The point is that a company whose CD sales are miniscule, and that could not afford to set up to press a CD in the first place, appears to be proving the RIAA wrong, even though its experience is completely irrelevant to the larger RIAA horse that keeps getting flogged. In other words, it's an anecdote that is consistent with the predominant Slashdot theme, and THAT'S why it's posted here.
One of the judges is one "Rain Forest Puppy". To me, this jeopardizes the credibility of the contest, just as if a judge was "Anonymous Coward" or "Big F*cking Idiot".
... does someone make the leap from finding "a gene proven to affect the ability of learning and processing language" to deciding that it is "an artistic gene" ? At best, all we know is that it affects learning and language. But somehow connecting this (tenuously shown) function to "artistic" abilities, and the building of cathedrals ?
I don't know who should be blamed more for the very tenuous conclusions that smack of headline-whoring: the scientists behind the study, the guy who posted the ludicrous conclusions (his own ?) or the/. editor who allowed it to go through without editing.
Think about it; it profiles your music taste and make recommandations. That's what spyware does (or says it does.)
I don't know about anyone else, but I can't see how a system could possibly make intelligent recommendations without profiling me. If I happen to like listening to (say) Britney Spears, Metallica, and Herbie Hancock, I'd like to see what other people who also do the same are listening to. I DON'T want to know that people who listen to Britney Spears is likely to also listen to N'Sync.
To me, the value-added here is precisely in the profiling.
He couldn't be much of an entrepeneur with this doozy of an idea. Given it's location, you really have to wonder how many customers he expects to get...
Look more carefully at the big picture before spouting off the party line....
I think YOU are the person who needs to practice the above. The fact that XP is "intended" (as divined by you) for "desktop use" by secretaries outlines a comparative lack of importance of security as compared, say, to an OS designed for "backend server systems" carrying out (presumably) enterprise-level operations.
Sure, maybe I don't see many secretaries choosing "what boot level to start up in the morning" (huh?), but if I have a choice between losing my secretariy's machine, and my department's finance or Oracle server, which would I choose ? If anything, the supposed relegation of XP to the desktop makes it LESS important that there exists the same gaping hole that exists in Linux.
You can do the same thing to Linux with a boot floppy.
You do realize, I hope, that the fact that Linux is, and has always been, vulnerable to a boot disk "attack" (just like/.'s other beloved OS, OS X) is irrelevant here, as neither vulnerability outlines the crappiness of Windows.
traditional web projects are structured to leave at least one of the parties taking a big risk... see whether the authors have successfully outlined a fairer, more successful system
I don't understand what is unfair about the supposed existing system. One of two parties, both of whom willingly enter into a contract, supposedly exposes itself to more risk: so what ? If the company is smart, it takes on that extra risk in the hopes that it will be able to realize a larger reward.
The point is that both parties enter into the contract willingly and freely. So what can be unfair about that ?
The first thing that'd happen would be that pepsi.com, pepsi.net, and pepsi.org would be obsolete since.pepsi would be run by PepsiCo.
Forgetting the issue of whether or not your plan could work, the last thing your plan would do is free the namespace because PepsiCo is never going to feel their domain is obsolete because there always exists the possibility that some guy is going to go to pepsi.com. You really think pepsi would ever give up the.com,.net, or.org ?
Why, the author asks, do makers of controller cards put all their BIOS utilities on DOS floppies which require us to find a DOS boot disk? Seriously, how many of us carry around DOS boot disks nowadays?
Well, given Dell's recent announcements, I suppose fewer and fewer of us will be doing so.
But really, the author's point is so moot that it's embarassing: if it's my job to maintain a RAID array, and the utilities are on DOS floppies, of course I'm going to have access to a DOS boot disk. So what ? Just how hard is it to carry such a thing around, and why is this is a worthy thing to rail about, in a book about RAID ? If the author wastes too much time talking about stuff like this, this book can't be that useful - arggh, I've wasted too much of my own time already.
Can't they just use make-believe places and situations? I find this kind of stuff offensive.
No kidding. Imagine the hell that would be raised if someone came out with a mod pack that lets you run squads of Israeli stormtroopers to squash Palestinian uprisings, conversely if you could play small squads of Palestinians to take out key Israeli civilian targets, or if you could deploy Arab sappers/bombers/engineers to take out key city buildings.
But is the remote infrared or RF, and if the former, is there a receiver that can be mounted on your desk ? Because I sure as hell can't stand pointing my remote under my desk. And is there a headphone jack that extends to the desktop ?
For my money, the best thing I've seen was the external box on the Creative Audigy Ex. All the ports you need, right on your desk, with a wireless remote. Wish the Audigy2 had the Ex model when I bought mine. Of course, it matters less now that I've sworn off gaming, but that's another story.
Does this mean I have to start buying cloths again instead of getting them at trade shows?
On the other hand, while you might not be getting your clothes at Comdex, you are proportionately less likely to get beat up on the street for wearing said clothes and so baldly advertising your geekiness.
How would people feel if someone wrote some magical piece of software that prevented users from having to view annoying copyright- and authorship- nag banners and notices that appear while running software ?
Why would someone want a digital camera integrated in their PDA?
Because it would mean I wouldn't need to tote around a digital camera to take those quickie pictures of the girl on the train who's picking her nose ? Because people who carry PDAs have them with them all the time, and might not always have their digital camera with them when something interesting happens ?
For many people, one of the biggest reason to buy Sony products is the memory stick. So many of their products use them now and they're all neatly integrated. I, for instance, have a digital voice recorder and mini-dv cam that all use the memory stick, and if I had to go buy a digital camera, notebook, or desktop, it sure would be appealing to get one that could also use these memory sticks.
I'm not aware of many desktops, let alone notebooks that ship with CompactFlash or smartmedia built in, but I do know the Sonys all have them.
The retailers are starting to get a clue but still have a long way to go as evidenced by 'Recording companies make the music...' and 'We are in the customer relationship business.'"
The silly demonizing of the record companies is really getting counter productive. In a strict sense, of course, the recording companies don't "make" the music (of course the artists do, but under contract), just like software companies don't "make" the software (their programmers do, under contract), and just like home-building companies don't "make" the homes (the construction workers do also under employment contract).
But it is a useful shorthand to say all of the above. Without the record companies the vast majority of songs that get traded so happily on P2P networks would never have made it to rippable CDs in the first place (as an aside, I always found the usage of the term "rip" in this context to be somewhat revealing).
And the poster's implied distinction between the record companies and the people who "made" the music suggests that the artists are uniformly against the record companies and their efforts in this area. P2P advocates are being flat-out chauvinistic if they think that all artists - or maybe even a majority - disagree with the RIAA's stands. It irks me when I see a few artists' views trotted out with the implicit assumption that their views are representative...what's the real big picture ?
To be sure, there is a vocal group, but I wonder whether they're getting disproportionate press precisely because they're arguing something more controversial - you never hear about Metallica complaining about P2P anymore, because it's just boring and it seems obvious.
Has anyone conducted polls of major artists to see where they stand and how they feel about the RIAA ? I'm not talking about disenfranchised had-their-day-in-the-sun-more-than-a-decade-ago artists (*cough*Janis Ian*cough*) and I'm not talking about little independent artists who probably secretly would *love* to get a big record deal if they could - what about a survey of artists in the Billboard 100, or artists with the best selling CDs in the last 10 years, or the top 100 artists traded on Kazaa/Gnutella...or some other reasonably objective criteria that defines a sample of artists under contract to record companies represented by theRIAA ?
What is needed here is hard, representative statistics, not agenda-laden anecdotes that fit whatever story happens to be convenient with the story-teller's philosophy.
Didn't they do the same thing a few years back by posting versions of their songs on Napster with some sort of nag-message in the middle ?
As far as I'm concerned, if it works, it's a good thing. Half the argument here is how P2P shouldn't be held back because it affects independent bands who are trying to operate without the RIAA. This kind of activity wouldn't affect such bands at all.
If it was became more and more difficult to share RIAA-covered material via P2P, then the independent bands we keep hearing about will have more currency on the P2P networks, while RIAA-covered material should be somewhat disadvantaged.
And then we'd all have an opportunity to see whether or not these independent artists are generally less commercially successful than their RIAA brethren because they lack something the RIAA provides, like marketing muscle, or whether they're less commercially successful because they're not good enough to get snapped up by major labels.
Can anybody who hangs out at these places heavy on clan gaming comment on the racial profile of customers ? In the old days, when I used to MUD, 95% of the people were Asian. Is there a disproportionate number of Asians (i.e. a greater proportion then Asians are represented in the surrounding population) in these places -forgetting, of course, the places located in Asia ? I'm betting there is, and if so, I wonder what this could mean...
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that a company whose CD sales are miniscule, and that could not afford to set up to press a CD in the first place, appears to be proving the RIAA wrong, even though its experience is completely irrelevant to the larger RIAA horse that keeps getting flogged. In other words, it's an anecdote that is consistent with the predominant Slashdot theme, and THAT'S why it's posted here.
One of the judges is one "Rain Forest Puppy". To me, this jeopardizes the credibility of the contest, just as if a judge was "Anonymous Coward" or "Big F*cking Idiot".
I wish I was lucky enough to have such accidents. The only accidents I have usually involve me looking for a mop and bucket, or writing a big check.
... does someone make the leap from finding "a gene proven to affect the ability of learning and processing language" to deciding that it is "an artistic gene" ? At best, all we know is that it affects learning and language. But somehow connecting this (tenuously shown) function to "artistic" abilities, and the building of cathedrals ?
/. editor who allowed it to go through without editing.
I don't know who should be blamed more for the very tenuous conclusions that smack of headline-whoring: the scientists behind the study, the guy who posted the ludicrous conclusions (his own ?) or the
Think about it; it profiles your music taste and make recommandations. That's what spyware does (or says it does.)
I don't know about anyone else, but I can't see how a system could possibly make intelligent recommendations without profiling me. If I happen to like listening to (say) Britney Spears, Metallica, and Herbie Hancock, I'd like to see what other people who also do the same are listening to. I DON'T want to know that people who listen to Britney Spears is likely to also listen to N'Sync.
To me, the value-added here is precisely in the profiling.
A Nepalese entrepreneur,
He couldn't be much of an entrepeneur with this doozy of an idea. Given it's location, you really have to wonder how many customers he expects to get...
I'd like to see someone present the anime timeline along with a timeseries depicting the number of beatings administered by high-school bullies.
Look more carefully at the big picture before spouting off the party line....
I think YOU are the person who needs to practice the above. The fact that XP is "intended" (as divined by you) for "desktop use" by secretaries outlines a comparative lack of importance of security as compared, say, to an OS designed for "backend server systems" carrying out (presumably) enterprise-level operations.
Sure, maybe I don't see many secretaries choosing "what boot level to start up in the morning" (huh?), but if I have a choice between losing my secretariy's machine, and my department's finance or Oracle server, which would I choose ? If anything, the supposed relegation of XP to the desktop makes it LESS important that there exists the same gaping hole that exists in Linux.
You can do the same thing to Linux with a boot floppy.
/.'s other beloved OS, OS X) is irrelevant here, as neither vulnerability outlines the crappiness of Windows.
You do realize, I hope, that the fact that Linux is, and has always been, vulnerable to a boot disk "attack" (just like
traditional web projects are structured to leave at least one of the parties taking a big risk ... see whether the authors have successfully outlined a fairer, more successful system
I don't understand what is unfair about the supposed existing system. One of two parties, both of whom willingly enter into a contract, supposedly exposes itself to more risk: so what ? If the company is smart, it takes on that extra risk in the hopes that it will be able to realize a larger reward.
The point is that both parties enter into the contract willingly and freely. So what can be unfair about that ?
The first thing that'd happen would be that pepsi.com, pepsi.net, and pepsi.org would be obsolete since .pepsi would be run by PepsiCo.
.com, .net, or .org ?
Forgetting the issue of whether or not your plan could work, the last thing your plan would do is free the namespace because PepsiCo is never going to feel their domain is obsolete because there always exists the possibility that some guy is going to go to pepsi.com. You really think pepsi would ever give up the
Why, the author asks, do makers of controller cards put all their BIOS utilities on DOS floppies which require us to find a DOS boot disk? Seriously, how many of us carry around DOS boot disks nowadays?
Well, given Dell's recent announcements, I suppose fewer and fewer of us will be doing so.
But really, the author's point is so moot that it's embarassing: if it's my job to maintain a RAID array, and the utilities are on DOS floppies, of course I'm going to have access to a DOS boot disk. So what ? Just how hard is it to carry such a thing around, and why is this is a worthy thing to rail about, in a book about RAID ? If the author wastes too much time talking about stuff like this, this book can't be that useful - arggh, I've wasted too much of my own time already.
Can't they just use make-believe places and situations? I find this kind of stuff offensive.
No kidding. Imagine the hell that would be raised if someone came out with a mod pack that lets you run squads of Israeli stormtroopers to squash Palestinian uprisings, conversely if you could play small squads of Palestinians to take out key Israeli civilian targets, or if you could deploy Arab sappers/bombers/engineers to take out key city buildings.
What are these plans going to do about all the spammers operating off-shore, or even just in the next state ?
But is the remote infrared or RF, and if the former, is there a receiver that can be mounted on your desk ? Because I sure as hell can't stand pointing my remote under my desk.
And is there a headphone jack that extends to the desktop ?
For my money, the best thing I've seen was the external box on the Creative Audigy Ex. All the ports you need, right on your desk, with a wireless remote. Wish the Audigy2 had the Ex model when I bought mine. Of course, it matters less now that I've sworn off gaming, but that's another story.
You'd have to be bananias to use one.
Does this mean I have to start buying cloths again instead of getting them at trade shows?
On the other hand, while you might not be getting your clothes at Comdex, you are proportionately less likely to get beat up on the street for wearing said clothes and so baldly advertising your geekiness.
Who wins? Who loses?
I guess the answer depends on whether the person being asked the question is American or not, doesn't it ?
How would people feel if someone wrote some magical piece of software that prevented users from having to view annoying copyright- and authorship- nag banners and notices that appear while running software ?
Linux has 'issues', I'm willing to deal with them because it's free. If it cost $800 I'd laugh and ask for a refund.
Ahh, but would you laugh and ask for a refund when one of those Linux issues turns up on a >$800 computer ?
Why would someone want a digital camera integrated in their PDA?
Because it would mean I wouldn't need to tote around a digital camera to take those quickie pictures of the girl on the train who's picking her nose ? Because people who carry PDAs have them with them all the time, and might not always have their digital camera with them when something interesting happens ?
For many people, one of the biggest reason to buy Sony products is the memory stick. So many of their products use them now and they're all neatly integrated. I, for instance, have a digital voice recorder and mini-dv cam that all use the memory stick, and if I had to go buy a digital camera, notebook, or desktop, it sure would be appealing to get one that could also use these memory sticks.
I'm not aware of many desktops, let alone notebooks that ship with CompactFlash or smartmedia built in, but I do know the Sonys all have them.
The retailers are starting to get a clue but still have a long way to go as evidenced by 'Recording companies make the music...' and 'We are in the customer relationship business.'"
The silly demonizing of the record companies is really getting counter productive. In a strict sense, of course, the recording companies don't "make" the music (of course the artists do, but under contract), just like software companies don't "make" the software (their programmers do, under contract), and just like home-building companies don't "make" the homes (the construction workers do also under employment contract).
But it is a useful shorthand to say all of the above. Without the record companies the vast majority of songs that get traded so happily on P2P networks would never have made it to rippable CDs in the first place (as an aside, I always found the usage of the term "rip" in this context to be somewhat revealing).
And the poster's implied distinction between the record companies and the people who "made" the music suggests that the artists are uniformly against the record companies and their efforts in this area. P2P advocates are being flat-out chauvinistic if they think that all artists - or maybe even a majority - disagree with the RIAA's stands. It irks me when I see a few artists' views trotted out with the implicit assumption that their views are representative...what's the real big picture ?
To be sure, there is a vocal group, but I wonder whether they're getting disproportionate press precisely because they're arguing something more controversial - you never hear about Metallica complaining about P2P anymore, because it's just boring and it seems obvious.
Has anyone conducted polls of major artists to see where they stand and how they feel about the RIAA ? I'm not talking about disenfranchised had-their-day-in-the-sun-more-than-a-decade-ago artists (*cough*Janis Ian*cough*) and I'm not talking about little independent artists who probably secretly would *love* to get a big record deal if they could - what about a survey of artists in the Billboard 100, or artists with the best selling CDs in the last 10 years, or the top 100 artists traded on Kazaa/Gnutella...or some other reasonably objective criteria that defines a sample of artists under contract to record companies represented by theRIAA ?
What is needed here is hard, representative statistics, not agenda-laden anecdotes that fit whatever story happens to be convenient with the story-teller's philosophy.
Didn't they do the same thing a few years back by posting versions of their songs on Napster with some sort of nag-message in the middle ?
As far as I'm concerned, if it works, it's a good thing. Half the argument here is how P2P shouldn't be held back because it affects independent bands who are trying to operate without the RIAA. This kind of activity wouldn't affect such bands at all.
If it was became more and more difficult to share RIAA-covered material via P2P, then the independent bands we keep hearing about will have more currency on the P2P networks, while RIAA-covered material should be somewhat disadvantaged.
And then we'd all have an opportunity to see whether or not these independent artists are generally less commercially successful than their RIAA brethren because they lack something the RIAA provides, like marketing muscle, or whether they're less commercially successful because they're not good enough to get snapped up by major labels.
Can anybody who hangs out at these places heavy on clan gaming comment on the racial profile of customers ? In the old days, when I used to MUD, 95% of the people were Asian. Is there a disproportionate number of Asians (i.e. a greater proportion then Asians are represented in the surrounding population) in these places -forgetting, of course, the places located in Asia ? I'm betting there is, and if so, I wonder what this could mean ...