Since the only reason you're keeping your landline is for Internet access, what about satellite dish services? That doesn't require you to have any wire infrastructure; you just buy the dish from like Radio Shack and concrete it on the ground or stick it on the roof. Then you can get your nicer mobile phone service and high-speed Internet access.
I don't know of any Internet dish services off the top of my head though.
THe article mentions this rediculous policy for PC only systems because of their IT staff and quite frankly it's foolish. IT departments, personel etc. are constantly updating their knowledge to better deal with emerging technologies, right? Why an IT department can't have 3 of those in-DUH-viduals learn about MAC systems?
You're missing the point (and your shift key). A Windows-only policy ensures that the IT staff are valuable and look smart even when things fall apart. My high school used to run only Macs. The librarians and the media techie ran everything. Then there was some stupid multi-year deal for Compaqs that made sure the school would be using old hardware in a few years and cost a lot more to hire a few more Windows people (they also tried to install and setup a Solaris server, but that's an even stupider story).
Install Macs, and watch the IT staff become less valuable. (In a school environment. It's different in an enterprise environment.)
The 12-16 year old computer literate kids will be going "What the FUCK is an Amiga?"
From my age of 15-18 (I'm guessing, it was 9th through 12th grade) I knew what an Amiga was/is. We used one at my high school to do television production stuff. The desktop looked a lot like NeXTStep, I think. But no, I didn't have one myself.
I also started reading/. quite a while ago. As my number will attest.
HyperCard was the first environment where I built real tools and applications for my own use, back when I was around 12 or so. Before then, I had done things in Symantec C++, BASIC on VAX, and a little C, but nothing that was actually an application or tool (e.g. Hello World!). Anyone who used HyperCard has got to admit it was an amazing development environment. I actually got a personal finance shareware application (named BalanceBook) on the Shareware Of The Month Club CD and wrote a trade route tool for Federation in HyperCard. I started putting together a Final Fantasy like game in HyperCard too, but I never got around to finishing up the sprites.
I would guess this request by the FTC is because they are responsible for interstate commerce. Spam would be an obvious case of interstate, or even international commerce, and we all know how misleading and fraudulent spam can be.
I don't see this as being very different from quietly investigating people who use the U.S. Postal service or telephone system to try and commit fraud or execute other illegal activities like ponzi or pyramid schemes. I don't think they intend this to be a way to investigate people based on the number of emails they send. Unless they also think that the abuse of the infrastructure and cost to the economy (i.e. businesses) is also something they should be responsible for.
The image on Apple's home page seems to have Quark Xpress in DVD-like packaging. Is that how it really comes? I would love if all software moved over to that kind of much more compact packaging. And I could also hide my GameCube games on the same shelf.
I did read the test description (although I did not run it myself) and as I understood it, you did not know which file was the reference file and which was not during playback. You simply rate them when they get played back blindly by the software he has setup for Windows.
Perhaps I read wrong, but that's the experiment test run description I got out of it.
SInce iTunes is the most popular mac audio player, its much easier to add DRM to a format that hasn't been used much. Players will implement fairplay and authorize tracks.
Not only that, but any music software that uses QuickTime to playback files/sources can also play the protected AAC files. So long as you have the playback key, which you would have since you purchased those protected AAC files using iTunes.
Sounds Better != High Fidelity
on
AAC Put To The Test
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This experiment is really designed to test which codec overall sounds better to the average user, for an arbitrary and inconsistent range of hardware setups, acoustic environments, and listening preferences (e.g. do I pay more attention to the primary beat or to the background harmony). I wouldn't place any value on this test other than to choose which codec I might choose if I wanted to please the ignorant consumer (a valid market, of course!). It does nothing to address how accurately a codec reproduces the artist's original sound.
If my writing is so hard to read, why can Tablet PCs that Iâ(TM)ve never used before get almost 95% of it? My Newton's HWR accuracy approaches 99% now that I've trained it.
Because it's easy for something with the intelligence of an amoeba to read the writing of another amoeba.;P
My report cards all through elementary school showed "Needs improvement" under penmanship, but it didn't seem to affect my getting A's in everything else. I mean how bad could my writing have been if all of my teachers were able to read and grade it?
Why don't you ask Mrs. Peebles, your English teacher from 3rd grade? Last I heard, she got hit by a school bus while trying to figure out if some kid wrote Bench or Penis. Don't think your bad penmanship didn't have an earth-shattering effect on the course of history!
Which, ultimately, costs the public, society, and culture more: KaZaa, or obscene copyright terms? Why are...university officials...more willing to attack the integrity of their own students than to criticize the practices of a small cartel of international media conglomerates that withhold creative output from the public domain for longer than most of their students will be alive? What is the bigger problem?
Um, so, like you're saying, like, that making it legal to, like, playback, copy, and distribute the latest, like most popular, Britney Spears album and, um, like that guy who moves his mouth funny when he sings and everything, is, like going to make our society so much, like, better and stuff?
I think I buy that, cause like, Britney is the biggest pop star ever, right?
Or are you instead talking about the ACM who makes papers only available to paying members (which is arguably okay because the ACM is in charge of producing and managing publications and events related to those papers)?
Or the ISO and other standards bodies that require thousands of dollars for a copy of the standard (which is arguably okay since the companies and people involved in developing the standard need to be paid for their work and time)?
Or the Universities who retain rights to Ph.D. dissertations (which is arguably okay, since the work was produced by a graduate student as part of his responsibility to the University, much like an employee and employer)?
Or do you just think you should be able to have an exact copy of Monet, Rembrandt, and Picasso in your living room for free since the duplication costs are nil. And because your friend at the Louve can get you a copy since he's your friend and it's just file-sharing and you deserve to experience the beauty of that art and it's not going to cost the artist anything since you wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Wait till I tell my fiance that her weight fluctuates on a weekly basis!
Wait until you tell her that her weight is monotonically increasing, and not just fluctuating. I wonder if you'll get out of there in a mentally stable condition.
I did evil telemarketing for Appleby Windows out of York for almost 5 years. They had a non-compete agreement. I have seen them pursue it ruthlessly.
No wonder it was evil. What would you expect from a schizophrenic company like Appleby Windows? And their non-compete agreement probably applied to everything except UNIX and Novell NetWare. That sucks.
I know, they could easily be selling those Windows that aren't trademarked. Stupid common-name trademarks.
From the article: What is more, it is would not slow down as more and more people use the service which is the case with DSL - broadband via the phone line. Huh? I fail to see how just 18 base stations would provide total UK coverage and at the same time be able to provide, say, 2Mbps up and down to all customers at the same time. The United Kingdom has a lot of people in it, last I checked. And DSL only slows down if the ISP's resources are over-provisioned from their point up. Cable is the one where resources are over-provisioned at the last-mile and up. Or does DSL somehow work different in the UK?
Also, although the article does address the issue of weather, I'd assume that performance must decrease somewhat during an electrical storm as more errors are introduced into the bitstream.
The apple i-tunes system gives you music in a file that can be placed on a CD if desired. This sounds very simple like it was in the 20th century. From what I can see, you buy a file, not the media. I assume you own the file and have the right to private use. Too me this is fair and reasonable.
And there's a good reason to believe that you own the file. That being that only you can access the contents of the file. It is keyed to your specific person, i.e. your Apple ID. It is not keyed to your individual hardware since you can move it between computers. You have the power to release the contents of the file as you see fit, e.g. to a CD in redbook format. If you destroy the file, then that specific arrangement of bits is lost forever (unless you reconstruct it at a personal cost of one dollar). If you copy the file, it is clear that it is your copy because your Apple ID and its related encryption is a part of the file.
Kinda weird, but the article claims that "While working as a 2002 summer intern at NASA Langley, team leader David Minton initiated the idea to study a "Mars Tumbleweed" for the class project." Well, that'd be all great and everything if JPL hadn't already come up with the idea: Exploring Mars: Blowing in the Wind?. The JPL article is dated August 10, 2001.
Someone probably should have told David Minton about Jack A. Jones' research at JPL. "Jack A. Jones...is leading JPL's research into various inflatable machines for exploring space. JPL's Inflatable Technology for Robotics Program aims to create rugged, all-terrain vehicles and other devices with low mass and low-packing volume."
After the Berkeley ComputerWare store reopened under Elite, the prices were too high. Things were just cheaper at the M.A.C. store which is only two blocks away. And ComputerWare didn't always have everything I wanted. Also, the original ComputerWare was better than the Elite ComputerWare, in terms of price, service, and availability.
Linux is all right, but monolithic kernels are so.. 1998. Besides everyone knows the GPL is evil. Personally I'm using Mac OS X on my iBook.
Mac OS X uses the Mach 2.5 kernel, which is not truly a microkernel. It's more monolithic kernel than you think. Mach 3.0 reached true microkernel status. It also performed slightly worse than Mach 2.5 because of all the context-switching penalties.
The MMORPG Ragnarok Online uses the Korean citizen ID to keep track of who is who, make people accountable for their actions (e.g. cheating), and also to prove ownership of accounts in the event you need them to do something like tell you your password. For this reason, some of those administrative things are not possible/enforceable on the International server.
What this does do is make the punishment for cheating much more severe--you can't simply establish a new account and start cheating again. But it also means Gravity might punish you when you don't think you deserve it, and in a fairly damaging way as far as the online game experience goes. Unfortunately, Gravity has a somewhat totalitarian stance on things: Regulations. I know people have been punished for complaining on the message boards (which are tied to your user account). Some of those regulations are very annoying to abide by due to the game dynamics, e.g. looting and kill-stealing. Others are extremely open to interpretation. I remember having to constantly watch my mouth because I wasn't sure who I would offend by an offhand comment.
Big Brother is watching. And you will learn to like it.
In what sane land would PRICES be protected under law? You can't really keep them secret, so "trade secret" is right out.
I suppose you could consider pricing to be a secret depending on how you sold your product or service to people. OEM deals might be a good example, since a vendor works out a certain price structure with one OEM but no other OEMs can know about this, otherwise the vendor loses its bargaining power.
They also do that voice actors first, animation of mouth movements second, in Anime films. I remember seeing this in the production extras of Akira's DVD release. They've formed a whole set of mouth shapes based on different vocal sounds and then animate the mouth shapes to match.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the only reason you're keeping your landline is for Internet access, what about satellite dish services? That doesn't require you to have any wire infrastructure; you just buy the dish from like Radio Shack and concrete it on the ground or stick it on the roof. Then you can get your nicer mobile phone service and high-speed Internet access.
I don't know of any Internet dish services off the top of my head though.
THe article mentions this rediculous policy for PC only systems because of their IT staff and quite frankly it's foolish. IT departments, personel etc. are constantly updating their knowledge to better deal with emerging technologies, right? Why an IT department can't have 3 of those in-DUH-viduals learn about MAC systems?
You're missing the point (and your shift key). A Windows-only policy ensures that the IT staff are valuable and look smart even when things fall apart. My high school used to run only Macs. The librarians and the media techie ran everything. Then there was some stupid multi-year deal for Compaqs that made sure the school would be using old hardware in a few years and cost a lot more to hire a few more Windows people (they also tried to install and setup a Solaris server, but that's an even stupider story).
Install Macs, and watch the IT staff become less valuable. (In a school environment. It's different in an enterprise environment.)
The 12-16 year old computer literate kids will be going "What the FUCK is an Amiga?"
/. quite a while ago. As my number will attest.
From my age of 15-18 (I'm guessing, it was 9th through 12th grade) I knew what an Amiga was/is. We used one at my high school to do television production stuff. The desktop looked a lot like NeXTStep, I think. But no, I didn't have one myself.
I also started reading
SuperCard!
HyperCard was the first environment where I built real tools and applications for my own use, back when I was around 12 or so. Before then, I had done things in Symantec C++, BASIC on VAX, and a little C, but nothing that was actually an application or tool (e.g. Hello World!). Anyone who used HyperCard has got to admit it was an amazing development environment. I actually got a personal finance shareware application (named BalanceBook) on the Shareware Of The Month Club CD and wrote a trade route tool for Federation in HyperCard. I started putting together a Final Fantasy like game in HyperCard too, but I never got around to finishing up the sprites.
I would guess this request by the FTC is because they are responsible for interstate commerce. Spam would be an obvious case of interstate, or even international commerce, and we all know how misleading and fraudulent spam can be.
I don't see this as being very different from quietly investigating people who use the U.S. Postal service or telephone system to try and commit fraud or execute other illegal activities like ponzi or pyramid schemes. I don't think they intend this to be a way to investigate people based on the number of emails they send. Unless they also think that the abuse of the infrastructure and cost to the economy (i.e. businesses) is also something they should be responsible for.
The image on Apple's home page seems to have Quark Xpress in DVD-like packaging. Is that how it really comes? I would love if all software moved over to that kind of much more compact packaging. And I could also hide my GameCube games on the same shelf.
I did read the test description (although I did not run it myself) and as I understood it, you did not know which file was the reference file and which was not during playback. You simply rate them when they get played back blindly by the software he has setup for Windows.
Perhaps I read wrong, but that's the experiment test run description I got out of it.
SInce iTunes is the most popular mac audio player, its much easier to add DRM to a format that hasn't been used much. Players will implement fairplay and authorize tracks.
Not only that, but any music software that uses QuickTime to playback files/sources can also play the protected AAC files. So long as you have the playback key, which you would have since you purchased those protected AAC files using iTunes.
This experiment is really designed to test which codec overall sounds better to the average user, for an arbitrary and inconsistent range of hardware setups, acoustic environments, and listening preferences (e.g. do I pay more attention to the primary beat or to the background harmony). I wouldn't place any value on this test other than to choose which codec I might choose if I wanted to please the ignorant consumer (a valid market, of course!). It does nothing to address how accurately a codec reproduces the artist's original sound.
I'll put a lot more stock in the Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests put together by David Meares (BBC), Kaoru Watanabe (NHK), Eric Scheirer (MIT Media Labs) for the ISO. And the other MPEG Audio Public Documents.
If my writing is so hard to read, why can Tablet PCs that Iâ(TM)ve never used before get almost 95% of it? My Newton's HWR accuracy approaches 99% now that I've trained it.
;P
Because it's easy for something with the intelligence of an amoeba to read the writing of another amoeba.
My report cards all through elementary school showed "Needs improvement" under penmanship, but it didn't seem to affect my getting A's in everything else. I mean how bad could my writing have been if all of my teachers were able to read and grade it?
Why don't you ask Mrs. Peebles, your English teacher from 3rd grade? Last I heard, she got hit by a school bus while trying to figure out if some kid wrote Bench or Penis. Don't think your bad penmanship didn't have an earth-shattering effect on the course of history!
Tetris had this years ago, Tetris plus with and ear tag to measure your heartbeat then speed up the game as it beats more :-)
Doesn't that encourage a heart attack?
"Or does DSL somehow work different in the UK?"
Nope, and it doesn't work differently either.
I use a Mac. I think different.
It wouldn't, because the copy protection in the iTunes Music Store still applies and is not circumvented.
Which, ultimately, costs the public, society, and culture more: KaZaa, or obscene copyright terms? Why are...university officials...more willing to attack the integrity of their own students than to criticize the practices of a small cartel of international media conglomerates that withhold creative output from the public domain for longer than most of their students will be alive? What is the bigger problem?
Um, so, like you're saying, like, that making it legal to, like, playback, copy, and distribute the latest, like most popular, Britney Spears album and, um, like that guy who moves his mouth funny when he sings and everything, is, like going to make our society so much, like, better and stuff?
I think I buy that, cause like, Britney is the biggest pop star ever, right?
Or are you instead talking about the ACM who makes papers only available to paying members (which is arguably okay because the ACM is in charge of producing and managing publications and events related to those papers)?
Or the ISO and other standards bodies that require thousands of dollars for a copy of the standard (which is arguably okay since the companies and people involved in developing the standard need to be paid for their work and time)?
Or the Universities who retain rights to Ph.D. dissertations (which is arguably okay, since the work was produced by a graduate student as part of his responsibility to the University, much like an employee and employer)?
Or do you just think you should be able to have an exact copy of Monet, Rembrandt, and Picasso in your living room for free since the duplication costs are nil. And because your friend at the Louve can get you a copy since he's your friend and it's just file-sharing and you deserve to experience the beauty of that art and it's not going to cost the artist anything since you wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Wait till I tell my fiance that her weight fluctuates on a weekly basis!
Wait until you tell her that her weight is monotonically increasing, and not just fluctuating. I wonder if you'll get out of there in a mentally stable condition.
I did evil telemarketing for Appleby Windows out of York for almost 5 years. They had a non-compete agreement. I have seen them pursue it ruthlessly.
No wonder it was evil. What would you expect from a schizophrenic company like Appleby Windows? And their non-compete agreement probably applied to everything except UNIX and Novell NetWare. That sucks.
I know, they could easily be selling those Windows that aren't trademarked. Stupid common-name trademarks.
From the article: What is more, it is would not slow down as more and more people use the service which is the case with DSL - broadband via the phone line. Huh? I fail to see how just 18 base stations would provide total UK coverage and at the same time be able to provide, say, 2Mbps up and down to all customers at the same time. The United Kingdom has a lot of people in it, last I checked. And DSL only slows down if the ISP's resources are over-provisioned from their point up. Cable is the one where resources are over-provisioned at the last-mile and up. Or does DSL somehow work different in the UK?
Also, although the article does address the issue of weather, I'd assume that performance must decrease somewhat during an electrical storm as more errors are introduced into the bitstream.
The apple i-tunes system gives you music in a file that can be placed on a CD if desired. This sounds very simple like it was in the 20th century. From what I can see, you buy a file, not the media. I assume you own the file and have the right to private use. Too me this is fair and reasonable.
And there's a good reason to believe that you own the file. That being that only you can access the contents of the file. It is keyed to your specific person, i.e. your Apple ID. It is not keyed to your individual hardware since you can move it between computers. You have the power to release the contents of the file as you see fit, e.g. to a CD in redbook format. If you destroy the file, then that specific arrangement of bits is lost forever (unless you reconstruct it at a personal cost of one dollar). If you copy the file, it is clear that it is your copy because your Apple ID and its related encryption is a part of the file.
Kinda weird, but the article claims that "While working as a 2002 summer intern at NASA Langley, team leader David Minton initiated the idea to study a "Mars Tumbleweed" for the class project." Well, that'd be all great and everything if JPL hadn't already come up with the idea: Exploring Mars: Blowing in the Wind?. The JPL article is dated August 10, 2001.
Someone probably should have told David Minton about Jack A. Jones' research at JPL. "Jack A. Jones...is leading JPL's research into various inflatable machines for exploring space. JPL's Inflatable Technology for Robotics Program aims to create rugged, all-terrain vehicles and other devices with low mass and low-packing volume."
After the Berkeley ComputerWare store reopened under Elite, the prices were too high. Things were just cheaper at the M.A.C. store which is only two blocks away. And ComputerWare didn't always have everything I wanted. Also, the original ComputerWare was better than the Elite ComputerWare, in terms of price, service, and availability.
Linux is all right, but monolithic kernels are so .. 1998. Besides everyone knows the GPL is evil. Personally I'm using Mac OS X on my iBook.
Mac OS X uses the Mach 2.5 kernel, which is not truly a microkernel. It's more monolithic kernel than you think. Mach 3.0 reached true microkernel status. It also performed slightly worse than Mach 2.5 because of all the context-switching penalties.
The MMORPG Ragnarok Online uses the Korean citizen ID to keep track of who is who, make people accountable for their actions (e.g. cheating), and also to prove ownership of accounts in the event you need them to do something like tell you your password. For this reason, some of those administrative things are not possible/enforceable on the International server.
What this does do is make the punishment for cheating much more severe--you can't simply establish a new account and start cheating again. But it also means Gravity might punish you when you don't think you deserve it, and in a fairly damaging way as far as the online game experience goes. Unfortunately, Gravity has a somewhat totalitarian stance on things: Regulations. I know people have been punished for complaining on the message boards (which are tied to your user account). Some of those regulations are very annoying to abide by due to the game dynamics, e.g. looting and kill-stealing. Others are extremely open to interpretation. I remember having to constantly watch my mouth because I wasn't sure who I would offend by an offhand comment.
Big Brother is watching. And you will learn to like it.
In what sane land would PRICES be protected under law? You can't really keep them secret, so "trade secret" is right out.
I suppose you could consider pricing to be a secret depending on how you sold your product or service to people. OEM deals might be a good example, since a vendor works out a certain price structure with one OEM but no other OEMs can know about this, otherwise the vendor loses its bargaining power.
They also do that voice actors first, animation of mouth movements second, in Anime films. I remember seeing this in the production extras of Akira's DVD release. They've formed a whole set of mouth shapes based on different vocal sounds and then animate the mouth shapes to match.