Licensing AAC costs $.50. Sure, that's 5 times the cost of WMA, but it's still $.50. A good headphone jack costs more than that. If a company is too cheap to spend $.50 licensing a burgeoning standard for a $300 device, I won't be doing business with them. They're sure to cut corners in other areas as well.
And the battery they're using today is, again, the largest capacity available at that size. And the battery life they get today is, again, 50% higher than what they got last year. So does this mean that the argument is, again, retarded?
As for having "less" features than the other players: I think it should be obvious to anyone who understands mathematics that the massive deficit in sales between more expensive, "under featured" iPod and its competitors should be proof that these features are not what sell a music device. That the folks that are willing to trade a good user interface for a stack of features and trade weight for battery life are a minority in the market.
Come on, recording? This isn't 1984. We're not holding our tape players up to the radio speakers. Recording is a very specific task that a music playback device does not need. If you're interested in recording, you probably want a device that was made to do that, not one that had it added on at the last second. FM? I'd never use it and I'd be pissed if they spent development time working out FM when I'd rather they spent it making iTunes even better. I bought a digital music player. I didn't buy a jackknife.
You obviously have a lot of issues about your terrible education to work through. I went to public school, went to a state college, and I do not feel that my education failed me, even when I had shitty teachers. I don't think I'm dumb and I have never been unemployed for a period longer than two months. But then, I have never considered my Lucky Charms to be a violent cereal either, and the one issue of AdBusters I bought illicited indescribable torrents of laughter.
No, I will not be doing business with iRiver anymore.
But...But...But they support OGG! How can any company that supports OGG be poorly run? Could it be that maybe supporting free file formats instead of file formats licensing fees is a way of cutting corners? Could it be that companies that cut corners in some areas MIGHT cut them in others?
More importantly, why does the thing support OGG files but not AAC files? We're talking about a multimedia standard created by the people who made MP3 and DVD and that's popularized by one of the most heavily used jukebox applications. And rather than support this great next generation format, iRiver chose Vorbis -- a standard backed by nobody, produced by volunteers with no commercial support whatsoever?
I've got no problem with OGG, but come on, guys...here I am with a 120 gig AAC library and I'm not going to convert that shit any time soon. It sounds good and works everywhere I need it to (MPlayer, iTunes, Winamp, iPod). You've made a device that could potentially replace my iPod when the hard drive goes...so why not make it easier for me to make the leap?
Right, and the old 3G iPod can get the same gains with the higher capacity aftermarket batteries that came out. I bought one for $25, I get about 10 hours of life out of it now.
The iPod's "dismal battery life" was a result of its form factor. Apple used the smallest battery they could to get a minimum of 8 hours playback, so you could listen all day at work. Now that there are millions of uses for batteries that size, many battery manufacturers are creating higher capacity flat batteries that are also mega cheap. Blaming Apple for using the best battery on the market at the time is kind of stupid.
Incidentally, I will not be replacing my iPod with an iRiver any time soon, because while the colour screen is really cool, the device looks pretty large, has WAY too many click tactile buttons to break and ports that will fill with lint, the visual interface looks pretty dull (reminds me of KDE, ew) and the human interface poorly laid out. It is hard to use tiny little buttons while on the go...that's why the iPod has a huge fucking wheel (and why mine has large, inset, finger sized buttons). Why does everybody else insist on making tiny little buttons and putting them right next to each other? Aesthetics? Who sees the thing when it's in your coat pocket? If you NEED to make some small buttons, at least space them more than a thumb's width apart, so you don't press all of them at once. GOD, why is Apple the only company who can engineer a fucking device that doesn't feel like some sadistic toy?
Television *DID* revolutionize education. Unfortunately, the effect has been grossly misused by many instructors. Children are indeed immensely visual and can benefit from well produced educational programming. My first grade class way back in 1986 used to watch these fascinating programs off video tapes during our snack break which would lead into our work for the second half of the day, and they were a great way to get all the background science out of the way before we did hands-on stuff. Then I had classes that were just video tapes with no reinforcement. Tapes were good, but not worth it.
Incidentally, the most interesting use of multimedia I saw in primary school was an English class, which showed a laserdisc of a segment from Northern Exposure to teach us what allegory was. Kind of a frivolous use, I guess, but it was certainly shorter than reading The Faerie Queene.
Nice paranoia, really, and good use of the word "gestalt," but when evidence moves from "over there on that table" to "right in front of my face," I am able to make a more informed decision as a juror.
When I don't have to wait a half hour while a bailiff goes to get the murder weapon because I can view it in 3d without disturbing the evidence, I'm making the trial move more fluidly.
When I can replay the witness' testimony, instead of merely remembering it, and I can detect that moment of hesitation that Juror 5 notices and I didn't on the replay, I might change my mind.
This technology opens WAY more doors than it closes. And you're complaining because of the colour balance? Man, last time I was on a jury one woman was near blind and another guy barely spoke English...if technology can bring them a little more information in any respect, it would be unconscionable NOT to use it. Shit, I'm sorry it's not some 3d cube with fractal resolution, but getting this out NOW, so people can use it NOW, is way more important than arguing about poor framing of the shot that you'd otherwise never see.
Oh, and this is technology to AUGMENT -- not REPLACE -- real live testimonies. It's so you don't have to rely on 12 hazy memories when the witness blinks three times and swallows before lying. You still see the live action deposition...and then you get instant replay for that second you were yawning.
Re:Lawer Needed: Photoshop skills a plus
on
Order in the e-Court!
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· Score: 3, Informative
Hi. I write government software and used to work for the Department of Criminal Justice Services of NY State. The point of electronic forms is not to take the place of paper, but to make it immensely more accessible. Right now, if you want a fingerprint card from the 1960s to test against a print you found at a crime scene, you can pull up a digital version of it with a ton of advanced search and detection algorithms in minutes. Or, you can request the physical card and receive it in a few daysdays. The system preserves BOTH, because it doesn't want the hassle of worrying about the possibility of digital tampering, the one is frequently checked against the other. Still, most everybody uses the digital records, because you can't perform a keyword search on a thirty page deposition if it's lying in a stack on your desk.
I will say this, though...the complexity of the digital system, the number of off network systems and password lockouts, etc, means that it's actually MUCH easier to fake a paper document than a digital one. Seriously...there's a bunch of low income college interns walking the stacks of the central file office, doing pulls and purges, and the security is not loose but not tight, either. Anybody can pull up a typewriter, write out a completely new arrest card, stick in a fake photo, and bam! Bye bye arrest record. When I worked there, we had a guy who after working for two weeks was removed because he had an arrest record nobody knew about. He didn't do anything funny in the stacks...but if he'd wanted to, he had two whole weeks to pull it off.
Er, no. The RAM file controls the location that the data will be streamed from. However, this location isn't live yet. Ergo, it doesn't work. This is like getting an advance ticket to a show; you still have to wait for the doors to open.
Right. Question is, when they patent this -- which they should -- will the anti-patent folks of Slashdot claim that their methodology was trivial and in fact they thought of it back in 1966 when they fell off the toilet?
Can't wait for spintronics...but just remember, the only reason IBM's got the money to spend on this stuff is that they potential payout is big enough to justify any expense.
Dude, I totally saw the Spin Doctors back in 1994. It was a tour with the Screaming Trees and Soul Asylum, right after they dropped Grave Dancer's Union. The trees and asylum really lit up the stage and then the dude from the Spin Doctors came out, stoned as hell and talking about weed all night even though the crowd wasn't smoking. The drummer and the bassist from his band were holding a conversation the whole time, it was obvious it was a by the numbers show. Man, did that suck. At least Van Connor broke a guitar on stage, which was the style at the time...
So those cryptic, obtuse Apache web pages are actually spot on for their purpose,which is to get more developers
Absolutely they are not. I am the sort of person who would be inclined to use and/or help with these projects. And most of the time, I find myself completely uninterested in projects because I cannot figure out what they do. A clever name and half-assed website does not attract my development time. A well written mission statement and a quick description of why I should care about the technology might. Shit man, in the time it took me to just understand what Coccoon does, I could have written an entire XML-driven template system. And every member of my team had to learn it! When I left that job, only three developers understood Coccoon in the least, only one guy really knew how to use it, and the big boss had no idea.
You are correct that the purpose of an OSS web page is to attract developers. Many of them do a pretty shitty job of it.
Technology will never understand Marketing. The two are different concepts with different goals. Marketing's goal is to attract the people who spend the money and make the big overall decisions to their technology. Technology's goal is to explain itself to the people who have to implement it.
Unfortunately, many technology leaders think Marketing is just cunning language and empty promises. So when they make a terribly useful technology, they fail to explain it and instead spin a picture of what it COULD be.
It is not just companies, either. Take a look at the product pages on Apache.org and see how long it takes to figure out exactly what a technology does, what platforms it works on, what language it works with and how to connect to it. Some of them are good. Most of the time, this information vital to deciding whether the technology is useful or not is hidden three or four links in, and occasionally it's not there at all. I mean, what the fuck is this? (rhetorical question, don't answer). Furthermore, the names of the projects are apocryphal and completely undescriptive. "Do we use Cocoon or Veocity for this project?" Who knows.
Technology is massively complicated. Just think of the question "What is Linux?" The term is used simulateously, by different people, to refer to a Kernel, to refer to a set of development tools, to refer to a GUI, to refer to a development philosophy, etc. Marketing's job is to boil off the variables you don't need to make a purchasing decision, and spice up the biggest advantages. If marketing isn't doing that, if all they're doing is making insane promises or coming up with wierd names, fire your marketing department. They're wasting your money.
While we're trading aphorisms, there's another formula for failure: don't do anything anybody could possibly like, and every time you find something somebody likes, destroy it in a conspicuous display of contempt for their perception of your art.
Seriously, is it really that bad to keep a laserdisc player hooked up for three films if they're three of your favorites? I mean, I have mine for some non-DVD anime, original ET and the Indy films too, but it would certainly be worth it for just Star Wars. I mean, I have a VHS player hooked up and I haven't watched a VHS tape, well, since I hooker it up.
Wait until you see the new version of that scene. Lucas digitally added a pair of monstrous hands on either side, forcing the Sarlac pit wide open. There's a website about it somewhere...
I think the problem is striking a compromise between what you, the artist, wants, and what the fans want. If you can't deal with that compromise, you're gonna have to deal with a loss: either of your integrity, or of the fan's respect and trust.
Lucas keeps claiming that he's making the movie he wanted to make originally. What he's actually doing is erasing the work of the other artists who worked on Star Wars (the directors, editors, cinematographers and effects technicians) in order to make it more his. And the result is something fans don't like. Furthermore, as the copyright holder on the material, he's electing not to allow the old version to be reproduced. This is why we're upset...not because he's doing something artistic that we don't like (he maintained our respect after Howard the Friggin' Duck), but because he's doing so at the expense of the continued viability of a medium we remember. You cannot buy a legal, modern edition of the original trilogy anymore. And that's artistic genocide.
Then I guess they're fucked. I checked your facts on copyright.gov (hey, i was interested, not mistrusting) and sure enough, software is only copyrighted as code, making it a literary work.
Some authors *DO* change their works throughout their lives. Walt Whitman only wrote one book -- Leaves of Grass -- which he added to and changed constantly, releasing different versions throughout his life.
Of course, Walt Whitman was an artist, and Lucas is a fucking hack of a producer who should let his directors, editors and cinematographers do their job and make his films into more than just a perfect version of one man's ambitious imagination.
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Licensing AAC costs $.50. Sure, that's 5 times the cost of WMA, but it's still $.50. A good headphone jack costs more than that. If a company is too cheap to spend $.50 licensing a burgeoning standard for a $300 device, I won't be doing business with them. They're sure to cut corners in other areas as well.
And the battery they're using today is, again, the largest capacity available at that size. And the battery life they get today is, again, 50% higher than what they got last year. So does this mean that the argument is, again, retarded?
As for having "less" features than the other players: I think it should be obvious to anyone who understands mathematics that the massive deficit in sales between more expensive, "under featured" iPod and its competitors should be proof that these features are not what sell a music device. That the folks that are willing to trade a good user interface for a stack of features and trade weight for battery life are a minority in the market.
Come on, recording? This isn't 1984. We're not holding our tape players up to the radio speakers. Recording is a very specific task that a music playback device does not need. If you're interested in recording, you probably want a device that was made to do that, not one that had it added on at the last second. FM? I'd never use it and I'd be pissed if they spent development time working out FM when I'd rather they spent it making iTunes even better. I bought a digital music player. I didn't buy a jackknife.
You obviously have a lot of issues about your terrible education to work through. I went to public school, went to a state college, and I do not feel that my education failed me, even when I had shitty teachers. I don't think I'm dumb and I have never been unemployed for a period longer than two months. But then, I have never considered my Lucky Charms to be a violent cereal either, and the one issue of AdBusters I bought illicited indescribable torrents of laughter.
No, I will not be doing business with iRiver anymore.
But...But...But they support OGG! How can any company that supports OGG be poorly run? Could it be that maybe supporting free file formats instead of file formats licensing fees is a way of cutting corners? Could it be that companies that cut corners in some areas MIGHT cut them in others?
Really? That's a pretty shitty buffer, then. The iPod has 32 meg, which is good enough for a 6 minute ALC file.
More importantly, why does the thing support OGG files but not AAC files? We're talking about a multimedia standard created by the people who made MP3 and DVD and that's popularized by one of the most heavily used jukebox applications. And rather than support this great next generation format, iRiver chose Vorbis -- a standard backed by nobody, produced by volunteers with no commercial support whatsoever?
I've got no problem with OGG, but come on, guys...here I am with a 120 gig AAC library and I'm not going to convert that shit any time soon. It sounds good and works everywhere I need it to (MPlayer, iTunes, Winamp, iPod). You've made a device that could potentially replace my iPod when the hard drive goes...so why not make it easier for me to make the leap?
Right, and the old 3G iPod can get the same gains with the higher capacity aftermarket batteries that came out. I bought one for $25, I get about 10 hours of life out of it now.
The iPod's "dismal battery life" was a result of its form factor. Apple used the smallest battery they could to get a minimum of 8 hours playback, so you could listen all day at work. Now that there are millions of uses for batteries that size, many battery manufacturers are creating higher capacity flat batteries that are also mega cheap. Blaming Apple for using the best battery on the market at the time is kind of stupid.
Incidentally, I will not be replacing my iPod with an iRiver any time soon, because while the colour screen is really cool, the device looks pretty large, has WAY too many click tactile buttons to break and ports that will fill with lint, the visual interface looks pretty dull (reminds me of KDE, ew) and the human interface poorly laid out. It is hard to use tiny little buttons while on the go...that's why the iPod has a huge fucking wheel (and why mine has large, inset, finger sized buttons). Why does everybody else insist on making tiny little buttons and putting them right next to each other? Aesthetics? Who sees the thing when it's in your coat pocket? If you NEED to make some small buttons, at least space them more than a thumb's width apart, so you don't press all of them at once. GOD, why is Apple the only company who can engineer a fucking device that doesn't feel like some sadistic toy?
Television *DID* revolutionize education. Unfortunately, the effect has been grossly misused by many instructors. Children are indeed immensely visual and can benefit from well produced educational programming. My first grade class way back in 1986 used to watch these fascinating programs off video tapes during our snack break which would lead into our work for the second half of the day, and they were a great way to get all the background science out of the way before we did hands-on stuff. Then I had classes that were just video tapes with no reinforcement. Tapes were good, but not worth it.
Incidentally, the most interesting use of multimedia I saw in primary school was an English class, which showed a laserdisc of a segment from Northern Exposure to teach us what allegory was. Kind of a frivolous use, I guess, but it was certainly shorter than reading The Faerie Queene.
Au contraire. Every person or group of people should have the right to take the life of anyone else, provided they had a good reason for it.
Your society would be one of smug lawlessness.
Mine would be one of polite tolerance.
Wow. I guess you bought the bumper sticker that says "Libertarian," because they were out of the ones that said "Complete Fucking Moron," eh?
Nice paranoia, really, and good use of the word "gestalt," but when evidence moves from "over there on that table" to "right in front of my face," I am able to make a more informed decision as a juror.
When I don't have to wait a half hour while a bailiff goes to get the murder weapon because I can view it in 3d without disturbing the evidence, I'm making the trial move more fluidly.
When I can replay the witness' testimony, instead of merely remembering it, and I can detect that moment of hesitation that Juror 5 notices and I didn't on the replay, I might change my mind.
This technology opens WAY more doors than it closes. And you're complaining because of the colour balance? Man, last time I was on a jury one woman was near blind and another guy barely spoke English...if technology can bring them a little more information in any respect, it would be unconscionable NOT to use it. Shit, I'm sorry it's not some 3d cube with fractal resolution, but getting this out NOW, so people can use it NOW, is way more important than arguing about poor framing of the shot that you'd otherwise never see.
Oh, and this is technology to AUGMENT -- not REPLACE -- real live testimonies. It's so you don't have to rely on 12 hazy memories when the witness blinks three times and swallows before lying. You still see the live action deposition...and then you get instant replay for that second you were yawning.
Hi. I write government software and used to work for the Department of Criminal Justice Services of NY State. The point of electronic forms is not to take the place of paper, but to make it immensely more accessible. Right now, if you want a fingerprint card from the 1960s to test against a print you found at a crime scene, you can pull up a digital version of it with a ton of advanced search and detection algorithms in minutes. Or, you can request the physical card and receive it in a few daysdays. The system preserves BOTH, because it doesn't want the hassle of worrying about the possibility of digital tampering, the one is frequently checked against the other. Still, most everybody uses the digital records, because you can't perform a keyword search on a thirty page deposition if it's lying in a stack on your desk.
I will say this, though...the complexity of the digital system, the number of off network systems and password lockouts, etc, means that it's actually MUCH easier to fake a paper document than a digital one. Seriously...there's a bunch of low income college interns walking the stacks of the central file office, doing pulls and purges, and the security is not loose but not tight, either. Anybody can pull up a typewriter, write out a completely new arrest card, stick in a fake photo, and bam! Bye bye arrest record. When I worked there, we had a guy who after working for two weeks was removed because he had an arrest record nobody knew about. He didn't do anything funny in the stacks...but if he'd wanted to, he had two whole weeks to pull it off.
Er, no. The RAM file controls the location that the data will be streamed from. However, this location isn't live yet. Ergo, it doesn't work. This is like getting an advance ticket to a show; you still have to wait for the doors to open.
Nice hacking though. Mazeltov.
Better still, is there a BitTorrent-type P2P multiplexor for streaming media, and if not...who wants to write one wimme?
Naw, he's in charge of the hard disc division that made the Deskstar GXP...
Right. Question is, when they patent this -- which they should -- will the anti-patent folks of Slashdot claim that their methodology was trivial and in fact they thought of it back in 1966 when they fell off the toilet?
Can't wait for spintronics...but just remember, the only reason IBM's got the money to spend on this stuff is that they potential payout is big enough to justify any expense.
Dude, I totally saw the Spin Doctors back in 1994. It was a tour with the Screaming Trees and Soul Asylum, right after they dropped Grave Dancer's Union. The trees and asylum really lit up the stage and then the dude from the Spin Doctors came out, stoned as hell and talking about weed all night even though the crowd wasn't smoking. The drummer and the bassist from his band were holding a conversation the whole time, it was obvious it was a by the numbers show. Man, did that suck. At least Van Connor broke a guitar on stage, which was the style at the time...
So those cryptic, obtuse Apache web pages are actually spot on for their purpose,which is to get more developers
Absolutely they are not. I am the sort of person who would be inclined to use and/or help with these projects. And most of the time, I find myself completely uninterested in projects because I cannot figure out what they do. A clever name and half-assed website does not attract my development time. A well written mission statement and a quick description of why I should care about the technology might. Shit man, in the time it took me to just understand what Coccoon does, I could have written an entire XML-driven template system. And every member of my team had to learn it! When I left that job, only three developers understood Coccoon in the least, only one guy really knew how to use it, and the big boss had no idea.
You are correct that the purpose of an OSS web page is to attract developers. Many of them do a pretty shitty job of it.
Technology will never understand Marketing. The two are different concepts with different goals. Marketing's goal is to attract the people who spend the money and make the big overall decisions to their technology. Technology's goal is to explain itself to the people who have to implement it.
Unfortunately, many technology leaders think Marketing is just cunning language and empty promises. So when they make a terribly useful technology, they fail to explain it and instead spin a picture of what it COULD be.
It is not just companies, either. Take a look at the product pages on Apache.org and see how long it takes to figure out exactly what a technology does, what platforms it works on, what language it works with and how to connect to it. Some of them are good. Most of the time, this information vital to deciding whether the technology is useful or not is hidden three or four links in, and occasionally it's not there at all. I mean, what the fuck is this? (rhetorical question, don't answer). Furthermore, the names of the projects are apocryphal and completely undescriptive. "Do we use Cocoon or Veocity for this project?" Who knows.
Technology is massively complicated. Just think of the question "What is Linux?" The term is used simulateously, by different people, to refer to a Kernel, to refer to a set of development tools, to refer to a GUI, to refer to a development philosophy, etc. Marketing's job is to boil off the variables you don't need to make a purchasing decision, and spice up the biggest advantages. If marketing isn't doing that, if all they're doing is making insane promises or coming up with wierd names, fire your marketing department. They're wasting your money.
While we're trading aphorisms, there's another formula for failure: don't do anything anybody could possibly like, and every time you find something somebody likes, destroy it in a conspicuous display of contempt for their perception of your art.
Five words: Massive quality drop, you idiot.
Seriously, is it really that bad to keep a laserdisc player hooked up for three films if they're three of your favorites? I mean, I have mine for some non-DVD anime, original ET and the Indy films too, but it would certainly be worth it for just Star Wars. I mean, I have a VHS player hooked up and I haven't watched a VHS tape, well, since I hooker it up.
Wait until you see the new version of that scene. Lucas digitally added a pair of monstrous hands on either side, forcing the Sarlac pit wide open. There's a website about it somewhere...
I think the problem is striking a compromise between what you, the artist, wants, and what the fans want. If you can't deal with that compromise, you're gonna have to deal with a loss: either of your integrity, or of the fan's respect and trust.
Lucas keeps claiming that he's making the movie he wanted to make originally. What he's actually doing is erasing the work of the other artists who worked on Star Wars (the directors, editors, cinematographers and effects technicians) in order to make it more his. And the result is something fans don't like. Furthermore, as the copyright holder on the material, he's electing not to allow the old version to be reproduced. This is why we're upset...not because he's doing something artistic that we don't like (he maintained our respect after Howard the Friggin' Duck), but because he's doing so at the expense of the continued viability of a medium we remember. You cannot buy a legal, modern edition of the original trilogy anymore. And that's artistic genocide.
Then I guess they're fucked. I checked your facts on copyright.gov (hey, i was interested, not mistrusting) and sure enough, software is only copyrighted as code, making it a literary work.
Oh well. No mo' SCO.
Some authors *DO* change their works throughout their lives. Walt Whitman only wrote one book -- Leaves of Grass -- which he added to and changed constantly, releasing different versions throughout his life.
Of course, Walt Whitman was an artist, and Lucas is a fucking hack of a producer who should let his directors, editors and cinematographers do their job and make his films into more than just a perfect version of one man's ambitious imagination.