There's a lot of spin going on at Real's new Freedom of Music Choice site. Clearly, Real was not expecting such a profound and immediate backlash. It must be frustrating that Apple gets to be both an underdog and a monopoly at the same time. But despite the feel good claims on your Freedom site (did you really write those?), your price drop, reverse engineering, and activism are hardly riling up the public.
What have you learned from this?
My favorite low-point of arrogant, greedy commercialism was a bit ago before Google was the best engine. I would occasionally look on Altavista (old habits are hard to break.) In an absurd attempt to gleen money every way they could, there would be links generated for every search...
Check news headlines about Renaissance literature
Buy books about the short-sightedness of altavista
Get great deals on architectural theory
Buy games about torture and mayhem
Check sports scores for Islamic Jewish relations.
There are heaps of these bloated systems. For a while, Vignette's system (formerly called Story Server) was a leader. Many outfits build their own, for example, based on Oracle. A colleague has recently installing Microsoft Content Management Server for a large government client, and he has been remarkably impressed.
For measuring color differences, your are on the right track. CIE-L*a*b* was designed to be fairly perceptually even, but it is still quite nonlinear and delta-E values mean different perceptual steps for different hues, as seen in the shapes of acceptability ellipses. Here's some samples.
An older approach is the Munsell system. His system, which he began in 1898 with the creation of his color sphere, or tree, saw its full expression with his publication, A Color Notation, in 1905. It is not mathematically based, but rather each step corresponds to an actual equal perception step.
Even though there are surprisingly large discrepancies between CIE L*a*b* and isotropic observation-based color spaces, such as Munsell, a good bet is to convert your LAB into Munsell and go from there.
As mentioned by Slashdot last August, Everquest has spawned an economy with a per-capita income comparable to that of a small country. Article in New Scientist.
Edward Castronova, of the economics department at California State University at Fullerton, studied thousands of EverQuest transactions performed through eBay to determine the real-world economic value generated by the inhabitants of Norrath.
Castronova discovered that Norrath's gross national product per-capita is $2,266. If Norrath was a country, it would be the 77th most wealthy in the world, just behind Russia.
Castronova also found that Norrath's virtual currency is more valuable in the US than the Yen. And his research shows that EverQuest players earn an average of $3.42 for every hour spent playing the game.
...
Launched in 1999 by Sony, EverQuest is one of the largest role playing games on the internet. According to Sony, the game has 400,000 users in total, with up to 60,000 inhabiting the game at any one time.
Stellar, middle-weight, supermassive
on
Giant Black Hole Found
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are three main classes of black hole. This article relates to the "stellar" type...
Astronomers suspect that most black holes are produced when massive stars (at least 8-10 times the Sun's mass) reach the end of their lifecycle. This is a so-called "stellar black hole." Stellar black holes are the remains of dead stars several times heavier than the Sun, compressed to a diameter of a few miles or less. Supermassive black holes have masses comparable to those of a typical galaxy. These masses range anywhere from a million to 100 billion of our Suns. Supermassive black holes tend to be in the centers of galaxies, creating what are called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). They may have formed in the early universe from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. Lastly, the field of black holes, formerly dominated by heavyweights packing the gravitational punch of a billion Suns and lightweights just a few times heavier than our Sun, has another contender, the middleweight black holes, weighing in at 100 to 10,000 Suns.
> I went to Apple to test cocoa for Mac OS X 10.1,
> and found a drag and drop problem with NSPopUpButtonCell.
> They didn't even pay me for my effort, yet they try to
> shut down my project. Isn't that ironic?
If I babysit your kids a few times, is it okay for me to smack them around a bit also?
Whew, that was close. That car nearly killed you. I saved your life. Shall we go back to my apartment?
I like to think of old 3.5 inch disks, with 1.4 MB on each. The new double FireWire will be like shooting 2,000 disks a second through a wire. Blazing. Slung from a sling shot, that is 2kHz. Listening to this, the band on the shot would sound like a high note on a violin. (440 hertz is assigned the note middle A)
For those of you who have never used FireWire, it is amazing, especially compared to USB and SCSI. The ease of hot-plugging is astounding, not to mention the data transfer. For example, I recently copied files from one PowerBook (Mac laptop) to another, with one laptop acting as a hard disk ("FireWire Disk Mode"). Boy does it fly. Megabytes of files flew though that cable. There seems to be much more than the raw speed of the protocol, the CPU, bus, etc., are all vital, and on these newer computers, the speed is impressive.
But when will the leading P2P sharing programs work with each other? How about a "plugin" system. I would like one program that works with all the systems.
Also, for all the talk of GUIs, all the current programs I have seen suck. If you want to see real innovation in intuitive and functional interfaces, see the headway that Apple Computer has been making with some of their appliance applications, such as "iTunes" and "Sherlock."
A plug-in system would facilitate specialization by developers who want to make new algorithms, implement new protocols, or create new interfaces.
It is a shame there was so much bureaucratic delay, along with "Internet bubble" arrogance. The result was that too few domains have been released, with a confused public. Even/.ers, most of whom are pretty Internet savvy, probably do not know the exact details of the TLD offerings.
There should have been dozens of TLDs available last year. The old dot com, dot org, and dot net names simply do not sound "right" for many web sites. These measly new offerings are hardly useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Two sources which might help: http://www.exhibitfiles.org/ http://informalscience.org/
There's a lot of spin going on at Real's new Freedom of Music Choice site. Clearly, Real was not expecting such a profound and immediate backlash. It must be frustrating that Apple gets to be both an underdog and a monopoly at the same time. But despite the feel good claims on your Freedom site (did you really write those?), your price drop, reverse engineering, and activism are hardly riling up the public. What have you learned from this?
Check news headlines about Renaissance literature
Buy books about the short-sightedness of altavista
Get great deals on architectural theory
Buy games about torture and mayhem
Check sports scores for Islamic Jewish relations.
There are heaps of these bloated systems. For a while, Vignette's system (formerly called Story Server) was a leader. Many outfits build their own, for example, based on Oracle. A colleague has recently installing Microsoft Content Management Server for a large government client, and he has been remarkably impressed.
How does it deal with DHCP IPs? What about when your mac is behind a router with NAT?
An older approach is the Munsell system. His system, which he began in 1898 with the creation of his color sphere, or tree, saw its full expression with his publication, A Color Notation, in 1905. It is not mathematically based, but rather each step corresponds to an actual equal perception step.
Even though there are surprisingly large discrepancies between CIE L*a*b* and isotropic observation-based color spaces, such as Munsell, a good bet is to convert your LAB into Munsell and go from there.
Edward Castronova, of the economics department at California State University at Fullerton, studied thousands of EverQuest transactions performed through eBay to determine the real-world economic value generated by the inhabitants of Norrath.
Castronova discovered that Norrath's gross national product per-capita is $2,266. If Norrath was a country, it would be the 77th most wealthy in the world, just behind Russia.
Castronova also found that Norrath's virtual currency is more valuable in the US than the Yen. And his research shows that EverQuest players earn an average of $3.42 for every hour spent playing the game.
...
Launched in 1999 by Sony, EverQuest is one of the largest role playing games on the internet. According to Sony, the game has 400,000 users in total, with up to 60,000 inhabiting the game at any one time.
Perhaps you have read The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition : Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks... The peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups means that such comparisons are amusing, at most. If it takes 1 boy 60 minutes to mow a lawn, does it take 60 boys 1 minute?
Astronomers suspect that most black holes are produced when massive stars (at least 8-10 times the Sun's mass) reach the end of their lifecycle. This is a so-called "stellar black hole." Stellar black holes are the remains of dead stars several times heavier than the Sun, compressed to a diameter of a few miles or less. Supermassive black holes have masses comparable to those of a typical galaxy. These masses range anywhere from a million to 100 billion of our Suns. Supermassive black holes tend to be in the centers of galaxies, creating what are called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). They may have formed in the early universe from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. Lastly, the field of black holes, formerly dominated by heavyweights packing the gravitational punch of a billion Suns and lightweights just a few times heavier than our Sun, has another contender, the middleweight black holes, weighing in at 100 to 10,000 Suns.
> I went to Apple to test cocoa for Mac OS X 10.1,
> and found a drag and drop problem with NSPopUpButtonCell.
> They didn't even pay me for my effort, yet they try to
> shut down my project. Isn't that ironic?
If I babysit your kids a few times, is it okay for me to smack them around a bit also?
Whew, that was close. That car nearly killed you. I saved your life. Shall we go back to my apartment?
Irony? No. Misplaced entitlement? Yes.
I like to think of old 3.5 inch disks, with 1.4 MB on each. The new double FireWire will be like shooting 2,000 disks a second through a wire. Blazing. Slung from a sling shot, that is 2kHz. Listening to this, the band on the shot would sound like a high note on a violin. (440 hertz is assigned the note middle A)
For those of you who have never used FireWire, it is amazing, especially compared to USB and SCSI. The ease of hot-plugging is astounding, not to mention the data transfer. For example, I recently copied files from one PowerBook (Mac laptop) to another, with one laptop acting as a hard disk ("FireWire Disk Mode"). Boy does it fly. Megabytes of files flew though that cable. There seems to be much more than the raw speed of the protocol, the CPU, bus, etc., are all vital, and on these newer computers, the speed is impressive.
But when will the leading P2P sharing programs work with each other? How about a "plugin" system. I would like one program that works with all the systems.
Also, for all the talk of GUIs, all the current programs I have seen suck. If you want to see real innovation in intuitive and functional interfaces, see the headway that Apple Computer has been making with some of their appliance applications, such as "iTunes" and "Sherlock."
A plug-in system would facilitate specialization by developers who want to make new algorithms, implement new protocols, or create new interfaces.
It is a shame there was so much bureaucratic delay, along with "Internet bubble" arrogance. The result was that too few domains have been released, with a confused public. Even /.ers, most of whom are pretty Internet savvy, probably do not know the exact details of the TLD offerings.
There should have been dozens of TLDs available last year. The old dot com, dot org, and dot net names simply do not sound "right" for many web sites. These measly new offerings are hardly useful.
See correct Astronomy Picture of the Day link. (It changes every day.)