the anthrax attacks in the US, terrible as they were, were initiated by a born-and-raised American citizen
As far as I know the anthrax attacks are as yet unsolved, and there is no evidence that they were or were not perpetrated by an American. Perhaps I missed something in the news; if so, would anyone care to enlighten me?
Tom: It's a lovely day for a launch, here, live at Cape Canaveral, at
the lower end of the Florida Peninsula, and the purpose of
today's mission is truly, really electrifying. Man 2: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be
devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny
screws.
Tom: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness.
And of course, this could have literally millions of applications
here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair. Homer: Boring.
[tries to switch channels, but the batteries fall from the
remote control]
No! The batteries!
Tom: Now let's look at the crew a little. Man 2: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "the Three
Musketeers". Heh heh heh --
Tom: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different
_kind_ of mathematician, and a statistician. Homer: Make it stop! [panics]
Re:Dragged kicking and screaming...
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 1
It is quite likely that at some point the music industry will end up making more money out of Internet distribution of their music than they do out of selling CDs. It is also entirely likely that they will continue fighting against P2P tooth and nail until they have exhausted all possible options.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be funny and ironic if they realized someday that p2p had become their real cash cow and that cd sales were actually affecting their p2p revenues adversely, prompting them to go on an enormous anti-piracy campaign against cd distributors and cd burner manufacturers: "When you purchase a cd, you're stealing! Do the honest thing and download from the net."
I intuitively lean towards the "out of band per mp3" theory, but I don't have a genuine good explanation as to why the noise would surface in the AIFF. Seems to me that the AIFF should consist of the very same bits that an mp3 player would feed to the sound hardware. And, that encoding a noisy AIFF to mp3 should relatively faithfully reproduce that noise. The sounds that mp3 compression remove are generally not audible; the related psycho-acoustic model is geared towards deciding what sound subcomponents will be inaudible because they are masked by other tones, which then allows the codec to quantize the inaudible components to whatever values would most assist the compression.
(digression) In fact, there should be some heuristic way to examine an mp3 file and determine the psychoacoustic model it used, and to then use this information to re-encode an mp3 (or go from AAC to mp3) without much degradation at all.
Mark my words, it's a bad idea to introduce something to a portapotty that will increase the time people have to wait in line at a concert. I forecast that this will be a self-correcting system: whoever has to go really badly and is forced to wait in line too long will, um, do something to the terminal once they get inside. Figuring out exactly what is left as an exercise to the reader.
Without DRM, you can't restrict free trading of files on P2P networks.
Now Michael Robertson (of mp3.com) is bitching that users won't be able to play it in MP3 players... fine enough. MP3 SHOULD CEASE to exist.
Better formats like Vorbis are not picking up just because every Joe is making MP3 players.
Your implication that Vorbis should become a commonly used format contradicts your stance that DRM is necessary to make money. Either that or you just changed topics without announcing it.
Doesn't really mean anything. You could have a company with each share not valued as much but with many shares issued, or with few shares but each share valued highly.
Market capitalization is much more useful
It's possible to have a big market cap on a low margin business, so it might be even better to know net revenue. But really the story of a publicly held company is better divined from things like how saturated its chosen markets are, what its competition is, how easily it can absorb risks when diversifying, and whether it holds a degree of monopoly (monopolies can be though of in degrees by quantifying the cost of barriers to entry).
(This might be offtopic but) I find it interesting to note the differences between assessing a public and a private company. Consider a privately held mom-and-pop deli that never expands, and makes enough money on a sustained basis to pay its employees, cover the cost of a decent lifestyle for the owners, and allow them to put away money for retirement and their kids' college. In the world of private companies this is a success. But in the world of public companies, this is a failure; there's no ever-growing profit to be distributed across the pool of stockholders. Whereas in a public company, a massive layoff can be considered a great boon and send stock prices up... but is an abysmal failure in the mom-and-pop scenario.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
If you see no problem with either violating state and federal laws or ignoring medical reccomendations just to feel good, why should a potential employer believe you would pay any attention to company and government health and safety requirements?
If you believe the sole motivation to use drugs is to break the law, then why can't we conclude that all people who exceed the speed limit are unfit to be employed?
If you're a drone who robotically follows all orders without ever evaluating them for yourself and making decisions on your own, then how useful will you be in any intelligent line of work?
yeah, opensource is the logical choice if all you're doing is attempting to get software for free.. except that the city will hire IBM (or simlar) to consult them as to which software to use, and implement it, and maintain it.....
Whether they need consultants on an ongoing basis is an issue that is seperable from which software they need. It's not as though windows software solves all its own problems (in fact, at the rate windows viri and vulnerabilities have been cropping up, I'd say it's the reigning king of inventing problems past release date). And IBM has committed solidly to both open source and to service as its revenue streams of now and the future; not a bad choice, if you ask me.
free software? nothing's ever free.
But there most definitely exists the concept of "cheaper" vs "more expensive", and it's worth paying attention to.
This will prevent them from just buying more of whatever they've currently got, which is always cheaper than buying new stuff.
This statement makes so little sense that I truly find myself wondering if you work for Microsoft.
Would you get in a car if you knew that statistically, you had a 1 in 50 chance of the car blowing up and killing you?
I do like the analogy, but just want to point out the missing time dilation that's present for space travel. I use a car five times a day; space travel happens (according to your guess) about five times a year. That puts the time-weighted likelihood of space death at one flight every ten years, but for a car once every ten days. The analogy is a powerful one, but to a degree it is misleading.
I tagged along with a friend this past weekend as he went to buy a sony video cam. On the way to the register, the salesman mentioned that the camera needed to be sent annually to the factory to get cleaning, for a $45 charge... and that this was enforced by a chip that prevented operation until this was done.
Had it been me, I would have refused to buy this cam. (total cost was $600, btw, so $45/year equals about 8%, to say nothing of the hassle of sending it in and waiting for it.)
My (non-technical) friend didn't seem to react at all. While standing in line I asked what he thought of the forced cleaning. His response was to ask whether I thought the salesman was giving correct info. I said "You bet. You'd be shocked at what companies are doing, and the reason is because enough consumers let them get away with it."
I agree that intellectual property is not uniformly conceived of by all, and so I agree with what I believe is the spirit of what you are saying. A few details:
In short, there is no possible way that every country -- let alone every human being in the world -- could [uncoercedly] agree to this concept of "intellectual property".
The agreement of every human is not necessary. The agreement of the countries (their governments) would be sufficient, if achievable.
Therefore, the implementation of intellectual property requires a major initiation of force, the very thing it proposes to protect us against.
Intellectual property concepts do not propose to protect us from the use of force; that is addressed by (depending on context) combinations of national sovereignty and laws against assault and battery. Intellectual property is a contract designed to spur the creation of art and information by granting limited monopolies to creators.
And, force is not the only form of coercion that could suffice to get countries on board.
[accurate sound and clear music] are not at all the same thing.
I'm interpreting this to mean that "clear music" fans object when the sound coming from a speaker has differences from the sound coming directly from a band, whereas the "accurate sound" fans take satisfaction from seeing the recorded waveform being recreated accurately by the speakers.
A few years back, Consumer Reports did an interesting set of listening tests. The usual blinds, of course...[sound engineers and musicians] differed radically in their rankings
In typical media format studies, participants are not invited to compare the output to a live recording. Neither are they given access to electrical equipment to observe waveforms. The question posed is along the lines of "what format sounds best to you", or "what format sounds the most like this thoroughly uncompressed initial sample". I'm having trouble imagining how such questions could lead to a "clear music" approval coupled with an "accurate sound" objection, or vise versa. Any speculation?
Statistics often make sense on a demographical scale, but never on an individual scale.
Untrue.
If 1000 polled people all indicate that it took them precisely one year (365 days) to find a job, then - assuming good random selection of the sampling pool - there is a statistically strong case that an individual will need one year to find a job. On the other hand if 1000 people indicate it took them on average one year, but their individual times were uniformly distributed between 0 days and 730 days (2x365), then there is a strong case that an individual's experience will be unpredictable... despite the average time being the same.
The likelihood of a group statistical inference being representative of an individual's experience is encapsulated in the standard deviation. A wide standard deviation indicates low individual correlation, while a narrow std dev suggests that an individual experience would correlate well to the group statistic.
You make it sound as though the only reason a person would download an mp3 (and not buy the cd) is a moral flaw called "dishonesty". BUTT (and there's always a big butt) there are reasons other than moral flaws that a person might download. They might, for example, have a highly principled (aka moral) objection to the police state that the RIAA is trying to turn the world into. They might have a practical objection to having their computer hobbled by cd designed to curtail fair use. They might have a philosophical difference of opinion with those who think that intellectual property is a tenable notion. They might just be oblivious. None of the above is - per se - unfair, deceptive, shameful, or dishonest.
Balmer: "...our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community"
Also: Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
So to sum this up: Balmer is going to demonstrate the innovative advantage of his company by producing a "command line interface". How could a command line interface be made work on a computer? What might it possibly look like? If we in the linux community do not want to be completely left behind, we'd better get together and figure out how we could possibly come up with such an interface and somehow integrate it into the OS. Time for some serious hacking! Stick it to the man!!
I dont believe the article said ANYWHERE it was free.
I can forgive someone for thinking that the product might be free. This forum is not typically thought of as an advertising medium for commercial products; it's common for the topic to run in the vein of how to expand (or reclaim) dwindling rights, or to discuss a new technology (like a chip) that doesn't imply an immediate point of sale transaction between a company and a reader. It may not be illegitimate to have PR for a paid product here, but keep in mind it's competing with the likes of linux and open office when it comes to shaping the mindset of the readers.
There are now a few choices of mp3 players that can record from internal FM, but AFAIK none of them allows a person to schedule a recording at a particular time and channel. This would be a killer feature for me, as there are all kinds of shows on the local jazz station and on NPR that are scheduled at regular times and which I'd love to listen to later. Without scheduling, the FM recording is of only marginal value to me.
Another article I liked was here. It compares the cyclical up-and-down of the music industry with that of the literature industry decades earlier. It begins with this tone, which I love:
Hemingway had rock-star status (and even impersonators). Steinbeck was Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker was Courtney Love. James Jones was David Crosby. Mailer was Eminem. This is to say -- and I understand how hard this is to appreciate -- that novelists were iconic for much of the first half of the last century. They set the cultural agenda. They made lots of money. They lived large (and self-medicated). They were the generational voice. For a long time, anybody with any creative ambition wanted to write the Great American Novel.
It goes on to include the theory that the music industry actually died in the early 80's... but that nobody noticed because it was resuscitated by the arrival of CDs, whereupon the music industry got a free game pass as everyone re-purchased their old music collections/tastes on the new medium.
According to the usual routine, it should be freely available about 2 days before its official launch...
But might wanna hold off on the download for a while, because the usual routine also prescribes that there will be serious root-level exploits exposed once every three days for the first couple of years.
Don't even get me started on making little Rabbit-Ears with your fingers
Agreed. I hate those so-called "Rabbit Ears". (reader invited to visualize fingers making rabbit ear gesticulations during previous sentence's quote marks.)
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know the anthrax attacks are as yet unsolved, and there is no evidence that they were or were not perpetrated by an American. Perhaps I missed something in the news; if so, would anyone care to enlighten me?
From The Simpsons:
Tom: It's a lovely day for a launch, here, live at Cape Canaveral, at
the lower end of the Florida Peninsula, and the purpose of
today's mission is truly, really electrifying.
Man 2: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be
devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny
screws.
Tom: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness.
And of course, this could have literally millions of applications
here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Homer: Boring.
[tries to switch channels, but the batteries fall from the
remote control]
No! The batteries!
Tom: Now let's look at the crew a little.
Man 2: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "the Three
Musketeers". Heh heh heh --
Tom: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different
_kind_ of mathematician, and a statistician.
Homer: Make it stop! [panics]
Agreed. Wouldn't it be funny and ironic if they realized someday that p2p had become their real cash cow and that cd sales were actually affecting their p2p revenues adversely, prompting them to go on an enormous anti-piracy campaign against cd distributors and cd burner manufacturers: "When you purchase a cd, you're stealing! Do the honest thing and download from the net."
There is no plate. Nor spoon. But there was a vase.
(digression) In fact, there should be some heuristic way to examine an mp3 file and determine the psychoacoustic model it used, and to then use this information to re-encode an mp3 (or go from AAC to mp3) without much degradation at all.
Mark my words, it's a bad idea to introduce something to a portapotty that will increase the time people have to wait in line at a concert. I forecast that this will be a self-correcting system: whoever has to go really badly and is forced to wait in line too long will, um, do something to the terminal once they get inside. Figuring out exactly what is left as an exercise to the reader.
Now Michael Robertson (of mp3.com) is bitching that users won't be able to play it in MP3 players... fine enough. MP3 SHOULD CEASE to exist. Better formats like Vorbis are not picking up just because every Joe is making MP3 players.
Your implication that Vorbis should become a commonly used format contradicts your stance that DRM is necessary to make money. Either that or you just changed topics without announcing it.
It's possible to have a big market cap on a low margin business, so it might be even better to know net revenue. But really the story of a publicly held company is better divined from things like how saturated its chosen markets are, what its competition is, how easily it can absorb risks when diversifying, and whether it holds a degree of monopoly (monopolies can be though of in degrees by quantifying the cost of barriers to entry).
(This might be offtopic but) I find it interesting to note the differences between assessing a public and a private company. Consider a privately held mom-and-pop deli that never expands, and makes enough money on a sustained basis to pay its employees, cover the cost of a decent lifestyle for the owners, and allow them to put away money for retirement and their kids' college. In the world of private companies this is a success. But in the world of public companies, this is a failure; there's no ever-growing profit to be distributed across the pool of stockholders. Whereas in a public company, a massive layoff can be considered a great boon and send stock prices up... but is an abysmal failure in the mom-and-pop scenario.
If you believe the sole motivation to use drugs is to break the law, then why can't we conclude that all people who exceed the speed limit are unfit to be employed?
If you're a drone who robotically follows all orders without ever evaluating them for yourself and making decisions on your own, then how useful will you be in any intelligent line of work?
Whether they need consultants on an ongoing basis is an issue that is seperable from which software they need. It's not as though windows software solves all its own problems (in fact, at the rate windows viri and vulnerabilities have been cropping up, I'd say it's the reigning king of inventing problems past release date). And IBM has committed solidly to both open source and to service as its revenue streams of now and the future; not a bad choice, if you ask me.
free software? nothing's ever free.
But there most definitely exists the concept of "cheaper" vs "more expensive", and it's worth paying attention to.
This will prevent them from just buying more of whatever they've currently got, which is always cheaper than buying new stuff.
This statement makes so little sense that I truly find myself wondering if you work for Microsoft.
How'd you know?
I do like the analogy, but just want to point out the missing time dilation that's present for space travel. I use a car five times a day; space travel happens (according to your guess) about five times a year. That puts the time-weighted likelihood of space death at one flight every ten years, but for a car once every ten days. The analogy is a powerful one, but to a degree it is misleading.
I tagged along with a friend this past weekend as he went to buy a sony video cam. On the way to the register, the salesman mentioned that the camera needed to be sent annually to the factory to get cleaning, for a $45 charge... and that this was enforced by a chip that prevented operation until this was done.
Had it been me, I would have refused to buy this cam. (total cost was $600, btw, so $45/year equals about 8%, to say nothing of the hassle of sending it in and waiting for it.)
My (non-technical) friend didn't seem to react at all. While standing in line I asked what he thought of the forced cleaning. His response was to ask whether I thought the salesman was giving correct info. I said "You bet. You'd be shocked at what companies are doing, and the reason is because enough consumers let them get away with it."
Case in point: he shrugged and bought the camera.
In short, there is no possible way that every country -- let alone every human being in the world -- could [uncoercedly] agree to this concept of "intellectual property".
The agreement of every human is not necessary. The agreement of the countries (their governments) would be sufficient, if achievable.
Therefore, the implementation of intellectual property requires a major initiation of force, the very thing it proposes to protect us against.
Intellectual property concepts do not propose to protect us from the use of force; that is addressed by (depending on context) combinations of national sovereignty and laws against assault and battery. Intellectual property is a contract designed to spur the creation of art and information by granting limited monopolies to creators.
And, force is not the only form of coercion that could suffice to get countries on board.
I'm interpreting this to mean that "clear music" fans object when the sound coming from a speaker has differences from the sound coming directly from a band, whereas the "accurate sound" fans take satisfaction from seeing the recorded waveform being recreated accurately by the speakers.
A few years back, Consumer Reports did an interesting set of listening tests. The usual blinds, of course...[sound engineers and musicians] differed radically in their rankings
In typical media format studies, participants are not invited to compare the output to a live recording. Neither are they given access to electrical equipment to observe waveforms. The question posed is along the lines of "what format sounds best to you", or "what format sounds the most like this thoroughly uncompressed initial sample". I'm having trouble imagining how such questions could lead to a "clear music" approval coupled with an "accurate sound" objection, or vise versa. Any speculation?
Everyone except the management. ;)
Untrue.
If 1000 polled people all indicate that it took them precisely one year (365 days) to find a job, then - assuming good random selection of the sampling pool - there is a statistically strong case that an individual will need one year to find a job. On the other hand if 1000 people indicate it took them on average one year, but their individual times were uniformly distributed between 0 days and 730 days (2x365), then there is a strong case that an individual's experience will be unpredictable... despite the average time being the same.
The likelihood of a group statistical inference being representative of an individual's experience is encapsulated in the standard deviation. A wide standard deviation indicates low individual correlation, while a narrow std dev suggests that an individual experience would correlate well to the group statistic.
A0 was an address register... did you mean D0, or did they actually do math in an address register?
You make it sound as though the only reason a person would download an mp3 (and not buy the cd) is a moral flaw called "dishonesty". BUTT (and there's always a big butt) there are reasons other than moral flaws that a person might download. They might, for example, have a highly principled (aka moral) objection to the police state that the RIAA is trying to turn the world into. They might have a practical objection to having their computer hobbled by cd designed to curtail fair use. They might have a philosophical difference of opinion with those who think that intellectual property is a tenable notion. They might just be oblivious. None of the above is - per se - unfair, deceptive, shameful, or dishonest.
Also: Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
So to sum this up: Balmer is going to demonstrate the innovative advantage of his company by producing a "command line interface". How could a command line interface be made work on a computer? What might it possibly look like? If we in the linux community do not want to be completely left behind, we'd better get together and figure out how we could possibly come up with such an interface and somehow integrate it into the OS. Time for some serious hacking! Stick it to the man!!
I can forgive someone for thinking that the product might be free. This forum is not typically thought of as an advertising medium for commercial products; it's common for the topic to run in the vein of how to expand (or reclaim) dwindling rights, or to discuss a new technology (like a chip) that doesn't imply an immediate point of sale transaction between a company and a reader. It may not be illegitimate to have PR for a paid product here, but keep in mind it's competing with the likes of linux and open office when it comes to shaping the mindset of the readers.
There are now a few choices of mp3 players that can record from internal FM, but AFAIK none of them allows a person to schedule a recording at a particular time and channel. This would be a killer feature for me, as there are all kinds of shows on the local jazz station and on NPR that are scheduled at regular times and which I'd love to listen to later. Without scheduling, the FM recording is of only marginal value to me.
But might wanna hold off on the download for a while, because the usual routine also prescribes that there will be serious root-level exploits exposed once every three days for the first couple of years.
Agreed. I hate those so-called "Rabbit Ears". (reader invited to visualize fingers making rabbit ear gesticulations during previous sentence's quote marks.)