I know you meant that as a one-liner,
but you've hit a peeve of mine. For
example, on 4 NiMH AA's, with a Smartmedia
card (ie, solid-state, not HDD), I get at
most an hour of actual use (with around
50% flash) out of my C3030z. And that
only if I keep the LCD off and take care
to turn the camera off whenever I'll pause
more than a minute or so between pics.
Currently, I consider batteries, more than any
other single factor, the limitation to most
small portable electronic toys. They either
last far too short a time, or weigh more than
half of the device's total weight (ie, laptops).
Fuel cells may remedy that, if the
manufacturers don't all gouge us with
proprietary cartridges that cost $5 each
for $0.06 worth of methanol, but for now,
I consider very little as truly "portable".
More like "I can take this up to half-an-hour's
walk from the nearest outlet".
As far as I can tell, this would save me
exactly one S-Video cable, from my livingroom
PC to the TV - And I'd just need to replace
that with an ethernet cable.
Assuming they sell this at a price comparable
to a typical standalone DVD player, it does
nothing more than choose one box over another,
with the added "bonus" of using quite a bit
of your LAN's bandwidth while reducing overall
flexibility of content (Can it play flash?
My PC can, and dumps it out to the TV. Can
it play "Fred's obscure and proprietary video
encoding format"? If it exists, my PC can,
and dumps it out to the TV.).
I suppose one could argue that this means you
wouldn't need a livingroom PC at all - But I
strongly suspect that such an argument
automatically excludes 99% of the potential
market for such a product.
Have I missed any cool features of this which
might make it more useful? As I understand
it, it does nothing I can't already do.
Is it possible to understand those "real
nice" redneck boys down in the deep south?
Not entirely on topic, but I agree completely.
A hint for people working in tech support, or
really any job where you need to talk to
the public. First of all, speak at a reasonable
pace, and ENUNCIATE!!!.
Two days ago, I called a few places to find out
it they had a particular hard-to-find product
in stock. One fellow, who appeared to speak
English, I could not understand whatsoever.
I asked him to repeat what he said - Tip #2,
when someone asks you to repeat something,
don't use the same rapid, clipped,
poorly-enunciated style as the first time.
I repeated this twice more, same response each
time, then just hung up in disgust. I
still have no idea what he said. For
all I know, he said they had the product I wanted
in stock, for some obscenely low price. But I'll
never know, because he couldn't take the damned
marbles out of his mouth.
I realize that losing a single $1500 sale doesn't
mean all that much to most companies, but in my
experience, salespeople like that count as the
rule, not the exception.
Judging by the way they "hurt" to focus on
(I can usually do stereograms with little
difficulty), I'd guess these result from
the camera rotating about an axis behind
the field of view (thus making them
divergent rather than convergent pairs). But
do they at least match the human 6.5cm separation,
or something radically different?
I ran Adaware on my computer once and deleted
all the spyware found. I later realised that Music
Match's access to the CDDB was gone, as it was
considered spyware to give details of which CD
was in my computer to a third party.
On the assumption that you mean that honestly,
rather than as a troll...
MusicMatch contains spyware, without which it
will not function correctly. You can compare
this, conceptually, to Kazaa, wherein people
used Kazaa Lite solely to make Kazaa work
without the spyware.
AdAware didn't so much "break" MM's ability
to access CDDB, so much as it legitimately
removed spyware from your system, without which
MM became whiney and refused to work properly.
Querying CDDB doesn't count as spyware
(dozens of apps do that without AdAware flagging
them). Associating the CDs you listen to with
your MMJB registration code, however, and sending
them to an MM controlled server rather than a
real CDDB one (CDDB exists as its own service,
entirely separate from MM) does count as
spyware. In this case, AdAware has done its job,
though it saved you from yourself rather than an
unknown antagonist.
This made it more difficult to rip CDs.
Lest you consider me just another "ideals
over function" open source protagonist, I
will gladly offer you a working solution,
spyware-free and open source to boot. CDex,
which accesses FreeDB (an open CCDB v1 service,
essentially what CDDB could have ended up as if
Escient didn't decide to send us all the middle
finger by closing the "real" CDDB). Rips to
any format you have an installed codec for, and
you don't need to worry about either spyware or
DRM.
Even though spyware may be annoying, it's
the price that must be paid to allow for a
more user-friendly computer.
Care to justify that stance?
When visiting someone who asks me to help them
with some computer-related task, as my very first
action I download and run AdAware. It usually
find at least 30-40 scattered chunks of spyware
(I've seen in the thousands more than once),
with perhaps half a dozen actual fully-functioning
programs (the abundance of spyware has the
amusingly ironic side effect that they all
tend to break one another over time).
After removing all the spyware found,
the computer's owner without fail notices the
improved responsiveness and reduced desktop
and browser clutter. I have not once had someone
then ask me annoyedly where their "favorite"
browser hijack vanished to; more often, I get a
thankful "Oh, you finally got rid of that damn
thing... I agreed to it from some website a few
months ago, and no matter what I do couldn't
make it go away".
So, what part of any of the above do you believe
makes a computer more user-friendly?
Does the world's strongest man lift ten
times the weight of an average man?
World record in clean/jerk lies somewhere around
1050lbs. I'd consider that better than 5x
average.
Let's assume driving and dialing a cell
phone at one tick pe you can multitask at the level
of flipping betweenr second.
Under that assumption, yeah, all that you said
would apply. Humans however, unlike computers, don't
have a single CPU. We can do more than
one thing at a time. I don't claim we do so
all that well, but some people really do
multitask better than others. Most people
can actively do one thing and keep track of
two or three other tasks. Some people can
actively do two things at once. I personally
have a great-aunt who can actively
engage in four attention-demanding tasks
simultaneously.
the car has driven 8.8 feet somewhere
where you ain't looking.
Humans have an interesting ability... Under
the normal physical laws applicable to macroscopic
objects on Earth, we predict future locations
of everything around us for several reaction time
periods into the future with quite a good bit of
accuracy (This phenomena has experimental proof
(I'll go into detail if you request it), not
just mere conjecture). So, taking all the
large objects around us while driving into
consideration, a car really can't suddenly
change course. Yes, it can start spinning - And
continues going forward. It can get hit - And
the two bodies maintain the same combined momentum.
A car can start slowing down (which without
breaklights counts as one of our "weak" areas of
prediction), but even that can only occur at a
finite rate. So, while you speak the truth, a
car at 60mph moves 15-20ft forward before the best
of us can react (even primed reactions take at least
100ms, more like 250-333ms for (central)reflex reactions,
and 700ms-1500ms for a basic conscious response), you ignore
the fact that the cars nearby also moving at that
speed have also continued along their previous course
by (almost) the predicted distance. They cannot
instantaneously stop or even radically change
direction; those actions require several seconds
(at least), by which time anyone even remotely
paying attention would have time to react.
(As an aside, during my research on periodicity
in sustained attention, one of our subject had a
sustainable non-primed reaction time on
the order of 50-60ms... That comes as close to
"amazing" as you see in the real world).
So, not exactly "supermen", I never claimed
that. But so far beyond "average" as to make
applying standards meaningful to the average
person's ability seem absurd? Most certainly
yes.
In any case, you'll notice I agree with
laws like this one in CA, because I do not trust
most people to recognize that they lack the
ability to drive well while tyring to do several
other things at the same time. Myself, I try
to recognize my faults (as I mentioned, I do
not consider myself a good driver), and work
around them; I by no means trust others to
do the same.
8.8 feet is sufficiently long of a distance
to crumple the front end of your car, drop your
engine onto your lap, and probably see you wind
up dead.
I agree completely, though for what you will
consider the "wrong" reason. For the most part,
people do not die in car accidents because of
things they could have recognized but had too
little time to react - They die from things they
had no way whatsoever of predicting. If,
hypothetically, the car immediately in front of
you at freeway speeds somehow stopped over the
course of a whopping 3 seconds, you'd still hit
it very, very hard, no matter how sober and focused,
even as a "superman" at the upper fringe of
every imagineable human ability. People die from
the unexpected, or because they've drifted off.
Not because an extra 150ms would have made all
the difference in the world. Obviously, exceptions
to this exist, but I would consider them, by far,
just that - Exceptions, not the rule.
CD that works out at 50 cents a song so $1000
of ACC songs world work out at about $500
You misunderstood his point.
Since you "license" rather than "buy" AAC's from
iTMS, they have effectively no inherent
resale value. Some folks have mentioned that you
could theoretically transfer your entire iTMS account to someone, but as the only test case
(so far) of the idea of "first sale" of iTMS
purchases showed, any possible resale would
necessarily occur solely at Apple's discretion.
They might charge a fee to make the transfer,
they might outright say no. They might not say
anything at all. And the seller and potential
buyer would effectively have no recourse whatsoever.
So, while $50 in crappy CDs leaves you with
something you could theoretically resell for
$50, the same $50 (I won't even touch
the issue of singles-vs-full-albums) in DRM'd
AACs leaves you with potentially nothing more
than the music itself.
The second is so they know who is distroing
thier email list without approval.
To accomplish what, sue the person selling
the list?
To sue someone, you need to exist, and
provide contact information. Considering
that the linked article basically states
that this CD of supposedly valid and unique
email addresses amounts to little more than
false advertising (and for the purpose of
something that counts as a crime in an
increasing number of places), only an
idiot would out themselves over $60.
More importantly, even if a spammer did reveal
their identity in this manner, at least in the
US, you cannot cannot copyright a collection
of facts (even with bogus tracer data thrown
in as proof, as the case of Fred L Worth vs
Trivial Pursuit proved), only the presentation
thereof. A list of email addresses has
no unique presentation (I doubt any court would
consider a trivial means of organizing, such
as putting them in alphabetical order, or as
in the linked article, in geographical order,
as a sufficient "presentation" to warrant
protection), so a spam list seller would
have very little ground to stand on in such
a suit.
From the linked article, they found 10,996,629
total addresses, with 6,220,454 unique
addresses. 56% unique, by the numbers
presented.
So could someone explain how, with 56% of them
unique, only 1,795,633 addresses appear only
once on the list? Does appearing "1 time" not
mean the same thing as "unique"?
I though perhaps those numbers might mean "once
more than unique", but that still doesn't add
up - Just looking at the "1 time" and "2 times"
columns, I see 1,795,633 + 4,107,246 = 5,902,879,
while 10,996,629 - 6,220,454 = 4,776,175. Still
doesn't add up.
Does anyone see something I missed that would
explain these discrepancies?
I really hate people who think this way.
"I am above average and don't need to be
treated like the rest of you." Just like
people who still drink and drive.
Why the hell did a sarcastic snipe from
a PC-drone that believes we all have the exact
same level of ability in everything get modded
to 5:Insightful???
We all (at least in the US and most "Western"
countries) have legal equality. But
that doesn't make us literally equal...
Some people have better reaction times than
others; Some people multitask better than
others; Some people just seem to have more
CPU power in their head. Similarly, some people
can run faster than others, or lift more weight,
or jump higher. Some people have better eyesight
than others, or better hearing, or sense of
smell.
People differ in ability by a HUGE margin.
Pretending otherwise wastes time.
Relating back to the actual topic, I do not
consider myself a "good" driver. I have great
reaction times, I multitask well, have passable
eyesight, but just don't feel comfortable while
driving. So I limit my distractions. Other
people drive very very well. A friend of mine
in highschool could make a car do anything he
wanted - Twisty back roads at 60, no problem.
Flat spin on ice, no problem (if he encountered
such a situation, he deliberately caused it in
the first place). People with exceptional skills
in various areas exist, and we need to accept
that.
That said, I do support legally restricting the
number of distractions available in a car.
I know, this sounds hypocritical, but I support
laws like this (and more usefully, against
cell phones) for one very simple reason - Not
everyone will admit to themselves and others
that they drive poorly (or only average) to
start with. As someone else pointed out,
most people believe they have a higher level
of skill than they actually do. When out for a
highway ride, watch the other drivers - You can
spot the ones on a cell-phone from a mile
away. They make long slow swerves from one
line to another, sometimes drifting slightly
out of their lane, then make a quick jerk on
the wheel to correct their drift. Some people
can talk and drive. Enough exist that can't
to count as a threat to my safety.
Screw that - If we need to ban major
distractions from the car, fine.
In case people can't tell (and judging by an
"informative" rating, they can't), the author
of this one meant it as a JOKE.
You don't get higher-than-CD quality in 2/3rds
the size, and a green marker does nothing*
to any form of digital media - You don't get
better or worse quality, you get bits.
Green bits don't sound better than clear bits
or blue bits or red bits, although a little
too much green might mean you get no
bits (ie, render the media unplayable).
* - Relating to making it unplayable, the
Sharpie trick to remove the copy protection
from some CDs works by making the invalid
data track unreadable. It doesn't "improve"
the cd, it just breaks it in a way that
happens to fix it, ironically enough.
111 times what you claim to be paying.
I think your sums were a bit off or you
threw a decimal place somewhere you
shouldn't have!
Hmm... Checking my math, I see you have indeed
found an error on my part. I used a CPU draw
of 30W (roughly accurate for a PIII) and a power
price of 15 cents per KW/h. And indeed screwed
up the decimal place, by a factor of 100 (I gave
the price in dollars, not cents).
So, rather than costing me 1/18th of what a
banner ad does, it costs five times as much...
Though for an hour. I still hold to my original
point, however, since no one lingers at a web
site for an hour at a time. Basically, this
would break even with banner ads (for which I
just checked, and did that math correctly <G>)
after about 10 minutes of CPU time.
I respect the effort and ingenuity, but the
rationale that "hey, we're helping solve a
problem" somehow justifies stealing someone
else's resources... it's just wrong.
Although letting visitors know about this would
certainly seem nicer, I don't think I'd
actually consider it as outright unethical.
For one thing, considering the number of
websites out there that try to feed outright
malicious code into our browsers, this looks
very very tame by comparison. It uses a few
CPU cycles, but has no long-term effects on
the visitor.
For another, this seems no different that sending
the visitor a few banner ads - Just a way of
"paying" for the content. For most of the world,
bandwidth costs far more than CPU time,
so in effect, this "charges" the user less per
visit than most advertisements. From some quick
n' dirty calculations, the bandwidth for 35k of
banner ads costs me 0.082 cents, while the
electricity for a full hour of CPU time
(on a PIII/933) costs me only 0.0045 cents...
Literally 18 times more.
Finally, I can (and do) keep Javascript disabled
in my browser. Advertisements, on the other hand,
I do my best to block, but a few still manage to
sneak through.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts
bashing the law that prohibits nudity in
public.
Because of the standard legal hypocrisy...
First of all, we supposedly have a separation
of religion and state, yet laws such as this one
that ban public nudity have a basis only
in morality. Yes, in some specific situations
you could call it a health hazard, either to
the exhibitionist or to those nearby, but that
would count as the exception, not the rule.
Second of all, since we need to invoke religion
to justify such archaic laws, the standard
"presume what god wants" counterargument work
fairly well... If the gods intended for
us to wear clothes, we'd come out of the
womb wearing them. Totally invalid, but
just as good as the opposite, which currently
contributes heavily to our actual body of laws.
Finally, in this particular case, she has a very
convenient loophole she can (and most likely will) exploit (assuming none of the bystanders come
forward to testify, an event I consider
VERY unlikely) - Total lack of a material
witness. And no, the pictures do not
count, since I could produce similar pictures
of just about anyone, in any public place, with
five minutes of work in the Gimp (case in point,
the famous picture of the "backpack guy" standing
on a balcony on the WTC with a plane behind him
about to hit). If no one speak up to disprove
that defense (particularly since the bar's owner
claims he didn't know about the photo shoot,
which I consider extremely unlikely to have gone
unnoticed in a crowded bar), the prosecution has
no case. Plausible deniability, end of story.
Re:Ads will HAVE to become better very soon
on
10 Ads The US Won't See
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I hate to break it to you: you're not
the majority. How many non-football fans
watch the SuperBowl each year because of
the commericials?
Along similar lines, I hate to break it to you
but Superbowl ads do not reflect peoples' opinions
of ads in general. I would tend to agree with
Zangief, that most people consider most ads
(excluding those rare ones such as Superbowl
ads or Honda's "Cog") at best ignorable,
and if possible would completely eliminate them
altogether.
I think as technologies like TiVo start to
take off there is going to be more and more
pressure placed on adverising companies to
come up with innovative ads that people
won't mind sitting through.
I agree, and would welcome that. We even
have a precedent for that, where daytime
soaps (which, although I personally consider
them not much more entertaining than ads,
they do seem popular) started out as serial
soap commercials.
350 MB is enough for very good quality
episodes of your favorite "1 hour" series
No.
For watching on a crappy TV, 350MB would give you
a result that you might not consider
unbearable (and that assumes it uses MPEG-4
compression, not an entirely safe assumption
when DVDs still use MPEG-2 (or even 1) for
virtually all content). For watching on a
PC, or a nice widescreen TV, you want at
least 10MB per minute, so a full CD
will give tolerable results on a one hour
episode (which only contains 48 minutes of
actual show).
I'd gladly pay 5 USD per episode
You might, but most people would not - $5 per
episode would cost slightly more than
the current system of distributing one season
on a few DVDs for $30-$50. And you'd pay that
for a lower quality version?
Movies, and to a lesser degree episodic TV
shows, cost a lot to make. I appreciate that
fact. But both of the **AAs have applied the
idea of an economy of scarcity to their product,
when it just doesn't apply.
Think of it like this - For every die-hard fan
of a series, who will fork over $200-$500 to
buy the complete collected series run, how many
hundred more would love to have that,
but would never pay that much? ST:TNG makes a
good example here - The Borg Megacube (the full
collected run) sold for the equivalent of USD$750.
I consider myself a big fan of the series, but
Hell will get a tad chilly before I fork over
nearly a grand for a collected TV show. However,
if they sold that for a more reasonable $100,
every geek on the planet would drop it without
even thinking twice. Poof, they go from a few
tens of thousand of sales (yeah, I know they
limited that particular collection to 1000, but
I'd bet they chose as a very close number to
the total potential predicted sales in the UK),
to perhaps 20 million sales. Quite a big
difference, for content already paid for by
Paramount - Pure profit (minus a few cents per
DVD for production costs), artificially capped
by an obscenely high price.
So relating this back to the parent article,
Consumers want realistic prices. In the US,
that would mean around $5 for full length movies
and $1/episode for collected TV series. Hey,
they want to nail the early adopters? Fine,
perhaps keep the current prices for the
initial release, then drop it after three
months. But put simply, the **AAs have an
extremely simple way to all but eliminate
piracy, that would actually make them
more money - Sell their product for
a reasonable price. And no, I don't mean this
as an "I justify stealing because they charge
too much" rant - Just a statement of fact.
Charge less, and fewer people will see
getting an illegal copy as worth the negative
moral connotations (I won't say "risk" because
we all know that we have almost zero risk of
getting caught for privately copying a movie).
People find stealing distasteful, and will
generally not do it if given a reasonable
alternative.
Of course, on/. we are morally opposed
to lawyers making any sort of reasonable
profit, so we would never participate in
such a suit.
Do the math - One million people, screwed for
roughly $150. That adds up.
If the lawyers kept even a whopping 10% of that,
hey, I have no problem. They make an obscene
amount of money (even with a five-way split among
a team of lawyers, that one settlement would
come out to more than most Americans will make
in their entire lives), and the settlemnt
group gets most of their money back. Basically,
no worse to the actual consumers than the BS
restocking fees some vendors try to charge
(free hint - If your state has a "lemon law",
you can probably force them to take it back,
no questions asked, with no fees).
So no, I don't mind the lawyers making a
fat wad of cash when they actually do a
service for society, rather than the
usual of making all our lives miserable.
But when a team of five lawyers in a case
such as I describe each gets $25 million,
with each claimant getting a gift certificate
for $5, and some random charity of the judge's
choosing getting the balance, I have a problem
with that. Not just because of the
absurd level of greed involved, but because
it does not serve justice. Justice, though
admittedly a difficult to quantify quality,
includes two main points - Relief for the
victim(s) as the FIRST priority, and
punishment for the evildoers as a close
second.
With that, you can see why most of us have a
problem with class action suits. Not so much
because the lawyers profit, and not because
the company involved doesn't suffer a bit of
token punishment, but because the actual
victims get absolutely no relief whatsoever.
In this case, that means a million people
each end up $150 (sorry, $145 minus a bit of good
karma) short, Replay TV ends up losing even
more between their own lawyers and lost
sales, and the lawyers end up making a
killing that directly stems from suffering
on both sides of the suit.
So while I don't grudge the lawyers an honest
living, just "follow the money", and you'll
see why most of us have learned to laugh
mockingly at anyone offering us a part in a
class action suit.
from someone who's never used iSync with a
newer model cell phone and a Mac.
True enough, since my phone and PC address books
sync just fine. I don't, however, have a native
C compiler for my phone. Do you?
Anyway, I think you missed my point... You can't
say that you no longer need a PDA because your
phone acts like one, as an argument against
including basic PDA functionality in other
portable devices such as an iPod.
More relevantly, and the justification for my sarcasm,
your reason for no longer needing a standalone
PDA has NOTHING to do with your use of
a Mac. Nothing at all. Yet, you mentioned it
as though you had some magical combination,
rather than just two devices following a
particular standardized interface.
If anything, you could thank Motorola for making
a cell-phone include those aspects of a PDA you
find most useful.
(Okay, Zealots, I've tossed you another one to
mod down. When will I learn to keep my mouth shut
in any thread having anything to do with Apple?
Ah well, I have karma to burn. Bite me, rabid
fanboys!)
Re:PDAs are a waste, that's why
on
Rumors of Mini iPods
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Any Mac user who needs a PDA just buys
a Bluetooth mobile phone and keeps their
data synced to it.
Wow, an entirely new level of mindless obedience
to Apple - Not only does Apple kick any PC's
butt regardless of relative price and power,
but now they rock people's world so much that
they win even when nowhere near the actual
machine!
Cool. I want to get a Mac so I don't need a
PDA anymore either. You'll have to mail me
to explain quite how that works, though - Does
it ship with the bluetooth-enabled neural
interface, or does that cost extra? And can
I still play solitaire on that while bored?
And most importantly, when its battery dies
six months after warantee, how much do they
charge to replace it?
Oh, wait, silly me, I forgot - The user counts
as disposeable hardware. Just buy a new iBrain,
and it will have a fresh battery.
Amusing, that they call this a "low end" player...
"Only" 400-800 songs? Gimme a break - How many
of us spend so long away from a PC that we need
more than 800 songs on a portable device?
If it plays Ogg Vorbis, they can consider me a
potential customer. If not, well, I suppose
they haven't lost me, since I'd never spend $400
for what amounts to a walkman-type device
anyway. But I hope it does, because this
sounds like almost exactly what I want in a
portable music player (assuming it plays Vorbis,
as I mentioned).
Hmm, one more qualification before I promise to
buy it - If they plan to charge $100 to replace
a $10 battery that dies within six months of the
warrantee ending, I'll pass.
It does however give them a signed document
they can produce in a courtroom
As a somewhat more relevant question, what
gives SCO the right to "demand" written statements
of compliance in the first place? Unless the
original contract explicitly states "we can ask
you to sign a promise of compliance at a later
date", only an idiot (then again, we do
talk about voluntary SCO customers here) would
send anything other than "Dear Darl, I hereby
swear that you suck, and we intend to migrate
all of our servers to Linux in the next quarter,
as, due to your actions, the odds of SCO still
existing to provide us with continuing support
seems exceedinly low. Sincerely, an soon-ex-SCO
customer".
You don't like political BS, do something about it.
Both sedition and assassination carry heavy penalties.
Anything short of that just plays the same game. As
I don't wish to spend the rest of my life in the federal
pen, I choose to bitch about things rather than "do"
something productive.
Damn, you people irritate me.
Likewise - It really disgusts me that even after the
200 election, and all the info coming out about Diebold,
and four thousand years of history of "business as usual"
where the rich get richer etc... That people like you
still believe that you can magically eliminate human
(or rather, primate) nature from within the system.
You can't win Trivial Pursuit playing Monopoly, no matter
how early in the game you get a hotel on Boardwalk.
Sorry, but the fact that you someday hope to win a comfy
chair in a rigged popularity contest doesn't erase the
fact that much of the world still lacks even uncomfy
chairs, it just makes it a lot easier for you to justify
the general inequity of chair ownership.
What did you think, we'd build one reactor
and supply the whole world with energy? Please.
At the very least each country will want their
own simply so their energy source simple to
guarantee the existance of their own energy
in case of war or natural disaster.
Actaully, I did get that impression on
my first read-through. Going back, I see that
does not hold true, and your last point in
particular makes a lot of sense...
Of course we'd want our own, for the
same reason we haven't already established
a global power distribution system - It
hurts to bomb one's own power grid.
Regardless, I still consider it absolutely
absurd that we would favor Japan over France
not for any legitimate reason, but actually
admit that we favor Japan because
Chirac wouldn't play Cowboys & Indians with
the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Bye bye battery life...
What battery life?
I know you meant that as a one-liner, but you've hit a peeve of mine. For example, on 4 NiMH AA's, with a Smartmedia card (ie, solid-state, not HDD), I get at most an hour of actual use (with around 50% flash) out of my C3030z. And that only if I keep the LCD off and take care to turn the camera off whenever I'll pause more than a minute or so between pics.
Currently, I consider batteries, more than any other single factor, the limitation to most small portable electronic toys. They either last far too short a time, or weigh more than half of the device's total weight (ie, laptops).
Fuel cells may remedy that, if the manufacturers don't all gouge us with proprietary cartridges that cost $5 each for $0.06 worth of methanol, but for now, I consider very little as truly "portable". More like "I can take this up to half-an-hour's walk from the nearest outlet".
As far as I can tell, this would save me exactly one S-Video cable, from my livingroom PC to the TV - And I'd just need to replace that with an ethernet cable.
Assuming they sell this at a price comparable to a typical standalone DVD player, it does nothing more than choose one box over another, with the added "bonus" of using quite a bit of your LAN's bandwidth while reducing overall flexibility of content (Can it play flash? My PC can, and dumps it out to the TV. Can it play "Fred's obscure and proprietary video encoding format"? If it exists, my PC can, and dumps it out to the TV.).
I suppose one could argue that this means you wouldn't need a livingroom PC at all - But I strongly suspect that such an argument automatically excludes 99% of the potential market for such a product.
Have I missed any cool features of this which might make it more useful? As I understand it, it does nothing I can't already do.
Is it possible to understand those "real nice" redneck boys down in the deep south?
Not entirely on topic, but I agree completely.
A hint for people working in tech support, or really any job where you need to talk to the public. First of all, speak at a reasonable pace, and ENUNCIATE!!!.
Two days ago, I called a few places to find out it they had a particular hard-to-find product in stock. One fellow, who appeared to speak English, I could not understand whatsoever.
I asked him to repeat what he said - Tip #2, when someone asks you to repeat something, don't use the same rapid, clipped, poorly-enunciated style as the first time.
I repeated this twice more, same response each time, then just hung up in disgust. I still have no idea what he said. For all I know, he said they had the product I wanted in stock, for some obscenely low price. But I'll never know, because he couldn't take the damned marbles out of his mouth.
I realize that losing a single $1500 sale doesn't mean all that much to most companies, but in my experience, salespeople like that count as the rule, not the exception.
Judging by the way they "hurt" to focus on (I can usually do stereograms with little difficulty), I'd guess these result from the camera rotating about an axis behind the field of view (thus making them divergent rather than convergent pairs). But do they at least match the human 6.5cm separation, or something radically different?
I ran Adaware on my computer once and deleted all the spyware found. I later realised that Music Match's access to the CDDB was gone, as it was considered spyware to give details of which CD was in my computer to a third party.
On the assumption that you mean that honestly, rather than as a troll...
MusicMatch contains spyware, without which it will not function correctly. You can compare this, conceptually, to Kazaa, wherein people used Kazaa Lite solely to make Kazaa work without the spyware.
AdAware didn't so much "break" MM's ability to access CDDB, so much as it legitimately removed spyware from your system, without which MM became whiney and refused to work properly. Querying CDDB doesn't count as spyware (dozens of apps do that without AdAware flagging them). Associating the CDs you listen to with your MMJB registration code, however, and sending them to an MM controlled server rather than a real CDDB one (CDDB exists as its own service, entirely separate from MM) does count as spyware. In this case, AdAware has done its job, though it saved you from yourself rather than an unknown antagonist.
This made it more difficult to rip CDs.
Lest you consider me just another "ideals over function" open source protagonist, I will gladly offer you a working solution, spyware-free and open source to boot. CDex, which accesses FreeDB (an open CCDB v1 service, essentially what CDDB could have ended up as if Escient didn't decide to send us all the middle finger by closing the "real" CDDB). Rips to any format you have an installed codec for, and you don't need to worry about either spyware or DRM.
Even though spyware may be annoying, it's the price that must be paid to allow for a more user-friendly computer.
Care to justify that stance?
When visiting someone who asks me to help them with some computer-related task, as my very first action I download and run AdAware. It usually find at least 30-40 scattered chunks of spyware (I've seen in the thousands more than once), with perhaps half a dozen actual fully-functioning programs (the abundance of spyware has the amusingly ironic side effect that they all tend to break one another over time).
After removing all the spyware found, the computer's owner without fail notices the improved responsiveness and reduced desktop and browser clutter. I have not once had someone then ask me annoyedly where their "favorite" browser hijack vanished to; more often, I get a thankful "Oh, you finally got rid of that damn thing... I agreed to it from some website a few months ago, and no matter what I do couldn't make it go away".
So, what part of any of the above do you believe makes a computer more user-friendly?
Does the world's strongest man lift ten times the weight of an average man?
World record in clean/jerk lies somewhere around 1050lbs. I'd consider that better than 5x average.
Let's assume driving and dialing a cell phone at one tick pe you can multitask at the level of flipping betweenr second.
Under that assumption, yeah, all that you said would apply. Humans however, unlike computers, don't have a single CPU. We can do more than one thing at a time. I don't claim we do so all that well, but some people really do multitask better than others. Most people can actively do one thing and keep track of two or three other tasks. Some people can actively do two things at once. I personally have a great-aunt who can actively engage in four attention-demanding tasks simultaneously.
the car has driven 8.8 feet somewhere where you ain't looking.
Humans have an interesting ability... Under the normal physical laws applicable to macroscopic objects on Earth, we predict future locations of everything around us for several reaction time periods into the future with quite a good bit of accuracy (This phenomena has experimental proof (I'll go into detail if you request it), not just mere conjecture). So, taking all the large objects around us while driving into consideration, a car really can't suddenly change course. Yes, it can start spinning - And continues going forward. It can get hit - And the two bodies maintain the same combined momentum. A car can start slowing down (which without breaklights counts as one of our "weak" areas of prediction), but even that can only occur at a finite rate. So, while you speak the truth, a car at 60mph moves 15-20ft forward before the best of us can react (even primed reactions take at least 100ms, more like 250-333ms for (central)reflex reactions, and 700ms-1500ms for a basic conscious response), you ignore the fact that the cars nearby also moving at that speed have also continued along their previous course by (almost) the predicted distance. They cannot instantaneously stop or even radically change direction; those actions require several seconds (at least), by which time anyone even remotely paying attention would have time to react.
(As an aside, during my research on periodicity in sustained attention, one of our subject had a sustainable non-primed reaction time on the order of 50-60ms... That comes as close to "amazing" as you see in the real world).
So, not exactly "supermen", I never claimed that. But so far beyond "average" as to make applying standards meaningful to the average person's ability seem absurd? Most certainly yes.
In any case, you'll notice I agree with laws like this one in CA, because I do not trust most people to recognize that they lack the ability to drive well while tyring to do several other things at the same time. Myself, I try to recognize my faults (as I mentioned, I do not consider myself a good driver), and work around them; I by no means trust others to do the same.
8.8 feet is sufficiently long of a distance to crumple the front end of your car, drop your engine onto your lap, and probably see you wind up dead.
I agree completely, though for what you will consider the "wrong" reason. For the most part, people do not die in car accidents because of things they could have recognized but had too little time to react - They die from things they had no way whatsoever of predicting. If, hypothetically, the car immediately in front of you at freeway speeds somehow stopped over the course of a whopping 3 seconds, you'd still hit it very, very hard, no matter how sober and focused, even as a "superman" at the upper fringe of every imagineable human ability. People die from the unexpected, or because they've drifted off. Not because an extra 150ms would have made all the difference in the world. Obviously, exceptions to this exist, but I would consider them, by far, just that - Exceptions, not the rule.
CD that works out at 50 cents a song so $1000 of ACC songs world work out at about $500
You misunderstood his point.
Since you "license" rather than "buy" AAC's from iTMS, they have effectively no inherent resale value. Some folks have mentioned that you could theoretically transfer your entire iTMS account to someone, but as the only test case (so far) of the idea of "first sale" of iTMS purchases showed, any possible resale would necessarily occur solely at Apple's discretion. They might charge a fee to make the transfer, they might outright say no. They might not say anything at all. And the seller and potential buyer would effectively have no recourse whatsoever.
So, while $50 in crappy CDs leaves you with something you could theoretically resell for $50, the same $50 (I won't even touch the issue of singles-vs-full-albums) in DRM'd AACs leaves you with potentially nothing more than the music itself.
A-E are unique, though there are repeats.
AH! Okay. Thank you, that makes sense.
The second is so they know who is distroing thier email list without approval.
To accomplish what, sue the person selling the list?
To sue someone, you need to exist, and provide contact information. Considering that the linked article basically states that this CD of supposedly valid and unique email addresses amounts to little more than false advertising (and for the purpose of something that counts as a crime in an increasing number of places), only an idiot would out themselves over $60.
More importantly, even if a spammer did reveal their identity in this manner, at least in the US, you cannot cannot copyright a collection of facts (even with bogus tracer data thrown in as proof, as the case of Fred L Worth vs Trivial Pursuit proved), only the presentation thereof. A list of email addresses has no unique presentation (I doubt any court would consider a trivial means of organizing, such as putting them in alphabetical order, or as in the linked article, in geographical order, as a sufficient "presentation" to warrant protection), so a spam list seller would have very little ground to stand on in such a suit.
From the linked article, they found 10,996,629 total addresses, with 6,220,454 unique addresses. 56% unique, by the numbers presented.
So could someone explain how, with 56% of them unique, only 1,795,633 addresses appear only once on the list? Does appearing "1 time" not mean the same thing as "unique"?
I though perhaps those numbers might mean "once more than unique", but that still doesn't add up - Just looking at the "1 time" and "2 times" columns, I see 1,795,633 + 4,107,246 = 5,902,879, while 10,996,629 - 6,220,454 = 4,776,175. Still doesn't add up.
Does anyone see something I missed that would explain these discrepancies?
I really hate people who think this way. "I am above average and don't need to be treated like the rest of you." Just like people who still drink and drive.
Why the hell did a sarcastic snipe from a PC-drone that believes we all have the exact same level of ability in everything get modded to 5:Insightful???
We all (at least in the US and most "Western" countries) have legal equality. But that doesn't make us literally equal... Some people have better reaction times than others; Some people multitask better than others; Some people just seem to have more CPU power in their head. Similarly, some people can run faster than others, or lift more weight, or jump higher. Some people have better eyesight than others, or better hearing, or sense of smell.
People differ in ability by a HUGE margin. Pretending otherwise wastes time.
Relating back to the actual topic, I do not consider myself a "good" driver. I have great reaction times, I multitask well, have passable eyesight, but just don't feel comfortable while driving. So I limit my distractions. Other people drive very very well. A friend of mine in highschool could make a car do anything he wanted - Twisty back roads at 60, no problem. Flat spin on ice, no problem (if he encountered such a situation, he deliberately caused it in the first place). People with exceptional skills in various areas exist, and we need to accept that.
That said, I do support legally restricting the number of distractions available in a car. I know, this sounds hypocritical, but I support laws like this (and more usefully, against cell phones) for one very simple reason - Not everyone will admit to themselves and others that they drive poorly (or only average) to start with. As someone else pointed out, most people believe they have a higher level of skill than they actually do. When out for a highway ride, watch the other drivers - You can spot the ones on a cell-phone from a mile away. They make long slow swerves from one line to another, sometimes drifting slightly out of their lane, then make a quick jerk on the wheel to correct their drift. Some people can talk and drive. Enough exist that can't to count as a threat to my safety. Screw that - If we need to ban major distractions from the car, fine.
Meta-comment here...
In case people can't tell (and judging by an "informative" rating, they can't), the author of this one meant it as a JOKE.
You don't get higher-than-CD quality in 2/3rds the size, and a green marker does nothing* to any form of digital media - You don't get better or worse quality, you get bits.
Green bits don't sound better than clear bits or blue bits or red bits, although a little too much green might mean you get no bits (ie, render the media unplayable).
* - Relating to making it unplayable, the Sharpie trick to remove the copy protection from some CDs works by making the invalid data track unreadable. It doesn't "improve" the cd, it just breaks it in a way that happens to fix it, ironically enough.
111 times what you claim to be paying. I think your sums were a bit off or you threw a decimal place somewhere you shouldn't have!
Hmm... Checking my math, I see you have indeed found an error on my part. I used a CPU draw of 30W (roughly accurate for a PIII) and a power price of 15 cents per KW/h. And indeed screwed up the decimal place, by a factor of 100 (I gave the price in dollars, not cents).
So, rather than costing me 1/18th of what a banner ad does, it costs five times as much... Though for an hour. I still hold to my original point, however, since no one lingers at a web site for an hour at a time. Basically, this would break even with banner ads (for which I just checked, and did that math correctly <G>) after about 10 minutes of CPU time.
Thanks for keeping me honest.
I respect the effort and ingenuity, but the rationale that "hey, we're helping solve a problem" somehow justifies stealing someone else's resources... it's just wrong.
Although letting visitors know about this would certainly seem nicer, I don't think I'd actually consider it as outright unethical.
For one thing, considering the number of websites out there that try to feed outright malicious code into our browsers, this looks very very tame by comparison. It uses a few CPU cycles, but has no long-term effects on the visitor.
For another, this seems no different that sending the visitor a few banner ads - Just a way of "paying" for the content. For most of the world, bandwidth costs far more than CPU time, so in effect, this "charges" the user less per visit than most advertisements. From some quick n' dirty calculations, the bandwidth for 35k of banner ads costs me 0.082 cents, while the electricity for a full hour of CPU time (on a PIII/933) costs me only 0.0045 cents... Literally 18 times more.
Finally, I can (and do) keep Javascript disabled in my browser. Advertisements, on the other hand, I do my best to block, but a few still manage to sneak through.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts bashing the law that prohibits nudity in public.
Because of the standard legal hypocrisy...
First of all, we supposedly have a separation of religion and state, yet laws such as this one that ban public nudity have a basis only in morality. Yes, in some specific situations you could call it a health hazard, either to the exhibitionist or to those nearby, but that would count as the exception, not the rule.
Second of all, since we need to invoke religion to justify such archaic laws, the standard "presume what god wants" counterargument work fairly well... If the gods intended for us to wear clothes, we'd come out of the womb wearing them. Totally invalid, but just as good as the opposite, which currently contributes heavily to our actual body of laws.
Finally, in this particular case, she has a very convenient loophole she can (and most likely will) exploit (assuming none of the bystanders come forward to testify, an event I consider VERY unlikely) - Total lack of a material witness. And no, the pictures do not count, since I could produce similar pictures of just about anyone, in any public place, with five minutes of work in the Gimp (case in point, the famous picture of the "backpack guy" standing on a balcony on the WTC with a plane behind him about to hit). If no one speak up to disprove that defense (particularly since the bar's owner claims he didn't know about the photo shoot, which I consider extremely unlikely to have gone unnoticed in a crowded bar), the prosecution has no case. Plausible deniability, end of story.
I hate to break it to you: you're not the majority. How many non-football fans watch the SuperBowl each year because of the commericials?
Along similar lines, I hate to break it to you but Superbowl ads do not reflect peoples' opinions of ads in general. I would tend to agree with Zangief, that most people consider most ads (excluding those rare ones such as Superbowl ads or Honda's "Cog") at best ignorable, and if possible would completely eliminate them altogether.
I think as technologies like TiVo start to take off there is going to be more and more pressure placed on adverising companies to come up with innovative ads that people won't mind sitting through.
I agree, and would welcome that. We even have a precedent for that, where daytime soaps (which, although I personally consider them not much more entertaining than ads, they do seem popular) started out as serial soap commercials.
350 MB is enough for very good quality episodes of your favorite "1 hour" series
No. For watching on a crappy TV, 350MB would give you a result that you might not consider unbearable (and that assumes it uses MPEG-4 compression, not an entirely safe assumption when DVDs still use MPEG-2 (or even 1) for virtually all content). For watching on a PC, or a nice widescreen TV, you want at least 10MB per minute, so a full CD will give tolerable results on a one hour episode (which only contains 48 minutes of actual show).
I'd gladly pay 5 USD per episode
You might, but most people would not - $5 per episode would cost slightly more than the current system of distributing one season on a few DVDs for $30-$50. And you'd pay that for a lower quality version?
Movies, and to a lesser degree episodic TV shows, cost a lot to make. I appreciate that fact. But both of the **AAs have applied the idea of an economy of scarcity to their product, when it just doesn't apply.
Think of it like this - For every die-hard fan of a series, who will fork over $200-$500 to buy the complete collected series run, how many hundred more would love to have that, but would never pay that much? ST:TNG makes a good example here - The Borg Megacube (the full collected run) sold for the equivalent of USD$750. I consider myself a big fan of the series, but Hell will get a tad chilly before I fork over nearly a grand for a collected TV show. However, if they sold that for a more reasonable $100, every geek on the planet would drop it without even thinking twice. Poof, they go from a few tens of thousand of sales (yeah, I know they limited that particular collection to 1000, but I'd bet they chose as a very close number to the total potential predicted sales in the UK), to perhaps 20 million sales. Quite a big difference, for content already paid for by Paramount - Pure profit (minus a few cents per DVD for production costs), artificially capped by an obscenely high price.
So relating this back to the parent article, Consumers want realistic prices. In the US, that would mean around $5 for full length movies and $1/episode for collected TV series. Hey, they want to nail the early adopters? Fine, perhaps keep the current prices for the initial release, then drop it after three months. But put simply, the **AAs have an extremely simple way to all but eliminate piracy, that would actually make them more money - Sell their product for a reasonable price. And no, I don't mean this as an "I justify stealing because they charge too much" rant - Just a statement of fact. Charge less, and fewer people will see getting an illegal copy as worth the negative moral connotations (I won't say "risk" because we all know that we have almost zero risk of getting caught for privately copying a movie). People find stealing distasteful, and will generally not do it if given a reasonable alternative.
Of course, on /. we are morally opposed
to lawyers making any sort of reasonable
profit, so we would never participate in
such a suit.
Do the math - One million people, screwed for roughly $150. That adds up.
If the lawyers kept even a whopping 10% of that, hey, I have no problem. They make an obscene amount of money (even with a five-way split among a team of lawyers, that one settlement would come out to more than most Americans will make in their entire lives), and the settlemnt group gets most of their money back. Basically, no worse to the actual consumers than the BS restocking fees some vendors try to charge (free hint - If your state has a "lemon law", you can probably force them to take it back, no questions asked, with no fees).
So no, I don't mind the lawyers making a fat wad of cash when they actually do a service for society, rather than the usual of making all our lives miserable.
But when a team of five lawyers in a case such as I describe each gets $25 million, with each claimant getting a gift certificate for $5, and some random charity of the judge's choosing getting the balance, I have a problem with that. Not just because of the absurd level of greed involved, but because it does not serve justice. Justice, though admittedly a difficult to quantify quality, includes two main points - Relief for the victim(s) as the FIRST priority, and punishment for the evildoers as a close second.
With that, you can see why most of us have a problem with class action suits. Not so much because the lawyers profit, and not because the company involved doesn't suffer a bit of token punishment, but because the actual victims get absolutely no relief whatsoever. In this case, that means a million people each end up $150 (sorry, $145 minus a bit of good karma) short, Replay TV ends up losing even more between their own lawyers and lost sales, and the lawyers end up making a killing that directly stems from suffering on both sides of the suit.
So while I don't grudge the lawyers an honest living, just "follow the money", and you'll see why most of us have learned to laugh mockingly at anyone offering us a part in a class action suit.
from someone who's never used iSync with a newer model cell phone and a Mac.
True enough, since my phone and PC address books sync just fine. I don't, however, have a native C compiler for my phone. Do you?
Anyway, I think you missed my point... You can't say that you no longer need a PDA because your phone acts like one, as an argument against including basic PDA functionality in other portable devices such as an iPod.
More relevantly, and the justification for my sarcasm, your reason for no longer needing a standalone PDA has NOTHING to do with your use of a Mac. Nothing at all. Yet, you mentioned it as though you had some magical combination, rather than just two devices following a particular standardized interface.
If anything, you could thank Motorola for making a cell-phone include those aspects of a PDA you find most useful.
(Okay, Zealots, I've tossed you another one to mod down. When will I learn to keep my mouth shut in any thread having anything to do with Apple? Ah well, I have karma to burn. Bite me, rabid fanboys!)
Any Mac user who needs a PDA just buys a Bluetooth mobile phone and keeps their data synced to it.
Wow, an entirely new level of mindless obedience to Apple - Not only does Apple kick any PC's butt regardless of relative price and power, but now they rock people's world so much that they win even when nowhere near the actual machine!
Cool. I want to get a Mac so I don't need a PDA anymore either. You'll have to mail me to explain quite how that works, though - Does it ship with the bluetooth-enabled neural interface, or does that cost extra? And can I still play solitaire on that while bored?
And most importantly, when its battery dies six months after warantee, how much do they charge to replace it?
Oh, wait, silly me, I forgot - The user counts as disposeable hardware. Just buy a new iBrain, and it will have a fresh battery.
Amusing, that they call this a "low end" player... "Only" 400-800 songs? Gimme a break - How many of us spend so long away from a PC that we need more than 800 songs on a portable device?
If it plays Ogg Vorbis, they can consider me a potential customer. If not, well, I suppose they haven't lost me, since I'd never spend $400 for what amounts to a walkman-type device anyway. But I hope it does, because this sounds like almost exactly what I want in a portable music player (assuming it plays Vorbis, as I mentioned).
Hmm, one more qualification before I promise to buy it - If they plan to charge $100 to replace a $10 battery that dies within six months of the warrantee ending, I'll pass.
It does however give them a signed document they can produce in a courtroom
As a somewhat more relevant question, what gives SCO the right to "demand" written statements of compliance in the first place? Unless the original contract explicitly states "we can ask you to sign a promise of compliance at a later date", only an idiot (then again, we do talk about voluntary SCO customers here) would send anything other than "Dear Darl, I hereby swear that you suck, and we intend to migrate all of our servers to Linux in the next quarter, as, due to your actions, the odds of SCO still existing to provide us with continuing support seems exceedinly low. Sincerely, an soon-ex-SCO customer".
You don't like political BS, do something about it.
Both sedition and assassination carry heavy penalties. Anything short of that just plays the same game. As I don't wish to spend the rest of my life in the federal pen, I choose to bitch about things rather than "do" something productive.
Damn, you people irritate me.
Likewise - It really disgusts me that even after the 200 election, and all the info coming out about Diebold, and four thousand years of history of "business as usual" where the rich get richer etc... That people like you still believe that you can magically eliminate human (or rather, primate) nature from within the system.
You can't win Trivial Pursuit playing Monopoly, no matter how early in the game you get a hotel on Boardwalk.
Sorry, but the fact that you someday hope to win a comfy chair in a rigged popularity contest doesn't erase the fact that much of the world still lacks even uncomfy chairs, it just makes it a lot easier for you to justify the general inequity of chair ownership.
What did you think, we'd build one reactor and supply the whole world with energy? Please. At the very least each country will want their own simply so their energy source simple to guarantee the existance of their own energy in case of war or natural disaster.
Actaully, I did get that impression on my first read-through. Going back, I see that does not hold true, and your last point in particular makes a lot of sense... Of course we'd want our own, for the same reason we haven't already established a global power distribution system - It hurts to bomb one's own power grid.
Regardless, I still consider it absolutely absurd that we would favor Japan over France not for any legitimate reason, but actually admit that we favor Japan because Chirac wouldn't play Cowboys & Indians with the US.