Nice of you to be so gracious as to be willing to shake the hand of those american darkies. You're own statements show your bigotry. Those sailors can walk your streets because your own people aren't able to provide for your defense as adequately. After all, who ever worried about the Aussie fleet sailing at them? But those same american darkies out of uniform would likely get the cold shoulder from one such as you.
I think you've taken the comment entirely out of context. The parent didn't say anything worthy of eliciting that response.
The Americans were not in Sydney harbour protecting the country, they were here on shore leave.
The reason that most Aussies would have talked to the American sailors in uniform is because they knew they were tourists. Not only are Australians mostly genuinely nice people, they like visitors to their country. Most tourists do not walk round Sydney in uniform, and as such do not stand out as much.
I'm assuming you're trolling, because when it comes down to the crunch AU has always been at the side of US and vice versa. Aussies are certainly not ones to turn a cold shoulder to someone because of the colour of their skin.
As for who ever worried about the Aussie fleet sailing after them, it's the US Govt that have been bugging us for technical information on our Collins Class subs.
Is it just me, or does Australia simply rule? It seems that they make a sensible thing after a sensible thing, seem to be enthusiastic on the Linux front, and generally kick ass? Will Australia be a leading ICT power after a while? US is, well, US and EU seems to be very slow in it's movement.
And as far as spammers go, I wouldn't blink an eye if they were thrown into a pound-me-in-the-ass prison in Siberia. They abuse the "freedom of speech" to make soem easy profit while harrassing general populace, while the freedom of speech that matters is generally not a problem unless you search for such information.
Watch out son, you just laid out a very big troll bait. You might not be able to handle what you're about to hook!
I'm an Aussie, and despite the oncoming wave of complaints about the Government and Telstra, it is a great place to live, and pretty-well IT minded. No, we're not South Korea, but broadband take up has just started accelerating at quite a pace, we've got an excellent mobile and landline network and all the capitals have cable in one form or another.
Every day I am reminded about how fortunate we are that our government by and large is not in the pockets of big corporations. This article on Wired really opened my eyes yesterday. The very thought of a Bank over here selling your details is unfathomable; good legislation is partly responsible, but I don't imagine many people would do it even if that wasn't in place. That a state is having to fight for this level of privacy (and having difficulty doing it) just floors me.
And the "do not call" register that the US has had to set up. My god, is it really that bad over there?
10M songs? Yeah, but it's only 0.99 per song, so that's less than $10M. IIRC, Apple keeps about a third of that, so ~$3M.
How much did it cost to program, to feed the lawyers to get all the contracts, to set up the servers/bandwidth needed? (And the Apple Store is *fast*- they didn't skimp here.)
I can't imagine this is going to have a big positive impact on Apple's bottom line, unless (and it's a big unless) the publicity they are getting sells more Macs/iPods. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the sole reason they are bothering.
All those costs you talk about are fixed costs.
In other words, when this is deployed to Windows (the other 95% of the computer using population) - it will suddenly make up a lot more than 10 mill in revenue. It will go spastic.
That will in turn encourage iPod sales, and those iPod sales will in turn encourage more music store purchases. Then they can start the real cross-pollination; "buy an iPod, get 10 free songs at the Apple Music Store".
If enough people start doing it, it's gonna hit a critical mass then just explode. The only risk Apple faces is if MS/whoever starts eating Apple's dinner. OTOH, very few of the other solutions will work with the world's most popular MP3 player - the iPod.
-- james
Re:I just started using Bluetooth
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I must have mis-spelt a HREF tag on that post - it's Address Book, located here that lets you do the SMSing and dialling, etc.
While I'm at it, I guess it would be pretty hard not to mention Salling Clicker, the most awesome little Bluetooth app I've seen. You can effectively control your mac through your phone because of this - it can run scripts to do all kinds of stuff, from presentations to controlling iTunes and DVD player. You can create more scripts through AppleScript too. The sky is the limit!:)
-- james
Re:I just started using Bluetooth
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Interesting that these machines use Bluetooth. My Thinkpad has bluetooth built in and I've just picked up a Bluetooth phone (Nokia 6310i). Bluetooth is *really* slick. I love not having to get my phone out of my bag to check contacts or sync with my address book. I can send SMS messages from my computer via Mobile Master again without having to locate my phone or punch text into a keyboard not designed for it.
I'm now very seriously considering getting a car speaker set for my vehicle and I'm certain my next PDA will have bluetooth. My next laptop will probably be a Powerbook and I hope they have bluetooth built in by then because I'm going to want it. It's one of those nifty technologies you wonder why you didn't bother with before.
Oh, if you do have a Nokia phone, their Nokia Connection Manager software is a bit hit/miss as to whether it will work with a given bluetooth device. Doesn't work with my T30 but I've been able to work around it. YMMV.
Bluetooth is standard on the 12 inch and 17 inch powerbooks; you have to buy an adaptor to use it on the 15 inch ones, but everyone expects that will change at MacWorld Paris.
The BT integration in OS X is fantastic. It works with a lot of different devices, and all the functionality that you talk about in your post is built in - no third party tools required. iSync syncs contacts via Bluetooth (and for your iPod etc, just not wireless:) and lets you do the SMSing and dialling/answering from the computer.
The other cool thing is connecting via GPRS via Bluetooth. You can have a semi-fast totally wireless connection without even getting your phone out of your bag, just your computer.
Cupertino, California--September 8, 2003--Apple(R) today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over ten million songs from the iTunes(R) Music Store since its launch just over four months ago, averaging over 500,000 songs per week. The ten millionth song, "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, was purchased and downloaded at 11:34 p.m. (PDT) on September 3.
The combination of the iTunes digital music jukebox, the pioneering iTunes Music Store and the market-leading iPod(TM) digital music player provide users with a complete solution for buying, managing and listening to their digital music collections anywhere. The iTunes Music Store will be available to Windows users by the end of this year.
"Legally selling ten million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Apple offers the only complete solution for digital music with iTunes and the amazing iPod, which now holds 10,000 songs in your pocket."
"We are honored and grateful to be one of the top selling artists in the iTunes Music Store," said Chris Martin, singer/songwriter of the Grammy-award winning band Coldplay. "It's clear Apple has delivered a working and successful platform for music fans to discover artists and purchase both albums and single songs instantly with ease. We embrace these efforts enthusiastically and see them as the future of our business."
The revolutionary online music store offers songs from major and independent music labels, groundbreaking personal use rights, and one-click download directly into Apple's integrated digital jukebox software, iTunes--all for just 99 cents per song. Users can listen to free 30-second previews of any song in the store, then purchase and download their favorite songs or complete albums in pristine digital quality. Songs can be burned at no extra cost onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, played on up to three computers, and listened to on an unlimited number of iPods.
How many of these cases have to be thrown out before people figure out they're not going to win?
In the US? A lot.
One of the things that I dislike most of all about the US is people's propensity to go out and start suing when things don't go exactly how they want. Sometimes, life sucks. Can't sue god? Find someone else with deep pockets.
I think people need to stop trying to get their lawyers to find somebody else to hold accountable for their own actions. It was like that McDonald's law suit. I eat McDonald's every damn day, I get fat, and then because I chose to eat McDonald's, they should pay for my obesity.
BZZZT. Wrong answer. This country needs a bit of accountability thrown back into it. Cleaning out the legal system to stop these baseless lawsuits would be a damn good place to start.
Ha ha! After reading the description of "pakistani/indian/arab", I'm betting that the person whose job it was to look after these things didn't see anybody at all.
Tell an Australian that a person from any one of these three sub-cultures stole something, they'll instantly believe you.
Here comes the part where people's excuse is that it's a joint effort, unable to be pinpointed as a "Linux hole." What does that mean? Nobody gets blame because a lot of people contribute? A lot of people contribute to Microsoft as well. They're just behind the moniker of a company label.
Rather than excuse Linux, I think the people hate these MS warnings most of all because MS-users, unlike most Linux users, don't patch their systems. What normally ensues within a couple of weeks of the vulnerabilities is some exploit wreaks absolute havoc with the internet.
If MS gets the patch out the door, and everyone installs it before some script-kiddie can exploit it, then who really cares? It's a pain downloading all the patches, but that would be the extent of the problem.
Instead, the horde of zombies kills the internet. We've only just recovered from the last attack.
Four of the 40 lawsuits in San Jose are due to go to trial next month. All the suits are being watched extremely closely by the semiconductor industry, which had been warned for years that chip-making and other processes requiring the use of tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals (such as Rob Malda's manseeking semen) might be associated with cancers, miscarriages, birth defects and other very serious health problems.
Informative? Informative?
What are these moderators smoking?
Whoever modded that Informative - I have some bad news for you. Unfortunately, your own moderation is unable to get modded +1, Funny.
Not only a nice prank, but may be of some help to the poster.
Hit Control+Alt+Apple+the star on the num pad. It will switch your display into grayscale and invert it. Under MacOS X 10.3 you will have to press Control+Alt+Apple+8
It obviously won't leave everything else as a normal colour, but you'll get your white text on black background. Hope that helps some!
This also allows any international company to politely ask SCO to send the licensing request to their German IT department. Or move the IT department mailing address to Germany for the same reason.
So any "licensing" request can be directly forwarded to court and converted to a payment request.
IANAL, but that tactic would not work. Different countries have different laws - say, for example, that SCO was successful in the US. An American company could not try to sidestep it by telling them to send it to Germany, as the US subsidiary is bound by US Law.
there's a lot of performance to be sucked out of the G5s yet.
A lot of programs are yet to be at all tweaked for the G5s. There are a couple of new processor functions (hardware square root for instance) that may bring big gains. Also, there are old functions from the G4 that slow down the G5. Check out Apple's G5 performance primer. I read that the changes are enough to make the guy who made the mac rc5 engine want to re-write it for the G5 (no simple tweaks). He was hoping to get by with just some minor tinkering, but the chip does require a lot more than that to take advantage of it's potential.
In that post, a guy called Richard from the Maxon development labs says this:
"OK, some news directly from the MAXON development lab:
Of course all the following numbers are not final, no promise at all !!!!!!!
This is based on the information we have right, now, there is still a of of work to do and we still have to wait for a new compiler...
With the current CineBench a single G5 1.8GHz scores at about 188, the optimized version will maybe score at about 238...
A hypothetical single G5 2.0GHz could score at about 210 on the old CB, optimized could be 265...
A dual G5 2.0 could maybe score at about 480 with the optimized version of CB....
Depending on the new compilers and our findings (thanks a lot to Apple for being extremely helpful and cooperative) we might even crack the 500 score for the dual G5 2GHz...
Again, no promise and of course no release date;)
Cheers, Richard"
This compares to a 1.8ghz G5 score that I've seen of 188. Which means they're aiming to get a fair bit out of optimisation for the chip. Just as a means of further comparison... http://www.imashination.com/bench.h tml
You'll see the top score these people have recorded is for a dual Xeon 2.4ghz - with a score of 502. If the G5s make it up to over 500, that says a lot about the chip.
Finally, you've also got to include a mention of the compilers. Whilst some optimisation has been made to GCC, the GCC guys rejected a whole heap of improvements for the G5 because they were too platform specific. There's a good thread over at Ars Technica that discusses some pretty big gains when using the IBM XLC compiler. Other Mac-specific compilers should yield some pretty awesome gains too.
So, in summary - take these scores with a grain of salt. They're just the beginning.
There was an office manager where I worked who had absolutely no idea. He just happened to be the brother-in-law of one of the Directors of the organisation (an ISP).
Other than having a propensity to open up every infected email he received (the best one was when he sent "I Love You" to all the employees), he did some other things that were pretty stupid. My favourite, however was when one of our bigger clients needed to talk to him about something. We looked all round the office, and couldn't find him, so we suggested to the client that they called him. The boss answered the phone, and they had a conversation about whatever it was that was required, though there was a really bad echo on the line. The disucssion was, however, suddenly punctuated by quite a loud "plop!", as if something was dropped into a bowl of water. It then dawned on the client why nobody could find him when we went looking.
He was on the crapper!
This guy had answered his mobile phone to one of our largest clients, while sitting on the john! The client had called the manager in front of us, and we wondered why he at first went bright red and then broke down in laughter.
He didn't tell us what had happened until later.
-- james
Re:You kicked my dog...
on
Dotcom Era Fads
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Does the prank call from the Paki guy accusing some chick of kicking his dog fall into this category? It certainly did at the place where I worked at the time - we roamed the halls shouting "You kicked my dog" and "I am going to sue you". To this day, my friends and I shout "YOU TRY TO CONFUSE" at each other. "Just because I'm Paki does not mean I stink".
Gee... I would have thought that most people had moved on from Napster to BitTorrent, KAZAA or eDonkey/Overnet
they have. that's the point. they've taken their music with them to the new services. the checksums on the mp3s don't change, however.
either everyone is using the same encoder with the same settings, or there must be quite a large element of piracy going on here. If the RIAA are getting joy from using checksums, then it means that a small number of files are being distributed a lot, as opposed to lots of people buying their own and ripping a new version (hence seeding lots of versions of the same song).
this does bring up one interesting issue for the RIAA though - what happens if the woman downloaded the song, went out and then went out and bought it. she may have still left the song available for download for others, but it would make for a nasty case for them PR-wise if they're trying to ping someone who actually does own the music.
Obviously a troll, but I'd say my criteria is "self awareness." That's all that is important.
I know what you're trying to say, but how do you tell when a machine has become self-aware?
Rampancy is the most commonly touted method, but I'm not sure it's all that accurate. That, or someone released an AI with a predisposition to finding out "My Details" and saying "Thank You" via email an awful lot.
this is/., so more than likely I'm going to get modded down for this.
one of the biggest plusses linux has got going for it is that it is free. this substantially reduces the cost of putting it on a machine - especially when couple with a DIY roll-it-yourself desktop.
I don't know how many people have tried assembling their own laptops. Not many, I'd venture. So, more than likely, you're going to have to buy one. As a general rule of thumb, they're not cheap - nowhere near ballpark for a cheap PC.
So the only reason I can think of to use Linux on a laptop (once you eliminate the value factor) is because it's *nix, or maybe just because it's not MS.
And when that becomes your primary motivation, why on earth would you look anywhere else other than Apple to get a laptop? These are the sleekest laptops out there - they're running an OS based on *nix and it's not MS to boot. There's hardware-software integration the likes of which would send this "scorecard" through the roof. And the hardware is just phenomenal - the new Powerbooks are some of the best laptops you can buy; the screens rock, Airport Extreme, great battery life, Firewire 800, bluetooth built in.
I guess this is why Apple portable machines are turning up at all the Linux conferences (and the traditional Linux markets, like Bioinfomatics and Java programmers). So - begs the question - what relevance does the Linux on laptops scorecard have?
Perhaps instead of "boxers or briefs," our next presidential candidate will have to answer "POP3 or IMAP?"
This reminds me of a question that a kid popped Al Gore in the last election - Mac or PC. Gore dodged the question. Kinda funny seeing he's now elected to Apple's board:)
Anyway, as for a techie vote, ha! Trying to get techs to agree on anything is always a challenge. How many flavours of Linux are there? And talking of flavour, how do we spell it again?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've got it the wrong way round. After this plays out, it's not going to be the kids scared of the RIAA reps.
It's gonna be the RIAA reps scared of kids.
-- james
The article is summed up by the last line:
"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud."
From here I can already see Bill O'Reilly on his soap box, and I live in Australia.
-- james
I think you've taken the comment entirely out of context. The parent didn't say anything worthy of eliciting that response.
The Americans were not in Sydney harbour protecting the country, they were here on shore leave.
The reason that most Aussies would have talked to the American sailors in uniform is because they knew they were tourists. Not only are Australians mostly genuinely nice people, they like visitors to their country. Most tourists do not walk round Sydney in uniform, and as such do not stand out as much.
I'm assuming you're trolling, because when it comes down to the crunch AU has always been at the side of US and vice versa. Aussies are certainly not ones to turn a cold shoulder to someone because of the colour of their skin.
As for who ever worried about the Aussie fleet sailing after them, it's the US Govt that have been bugging us for technical information on our Collins Class subs.
Watch out son, you just laid out a very big troll bait. You might not be able to handle what you're about to hook!
I'm an Aussie, and despite the oncoming wave of complaints about the Government and Telstra, it is a great place to live, and pretty-well IT minded. No, we're not South Korea, but broadband take up has just started accelerating at quite a pace, we've got an excellent mobile and landline network and all the capitals have cable in one form or another.
Every day I am reminded about how fortunate we are that our government by and large is not in the pockets of big corporations. This article on Wired really opened my eyes yesterday. The very thought of a Bank over here selling your details is unfathomable; good legislation is partly responsible, but I don't imagine many people would do it even if that wasn't in place. That a state is having to fight for this level of privacy (and having difficulty doing it) just floors me.
And the "do not call" register that the US has had to set up. My god, is it really that bad over there?
-- james
All those costs you talk about are fixed costs.
In other words, when this is deployed to Windows (the other 95% of the computer using population) - it will suddenly make up a lot more than 10 mill in revenue. It will go spastic.
That will in turn encourage iPod sales, and those iPod sales will in turn encourage more music store purchases. Then they can start the real cross-pollination; "buy an iPod, get 10 free songs at the Apple Music Store".
If enough people start doing it, it's gonna hit a critical mass then just explode. The only risk Apple faces is if MS/whoever starts eating Apple's dinner. OTOH, very few of the other solutions will work with the world's most popular MP3 player - the iPod.
-- james
I must have mis-spelt a HREF tag on that post - it's Address Book, located here that lets you do the SMSing and dialling, etc.
:)
While I'm at it, I guess it would be pretty hard not to mention Salling Clicker, the most awesome little Bluetooth app I've seen. You can effectively control your mac through your phone because of this - it can run scripts to do all kinds of stuff, from presentations to controlling iTunes and DVD player. You can create more scripts through AppleScript too. The sky is the limit!
-- james
Bluetooth is standard on the 12 inch and 17 inch powerbooks; you have to buy an adaptor to use it on the 15 inch ones, but everyone expects that will change at MacWorld Paris.
The BT integration in OS X is fantastic. It works with a lot of different devices, and all the functionality that you talk about in your post is built in - no third party tools required. iSync syncs contacts via Bluetooth (and for your iPod etc, just not wireless
The other cool thing is connecting via GPRS via Bluetooth. You can have a semi-fast totally wireless connection without even getting your phone out of your bag, just your computer.
-- james
this was the other big piece of Apple news today:
t ore.html
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/sep/08musics
iTunes Music Store Sells Ten Millionth Song
Cupertino, California--September 8, 2003--Apple(R) today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over ten million songs from the iTunes(R) Music Store since its launch just over four months ago, averaging over 500,000 songs per week. The ten millionth song, "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, was purchased and downloaded at 11:34 p.m. (PDT) on September 3.
The combination of the iTunes digital music jukebox, the pioneering iTunes Music Store and the market-leading iPod(TM) digital music player provide users with a complete solution for buying, managing and listening to their digital music collections anywhere. The iTunes Music Store will be available to Windows users by the end of this year.
"Legally selling ten million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Apple offers the only complete solution for digital music with iTunes and the amazing iPod, which now holds 10,000 songs in your pocket."
"We are honored and grateful to be one of the top selling artists in the iTunes Music Store," said Chris Martin, singer/songwriter of the Grammy-award winning band Coldplay. "It's clear Apple has delivered a working and successful platform for music fans to discover artists and purchase both albums and single songs instantly with ease. We embrace these efforts enthusiastically and see them as the future of our business."
The revolutionary online music store offers songs from major and independent music labels, groundbreaking personal use rights, and one-click download directly into Apple's integrated digital jukebox software, iTunes--all for just 99 cents per song. Users can listen to free 30-second previews of any song in the store, then purchase and download their favorite songs or complete albums in pristine digital quality. Songs can be burned at no extra cost onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, played on up to three computers, and listened to on an unlimited number of iPods.
In the US? A lot.
One of the things that I dislike most of all about the US is people's propensity to go out and start suing when things don't go exactly how they want. Sometimes, life sucks. Can't sue god? Find someone else with deep pockets.
I think people need to stop trying to get their lawyers to find somebody else to hold accountable for their own actions. It was like that McDonald's law suit. I eat McDonald's every damn day, I get fat, and then because I chose to eat McDonald's, they should pay for my obesity.
BZZZT. Wrong answer. This country needs a bit of accountability thrown back into it. Cleaning out the legal system to stop these baseless lawsuits would be a damn good place to start.
-- james
Ha ha! After reading the description of "pakistani/indian/arab", I'm betting that the person whose job it was to look after these things didn't see anybody at all.
Tell an Australian that a person from any one of these three sub-cultures stole something, they'll instantly believe you.
-- james
Rather than excuse Linux, I think the people hate these MS warnings most of all because MS-users, unlike most Linux users, don't patch their systems. What normally ensues within a couple of weeks of the vulnerabilities is some exploit wreaks absolute havoc with the internet.
If MS gets the patch out the door, and everyone installs it before some script-kiddie can exploit it, then who really cares? It's a pain downloading all the patches, but that would be the extent of the problem.
Instead, the horde of zombies kills the internet. We've only just recovered from the last attack.
-- james
oops, my bad. I now realise that a parent troll was trying to have a laugh at our expense
-- james
Informative? Informative?
What are these moderators smoking?
Whoever modded that Informative - I have some bad news for you. Unfortunately, your own moderation is unable to get modded +1, Funny.
Sorry. No karma for you.
-- james
Not only a nice prank, but may be of some help to the poster.
Hit Control+Alt+Apple+the star on the num pad. It will switch your display into grayscale and invert it. Under MacOS X 10.3 you will have to press Control+Alt+Apple+8
It obviously won't leave everything else as a normal colour, but you'll get your white text on black background. Hope that helps some!
-- james
IANAL, but that tactic would not work. Different countries have different laws - say, for example, that SCO was successful in the US. An American company could not try to sidestep it by telling them to send it to Germany, as the US subsidiary is bound by US Law.
-- james
A lot of programs are yet to be at all tweaked for the G5s. There are a couple of new processor functions (hardware square root for instance) that may bring big gains. Also, there are old functions from the G4 that slow down the G5. Check out Apple's G5 performance primer. I read that the changes are enough to make the guy who made the mac rc5 engine want to re-write it for the G5 (no simple tweaks). He was hoping to get by with just some minor tinkering, but the chip does require a lot more than that to take advantage of it's potential.
Let me take another example; regarding CineBench.
http://www.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=6&i=87
In that post, a guy called Richard from the Maxon development labs says this:
This compares to a 1.8ghz G5 score that I've seen of 188. Which means they're aiming to get a fair bit out of optimisation for the chip. Just as a means of further comparison...
http://www.imashination.com/bench.
You'll see the top score these people have recorded is for a dual Xeon 2.4ghz - with a score of 502. If the G5s make it up to over 500, that says a lot about the chip.
Finally, you've also got to include a mention of the compilers. Whilst some optimisation has been made to GCC, the GCC guys rejected a whole heap of improvements for the G5 because they were too platform specific. There's a good thread over at Ars Technica that discusses some pretty big gains when using the IBM XLC compiler. Other Mac-specific compilers should yield some pretty awesome gains too.
So, in summary - take these scores with a grain of salt. They're just the beginning.
-- james
There was an office manager where I worked who had absolutely no idea. He just happened to be the brother-in-law of one of the Directors of the organisation (an ISP).
Other than having a propensity to open up every infected email he received (the best one was when he sent "I Love You" to all the employees), he did some other things that were pretty stupid. My favourite, however was when one of our bigger clients needed to talk to him about something. We looked all round the office, and couldn't find him, so we suggested to the client that they called him. The boss answered the phone, and they had a conversation about whatever it was that was required, though there was a really bad echo on the line. The disucssion was, however, suddenly punctuated by quite a loud "plop!", as if something was dropped into a bowl of water. It then dawned on the client why nobody could find him when we went looking.
He was on the crapper!
This guy had answered his mobile phone to one of our largest clients, while sitting on the john! The client had called the manager in front of us, and we wondered why he at first went bright red and then broke down in laughter.
He didn't tell us what had happened until later.
-- james
I don't remember that one, so I looked it up
http://www.funnyjunk.com/pages/mydog.htm
It's a shockwave file, and it's not bad. Not bad at all
-- james
they have. that's the point. they've taken their music with them to the new services. the checksums on the mp3s don't change, however.
either everyone is using the same encoder with the same settings, or there must be quite a large element of piracy going on here. If the RIAA are getting joy from using checksums, then it means that a small number of files are being distributed a lot, as opposed to lots of people buying their own and ripping a new version (hence seeding lots of versions of the same song).
this does bring up one interesting issue for the RIAA though - what happens if the woman downloaded the song, went out and then went out and bought it. she may have still left the song available for download for others, but it would make for a nasty case for them PR-wise if they're trying to ping someone who actually does own the music.
-- james
... they provide you with a near weekly reminded of why you shouldn't use Windows! ;)
-- james
"Will the future of space exploration be dominated by names other than Russia and the USA?"
WTF? Where did this line come from?
It didn't even get off the launch pad!
-- james
this is /., so more than likely I'm going to get modded down for this.
one of the biggest plusses linux has got going for it is that it is free. this substantially reduces the cost of putting it on a machine - especially when couple with a DIY roll-it-yourself desktop.
I don't know how many people have tried assembling their own laptops. Not many, I'd venture. So, more than likely, you're going to have to buy one. As a general rule of thumb, they're not cheap - nowhere near ballpark for a cheap PC.
So the only reason I can think of to use Linux on a laptop (once you eliminate the value factor) is because it's *nix, or maybe just because it's not MS.
And when that becomes your primary motivation, why on earth would you look anywhere else other than Apple to get a laptop? These are the sleekest laptops out there - they're running an OS based on *nix and it's not MS to boot. There's hardware-software integration the likes of which would send this "scorecard" through the roof. And the hardware is just phenomenal - the new Powerbooks are some of the best laptops you can buy; the screens rock, Airport Extreme, great battery life, Firewire 800, bluetooth built in.
I guess this is why Apple portable machines are turning up at all the Linux conferences (and the traditional Linux markets, like Bioinfomatics and Java programmers). So - begs the question - what relevance does the Linux on laptops scorecard have?
-- james
This reminds me of a question that a kid popped Al Gore in the last election - Mac or PC. Gore dodged the question. Kinda funny seeing he's now elected to Apple's board
Anyway, as for a techie vote, ha! Trying to get techs to agree on anything is always a challenge. How many flavours of Linux are there? And talking of flavour, how do we spell it again?
-- james
1. quit day job
2. play computer games.
3. ???
4. profit!