site returns.
Personally, I think the West End cinemas are overpriced and overrated. You can get just as good a screen in half a dozen cinemas in Zone 2.
The problem is, that the Odeon werbsite is so horribly painfully unpleasant to use. It's hideous. It's probably the worst website I've ever used.
Somerville produced a site that was actually pleasant to use. It actually made me willing to use the web to check Odeon's times.
While Odeon is legally in the right, the accesible site was not actually doing any direct harm. They were not making money from their website. They sell cinema tickets to make money. The question is not whether he was breaking the law, but whether he was actually causing harm to Odeon.
Why do you njeed running water for Linux? It's not so resource hungry that it needs a water cooled processor is it?
And when did you last check? 1972? Most (i.e. > 50%) of the worlds population now has both running water and electricity.
His skills seem to be in siezing advantage in the present rather than predicting the future. This doesn't seem to have done any harm to his career, but really we shouldn't consider him a prophet.
Yes. That's because there's a Linux firewall between the server and the internet.