I can tell you that two that I bought would not copy. They had done something to trip the SCCS system. Even though, being commercial first-generation releases, the recorder should have considered them to be "originals," they were deliberately miscoded as being first-generation digital copies. Thus the recorder would refuse to make what it had been tricked into thinking was a second-generation copy.
...for decades. It has been an official alternate name for MUMPS, ANSI standard X11.1, since 1995, while MUMPS itself goes back to 1966. It has been available for virtually every important platform, including but certainly not limited to Windows, for decades. I believe it is still the programming language used by the Veterans Administration. It is the foundation of Intersystem's corporations Cache development platform, and a (much-modified) form of it underlies the product line of Medical Information Technology (Meditech).
Meditech's revenues are something in the range of $350 million, Intersystems' were about $140 million in 2003. That ain't Microsoft but that ain't hay, either.
Regardless of what the legal rights and wrongs might be--I'm not sure whether the ISO and ANSI standards are still current--it just arrogant and tacky and lame for Microsoft to have appropriated this well-established, decades-old language name, particularly when they're so pugnacious about defending their own rights to an ordinary English plural noun.
Microsoft isn't alone in this, but I do get the impression that they have a few research units that they fund as window dressing, that are constantly presenting exciting demos of pretty cool stuff that never make it into actual products and never will.
Like Detroit's "concept cars."
Or Xerox PARC's Alto.
Or a Fortune 500 company I worked at that collapsed with astonishing speed. Little groups were always coming up with amazing things, and higher-ups were always clucking admiringly over them, but the little groups never had the internal political connections to get them turned into actual products.
The actual decisions on what got made into products were based on what the salespeople that called on the bank CEOs had to say. And the bank CEOs never told the salespeople that they were ready to write $100 million dollar checks for smell navigation or a spreadsheet for calculating music or whatever.
(Probably one of the things that makes Apple what it is, for good or for bad, is that it's run by a guy who has pretty good taste in ideas and is willing to back good ideas just because he thinks they are good).
I'm guessing it's because it's the audio home recording act and this is video.
Having owned a home audio CD recorder for many years, I can tell you that the AHRA was an interesting compromise. Home audio CD recorders do not accept standard CD-R media, but require special "audio" or "music" CD-R media that contains some encoded information that tells the recorder that it's an "audio CD-R."
The system also incorporated a technical mechanism that allowed for only first-generation bit-for-bit digital copying--you could make a bit-for-bit copy of a commercial original, but you couldn't copy the copy. (The machines, however, make a really excellent analog copy of a digital copy).
It was, I thought, really acceptable. It made casual copying convenient, you paid a quite reasonable amount for doing it, you were paying for the copy and not "pirating."
Manufacturers of audio CD-R media are required to pay a small amount of money to an agency that divvies it up between artists and music publishers.
One of the things that pushed me over the edge into a raging anti-RIAA crank was that when they started fooling around with "copy-protected" CDs, they made them uncopiable in audio home CD recorders.
In other words, here I was, an honest user, paying for every copy and keeping my end of the deal, and there they were, reneging on the deal.
I'm now utterly opposed to DRM because I'm convinced that the publishers cannot be trusted to limit themselves to enforcing rights that they actually possess. When allowed to use technical means to enforce their rights, they always overreach. They do not possess a six-year-old's sense of basic fair play.
...or not much, anyway. I'm sure I read about a home hobbyist conversion back in the sixties, in Mechanix Illustrated or one of those magazines, under the headline "It's a Volts Wagon!"
Of course, when I Googled on that title, what I turned up was http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,924216,00.html>this 1980 Time Magazine story about a bunch of prototype electric cars being developed by big corporations.
They were, as they always are, just around the corner.
"The G & W power system, unveiled with much fanfare, is the latest step toward the return of the volts wagon. With gasoline heading toward $1.50 per gal., with the nation bent on reducing imports of OPEC oil, and with cleaner air high on Washington's list of priorities, the electric vehicle, or EV for short, is the focus of increasing scientific and marketing attention."
"A lot of time and money is being spent on these things. Electrics are no longer dowdy."
"Gulf & Western believes it has solved, or is on the verge of solving, most of the problems of the electric car. The company demonstrated three EVs near its Manhattan headquarters last week: the VW Rabbit and two Japanese-made vans, all powered by zinc-chloride Electric Engines."
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality... But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
Bring stuff you can pass around. As much stuff as possible. Short network cables. A small hub. Some system upgrade CDs (ones that are old enough that you don't mind fingerprints on them. A ring binder. Snapshots of server rooms, wiring closets, etc. A punchdown block and a punchdown tools. You know, stuff.
Elementary school? Include the nuts-and-bolts physical details people take for granted. For example, just imagining, please don't be offended...
I drive to work. The building I work in is about the size of this school. I get free coffee. I ride the elevator to the third floor. I spend some of my time sitting at a computer screen, and some of my time walking out to server rooms and wiring closets and plugging and unplugging cables.
My office is a cubicle. Here's a picture of it that I'm going to pass around. Some companies are very stodgy and want everyone's cubicles to look neat and tidy, but mine doesn't care and I get to decorate it any way I like.
On a good day, it feels as if I'm playing with the biggest model train set in the world. Other times it feels boring and like doing homework.
My job makes me feel important because my company depends on all of this complicated stuff working smoothly, and I'm good at making it smoothly. It's not easy, but I make it look easy. It can be scary because if I make one little mistake, suddenly hundreds of computers throughout the company stop working correctly and my phone starts ringing and people get angry at me.
I get paid pretty well.
I need to spend a lot of time learning about new systems. Earlier this year I went to a one-week training session in Toledo. It was almost like going to school. But because I'm an adult they have to treat me nicer, and they give us better lunches. We sat at desks and listened to a teacher tell us about Frammis Server 8.4.3 and at the end I took a quiz about it and I passed and they gave me this Certificate of Completion.
Around the turn of the century, electric cars had a range of about forty miles... the same as the Chevy Volt. All the improvements in battery technology have been able to do no more than keep up with our expectations of automotive comfort and speed.
Electric cars have, for a century, been waiting for the big breakthrough in battery technology that has yet to occur. The brilliance of the basic TRW design--the one they could never get U. S. carmakers interested in, the design that is fundamentally the same that Toyota uses in the Prius--is that it only relies on the battery as a short-term buffering device, a "torquer" as TRW called it, to make up the difference between the torque that can be provided by a little economical gas engine and the torque that's needed in normal driving.
So, a Prius provides a very meaningful increase in fuel efficiency without demanding a battery made of unobtainium. The Prius battery in fact only stores about enough energy to drive the car for about a mile.
Despite the possibility that Toyota is putting a spin on things, what they are saying makes sense. As hobbyists have confirmed, a Prius is virtually ready to be a plug-in hybrid, needing only a bigger battery. It would seemingly be so easy for Toyota to compete in the plug-in hybrid market that I have to believe they have sound reasons for skepticism.
Another possibility is that Toyota has encountered some serious snags that they're not talking about in trying to produce a plug-in version of the Prius. Perhaps GM knows about these snags and has some trade-secret ways of overcoming them... or perhaps GM hasn't discovered them yet, or is ignoring them because the Volt isn't really intended to succeed and is just a very elaborate "image" ploy.
Is it safe to assume that some competitor has just released a working toolkit for developing cloud applications that works pretty well? And that Ballmer needs to get the pointy-haired boss to stop Dilbert from using that toolkit, and redesign the mission-critical project around Windows Cloud?
...and your hard work will last exactly as long as it takes Microsoft's marketing department to decide to tweak VBA for some strategic purpose. They'll take it out of Excel, or only put it into Excel Plus, or change all the functions to work only with.NET or whatever their newest strategic push is for. Or it will mysteriously happen that the current version of VBA breaks under Windows 7 and can only be fixed by upgrading Excel, which will then be segmented into seven flavors (Excel Home, Excel Home Office, Excel Small Business, Excel Enterprise), etc. with VBA being included only in Excel Premium Pro Deluxe for Enterprises for $895.00.
Write it in VBA and it will last as long as something written in Exidy Sorceror BASIC or a TI-99A program or
Write it in VBA and your math results will depend on programmers who in all likelihood have never studied numerical analysis, and whose work isn't being carefully reviewed or QA-ed numerical accuracy because Excel isn't intended for that market. (On the other hand, cents roundoff and internal rate of return will probably be very reliable).
Their motivation is commercial, but RealNetworks is nevertheless defending (some aspects of) fair use. What is very important is that RealNetworks is saying that content owners do not get to make the final determination of what is and is not fair use.
The content owners have been overreaching on copyright by a large amount and for a long time now. I happen to think the current copyright law gives them far too much. But even saying "you only get to take what the law gives you and no more" would be an improvement on the present situation.
Some nice action in the commercial marketplace to push the grabby MPAA back into the spacious terrain that's been staked out for them is a Good Thing.
Why weren't 1960s telephones available with tiny Minox cameras built into them? BECAUSE NOBODY NEEDS A CAMERA IN A TELEPHONE, that's why.
What do I need? I need a cell phone that works everywhere and has as good voice quality as a landline phone. One that costs less than $10 a month to use. That's what I need.
A camera in a phone? Makes as much sense as a toaster in a car, a thermometer in a tennis racquet, or an mp3 player in a condom.
The only way Blu-Ray could have a chance would be if the price of the player mechanism dropped to the point where the price differential between a DVD player and a DVD-and-Blu-Ray player becomes negligible... so negligible that a consumer walking into Wal*Mart to buy "a DVD player" almost accidentally gets Blu-Ray too.
If I were Sony I'd heavily subsidize the cost of the players to make that happen, giving away the Blu-Ray player razor in hopes of selling some Blu-Ray disk blades.
Oh, yeah, and the price differential between DVD and Blu-Ray disks would need to narrow almost to nothing, as well.
Consider the value Mendeleev added to the names of the elements when, instead of listing them in alphabetical order, he organized them into the Periodic Table.
Consider the value Tom Lehrer added to them when he arranged them to make a funny song out of them.
See if that doesn't convince you of the soundness of Wikipedia's judgments (which, perhaps I should say, are not made by administrators, but hashed out in group discussions to which all Wikipedia editors may contribute).
"Sean Cragg is the coolest dude alive. he thinks. And he sneezes like he is Vomiting:P"
"Normo: A derogatory term to refer a person (Normal) who fears people with mental disabilities"
"Josh Himberg the man. He runs the NHS like its his bisnuss."
They should just offer the things in the United States, price them at whatever level they need to make a profit, and find out whether there's a market for it.
How much downside can there be? There must be as big a market for this as there is for a Limited Edition Shelby GT500KR.
There are lot more places to buy diesel than E85, but that doesn't stop them from selling flex-fuel vehicles.
Why not test the market? If there's any sign of interest how hard can it be to build the engines in the United States? Maybe in one of the fourteen plants they closed?
I can't believe it wouldn't be a huge publicity boost to Ford to say "we have a car that's more fuel-efficient than a Toyota Prius," even if it does use diesel. And it might help them get those CAFE numbers up without a handout from the government.
As long as the fudge factor is constant...
on
24 Hour Laptops From HP?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The typical laptop claims four hours and gets about two. My iPod claims eight hours and gets about four.
Peace to all the battery hypermilers who can actually get the stated life by turning off this, selecting that, and uninstalling the other thing. I believe you. I'm talking about me and the battery life I get.
HP claims twenty-four hours, so in real life it's probably about twelve. It's still a lot.
In the 1960s I loved an almost-forgotten comic strip called Smokey Stover. (Aha! Not so forgotten! Doesn't seem to be a searchable site... one that I loved and wish that I'd clipped and framed involved Smokey and an assistant are drilling a hole in the ceiling with a brace and bit. Smokey says "That's funny, this one-inch bit is making six-inch holes." In some inexplicable manner, the bit is drilling a perfectly round, clean, six-inch hole.
The assistant says, "Well, try this half-inch bit--then you'll only get a three-inch hole."
(Meanwhile, the OLPC people claimed twenty hours for the XO laptop, but it actually gets about four. That's not "fudge," that's some other brown substance.)
And the human body is just eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals.
And you can explain everything with just ninety-two elements. Or just four, earth, air, water, and fire.
One of the most amazingly mind-opening things I ever read was a remark in a book by John R. Pierce, to the effect that Kirchoff's Laws are more general than Maxwell's Equations, because they can explain the behavior of all circuits, not just electronic circuits... but that Maxwell's Equations are more general than Kirchoff's Laws because they can explain the behavior of all electromagnetic systems, not just circuits.
It occurs to me that if there are "forgotten" segments of the population (e.g. prisoners) who've escaped official notice in the preparation for the switch, and haven't been reached by the numerous public announcements, or can't or don't know how to prepare for it......how is the FCC going to find out whether they've been affected?
The same factors that have caused them to be overlooked before the test may cause them to be overlooked in evaluating the results of the test.
The people who have a phone and know how to call the FCC are the same people who won't need to--because they heard the announcements, got their coupons, and bought their boxes at Wal*Mart.
Numerous stories mention that prisons are not ready for digital television, and prison administrators are worried.
Generally, inmates pay for their own television sets and (for some reason that escapes me) are not eligible for the $40 coupons.
Prison administrators say"the tube does more than fill year after year of idle hours. It provides a sense of normalcy and is a bargaining chip that encourages good behavior... At Indiana's Wabash Valley super-maximum security prison [a psychiatrist said], far fewer behavior problems were reported among inmates in isolation after they were given small TVs. 'You don't want to be managing prisoners who have nothing to lose,' Kupers."
I expect the test will show that, in fact, prison inmates represent only one example of what will prove to be a large population of forgotten Americans... the people who don't answer telephone surveys because they don't have telephones, the people who don't shop at Best Buy because they don't have cars and the nearest Best Buy can't be reached by public transportation, etc.
I will grant that the amount of publicity being given to the DTV switchover on our local TV stations is so large... at least during the times of day we watch and on the channels we watch... that it's hard to imagine people not knowing about it, but there is always that twenty percent of the population who can't name the President.
Indeed, I'm astonished at the poster who asks "Will they broadcast a notice?" since our local stations have been doing that continuously since February. Either his are not or he, like those twenty per cent I'm talking about, didn't notice.
I expected to be able to zoom out and see a conspicuous ring of communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, but I didn't see what I expected. Am I missing something obvious? Or doesn't the zoom zoom out far enough?
...required me to keep possession of a USB-key-sized physical object in order to maintain access to it, then I calculate that I would need to keep about two thousand pounds of USB keys, which would be enough to fill approximately twenty desk drawers.
I guess it's not impossible on the face of it.
I could store them in shallow drawers, vertically, alphabetical order, with little P-touch labels on the end of each one.
..."Your bank's bill paying service didn't send AT&T the payment stub you received from AT&T..." That's very interesting and it makes all kinds of sense. Thanks for the insight.
In other words, AT&T was paid on time but didn't know they'd been paid on time.
As for disclosure, I'm an inveterate fine-print reader and I doubt it was spelled out the way you explained it. But yes, I'm sure the "5 days" was just labeled as an estimate and there probably was no commitment to get it paid within any definite period of time at all. But if they estimate 5 days I think most people would have thought 10 days was pretty safe!
I've copyrighted "Pg Up," "Pg Dn," and every variation thereof. So, Microsoft can program a couple of keys to perform a Page Up and a Page Down, but they can't call the keys that do it "Pg Up" and "Pg Dn" without paying me a royalty.
They'll have to use something else, maybe Ctrl-Q E and Ctrl-Q X.
Bwahahahaha!
Don't believe me? Why do you suppose the key that copies the screen says "Prnt Scr" instead of "Copy Scr?" Because I hold the rights to the "Copy Scr" legend!
Slashdot Mirror
I can't vouch for "most."
I can tell you that two that I bought would not copy. They had done something to trip the SCCS system. Even though, being commercial first-generation releases, the recorder should have considered them to be "originals," they were deliberately miscoded as being first-generation digital copies. Thus the recorder would refuse to make what it had been tricked into thinking was a second-generation copy.
...for decades. It has been an official alternate name for MUMPS, ANSI standard X11.1, since 1995, while MUMPS itself goes back to 1966. It has been available for virtually every important platform, including but certainly not limited to Windows, for decades. I believe it is still the programming language used by the Veterans Administration. It is the foundation of Intersystem's corporations Cache development platform, and a (much-modified) form of it underlies the product line of Medical Information Technology (Meditech).
Meditech's revenues are something in the range of $350 million, Intersystems' were about $140 million in 2003. That ain't Microsoft but that ain't hay, either.
Regardless of what the legal rights and wrongs might be--I'm not sure whether the ISO and ANSI standards are still current--it just arrogant and tacky and lame for Microsoft to have appropriated this well-established, decades-old language name, particularly when they're so pugnacious about defending their own rights to an ordinary English plural noun.
Microsoft isn't alone in this, but I do get the impression that they have a few research units that they fund as window dressing, that are constantly presenting exciting demos of pretty cool stuff that never make it into actual products and never will.
Like Detroit's "concept cars."
Or Xerox PARC's Alto.
Or a Fortune 500 company I worked at that collapsed with astonishing speed. Little groups were always coming up with amazing things, and higher-ups were always clucking admiringly over them, but the little groups never had the internal political connections to get them turned into actual products.
The actual decisions on what got made into products were based on what the salespeople that called on the bank CEOs had to say. And the bank CEOs never told the salespeople that they were ready to write $100 million dollar checks for smell navigation or a spreadsheet for calculating music or whatever.
(Probably one of the things that makes Apple what it is, for good or for bad, is that it's run by a guy who has pretty good taste in ideas and is willing to back good ideas just because he thinks they are good).
I'm guessing it's because it's the audio home recording act and this is video.
Having owned a home audio CD recorder for many years, I can tell you that the AHRA was an interesting compromise. Home audio CD recorders do not accept standard CD-R media, but require special "audio" or "music" CD-R media that contains some encoded information that tells the recorder that it's an "audio CD-R."
The system also incorporated a technical mechanism that allowed for only first-generation bit-for-bit digital copying--you could make a bit-for-bit copy of a commercial original, but you couldn't copy the copy. (The machines, however, make a really excellent analog copy of a digital copy).
It was, I thought, really acceptable. It made casual copying convenient, you paid a quite reasonable amount for doing it, you were paying for the copy and not "pirating."
Manufacturers of audio CD-R media are required to pay a small amount of money to an agency that divvies it up between artists and music publishers.
One of the things that pushed me over the edge into a raging anti-RIAA crank was that when they started fooling around with "copy-protected" CDs, they made them uncopiable in audio home CD recorders.
In other words, here I was, an honest user, paying for every copy and keeping my end of the deal, and there they were, reneging on the deal.
I'm now utterly opposed to DRM because I'm convinced that the publishers cannot be trusted to limit themselves to enforcing rights that they actually possess. When allowed to use technical means to enforce their rights, they always overreach. They do not possess a six-year-old's sense of basic fair play.
...or not much, anyway. I'm sure I read about a home hobbyist conversion back in the sixties, in Mechanix Illustrated or one of those magazines, under the headline "It's a Volts Wagon!"
Of course, when I Googled on that title, what I turned up was http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,924216,00.html>this 1980 Time Magazine story about a bunch of prototype electric cars being developed by big corporations.
They were, as they always are, just around the corner.
"The G & W power system, unveiled with much fanfare, is the latest step toward the return of the volts wagon. With gasoline heading toward $1.50 per gal., with the nation bent on reducing imports of OPEC oil, and with cleaner air high on Washington's list of priorities, the electric vehicle, or EV for short, is the focus of increasing scientific and marketing attention."
"A lot of time and money is being spent on these things. Electrics are no longer dowdy."
"Gulf & Western believes it has solved, or is on the verge of solving, most of the problems of the electric car. The company demonstrated three EVs near its Manhattan headquarters last week: the VW Rabbit and two Japanese-made vans, all powered by zinc-chloride Electric Engines."
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality... But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
--H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909)
Bring stuff you can pass around. As much stuff as possible. Short network cables. A small hub. Some system upgrade CDs (ones that are old enough that you don't mind fingerprints on them. A ring binder. Snapshots of server rooms, wiring closets, etc. A punchdown block and a punchdown tools. You know, stuff.
Elementary school? Include the nuts-and-bolts physical details people take for granted. For example, just imagining, please don't be offended...
I drive to work. The building I work in is about the size of this school. I get free coffee. I ride the elevator to the third floor. I spend some of my time sitting at a computer screen, and some of my time walking out to server rooms and wiring closets and plugging and unplugging cables.
My office is a cubicle. Here's a picture of it that I'm going to pass around. Some companies are very stodgy and want everyone's cubicles to look neat and tidy, but mine doesn't care and I get to decorate it any way I like.
On a good day, it feels as if I'm playing with the biggest model train set in the world. Other times it feels boring and like doing homework.
My job makes me feel important because my company depends on all of this complicated stuff working smoothly, and I'm good at making it smoothly. It's not easy, but I make it look easy. It can be scary because if I make one little mistake, suddenly hundreds of computers throughout the company stop working correctly and my phone starts ringing and people get angry at me.
I get paid pretty well.
I need to spend a lot of time learning about new systems. Earlier this year I went to a one-week training session in Toledo. It was almost like going to school. But because I'm an adult they have to treat me nicer, and they give us better lunches. We sat at desks and listened to a teacher tell us about Frammis Server 8.4.3 and at the end I took a quiz about it and I passed and they gave me this Certificate of Completion.
etc. etc.
Around the turn of the century, electric cars had a range of about forty miles... the same as the Chevy Volt. All the improvements in battery technology have been able to do no more than keep up with our expectations of automotive comfort and speed.
Electric cars have, for a century, been waiting for the big breakthrough in battery technology that has yet to occur. The brilliance of the basic TRW design--the one they could never get U. S. carmakers interested in, the design that is fundamentally the same that Toyota uses in the Prius--is that it only relies on the battery as a short-term buffering device, a "torquer" as TRW called it, to make up the difference between the torque that can be provided by a little economical gas engine and the torque that's needed in normal driving.
So, a Prius provides a very meaningful increase in fuel efficiency without demanding a battery made of unobtainium. The Prius battery in fact only stores about enough energy to drive the car for about a mile.
Despite the possibility that Toyota is putting a spin on things, what they are saying makes sense. As hobbyists have confirmed, a Prius is virtually ready to be a plug-in hybrid, needing only a bigger battery. It would seemingly be so easy for Toyota to compete in the plug-in hybrid market that I have to believe they have sound reasons for skepticism.
Another possibility is that Toyota has encountered some serious snags that they're not talking about in trying to produce a plug-in version of the Prius. Perhaps GM knows about these snags and has some trade-secret ways of overcoming them... or perhaps GM hasn't discovered them yet, or is ignoring them because the Volt isn't really intended to succeed and is just a very elaborate "image" ploy.
I haven't been following this stuff.
Is it safe to assume that some competitor has just released a working toolkit for developing cloud applications that works pretty well? And that Ballmer needs to get the pointy-haired boss to stop Dilbert from using that toolkit, and redesign the mission-critical project around Windows Cloud?
...and your hard work will last exactly as long as it takes Microsoft's marketing department to decide to tweak VBA for some strategic purpose. They'll take it out of Excel, or only put it into Excel Plus, or change all the functions to work only with .NET or whatever their newest strategic push is for. Or it will mysteriously happen that the current version of VBA breaks under Windows 7 and can only be fixed by upgrading Excel, which will then be segmented into seven flavors (Excel Home, Excel Home Office, Excel Small Business, Excel Enterprise), etc. with VBA being included only in Excel Premium Pro Deluxe for Enterprises for $895.00.
Write it in VBA and it will last as long as something written in Exidy Sorceror BASIC or a TI-99A program or
Write it in VBA and your math results will depend on programmers who in all likelihood have never studied numerical analysis, and whose work isn't being carefully reviewed or QA-ed numerical accuracy because Excel isn't intended for that market. (On the other hand, cents roundoff and internal rate of return will probably be very reliable).
Their motivation is commercial, but RealNetworks is nevertheless defending (some aspects of) fair use. What is very important is that RealNetworks is saying that content owners do not get to make the final determination of what is and is not fair use.
The content owners have been overreaching on copyright by a large amount and for a long time now. I happen to think the current copyright law gives them far too much. But even saying "you only get to take what the law gives you and no more" would be an improvement on the present situation.
Some nice action in the commercial marketplace to push the grabby MPAA back into the spacious terrain that's been staked out for them is a Good Thing.
Why weren't 1960s telephones available with tiny Minox cameras built into them? BECAUSE NOBODY NEEDS A CAMERA IN A TELEPHONE, that's why.
What do I need? I need a cell phone that works everywhere and has as good voice quality as a landline phone. One that costs less than $10 a month to use. That's what I need.
A camera in a phone? Makes as much sense as a toaster in a car, a thermometer in a tennis racquet, or an mp3 player in a condom.
The only way Blu-Ray could have a chance would be if the price of the player mechanism dropped to the point where the price differential between a DVD player and a DVD-and-Blu-Ray player becomes negligible... so negligible that a consumer walking into Wal*Mart to buy "a DVD player" almost accidentally gets Blu-Ray too.
If I were Sony I'd heavily subsidize the cost of the players to make that happen, giving away the Blu-Ray player razor in hopes of selling some Blu-Ray disk blades.
Oh, yeah, and the price differential between DVD and Blu-Ray disks would need to narrow almost to nothing, as well.
Consider the value Mendeleev added to the names of the elements when, instead of listing them in alphabetical order, he organized them into the Periodic Table.
Consider the value Tom Lehrer added to them when he arranged them to make a funny song out of them.
See if that doesn't convince you of the soundness of Wikipedia's judgments (which, perhaps I should say, are not made by administrators, but hashed out in group discussions to which all Wikipedia editors may contribute).
"Sean Cragg is the coolest dude alive. he thinks. And he sneezes like he is Vomiting :P"
"Normo: A derogatory term to refer a person (Normal) who fears people with mental disabilities"
"Josh Himberg the man. He runs the NHS like its his bisnuss."
These are buried treasure?
They should just offer the things in the United States, price them at whatever level they need to make a profit, and find out whether there's a market for it.
How much downside can there be? There must be as big a market for this as there is for a Limited Edition Shelby GT500KR.
There are lot more places to buy diesel than E85, but that doesn't stop them from selling flex-fuel vehicles.
Why not test the market? If there's any sign of interest how hard can it be to build the engines in the United States? Maybe in one of the fourteen plants they closed?
I can't believe it wouldn't be a huge publicity boost to Ford to say "we have a car that's more fuel-efficient than a Toyota Prius," even if it does use diesel. And it might help them get those CAFE numbers up without a handout from the government.
The typical laptop claims four hours and gets about two. My iPod claims eight hours and gets about four.
Peace to all the battery hypermilers who can actually get the stated life by turning off this, selecting that, and uninstalling the other thing. I believe you. I'm talking about me and the battery life I get.
HP claims twenty-four hours, so in real life it's probably about twelve. It's still a lot.
In the 1960s I loved an almost-forgotten comic strip called Smokey Stover. (Aha! Not so forgotten! Doesn't seem to be a searchable site... one that I loved and wish that I'd clipped and framed involved Smokey and an assistant are drilling a hole in the ceiling with a brace and bit. Smokey says "That's funny, this one-inch bit is making six-inch holes." In some inexplicable manner, the bit is drilling a perfectly round, clean, six-inch hole.
The assistant says, "Well, try this half-inch bit--then you'll only get a three-inch hole."
(Meanwhile, the OLPC people claimed twenty hours for the XO laptop, but it actually gets about four. That's not "fudge," that's some other brown substance.)
And the human body is just eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals.
And you can explain everything with just ninety-two elements. Or just four, earth, air, water, and fire.
One of the most amazingly mind-opening things I ever read was a remark in a book by John R. Pierce, to the effect that Kirchoff's Laws are more general than Maxwell's Equations, because they can explain the behavior of all circuits, not just electronic circuits... but that Maxwell's Equations are more general than Kirchoff's Laws because they can explain the behavior of all electromagnetic systems, not just circuits.
It occurs to me that if there are "forgotten" segments of the population (e.g. prisoners) who've escaped official notice in the preparation for the switch, and haven't been reached by the numerous public announcements, or can't or don't know how to prepare for it... ...how is the FCC going to find out whether they've been affected?
The same factors that have caused them to be overlooked before the test may cause them to be overlooked in evaluating the results of the test.
The people who have a phone and know how to call the FCC are the same people who won't need to--because they heard the announcements, got their coupons, and bought their boxes at Wal*Mart.
Numerous stories mention that prisons are not ready for digital television, and prison administrators are worried.
Generally, inmates pay for their own television sets and (for some reason that escapes me) are not eligible for the $40 coupons.
Prison administrators say"the tube does more than fill year after year of idle hours. It provides a sense of normalcy and is a bargaining chip that encourages good behavior... At Indiana's Wabash Valley super-maximum security prison [a psychiatrist said], far fewer behavior problems were reported among inmates in isolation after they were given small TVs. 'You don't want to be managing prisoners who have nothing to lose,' Kupers."
I expect the test will show that, in fact, prison inmates represent only one example of what will prove to be a large population of forgotten Americans... the people who don't answer telephone surveys because they don't have telephones, the people who don't shop at Best Buy because they don't have cars and the nearest Best Buy can't be reached by public transportation, etc.
I will grant that the amount of publicity being given to the DTV switchover on our local TV stations is so large... at least during the times of day we watch and on the channels we watch... that it's hard to imagine people not knowing about it, but there is always that twenty percent of the population who can't name the President.
Indeed, I'm astonished at the poster who asks "Will they broadcast a notice?" since our local stations have been doing that continuously since February. Either his are not or he, like those twenty per cent I'm talking about, didn't notice.
I expected to be able to zoom out and see a conspicuous ring of communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, but I didn't see what I expected. Am I missing something obvious? Or doesn't the zoom zoom out far enough?
...required me to keep possession of a USB-key-sized physical object in order to maintain access to it, then I calculate that I would need to keep about two thousand pounds of USB keys, which would be enough to fill approximately twenty desk drawers.
I guess it's not impossible on the face of it.
I could store them in shallow drawers, vertically, alphabetical order, with little P-touch labels on the end of each one.
..."Your bank's bill paying service didn't send AT&T the payment stub you received from AT&T..." That's very interesting and it makes all kinds of sense. Thanks for the insight.
In other words, AT&T was paid on time but didn't know they'd been paid on time.
As for disclosure, I'm an inveterate fine-print reader and I doubt it was spelled out the way you explained it. But yes, I'm sure the "5 days" was just labeled as an estimate and there probably was no commitment to get it paid within any definite period of time at all. But if they estimate 5 days I think most people would have thought 10 days was pretty safe!
I've copyrighted "Pg Up," "Pg Dn," and every variation thereof. So, Microsoft can program a couple of keys to perform a Page Up and a Page Down, but they can't call the keys that do it "Pg Up" and "Pg Dn" without paying me a royalty.
They'll have to use something else, maybe Ctrl-Q E and Ctrl-Q X.
Bwahahahaha!
Don't believe me? Why do you suppose the key that copies the screen says "Prnt Scr" instead of "Copy Scr?" Because I hold the rights to the "Copy Scr" legend!