80 years ago people were expected to read Shakespear in the 4th grade, now we (MAYBE) get into it by high school. We've been dumbed down folks, and if you don't think TV played a large part in that, well, you watch too much TV...
That statement is a steaming pile of feces. Maybe you have dumbed down. I wouldn't claim any specific knowledge about you that would allow me to make such a judgment except that you have fallen for one of the oldest geezer illusions in the book. It goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. It may have been Plato quoting Socrates that current youth just aren't up to the standards of earlier generations. The same sort of observations has been repeated in probably every subsequent generation. By now we should barely be capable of walking upright and remembering how to breathe.
It shouldn't take very impressive insight to realize that societies sometime advance and sometimes retreat. My own anecdotal observation is that we are still advancing. Including Shakespeare in a fourth grade curriculum strikes me as remarkably poor judgment. On the other hand I have noted that the educational opportunities afforded my three children in public school in Edina, MN are distinctly better than what I had 30+ years ago (admittedly in a smaller community). I would also say that the availability of television, internet, and much more accessible foreign and domestic travel have been positive influences. They have all had the benefit of bilingual, immersive education (French and English) and significantly more advanced classes in high school. My oldest is taking all AP classes except for orchestra. I might add that his orchestra is incomparably larger and better than the group to which I had access.
I am simplifying my description to avoid unimportant caveats but I just get tired of hearing the same old geezer nonsense about how kids today just aren't as well brought up as we were. Nonsense. Oh, and by the way, TV is better today (and at the same time manages to reach lower lows, you have to be selective).
Y'know, if you'd actually bothered to find out what you're talking about first...
Thank you for posting. This topic seems to be a veritable magnet for people with strong opinions and a complete inability to read or even just watch a video. There also seems to be an assumption that this non-profit effort is taking money out of some of these commentators pockets. Hey, if you have another idea that you think is better then go for it! No one is holding you back. Negroponte has been pursuing this goal for years and there is nothing naive about his effort. I hope more people read about the mesh network architecture that has been built into these laptops and stop parroting the fashionable dismissal of the internet.
Possibly the best aspect of this effort is the chance to avoid the usual corruption that fungible aid has always created. A grey market in these devices needs to be kept in check by treating those with diverted laptops as social pariahs.
By using their dominance in the PC market as leverage they are going to attempt to cut Sony out of the "next-gen" console market before they even come out of the gate.
You expect Vista to be a factor before Sony sells 10 million PS3's next spring and summer? I'll take PS3 in that race any day.
If HD-DVD or Blu-ray wants to be the media of choice on the desktop just make any DRM that gets tacked on as inocuous as possible. I suspect that one of the reasons the iPod was able to get traction in its early incarnations was that Apple didn't do much more than genuflect as their DRM measure. Now Apple sells a huge amount of digital content for the media companies.
Um... maybe companies shouldn't hire malicious employees.
Have you ever read any of the memoirs of Richard Feynman? I'm not going to make the ridiculous claim that every malicious employee is the equivalent of Nobel prize physicist Feynman, but any objective review of what he claims to have done makes it clear he would be classified as malicious. He found the security at Los Alamos labs during WWII to be onerous and pointless in the manner it was handled. That inspired him to various exploits that caused headaches for them. On the other hand he was one of the best physicists our country has ever produced. His contributions during the Manhattan Project might have been crucial. The idea here is that making the security department happy might not be the most important criterion when choosing employees.
It only takes one hand to safely maneuver the vehicle in the vast majority of situations.
Words of utter stupidity. The point is you don't get to choose when that moment arrives when you unexpectedly absolutely need both hands on the steering wheel to drive safely. You can have dumb luck and never have that moment arrive. But if it does and you've decided that having phone conversations is needed to entertain you while driving then you will be out of luck. People should generally be allowed to make such choices for themselves. Problem is you may be making that choice for someone else as well. That sucks.
The next time you are leaving a parking place while others are doing so at the same time watch how many of them have pulled out a cell phone to make a call. I'm appalled at how often I see this happen. In my limited experience it seems like women are more likely to feel they must be conversing if they have to drive. I think it is utterly hypocritical for there to be the emphasis there is on drunk drivers while impaired cell phone drivers are a plague on our roads. Hang up the damn phone and pay attention to your driving! It isn't as though anyone is so good that he can afford the distraction. If a call is so damn important then pull over and make the call.
Why? Does being a divorced mother of five make you immune from having to obey the law?
Damn, is it so hard for people to understand this point? Because she is a divorced mother of five rather than a 22 year old male slacker, it will be at least initially apparent to the jury that it is very unlikely that she downloaded any of the music in the allegation. It will be the burden of the plaintiff to convince the jury that she should be held responsible for amounts in the range of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars because her IT department may not have run a tight ship. A judge in another case has already offered the opinion that she would not want to be in the position of having such a liability held over her just because she chose to pay a monthly bill to provide internet access.
Since most homes do not have an IT department, it is a stretch to assume a jury would send the message that everyone who has internet access is automatically exposed to a huge financial liability because they failed to lock down access to that network. In summary the important reason many feel a divorced mother of five and many other potential defendants would not be assessed damages is because in those cases it is unlikely that the defendant actually downloaded anything. It does not require any sentimentality to tell the plaintiff to forget it in those cases.
I almost wonder if winning this case might be the worst possible outcome for the RIAA. Copyright infringement laws that were crafted to protect one commercial publisher from another commercial publisher. Now the RIAA is using them against 11 year old non-commercial publishers. More ominous to adults and parents is that this case would hold adults liable because they are paying to provide internet access. Talk about no good deed goes unpunished! Attention brought to this case could possibly lead to a degree of rationality being forced onto currently baroque copyright laws. For instance, in cases of non-commercial infringement damages could be limited to the price or twice or ten times the price rather than 100,000 times the price of the infringing copy.
Fortunately I live in Britain, where all you need is a demultiplexer to grab the digital signal and record it completely unchanged on the harddisk
I'm guessing you may not get out all that often and may not be aware of the status of digital TV in the US. The transition from analog to digital began in 1998. At this point essentially all current prime time network programming is produced in HDTV and available over the air for free (more accurately: advertisement supported). It seems possible that Apple could decide to just support ATSC (the digital standard) and leave behind most of the legacy standards that will fade away in any case. A German company, elgato, has been pioneering the integration of digital television with the Mac and includes digital standards from all around the world. I would expect they would be acquired for this venture much like Astarte was for DVD authoring on the Mac.
I hate to be the grinch but how do you plan to play that HDTV content if all you have is an iBook or Mac mini? I suppose you could use FireWire out to a display that can handle HD input over FireWire (not a big part of the market). The reality is that you need a dual G5 tower if you hope to deal with uncompressed HD on a Mac and it's just cruel to imply otherwise.
if your courier blows it, looses the tape, and the world finds out
I suppose this correction may be unwelcome and perhaps seem tedious but I've seen one too many loose where lose should be. This trivial error has reached epidemic proportions. This is an example where someone flawlessly spells every other word in an extemporaneous essay of almost 500 words and yet the poor lose is lost.
Now that it allows you to use the inexpensive PSP as your portable viewer the only expensive part of the setup is the base station. An interesting rumor that I read is the possibility that the PS3 will include the base station capability. So if you are a gamer the system is pretty much available at no added cost.
Also I think some people have been assuming too many limitations. Besides allowing you to view live TV from your home anywhere in the workd where you have broadband access it is also supposed to allow access to your DVR. Depending on how much content you keep on your DVR that could be a lot of content that is of interest to you. If you could add access to your entire DVD library that would make your media collection something that you could bring with you anywhere (assuming broadband availability).
Has anyone explored the topic of how this debacle might be used to explain what is being attempted by the media companies with their advocacy of Trusted Computing? It is another effort to hijack a computer from its owner. In fact it seems to me that this episode is a clumsy attempt to retrofit Trusted Computing onto existing non-compliant machines.
I suppose it might be too confusing to try to bring up something that does not exist yet but you don't want to face a situation where it has been become a fait accompli for all new computers. There are enough ways for a computer to fail to work without adding people trying to inhibit it for their own agenda.
I don't have one of these odious Sony CD's but I think you are missing the obvious. If the CD is playable in the hundreds of millions of standard CD players then it contains Red Book audio tracks. PC's don't need no stinkin' rootkit installed in order to play Red Book audio tracks. You have to install Sony's nasty software to break your computer to the point that it cannot play the standard audio. That would imply that successfully removing Sony's criminally illegal software from your computer should allow it to play that standard audio.
The continuing unfolding of this case is showing the extent to which laws about computer crime are cynically dishonest. The executives involved should be facing criminal trials and, if convicted, incarceration. Is anyone holding his breath waiting for that to happen?
Maybe there is an element of unfamiliarity I have with the details of Windows (I do have a Windows XP box that I maintain for games, entertainment, etc for my kids) but I think you are overlooking a fundamental difference when you make this statement:
Given user permission, it'll be easy, easy, EASY to mess up a Mac just as bad as a Windows box..
I have myself and all of my kids set up on the Mac with accounts that don't include administrator privileges. It is quite easy to do. No matter what the user tries to permit there is a limit to what can be messed up. On Windows I am not aware of a similar mechanism.
...and go bankrupt trying to support an Earth-bound force when they can drop rocks on us all night.
I suppose statements like this are not to be taken literally but I wonder if it is generally understood how completely contrary to a basic understanding of physics it is. What do you think happens if you drop a rock from orbit? Here is a hint: it does not fall to the ground. If you are in orbit you are already in free fall so anything you drop will just keep zipping around the Earth with you. It takes a great deal of effort to cause something to cease to be in free fall. Then it has a sort of bad habit of being incinerated when it re-enters the denser parts of the atmosphere.
Depending on where you looked for predictions of the future you could get solemn advice throughout the 70's and 80's that the Japanese were going to inevitably be dominant in coming years and as Kent Brockman might say "Ï, for one, welcome our new Rising Sun overlords". If you listened to bitter alienated French intellectuals as far back as the 60's you would have gotten an earful about how the Chinese were already on the verge of sweeping aside those unworthy American pipsqueaks. Lots of noise, not a lot of accurate vision.
I hope the challenge of new contestants will re-energize the pursuit of science in the US. I just wish the noisy jeremiads didn't have to be so prominent in discussions of the topic.
Pretty much everybody has missed the point...What do they have in common? MSN and Vonage are both ISPs...
If you are going to be condescending it would be helpful if you actually had a clue. Vonage is an ISP? Are you kidding? I am not an expert on every aspect of Vonage but I am a customer. Vonage sells VoIP services to people who seperately purchase internet access from another company. Vonage is NOT an ISP.
We don't have to speculate what he has in mind for Vonage or any other VoIP provider because some foreign telecom companies have been entirely candid about their plans for VoIP providers. Since those telecom providers plan to have a monopoly over VoIP service they have been explicit that they intend to forbid VoIP using indepenedent services like Vonage. Depending on the country involved such calls will possibly be criminalized or in more moderate cases simply blocked by the telecom company. Since telecom companies in the US don't quite have that leverage at the moment we instead hear this ranting about how upstarts like Vonage and Google will be "taxed" by the telecom. Google is not a VoIP service but like VoIP a great deal of bandwidth (already bought and paid for by SBC customers) is being devoted to its service.
This has nothing to do with Google's proposal to the city of San Francisco which is only a proposal so far and in any case would be completely dwarfed by the their existing service in its use of bandwidth and has nothing to do with SBC (unless they've swallowed PacBell which I wouldn't rule out since acquisition seems to be the main form of innovation in the telecom industry).
what's the point of listening to lossless audio formats on earbud headphones
Sometime between these two comments wouldn't it occur to you that you might acknowledge that you are just spouting off and don't really know basic facts? It might even make sense to apologize for saying something completely false like your first statement. Never mind, Jake, it's slashdot.
A brief googling suggests that the files are about 150-200MB
That is going to be nasty for a one hour program (about 42 minutes after the ads are removed). Good quality encoding of the HD signal will take about 350 MB and a higher resolution encoding is about 700 MB. Heck, the unmodified MPEG2 encoded hour of HD content is over 8 GB but the 700 MB version is quite surprisingly good. On the diminutive, low res iPod screen the possibility of a higher resolution signal would not be important. But it will not be worthwhile saving such low-res copies of Lost when the DVD will be so much better and the HD version is available for free (a low cost PCI card like FusionHDTV makes it fairly easy to capture that free version).
Saw one this afternoon with a beautiful screen about 50% larger than the PSP
What resolution do you think that larger screen might have? It is probably engineered for low price and NTSC resolution which is about 320x240. Compare that with the 480x272 for the PSP screen. It would be cool (and maybe not so inexpensive) if someone made a 7" portable DVD player that took full advantage of the 720x480 resolution of the DVD format like a laptop computer can.
...You're not the only one with 50" HDTV amd two notebooks, so you can stop showing your wang and step in line as the rest of us that own them.
The person you are taking to task was reponding to this comment:
Get a job, then you can buy shit. Nobody likes to read a poor man's critiques of products he wouldn't buy.
So what was so unusual about the response? Posting notarized copies of his tax returns might have been excessive but indicating price was not a factor when commenting on UMDs was not unusual. I've seen a UMD movie on my son's PSP and despite my initial skepticism I was favorably impressed. The PSP has a very impressive screen which has to be seen to properly appreciated. It might also be worth noting that its screen size is 4.3, not 2 inches. I wish the video iPod had a screen that nice to go with its capacious hard drive.
You think that is anger? What I was expressing was disappointment. The numbers were being thrown around like a salesman at Best Buy which is OK if you are in that context but not appropriate to slashdot. For instance 480x480 doesn't correspond to any DTV format. A customary 480 x 720 would have to be shown with black bars above and below the actual picture or both sides would have to be cropped off.
I think it may be a good business decision on Apple's part to offer a more portable device with lower resolution. I don't think stories should be made up that disguise that choice. It seems to provide NTSC level resolution which is probably fine for music videos, but it is only a fraction of the screen that Sony provides with the PSP.
H.264 video up to 768 kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per second; MPEG-4 video up to 2.5mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per second
so, not true HD, but comperable to DVD
How on earth do you reach that conclusion? The resolution for DVD is 720x480. The resolutions described are similar to what NTSC delivers although NTSC is not digital so comparisons are somewhat ambiguous. So the comment "not true HD" is an understatement.
Is the screen on the video iPod really only 320x240? That is miserable compared with the Sony PSP which has 480x272 (roughly twice as many pixels). I guess that is a consequence of the PSP being significantly larger and less portable than the iPod. What about DRM? Would a Lost episode be playable on a PSP?
Please DON'T WAIT, and please DO see it at full price. The makers of this film have stated that they won't produce a sequel unless the film makes 80 million dollars.
Well, I purchased a full price ticket for myself and two for my kids so I feel like I've done my part. But if a person has not seen the series and just sees the movie, that person really should see the series to see how much better it is. I verified that impression by watching Serenity the pilot episode again last night.
It might be relevant to admit that even during the series I found the idea of the reevers to be ridiculous and generally ignored those plot elements. Since they are so central to the movie it is hard to overlook. Also the climactic scene with Mal had an unfortunate resemblence to the scene in Galaxy Quest which causes the character played by Sigourney Weaver to complain "This episode was badly written". In any case I hope for sequels because from previous experience I know they can do better.
"Seriously, are you going to tell me Serenity is better than Bladerunner?
Yep."
Serenity is not ambitious enough to be in that sort of company. I'm a big fan of the Firefly TV series but this movie is a serious step down from the TV series. The writing and acting were much better in several episodes. I get the feeling they might have felt it necessary to dumb it down for a movie audience. It is loud and fast with lots of fighting action but that was only one aspect of the TV episodes. I hope they are successful anyhow so there is a chance of another movie.
I usually wait for movies to appear in second run theaters so at least I don't spend as much money if I'm disappointed. Firefly was so good I didn't have the patience to wait and yet again I wish I had found it easier to wait. If you haven't seen the series then do yourself a favor. Rent and watch the DVD's and see the movie when the price drops to $2 from the current $8.50 and more.
Bladerunner included musing on what it means to be human, mortality, memory and really cool sci fi sets. Serenity includes some really cool sci fi sets that even evoke Bladerunner but it is a caper.
Slashdot Mirror
80 years ago people were expected to read Shakespear in the 4th grade, now we (MAYBE) get into it by high school. We've been dumbed down folks, and if you don't think TV played a large part in that, well, you watch too much TV...
That statement is a steaming pile of feces. Maybe you have dumbed down. I wouldn't claim any specific knowledge about you that would allow me to make such a judgment except that you have fallen for one of the oldest geezer illusions in the book. It goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. It may have been Plato quoting Socrates that current youth just aren't up to the standards of earlier generations. The same sort of observations has been repeated in probably every subsequent generation. By now we should barely be capable of walking upright and remembering how to breathe.
It shouldn't take very impressive insight to realize that societies sometime advance and sometimes retreat. My own anecdotal observation is that we are still advancing. Including Shakespeare in a fourth grade curriculum strikes me as remarkably poor judgment. On the other hand I have noted that the educational opportunities afforded my three children in public school in Edina, MN are distinctly better than what I had 30+ years ago (admittedly in a smaller community). I would also say that the availability of television, internet, and much more accessible foreign and domestic travel have been positive influences. They have all had the benefit of bilingual, immersive education (French and English) and significantly more advanced classes in high school. My oldest is taking all AP classes except for orchestra. I might add that his orchestra is incomparably larger and better than the group to which I had access.
I am simplifying my description to avoid unimportant caveats but I just get tired of hearing the same old geezer nonsense about how kids today just aren't as well brought up as we were. Nonsense. Oh, and by the way, TV is better today (and at the same time manages to reach lower lows, you have to be selective).
Y'know, if you'd actually bothered to find out what you're talking about first...
Thank you for posting. This topic seems to be a veritable magnet for people with strong opinions and a complete inability to read or even just watch a video. There also seems to be an assumption that this non-profit effort is taking money out of some of these commentators pockets. Hey, if you have another idea that you think is better then go for it! No one is holding you back. Negroponte has been pursuing this goal for years and there is nothing naive about his effort. I hope more people read about the mesh network architecture that has been built into these laptops and stop parroting the fashionable dismissal of the internet.
Possibly the best aspect of this effort is the chance to avoid the usual corruption that fungible aid has always created. A grey market in these devices needs to be kept in check by treating those with diverted laptops as social pariahs.
By using their dominance in the PC market as leverage they are going to attempt to cut Sony out of the "next-gen" console market before they even come out of the gate.
You expect Vista to be a factor before Sony sells 10 million PS3's next spring and summer? I'll take PS3 in that race any day.
If HD-DVD or Blu-ray wants to be the media of choice on the desktop just make any DRM that gets tacked on as inocuous as possible. I suspect that one of the reasons the iPod was able to get traction in its early incarnations was that Apple didn't do much more than genuflect as their DRM measure. Now Apple sells a huge amount of digital content for the media companies.
Um... maybe companies shouldn't hire malicious employees.
Have you ever read any of the memoirs of Richard Feynman? I'm not going to make the ridiculous claim that every malicious employee is the equivalent of Nobel prize physicist Feynman, but any objective review of what he claims to have done makes it clear he would be classified as malicious. He found the security at Los Alamos labs during WWII to be onerous and pointless in the manner it was handled. That inspired him to various exploits that caused headaches for them. On the other hand he was one of the best physicists our country has ever produced. His contributions during the Manhattan Project might have been crucial. The idea here is that making the security department happy might not be the most important criterion when choosing employees.
It only takes one hand to safely maneuver the vehicle in the vast majority of situations.
Words of utter stupidity. The point is you don't get to choose when that moment arrives when you unexpectedly absolutely need both hands on the steering wheel to drive safely. You can have dumb luck and never have that moment arrive. But if it does and you've decided that having phone conversations is needed to entertain you while driving then you will be out of luck. People should generally be allowed to make such choices for themselves. Problem is you may be making that choice for someone else as well. That sucks.
unless you spend the entire drive on a cell phone
The next time you are leaving a parking place while others are doing so at the same time watch how many of them have pulled out a cell phone to make a call. I'm appalled at how often I see this happen. In my limited experience it seems like women are more likely to feel they must be conversing if they have to drive. I think it is utterly hypocritical for there to be the emphasis there is on drunk drivers while impaired cell phone drivers are a plague on our roads. Hang up the damn phone and pay attention to your driving! It isn't as though anyone is so good that he can afford the distraction. If a call is so damn important then pull over and make the call.
Why? Does being a divorced mother of five make you immune from having to obey the law?
Damn, is it so hard for people to understand this point? Because she is a divorced mother of five rather than a 22 year old male slacker, it will be at least initially apparent to the jury that it is very unlikely that she downloaded any of the music in the allegation. It will be the burden of the plaintiff to convince the jury that she should be held responsible for amounts in the range of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars because her IT department may not have run a tight ship. A judge in another case has already offered the opinion that she would not want to be in the position of having such a liability held over her just because she chose to pay a monthly bill to provide internet access.
Since most homes do not have an IT department, it is a stretch to assume a jury would send the message that everyone who has internet access is automatically exposed to a huge financial liability because they failed to lock down access to that network. In summary the important reason many feel a divorced mother of five and many other potential defendants would not be assessed damages is because in those cases it is unlikely that the defendant actually downloaded anything. It does not require any sentimentality to tell the plaintiff to forget it in those cases.
I almost wonder if winning this case might be the worst possible outcome for the RIAA. Copyright infringement laws that were crafted to protect one commercial publisher from another commercial publisher. Now the RIAA is using them against 11 year old non-commercial publishers. More ominous to adults and parents is that this case would hold adults liable because they are paying to provide internet access. Talk about no good deed goes unpunished! Attention brought to this case could possibly lead to a degree of rationality being forced onto currently baroque copyright laws. For instance, in cases of non-commercial infringement damages could be limited to the price or twice or ten times the price rather than 100,000 times the price of the infringing copy.
...you've convinced me to subscribe to DirecTV again.
Now that's funny!
Fortunately I live in Britain, where all you need is a demultiplexer to grab the digital signal and record it completely unchanged on the harddisk
I'm guessing you may not get out all that often and may not be aware of the status of digital TV in the US. The transition from analog to digital began in 1998. At this point essentially all current prime time network programming is produced in HDTV and available over the air for free (more accurately: advertisement supported). It seems possible that Apple could decide to just support ATSC (the digital standard) and leave behind most of the legacy standards that will fade away in any case. A German company, elgato, has been pioneering the integration of digital television with the Mac and includes digital standards from all around the world. I would expect they would be acquired for this venture much like Astarte was for DVD authoring on the Mac.
I hate to be the grinch but how do you plan to play that HDTV content if all you have is an iBook or Mac mini? I suppose you could use FireWire out to a display that can handle HD input over FireWire (not a big part of the market). The reality is that you need a dual G5 tower if you hope to deal with uncompressed HD on a Mac and it's just cruel to imply otherwise.
if your courier blows it, looses the tape, and the world finds out
I suppose this correction may be unwelcome and perhaps seem tedious but I've seen one too many loose where lose should be. This trivial error has reached epidemic proportions. This is an example where someone flawlessly spells every other word in an extemporaneous essay of almost 500 words and yet the poor lose is lost.
Now that it allows you to use the inexpensive PSP as your portable viewer the only expensive part of the setup is the base station. An interesting rumor that I read is the possibility that the PS3 will include the base station capability. So if you are a gamer the system is pretty much available at no added cost.
Also I think some people have been assuming too many limitations. Besides allowing you to view live TV from your home anywhere in the workd where you have broadband access it is also supposed to allow access to your DVR. Depending on how much content you keep on your DVR that could be a lot of content that is of interest to you. If you could add access to your entire DVD library that would make your media collection something that you could bring with you anywhere (assuming broadband availability).
Has anyone explored the topic of how this debacle might be used to explain what is being attempted by the media companies with their advocacy of Trusted Computing? It is another effort to hijack a computer from its owner. In fact it seems to me that this episode is a clumsy attempt to retrofit Trusted Computing onto existing non-compliant machines.
I suppose it might be too confusing to try to bring up something that does not exist yet but you don't want to face a situation where it has been become a fait accompli for all new computers. There are enough ways for a computer to fail to work without adding people trying to inhibit it for their own agenda.
I don't have one of these odious Sony CD's but I think you are missing the obvious. If the CD is playable in the hundreds of millions of standard CD players then it contains Red Book audio tracks. PC's don't need no stinkin' rootkit installed in order to play Red Book audio tracks. You have to install Sony's nasty software to break your computer to the point that it cannot play the standard audio. That would imply that successfully removing Sony's criminally illegal software from your computer should allow it to play that standard audio.
The continuing unfolding of this case is showing the extent to which laws about computer crime are cynically dishonest. The executives involved should be facing criminal trials and, if convicted, incarceration. Is anyone holding his breath waiting for that to happen?
Maybe there is an element of unfamiliarity I have with the details of Windows (I do have a Windows XP box that I maintain for games, entertainment, etc for my kids) but I think you are overlooking a fundamental difference when you make this statement:
Given user permission, it'll be easy, easy, EASY to mess up a Mac just as bad as a Windows box..
I have myself and all of my kids set up on the Mac with accounts that don't include administrator privileges. It is quite easy to do. No matter what the user tries to permit there is a limit to what can be messed up. On Windows I am not aware of a similar mechanism.
...and go bankrupt trying to support an Earth-bound force when they can drop rocks on us all night.
I suppose statements like this are not to be taken literally but I wonder if it is generally understood how completely contrary to a basic understanding of physics it is. What do you think happens if you drop a rock from orbit? Here is a hint: it does not fall to the ground. If you are in orbit you are already in free fall so anything you drop will just keep zipping around the Earth with you. It takes a great deal of effort to cause something to cease to be in free fall. Then it has a sort of bad habit of being incinerated when it re-enters the denser parts of the atmosphere.
Depending on where you looked for predictions of the future you could get solemn advice throughout the 70's and 80's that the Japanese were going to inevitably be dominant in coming years and as Kent Brockman might say "Ï, for one, welcome our new Rising Sun overlords". If you listened to bitter alienated French intellectuals as far back as the 60's you would have gotten an earful about how the Chinese were already on the verge of sweeping aside those unworthy American pipsqueaks. Lots of noise, not a lot of accurate vision.
I hope the challenge of new contestants will re-energize the pursuit of science in the US. I just wish the noisy jeremiads didn't have to be so prominent in discussions of the topic.
Pretty much everybody has missed the point...What do they have in common? MSN and Vonage are both ISPs...
If you are going to be condescending it would be helpful if you actually had a clue. Vonage is an ISP? Are you kidding? I am not an expert on every aspect of Vonage but I am a customer. Vonage sells VoIP services to people who seperately purchase internet access from another company. Vonage is NOT an ISP.
We don't have to speculate what he has in mind for Vonage or any other VoIP provider because some foreign telecom companies have been entirely candid about their plans for VoIP providers. Since those telecom providers plan to have a monopoly over VoIP service they have been explicit that they intend to forbid VoIP using indepenedent services like Vonage. Depending on the country involved such calls will possibly be criminalized or in more moderate cases simply blocked by the telecom company. Since telecom companies in the US don't quite have that leverage at the moment we instead hear this ranting about how upstarts like Vonage and Google will be "taxed" by the telecom. Google is not a VoIP service but like VoIP a great deal of bandwidth (already bought and paid for by SBC customers) is being devoted to its service.
This has nothing to do with Google's proposal to the city of San Francisco which is only a proposal so far and in any case would be completely dwarfed by the their existing service in its use of bandwidth and has nothing to do with SBC (unless they've swallowed PacBell which I wouldn't rule out since acquisition seems to be the main form of innovation in the telecom industry).
iPods don't support any lossless formats
what's the point of listening to lossless audio formats on earbud headphones
Sometime between these two comments wouldn't it occur to you that you might acknowledge that you are just spouting off and don't really know basic facts? It might even make sense to apologize for saying something completely false like your first statement. Never mind, Jake, it's slashdot.
A brief googling suggests that the files are about 150-200MB
That is going to be nasty for a one hour program (about 42 minutes after the ads are removed). Good quality encoding of the HD signal will take about 350 MB and a higher resolution encoding is about 700 MB. Heck, the unmodified MPEG2 encoded hour of HD content is over 8 GB but the 700 MB version is quite surprisingly good. On the diminutive, low res iPod screen the possibility of a higher resolution signal would not be important. But it will not be worthwhile saving such low-res copies of Lost when the DVD will be so much better and the HD version is available for free (a low cost PCI card like FusionHDTV makes it fairly easy to capture that free version).
Saw one this afternoon with a beautiful screen about 50% larger than the PSP
What resolution do you think that larger screen might have? It is probably engineered for low price and NTSC resolution which is about 320x240. Compare that with the 480x272 for the PSP screen. It would be cool (and maybe not so inexpensive) if someone made a 7" portable DVD player that took full advantage of the 720x480 resolution of the DVD format like a laptop computer can.
...You're not the only one with 50" HDTV amd two notebooks, so you can stop showing your wang and step in line as the rest of us that own them.
The person you are taking to task was reponding to this comment:
Get a job, then you can buy shit. Nobody likes to read a poor man's critiques of products he wouldn't buy.
So what was so unusual about the response? Posting notarized copies of his tax returns might have been excessive but indicating price was not a factor when commenting on UMDs was not unusual. I've seen a UMD movie on my son's PSP and despite my initial skepticism I was favorably impressed. The PSP has a very impressive screen which has to be seen to properly appreciated. It might also be worth noting that its screen size is 4.3, not 2 inches. I wish the video iPod had a screen that nice to go with its capacious hard drive.
You seem very angry...
You think that is anger? What I was expressing was disappointment. The numbers were being thrown around like a salesman at Best Buy which is OK if you are in that context but not appropriate to slashdot. For instance 480x480 doesn't correspond to any DTV format. A customary 480 x 720 would have to be shown with black bars above and below the actual picture or both sides would have to be cropped off.
I think it may be a good business decision on Apple's part to offer a more portable device with lower resolution. I don't think stories should be made up that disguise that choice. It seems to provide NTSC level resolution which is probably fine for music videos, but it is only a fraction of the screen that Sony provides with the PSP.
from the apple store:
H.264 video up to 768 kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per second; MPEG-4 video up to 2.5mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per second
so, not true HD, but comperable to DVD
How on earth do you reach that conclusion? The resolution for DVD is 720x480. The resolutions described are similar to what NTSC delivers although NTSC is not digital so comparisons are somewhat ambiguous. So the comment "not true HD" is an understatement.
Is the screen on the video iPod really only 320x240? That is miserable compared with the Sony PSP which has 480x272 (roughly twice as many pixels). I guess that is a consequence of the PSP being significantly larger and less portable than the iPod. What about DRM? Would a Lost episode be playable on a PSP?
Please DON'T WAIT, and please DO see it at full price. The makers of this film have stated that they won't produce a sequel unless the film makes 80 million dollars.
Well, I purchased a full price ticket for myself and two for my kids so I feel like I've done my part. But if a person has not seen the series and just sees the movie, that person really should see the series to see how much better it is. I verified that impression by watching Serenity the pilot episode again last night.
It might be relevant to admit that even during the series I found the idea of the reevers to be ridiculous and generally ignored those plot elements. Since they are so central to the movie it is hard to overlook. Also the climactic scene with Mal had an unfortunate resemblence to the scene in Galaxy Quest which causes the character played by Sigourney Weaver to complain "This episode was badly written". In any case I hope for sequels because from previous experience I know they can do better.
"Seriously, are you going to tell me Serenity is better than Bladerunner?
Yep."
Serenity is not ambitious enough to be in that sort of company. I'm a big fan of the Firefly TV series but this movie is a serious step down from the TV series. The writing and acting were much better in several episodes. I get the feeling they might have felt it necessary to dumb it down for a movie audience. It is loud and fast with lots of fighting action but that was only one aspect of the TV episodes. I hope they are successful anyhow so there is a chance of another movie.
I usually wait for movies to appear in second run theaters so at least I don't spend as much money if I'm disappointed. Firefly was so good I didn't have the patience to wait and yet again I wish I had found it easier to wait. If you haven't seen the series then do yourself a favor. Rent and watch the DVD's and see the movie when the price drops to $2 from the current $8.50 and more.
Bladerunner included musing on what it means to be human, mortality, memory and really cool sci fi sets. Serenity includes some really cool sci fi sets that even evoke Bladerunner but it is a caper.