As of my drive home, they were saying on the radio that the race was a "statistical dead heat." They also said that (at least some claim) that the incidence of problems is not uniform and that the worst problems are occurring in urban areas...
What they didn't say is exactly how a recount is performed with these systems. Does anyone know? Do you pull down "recount" on the menu and have it display the same answer it displayed before and say, "Look, a recount?"
Once again... I'm willing to pay, but I have to GET something as good as I used to get.
There's no way that "Over 17,000 albums by over 7,000 top artists" is going to come close to the richness and variety we got from of individual fans trading their individual favorites.
I am now going to make a quick test on four items I obtained from the "real" Audiogalaxy a few months ago. This is an authentic test, I do not know yet what I am going to find. Bernard Cribbins, 'Ole in the Ground; Harry Champion, "I'm Enerey the Eighth;" Nervous Norvus, "Ape Call;" and the MIT Chorallaries, "We Are The Engineers."
Well, it seems you can't search for individual titles unless you actually join, but with great labor you can page through the artist list, and I find:
Bernard Cribbins: Nope.
Harry Champion: Nope.
Nervous Norvus: Nope.
The MIT Chorallaries: Nope.
Now, someone is saying "What kind of market is there for the MIT Chorallaries, for pete's sake?" Well, all I can say is, when Audiogalaxy was for real, _I_ wanted to hear them and _someone_ out there wanted to share them.
Without SHARING, all you're ever going to get is Britney Spears and Elvis Presley.
on a whiteboard. You know, the guys that love to draw rectangles and clouds and arrows and boxes sitting on top of other boxes and call it an "architecture."
Without screen shots, critical commentary, or a real review it's hard to tell just how effective this really is. SLIGHTLY polarized light is very common in the everyday environment. For example, light from most parts of the sky is partially polarized. Many of us have probably noticed pale rainbow- or oil-film-like colorations in car windows as a result of the interactions between birefringence in the prestressed safety glass and natural polarized light from the sky. This is even more noticable on airline flights with airliner windows.
I think it is VERY unlikely that the screen looks PERFECTLY blank all the time. I'll bet that, for example, in a laptop on an airplane, it would be easy to see that there was SOMETHING on the screen, and even to read it without glasses by close inspection.
So, I'm not completely sure I understand the practical point of this invention. It isn't going to make spies think that the screen is truly blank or truly turned off--if, indeed, the fact that someone is looking at the screen with special glasses was not a giveaway in itself. As a casual "privacy" device it probably works--a spy probably couldn't read it from three feet away, and staring at it from six inches away while rotating it to get the greatest amount of naturally polarized light would make the spy conspicuous. But various existing privacy devices that limit the usable angle of view would probably be just as effective.
On the other hand, if someone can develop a version of this that simulataneously display TWO DIFFERENT images with 90-degree-opposite polarization--the computer-display equivalent of a Polaroid "Vectograph"--it might be a useful form of 3D-with-glasses display.
...is an amusing century-old story about competitive brothers who devise two different methods of achieving invisibility. It's online here.
In his fictional story, both methods have problems. The problems are more than fictional, since one of the methods relies on the nonsense supposition that since black is the absence of light, the only reason you can see something that's black is that the black isn't PERFECTLY black, and that if you could achieve perfect blackness you could achieve invisibility.
However, the method described in the parent article here is equally flawed, since it would work only for an observer placed in a specific view location. One wonders how the equipment is supposed to locate the observer; if there are several observers, how does it decide which of them should be prevented from seeing the object?
The method bears a close resemblance to Hollywood special effects processes (glass shots, matte shots, etc.) Special effects processes are notorious for having visible edge effects if not done carefully, and I'm sure this would be true of the proposed method as well.
In "The Shadow and the Flash," one invisibility cloak could be detected by a sensation of darkness and depression whenever the concealed individual was nearby; the other suffered from occasional rainbow flashes due to mismatches in the index of refraction. I'm sure that the proposed method would have similar problems.
As I've said before... what the music companies need to do is give us something AS GOOD AS Napster and Audiogalaxy were.
The problem is not the "pay" part.
The problem is the "as good as" part.
And that means: ALLOW FILE SHARING. There is no way in the world that a consortium of music companies pitching their collective Top 40 is going to cater to my oddball individual interests. (And EVERYONE has oddball individual interests--this is not an elitist thing).
Napster and AudioGalaxy have shown me that there are PLENTY of people out there who share my fondness for, say, Billy Murray cylinder recordings, or Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground," or Johnny Standley's "Grandma's Lye Soap." And are willing to take the time to rip and upload them.
There's no way a for-profit company is going to bother with this sort of thing. Which, while it may or may not be under copyright, is of negligible commercial value.
So, what they should do is LET THE FANS DO WHAT THEY LIKE and charge a REASONABLE fee, like the "blank media" fee on VHS cassettes or home audio music CD-R's, to compensate music companies and artists for their use.
This isn't very different from what ASCAP and BMI have done for years with radio stations, where a flat fee is charged, based on the radio station's audience, which gives them the right to broadcast as much as they like of the licensed material.
Just set up something like Napster or AudioGalaxy, and charge me the appropriate ASCAP fee for an audience of one.
Oh, well, the point was supposed to be that if it behaved like the device described in the article, it would start stealing music off of the radio when it was supposed to be composing its own... I guess my comment was either a) too subtle, or b) not funny.
What's the big deal? The Boston Globe has been reporting on this as it unfolds. The author of the report asked his teen-aged daughter if she'd do an illustration, she did, she didn't know better, they used it, Horizon complained, MIT apologized.
I just feel sorry for the guy and his daughter. She was interested in art, he was trying to give her a nice little moment.
The last time I looked, Horizon wanted a more sincere apology--I think they said that since the original had been a press release the apology should be a press release or something like that. But I'm sure MIT and Horizon will work it out, probably without even any money payment.
Nothing in the incident even involves any EXTREME misjudgement or overreaction. It's not as if the author of the report did anything TERRIBLY stupid; it fell well within the normal range of misjudgement that anyone could make from time to time. And, dammit, it was a nice thing for him to do for his daughter. He just should have been a little more careful.
It's not like Horizon was wrong to complain. It's not like Horizon is overreacting or suing MIT for $100,000,000.
It was a minor misjudgement, everyone seems to be acting in a reasonably adult manner... what's the big deal?
It will be interesting to see just how.NET can avoid the same issues.
Demo software like Bricklin's is usually used to present a positive view of technology that doesn't exist... this is the first time I've ever seen demo software used to present a negative view of technology that DOES exist.
A "free" version bundled with their hardware which works only with their hardware (on which they've paid a licensing fee)... and a $29.95 version which works with third-party hardware and on which they'd pay a licensing fee per-SOFTWARE_copy?
They could pay the licensing fee out of that, make a little money, make their dealers and third-party add-on providers and customers happy... seems like a win-win-win-win scenario to me.
No corroborating evidence at all except the word of the adolescent girl herself. Nobody else saw it. Nobody but she can testify that it was warm.
They say they "plan" to have the stone analyzed by scientists, but it hasn't happened yet.
Even the scientist couldn't prove that someone hadn't warmed up a meteorite and pitched it over the rooftops.
I have no doubt Charles Fort would put this in his newspaper clippings file, but the only thing that's remarkable about this to me is that the BBC would publish it.
I bet a nickel that there's never even any followup story reporting on any scientist's report on the meteorite. I can just see the family in their car on their way to the university and the embarrassed kid 'fesses up.
Apparently my memory of the 1964 Picturephone is faulty, because it says here that "The image only refreshed once every few seconds." That's sure not the way I remember it, but...
On the other hand, something doesn't quite jibe, because this article says that the bandwidth was 1,000,000 Hz, which was about one-quarter that of full broadcast EIA RS-170-A black-and-white video; so if you assume that the screen resolution was half that of broadcast in both dimensions, it should have been possible to get a full 30 fps. Or if the screen had full broadcast resolution, it should have been possible to get 7 fps, which is a far cry from "once every few seconds."
"based on my tests, Beamer sometimes worked and sometimes didn't...when it did, the pixilated video could be as jittery as Jell-O... on none of my Beamer calls were the voice and the movement of the other party's lips in sync..."
"If both people press the button before a connection is made, the video may fail. [If you get it right] there's an uncomfortable silence for between 15 and 45 seconds.... the audio resumes when the person at the other end shows up on screen... If the person does show up, that is. My initial efforts to connect with my father-in-law repeatedly failed, until Vialta replaced the unit I had sent him."
Have our standards for "computerish" devices fallen so low that Slashdot considers THAT to be "working as advertised?"
I personally used a Picturephone at the World's Fair in 1964. To the best of my recollection, the picture was black-and-white, and small (perhaps 5" wide by 7" high--it was in portrait orientation). But it was razor sharp, had a good grayscale, and looked pretty much like good live television--I'm sure it was a 30 fps rate or close to it.
Oh, and the audio on the 1964 Picturephone was perfectly lip-synced. OF COURSE. I didn't even think about it at the time, I took it for granted.
Until I read the article, it had never even crossed my mind that there could BE a videophone that WASN'T lip-synced.
To work, a videophone has got to give you a closer emotional experience than voice alone. A jittery non-lip-synced picture is going to be a distraction and, I would think, would INCREASE your perception of emotional distance.
It's not enough for these new gadgets to be affordable and easily self-installed on a phone line. If they can't match the "user experience" of a 1964 Picturephone I'd say they're dead in the water.
Remember the scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" where Dr. Floyd is talking to his daughter on, IIRC an "AT&T Picturephone?" It's 2002 now, why don't we have them yet?
Well, actually even though it never did go into service, it WAS nasty as hell when it experienced a partial core meltdown on November 29, 1955.
For some reason, most of the sites like this that show it lighting four light bulbs or mention Arco, Idaho as "the first city to be lit by atomic power" don't seem to mention this...
Two or three years ago, all the newspaper computer columns were full of "don't worry, be happy" explanations of why cookies cannot be used to identify individuals. They stated authoritatively that there was NO POSSIBLE WAY cookies could be used in this fashion and "explained" the "technical reasons" behind it.
For example, Infoworld columnist Fred Langa says here that "To me, cookies seem pretty harmless. Despite commonly-voiced concerns among the anti-cookie faction, cookies (or the JavaScripts that create them) won't let website owners surreptitiously figure out who you are, for example... My advice: leave cookies turned on; the real benefits far outweigh the very small risks."
Indeed, a Google search on "cookies cannot be used to identify individuals" turns up 21000 hits--mostly in Web site's privacy statements.
DoubleClick's motto: when it comes to invading privacy, we do the "impossible" every day.
I think Slashdot should rethink its connection with DoubleClick.
Just as soon as these burners hit the markets, I expect Sony to introduce SVDVD (Super Video Digital Video Disk), with a higher bandwidth and a richer, emotionally more intense "look" that is often compared to film.
The SVDVD signal will, of course, be recorded on a special third layer that cannot be seen, let alone read, by any device sold as a computer peripheral.
It seems so obvious... the problem is not that the music services make you pay, it's that they don't provide what people want.
I'm willing to pay, but what frosts me is the idea of paying for something that's NOWHERE NEAR AS GOOD as what I was getting for free.
I enjoyed downloading really weird stuff from Napster and AudioGalaxy. Are the Sonys and Vivendis of the world ever likely to provide Harry Champion singing "I'm 'Enery the Eight I Am?" Cab Calloway singing "Nagasaki?" Joe Venuti playing "The Hot Canary?" Raymond Scott playing the Clavivox? Charles Trenet singing "Fleur Bleu?" Kay Thompson singing "Eloise?" Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground?"
Or will they just have Britney Spears?
The solution is obvious. Let people upload and share material. "Electronic record store" is the wrong model. "Electronic flea market" or "electronic swap meet" is the right model. The only thing that needs to be changed from what Napster was doing is to do what flea markets do: charge a small fee to participants.
I have these items because other people that share my weird tastes were willing to provide them. Nobody has to wait for some executive to decide whether there's money in releasing them. If anyone thinks they have something that might interest someone, they upload it and if you're right, they download it.
This frees the service from all the cost of acquiring and converting recordings themselves.
Now, how much does sharing REALLY cost the record companies? There's not a doubt in my mind that a) the amount it affects them is tiny, almost lost in the noise; b) if it does represent lost revenues, it's a TINY loss; and that c) a solution along the lines of the "blank VCR tape tax" or the similar charge for home audio digital media could take care of it.
The other piece of the puzzle is micropayments. Why does EVERYONE want to charge me $4.95 and $8.95 and $11.95 per month? To cover the costs of charging me, or something? A jukebox will play a single song for a single payment $0.25. If we can put a man on the moon we should be able to provide an Internet service that delivers what a jukebox can deliver.
So, what you have a service patterned on the very successful Napster or Audiogalaxy, the only difference being that to access it, you need to charge $15 to set up your account, and every time you download a song, $0.25 gets deducted from the account.
There's no reason in the world other than pigheadedness why this couldn't work, and could be very profitable for music companies.
At the first of a) pointing out the obvious, and b) getting flamed, there ARE other ways in the world to support television besides commercial services sponsored by advertising.
I don't say you have to like the BBC. I don't say I would like this as a solution in the U. S. I just say, here is an existence proof. Here's one way television can and has "survived" without advertising.
That brings back memories... in 1962 I took a seminar with Dr. Edgerton and, as a matter of fact, he showed us some pictures like those. They look like an abstract painting of a kohlrabi...
I'm not sure this really counts, however, since each physical camera could only take one picture, so it wasn't really a motion-picture process--to get ten frames, you needed ten cameras. It was really like Muybridge's original technique (recently used for that "bullet-time" sequence in _The Matrix_). I'm sure you could use the same technique with digital cameras and get very high frame rates for very short sequences.
The FAQ says that "the sound of SACD [tick] is often compared to that [tick] of vinyl."
But just wait until next year, when they unleash UACD (Ultra Audio CD). The rich [tick] emotional [tick] impact of [tick] THIS format [tick] is often [tick] compared to [tick] a 78-RPM [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing.
However, even the 78 is subject to electronic processes which distort the sound.
The best process of all would be one in which the actual soundwaves create the recording through direct action, without the intermediary of any transducers of electronics whatsoever.
So I wouldn't buy UACD.
No sir, I'm wait for the MACD (Mega Audio CD) that's waiting in the wings, with sound that's often compared to an acoustically recorded Edison Amberol cylinder.
As I write this, the counter is showing 24,719 hits--and no bids.
That has got to be one of the highest hit counts I've EVER seen on eBay. How frustrating to it must be to have that many hits and no bids.
I have to think the guy was unwise to set the starting bid so high, though. I wonder why he didn't set a lower bid and put in a $15,000 reserve? Then he would at least have been able to get a reading on its market value. (Although eBay does charge a reserve fee if the item doesn't sell...)
Slashdot Mirror
As of my drive home, they were saying on the radio that the race was a "statistical dead heat." They also said that (at least some claim) that the incidence of problems is not uniform and that the worst problems are occurring in urban areas...
What they didn't say is exactly how a recount is performed with these systems. Does anyone know? Do you pull down "recount" on the menu and have it display the same answer it displayed before and say, "Look, a recount?"
Once again... I'm willing to pay, but I have to GET something as good as I used to get.
There's no way that "Over 17,000 albums by over 7,000 top artists" is going to come close to the richness and variety we got from of individual fans trading their individual favorites.
I am now going to make a quick test on four items I obtained from the "real" Audiogalaxy a few months ago. This is an authentic test, I do not know yet what I am going to find. Bernard Cribbins, 'Ole in the Ground; Harry Champion, "I'm Enerey the Eighth;" Nervous Norvus, "Ape Call;" and the MIT Chorallaries, "We Are The Engineers."
Well, it seems you can't search for individual titles unless you actually join, but with great labor you can page through the artist list, and I find:
Bernard Cribbins: Nope.
Harry Champion: Nope.
Nervous Norvus: Nope.
The MIT Chorallaries: Nope.
Now, someone is saying "What kind of market is there for the MIT Chorallaries, for pete's sake?" Well, all I can say is, when Audiogalaxy was for real, _I_ wanted to hear them and _someone_ out there wanted to share them.
Without SHARING, all you're ever going to get is Britney Spears and Elvis Presley.
on a whiteboard. You know, the guys that love to draw rectangles and clouds and arrows and boxes sitting on top of other boxes and call it an "architecture."
Without screen shots, critical commentary, or a real review it's hard to tell just how effective this really is. SLIGHTLY polarized light is very common in the everyday environment. For example, light from most parts of the sky is partially polarized. Many of us have probably noticed pale rainbow- or oil-film-like colorations in car windows as a result of the interactions between birefringence in the prestressed safety glass and natural polarized light from the sky. This is even more noticable on airline flights with airliner windows.
I think it is VERY unlikely that the screen looks PERFECTLY blank all the time. I'll bet that, for example, in a laptop on an airplane, it would be easy to see that there was SOMETHING on the screen, and even to read it without glasses by close inspection.
So, I'm not completely sure I understand the practical point of this invention. It isn't going to make spies think that the screen is truly blank or truly turned off--if, indeed, the fact that someone is looking at the screen with special glasses was not a giveaway in itself. As a casual "privacy" device it probably works--a spy probably couldn't read it from three feet away, and staring at it from six inches away while rotating it to get the greatest amount of naturally polarized light would make the spy conspicuous. But various existing privacy devices that limit the usable angle of view would probably be just as effective.
On the other hand, if someone can develop a version of this that simulataneously display TWO DIFFERENT images with 90-degree-opposite polarization--the computer-display equivalent of a Polaroid "Vectograph"--it might be a useful form of 3D-with-glasses display.
...is an amusing century-old story about competitive brothers who devise two different methods of achieving invisibility. It's online here.
In his fictional story, both methods have problems. The problems are more than fictional, since one of the methods relies on the nonsense supposition that since black is the absence of light, the only reason you can see something that's black is that the black isn't PERFECTLY black, and that if you could achieve perfect blackness you could achieve invisibility.
However, the method described in the parent article here is equally flawed, since it would work only for an observer placed in a specific view location. One wonders how the equipment is supposed to locate the observer; if there are several observers, how does it decide which of them should be prevented from seeing the object?
The method bears a close resemblance to Hollywood special effects processes (glass shots, matte shots, etc.) Special effects processes are notorious for having visible edge effects if not done carefully, and I'm sure this would be true of the proposed method as well.
In "The Shadow and the Flash," one invisibility cloak could be detected by a sensation of darkness and depression whenever the concealed individual was nearby; the other suffered from occasional rainbow flashes due to mismatches in the index of refraction. I'm sure that the proposed method would have similar problems.
As I've said before... what the music companies need to do is give us something AS GOOD AS Napster and Audiogalaxy were.
The problem is not the "pay" part.
The problem is the "as good as" part.
And that means: ALLOW FILE SHARING. There is no way in the world that a consortium of music companies pitching their collective Top 40 is going to cater to my oddball individual interests. (And EVERYONE has oddball individual interests--this is not an elitist thing).
Napster and AudioGalaxy have shown me that there are PLENTY of people out there who share my fondness for, say, Billy Murray cylinder recordings, or Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground," or Johnny Standley's "Grandma's Lye Soap." And are willing to take the time to rip and upload them.
There's no way a for-profit company is going to bother with this sort of thing. Which, while it may or may not be under copyright, is of negligible commercial value.
So, what they should do is LET THE FANS DO WHAT THEY LIKE and charge a REASONABLE fee, like the "blank media" fee on VHS cassettes or home audio music CD-R's, to compensate music companies and artists for their use.
This isn't very different from what ASCAP and BMI have done for years with radio stations, where a flat fee is charged, based on the radio station's audience, which gives them the right to broadcast as much as they like of the licensed material.
Just set up something like Napster or AudioGalaxy, and charge me the appropriate ASCAP fee for an audience of one.
Oh, well, the point was supposed to be that if it behaved like the device described in the article, it would start stealing music off of the radio when it was supposed to be composing its own... I guess my comment was either a) too subtle, or b) not funny.
...That should produce some interesting lawsuits!
What's the big deal? The Boston Globe has been reporting on this as it unfolds. The author of the report asked his teen-aged daughter if she'd do an illustration, she did, she didn't know better, they used it, Horizon complained, MIT apologized.
I just feel sorry for the guy and his daughter. She was interested in art, he was trying to give her a nice little moment.
The last time I looked, Horizon wanted a more sincere apology--I think they said that since the original had been a press release the apology should be a press release or something like that. But I'm sure MIT and Horizon will work it out, probably without even any money payment.
Nothing in the incident even involves any EXTREME misjudgement or overreaction. It's not as if the author of the report did anything TERRIBLY stupid; it fell well within the normal range of misjudgement that anyone could make from time to time. And, dammit, it was a nice thing for him to do for his daughter. He just should have been a little more careful.
It's not like Horizon was wrong to complain. It's not like Horizon is overreacting or suing MIT for $100,000,000.
It was a minor misjudgement, everyone seems to be acting in a reasonably adult manner... what's the big deal?
Take a look at Dan Bricklin's hysterically funny parody of client-side Java. It says it all. Just as funny and relevant as when it was written.
.NET can avoid the same issues.
It will be interesting to see just how
Demo software like Bricklin's is usually used to present a positive view of technology that doesn't exist... this is the first time I've ever seen demo software used to present a negative view of technology that DOES exist.
A "free" version bundled with their hardware which works only with their hardware (on which they've paid a licensing fee)... and a $29.95 version which works with third-party hardware and on which they'd pay a licensing fee per-SOFTWARE_copy?
They could pay the licensing fee out of that, make a little money, make their dealers and third-party add-on providers and customers happy... seems like a win-win-win-win scenario to me.
Let's see if I've got this right:
No corroborating evidence at all except the word of the adolescent girl herself. Nobody else saw it. Nobody but she can testify that it was warm.
They say they "plan" to have the stone analyzed by scientists, but it hasn't happened yet.
Even the scientist couldn't prove that someone hadn't warmed up a meteorite and pitched it over the rooftops.
I have no doubt Charles Fort would put this in his newspaper clippings file, but the only thing that's remarkable about this to me is that the BBC would publish it.
I bet a nickel that there's never even any followup story reporting on any scientist's report on the meteorite. I can just see the family in their car on their way to the university and the embarrassed kid 'fesses up.
Apparently my memory of the 1964 Picturephone is faulty, because it says here that "The image only refreshed once every few seconds." That's sure not the way I remember it, but...
On the other hand, something doesn't quite jibe, because this article says that the bandwidth was 1,000,000 Hz, which was about one-quarter that of full broadcast EIA RS-170-A black-and-white video; so if you assume that the screen resolution was half that of broadcast in both dimensions, it should have been possible to get a full 30 fps. Or if the screen had full broadcast resolution, it should have been possible to get 7 fps, which is a far cry from "once every few seconds."
"The product works as advertised?"
The WSJ article says
"based on my tests, Beamer sometimes worked and sometimes didn't...when it did, the pixilated video could be as jittery as Jell-O... on none of my Beamer calls were the voice and the movement of the other party's lips in sync..."
"If both people press the button before a connection is made, the video may fail. [If you get it right] there's an uncomfortable silence for between 15 and 45 seconds.... the audio resumes when the person at the other end shows up on screen... If the person does show up, that is. My initial efforts to connect with my father-in-law repeatedly failed, until Vialta replaced the unit I had sent him."
Have our standards for "computerish" devices fallen so low that Slashdot considers THAT to be "working as advertised?"
I personally used a Picturephone at the World's Fair in 1964. To the best of my recollection, the picture was black-and-white, and small (perhaps 5" wide by 7" high--it was in portrait orientation). But it was razor sharp, had a good grayscale, and looked pretty much like good live television--I'm sure it was a 30 fps rate or close to it.
Oh, and the audio on the 1964 Picturephone was perfectly lip-synced. OF COURSE. I didn't even think about it at the time, I took it for granted.
Until I read the article, it had never even crossed my mind that there could BE a videophone that WASN'T lip-synced.
To work, a videophone has got to give you a closer emotional experience than voice alone. A jittery non-lip-synced picture is going to be a distraction and, I would think, would INCREASE your perception of emotional distance.
It's not enough for these new gadgets to be affordable and easily self-installed on a phone line. If they can't match the "user experience" of a 1964 Picturephone I'd say they're dead in the water.
Remember the scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" where Dr. Floyd is talking to his daughter on, IIRC an "AT&T Picturephone?" It's 2002 now, why don't we have them yet?
Well, actually even though it never did go into service, it WAS nasty as hell when it experienced a partial core meltdown on November 29, 1955.
For some reason, most of the sites like this that show it lighting four light bulbs or mention Arco, Idaho as "the first city to be lit by atomic power" don't seem to mention this...
Which do you think sounds better in an annual review (if the software project succeeded) or resume (if it failed):
"Evaluated, selected, and managed contractor for a $5,000 software project..."
"Evaluated, selected, and managed contractor for a $15,000 software project..."
"Evaluated, selected, and managed contractor for a $75,000 software project..."
In a big company, thinking big is one of the keys to advancement...
Two or three years ago, all the newspaper computer columns were full of "don't worry, be happy" explanations of why cookies cannot be used to identify individuals. They stated authoritatively that there was NO POSSIBLE WAY cookies could be used in this fashion and "explained" the "technical reasons" behind it.
For example, Infoworld columnist Fred Langa says here that "To me, cookies seem pretty harmless. Despite commonly-voiced concerns among the anti-cookie faction, cookies (or the JavaScripts that create them) won't let website owners surreptitiously figure out who you are, for example... My advice: leave cookies turned on; the real benefits far outweigh the very small risks."
Indeed, a Google search on "cookies cannot be used to identify individuals" turns up 21000 hits--mostly in Web site's privacy statements.
DoubleClick's motto: when it comes to invading privacy, we do the "impossible" every day.
I think Slashdot should rethink its connection with DoubleClick.
It will take a poster-sized wall chart just to summarize the basic formats and their compatibility.
Consumers will just refer to them all as DVD!@#*&!!
Just as soon as these burners hit the markets, I expect Sony to introduce SVDVD (Super Video Digital Video Disk), with a higher bandwidth and a richer, emotionally more intense "look" that is often compared to film.
The SVDVD signal will, of course, be recorded on a special third layer that cannot be seen, let alone read, by any device sold as a computer peripheral.
It seems so obvious... the problem is not that the music services make you pay, it's that they don't provide what people want.
I'm willing to pay, but what frosts me is the idea of paying for something that's NOWHERE NEAR AS GOOD as what I was getting for free.
I enjoyed downloading really weird stuff from Napster and AudioGalaxy. Are the Sonys and Vivendis of the world ever likely to provide Harry Champion singing "I'm 'Enery the Eight I Am?" Cab Calloway singing "Nagasaki?" Joe Venuti playing "The Hot Canary?" Raymond Scott playing the Clavivox? Charles Trenet singing "Fleur Bleu?" Kay Thompson singing "Eloise?" Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground?"
Or will they just have Britney Spears?
The solution is obvious. Let people upload and share material. "Electronic record store" is the wrong model. "Electronic flea market" or "electronic swap meet" is the right model. The only thing that needs to be changed from what Napster was doing is to do what flea markets do: charge a small fee to participants.
I have these items because other people that share my weird tastes were willing to provide them. Nobody has to wait for some executive to decide whether there's money in releasing them. If anyone thinks they have something that might interest someone, they upload it and if you're right, they download it.
This frees the service from all the cost of acquiring and converting recordings themselves.
Now, how much does sharing REALLY cost the record companies? There's not a doubt in my mind that a) the amount it affects them is tiny, almost lost in the noise; b) if it does represent lost revenues, it's a TINY loss; and that c) a solution along the lines of the "blank VCR tape tax" or the similar charge for home audio digital media could take care of it.
The other piece of the puzzle is micropayments. Why does EVERYONE want to charge me $4.95 and $8.95 and $11.95 per month? To cover the costs of charging me, or something? A jukebox will play a single song for a single payment $0.25. If we can put a man on the moon we should be able to provide an Internet service that delivers what a jukebox can deliver.
So, what you have a service patterned on the very successful Napster or Audiogalaxy, the only difference being that to access it, you need to charge $15 to set up your account, and every time you download a song, $0.25 gets deducted from the account.
There's no reason in the world other than pigheadedness why this couldn't work, and could be very profitable for music companies.
At the first of a) pointing out the obvious, and b) getting flamed, there ARE other ways in the world to support television besides commercial services sponsored by advertising.
I don't say you have to like the BBC. I don't say I would like this as a solution in the U. S. I just say, here is an existence proof. Here's one way television can and has "survived" without advertising.
As it says here,
The BBC's domestic radio and TV services are financed by the television licence fee.
The current licence fee (from 1 April 2002) is £112.00 for colour and £37.50 for black and white.
Anyone aged 75 or over is now entitled to a free TV Licence for their principal address.
If you are registered blind you only pay 50% of the full licence fee.
For less than 30p a day (colour), the licence fee pays for:
The television channels BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC Choice, BBC FOUR, BBC News 24 and BBC Parliament;
Five network radio services, plus the BBC Asian Network, and new digital radio services launching in 2002;
Regional TV programmes and Local Radio services in England;
National Radio & TV in Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland;
BBCi.
That brings back memories... in 1962 I took a seminar with Dr. Edgerton and, as a matter of fact, he showed us some pictures like those. They look like an abstract painting of a kohlrabi...
I'm not sure this really counts, however, since each physical camera could only take one picture, so it wasn't really a motion-picture process--to get ten frames, you needed ten cameras. It was really like Muybridge's original technique (recently used for that "bullet-time" sequence in _The Matrix_). I'm sure you could use the same technique with digital cameras and get very high frame rates for very short sequences.
The FAQ says that "the sound of SACD [tick] is often compared to that [tick] of vinyl."
But just wait until next year, when they unleash UACD (Ultra Audio CD). The rich [tick] emotional [tick] impact of [tick] THIS format [tick] is often [tick] compared to [tick] a 78-RPM [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing.
However, even the 78 is subject to electronic processes which distort the sound.
The best process of all would be one in which the actual soundwaves create the recording through direct action, without the intermediary of any transducers of electronics whatsoever.
So I wouldn't buy UACD.
No sir, I'm wait for the MACD (Mega Audio CD) that's waiting in the wings, with sound that's often compared to an acoustically recorded Edison Amberol cylinder.
As I write this, the counter is showing 24,719 hits--and no bids.
That has got to be one of the highest hit counts I've EVER seen on eBay. How frustrating to it must be to have that many hits and no bids.
I have to think the guy was unwise to set the starting bid so high, though. I wonder why he didn't set a lower bid and put in a $15,000 reserve? Then he would at least have been able to get a reading on its market value. (Although eBay does charge a reserve fee if the item doesn't sell...)
I particularly enjoy the idea that after the departed one's cremains have been converted to diamonds, the diamonds will be graded. One has to wonder:
--Will the obese deceased yield a higher number of carats?
--Will the chaste deceased score higher on clarity?
--Will the intelligent deceased get a "brilliant" cut?
And, of course...
--What affect will the race of the deceased have on the color?