I usually do this by playlist. Also in iTunes you can sort on whatever fields you want, so you could easily group everything from the same album together.
Really, there are a bunch of ways of doing this. The hierarchical presentation, in my experience, is actually a PITA because it makes assumptions about what I want to see first.
Apple and Microsoft have been trying to get similar patents for themselves.
You'll excuse me if I'm not going to burst into tears about this one. If Creative sues the Free Software and Open Source communities over this, then I'll get a crap. But right now, Apple deserves everything it gets from this. They quite deliberately entered the game (they're not some innocent third party who accidentally and unknowingly infringed on the patent, they're one of the groups who wanted this technology locked down in the first place.) They've lost. Nah nah.
Because the entire point of the article is to work out why it doesn't work! Trying to work out why MySQL doesn't work by ignoring it and using PostgreSQL instead isn't going to get you many useful answers. Useful analogies:
You bring your car to a mechanic. You come back later to ask the mechanic what was wrong, who promptly tells you he found your car didn't work so he drove an entirely different one instead (Obligitory Slashdot Car Analogy)
The Director of FEMA finds that New Orleans is under water. So he evacuates Chicago. (Obligitory current affairs analogy)
There's a problem with the lock on your door. You bring in a locksmith, who asks why you don't just go in through the window? (Obligitory locks on house Analogy)
You go to Wendy's and find a finger in your chili. So you sue MacDonalds (Obligitory reference to poorly understood lawsuit Analogy)
Your computer program runs slowly and inefficiently. So you rewrite it in Python (Obligitory, probably justified, attack on Python Analogy)
You're trying to work out whether "The Brothers Grimm" is a great movie. So you read the reviews of "Harry Potter: Revenge of the Sith" (Confusing movie analogy)
You feel the country needs a better President, one with experience and an understanding of wars, one with the ability to engage others and move this country forward, to seek and resolve conflicts peaceably where possible, one that strongly believes in personal freedom, in freedom of thought, one that copes with national disasters and can unite the country in even the worst of circumstances - so you vote for George W. Bush, again (Obligitory (justified) Bush Bashing Analogy)
You don't understand why your dog will not eat the dog food you got him, so you get a car. (Obligitory other/miscellaneous Analogy)
I hope all those analogies helped. Let me know if you have any problems.
No, ensuring incentive is a purpose. Copyright can only create incentives, it cannot do more than that.
You can promote science and the useful arts without wanting them to get bigger - you could give every single person in the country a book containing any novel ever written and every fact ever known, and you would be promoting science and the useful arts. Copyright is not about that, it's about the wider issue of getting new content created.
The main purpose of copyright was to ensure that artists would have an incentive to create new content. Period.
Now, the US constitution (which is one of many documents the world over that calls for copyrights, etc) calls for "limited times" which implies that part of that mechanism is ensuring content falls into the public domain.
But that's not the reason for the copyright, indeed it could be argued that putting stuff in the public domain is a part of the incentive (ie you're putting the cart before the horse): by ensuring stuff eventually gets put in the public domain, artists can build upon the works of others and, in the past when copyrights lasted a few decades, artists had an incentive to continue creating rather than relying upon a back-catalog of stuff they did in their 20s to keep them fed in their 50s and 60s.
We want content, we want it in general circulation and accessable to everyone. Whether it's public domain or not is more a matter of practicalities, not of some greater goal.
Disclaimer: this doesn't not mean I don't like the public domain, or am in favour of current copyright limits and evil absurdities like the DMCA's ACMs/CCMs.
With respect, I think you're digging yourself into a deeper hole, assuming you read the quoted story before you wrote your comment criticising Amazon and Google.
It's clear, from the above, that Amazon didn't immediately create such a donation system because it didn't think it was needed this time, not because, as you put it, "I guess the hundreds of thousands of displaced and the thousands of dead americans aren't worth their time."
That's an outrageously unfair comment to make if your understanding at the time you wrote it was that Amazon felt that the Red Cross was able to handle donations this time in a way it hadn't been previously.
Remember the massive calls for aid from google, amazon, and every other online company out there during the Tsunami? Not a single one has posted a link for donations for the hurricane.
Amazon has such a link and had it from (at the earliest) yesterday afternoon, it's at the top right of their home page. If you can't get into the Red Cross site to donate directly, it's worth knowing about.
Be very careful about making those kinds of allegations against groups for whom it's not usually the job of to do this kind of work. They very often haven't gotten around to it when you last checked, and, frankly, it's a positive thing when they do do it, not a negative thing when they don't. It's a very different thing to, say, FEMA deciding not to turn up.
I don't suppose anyone's noticed that the "Mom" in this case is essentially using the defense that she's actually innocent because she wasn't using the P2P system involved?
Not quite the dramatic Pirates Stand Up Against Evil Artists situation the story seems to be painted as, does it?
Sorry, but no, and while I understand where you've coming from, you also have to acknowledge that when you see a particular source mislead, mislead, and mislead again, and do so in a consistantly insulting way towards real scientists while, with breathtaking arrogance, claiming their mantle, you're not going to take much notice of it. You're certainly not going to take seriously someone quoting from it.
At this stage, quoting from JunkScience in an argument proposing skepticism at the general consensus that man-made CO2 emissions are causing global warming isn't much different to linking to something on the Enterprise Mission website expressing a view that intelligent life may have existed recently on Mars. Sure, it might be that - remarkably - Hoagland's found something relevent and credible, but you'll forgive me for instinctively distrusting the source. It's also unnecessary if, as you suggest, "The research wasn't DONE by the JunkScience guy", to link to JunkScience's spin on it, you could just link directly to the source.
Sorry if that sounds close minded, but after a while, anyone but the least human of us considers certain sources strong clues as to whether something should be taken seriously. I'd have laughed at someone for linking to a Greenpeace report too. Link directly to the papers, or neutral group's readings of it (Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, you name it) if you like, but don't expect to be taken any more seriously if you link to JunkScience than if you'd linked to the Church of Scientology.
Let's split the difference. The phone I had in 2000 could easily go a long weekend of casual use out of range of AC without worrying about it going flat. It had over a week of standby, and a day of heavy use didn't mean obsessing over getting it plugged in by the time I got home.
Just like my Nokia 9290, you mean?
my old 9290 had that, and battery life was close to a week.... your phone weighed, what, 3x as much as my little "bar" and was half again as long. And mine phone was at the upper end of the size that was worth carrying.
Is this an issue to you? You do know there's a variety of phones around today of different wieghts and sizes. If I'm replacing an iPod, cellphone, camera, and PDA, a phone that wieghts "3 times as much" to your "little bar" is hardly a major issue.
Really, honestly, it doesn't sound like you've touched a new phone since 2000, nor does have you ever used any electronic device that had to be carried around with the exception of your cellphone. I don't carry a PDA at the moment, not because I don't want one, but because carrying those and everything else is a pain. I usually leave the iPod at the office. They all may be small in theory, but in practice, the sheer quantity of these redundant bits of electronics means their portability is simply non-existant. My iPod might just as well be as big as a suitcase and it'd be no less portable.
Of course, the funniest part is that climate change deniers tend to quote from a website entitled "Junk Science", which is infamous for being exactly what it calls itself.
My current phone does GSM and GPRS. A camera is a little bit of a powerhog, but the circuitry doesn't have to be turned on except when it's being used. 802.11g shouldn't be any worse than bluetooth, and again it doesn't have to be on all the time. The HD is a little power consuming, but when not in use... MP3 and Ogg support doesn't really come into it. The 2.5mm handsfree doesn't come into it. And the landscape screen - well, my old 9290 had that, and battery life was close to a week.
I don't think there's any reason to have a "backpack for the batteries". And honestly, if you grafted the circuitry for the camera, HD, and 802.11g into the 9290, updated the software, and standardized the audio jacks, you'd end up with something capable of implementing what I'd want.
If file sharing actually made them money (as submitter is trying to suggest) then it would be a poor business practice to attempt to stop it.
But it doesn't really make them money now, does it? The submitter's wrong, and made an elementary mistake of statistics reasoning that would normally be jumped upon if anyone made it about any other subject here.
The study pointed to does NOT claim that people who use P2P networks will subsequently buy more music as a result of doing so. It merely claims that people who heavily use P2P also buy music heavily. Corrolation does not imply cause.
The most probable reason why someone would buy a lot of music and use a P2P system heavily is that they like music. They like music so they get more of it from more sources. That's it. It's that simple. It's so obvious, that you have to question the reasoning skills of anyone who thinks the two are linked by causation. Everyone these days is trying to find stupid reasons to think one thing causes another.
While P2P probably provides some degree of "try before you buy", it's equally true that legal mechanisms to do much the same thing are widely available, from friends introducing friends to new acts, to samples downloadable from band websites, those little headphone and barcode readers you get in most record stores, and even, to some extent, radio and television. So it's hard to see how P2P helps content producers. In practice, I suspect the number of cheap-asses like certain people I know who download music with the specific intention of burning it to CD and saving themselves money more than outwieghs the High Minded Slashdotter Who Would Only Ever Download Music To Try It and Will Buy The CD If It's Good.
Please, let's stop pretending the study the submitter linked to in any way justifies music piracy. It doesn't. It never did. Indeed, it may well be it does the opposite, showing that people across the spectrum of music appreciation are willing to use P2P as a substitute for at least some of their music purchases. Content producers have every reason to be concerned about those trading files on the Internet.
You can get naked DSL in the US, but you have to get it from a company that uses unbundled local loops. One example would be Covad, semi-famous for being SpeakEasy's last-mile provider.
SpeakEasy offers a number of "no phone service required" options. It is, naturally, more expensive than the cheapest DSL service your phone company offers coupled with their cheapest phone service, but then your phone company's DSL is, in all probability, crippled anyway.
Why the hell are you all assuming that this is a one-or-the-other choice on the part of the content industry?
Here's the real answer to the question: "Why are they suing bitorrent users then?": It's because BitTorrent users who use BT to copy copyrighted content without authorization area threat to the movie industry. they're not the biggest threat, but those who use BT as an alternative to buying movies, watching them at the cinema, or waiting for them to come on TV, are undermining the (perfectly reasonable) business model of most studios of "We'll make the film, and anyone who wants to see it can contribute, directly or indirectly, to the costs of making it."
The industry is suing downloaders, and it is going after organized crime. Organized crime is more difficult, you can easily (as they do) go after street vendors, but getting to the networks behind them is clearly more difficult. Still, one does hear about busts from time to time. And those busts are usually dealt with using criminal sanctions, rather than the civil sanctions usually levied against uploaders.
Put it this way: someone steals my wallet, and another hacks into my bankaccount and starts pilfering money. Because the latter is worse than the former, should I not complain about the wallet? Or should I report both?
You're surely not suggesting that it's sane or rational to store data best treated as binary in base64 or uuencoded form? I ask because, yes, you can encapsulate binary data in this way (as I ended the paragraph you quoted from "Hell, most of the files on our PCs can't easily be represented efficiently or usefully as text."), but nobody in their right mind would do so unless actively forced to do so by other circumstances (eg "It must be in one file")
It's horrendously inefficient. Saying "Yeah, you can include binary data, just uuencode it" isn't much different from saying "What do you mean, plain old analog phones aren't designed for data? I can convert data into tones and transmit it at 300 baud!"
Like modems, it's a hack. Let's not pretend this isn't a problem with XML.
The wierdest I had to decypher essentially comprised of a bunch of hierarchical blocks using headers that constituted a description word and some properties, enclosed in less than and greater than signs.
It was, frankly, awful. Someone had clearly designed it as some kind of "One size fits all" type thing, except that as it was text based it didn't really work that well. Typically graphics, for example, had to be represented by a block that contained a filename: yep, graphics, sound, anything more complicated than a word or a number had to be put in a separate file. Neither my collegues nor I could understand why anyone would try to put so much effort into making it look hierarchical and extensible, and then not include support for data that isn't well represented as text. Hell, most of the files on our PCs can't easily be represented efficiently or usefully as text.
It was also remarkably inefficient. To give you some idea, when we converted it into plain text files in a more efficient form, the files were typically 60-70% smaller. I've always found gzip a good indicator of the efficiency of a file format - usually, plain text compresses to about 30% of the original size. In this case, it was frequently 10%.
Absolutely horrible format. I hope I never have to work with it again.
Well, thanks both of you with the advice. That's more what I thought the problem was, a friend was telling me that I should waste money on replacing the Certron cassettes, and I really didn't want to spend money on something like that if the problem was elsewhere.
I've noticed my microwave oven causes all sorts of problems when I use my cordless phone. Do you think it is partially responsible for the poor quality recordings I've been getting, or does it not really output that much power (I don't think phones do) and the microwave oven is a more likely bet?
Good question. It might surprise you, but I was at a B&O store the other day and when I was talking to the salesman the same subject came up, and it turns out there's a good reason. Apparently, in a lot of areas, because people are adding more and more devices to their homes (lights, home computers, TVs, etc), the actual quality of the electric supply received by your Hi-fi devices is actually dropping. What's happening is that instead of getting a smooth 60Hz 120V supply, you're getting a whole bunch of frequencies overlaid on that.
Now, you have to understand that most audio equipment is designed around an "ideal" supply of a smooth 60Hz (or close to it) frequency, not one with warbles overlaid. So when you record your tapes and listen to them (both times!) you're getting, essentially, noise from your TV and from your home computer, overlaid on the tape. It's not just the audio, but, like from the TV, the vision part of the signal, and from the computer the raw data going from your memory to your CPU, plus bigger spikes as your hard disk head is moved around or your CD tray opens.
And don't think you're safe using batteries either. The fact your AC wiring goes all around your house means that a magnetic field containing exactly the same type of interference is being generated, and, thanks to the faraday-cage nature of the wiring, is actually being reflected into it.
What you need is a "voltage smoother". They're a little bit expensive. A lot of people think you need one for the hifi, but as the salesman was telling me, that's not true, you're trying to preserve the integrity of the current in the entire house, not just for the hifi, because if you didn't, you still get the electro-magnetic field interfering with your recordings. So you need to get one for every electric device you have that plugs into the mains. This will protect your circuits, and ensure you get a good quality electric supply.
Also consider one of those specially shielded AC cables. They're really good.
I did it. The entire thing in the end cost me a hair under $10,000, but the results are amazing. My hi-fi sounds like a concert hall now. The accoustics are, frankly, stunning. I didn't realise what a major difference poor quality AC current would make.
I'm sorry, but this couldn't be worse. What you're looking at is either a security nightmare, or an absolute guarantee that extremists against openness like Micro$oft will take technologies like "Bluetooth" and implement "security measures" that will, essentially, lock ordinary programmers and developers out of their own hardware, forcing us to use whatever version of Winblows they want to force us to use.
This kind of distributed computing is ultimately a way of implementing DRM by the back door. By guaranteeing that a network has to implement a trust system to work effectively, you're allowing a situation to arise where data cannot flow freely, allowing the MPAA to force us to pay every time we listen to their so-called "music", eg Brittney Spears etc, and the DMCA to prevent us from quite legally distributing their movies to millions of fans.
Worse still, once can envisage a situation where cellphones with this kind of "trust" technology will need EULAs to be agreed to to use. Imagine if every time you call someone, you have to click on "I agree" to yet another long list of terms and conditions, culiminating in, at worst, an agreement that you cannot talk ill of Cingular or Verizon?
And that's not to mention that all this DRM and stuff will probably take more processing power to implement than we'd gain.
Did you think about that? Or are you just another M$ Shill, like Laura DilDio and Moron O'Hara? It's rediculous. And all to implement features I could care less about. We have everything to loose with these overpowered cellphones.
I think you're so concerned about security, you're not looking at the full potential of this idea, and you're ignoring some quite remarkable technologies that could make this safe, coming from well known experts in secure computer technologies like Sun and Microsoft.
Look, by itself, a single cellphone CPU isn't capable of much. Most are pretty much at their limits when they simultaneously encode a 64kbps audio PCM stream as 14kbps GSM, decode a similar stream, encrypt and decrypt said streams, update a 3d image on a 2" LCD, while playing an MP3 out of an addition 3.5mm jack, compressing a 24fps VGA video stream from the built-in camera and storing it on the disk, and use what's left over to SETI@Home. That's not a lot by modern standards.
But most of those CPUs are idle most of the time. By utilizing clustering, you can have neighbouring CPUs provide additional power, so that, for example, someone can play a multiplayer session of Unreal Tournament 2007 on their phone, with the built-in projector showing the entire thing at 200fps 2048x1536 on a nearby wall. The secret is that the master CPU in the phone being used will utilize the processing power of its neighbouring phones, via Bluetooth.
Now, you raise security as a potential issue, but in practice it isn't. You see, Microsoft's Paladium technology means that only trusted mobile phones would be allowed to help, and those trusted mobile phones really would be trusted. Simple.NET procedures, signed and encrypted, would be transmitted to the neighbouring phones, which in turn would help with the Unreal Tournament session. Microsoft's technologies will keep the phones 100% secure, guaranteeing there would never be any reason to fear worms or anything else on apparently insecure networks like Bluetooth.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, there are a bunch of ways of doing this. The hierarchical presentation, in my experience, is actually a PITA because it makes assumptions about what I want to see first.
But I'm probably wierd.
You'll excuse me if I'm not going to burst into tears about this one. If Creative sues the Free Software and Open Source communities over this, then I'll get a crap. But right now, Apple deserves everything it gets from this. They quite deliberately entered the game (they're not some innocent third party who accidentally and unknowingly infringed on the patent, they're one of the groups who wanted this technology locked down in the first place.) They've lost. Nah nah.
- You bring your car to a mechanic. You come back later to ask the mechanic what was wrong, who promptly tells you he found your car didn't work so he drove an entirely different one instead (Obligitory Slashdot Car Analogy)
- The Director of FEMA finds that New Orleans is under water. So he evacuates Chicago. (Obligitory current affairs analogy)
- There's a problem with the lock on your door. You bring in a locksmith, who asks why you don't just go in through the window? (Obligitory locks on house Analogy)
- You go to Wendy's and find a finger in your chili. So you sue MacDonalds (Obligitory reference to poorly understood lawsuit Analogy)
- Your computer program runs slowly and inefficiently. So you rewrite it in Python (Obligitory, probably justified, attack on Python Analogy)
- You're trying to work out whether "The Brothers Grimm" is a great movie. So you read the reviews of "Harry Potter: Revenge of the Sith" (Confusing movie analogy)
- You feel the country needs a better President, one with experience and an understanding of wars, one with the ability to engage others and move this country forward, to seek and resolve conflicts peaceably where possible, one that strongly believes in personal freedom, in freedom of thought, one that copes with national disasters and can unite the country in even the worst of circumstances - so you vote for George W. Bush, again (Obligitory (justified) Bush Bashing Analogy)
- You don't understand why your dog will not eat the dog food you got him, so you get a car. (Obligitory other/miscellaneous Analogy)
I hope all those analogies helped. Let me know if you have any problems.You can promote science and the useful arts without wanting them to get bigger - you could give every single person in the country a book containing any novel ever written and every fact ever known, and you would be promoting science and the useful arts. Copyright is not about that, it's about the wider issue of getting new content created.
No apology to me needed, I'm not Amazon.
Thanks for boosting my opinion of others this morning.
Now, the US constitution (which is one of many documents the world over that calls for copyrights, etc) calls for "limited times" which implies that part of that mechanism is ensuring content falls into the public domain.
But that's not the reason for the copyright, indeed it could be argued that putting stuff in the public domain is a part of the incentive (ie you're putting the cart before the horse): by ensuring stuff eventually gets put in the public domain, artists can build upon the works of others and, in the past when copyrights lasted a few decades, artists had an incentive to continue creating rather than relying upon a back-catalog of stuff they did in their 20s to keep them fed in their 50s and 60s.
We want content, we want it in general circulation and accessable to everyone. Whether it's public domain or not is more a matter of practicalities, not of some greater goal.
Disclaimer: this doesn't not mean I don't like the public domain, or am in favour of current copyright limits and evil absurdities like the DMCA's ACMs/CCMs.
It's clear, from the above, that Amazon didn't immediately create such a donation system because it didn't think it was needed this time, not because, as you put it, "I guess the hundreds of thousands of displaced and the thousands of dead americans aren't worth their time."
That's an outrageously unfair comment to make if your understanding at the time you wrote it was that Amazon felt that the Red Cross was able to handle donations this time in a way it hadn't been previously.
Be very careful about making those kinds of allegations against groups for whom it's not usually the job of to do this kind of work. They very often haven't gotten around to it when you last checked, and, frankly, it's a positive thing when they do do it, not a negative thing when they don't. It's a very different thing to, say, FEMA deciding not to turn up.
Not quite the dramatic Pirates Stand Up Against Evil Artists situation the story seems to be painted as, does it?
At this stage, quoting from JunkScience in an argument proposing skepticism at the general consensus that man-made CO2 emissions are causing global warming isn't much different to linking to something on the Enterprise Mission website expressing a view that intelligent life may have existed recently on Mars. Sure, it might be that - remarkably - Hoagland's found something relevent and credible, but you'll forgive me for instinctively distrusting the source. It's also unnecessary if, as you suggest, "The research wasn't DONE by the JunkScience guy", to link to JunkScience's spin on it, you could just link directly to the source.
Sorry if that sounds close minded, but after a while, anyone but the least human of us considers certain sources strong clues as to whether something should be taken seriously. I'd have laughed at someone for linking to a Greenpeace report too. Link directly to the papers, or neutral group's readings of it (Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, you name it) if you like, but don't expect to be taken any more seriously if you link to JunkScience than if you'd linked to the Church of Scientology.
Really, honestly, it doesn't sound like you've touched a new phone since 2000, nor does have you ever used any electronic device that had to be carried around with the exception of your cellphone. I don't carry a PDA at the moment, not because I don't want one, but because carrying those and everything else is a pain. I usually leave the iPod at the office. They all may be small in theory, but in practice, the sheer quantity of these redundant bits of electronics means their portability is simply non-existant. My iPod might just as well be as big as a suitcase and it'd be no less portable.
Of course, the funniest part is that climate change deniers tend to quote from a website entitled "Junk Science", which is infamous for being exactly what it calls itself.
My current phone does GSM and GPRS. A camera is a little bit of a powerhog, but the circuitry doesn't have to be turned on except when it's being used. 802.11g shouldn't be any worse than bluetooth, and again it doesn't have to be on all the time. The HD is a little power consuming, but when not in use... MP3 and Ogg support doesn't really come into it. The 2.5mm handsfree doesn't come into it. And the landscape screen - well, my old 9290 had that, and battery life was close to a week.
I don't think there's any reason to have a "backpack for the batteries". And honestly, if you grafted the circuitry for the camera, HD, and 802.11g into the 9290, updated the software, and standardized the audio jacks, you'd end up with something capable of implementing what I'd want.
The study pointed to does NOT claim that people who use P2P networks will subsequently buy more music as a result of doing so. It merely claims that people who heavily use P2P also buy music heavily. Corrolation does not imply cause.
The most probable reason why someone would buy a lot of music and use a P2P system heavily is that they like music. They like music so they get more of it from more sources. That's it. It's that simple. It's so obvious, that you have to question the reasoning skills of anyone who thinks the two are linked by causation. Everyone these days is trying to find stupid reasons to think one thing causes another.
While P2P probably provides some degree of "try before you buy", it's equally true that legal mechanisms to do much the same thing are widely available, from friends introducing friends to new acts, to samples downloadable from band websites, those little headphone and barcode readers you get in most record stores, and even, to some extent, radio and television. So it's hard to see how P2P helps content producers. In practice, I suspect the number of cheap-asses like certain people I know who download music with the specific intention of burning it to CD and saving themselves money more than outwieghs the High Minded Slashdotter Who Would Only Ever Download Music To Try It and Will Buy The CD If It's Good.
Please, let's stop pretending the study the submitter linked to in any way justifies music piracy. It doesn't. It never did. Indeed, it may well be it does the opposite, showing that people across the spectrum of music appreciation are willing to use P2P as a substitute for at least some of their music purchases. Content producers have every reason to be concerned about those trading files on the Internet.
SpeakEasy offers a number of "no phone service required" options. It is, naturally, more expensive than the cheapest DSL service your phone company offers coupled with their cheapest phone service, but then your phone company's DSL is, in all probability, crippled anyway.
Here's the real answer to the question: "Why are they suing bitorrent users then?": It's because BitTorrent users who use BT to copy copyrighted content without authorization are a threat to the movie industry. they're not the biggest threat, but those who use BT as an alternative to buying movies, watching them at the cinema, or waiting for them to come on TV, are undermining the (perfectly reasonable) business model of most studios of "We'll make the film, and anyone who wants to see it can contribute, directly or indirectly, to the costs of making it."
The industry is suing downloaders, and it is going after organized crime. Organized crime is more difficult, you can easily (as they do) go after street vendors, but getting to the networks behind them is clearly more difficult. Still, one does hear about busts from time to time. And those busts are usually dealt with using criminal sanctions, rather than the civil sanctions usually levied against uploaders.
Put it this way: someone steals my wallet, and another hacks into my bankaccount and starts pilfering money. Because the latter is worse than the former, should I not complain about the wallet? Or should I report both?
It's horrendously inefficient. Saying "Yeah, you can include binary data, just uuencode it" isn't much different from saying "What do you mean, plain old analog phones aren't designed for data? I can convert data into tones and transmit it at 300 baud!"
Like modems, it's a hack. Let's not pretend this isn't a problem with XML.
It was, frankly, awful. Someone had clearly designed it as some kind of "One size fits all" type thing, except that as it was text based it didn't really work that well. Typically graphics, for example, had to be represented by a block that contained a filename: yep, graphics, sound, anything more complicated than a word or a number had to be put in a separate file. Neither my collegues nor I could understand why anyone would try to put so much effort into making it look hierarchical and extensible, and then not include support for data that isn't well represented as text. Hell, most of the files on our PCs can't easily be represented efficiently or usefully as text.
It was also remarkably inefficient. To give you some idea, when we converted it into plain text files in a more efficient form, the files were typically 60-70% smaller. I've always found gzip a good indicator of the efficiency of a file format - usually, plain text compresses to about 30% of the original size. In this case, it was frequently 10%.
Absolutely horrible format. I hope I never have to work with it again.
So is the Pope (and his predecessor) one of these "Social Christians" then?
I've noticed my microwave oven causes all sorts of problems when I use my cordless phone. Do you think it is partially responsible for the poor quality recordings I've been getting, or does it not really output that much power (I don't think phones do) and the microwave oven is a more likely bet?
Now, you have to understand that most audio equipment is designed around an "ideal" supply of a smooth 60Hz (or close to it) frequency, not one with warbles overlaid. So when you record your tapes and listen to them (both times!) you're getting, essentially, noise from your TV and from your home computer, overlaid on the tape. It's not just the audio, but, like from the TV, the vision part of the signal, and from the computer the raw data going from your memory to your CPU, plus bigger spikes as your hard disk head is moved around or your CD tray opens.
And don't think you're safe using batteries either. The fact your AC wiring goes all around your house means that a magnetic field containing exactly the same type of interference is being generated, and, thanks to the faraday-cage nature of the wiring, is actually being reflected into it.
What you need is a "voltage smoother". They're a little bit expensive. A lot of people think you need one for the hifi, but as the salesman was telling me, that's not true, you're trying to preserve the integrity of the current in the entire house, not just for the hifi, because if you didn't, you still get the electro-magnetic field interfering with your recordings. So you need to get one for every electric device you have that plugs into the mains. This will protect your circuits, and ensure you get a good quality electric supply.
Also consider one of those specially shielded AC cables. They're really good.
I did it. The entire thing in the end cost me a hair under $10,000, but the results are amazing. My hi-fi sounds like a concert hall now. The accoustics are, frankly, stunning. I didn't realise what a major difference poor quality AC current would make.
This kind of distributed computing is ultimately a way of implementing DRM by the back door. By guaranteeing that a network has to implement a trust system to work effectively, you're allowing a situation to arise where data cannot flow freely, allowing the MPAA to force us to pay every time we listen to their so-called "music", eg Brittney Spears etc, and the DMCA to prevent us from quite legally distributing their movies to millions of fans.
Worse still, once can envisage a situation where cellphones with this kind of "trust" technology will need EULAs to be agreed to to use. Imagine if every time you call someone, you have to click on "I agree" to yet another long list of terms and conditions, culiminating in, at worst, an agreement that you cannot talk ill of Cingular or Verizon?
And that's not to mention that all this DRM and stuff will probably take more processing power to implement than we'd gain.
Did you think about that? Or are you just another M$ Shill, like Laura DilDio and Moron O'Hara? It's rediculous. And all to implement features I could care less about. We have everything to loose with these overpowered cellphones.
Look, by itself, a single cellphone CPU isn't capable of much. Most are pretty much at their limits when they simultaneously encode a 64kbps audio PCM stream as 14kbps GSM, decode a similar stream, encrypt and decrypt said streams, update a 3d image on a 2" LCD, while playing an MP3 out of an addition 3.5mm jack, compressing a 24fps VGA video stream from the built-in camera and storing it on the disk, and use what's left over to SETI@Home. That's not a lot by modern standards.
But most of those CPUs are idle most of the time. By utilizing clustering, you can have neighbouring CPUs provide additional power, so that, for example, someone can play a multiplayer session of Unreal Tournament 2007 on their phone, with the built-in projector showing the entire thing at 200fps 2048x1536 on a nearby wall. The secret is that the master CPU in the phone being used will utilize the processing power of its neighbouring phones, via Bluetooth.
Now, you raise security as a potential issue, but in practice it isn't. You see, Microsoft's Paladium technology means that only trusted mobile phones would be allowed to help, and those trusted mobile phones really would be trusted. Simple .NET procedures, signed and encrypted, would be transmitted to the neighbouring phones, which in turn would help with the Unreal Tournament session. Microsoft's technologies will keep the phones 100% secure, guaranteeing there would never be any reason to fear worms or anything else on apparently insecure networks like Bluetooth.
Who can be against that?
Perhaps you need to stop buying all your DVDs from Harrods.