Okay, don't buy one. Apple's responsibility is not to you, the hacke
I'm always amazed when someone makes it clear they're not going to buy something because they consider it unattractive for a variety of reasons, only to get a response "Ok, don't buy one".
The GP was pretty clear it wasn't a phone he was likely to buy. Why respond as if he was?
Apple is releasing an SDK which means companies other than Apple will be able to develop for iPhone. It does not mean you will be able to get your application onto an iPhone without Apple's permission; most of the speculation on the issue, and public announcements from Apple, have suggested the opposite - that the iPhone will only run applications that Apple approves.
Ok, looks like I misread that. I thought you were comparing combo discs to regular discs, rather than HD-DVD combo discs to Blu-ray combo discs (does anyone even make those?) Sorry about that.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks are about as reliable as one another. Blu-ray disc manufacturers use a protective coating to ensure reliability, whereas HD-DVD discs don't require it as they don't store data as close to the surface. The net affect is both are about the same.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray both use the same blue-violet lasers. The drives are not "cheaper to make", they're close to identical except for the differences you'd expect from slightly different formats designed by two groups aiming to do the same thing. HD-DVD discs are cheaper to make, although dollar-per-megabyte they come close in price. But the drives have no price advantage. I'm not sure why you think combo discs would be cheaper than regular discs, as you imply above, but a combo disc costs about what you'd expect a double-sided HD-DVD to cost.
Production HD-DVD does not contain 51GB. Production HD-DVD is still two layer. Three layers is coming, but there's some debate as to whether existing players will support it, and that's holding up production use. Three layer HD-DVD is coming, but lay off the word "production" until it actually goes into production, ok?
1. Install Windows XP SP3 or better, or Vista, on your PC. Ensure your system has a Core 2 Duo 3GHz or better, or equivalent.
2. If you haven't already, install Microsoft's.NET Runtime version 3 or better.
3. Install MyConvert 3.72b or better. Make sure you download the beta. You'll also need to find WIN32CRT.DLL, VB64RT6.DLL, and DECSS.DLL - copy these to your WINDOWS SYSTEM32 directory. Also install VBMP3LIB.OCX and LIBDOTGSM4.VBX, and copy them to the same directory to installed MyCovert 3.72b. I usually find a Google search will find repositories that include these files.
4. Have a play with MyConvert 3.72b. Note you have to press the big "OPEN" button to give it focus before you can actually press it to activate it. The OPEN button is the one that has a large "O" with a picture of a pen inside it. This will bring up the custom file selector which looks a bit like an iPod. From "Sources", highlight "MAME", then select "2600", "Speaker", "Audio", "\devices\system\audio\by-uid\0011-20494931-3185891928172-9321" (the middle seven digits will change depending on your system set up.)
5. Finally, plug an Atari 2600 into your TV, hold the phone near the TV speaker, plug the ET game in, switch it on, and on boot, record the noise it makes with your phone. Use your phone's "Use as ringtone" feature to make this your ring tone.
The publishers are providing you with a service, and it is akin to a rental and not unreasonable to describe it as one. Further, calling it a rental makes your point for you - end users know that their rights to the content are limited.
This isn't like DVD where you have bought something but little known to the average consumer is the fact you can go to prison for watching it on a computer running GNU/Linux and VLC. There's a difference in expectations. You expect a rental to be limited. You expect a purchase to be unrestricted (beyond what reasonable copyright law allows.)
The major problems with HD DVD and Blu-ray have little to do with the customer's desire to have HD or not.
Both are having problems because:
People are worried, justifiably, that whichever they buy will be the one that loses the HD war.
Both formats are only now beginning to have serious libraries available, and even then the refusal of most studios to support both means that both Blu-ray and HD DVD have libraries far smaller than they should have.
HDTVs have only started selling in the last year or so. Even owners of big screen TVs frequently have rear-projection sets that don't do HD. HDTVs that are large enough for HD video to be a serious advantage over ED (DVD) are still generally in the four digit dollar value range.
There is additional confusion because the format war has been damaged by the rival camps trying to devalue the other formats rather than focusing on the advantages of HD in general and their formats in particular, which slightly feeds into your point, but in any case I think it's too early to describe either as market failures. HDTV sales will push HD content demand. Anyone who's seen the difference between ATSC HD and SD (NTSC or ATSC) on a modern 32" (or better) LCD TV wants something as close to HD as possible.
Whether they'll both fail in the market will depend on whether other sources of HD content become acceptable, such as HD movie downloads. In the short term, ED will suffice; in the long term, if the movie download services don't (eventually) support 1080p24 at minimum, one or both HD disc formats will supplant DVD.
Absolutely! I also heard that two companies are being formed, called Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, that will actually try to rent out temporary copies of movies using a protection scheme that involves the customer giving the movie back before the end of the rental period.
What idiots! They must think it's impossible to make a permanent copy of the media before it's returned! Don't they realize that virtually everyone will simply do that in future?!
I give both companies six months before they fold.
Since when did "free trade" translate into an abandonment of sovereignty in favor of having an unelected global organization dictate national policy?
Ok, ok, another "sovereignty" argument.
Let me put it like this: What do you think Antigua's usual incentive is for respecting US copyrights?
They're a small country. They have very little cultural output of their own. They have no good reason to ratify things like the Berne Convention, and if they have, they have little reason to take any notice of it - other countries have more to lose than they do if Antigua ignores foreign copyrights and other countries decide to ignore Antigua's.
What this WTO decision means is that Antigua is going to temporarily ignore laws that it wouldn't have respected at all if the WTO didn't exist. So who's sovereignty was being attacked again?
I can't tell if you're serious, but here goes. 60 calories is the TOTAL BURNED for the Wii-hour, not the INCREASE.
The article, which is what I'm making fun of, says it's the increase.
If you didn't understand I was ridiculing the article, then sorry about that. If you did, then no, you've misread the lazy, idiotic, journalism that I'm criticizing. It quite specifically says 60 calories "more" per hour
No one here, or really anywhere else, could believe the (music industry) would win that fucking case in Duluth and yet they did.
Speak for yourself. I certainly did. The case wasn't criminal, and the balance of probabilities was that the alleged copyright violations had happened. And it wasn't exactly a "51% chance she did it" type balance of probabilities either.
Many people on Slashdot think that if something can be described as fair use, then describing something else entirely different in the same terms makes it fair use too. For example, the fact that it's ok to have MP3s ripped from your CD collection on your hard drive for your own listening pleasure does not mean that any set of circumstances in which you have MP3s on your hard drive is A-ok. The only reason people like New York Country Lawyer are able to get a few judges to treat "Making available" the same thing as "Happening to have MP3s on your hard drive that are probably for you to listen to" is because this is technologically unfamiliar territory for judges - in other words, judicial ignorance is favoring the P2P copyright infringers at the moment despite the belief by many it's the other way around.
If you understand how draconian copyright law is (and sometimes that draconian aspect is legitimate), then you'll understand why P2P piracy is, ultimately, going to get nailed by the judicial system. Some temporary setbacks for the music industry as happened this year shouldn't be seen as a trend, because if you do you'll surely find a whole bunch of decisions you'll find hard to believe coming up.
Ok, if we're going to get pedantic, here's what the article says:
The result showed that the youths burned 60 calories (in nutrition terms) more an hour playing Wii, a 2% increase in the amount of energy burned versus the Xbox 360 players.
So, according to the article, and this is on a Gaming Website so it must be true, playing X-Box 360 games for more than an hour will burn a staggering 3,000 calories, approximately 500-1,000 more, indeed, than the average person is supposed to consume in a day.
So, for the sake of your health, remember to consume at least six Big Macs an hour when playing games on the Wii, or else you're going to die of starvation.
Yes, that's right, RMS really, truly, deeply cares about IBM. I mean, it's right there in everything he writes, from "The Right to Read: How DRM might cripple books in the future, and how I love IBM" to the time he held up a placard outside a talk held by an ATI spokesman, proclaiming "Don't buy ATI, enemy of your freedom. Buy IBM instead. Their stuff rocks."
Honestly, I'm trying to work out how anyone can convince themselves of this kind of logic. You might argue that the changes to the GPL benefited IBM - and to some extent, they may have, though they benefit virtually any company that develops free software and it's not hard to see how they also damage IBM - but to claim that they were written to aid IBM is plain ridiculous.
That's the real George Bush, in the same way as the real Chuck Norris is Carlos Norris, an actor.
The image is the warrior. The Texan. The man who landed a plane on an aircraft carrier with socks in his pants. "Bring it on". That's the image Dubya's imagemakers cultivate.
Europe started off with a patchwork of different, incompatible, analog mobile phone networks that were replaced by a common digital standard (GSM.) The US started off with a single analog mobile phone standard, and then allowed operators to deploy whatever incompatible digital standards they choose. The result is that until the last few years, it was common to go into an area and find no operator running the digital standard your network used, with only AMPS available as a fall back.
So there was no real reason in Europe not to ditch the various analog networks as soon as GSM was deployed covering the same areas. Whereas, in the US, AMPS had to be kept around because there just wasn't any other standard that was truly national.
The irony is that he's right for the wrong reasons, reasons you highlight fairly well. The GP is enough of a geek not to realize that most phones are capable of recording ringtones through their microphone, and it's usually no more complicated to do so than it would be to go to the trouble of buying downloading one, possibly easier.
The technical objection - that "recording through the microphone" results in awful sound quality - is actually for once entirely irrelevant as no matter how high a quality recording you have, when it's played as a ring tone it usually sounds awful anyway.
So I don't really understand why people buy ringtones either. I suspect it's the fun of browsing for things on the web and buying them, rather than any technical ignorance on the part of the people who do.
There are, they're sold with warning labels though. The FCC is steadily banning the sale of TVs without ATSC tuners based upon screen size - I can't remember what the maximum is now, but I know that you can't legally sell a new 30" TV with only an analog tuner.
You can get SDTV CRT TVs for around $150-200 with ATSC tuners (these aren't HD but they do display the same feeds either scaled down or using an alternative SDTV stream), so there's no necessity to replace your 25" analog with an expensive 32" LCD TV either.
Two problems with that scenario: first, that would mean retailers selling well below cost. Retailers are highly unlikely to do that, given there's no advantage to them - people aren't going to walk in, buy a PS3 for $250, and then spend $300-1,000 buying other items with a sufficient profit margin to cover the lost $150.
Second: the Wii isn't as big a competitor for the PS3 and X-Box 360 as "gamers" like to think it is. Forget price, there's no way I'd have ever persuaded my wife to be interested in those consoles. My non-geek friends who went out and found Wiis aren't interested in either of those consoles either. The PS3 and X-Box 360 are, to be honest, niche products - a large niche to be sure - but nonetheless a niche rather than having the broad appeal that the Wii has proven itself to have.
It helps Nintendo to keep the advertised price down as part of the marketing message that the Wii is the console for "everyone". Microsoft and Sony would have to do more than drop prices to achieve that goal at this stage, they'd also have to persuade game makers to approach their products differently, and produce something as intuitive and obvious to end users as the Wii-mote is.
They're not going to do that. They know what market they're aiming at. Sony is at war with Microsoft and vice-versa. Nintendo is an irrelevance in terms of the market they're going for. Sony doesn't have to cut prices unless Microsoft's price advantage starts making a massive difference, and vice versa.
Unless you're counting Wii Sports as a bundle, then you probably haven't been looking hard enough. I bought my Wii by entering Wal*mart at an unholy time on a Sunday morning, forking over $250+taxes, and walking out with the Wii under my arm.
It's difficult to get one online that isn't part of a bundle, but if you find one in a retail outlet, the chances are greater than not that the Wii will be the basic Wii Sports pack.
Look, it's really quite simple what he's trying to say: If you add the letters of "ROUGHLYDRAFTED.COM" (A=1, Z=26, . = 0), you get 195. Add those digits together and you get 15. Again, add a third time and you get 6. So after adding the digits together three times, we get 6. Six repeated three times is "666", which is specified in the Bible as being the mark of the devil.
Now, if you do the same thing with "SECUNIA", you get 72. 7+2 = 9. And 9, added to itself, is 18, and its digits also add up to 9. So nine is obviously significant.
What does this mean? It's quite simple. The Devil, as specified by the Bible, is also what tempted Adam and Eve to take an Apple from the tree of knowledge. You see where this is going? ROUGHLYDRAFTED.COM is essentially saying that Apple is the source of knowledge. Whereas SECUNIA's, like, nine, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always amazed when someone makes it clear they're not going to buy something because they consider it unattractive for a variety of reasons, only to get a response "Ok, don't buy one".
The GP was pretty clear it wasn't a phone he was likely to buy. Why respond as if he was?
No, that's not what it means at all.
Apple is releasing an SDK which means companies other than Apple will be able to develop for iPhone. It does not mean you will be able to get your application onto an iPhone without Apple's permission; most of the speculation on the issue, and public announcements from Apple, have suggested the opposite - that the iPhone will only run applications that Apple approves.
It'll still be a walled garden.
Ok, looks like I misread that. I thought you were comparing combo discs to regular discs, rather than HD-DVD combo discs to Blu-ray combo discs (does anyone even make those?) Sorry about that.
While I've made my choice for HD DVD, many of your comments are exaggerations or just plain silly.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks are about as reliable as one another. Blu-ray disc manufacturers use a protective coating to ensure reliability, whereas HD-DVD discs don't require it as they don't store data as close to the surface. The net affect is both are about the same.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray both use the same blue-violet lasers. The drives are not "cheaper to make", they're close to identical except for the differences you'd expect from slightly different formats designed by two groups aiming to do the same thing. HD-DVD discs are cheaper to make, although dollar-per-megabyte they come close in price. But the drives have no price advantage. I'm not sure why you think combo discs would be cheaper than regular discs, as you imply above, but a combo disc costs about what you'd expect a double-sided HD-DVD to cost.
Production HD-DVD does not contain 51GB. Production HD-DVD is still two layer. Three layers is coming, but there's some debate as to whether existing players will support it, and that's holding up production use. Three layer HD-DVD is coming, but lay off the word "production" until it actually goes into production, ok?
It's actually very easy. Here's what you do:
1. Install Windows XP SP3 or better, or Vista, on your PC. Ensure your system has a Core 2 Duo 3GHz or better, or equivalent.
2. If you haven't already, install Microsoft's .NET Runtime version 3 or better.
3. Install MyConvert 3.72b or better. Make sure you download the beta. You'll also need to find WIN32CRT.DLL, VB64RT6.DLL, and DECSS.DLL - copy these to your WINDOWS SYSTEM32 directory. Also install VBMP3LIB.OCX and LIBDOTGSM4.VBX, and copy them to the same directory to installed MyCovert 3.72b. I usually find a Google search will find repositories that include these files.
4. Have a play with MyConvert 3.72b. Note you have to press the big "OPEN" button to give it focus before you can actually press it to activate it. The OPEN button is the one that has a large "O" with a picture of a pen inside it. This will bring up the custom file selector which looks a bit like an iPod. From "Sources", highlight "MAME", then select "2600", "Speaker", "Audio", "\devices\system\audio\by-uid\0011-20494931-3185891928172-9321" (the middle seven digits will change depending on your system set up.)
5. Finally, plug an Atari 2600 into your TV, hold the phone near the TV speaker, plug the ET game in, switch it on, and on boot, record the noise it makes with your phone. Use your phone's "Use as ringtone" feature to make this your ring tone.
I hope this helps,
you're welcome ;-)
The publishers are providing you with a service, and it is akin to a rental and not unreasonable to describe it as one. Further, calling it a rental makes your point for you - end users know that their rights to the content are limited.
This isn't like DVD where you have bought something but little known to the average consumer is the fact you can go to prison for watching it on a computer running GNU/Linux and VLC. There's a difference in expectations. You expect a rental to be limited. You expect a purchase to be unrestricted (beyond what reasonable copyright law allows.)
The major problems with HD DVD and Blu-ray have little to do with the customer's desire to have HD or not.
Both are having problems because:
There is additional confusion because the format war has been damaged by the rival camps trying to devalue the other formats rather than focusing on the advantages of HD in general and their formats in particular, which slightly feeds into your point, but in any case I think it's too early to describe either as market failures. HDTV sales will push HD content demand. Anyone who's seen the difference between ATSC HD and SD (NTSC or ATSC) on a modern 32" (or better) LCD TV wants something as close to HD as possible.
Whether they'll both fail in the market will depend on whether other sources of HD content become acceptable, such as HD movie downloads. In the short term, ED will suffice; in the long term, if the movie download services don't (eventually) support 1080p24 at minimum, one or both HD disc formats will supplant DVD.
Absolutely! I also heard that two companies are being formed, called Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, that will actually try to rent out temporary copies of movies using a protection scheme that involves the customer giving the movie back before the end of the rental period.
What idiots! They must think it's impossible to make a permanent copy of the media before it's returned! Don't they realize that virtually everyone will simply do that in future?!
I give both companies six months before they fold.
Both are different? As opposed to one being different, and the other one not being different? ;-)
Ok, ok, another "sovereignty" argument.
Let me put it like this: What do you think Antigua's usual incentive is for respecting US copyrights?
They're a small country. They have very little cultural output of their own. They have no good reason to ratify things like the Berne Convention, and if they have, they have little reason to take any notice of it - other countries have more to lose than they do if Antigua ignores foreign copyrights and other countries decide to ignore Antigua's.
What this WTO decision means is that Antigua is going to temporarily ignore laws that it wouldn't have respected at all if the WTO didn't exist. So who's sovereignty was being attacked again?
The article, which is what I'm making fun of, says it's the increase.
If you didn't understand I was ridiculing the article, then sorry about that. If you did, then no, you've misread the lazy, idiotic, journalism that I'm criticizing. It quite specifically says 60 calories "more" per hour
Speak for yourself. I certainly did. The case wasn't criminal, and the balance of probabilities was that the alleged copyright violations had happened. And it wasn't exactly a "51% chance she did it" type balance of probabilities either.
Many people on Slashdot think that if something can be described as fair use, then describing something else entirely different in the same terms makes it fair use too. For example, the fact that it's ok to have MP3s ripped from your CD collection on your hard drive for your own listening pleasure does not mean that any set of circumstances in which you have MP3s on your hard drive is A-ok. The only reason people like New York Country Lawyer are able to get a few judges to treat "Making available" the same thing as "Happening to have MP3s on your hard drive that are probably for you to listen to" is because this is technologically unfamiliar territory for judges - in other words, judicial ignorance is favoring the P2P copyright infringers at the moment despite the belief by many it's the other way around.
If you understand how draconian copyright law is (and sometimes that draconian aspect is legitimate), then you'll understand why P2P piracy is, ultimately, going to get nailed by the judicial system. Some temporary setbacks for the music industry as happened this year shouldn't be seen as a trend, because if you do you'll surely find a whole bunch of decisions you'll find hard to believe coming up.
Ok, if we're going to get pedantic, here's what the article says:
So, according to the article, and this is on a Gaming Website so it must be true, playing X-Box 360 games for more than an hour will burn a staggering 3,000 calories, approximately 500-1,000 more, indeed, than the average person is supposed to consume in a day.
So, for the sake of your health, remember to consume at least six Big Macs an hour when playing games on the Wii, or else you're going to die of starvation.
Yes, that's right, RMS really, truly, deeply cares about IBM. I mean, it's right there in everything he writes, from "The Right to Read: How DRM might cripple books in the future, and how I love IBM" to the time he held up a placard outside a talk held by an ATI spokesman, proclaiming "Don't buy ATI, enemy of your freedom. Buy IBM instead. Their stuff rocks."
Honestly, I'm trying to work out how anyone can convince themselves of this kind of logic. You might argue that the changes to the GPL benefited IBM - and to some extent, they may have, though they benefit virtually any company that develops free software and it's not hard to see how they also damage IBM - but to claim that they were written to aid IBM is plain ridiculous.
That's the real George Bush, in the same way as the real Chuck Norris is Carlos Norris, an actor.
The image is the warrior. The Texan. The man who landed a plane on an aircraft carrier with socks in his pants. "Bring it on". That's the image Dubya's imagemakers cultivate.
That's what the GP was talking about.
Europe started off with a patchwork of different, incompatible, analog mobile phone networks that were replaced by a common digital standard (GSM.) The US started off with a single analog mobile phone standard, and then allowed operators to deploy whatever incompatible digital standards they choose. The result is that until the last few years, it was common to go into an area and find no operator running the digital standard your network used, with only AMPS available as a fall back.
So there was no real reason in Europe not to ditch the various analog networks as soon as GSM was deployed covering the same areas. Whereas, in the US, AMPS had to be kept around because there just wasn't any other standard that was truly national.
Yep, that applies regardless of the size; the size determines whether an analog-only TV can be sold in the first place.
The irony is that he's right for the wrong reasons, reasons you highlight fairly well. The GP is enough of a geek not to realize that most phones are capable of recording ringtones through their microphone, and it's usually no more complicated to do so than it would be to go to the trouble of buying downloading one, possibly easier.
The technical objection - that "recording through the microphone" results in awful sound quality - is actually for once entirely irrelevant as no matter how high a quality recording you have, when it's played as a ring tone it usually sounds awful anyway.
So I don't really understand why people buy ringtones either. I suspect it's the fun of browsing for things on the web and buying them, rather than any technical ignorance on the part of the people who do.
There are, they're sold with warning labels though. The FCC is steadily banning the sale of TVs without ATSC tuners based upon screen size - I can't remember what the maximum is now, but I know that you can't legally sell a new 30" TV with only an analog tuner.
You can get SDTV CRT TVs for around $150-200 with ATSC tuners (these aren't HD but they do display the same feeds either scaled down or using an alternative SDTV stream), so there's no necessity to replace your 25" analog with an expensive 32" LCD TV either.
Two problems with that scenario: first, that would mean retailers selling well below cost. Retailers are highly unlikely to do that, given there's no advantage to them - people aren't going to walk in, buy a PS3 for $250, and then spend $300-1,000 buying other items with a sufficient profit margin to cover the lost $150.
Second: the Wii isn't as big a competitor for the PS3 and X-Box 360 as "gamers" like to think it is. Forget price, there's no way I'd have ever persuaded my wife to be interested in those consoles. My non-geek friends who went out and found Wiis aren't interested in either of those consoles either. The PS3 and X-Box 360 are, to be honest, niche products - a large niche to be sure - but nonetheless a niche rather than having the broad appeal that the Wii has proven itself to have.
It helps Nintendo to keep the advertised price down as part of the marketing message that the Wii is the console for "everyone". Microsoft and Sony would have to do more than drop prices to achieve that goal at this stage, they'd also have to persuade game makers to approach their products differently, and produce something as intuitive and obvious to end users as the Wii-mote is.
They're not going to do that. They know what market they're aiming at. Sony is at war with Microsoft and vice-versa. Nintendo is an irrelevance in terms of the market they're going for. Sony doesn't have to cut prices unless Microsoft's price advantage starts making a massive difference, and vice versa.
Unless you're counting Wii Sports as a bundle, then you probably haven't been looking hard enough. I bought my Wii by entering Wal*mart at an unholy time on a Sunday morning, forking over $250+taxes, and walking out with the Wii under my arm.
It's difficult to get one online that isn't part of a bundle, but if you find one in a retail outlet, the chances are greater than not that the Wii will be the basic Wii Sports pack.
Look, it's really quite simple what he's trying to say: If you add the letters of "ROUGHLYDRAFTED.COM" (A=1, Z=26, . = 0), you get 195. Add those digits together and you get 15. Again, add a third time and you get 6. So after adding the digits together three times, we get 6. Six repeated three times is "666", which is specified in the Bible as being the mark of the devil.
Now, if you do the same thing with "SECUNIA", you get 72. 7+2 = 9. And 9, added to itself, is 18, and its digits also add up to 9. So nine is obviously significant.
What does this mean? It's quite simple. The Devil, as specified by the Bible, is also what tempted Adam and Eve to take an Apple from the tree of knowledge. You see where this is going? ROUGHLYDRAFTED.COM is essentially saying that Apple is the source of knowledge. Whereas SECUNIA's, like, nine, or something.
Does this help?
Firefox users might find TheRaven64's advice useful WRT to making it a little easier to identify RD articles.