If not, what makes you believe it is so? If it is, do you happens to know were to find it?
I don't have any links to hand but I'm sure Google can probably help. My understanding has been from the legal department of the company I work in and several friends of mine who work for the big 5 law practises.
WHat other countries do you refer to by the way?
Canada (until recently) and Australia. I believe there are a number of other European countries - but I can't tell you off the top of my head.
On the other hand, it has been shown that you are welcome to take your purchased sony CD-ROMs and make Mp3s for them for your personal use on your sony MP3 players or whatnot.
Remember the laws of the USA != the laws of other countries and this is, sadly, where your argument falls flat on its face.
Here in the UK (and other countries) when you purchase a CD, you purchase a licence to listen to the music on that medium only.
Therefore you cannot rip your music to MP3 and use it on your portable player without permission from the copyright holder. So buying a CD and dumping the contents onto your iPod is actually illegal.
Having said that I'd hope no music company would be silly enough to try and get the law enforced, but you never know...
the UK Government's Department for Work and Pensions attempted to upgrade seven PCs from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and ended up with BSODs on over 60,000 machines.
In actual fact, the Register quotes:
According to one, a limited network upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was taking place, but instead of this taking place on only a small number of the target machines, all the clients connected to the network received a partial, but fatal, 'upgrade.'
and then below it:
Another source says that the DWP was trialing Windows XP on a small number ("about seven") of machines. "EDS were going to apply a patch to these, unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 per cent of the Win2k desktops.
So, by merging them you get the following story:
There was a trial of seven PC's, instead of patching only those seven, the request to roll it out was accidently performed and every computer attempted to install a botched version of XP.
Somewhat slightly different to the Slashdot version wouldn't you say?
In addition, I'm pretty sure that if you accidently deployed a botched version of the linux kernel then it too would probably have a similar effect.
What is the easiest way to download your favourite versions of TV programmes? Is there some way to view the schedule, pick a programme and have it appear on your PC/XBOX/whatever some time later?
Or is it a completely manual process to get these files?
Who wants to bet that a "Dilbert" probably pointed out the problems with the new memory architecture, but was over-ruled by a PHB with no clue?
Who wants to bet that the PHB who over-ruled him had his hands tied behind his back because of the head of marketings commitment to the board and an already pre-paid advertising campaign which would have costs millions to pull at the last minute?
As much as it would pain Slashdot readership to know this, not all managers have no clue.
I also talked with a Mac-enthusiatic buddy of mine, and he hated it. I don't know why, but he thought it would bring down Apple another notch on the finance scale. Guess he was wrong. Along with some that said "no wireless. Lame."
Look how well Creative are doing too. From being the first with a HD based MP3 device to playing catch up. Oh and trying to make their products look as similar as possible to Apple's.
Probably not quite the direction they were hoping for.
One of the key points which I believe made the iPod sell well is that it appeals to women. Several in the office have seen the alternative "iPod killers" and every single one of them have commented about how ugly it is. One key quote was "if you asked for an ipod and you got that, you'd be disappointed".
I find it interesting that every "iPod killer" attempts to add more features and make it cheaper. Unfortunately this has the side effect of it having a horrible design or uses cheap materials which makes it feel horrible to handle.
Personally I believe that if something looks and feels good, then people will buy it. As soon as a company accepts that there are people who are perfectly happy to pay more for something that looks and feels good, then they might spend a little more on the hardware and less on trying to get it's sales price as low as possible.
I fear that at the moment the only real competitor to Apple was Sony, but then they dropped the ball with a limited hard drive (no 40 gig option?) and the stupid requirement to convert to ATRAC. Creative have never produced a product that remotely looks like it's worth the money that was paid for it and iRiver (whilst being technically very good) needs to seriously review some of their design choices (ruggidised black and a stubbly joypad doesn't appeal to many and definately not to women).
Of course, everyones opinion is different. I know people who think the Creative one is beautiful and the Apple one horrible. But the market has clearly shown that they are in the minority.
More style, more class, less about the price point and someone could actually make it vaiguley close to having an "iPod killer" on their hands.
ok lets settle this...purchasing music from iTMS or "stealing" music from P2P is not the only way to fill an iPod. Of course, my CD collection might be a tad larger than yours.
UK copyright laws are actually more draconian than the US and there is no concept of "fair use".
In short, this means that the CD you bought gives you the licence to listen to it on that medium only.
So, in the UK, the only way to legimately fill your iPod is to actually drop £15,000 (we pay more than you lot) to fill it up. Sticking your CD's onto it is actually not allowed by UK law.
(of course that doesn't stop people doing it and the music industry would be blowing off their nose to spite their face if they ever did try to bring it to the courts... but you get what I mean)
Build a dell with the same amount of functionnalities (not the first entry-level $300 machine), add the software that's bundled with the iBook (I'll exempt you of finding a GarageBand alternative) and then compare the prices.
Mac's are more expensive that PC's if you already own a PC and have invested significantly in the software for it.
If you don't have a PC, then purchasing a Mac with Office Photoshop is about the same price as a PC with the same applications.
However if you already have a PC with those two items, it's significantly cheaper to upgrade your motherboard, CPU and/or graphics card than it is to buy a Mac and then replacement versions of all your software.
A Mac is too expensive for me, because I have a lot invested in software which I'm not willing the throw away and re-purchase for another platform. I could use emulators and alternatives, but it isn't quite the same experience.
While fans of the dead Casey Donovan might be upset, this seems to be a legitimate thing bigpond to do. It's pretty clear that the vast majority got sent to the site they wanted to see, and in a few weeks/months everything can be returned to normal, and gay porn fans can get their Casey back.
Indeed, and it is also worth pointing out that had they not done this, then someones hosting bill could have become horribly expensive or their entire site shut down because it's reached its allocated bandwidth.
If it was my site wrongly pointed to in an ad, I've far rather than the whole of Austrialia were redirected for a couple of months rather than find myself on the recieving end of a huge bill or everyone else get inconvenianced by a completely inaccessable website.
Can you download steam updates onto another machine?
The reason I ask is that I have only a 56k modem at home - so would rather get the downloads on a fast connection, drop them onto a USB stick and take them home rather than sitting around for 2 hours for the updates to come down.
[x] Light (reduce the complexity of Slashdot's HTML for AvantGo, Lynx, or slow connections)
If you really are going to use AvantGo (or Plucker) then consider using AvantSlash instead which cleans up the articles and comments for browsing on mobile devices. It can also remove all the hyperlinks from external websites so that you can set your link depth high enough to get all the slashdot content and avoid 3/4's of the general internet.
He's talking about the itunes software, not the music store that it's linked to!
Oh blast, missed that:)
Having said that, I installed iTunes (PC version) on my brothers computer and wasn't that impressed. It had a tendancy to mangle filenames, was rather sluggish and once the database and the partitioned hard-drive got out of sync with each other (which happened twice) there seemed to be no way to easily repair it short to exporting the lot to another location and then back again.
I think what companies don't realise that it's not really the player they have to better...it's iTunes. When it comes down to it, although the iPod is a great player, it's really it's integration with itunes that makes it work so well.
According to Apple, 2m iPods have been sold and 20m iTunes tracks.
This means that for each iPod, there are 10 tracks from iTunes on it.
Assuming each track is 3 meg big and the average iPod is 30 gig, then you are looking at ((3*10)/(30*1024))*100 = 0.1% of a users iPod taken up with iTunes music.
Even if you double or quadruple the downloaded numbers, you are still talking less than 1% of iPod music is from iTunes.
In short, based on these stats, I cannot see how anyone can consider the iTunes service as a key driver in someones purchasing decision of the iPod.
While useful, I only found MusicBrainz any good when the file had a tag that had two out of three for the artist, album or track name.
I would hazard a guess that in order for relatable to speed up the time searching their database, they make the assumption that two out of the three tags are reasonably correct. This can quite significantly cut down on the possible entries to look up.
If they removed this restriction, it would probably be more accurate - but take far longer to identify the track.
It would not suprise me if his company has signed a deal with relatable whose acoustic fingerprinting technology is used in applications such as MusicBrainz.
Therefore every time you submit your MP3 TRM's to MusicBrainz, who in turn pass them onto relatable, his company can use that data to identify the songs on the P2P networks.
Far more accurate (although slower) than looking at the title of the files. Additionally, changing the metadata within the MP3 won't make a difference.
If the Netscape version of Firefox came with the following already installed by default:
the adblocker
pre-populated with rules so I don't have to hunt for them using google because even the extension doesn't give you any help.
the download manager extension
why oh why do we have to have an extension for basic functionality?
a better set of default buttons
new tab, back, forward, stop, release, home, bookmarks, history, print, downloads. Rather than the limited selection we have now - oh and a better positioning of them.
a nicer looking theme
Qute or mostly crystal maybe. With the proper windows style looking menus.
then 90% of the stuff that I have to do every single time Firefox is installed would be done already.
I know the concept of extensions is to keep it lean and mean, but if Netscape want to make it truely customer friendly, these would be a good start. Power users can always uninstall them (if they even bother with the branded version)
Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule.
I'm sorry, but if you have to have "crunch time" in a project, then it hasn't been planned properly. Having a "pre-crunch" also indicates it isn't planned properly.
A well planned project with sensible deliverables and timescales may have the odd long hour stint but not enough to have it called by a specific name.
This just translates to poor planning and project management coupled with poor decision making at the top.
Fix all the bugs listed in bugzilla (it's crashed twice on me today - talkbacks are in the post)
Resist the urge to include the kitchen sink.
Concentrate on getting it running faster and leaner.
Fix some more bugs. Make it automatically restart when it crashes - that would be nice.
Take out a lot of the options that can only be used by editing a text file and stick them in an "advanced" section on preferences.
Make it so the browser reports errors in an html page rather than a pop up window. Pop up windows are so Netscape 4. The option is in the config files, default it to on and stick it on the GUI.
Make the browser generated error page look polished, rather than something knocked up by someone in 10 minutes.
Change the theme to something that looks nicer. What exactly was wrong with Qute?
Bundle some plugins with the installer package - 95% of users don't care about the developer tools being an option. Adblock would be more sensible.
Set the default buttons to something a little more than it currently is. I have new tab, back, forwards, stop, reload, home, bookmarks, history, print and downloads.
More support for standards? Anything missed out already.
Generally concentrate on making a better browser. If you go for world domination, we'll end up with a half-assed mess that doesn't do everything that people would like it to do. I like Firefox because its a web-browser, nothing more.
although it appears this is mostly a face-lift (despite a year of development and $100 million investment)
I thought it was only marketing that didn't understand that just because it looks the same, doesn't necessarily mean you've done nothing under the hood.
I for one am tired of the pharse "iPod killer". The iPod is entrenched to the point that it is going to take more than a superior product to unseat it.
The problem that rivals are having is that whilst they can easily make a product that is technically superior, they can't make a product that is asthetically superior.
All the "iPod killers" i've seen look cheap, nasty and feel it too. Maybe if they stopped concentrating on bundling niche features and geting their price as low as possible and looked to using quality materials and a good design then people will buy it. Apple has clearly shown that people are prepared to pay more for something that looks it.
Finally, Sony got it almost right. Their HD based MP3 players look asthetically very good. It's a pity they then threw that all away by not making it support MP3 and only having 20 gig.
There really isn't much of a future for innovation in PC Audio. Most people have a PC with a motherboard that has built in soundcard and couple of cheap speakers and have absolutely no reason to upgrade.
Hard drives, monitors, graphics cards - as time goes by you can find an application, game or fashion reason to upgrade. However sound cards? When was the last time you upgraded your 5.1 built-in sound card especially for a game or application?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it is.
If not, what makes you believe it is so? If it is, do you happens to know were to find it?
I don't have any links to hand but I'm sure Google can probably help. My understanding has been from the legal department of the company I work in and several friends of mine who work for the big 5 law practises.
WHat other countries do you refer to by the way?
Canada (until recently) and Australia. I believe there are a number of other European countries - but I can't tell you off the top of my head.
HTH
Remember the laws of the USA != the laws of other countries and this is, sadly, where your argument falls flat on its face.
Here in the UK (and other countries) when you purchase a CD, you purchase a licence to listen to the music on that medium only.
Therefore you cannot rip your music to MP3 and use it on your portable player without permission from the copyright holder. So buying a CD and dumping the contents onto your iPod is actually illegal.
Having said that I'd hope no music company would be silly enough to try and get the law enforced, but you never know ...
the UK Government's Department for Work and Pensions attempted to upgrade seven PCs from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and ended up with BSODs on over 60,000 machines.
In actual fact, the Register quotes:
According to one, a limited network upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was taking place, but instead of this taking place on only a small number of the target machines, all the clients connected to the network received a partial, but fatal, 'upgrade.'
and then below it:
Another source says that the DWP was trialing Windows XP on a small number ("about seven") of machines. "EDS were going to apply a patch to these, unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 per cent of the Win2k desktops.
So, by merging them you get the following story:
There was a trial of seven PC's, instead of patching only those seven, the request to roll it out was accidently performed and every computer attempted to install a botched version of XP.
Somewhat slightly different to the Slashdot version wouldn't you say?
In addition, I'm pretty sure that if you accidently deployed a botched version of the linux kernel then it too would probably have a similar effect.
Or is it a completely manual process to get these files?
Who wants to bet that the PHB who over-ruled him had his hands tied behind his back because of the head of marketings commitment to the board and an already pre-paid advertising campaign which would have costs millions to pull at the last minute?
As much as it would pain Slashdot readership to know this, not all managers have no clue.
That would be Taco then.
Look how well Creative are doing too. From being the first with a HD based MP3 device to playing catch up. Oh and trying to make their products look as similar as possible to Apple's.
Probably not quite the direction they were hoping for.
I find it interesting that every "iPod killer" attempts to add more features and make it cheaper. Unfortunately this has the side effect of it having a horrible design or uses cheap materials which makes it feel horrible to handle.
Personally I believe that if something looks and feels good, then people will buy it. As soon as a company accepts that there are people who are perfectly happy to pay more for something that looks and feels good, then they might spend a little more on the hardware and less on trying to get it's sales price as low as possible.
I fear that at the moment the only real competitor to Apple was Sony, but then they dropped the ball with a limited hard drive (no 40 gig option?) and the stupid requirement to convert to ATRAC. Creative have never produced a product that remotely looks like it's worth the money that was paid for it and iRiver (whilst being technically very good) needs to seriously review some of their design choices (ruggidised black and a stubbly joypad doesn't appeal to many and definately not to women).
Of course, everyones opinion is different. I know people who think the Creative one is beautiful and the Apple one horrible. But the market has clearly shown that they are in the minority.
More style, more class, less about the price point and someone could actually make it vaiguley close to having an "iPod killer" on their hands.
UK copyright laws are actually more draconian than the US and there is no concept of "fair use".
In short, this means that the CD you bought gives you the licence to listen to it on that medium only.
So, in the UK, the only way to legimately fill your iPod is to actually drop £15,000 (we pay more than you lot) to fill it up. Sticking your CD's onto it is actually not allowed by UK law.
(of course that doesn't stop people doing it and the music industry would be blowing off their nose to spite their face if they ever did try to bring it to the courts ... but you get what I mean)
Mac's are more expensive that PC's if you already own a PC and have invested significantly in the software for it.
If you don't have a PC, then purchasing a Mac with Office Photoshop is about the same price as a PC with the same applications.
However if you already have a PC with those two items, it's significantly cheaper to upgrade your motherboard, CPU and/or graphics card than it is to buy a Mac and then replacement versions of all your software.
A Mac is too expensive for me, because I have a lot invested in software which I'm not willing the throw away and re-purchase for another platform. I could use emulators and alternatives, but it isn't quite the same experience.
Indeed, and it is also worth pointing out that had they not done this, then someones hosting bill could have become horribly expensive or their entire site shut down because it's reached its allocated bandwidth.
If it was my site wrongly pointed to in an ad, I've far rather than the whole of Austrialia were redirected for a couple of months rather than find myself on the recieving end of a huge bill or everyone else get inconvenianced by a completely inaccessable website.
The reason I ask is that I have only a 56k modem at home - so would rather get the downloads on a fast connection, drop them onto a USB stick and take them home rather than sitting around for 2 hours for the updates to come down.
If you really are going to use AvantGo (or Plucker) then consider using AvantSlash instead which cleans up the articles and comments for browsing on mobile devices. It can also remove all the hyperlinks from external websites so that you can set your link depth high enough to get all the slashdot content and avoid 3/4's of the general internet.
Of course, if Slashdot was re-written with valid XHTML and CSS then this code wouldn't be necessary.
Average iPod is probably closer to 20gig. Less actually when you consider mini's....
And it's foolish to think that all iPods (or even half) are full or even close to it.
True. So if we assume that average iPod size is only 10 gig and only a quarter of it is full, then we're talking 2.5 gig.
(3*10)/(2.5*1024))*100 = 1.18%
Even with the generious statistics in Apple's favour, I still don't think its enough to really influence anyones purchasing.
Oh blast, missed that :)
Having said that, I installed iTunes (PC version) on my brothers computer and wasn't that impressed. It had a tendancy to mangle filenames, was rather sluggish and once the database and the partitioned hard-drive got out of sync with each other (which happened twice) there seemed to be no way to easily repair it short to exporting the lot to another location and then back again.
According to Apple, 2m iPods have been sold and 20m iTunes tracks.
This means that for each iPod, there are 10 tracks from iTunes on it.
Assuming each track is 3 meg big and the average iPod is 30 gig, then you are looking at ((3*10)/(30*1024))*100 = 0.1% of a users iPod taken up with iTunes music.
Even if you double or quadruple the downloaded numbers, you are still talking less than 1% of iPod music is from iTunes.
In short, based on these stats, I cannot see how anyone can consider the iTunes service as a key driver in someones purchasing decision of the iPod.
I can't work out any kind of strategy because by the time I've thought about it, the timer is rapidly at zero.
Can anyone give me any top-tips on how to *properly* play this game well?
Thanks!
I would hazard a guess that in order for relatable to speed up the time searching their database, they make the assumption that two out of the three tags are reasonably correct. This can quite significantly cut down on the possible entries to look up.
If they removed this restriction, it would probably be more accurate - but take far longer to identify the track.
Therefore every time you submit your MP3 TRM's to MusicBrainz, who in turn pass them onto relatable, his company can use that data to identify the songs on the P2P networks.
Far more accurate (although slower) than looking at the title of the files. Additionally, changing the metadata within the MP3 won't make a difference.
the adblocker
pre-populated with rules so I don't have to hunt for them using google because even the extension doesn't give you any help.
the download manager extension
why oh why do we have to have an extension for basic functionality?
a better set of default buttons
new tab, back, forward, stop, release, home, bookmarks, history, print, downloads. Rather than the limited selection we have now - oh and a better positioning of them.
a nicer looking theme
Qute or mostly crystal maybe. With the proper windows style looking menus.
then 90% of the stuff that I have to do every single time Firefox is installed would be done already. I know the concept of extensions is to keep it lean and mean, but if Netscape want to make it truely customer friendly, these would be a good start. Power users can always uninstall them (if they even bother with the branded version)
I'm sorry, but if you have to have "crunch time" in a project, then it hasn't been planned properly. Having a "pre-crunch" also indicates it isn't planned properly.
A well planned project with sensible deliverables and timescales may have the odd long hour stint but not enough to have it called by a specific name.
This just translates to poor planning and project management coupled with poor decision making at the top.
Generally concentrate on making a better browser. If you go for world domination, we'll end up with a half-assed mess that doesn't do everything that people would like it to do. I like Firefox because its a web-browser, nothing more.
I thought it was only marketing that didn't understand that just because it looks the same, doesn't necessarily mean you've done nothing under the hood.
The problem that rivals are having is that whilst they can easily make a product that is technically superior, they can't make a product that is asthetically superior.
All the "iPod killers" i've seen look cheap, nasty and feel it too. Maybe if they stopped concentrating on bundling niche features and geting their price as low as possible and looked to using quality materials and a good design then people will buy it. Apple has clearly shown that people are prepared to pay more for something that looks it.
Finally, Sony got it almost right. Their HD based MP3 players look asthetically very good. It's a pity they then threw that all away by not making it support MP3 and only having 20 gig.
Hard drives, monitors, graphics cards - as time goes by you can find an application, game or fashion reason to upgrade. However sound cards? When was the last time you upgraded your 5.1 built-in sound card especially for a game or application?
Because it isn't handwriting? Jot cannot cope with cursive which I would consider to be a key thing to claiming handwriting recognition.
Microsoft's PocketPC line have had the transcriber application for years which does cope with cursive.
Since it also runs on the PocketPC phone edition, you could easily claim that Microsoft were the first with a phone with handwriting recognition.