Given that every other service provider at the time was charging you a monthly subscription, it was considered free.
In this country, local rate (0845) calls are not free.
Neither were the dial up numbers for the other ISP's. Truely free (as in 0800) access ISP's only came along later... and then disappeared again almost as quickly as they arrived.
Seth Godin, author of several books on the Internet, including Small Is the New Big, says Mozilla needs to incorporate tools like tagging or building tools like a link to eBay's Skype calling service that will help keep friends connected.
Or maybe not.
I'm a big fan of Mozilla (well, Firefox) and, unlike a lot of people here, I would dearly love to see a number of plugins actually come bundled into the default build because they truly are useful (for example, adblock) and some actually put directly into the code because they seem silly to be as an extension (for example, tabmix plus).
However, these pieces of functionality are all generic and are of benefit to everyone. I simply cannot see how spell checkers, tagging, blogging or skype can be of interest to the masses (they certainly are of little interest to me - even though I may need the spell checker from time to time).
In order to keep everyone happy, I'd suggest an option in the installer which provides you with 5 or so top extensions (already pre-ticked, with an option to deselect all) and if you continue with them enabled then firefox will automatically download and install them for you.
Not only do you keep the "I want no extensions" purists happy, but you keep those people (like me) who can't help feeling that Firefox should do a little more out of the box than it currently does.
Speaking personally, if i'm on a flight under 3 hours then by the time you've gone up, had a drink and got your food out of the way, you're getting ready to land again.
Flights that are 4-5 hours, I usually watch the film, read the book or (if i'm really inclined to do some work) I'll fire up my laptop and work on something offline.
Flights that are over 5 hours, I'll generally try and catch some sleep so that I'm refreshed when I get there.
As such, there is only small chance that i'll even think about using a laptop and, even then, the requirement for internet is limited. It doesn't surprise me that this venture is not particually sucessful.
Unfortunately the government will now use this incident to push through stronger and more draconian laws that will ultimately reduce peoples privacy... and, like the lemmings the general population are, they will accept this reasoning and stand by and watch their cival liberties fall by the way side.
The question I have is, how many of these OEM's are actually going to bother changing all the possible options?
Okay, so someone like Dell might because they can make some extra money but if the large majority of the others simply don't bother then this change of policy by Microsoft won't equate to much for the average purchaser.
Yes, that's all very well, but will it play my OGG files?
I know you're joking but the answer is actually "sort-of".
It is my understanding that as part of MTP (the transfer protocol), the device will broadcast it's capabilities to a MTP compliant player (eg. Windows Media Player 11). If there is a format in the music library that the device cannot use, then WMP11 will transcode it to WMA before putting it onto the device.
As such, OGG can be supported provided there is a codec installed on the PC (here) and a helper application which will allow WMP11 to read the meta-data from within the file.
Unfortunately I don't know whether the latter is available - but you're 50% there. Granted it isn't as good as native support on the player and the device, but it's better than no support at all.
Microsoft's DRM is not more lenient. It is much more strict than Fair Play.
Not true and a common misconception. Microsoft's DRM can be as flexible and as inflexible as the provider of the music service would like. It is perfectly possible to set the restrictions to be better than those of fairplay, but it is also perfectly possible to do the opposite.
Microsoft does not define how these are set - it is down to the music service and the agreements they have with labels.
I predict you will not love it.
Given previous experience, you're probably right on that one.
That's not so much the problem as much as the fact that the 'gratis' service actually lures students into a subscription service after college that they can't easily get out of without losing their music.
So they leave University with the same amount of music that they had when they joined university and having paid nothing?
I'm sorry, but I still don't see what the issue is here. If you don't want to use a subscription service then fine, but the fact of the matter is that you get a large amount of content for free for the period of time you're at university which you can keep if you keep the service on.
The alternative would be that you don't use the service and you'd still spend the same amount of money (ie. nothing) and you'd miss out on the free music.
Sounds like a damn good deal to me, however you put it.
Us college students never asked for these services; they were thrust upon us.
"Thrust" implies you're forced to use them, which I very much doubt.
When I was a student, downloading content not considered relevant to your course was an offense and could see your account being frozen.
These days you actually get universities paying your monthly subscription fee for you to download music - doesn't sound like a bad deal to me however crappy it is.
Worse, the free (gratis) part is an expiring, "tethered" collection of music for those who use it; downloads to keep are fee-per-track.
So let me get this straight... you get access to a large selection of music with mildly annoying DRM for free but if you want a non-expiring version, then you have to pay for it?
If you think this is poor, woe betide you when you get out into the "real world" as you'll find out that no-one here gets free unlimited downloads in that way and, shock horror, also has to pay for non-expiring versions of the music they like.
Personally, I think its a bit much you complaining about something for free which is obviously being paid for by someone else, but there you go.
Propriatory formats are a good example of a good strategy for making money that clashes with the requirements of customers.
If you force people to buy only your memory sticks (for example) then they are less likely to move to something else which doesn't support them as they'll end up with a format that is useless.
In addition, the markup on these items can generate a healthy revenue. The higher cost of the sticks is only partially due to volumes but also due to the large profit tacked on the top.
However this serves to right royally p**s off your customers. In addition, it means that the very thing that you use to lock people in is the very thing that keeps people away from buying that product in the first place.
Hence why I never will buy a Sony phone or a Sony digital camera and generally don't recommend them to anyone else either. At least when your Canon breaks, you can buy any other MiniSD supporting device and re-use all your memory.
If we'd all said that GIF was good enough, PNG wouldn't have happened.
If we'd all said that ZIP was good enough, RAR and 7z wouldn't have happened.
If we'd all said that WAV was good enough, MP3 wouldn't have happened.
If we'd all said that MP3 was good enough, AAC wouldn't have happened.
...and on...and on...and on...
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with proposing another file format. The current formats we have now or in the future are never going to be good enough and there will always be room for improvement.
Having said all that, I agree with the parent comment in the fact that licencing will make or break this format and the click-through agreement doesn't bode well.
Isn't this what the "handheld" CSS media type is for?
Yes, but it is by no means a single perfect solution. For example, the phone would still have to download the full HTML and stylesheet before adhering to the handheld media type. On a 2G phone, this equates to a painful downloading experience. In addition, certain browsers (such as Obigo) have a limit on the size of the page they can download.
I maintain AvantSlash which takes Slashdots HTML pages and turns them into a more PDA friendly version. Even though their handheld media type does a reasonable job it still means that your phone is downloading 48k's worth of content.
By contrast, generating PDA specific content rather than relying on the CSS to hide stuff you don't want to see means that you can reduce this download size to 13k.
On a standard GRPS connection running at approximately 38kbps (real world scenario) this extra 35k equates to an extra 7 seconds of download time.
Out of interest, what do people on Slashdot do for PVR's in the UK?
If you have Sky, it seems like you're locked into using Sky+ - which admitidally is rather nice and has possibily the next best UI to Tivo (but is still way ahead of everything else out there). However I don't want to pay £15/month for half the channels I want and then an extra £10/month for the subscription to the + service.
For Freeview, you seem to be left with Humax, DigiFusion or Toppy - all of which are substantially lower quality, have a UI with many quirks and all three are lacking "season pass" functionality (hell, on the Humax you can't just select a program and say "record this timeslot every week", you have to set it up from a completely different location).
Although I've not looked very hard, DIY Sky+ appears to be impossible and DIY Freeview appears to be a little on the hacky side.
So I sit out a couple days trying to get the techs behind banned@slashdot.org to notice my emails. Finally, after a long negotiation with these guys and promising that I will turn off all my Firefox extensions when accessing the site, I get let back on.
My experience was completely the opposite. When a bug in AvantSlash caused the cache timeout to be set to 1 second they, naturally, banned my site.
After a quick email to that address asking why I'd been banned , Robert (Samzenpus) responded, told me about the number of hits and I went off to fix the script. Once done, I dropped another email to him and the ban was turned off within 24 hours.
Not to mention the fact that the world isn't even ASKING for a Photoshop replacement
Indeed. In fact, if they bundled Paint.NET in with Windows, then this would be perfectly adequate for the vast majority of people. It is that good.
I'm not sure how well Paint.NET stacks up in terms of features against the GIMP. My own personal experience was that it was easier to use, the UI was logical and I was productive with it in a matter of minutes - whereas GIMP just had me getting frustrated and going nowhere quickly.
Adding EFI support would allow people to run dual boot Windows and OSX on Apple hardware the next time they purchase a computer.
Worse case for Microsoft would be that they try OSX, like it and then gradually migrate across to it.
If they don't support EFI, then there is no good and legal way of running both on one machine. You could use software based solutions, but none of them are as good as a dual boot machine.
As such, if you want to jump from Windows to OSX, it requires significant cash investment - something which a lot of people (myself included) aren't prepared to do.
Could someone please enlighten me as to why it is possible for a least privileged user account to gain root without the consent of the owner to be classed as a "non-incident"?
If I give someone an account with limited rights I've given them an account with limited rights, not an account for them to get root if they feel like it. If I wanted them to have root, I'd have given it to them in the first place!
However, it's in Perl. And I really have to ask myself; Do I want to play games coded by people who started programming games in perl?
I would ask yourself, "why do you care what it is written in?". The whole point of playing a game is that its supposed to be enjoyable. The fact that it is written in Perl, C, BASIC, Java or Cobol is immaterial if you enjoy the game.
Would you suddenly consider Half-life 2, GTA or any other game "rubbish" just because you found out that it was written in a programming language that you didn't like or didn't think would be suited to the task?
I see a similar thing with people who snub Visual Basic applications. Yes we all know how good or bad VB is at development but if someone has produced a tool using it which does what you want, quickly, easily and at the right price, why does it matter what it was written in?
I think this whole idea of Taco posting is a really good idea. What I would like to know is how we go about suggesting topics?
For example, i'd really like to know how the submission process works, how you review links, how you check for duplicates and inaccuracies, what help you have with the Slashcode base in finding dupes, how you plan to change the process (and Slashcode) in the future to reduce the number of duplicates and what the best way is to feed back when an article is incorrect, duplicate or something else.
I have on this website and on another predicted that Apple will simply buy a mobile phone network.
It's very difficult to "simply buy a mobile phone network". Apple is a global company and unless they want to pick up some tin-pot network somewhere in the middle of Russia then they simply aren't going to have the experience or (as you mentioned) the market cap to go for companies like Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefonica or France Telecom (Orange) who truely are global. It simply won't happen.
They may start an MVNO which would piggyback onto an existing operator but again I doubt it because this would limit their marketability.
If they do decide to get into the phone arena then they'll probably partner with someone like Foxtel who will build them a device with the software, UI and materials that Apple define.
They could then just sell this via the network operators a la Motorola and Nokia. It would be simpler and still give them that global reach.
Not arguing with you, but I think the idea is that most users will not enable it, and it will be difficult to perform the statistical (as clarified now) data collection and analysis that Apple does.
To get around this, Apple should have popped up a dialog box the first time which says something along the lines of "iTunes can recommend new music based on what you are currently playing. This feature requires that the songs you play are sent to the server. Would you like to turn this feature on?" to which the customer clicks on "yes" or "no".
In this way, you get visibility of a new feature (the pro of having it on by default) and the chance to opt out if you don't want it (the pro of having it off by default).
My opinion is no. Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?
Let them keep the link but use nofollow. They'll still get the "cred" of it being there, it'll still drive people to visit their site out of interest but the search engines will ignore it and so those who try to post articles to boost their pagerank will be left out.
Everyone is a winner. Except the pagerank scammers, but we don't care about them.
I like this idea of Taco posting stuff about Slashdot every month. Next time I'd like to know how they handle dupes and what they intend on doing/implementing to reduce the number.
Slashdot Mirror
Metacritic agrigates reviews from all the main games sites and comes up with a combined score.
According to them, the top 7 games are:
Interestingly, the top Gamecube one is Mario Kart DS at 91%.
Personally, my favourites were Half-Life 2 and Half-Life on the PC and Sensible Soccer and Megalomania on the Amiga.
Given that every other service provider at the time was charging you a monthly subscription, it was considered free.
Neither were the dial up numbers for the other ISP's. Truely free (as in 0800) access ISP's only came along later ... and then disappeared again almost as quickly as they arrived.
Or maybe not.
I'm a big fan of Mozilla (well, Firefox) and, unlike a lot of people here, I would dearly love to see a number of plugins actually come bundled into the default build because they truly are useful (for example, adblock) and some actually put directly into the code because they seem silly to be as an extension (for example, tabmix plus).
However, these pieces of functionality are all generic and are of benefit to everyone. I simply cannot see how spell checkers, tagging, blogging or skype can be of interest to the masses (they certainly are of little interest to me - even though I may need the spell checker from time to time).
In order to keep everyone happy, I'd suggest an option in the installer which provides you with 5 or so top extensions (already pre-ticked, with an option to deselect all) and if you continue with them enabled then firefox will automatically download and install them for you.
Not only do you keep the "I want no extensions" purists happy, but you keep those people (like me) who can't help feeling that Firefox should do a little more out of the box than it currently does.
Speaking personally, if i'm on a flight under 3 hours then by the time you've gone up, had a drink and got your food out of the way, you're getting ready to land again.
Flights that are 4-5 hours, I usually watch the film, read the book or (if i'm really inclined to do some work) I'll fire up my laptop and work on something offline.
Flights that are over 5 hours, I'll generally try and catch some sleep so that I'm refreshed when I get there.
As such, there is only small chance that i'll even think about using a laptop and, even then, the requirement for internet is limited. It doesn't surprise me that this venture is not particually sucessful.
Unfortunately the government will now use this incident to push through stronger and more draconian laws that will ultimately reduce peoples privacy ... and, like the lemmings the general population are, they will accept this reasoning and stand by and watch their cival liberties fall by the way side.
The question I have is, how many of these OEM's are actually going to bother changing all the possible options?
Okay, so someone like Dell might because they can make some extra money but if the large majority of the others simply don't bother then this change of policy by Microsoft won't equate to much for the average purchaser.
I know you're joking but the answer is actually "sort-of".
It is my understanding that as part of MTP (the transfer protocol), the device will broadcast it's capabilities to a MTP compliant player (eg. Windows Media Player 11). If there is a format in the music library that the device cannot use, then WMP11 will transcode it to WMA before putting it onto the device.
As such, OGG can be supported provided there is a codec installed on the PC (here) and a helper application which will allow WMP11 to read the meta-data from within the file.
Unfortunately I don't know whether the latter is available - but you're 50% there. Granted it isn't as good as native support on the player and the device, but it's better than no support at all.
Not true and a common misconception. Microsoft's DRM can be as flexible and as inflexible as the provider of the music service would like. It is perfectly possible to set the restrictions to be better than those of fairplay, but it is also perfectly possible to do the opposite.
Microsoft does not define how these are set - it is down to the music service and the agreements they have with labels.
Given previous experience, you're probably right on that one.
So they leave University with the same amount of music that they had when they joined university and having paid nothing?
I'm sorry, but I still don't see what the issue is here. If you don't want to use a subscription service then fine, but the fact of the matter is that you get a large amount of content for free for the period of time you're at university which you can keep if you keep the service on.
The alternative would be that you don't use the service and you'd still spend the same amount of money (ie. nothing) and you'd miss out on the free music.
Sounds like a damn good deal to me, however you put it.
"Thrust" implies you're forced to use them, which I very much doubt.
When I was a student, downloading content not considered relevant to your course was an offense and could see your account being frozen.
These days you actually get universities paying your monthly subscription fee for you to download music - doesn't sound like a bad deal to me however crappy it is.
So let me get this straight ... you get access to a large selection of music with mildly annoying DRM for free but if you want a non-expiring version, then you have to pay for it?
If you think this is poor, woe betide you when you get out into the "real world" as you'll find out that no-one here gets free unlimited downloads in that way and, shock horror, also has to pay for non-expiring versions of the music they like.
Personally, I think its a bit much you complaining about something for free which is obviously being paid for by someone else, but there you go.
Propriatory formats are a good example of a good strategy for making money that clashes with the requirements of customers.
If you force people to buy only your memory sticks (for example) then they are less likely to move to something else which doesn't support them as they'll end up with a format that is useless.
In addition, the markup on these items can generate a healthy revenue. The higher cost of the sticks is only partially due to volumes but also due to the large profit tacked on the top.
However this serves to right royally p**s off your customers. In addition, it means that the very thing that you use to lock people in is the very thing that keeps people away from buying that product in the first place.
Hence why I never will buy a Sony phone or a Sony digital camera and generally don't recommend them to anyone else either. At least when your Canon breaks, you can buy any other MiniSD supporting device and re-use all your memory.
Why not?
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with proposing another file format. The current formats we have now or in the future are never going to be good enough and there will always be room for improvement.
Having said all that, I agree with the parent comment in the fact that licencing will make or break this format and the click-through agreement doesn't bode well.
Yes, but it is by no means a single perfect solution. For example, the phone would still have to download the full HTML and stylesheet before adhering to the handheld media type. On a 2G phone, this equates to a painful downloading experience. In addition, certain browsers (such as Obigo) have a limit on the size of the page they can download.
I maintain AvantSlash which takes Slashdots HTML pages and turns them into a more PDA friendly version. Even though their handheld media type does a reasonable job it still means that your phone is downloading 48k's worth of content.
By contrast, generating PDA specific content rather than relying on the CSS to hide stuff you don't want to see means that you can reduce this download size to 13k.
On a standard GRPS connection running at approximately 38kbps (real world scenario) this extra 35k equates to an extra 7 seconds of download time.
If you have Sky, it seems like you're locked into using Sky+ - which admitidally is rather nice and has possibily the next best UI to Tivo (but is still way ahead of everything else out there). However I don't want to pay £15/month for half the channels I want and then an extra £10/month for the subscription to the + service.
For Freeview, you seem to be left with Humax, DigiFusion or Toppy - all of which are substantially lower quality, have a UI with many quirks and all three are lacking "season pass" functionality (hell, on the Humax you can't just select a program and say "record this timeslot every week", you have to set it up from a completely different location).
Although I've not looked very hard, DIY Sky+ appears to be impossible and DIY Freeview appears to be a little on the hacky side.
What do people do?
My experience was completely the opposite. When a bug in AvantSlash caused the cache timeout to be set to 1 second they, naturally, banned my site.
After a quick email to that address asking why I'd been banned , Robert (Samzenpus) responded, told me about the number of hits and I went off to fix the script. Once done, I dropped another email to him and the ban was turned off within 24 hours.
Couldn't fault him in the slightest.
Indeed. In fact, if they bundled Paint.NET in with Windows, then this would be perfectly adequate for the vast majority of people. It is that good.
I'm not sure how well Paint.NET stacks up in terms of features against the GIMP. My own personal experience was that it was easier to use, the UI was logical and I was productive with it in a matter of minutes - whereas GIMP just had me getting frustrated and going nowhere quickly.
Adding EFI support would allow people to run dual boot Windows and OSX on Apple hardware the next time they purchase a computer.
Worse case for Microsoft would be that they try OSX, like it and then gradually migrate across to it.
If they don't support EFI, then there is no good and legal way of running both on one machine. You could use software based solutions, but none of them are as good as a dual boot machine.
As such, if you want to jump from Windows to OSX, it requires significant cash investment - something which a lot of people (myself included) aren't prepared to do.
</tinfoil hat>
If I give someone an account with limited rights I've given them an account with limited rights, not an account for them to get root if they feel like it. If I wanted them to have root, I'd have given it to them in the first place!
I would ask yourself, "why do you care what it is written in?". The whole point of playing a game is that its supposed to be enjoyable. The fact that it is written in Perl, C, BASIC, Java or Cobol is immaterial if you enjoy the game.
Would you suddenly consider Half-life 2, GTA or any other game "rubbish" just because you found out that it was written in a programming language that you didn't like or didn't think would be suited to the task?
I see a similar thing with people who snub Visual Basic applications. Yes we all know how good or bad VB is at development but if someone has produced a tool using it which does what you want, quickly, easily and at the right price, why does it matter what it was written in?
To be honest, I'd far rather they didn't have to fight this because they didn't actually keep the information in the first place.
For example, i'd really like to know how the submission process works, how you review links, how you check for duplicates and inaccuracies, what help you have with the Slashcode base in finding dupes, how you plan to change the process (and Slashcode) in the future to reduce the number of duplicates and what the best way is to feed back when an article is incorrect, duplicate or something else.
It's very difficult to "simply buy a mobile phone network". Apple is a global company and unless they want to pick up some tin-pot network somewhere in the middle of Russia then they simply aren't going to have the experience or (as you mentioned) the market cap to go for companies like Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefonica or France Telecom (Orange) who truely are global. It simply won't happen.
They may start an MVNO which would piggyback onto an existing operator but again I doubt it because this would limit their marketability.
If they do decide to get into the phone arena then they'll probably partner with someone like Foxtel who will build them a device with the software, UI and materials that Apple define.
They could then just sell this via the network operators a la Motorola and Nokia. It would be simpler and still give them that global reach.
To get around this, Apple should have popped up a dialog box the first time which says something along the lines of "iTunes can recommend new music based on what you are currently playing. This feature requires that the songs you play are sent to the server. Would you like to turn this feature on?" to which the customer clicks on "yes" or "no".
In this way, you get visibility of a new feature (the pro of having it on by default) and the chance to opt out if you don't want it (the pro of having it off by default).
Let them keep the link but use nofollow. They'll still get the "cred" of it being there, it'll still drive people to visit their site out of interest but the search engines will ignore it and so those who try to post articles to boost their pagerank will be left out.
Everyone is a winner. Except the pagerank scammers, but we don't care about them.
I like this idea of Taco posting stuff about Slashdot every month. Next time I'd like to know how they handle dupes and what they intend on doing/implementing to reduce the number.