And, if you've got a laser player, you probably COULD rip it at something other than 1x speed.
And playing it once, if you've gotten the capture, you don't typically NEED to play it again off the player, now do you?
The only major drawbacks I see to vinyl discs is that they're MUCH more fragile and bulky than CDs or other digital storage and they typically can't be re-encoded at anything other than normal playback rates unless you've got some very special hardware.
The second's obnoxious but once done, it's done. The first's a bit of a problem, really, but if you've got the pieces, you've got proof that you'd legitimately obtained the copy and the digital image(s) you have remaining are fair use.
But DRM? Nope. Nothing impeding you from making digital copies- just a little inconvienience in your way. That's not DRM. DRM's trying to lock up the content (much like trying to tell me locking up excrement is a good thing...) with encryption, etc.
All one has to do to see the consequences of a real estate bubble is look at what happened to Japan back in the early 90's when the Nikkei took a serious nosedive. To be sure, it was only one piece of the bubble, but the land being seriously overvalued (as much as 14 times it's current values, which are still dropping...) and the sudden cooling of the economy by the government triggered a spiral they're still trying to recover from- and the land/property bubble made it much, much worse than it probably ought to have been.
To be sure, we don't have QUITE the bubble in land valuations and housing valuations that Japan had, but it's going to send things back into another recession if things don't improve a little quicker to lessen the blow from that bubble bursting. But this only causes a recession because people do stupid things like base the current economic health of the country off of things like the stock market valuations- the stock market does NOT reflect the health of the country, but people keep pulling back when they should be forging forward when the market takes a small nosedive because they're terrified of getting caught in the messes that were caused by the Great Depression. It's sad really. The last recession could have been less severe and wouldn't have lasted as long as it did if people would have just managed their budgets accordingly, doing what they would have normally if the bubble hadn't have burst. It went as long as it did and as deep as it did because people let the stock market do the decision making for them (What? You're going to let a bunch of gamblers and manipulators determine what you are going to spend on capital purchases you're actually needing to do? Tell me again why you're an executive manager?). I fear the same thing if the ongoing housing bubble brought on by the tech bubble pops instead of deflates slowly or the economy rises up to meet it.
When arguing with an idiot, it becomes difficult to distinguish which is the idiot.
In his case, I suspect he's one of four categories of people typically arguing from this position:
1) Owns "IP" and thinks that he has something to gain from it. 2) Hopes to be in position #1 3) Is an IP Attorney that stands to gain from people in position #1 or #2. 4) Brainwashed by an IP Attorney that's in position #3.
But what the people in group #3 won't tell you is that you have to have something special (Like the adhesive for PostIt Notes...) or a popular song, movie, or book for it to be honestly worth anything. And then, you have to have a LOT of money to defend the "IP" rights from infringers in the form of money to spend on IP litigation.
No cash? Too bad- no Patent, no Trademark, no Copyright Registration for YOU! Got the grant of Patent, Trademark, or Copyright? Good. Got money to pay me to mail threatening letters or take an infringer to court? No? Too bad- good luck on pursuing the infringers!
This is not to say it's not worth it. I wouldn't have one Patent Pending and 5-6 more about to start that process. But it's not the rosy world that the person's arguing with you about- it might have been at one point in time, but it's not that way now.
Consumers aren't drawn to relatively minor improvements in quality for moderately large price increases.
SVHS is nicer. No doubt about it. If it'd offered the quality jump that DVDs offered, it'd been an easier sell and DVD would have had harder issues getting into the marketplace- IF the pricing wasn't compelling along with the nifty new features like effectively full random access to the movie, makings of, etc. that they throw into the DVDs these days when they come out.
It's all about what do you get for the price increases. If they gave HD-DVD quality for SVHS pricing at the time the format came out, don't doubt for a moment that it'd gotten more traction.
$500 buys quite a few things. Including TWO Wii machines.
HD isn't that special- yet.
So far, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray's showing up to be another VHS vs. Betamax war. You all know how that ended up. (And we won't go into what lackluster offerings we're seeing from the media companies in those formats...)
Just because the DVD player in the console worked for Sony and Microsoft at the beginnings means little; the price point was justified and it sold quite a few units because it was cheaper to buy the console than to get a console and a DVD player- and the DVD format was already entrenched and everyone wanted a DVD player at that time. This meant that they could get away with pricing the consoles at the ~$300 mark and they'd sell in a time when $150-200 was what they were normally selling for. The same can't be said for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. They made this play waaay too soon and it is going to cost Sony and to a lesser extent Microsoft sales- especially if the Wii comes on as strong as it's looking to be.
what bullshit. So why exactly would anyone on earth ever develop intellectual property of any kind ever again?
Hm... Seems to me that there's been quite a LOT of work without consideration of IP as we see it these days:
Mona Lisa Steam Engine Antibiotics Vaccines
The list is long and varied, but they did ALL of this work without IP as a goad. People will keep doing things regardless of whether they can extract a government granted monopoly on things.
Here's a hint: Patents and Copyrights are only as good as the money defending the same.
That's right. If you think that real innovation comes from the big boys, you'd largely be mistaken- and it's the big boys right now that are the only ones that can actually take advantage of the laws for "IP" the way they've been written and being used.
And before you spout off about me not knowing what I'm on about... I've got one Patent pending and about to have 6 more. I'd have done the stuff anyway- but now my employer's happy and the VC's and Investors are happy. But...the damn thing's not worth the paper it's printed on unless you've got the money to back an infringement lawsuit; because that's the ONLY way you're going to get someone to really stop unless they're honest and they didn't deliberately infringe on my Patents.
For most people, it's "I want everything to work the second I plug it, and I want to be able to connect to the tubes to get intarweb".
Unfortunately for those people, it's not that way, even if MS told them it was. And as far as them caring about privacy and security, they'll care all too well once they get phished or similar.
Anyhow, it's quite a moot point. The desktop won't come from the home users, any more than Windows use came from there. It'll be business use- and I can readily assure you that they DO care about those things- and in some segments of the industry, they're going to be making major changes within the next 6-18 months that'll just simply surprise you.
Nobody was really interested in that sort of thing. The prices were too close to a real PC to make it compelling except with people looking for a locked down appliance type configuration- and I know for a fact there weren't any takers because I'd not have experienced the downturn from the dot-bomb and 9/11 quite so severely otherwise.
The closest thing would be to snag something like DSL (DamnSmallLinux), Knoppix, or similar, add a smallish USB or IDE flash disk to the CHEAPEST computer you can find.
...are typically just looking at the report and not giving a damn about what caused the "problems" if there is any.
A Credit Report is NOT a good metric for "organization" or "trustworthiness"- at best it's an indicator of the risk level for giving out credit. Nothing more.
Considering that I didn't DO anything of the sort that you attribute to the "problem" in question, your assessment is dead wrong. All it takes is being under/un-employed and going to the hospital or having the budget to cover all your expenses, including the Mortgage, and then losing your job for an extended period- you didn't do the wrong things, but bad things happened to you anyhow.
He thinks he knows it all. Let him find out the hard way how things REALLY are- eventually, unless he's one of the people at the top (and I don't mean just at companies) he's going to fall upon hard times like the rest of us have (unless he's damned lucky...).
It only works with student loans, and it doesn't last indefinitely. I should know, my wife got one through part of the bad times from the dot com bust. What about the credit cards? What about your cars, your house, etc.
What if you got nailed in one of the mass-layoffs and couldn't find work for YEARS?
Get off your damned high horse and place yourself in the situations most of the people found themselves in. They weren't mortgaged out to the eyeballs, they weren't people that had ran up massive credit debts- they were making their payments until, BOOM, they were unemployed, and unemployable for an extended period of time, not because of lack of skills- NOBODY WAS OFFERING JOBS.
Someone ELSE that gets it- and is in a position to do something about it.
Pending funding, my company's going to be in the position and we've got the same basic policy.
Why? Because every one of the CXO crowd at this company has been through the same wringer over the past 5+ years!
Credit score means NOTHING about organizing your life or the work you do in the workplace. Credit score means you took on debt and either paid it off or not based on circumstances and decisions- but since circumstances DO play a goodly part of this stuff, it's NOT at all useful for determining work worthiness.
Considering the evil recent recession due to the dot com bubble popping, perhaps they need to be a little less stringent on those "credit ratings"- MANY people that normally would have had their lives organized (as well as a normally good credit rating) won't because of that alone- and these people are employing off of that sort of thing.
It's rubbish. And with all the problems with the country's economy and employment, they really, really don't need to be making this specious comparison.
It might be any number of things. A sleeve with data collecting sensors a' la PowerGlove/P5 with no other component that can hold the Wiimote and be plugged into the Joystick jack on the bottom of the main controller could concievably be only $10, considering that the P5's only $30-40, always been that, and the bulk of the cost is the positioning system, not the gestures component.
That someone made that USB powered vibe and Ted Nelson came up with the idea of Teledildonics...it wouldn't surprise me if some perverse person came up with a haptic feedback device for resale for adult console titles...
The thing is WHOSE responsibility is it to check for it. Is it the responsibility of the code that is a performance loop and the data should already have been checked for sanity WAAAAY up above it? Nope. I think that was the point that the parent post was trying to make here. Yes, it's a potential vulnerability. Yes, it's a bug. But whose bug is it really? If the interface specifies that there's no checking (and I've done this regularly in code I've written over the years for performance reasons...) then that checking should be done above me, NOT everywhere all over the place.
In reality, they could be taken to court over Anti-Trust law violations with the how the Console division is being ran right now- nobody's done that (YET!) because nobody's fell fighting MS trying to buy their way into the market like they did with Netscape, Real, or Sun.
In reality, I wasn't thinking in those terms. I was thinking more in terms of being able to go the full range of the current Segway (~3-5 miles) daily for a whole week or two without needing to go charge overnight- or double that distance in those same timeframes. In that context it becomes very useful- and if you can couple a non NOX/CO emitting power source with it, you can use it in warehouses, etc. for a LOT longer than you can now. It's not a modality for going that full range, and I wasn't envisioning it. What I was envisioning was more of a short haul commute device much like a bicycle is, but with greater realistic range possible than the bicycle possesses for most people. Right now, the Segway's mostly a neato gizmo. The few things it's being honestly put to it seems to do QUITE well at- but at it's price and it's range, it's going into the only places that it will ever go into unless something changes range, speed, etc.
In reality, he developed the tech for the iBot and tried to make it go a little further because of the potential. It's got that- it's just wasted because the Segway's got such limited range because it's using conventional electric storage technology. As for when the power goes out, what happens with people in power chairs when the juice gives out? You end up with this heavy-assed chair that's moderately hard (Heh... How about next to impossible, even AFTER you disengage the transmissions on the drive motors...) to push (Unless it's one of the models with traditional wheel chair handles, etc...)- and they can't do stairs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if you've got a laser player, you probably COULD rip it at something other than 1x speed.
And playing it once, if you've gotten the capture, you don't typically NEED to play it again
off the player, now do you?
The only major drawbacks I see to vinyl discs is that they're MUCH more fragile and bulky than
CDs or other digital storage and they typically can't be re-encoded at anything other than normal
playback rates unless you've got some very special hardware.
The second's obnoxious but once done, it's done. The first's a bit of a problem, really, but
if you've got the pieces, you've got proof that you'd legitimately obtained the copy and the
digital image(s) you have remaining are fair use.
But DRM? Nope. Nothing impeding you from making digital copies- just a little inconvienience
in your way. That's not DRM. DRM's trying to lock up the content (much like trying to tell me
locking up excrement is a good thing...) with encryption, etc.
All one has to do to see the consequences of a real estate bubble is look at what
happened to Japan back in the early 90's when the Nikkei took a serious nosedive.
To be sure, it was only one piece of the bubble, but the land being seriously
overvalued (as much as 14 times it's current values, which are still dropping...)
and the sudden cooling of the economy by the government triggered a spiral they're
still trying to recover from- and the land/property bubble made it much, much
worse than it probably ought to have been.
To be sure, we don't have QUITE the bubble in land valuations and housing valuations
that Japan had, but it's going to send things back into another recession if things
don't improve a little quicker to lessen the blow from that bubble bursting. But
this only causes a recession because people do stupid things like base the current
economic health of the country off of things like the stock market valuations- the
stock market does NOT reflect the health of the country, but people keep pulling back
when they should be forging forward when the market takes a small nosedive because
they're terrified of getting caught in the messes that were caused by the Great
Depression. It's sad really. The last recession could have been less severe and
wouldn't have lasted as long as it did if people would have just managed their budgets
accordingly, doing what they would have normally if the bubble hadn't have burst.
It went as long as it did and as deep as it did because people let the stock market
do the decision making for them (What? You're going to let a bunch of gamblers and
manipulators determine what you are going to spend on capital purchases you're
actually needing to do? Tell me again why you're an executive manager?). I fear
the same thing if the ongoing housing bubble brought on by the tech bubble pops instead
of deflates slowly or the economy rises up to meet it.
When arguing with an idiot, it becomes difficult to distinguish which is the idiot.
In his case, I suspect he's one of four categories of people typically arguing from this position:
1) Owns "IP" and thinks that he has something to gain from it.
2) Hopes to be in position #1
3) Is an IP Attorney that stands to gain from people in position #1 or #2.
4) Brainwashed by an IP Attorney that's in position #3.
But what the people in group #3 won't tell you is that you have to have something special
(Like the adhesive for PostIt Notes...) or a popular song, movie, or book for it to be
honestly worth anything. And then, you have to have a LOT of money to defend
the "IP" rights from infringers in the form of money to spend on IP litigation.
No cash? Too bad- no Patent, no Trademark, no Copyright Registration for YOU!
Got the grant of Patent, Trademark, or Copyright? Good. Got money to pay me
to mail threatening letters or take an infringer to court? No? Too bad- good
luck on pursuing the infringers!
This is not to say it's not worth it. I wouldn't have one Patent Pending and 5-6
more about to start that process. But it's not the rosy world that the person's
arguing with you about- it might have been at one point in time, but it's not that
way now.
Consumers aren't drawn to relatively minor improvements in quality for moderately large price increases.
SVHS is nicer. No doubt about it. If it'd offered the quality jump that DVDs offered, it'd been
an easier sell and DVD would have had harder issues getting into the marketplace- IF the pricing
wasn't compelling along with the nifty new features like effectively full random access to the
movie, makings of, etc. that they throw into the DVDs these days when they come out.
It's all about what do you get for the price increases. If they gave HD-DVD quality for SVHS pricing
at the time the format came out, don't doubt for a moment that it'd gotten more traction.
$500 buys quite a few things. Including TWO Wii machines.
HD isn't that special- yet.
So far, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray's showing up to be another VHS vs. Betamax war. You all know how that ended up.
(And we won't go into what lackluster offerings we're seeing from the media companies in those formats...)
Just because the DVD player in the console worked for Sony and Microsoft at the beginnings means little;
the price point was justified and it sold quite a few units because it was cheaper to buy the console
than to get a console and a DVD player- and the DVD format was already entrenched and everyone wanted
a DVD player at that time. This meant that they could get away with pricing the consoles at the ~$300
mark and they'd sell in a time when $150-200 was what they were normally selling for. The same can't be
said for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. They made this play waaay too soon and it is going to cost Sony and to a lesser
extent Microsoft sales- especially if the Wii comes on as strong as it's looking to be.
Hm... Seems to me that there's been quite a LOT of work without consideration of IP as we see it these days:
Mona Lisa
Steam Engine
Antibiotics
Vaccines
The list is long and varied, but they did ALL of this work without IP as a goad. People will keep doing
things regardless of whether they can extract a government granted monopoly on things.
Here's a hint: Patents and Copyrights are only as good as the money defending the same.
That's right. If you think that real innovation comes from the big boys, you'd largely be mistaken-
and it's the big boys right now that are the only ones that can actually take advantage of the
laws for "IP" the way they've been written and being used.
And before you spout off about me not knowing what I'm on about... I've got one Patent pending
and about to have 6 more. I'd have done the stuff anyway- but now my employer's happy and the
VC's and Investors are happy. But...the damn thing's not worth the paper it's printed on unless
you've got the money to back an infringement lawsuit; because that's the ONLY way you're going
to get someone to really stop unless they're honest and they didn't deliberately infringe on
my Patents.
Unfortunately for those people, it's not that way, even if MS told them it was. And as far as them caring about privacy and security,
they'll care all too well once they get phished or similar.
Anyhow, it's quite a moot point. The desktop won't come from the home users, any more than Windows use came from there.
It'll be business use- and I can readily assure you that they DO care about those things- and in some segments of the
industry, they're going to be making major changes within the next 6-18 months that'll just simply surprise you.
Step down? All she did was relinquish the Chair of the BoD- she's still ON the BoD.
Stepping down would be doing like Perkins did and resigning.
In reality, I honestly and fervently wish people would QUIT using the market valuations as how the economy's doing.
It's frigging legalized gambling in most cases and as such, is not a reflection of how the country's REALLY doing.
Nobody was really interested in that sort of thing. The prices were too close
to a real PC to make it compelling except with people looking for a locked down
appliance type configuration- and I know for a fact there weren't any takers
because I'd not have experienced the downturn from the dot-bomb and 9/11 quite
so severely otherwise.
The closest thing would be to snag something like DSL (DamnSmallLinux), Knoppix,
or similar, add a smallish USB or IDE flash disk to the CHEAPEST computer you
can find.
...are typically just looking at the report and not giving a damn about what
caused the "problems" if there is any.
A Credit Report is NOT a good metric for "organization" or "trustworthiness"-
at best it's an indicator of the risk level for giving out credit. Nothing more.
Considering that I didn't DO anything of the sort that you attribute to the "problem" in question,
your assessment is dead wrong. All it takes is being under/un-employed and going to the hospital
or having the budget to cover all your expenses, including the Mortgage, and then losing your job
for an extended period- you didn't do the wrong things, but bad things happened to you anyhow.
Just ignore the fool...
He thinks he knows it all. Let him find out the hard way how things REALLY
are- eventually, unless he's one of the people at the top (and I don't mean
just at companies) he's going to fall upon hard times like the rest of us
have (unless he's damned lucky...).
It only works with student loans, and it doesn't last indefinitely. I should know, my wife got one through
part of the bad times from the dot com bust. What about the credit cards? What about your cars, your house, etc.
What if you got nailed in one of the mass-layoffs and couldn't find work for YEARS?
Get off your damned high horse and place yourself in the situations most of the people
found themselves in. They weren't mortgaged out to the eyeballs, they weren't people
that had ran up massive credit debts- they were making their payments until, BOOM, they
were unemployed, and unemployable for an extended period of time, not because of lack
of skills- NOBODY WAS OFFERING JOBS.
Until you live it, you've no clue how it was.
Someone ELSE that gets it- and is in a position to do something about it.
Pending funding, my company's going to be in the position and we've got the same
basic policy.
Why? Because every one of the CXO crowd at this company has been through the
same wringer over the past 5+ years!
Credit score means NOTHING about organizing your life or the work you do in the workplace.
Credit score means you took on debt and either paid it off or not based on circumstances
and decisions- but since circumstances DO play a goodly part of this stuff, it's NOT
at all useful for determining work worthiness.
Considering the evil recent recession due to the dot com bubble popping, perhaps they
need to be a little less stringent on those "credit ratings"- MANY people that normally would have had
their lives organized (as well as a normally good credit rating) won't because of that alone- and these
people are employing off of that sort of thing.
It's rubbish. And with all the problems with the country's economy and employment, they
really, really don't need to be making this specious comparison.
After all, she's a suit too... Just not a management one in a company.
Suits go to jail when it suits the powers that be or when it will take the
pollitical heat off their backs.
It might be any number of things. A sleeve with data collecting sensors a' la PowerGlove/P5 with no other component that can hold the Wiimote and be plugged into the Joystick jack on the bottom of the main controller could concievably be only $10, considering that the P5's only $30-40, always been that, and the bulk of the cost is the positioning system, not the gestures component.
And from the looks of the posts on here, it appears that there's quite a bit that can be done before problems show up...
That someone made that USB powered vibe and Ted Nelson came up with the idea of Teledildonics...it wouldn't surprise
me if some perverse person came up with a haptic feedback device for resale for adult console titles...
The thing is WHOSE responsibility is it to check for it. Is it the responsibility of the
code that is a performance loop and the data should already have been checked for sanity
WAAAAY up above it? Nope. I think that was the point that the parent post was trying
to make here. Yes, it's a potential vulnerability. Yes, it's a bug. But whose bug is
it really? If the interface specifies that there's no checking (and I've
done this regularly in code I've written over the years for performance reasons...) then
that checking should be done above me, NOT everywhere all over the place.
In reality, they could be taken to court over Anti-Trust law violations with the how the
Console division is being ran right now- nobody's done that (YET!) because nobody's fell
fighting MS trying to buy their way into the market like they did with Netscape, Real,
or Sun.
This depends on your "professional" use.
For web development, it works.
For movie retouching, the Cinepaint fork of GIMP works just about as well.
Both are professional uses- just not YOUR professional use.
In reality, I wasn't thinking in those terms. I was thinking more in terms of being able to go the full range of the
current Segway (~3-5 miles) daily for a whole week or two without needing to go charge overnight- or double that distance
in those same timeframes. In that context it becomes very useful- and if you can couple a non NOX/CO emitting power
source with it, you can use it in warehouses, etc. for a LOT longer than you can now. It's not a modality for going that
full range, and I wasn't envisioning it. What I was envisioning was more of a short haul commute device much like a
bicycle is, but with greater realistic range possible than the bicycle possesses for most people. Right now, the Segway's
mostly a neato gizmo. The few things it's being honestly put to it seems to do QUITE well at- but at it's price and
it's range, it's going into the only places that it will ever go into unless something changes range, speed, etc.
In reality, he developed the tech for the iBot and tried to make it go a little
further because of the potential. It's got that- it's just wasted because the
Segway's got such limited range because it's using conventional electric storage
technology. As for when the power goes out, what happens with people in power
chairs when the juice gives out? You end up with this heavy-assed chair that's
moderately hard (Heh... How about next to impossible, even AFTER you disengage
the transmissions on the drive motors...) to push (Unless it's one of the models
with traditional wheel chair handles, etc...)- and they can't do stairs, etc.