Why limit yourself to inferior hardware players just because u want to support an "open" format. AAC is not "closed" by any definition.
From a legal standpoint AAC has the exact same problems as MP3. That is that several aspects of the encoding / decoding process are patented, and you must license them in order to legally distribute an encoder or decoder. This makes it impossible have a legal open source implimentation. In fact, one such project has already been shut down after receiving a cease and decist letter from Dolby Labs. If anything the AAC patent holders have been less lenient with open source developers than the MP3 patent holders.
So, if you were happy with the legal restrictions on MP3 and choose to switch to OGG for purely technical reasons, then the legal restrictions on AAC should be no problem. However, the reason that the OGG project was started, and the reason that many people switched to it was to get away from the legal encumberances that surrounded MP3. It is a format that is patent free and anyone may write an implementation, without any licencing requirements. For people who care about that AAC definitely NOT open, and is not acceptable.
The Saturn V was capable of sending around 50 tons to the moon (over 120 tons to LEO), and the planned STS Heavy Lift Vehicle will be slightly more powerfull. Even with existing rockets, the Titan IVB/Centaur and the Delta IV are each capable of sending over 6 tons to geosyncronous orbit.
For recent comparison, the shuttle orbiter is over 100 tons and capable of carrying about 30 tons of payload to LEO Cassini was about 6 tons, and we sent it all the way to Saturn.
If we could afford to launch all these things, then we can afford to launch something to prevent a cataclysmic astroid strike.
The first two points assume that people want streaming content. I think the success of Tivo and Netflix have shown that this isn't necisarry. People really just want to watch shows on their own schedule. Watching them On-Demand is an extra plus, but not as big as the media companies are making it.
It takes an hour or two to download a full ISO over bittorrent (Comcast cable modem), which is about how large a DVD-quality TV show would be. I could easily download 4 hours of TV in a day if such a service was available, far more than I watch, therefore current broadband is fine.
The third is a very valid point, and I would add a 4th. The content producers and affiliate stations are going to be very reluctant to join a service that undercuts their main revenue. Therefore they would be much more likely to negotiate with the cable companies for new services than any other internet service. Both of them benifit from a proprietary monopoly on media distribution.
I am getting excited about the shift towards internet viewing, and would actually prefer cheap rental over buying for video, and as a consumer don't really care about rented material being highly DRM'ed (purchased is anothering).
But this particular service isn't all that exciting. You need to have DirectTV's or Comcast's DVR already in order to use the service. That means that I could have been recording these shows and watching them whenever I wanted.
The price wouldn't be too bad on it's own. I figure that reasonable internet rental prices prices are $0.50 for a 20 minute show, $1.00 for a 40 minute show, and $2.00 for a movie. But this is on top of the $50-70 dollars that you are already paying for cable or satelite. I have already payed to watch these shows, I am not going to pay again.
It could be that the creator of the entire biological process was stupid and didn't understand his own creation.
Or it could be that he wanted to allow man to realise on his own that he was incomplete without woman, so that he would have a deeper appreciation and understanding for her rather than if she was there from the begining.
When refuting irrational beliefs, it helps if you don't use logical fallacies in your own arguments.
PS: this was moderated Interesting when I responded. If you are weren't being serious, then concider my remarks aimed towards the moderators not yourself.
We spent two decades wasting time trying to improve the energy efficiency of solar cells. The energy efficiency isn't what matters - it is the cost efficiency! If you are using solar cells as supplemental power to a house (their most effective application), then doubling the energy efficiency of the panel just means you get to use a smaller panel. Who cares - you have a whole roof's worth of space up there. Whereas if you get the price down, then you will decrease the amount of time it takes to pay off the cost of the cells, making it worthwhile to include them in more homes. And for other uses - cars, power plants, even if we had 50% efficient cells they still wouldn't generate enough power to be much use.
I have been getting excited about some of the recent research that is making progress towards less costly, cleaner (to produce and dispose) solar cells. I guess if you are the military, and price is not an issue than this DARPA research is usefull. They need to find some way to power all this new electronics equipment that soldiers are carrying. But it is improvements in cost efficiency that will really make a difference in real world.
The reason that Novell has been leaning towards Gnome in because their top linux desktop developers are from Ximian. Novell hired them because their projects (Mono, Evolution, etc) filled an important role in the corporate market that they are targeting. However, they also happen to be the founders and large contributers to the Gnome project.
What make you think the movie industry will allow you to download a copy that you own? It's much more likely that it will be a heavily DRMed self-destructing copy, to prevent it from being uploaded to P2P networks.
I am going by what the article stated, which is $8 to buy $2 to rent. I don't know what the actual service will end up looking like, but attacking $8 as an outrageous rental cost is a straw man argument as such a service does not exist and is not being proposed.
I'm on their 3 at a time plan ($18/month), and go through 20 DVDs a month on average. If folks don't cycle that fast, why wouldn't they go to one of the lower priced plans to keep the cost per DVD lower?
They could. But they don't for various reasons. They think they will use it more often, but then don't get around to it. Or more commonly some weeks they will watch a bunch of movies, others they will be occupied with other thing and not watch so many.
And even people were maximizing their usage cost, many common viewing usage cases end up above $1 / DVD regardless of the plan you choose. For the average user who watches a couple movies on the weekend, unless he is busy in which case they get put off resulting in about 7 or 8 movies a month, the best plan is the $15 plan which works out to $2.00 per DVD. Assuming the heavy users balence out with the "fitness club bought it but don't use it much", then the average is probably about $1.50 - $2.50.
Anyway, It is great for you that some people don't maximize the use of thier plan because it lowers your price. But my point was that Netflix would likely not remain solvent if they charged a flat $1 / DVD. An online retailer might, but bandwidth and running such a service is more expensive than people think so I don't know. The $2.00 price that the article quoted is reasonable and competitive, although it won't certainly won't shake things up much.
It's well documented (Google) that about 90% of the cost of an iTMS download is being taken by the music industry.
No it isn't:) It is well documented that the record companies get around 65-70% of the revenue, with the remaining 30-35% going to Apple, who makes very little profit on that after credit card transaction fees, and the cost of running the service. ( many links here )
That means that running the store, bandwidth, and Apple's profit is coming from less than 10 cents per download.
Even if it was, then my point still stands that your suggested price is equal to the cost of distribution with no money going to the artists or producers.
In other words, the music industry is charging 500% to 1000% as much as the movie industry. That's an industry long overdue for a reality check.
How do you figure? Cost per minute? Cost per production money? Regardless there are big differences between the CD and DVD markets that justify the price difference.
The primary income on movies is the movie theater, while DVD sales and merchandizing are just icing on the cake. The music industry has no analog. An artist can't play a 5 shows a night in every city in the country.
Concerts and Merchandizing pay the costs of the concert and the artists salary for the job of touring. CD sales are not icing on the cake for the music industry, they are the primary income to pay for the production of the album. So it doesn't make since to compare the prices of CDs DVDs based on the cost of producing the work.
I won't argue with you that the record companies need to be shaken up. But I don't think that $10 for an album is unreasonable. I also don't think it is unreasonable that they keep a large share of the money from hit bands to use to invest in other bands. What I do think is unreasonable are all the good artists who signed with a major label, and never got shit out of it. They never got any air play or advertising to speak of, but managed to make a name for themselves. The consistantly sell enough CD's to turn a good profit, but hardly see a dime of that money, which they earned entirely on their own.
You are comparing renting to buying, of course they don't work out. If you compare the $8 to buy a movie online vs the cost of buying a DVD, then it could be quite competitive depending on the relative quality of the video, and the amount DRM.
Furthermore, the $1/DVD Netflix estimate is unreasonable. Most people with Netflix do not cycle through movies that fast and if they did, then Netflix would have to raise the price to cover the additional costs. Looking at the plans, a typical cost/DVD is more around $1.50 to $3.50, and I would guess that the Netflix average is about $2.50 per DVD which is only slightly less than a brick-and-mortar rental store. Unless you are a huge film junkie, the main advantage of Netflix over Blockbuster is the selection and convienience, not the price.
Music downloads, compared to other media downloads (movies, above), should cost no more than 10 cents per track or $1 per album.
What argument do you have for that? It costs that much just to run iTMS. I think that $10 for a CD is very reasonable given the amount of enjoyment I will get out of it over my life - far more than I will out of a movie. Millions of other people happen to agree that the current prices for CD's are reasonable, hence the buy them.
After all, I can go to my local library and get the DVDs/CDs for zero dollars. Yes, you can also get books - they even have bigger selection of those. However, that hasn't done anything to devalue books you can purchase new/used from book stores. Why would music and video be any different?
Are you sure it is that simple?
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have heard that many times, and I think it would definately be good if our law was written that way. However I haven't found any authoritive legal sources to back that assertion up, and there are several things that lead me to think it incorrect.
For starters, the way the law is written, copying appears to be protected privalege granted to the owner of the copyright. From Section 106 of the Copyright Act of 1976:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
Note that the original Copyright Act of 1790, did not mention reproduction but rather just "publishing, printing, and vending."
Furthermore, all the articles that I've read that were actually written by lawyers familiar with copyright law, give me the impression that copying for personal, non-comercial use is legal only by way of various precidents, and not by statue. Furthermore, the exact boundries of personal-comercial use are still in flux. This view was held both by people who were in favor of increasing copyright protections, and by those who were in favor of increasing fair use. There was also a great deal of debate among lawyers over whether space-shifting (copying and coverting between formats for personal use) would be concidered fair-use, as no court cases had set a precident yet.
If copying was not restricted at all, then they would not be talking in this way. It would be clear that as long as it was not distributing then it was fine.
If you have any legal sources that back up the idea that copying is not illegal I would love to hear about them, but from everything I have seen, copying is illegal by default, but he most common cases have been ruled fair use, and others are simply overlooked.
Alexander Stepanov went onto SGI after HP and continued his work with implementing and extending the STL while there. It improved many implementation details (the HP version was not thread safe for example), as well as adding several templates (hash'es etc) that did not get into the standard for political reasons. Like the HP version, the SGI code was freely available (BSD-like license).
The SGI implementation of STL has pretty much become the defacto-standard implementation. It is definately the most widely used implementation in the open source world and probably in the proprietary world as well.
On a related note, this is a pretty interesting interview with Stepanov.
I put them akin to Next in that they both make(made) quality machines that not many people want to buy.
Oh I wouldn't say that. I think just about everyone who knew about theme wanted to buy their machines:) They just couldn't justify the price, unless they were a big profesional studio. As commidity hardware is becoming more capable it is starting to get to the point where even the profesionals have a hard time justifying the cost.
The story here isn't that bees are smart - this is simple pavlovian association going on, not any sort of problem solving. The story is that they are able to recognize the color of objects that are complexly lit.
As Violated, nobody ever will recognize me for my day job. But that's really not what bugs me. I was really attached to my name. This character bounded through Azgalor slaying monsters and meeting new people. Now that character is erased and another character stands in its place. Same armor. Same class. But different somehow.
A hard pit began to form in the depth of my soul, and I began to realize that my life as I knew it was gone. I had been cut off from everyone who knew me, from who I was. I was faceless, nameless, alone in the world. Now I would wander the shadows of the worlds, a piercing invisible wind, striking terror in the hearts of the GMs. Not just for me but for all who are Violated.
Wow that is interesting.
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 1
More so that most of the news posted here.
How long has Adrian been such a greedy bastard? He has gotten over $3 million a year the last several years, and was offered a $20 million dollars to buy back his stock when he wanted to sell out to Activision. But no that wasn't good enough.
I am glad that the rest of id voted against Adrian on the Activision sale. It sucks that they had to fire him but if I were the other founders I certainly wouldn't want someone that intended to sell out the company holding a 40% share. Although the bit about not paying out dividends and not firing him outright is a crock.
AFAIK, any university can receive the source code to MS Windows under a restrive, look but don't talk, touch, or take license / NDA like the Ms-RL. Here is a list of colleges that do. But, I wouldn't touch that code with a 15 foot stick. I don't want to know what their source does in case they ever decide that something I am doing was "inspired" by it.
One thing in particular that I was glad to see was the absence of any unbalanced vendor rights that exist in many open source licenses created for commercial use. For example, the Netscape Public License requires you to give any changes that you make back to Netscape, regardless of whether you redistribute the changes. Furthermore, it requires that you give Netscape permission to use the changes in proprietary, binary-only products for which they don't release the source.
However the Ms-PL and Ms-CL do not grant Microsoft any special priveledges.
I don't see anything in the Ms-PL and Ms-CL that would prevent them from meeting the definition of Free Software, so I would definitely expect them to get on the list. I was also pleasantly surprised to see how short and straight-forward the actual texts of the licenses are.
The limited version of the licenses (Ms-LPL, and Ms-LCL) are definitely not free software as the limit their use to a single operating system, and of course the Ms-RL isn't even close to being free software, so it won't be on there.
As for GPL compatibility, that is a more difficult question, and is more dependent on legal details than differences in philosophy. IANAL, but I'd guess that they are not GPL compatible because of the Patent Litigation Clause:
(D) If you begin patent litigation against Microsoft over patents that you think may apply to the software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), your license to the software ends automatically.
This is a restriction that is not in the GPL, and the GPL has a clause that you cannot place any restrictions on the user beyond what is listed in the GPL. It should be noted that the Free Software Foundation is not opposed to a clause like this, and are in fact considering adding one to the next version of the GPL.
So, by my interpretation, they have technical incompatibilities with the GPL which may go away with the next version of the GPL.
That sucks, but I think someone is being a bit sensational. They have almost a year to correct this. They have a mission planned in two months, by that time it will still be at least 330km up. They have been that low before. Also, by your own link, it takes at least three weeks for the orbit to decay from 300km, I have seen others that say up to 3 months. Neither of those are "a matter of days".
Well yeah, but what does that have to do with anything? The term OpenDoc isn't mentioned in any of the articles. It also has nothing to do with OpenDocument and had a completely different goal. OpenDoc was a programming framework for object embedding and encapsulating, you can think of it as OLE on steriods. OpenDocument is a file format.
f) In America cars can go anywhere, while public transportation is limited especially compared to Europe. Therefore most people already have cars and it is usually more convienient to use them for medium length trips (don't have to plan around train schedule, have something to get around town when they get to their destination).
g) America is more spread-out that europe. Therefore it is harder to support frequent routes to where people need to go. This creates a harsher trade off between convinience and price.
h) Americans have less vacation time than europe. Therefore, Americans put a larger value on fast tranportation for long trips, and thus choose planes.
All of these decrease train usage which drives up the overhead price for the remaining customers. I like Amtrack, but it really doesn't have much place in the transportation system here in the US. Until the rest of the system changes, continental rail will be a fundamentally bad solution, because the economies of scale just aren't there.
I learned to knit as a kid while bored at my grandmas house, and while there are other hobbies that I prefer to do instead, I understand how knitting can be enjoyable.
First repetitive task are soothing. They aren't challenging or mind tasking or exciting, but when you have spent all day at work, that isn't always what you want.
It is also something to keep your hands busy, and can be done while doing something else. This fact appeals differently to different people: It is a justification for gossip gatherings. It lets you have a hobby without taking much time from other activities. If you are sitting around it might as well be productive and relaxing at the same time.
And of course there is always that sense of accomplishment gained from doing something by hand.
Christ, given the number of programmers and CS people and IT people on Slashdot, shouldn't it be possible to offer a "PRE" tag so one can post code??
Slashdot has the ecode tag for this. The difference is that it html markup is also printed as-is, whereas with the pre tag you would have to manually use < and > to spell out the tags, lest they be processed.
Ah I got it. Took 16 rolls (written down) and almost hour. The fact that I am ignorant about roses didn't help:)
Anyway I read that story and it didn't appear to me that he was trying to solve it by memorization, but rather that after an hour, seeing hundreds of rolls, he remembered many of them, which isn't all that surprising. What I got out of the story, is that he persistently kept at the problem trying many different ideas until he finally got it, even after everyone else in the group had solved it or quit.
I don't think that how quickly someone solves any one particular problem is much of an indicator of how smart they are. We were doing brain teasers on an ACM trip my freshman year of college, and I was one of the first to get most of them. Then there was this one that everyone got right away and I couldn't get it. When I finally did a day later I was kicking myself because it was so obvious - I just wasn't looking at it the right way.
This story showed my that Bill Gates is a very persistent and determined person which is probably a big reason that he was so successful. That and he needed to get a girlfriend at that point, as do I apparently:)
Cable controls the rate at which you view the show, and therefore if they put in advertisements most people will watch them. But no one watches the ads on things on shows they have recorded, and no-one will watch ads on video downloaded off the internet. If the vast majority of people skip ads then they will not be a tenable form of income for the cable company and will not be used.
Slashdot Mirror
Why limit yourself to inferior hardware players just because u want to support an "open" format. AAC is not "closed" by any definition.
From a legal standpoint AAC has the exact same problems as MP3. That is that several aspects of the encoding / decoding process are patented, and you must license them in order to legally distribute an encoder or decoder. This makes it impossible have a legal open source implimentation. In fact, one such project has already been shut down after receiving a cease and decist letter from Dolby Labs. If anything the AAC patent holders have been less lenient with open source developers than the MP3 patent holders.
So, if you were happy with the legal restrictions on MP3 and choose to switch to OGG for purely technical reasons, then the legal restrictions on AAC should be no problem. However, the reason that the OGG project was started, and the reason that many people switched to it was to get away from the legal encumberances that surrounded MP3. It is a format that is patent free and anyone may write an implementation, without any licencing requirements. For people who care about that AAC definitely NOT open, and is not acceptable.
The Saturn V was capable of sending around 50 tons to the moon (over 120 tons to LEO), and the planned STS Heavy Lift Vehicle will be slightly more powerfull. Even with existing rockets, the Titan IVB/Centaur and the Delta IV are each capable of sending over 6 tons to geosyncronous orbit.
For recent comparison, the shuttle orbiter is over 100 tons and capable of carrying about 30 tons of payload to LEO Cassini was about 6 tons, and we sent it all the way to Saturn.
If we could afford to launch all these things, then we can afford to launch something to prevent a cataclysmic astroid strike.
The first two points assume that people want streaming content. I think the success of Tivo and Netflix have shown that this isn't necisarry. People really just want to watch shows on their own schedule. Watching them On-Demand is an extra plus, but not as big as the media companies are making it.
It takes an hour or two to download a full ISO over bittorrent (Comcast cable modem), which is about how large a DVD-quality TV show would be. I could easily download 4 hours of TV in a day if such a service was available, far more than I watch, therefore current broadband is fine.
The third is a very valid point, and I would add a 4th. The content producers and affiliate stations are going to be very reluctant to join a service that undercuts their main revenue. Therefore they would be much more likely to negotiate with the cable companies for new services than any other internet service. Both of them benifit from a proprietary monopoly on media distribution.
I am getting excited about the shift towards internet viewing, and would actually prefer cheap rental over buying for video, and as a consumer don't really care about rented material being highly DRM'ed (purchased is anothering).
But this particular service isn't all that exciting. You need to have DirectTV's or Comcast's DVR already in order to use the service. That means that I could have been recording these shows and watching them whenever I wanted.
The price wouldn't be too bad on it's own. I figure that reasonable internet rental prices prices are $0.50 for a 20 minute show, $1.00 for a 40 minute show, and $2.00 for a movie. But this is on top of the $50-70 dollars that you are already paying for cable or satelite. I have already payed to watch these shows, I am not going to pay again.
It could be that the creator of the entire biological process was stupid and didn't understand his own creation.
Or it could be that he wanted to allow man to realise on his own that he was incomplete without woman, so that he would have a deeper appreciation and understanding for her rather than if she was there from the begining.
When refuting irrational beliefs, it helps if you don't use logical fallacies in your own arguments.
PS: this was moderated Interesting when I responded. If you are weren't being serious, then concider my remarks aimed towards the moderators not yourself.
We spent two decades wasting time trying to improve the energy efficiency of solar cells. The energy efficiency isn't what matters - it is the cost efficiency! If you are using solar cells as supplemental power to a house (their most effective application), then doubling the energy efficiency of the panel just means you get to use a smaller panel. Who cares - you have a whole roof's worth of space up there. Whereas if you get the price down, then you will decrease the amount of time it takes to pay off the cost of the cells, making it worthwhile to include them in more homes. And for other uses - cars, power plants, even if we had 50% efficient cells they still wouldn't generate enough power to be much use.
I have been getting excited about some of the recent research that is making progress towards less costly, cleaner (to produce and dispose) solar cells. I guess if you are the military, and price is not an issue than this DARPA research is usefull. They need to find some way to power all this new electronics equipment that soldiers are carrying. But it is improvements in cost efficiency that will really make a difference in real world.
Coincidence?
Yes.
The reason that Novell has been leaning towards Gnome in because their top linux desktop developers are from Ximian. Novell hired them because their projects (Mono, Evolution, etc) filled an important role in the corporate market that they are targeting. However, they also happen to be the founders and large contributers to the Gnome project.
What make you think the movie industry will allow you to download a copy that you own? It's much more likely that it will be a heavily DRMed self-destructing copy, to prevent it from being uploaded to P2P networks.
:) It is well documented that the record companies get around 65-70% of the revenue, with the remaining 30-35% going to Apple, who makes very little profit on that after credit card transaction fees, and the cost of running the service. ( many links here )
I am going by what the article stated, which is $8 to buy $2 to rent. I don't know what the actual service will end up looking like, but attacking $8 as an outrageous rental cost is a straw man argument as such a service does not exist and is not being proposed.
I'm on their 3 at a time plan ($18/month), and go through 20 DVDs a month on average. If folks don't cycle that fast, why wouldn't they go to one of the lower priced plans to keep the cost per DVD lower?
They could. But they don't for various reasons. They think they will use it more often, but then don't get around to it. Or more commonly some weeks they will watch a bunch of movies, others they will be occupied with other thing and not watch so many.
And even people were maximizing their usage cost, many common viewing usage cases end up above $1 / DVD regardless of the plan you choose. For the average user who watches a couple movies on the weekend, unless he is busy in which case they get put off resulting in about 7 or 8 movies a month, the best plan is the $15 plan which works out to $2.00 per DVD. Assuming the heavy users balence out with the "fitness club bought it but don't use it much", then the average is probably about $1.50 - $2.50.
Anyway, It is great for you that some people don't maximize the use of thier plan because it lowers your price. But my point was that Netflix would likely not remain solvent if they charged a flat $1 / DVD. An online retailer might, but bandwidth and running such a service is more expensive than people think so I don't know. The $2.00 price that the article quoted is reasonable and competitive, although it won't certainly won't shake things up much.
It's well documented (Google) that about 90% of the cost of an iTMS download is being taken by the music industry.
No it isn't
That means that running the store, bandwidth, and Apple's profit is coming from less than 10 cents per download.
Even if it was, then my point still stands that your suggested price is equal to the cost of distribution with no money going to the artists or producers.
In other words, the music industry is charging 500% to 1000% as much as the movie industry. That's an industry long overdue for a reality check.
How do you figure? Cost per minute? Cost per production money? Regardless there are big differences between the CD and DVD markets that justify the price difference.
The primary income on movies is the movie theater, while DVD sales and merchandizing are just icing on the cake. The music industry has no analog. An artist can't play a 5 shows a night in every city in the country.
Concerts and Merchandizing pay the costs of the concert and the artists salary for the job of touring. CD sales are not icing on the cake for the music industry, they are the primary income to pay for the production of the album. So it doesn't make since to compare the prices of CDs DVDs based on the cost of producing the work.
I won't argue with you that the record companies need to be shaken up. But I don't think that $10 for an album is unreasonable. I also don't think it is unreasonable that they keep a large share of the money from hit bands to use to invest in other bands. What I do think is unreasonable are all the good artists who signed with a major label, and never got shit out of it. They never got any air play or advertising to speak of, but managed to make a name for themselves. The consistantly sell enough CD's to turn a good profit, but hardly see a dime of that money, which they earned entirely on their own.
You are comparing renting to buying, of course they don't work out. If you compare the $8 to buy a movie online vs the cost of buying a DVD, then it could be quite competitive depending on the relative quality of the video, and the amount DRM.
Furthermore, the $1/DVD Netflix estimate is unreasonable. Most people with Netflix do not cycle through movies that fast and if they did, then Netflix would have to raise the price to cover the additional costs. Looking at the plans, a typical cost/DVD is more around $1.50 to $3.50, and I would guess that the Netflix average is about $2.50 per DVD which is only slightly less than a brick-and-mortar rental store. Unless you are a huge film junkie, the main advantage of Netflix over Blockbuster is the selection and convienience, not the price.
Music downloads, compared to other media downloads (movies, above), should cost no more than 10 cents per track or $1 per album.
What argument do you have for that? It costs that much just to run iTMS. I think that $10 for a CD is very reasonable given the amount of enjoyment I will get out of it over my life - far more than I will out of a movie. Millions of other people happen to agree that the current prices for CD's are reasonable, hence the buy them.
After all, I can go to my local library and get the DVDs/CDs for zero dollars.
Yes, you can also get books - they even have bigger selection of those. However, that hasn't done anything to devalue books you can purchase new/used from book stores. Why would music and video be any different?
For starters, the way the law is written, copying appears to be protected privalege granted to the owner of the copyright. From Section 106 of the Copyright Act of 1976:
Note that the original Copyright Act of 1790, did not mention reproduction but rather just "publishing, printing, and vending."
Furthermore, all the articles that I've read that were actually written by lawyers familiar with copyright law, give me the impression that copying for personal, non-comercial use is legal only by way of various precidents, and not by statue. Furthermore, the exact boundries of personal-comercial use are still in flux. This view was held both by people who were in favor of increasing copyright protections, and by those who were in favor of increasing fair use. There was also a great deal of debate among lawyers over whether space-shifting (copying and coverting between formats for personal use) would be concidered fair-use, as no court cases had set a precident yet.
If copying was not restricted at all, then they would not be talking in this way. It would be clear that as long as it was not distributing then it was fine.
If you have any legal sources that back up the idea that copying is not illegal I would love to hear about them, but from everything I have seen, copying is illegal by default, but he most common cases have been ruled fair use, and others are simply overlooked.
Alexander Stepanov went onto SGI after HP and continued his work with implementing and extending the STL while there. It improved many implementation details (the HP version was not thread safe for example), as well as adding several templates (hash'es etc) that did not get into the standard for political reasons. Like the HP version, the SGI code was freely available (BSD-like license).
The SGI implementation of STL has pretty much become the defacto-standard implementation. It is definately the most widely used implementation in the open source world and probably in the proprietary world as well.
On a related note, this is a pretty interesting interview with Stepanov.
I put them akin to Next in that they both make(made) quality machines that not many people want to buy.
:) They just couldn't justify the price, unless they were a big profesional studio. As commidity hardware is becoming more capable it is starting to get to the point where even the profesionals have a hard time justifying the cost.
Oh I wouldn't say that. I think just about everyone who knew about theme wanted to buy their machines
The story here isn't that bees are smart - this is simple pavlovian association going on, not any sort of problem solving. The story is that they are able to recognize the color of objects that are complexly lit.
As Violated, nobody ever will recognize me for my day job. But that's really not what bugs me. I was really attached to my name. This character bounded through Azgalor slaying monsters and meeting new people. Now that character is erased and another character stands in its place. Same armor. Same class. But different somehow.
A hard pit began to form in the depth of my soul, and I began to realize that my life as I knew it was gone. I had been cut off from everyone who knew me, from who I was. I was faceless, nameless, alone in the world. Now I would wander the shadows of the worlds, a piercing invisible wind, striking terror in the hearts of the GMs. Not just for me but for all who are Violated.
More so that most of the news posted here.
How long has Adrian been such a greedy bastard? He has gotten over $3 million a year the last several years, and was offered a $20 million dollars to buy back his stock when he wanted to sell out to Activision. But no that wasn't good enough.
I am glad that the rest of id voted against Adrian on the Activision sale. It sucks that they had to fire him but if I were the other founders I certainly wouldn't want someone that intended to sell out the company holding a 40% share. Although the bit about not paying out dividends and not firing him outright is a crock.
AFAIK, any university can receive the source code to MS Windows under a restrive, look but don't talk, touch, or take license / NDA like the Ms-RL. Here is a list of colleges that do. But, I wouldn't touch that code with a 15 foot stick. I don't want to know what their source does in case they ever decide that something I am doing was "inspired" by it.
One thing in particular that I was glad to see was the absence of any unbalanced vendor rights that exist in many open source licenses created for commercial use. For example, the Netscape Public License requires you to give any changes that you make back to Netscape, regardless of whether you redistribute the changes. Furthermore, it requires that you give Netscape permission to use the changes in proprietary, binary-only products for which they don't release the source.
However the Ms-PL and Ms-CL do not grant Microsoft any special priveledges.
The limited version of the licenses (Ms-LPL, and Ms-LCL) are definitely not free software as the limit their use to a single operating system, and of course the Ms-RL isn't even close to being free software, so it won't be on there.
As for GPL compatibility, that is a more difficult question, and is more dependent on legal details than differences in philosophy. IANAL, but I'd guess that they are not GPL compatible because of the Patent Litigation Clause:
This is a restriction that is not in the GPL, and the GPL has a clause that you cannot place any restrictions on the user beyond what is listed in the GPL. It should be noted that the Free Software Foundation is not opposed to a clause like this, and are in fact considering adding one to the next version of the GPL.
So, by my interpretation, they have technical incompatibilities with the GPL which may go away with the next version of the GPL.
That sucks, but I think someone is being a bit sensational. They have almost a year to correct this. They have a mission planned in two months, by that time it will still be at least 330km up. They have been that low before. Also, by your own link, it takes at least three weeks for the orbit to decay from 300km, I have seen others that say up to 3 months. Neither of those are "a matter of days".
Well yeah, but what does that have to do with anything? The term OpenDoc isn't mentioned in any of the articles. It also has nothing to do with OpenDocument and had a completely different goal. OpenDoc was a programming framework for object embedding and encapsulating, you can think of it as OLE on steriods. OpenDocument is a file format.
f) In America cars can go anywhere, while public transportation is limited especially compared to Europe.
Therefore most people already have cars and it is usually more convienient to use them for medium length trips (don't have to plan around train schedule, have something to get around town when they get to their destination).
g) America is more spread-out that europe.
Therefore it is harder to support frequent routes to where people need to go. This creates a harsher trade off between convinience and price.
h) Americans have less vacation time than europe.
Therefore, Americans put a larger value on fast tranportation for long trips, and thus choose planes.
All of these decrease train usage which drives up the overhead price for the remaining customers. I like Amtrack, but it really doesn't have much place in the transportation system here in the US. Until the rest of the system changes, continental rail will be a fundamentally bad solution, because the economies of scale just aren't there.
I learned to knit as a kid while bored at my grandmas house, and while there are other hobbies that I prefer to do instead, I understand how knitting can be enjoyable.
First repetitive task are soothing. They aren't challenging or mind tasking or exciting, but when you have spent all day at work, that isn't always what you want.
It is also something to keep your hands busy, and can be done while doing something else. This fact appeals differently to different people: It is a justification for gossip gatherings. It lets you have a hobby without taking much time from other activities. If you are sitting around it might as well be productive and relaxing at the same time.
And of course there is always that sense of accomplishment gained from doing something by hand.
Christ, given the number of programmers and CS people and IT people on Slashdot, shouldn't it be possible to offer a "PRE" tag so one can post code??
Slashdot has the ecode tag for this. The difference is that it html markup is also printed as-is, whereas with the pre tag you would have to manually use < and > to spell out the tags, lest they be processed.
Ah I got it. Took 16 rolls (written down) and almost hour. The fact that I am ignorant about roses didn't help :)
:)
Anyway I read that story and it didn't appear to me that he was trying to solve it by memorization, but rather that after an hour, seeing hundreds of rolls, he remembered many of them, which isn't all that surprising. What I got out of the story, is that he persistently kept at the problem trying many different ideas until he finally got it, even after everyone else in the group had solved it or quit.
I don't think that how quickly someone solves any one particular problem is much of an indicator of how smart they are. We were doing brain teasers on an ACM trip my freshman year of college, and I was one of the first to get most of them. Then there was this one that everyone got right away and I couldn't get it. When I finally did a day later I was kicking myself because it was so obvious - I just wasn't looking at it the right way.
This story showed my that Bill Gates is a very persistent and determined person which is probably a big reason that he was so successful. That and he needed to get a girlfriend at that point, as do I apparently
Cable controls the rate at which you view the show, and therefore if they put in advertisements most people will watch them. But no one watches the ads on things on shows they have recorded, and no-one will watch ads on video downloaded off the internet. If the vast majority of people skip ads then they will not be a tenable form of income for the cable company and will not be used.