Oh and Edgar Bronfman Jr: You say you want to hold the cheapest songs on iTunes to.99 cents and raise the prices on the popular tracks? Was not this what you were trying to do when that pesky price fixing scheme was discovered back when you were at Universal? Are you guys *trying* to put yourselves out of business?
Not only is he trying to put himself out of business, he's trying to directly oppose the law of supply and demand. Granted, it's been argued that the S&D laws don't necessarily apply to intellectual property and the like, but charging a premium for a high-volume item is a recipe for disaster.
If anything, it's the rare live recordings that should be priced more agressively. Why would we want to pay a premium for a song that's played frequently on the radio?
I could possibly see something like 'Buy 2 songs from this EP and get the 3rd for $.50' -- which would be a win-win for consumers and the labels. Consumers get a cheap song, and the labels still make a profit on it because chances are, without the discount, the person wouldn't have purchased the song.
When I was in Seattle last summer, I rode the monorail to seattle center. It was slow, tickets were expensive, and the train took about 15 minutes to arrive before we could board.
On the way back, we walked. It took about half the time.
This is best evidenced by the New York Metro Area. Mass Transit in manhattan is exceptional...you can get just about everywhere you want to go.
Are you serious!?
AFAIK, NYC has one of the world's worst mass transit systems for a city of its size, a problem that largely stems from the fact that a large number of people working in NYC commute from NJ and CT.
I live an hour by road from NYC, but 2 by rail. And let me say that the roads are not great by any measure. If it weren't for the private cab industry, NYC wouldn't work. The subway is a convoluted MESS, and getting anywhere beyond brooklyn or long island by mass transit is impossible.
zlib is simply released with no strings attached whatsoever. only catch is that the author's not responsible for anything that happens with it.
most people equate OSS with the GPL or a BSD-style license. zlib is released more or less without any license at all. It's a few lines that make it VERY VERY CLEAR that the authors don't care what the hell you do with it as long as they're not implicated
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,
including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it
freely, subject to the following restrictions:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not
claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software
in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be
appreciated but is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be
misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
I believe that the Xeons have a much lower yield due to the huge amount of cache they require. (Does this $40 also include the costs of the very large number of chips that 'didn't make it'?)
Chances are that the xeon will indeed cost a heck of a lot more to produce, and the price is substantiated by this.
On the other hand, many see the Xeon as a form of market differentiation for Intel. Intel knows that their business customers NEED these chips, and are willing and able to pay the big bucks for them, while they intentionally design their desktop chips to suck at server applications. (This isn't true -- if it were, Intel would have loaded its desktop chips with gobs of cache back when they were in fierce competition with AMD for the desktop market crown)
This is for the same reason that, when booking a flight, it's usually cheaper to go round-trip if you stay over across a weekend. The airline industry knows that most business travellers will not stay the weekend, while individuals and tourists usually will. The business travellers are willing and able to pay the hefty price premium. Before you object and cry wolf, pause to consider that in theory this actually makes the product more affordable for the 'average joe' -- judging by the fact that the airlines don't seem to by raking in the cash very much right now, I think we can assume this is actually true.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I highly reccommend reading Naked Economica. The book's expertly written, and to my delight, didn't include a single graph or mathematical equation. A fun read that will change your views on a lot of current events.
Oh, and I might as well interject here that the same exact thing holds true for the pharmaceutical industry. Their R&D and Upfront costs are staggering compared to the product, not to mention that a company can spend billions developing a dead-end drug that doesn't make it past clinical trials. Likewise, I don't think the people bitching about companies refusing to develop/produce drugs to cure exotic african illnesses realize the huge costs involved for a product that will not even come close to turning a profit. Yes. Charity is a good thing, but if people want these drugs to be produced, they need to find somebody to pay for them -- we live in a capitalist society.
Ever since my physician completely dropped all HMOs, he's been much more accessable, and the quality of the care has increased tenfold.
The HMO zombies can't properly treat their patients. Period. End of story.
On the other hand, I agree with nationalized healthcare on principle, but am sternly opposed to it for the simple reason that I know that it will be terribly terribly screwed up if we try to implement it, given our current track record.
Anyone who disagrees hasn't been to the DMV recently.
Many/.-ers would be interested in the Rosetta Project which aims to preserve many world languages using an extremely failsafe medium. defintiely a cool read -- check it out.
sure, it may not be terribly convenient, but it's certainly going to be readable 100 to 1000 years from now (by which point we should have adequate OCR to complete the task of reading the disc automatically)
Another example: It's getting harder to find apps that play "tracker module" music, and the programs that are available tend to be awkward and unreliable. Everything went to MP3, and mod music was quickly forgotten.
Winamp does, and there's various ports and frontends of mikmod for virtually every OS imaginable. On the other hand, tracker modules were a very cool form of music, and it's a shame to see them begin to die after the community refused to adopt aa format that supported mp3-encoded samples....
Harvard is not a tech/trade school. Their graduates don't seem to have any problems finding jobs in the real world.
There is a definite trend where employers are looking to hire people with a broader educational background. They may not start the job with all the necessary skills, but will definitely be able to learn those skills rapidly, and adapt to whatever is thrown at them.
Alas, I do not attend harvard, but am currently attending a similarly-minded public institution, and can already see how this applies. Rather than being enrolled in exclusively compsci/physics/engineering courses, I'm taking a smattering of courses this semester, each from a different department. Although I have no intent to become a psychologist, I can easily see how what I'm learning in the class would apply to UI design. The english course I'm taking certainly isn't going to help me write better code, but will certainly help me document that code.
I believe that all but one or two of our CS courses are predominately theory-based. Although useful, learning the language itself is peripheral to the overall theory.
Think bundling your newspapers is "messy"? Not when compared with the process of making paper from virgin timber. While modern paper recycling mills can be designed to operate without producing any hazardous air or water pollution and virtually no hazardous wastes,[16] the virgin pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest generators of toxic air pollutants, surface water pollution, sludge, and solid wastes. [17] Indeed, the timber industry has in all likelihood wiped out more habitat and more species per unit of production than has any other industry. Most Americans associate virgin paper mills with both the destruction of resident-species habitat and the contamination of streams and rivers with chlorinated dioxins and other pollutants. But the fact is these mills are also major sources of a wide variety of hazardous air and water pollutants, odors, solid waste, contaminated sludge, and water discoloring agents. Besides their well known, often unbearable emissions of sulfur compounds (causing an odor resembling rotten eggs), pulp and paper mills are classified under U.S. federal law as generators of "significant quantities of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) chlorinated and non-chlorinated. Some of these pollutants are considered to be carcinogenic, and all can cause toxic health effects following exposure. Most of the organic HAPs emitted from this industry also are classified as volatile organic compounds which participate in photochemical reactions in the atmosphere to produce ozone, a contributor to photochemical smog."[18]
In worldwide terms, $27 billion is pocket change. Implementing these changes over a period of 10 or 15 years would be extremely easy, especially given the number of paper mills in the world ($27 billion divided by the number of paper mills worldwide shouldn't be a frighteningly big sum.....)
2008: The Floating Reactor (the Severodvinsk Reactor)
In 2008, if all goes according to plan, the world's first commercial floating nuclear power plant will be ready to begin operation... Pravda, the Russian news publication, reported the project was approved by the head of the Ministry for Nuclear Power, Alexander Rumyantsev. Sevmash Enterprise, which specializes in submarine construction, will build the vessel. Rosenergoatom, the Russian nuclear firm, will supply the reactors. Two such floating power stations are planned, each anticipated to cost $100 to $120 million. The first one will supply power to the city of Severodvinsk, approximately 50 miles west of Archangel.
Looks like TFA was wrong by several orders of magnitude on this one....
Somehow, I've got a good feeling that you're gonna end up on a LOT of government watch lists if you start dealing with a company named 'United Nuclear'
1) Lazy 2) The last time I tried this, whichever version of iTunes I was using at the time refused to mount the iPod, even though I could access its filesystem perfectly. Right now, I'm not exactly inclined to reformat the iPod just for the hell of it.
iTunes 5 for Windws appears to break support for using mac(HFS+) formatted iPods through macDrive, and instead displays a dialogue asking if you'd like to reformat the iPod.
This is probably just an oversight on apple's part, as this functionality was never 'officially' supported, although it'd be nice if they got a patch out so I can sync my iPod both at home (Mac) and at work (PC)
It seems like corporate america has adopted an ass-backwards version of communism where corporations own every bit of your property rather than the government.
In communism (which has proven not to work), you can at least trust that the government has some positive motives in mind that will eventually lead to prosperity for the people. Obviously, history has proven this false, but the fact remains....
Here, on the other hand, we are no longer in control of our own property, and are at the mercy of huge corporations that have the single goal of making money. This, I can assure you, will NOT lead to prosperity for the proletariat no matter how you spin it.
So in a sense, our neo-capitalism has evolved into a system that incorporates the absolute worst parts of communism.
this leaves me conflicted inside. I don't like the idea of socialism/communism at all, and think that our free-market economy has served us well so far. However, corporations (foreign ones at that!) should not be in control of our personal possessions!
Everyone uses/benefits from the roads. It's a meer fact of life.
If we didn't have our roads, our economy and way of life would grind to a halt. The cost of shipping would become astronomical if we had such a high fuel tax were put in place.
Likewise, consider the fact that the US is HUGE. Everyone uses the roads, directly or indirectly. Our population density is also quite a bit lower that makes pedestrian/bicycle travel impractical except in the most densely populated areas.
From what I've heard so far, the project wasn't directly rejected for the sake of homeland security, and the bush administration has been the FIRST to even consider such a project. I recall that proposals like this have been going on for DECADES.
I feel bad for the citizens of new orleans that their lives have been destroyed due to human incompetence. The city knew of the danger. The levies were underengineered. If the federal government wouldn't foot the bill, the city should have found a way to pay for it by itself.
Because of this, an entire region suffers, and the entire country has to pay the massive cleanup bill (which it should. anyone who says otherwise is a heartless bastard.). $5 gas could throw us into a severe depression. During wartime no less.
Our infrastructure is not conducive to conserving gas. I predict that if we don't make a full economic recovery within a year, the US is going to look a lot like europe 10 years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
...and you can imagine where it goes from there...
These people are INSANE.
No. They just have no soul.
Oh and Edgar Bronfman Jr: You say you want to hold the cheapest songs on iTunes to
Not only is he trying to put himself out of business, he's trying to directly oppose the law of supply and demand. Granted, it's been argued that the S&D laws don't necessarily apply to intellectual property and the like, but charging a premium for a high-volume item is a recipe for disaster.
If anything, it's the rare live recordings that should be priced more agressively. Why would we want to pay a premium for a song that's played frequently on the radio?
I could possibly see something like 'Buy 2 songs from this EP and get the 3rd for $.50' -- which would be a win-win for consumers and the labels. Consumers get a cheap song, and the labels still make a profit on it because chances are, without the discount, the person wouldn't have purchased the song.
The RIAA is shooting itself in the foot.
Amen to that.
When I was in Seattle last summer, I rode the monorail to seattle center. It was slow, tickets were expensive, and the train took about 15 minutes to arrive before we could board.
On the way back, we walked. It took about half the time.
This is best evidenced by the New York Metro Area. Mass Transit in manhattan is exceptional...you can get just about everywhere you want to go.
Are you serious!?
AFAIK, NYC has one of the world's worst mass transit systems for a city of its size, a problem that largely stems from the fact that a large number of people working in NYC commute from NJ and CT.
I live an hour by road from NYC, but 2 by rail. And let me say that the roads are not great by any measure. If it weren't for the private cab industry, NYC wouldn't work. The subway is a convoluted MESS, and getting anywhere beyond brooklyn or long island by mass transit is impossible.
No. I think it's because today's International Talk Like a Pirate Day
zlib is simply released with no strings attached whatsoever. only catch is that the author's not responsible for anything that happens with it.
most people equate OSS with the GPL or a BSD-style license. zlib is released more or less without any license at all. It's a few lines that make it VERY VERY CLEAR that the authors don't care what the hell you do with it as long as they're not implicated
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.
I believe that the Xeons have a much lower yield due to the huge amount of cache they require. (Does this $40 also include the costs of the very large number of chips that 'didn't make it'?)
Chances are that the xeon will indeed cost a heck of a lot more to produce, and the price is substantiated by this.
On the other hand, many see the Xeon as a form of market differentiation for Intel. Intel knows that their business customers NEED these chips, and are willing and able to pay the big bucks for them, while they intentionally design their desktop chips to suck at server applications. (This isn't true -- if it were, Intel would have loaded its desktop chips with gobs of cache back when they were in fierce competition with AMD for the desktop market crown)
This is for the same reason that, when booking a flight, it's usually cheaper to go round-trip if you stay over across a weekend. The airline industry knows that most business travellers will not stay the weekend, while individuals and tourists usually will. The business travellers are willing and able to pay the hefty price premium. Before you object and cry wolf, pause to consider that in theory this actually makes the product more affordable for the 'average joe' -- judging by the fact that the airlines don't seem to by raking in the cash very much right now, I think we can assume this is actually true.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I highly reccommend reading Naked Economica. The book's expertly written, and to my delight, didn't include a single graph or mathematical equation. A fun read that will change your views on a lot of current events.
Oh, and I might as well interject here that the same exact thing holds true for the pharmaceutical industry. Their R&D and Upfront costs are staggering compared to the product, not to mention that a company can spend billions developing a dead-end drug that doesn't make it past clinical trials. Likewise, I don't think the people bitching about companies refusing to develop/produce drugs to cure exotic african illnesses realize the huge costs involved for a product that will not even come close to turning a profit. Yes. Charity is a good thing, but if people want these drugs to be produced, they need to find somebody to pay for them -- we live in a capitalist society.
Seriously.
Ever since my physician completely dropped all HMOs, he's been much more accessable, and the quality of the care has increased tenfold.
The HMO zombies can't properly treat their patients. Period. End of story.
On the other hand, I agree with nationalized healthcare on principle, but am sternly opposed to it for the simple reason that I know that it will be terribly terribly screwed up if we try to implement it, given our current track record.
Anyone who disagrees hasn't been to the DMV recently.
Many /.-ers would be interested in the Rosetta Project which aims to preserve many world languages using an extremely failsafe medium. defintiely a cool read -- check it out.
sure, it may not be terribly convenient, but it's certainly going to be readable 100 to 1000 years from now (by which point we should have adequate OCR to complete the task of reading the disc automatically)
Another example: It's getting harder to find apps that play "tracker module" music, and the programs that are available tend to be awkward and unreliable. Everything went to MP3, and mod music was quickly forgotten.
Winamp does, and there's various ports and frontends of mikmod for virtually every OS imaginable. On the other hand, tracker modules were a very cool form of music, and it's a shame to see them begin to die after the community refused to adopt aa format that supported mp3-encoded samples....
Harvard is not a tech/trade school. Their graduates don't seem to have any problems finding jobs in the real world.
There is a definite trend where employers are looking to hire people with a broader educational background. They may not start the job with all the necessary skills, but will definitely be able to learn those skills rapidly, and adapt to whatever is thrown at them.
Alas, I do not attend harvard, but am currently attending a similarly-minded public institution, and can already see how this applies. Rather than being enrolled in exclusively compsci/physics/engineering courses, I'm taking a smattering of courses this semester, each from a different department. Although I have no intent to become a psychologist, I can easily see how what I'm learning in the class would apply to UI design. The english course I'm taking certainly isn't going to help me write better code, but will certainly help me document that code.
I believe that all but one or two of our CS courses are predominately theory-based. Although useful, learning the language itself is peripheral to the overall theory.
I think that the over governments are sympathetic to the fact that Russia's space program has virtually no budget.
If this is what they have to do to raise the funds necessary to operate, then so be it.
Think bundling your newspapers is "messy"? Not when compared with the process of making paper from virgin timber. While modern paper recycling mills can be designed to operate without producing any hazardous air or water pollution and virtually no hazardous wastes,[16] the virgin pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest generators of toxic air pollutants, surface water pollution, sludge, and solid wastes. [17] Indeed, the timber industry has in all likelihood wiped out more habitat and more species per unit of production than has any other industry. Most Americans associate virgin paper mills with both the destruction of resident-species habitat and the contamination of streams and rivers with chlorinated dioxins and other pollutants. But the fact is these mills are also major sources of a wide variety of hazardous air and water pollutants, odors, solid waste, contaminated sludge, and water discoloring agents. Besides their well known, often unbearable emissions of sulfur compounds (causing an odor resembling rotten eggs), pulp and paper mills are classified under U.S. federal law as generators of "significant quantities of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) chlorinated and non-chlorinated. Some of these pollutants are considered to be carcinogenic, and all can cause toxic health effects following exposure. Most of the organic HAPs emitted from this industry also are classified as volatile organic compounds which participate in photochemical reactions in the atmosphere to produce ozone, a contributor to photochemical smog."[18]
In worldwide terms, $27 billion is pocket change. Implementing these changes over a period of 10 or 15 years would be extremely easy, especially given the number of paper mills in the world ($27 billion divided by the number of paper mills worldwide shouldn't be a frighteningly big sum.....)
A lot of IDEs turn on 'word wrap' for printing out code, and indicate line breaks by some other means...
I know that a lot of languages frequently use very long lines of code.....
From the unique reactors linked to by the parent poster:
2008: The Floating Reactor (the Severodvinsk Reactor)
In 2008, if all goes according to plan, the world's first commercial floating nuclear power plant will be ready to begin operation... Pravda, the Russian news publication, reported the project was approved by the head of the Ministry for Nuclear Power, Alexander Rumyantsev. Sevmash Enterprise, which specializes in submarine construction, will build the vessel. Rosenergoatom, the Russian nuclear firm, will supply the reactors. Two such floating power stations are planned, each anticipated to cost $100 to $120 million. The first one will supply power to the city of Severodvinsk, approximately 50 miles west of Archangel.
Looks like TFA was wrong by several orders of magnitude on this one....
Somehow, I've got a good feeling that you're gonna end up on a LOT of government watch lists if you start dealing with a company named 'United Nuclear'
FEMA Nixes Grassroots Radio Station for Hurricane Evacuees
Bureaucracy KO's info source at the Astrodome
by Sarah Ferguson
Since when has the dutchess of york been a journalist?
Erm.....
What sort of teacher/student in the past 20 years hasn't used a scantron at some point or another?
the machines are dirt-cheap, and accurate enough for all intents and purposes.
of course, it does make the course a good deal less personal.
1) Lazy
2) The last time I tried this, whichever version of iTunes I was using at the time refused to mount the iPod, even though I could access its filesystem perfectly. Right now, I'm not exactly inclined to reformat the iPod just for the hell of it.
iTunes 5 for Windws appears to break support for using mac(HFS+) formatted iPods through macDrive, and instead displays a dialogue asking if you'd like to reformat the iPod.
This is probably just an oversight on apple's part, as this functionality was never 'officially' supported, although it'd be nice if they got a patch out so I can sync my iPod both at home (Mac) and at work (PC)
It seems like corporate america has adopted an ass-backwards version of communism where corporations own every bit of your property rather than the government.
In communism (which has proven not to work), you can at least trust that the government has some positive motives in mind that will eventually lead to prosperity for the people. Obviously, history has proven this false, but the fact remains....
Here, on the other hand, we are no longer in control of our own property, and are at the mercy of huge corporations that have the single goal of making money. This, I can assure you, will NOT lead to prosperity for the proletariat no matter how you spin it.
So in a sense, our neo-capitalism has evolved into a system that incorporates the absolute worst parts of communism.
this leaves me conflicted inside. I don't like the idea of socialism/communism at all, and think that our free-market economy has served us well so far. However, corporations (foreign ones at that!) should not be in control of our personal possessions!
Everyone uses/benefits from the roads. It's a meer fact of life.
If we didn't have our roads, our economy and way of life would grind to a halt. The cost of shipping would become astronomical if we had such a high fuel tax were put in place.
Likewise, consider the fact that the US is HUGE. Everyone uses the roads, directly or indirectly. Our population density is also quite a bit lower that makes pedestrian/bicycle travel impractical except in the most densely populated areas.
1) Laptop
2) Power Cord
3) 2 Pens, 1 Pencil, and occasionally a legal pad. Nothing beats pen & paper.
Let me add to that:
From what I've heard so far, the project wasn't directly rejected for the sake of homeland security, and the bush administration has been the FIRST to even consider such a project. I recall that proposals like this have been going on for DECADES.
I feel bad for the citizens of new orleans that their lives have been destroyed due to human incompetence. The city knew of the danger. The levies were underengineered. If the federal government wouldn't foot the bill, the city should have found a way to pay for it by itself.
Because of this, an entire region suffers, and the entire country has to pay the massive cleanup bill (which it should. anyone who says otherwise is a heartless bastard.). $5 gas could throw us into a severe depression. During wartime no less.
Our infrastructure is not conducive to conserving gas. I predict that if we don't make a full economic recovery within a year, the US is going to look a lot like europe 10 years from now.