Both of these guys who wrote this are my co-workers at my day job. They're both really brilliant guys. IIRC Roice has actually solved a 3D cube behind his back before...
With 433 posted comments, it's probably way too late to comment on this story. But it's surprising to me that no one has looked at this from the DRM angle yet. One of the major threats against things like disc-to-screen locking of content is that the XNU DRM tie-ins have only a tenuous hold at best as long as you can hack and install your own kernel. Now they can make it that much harder to do that. With a TPM present in most Intel Macs, most of the pieces are now in place, and Apple can blithly point a finger to the pirates, if they even need to. Hmm, pointing at pirates to explain your actions.. sounds familiar.:P
I can't be the only one who heard "F'd" mentally when reading that headline... hopefully that's not a statement on the release or users who choose to install it.:D
(I love Ubuntu and their funky names.. bring it on!)
LGPL allows reuse of your code as a component part of a commercial software system - hence its alternative name of "library GPL". You don't need to release the code for anything that uses this code/library. However if you make changes to the LGPL code/library then you must release the changes. Again, credits are required.
This has a slight misconception actually, one you'll run into if you work in any sort of embedded software. If you distribute code that links to an LGPL piece, an average user (or developer, whatever) must be able to replace that piece with an updated version of their own choosing. So if it's statically linked, you must distribute your.o files at the very least. For consoles that have code signing, it's totally impossible, so they can't use LGPL libraries.
For standard PCs or whatever, there's no issue since most libraries will be dyn-linked anyway.
For some backup on this, check the plib library -- they specifically have an exception for this clause.
I just wanted to say, Frequency and Amplitude are high in my list of "best games ever" and I *still* play them regularly, even after beating Cosmonaut Zero finally.;) The power-ups were even the inspiration for the PvP effects in Feet of Fury.
Thanks:)
(yes, sorry moderation-power people, I know it has nothing to do with videogame journalism...:)
And where did that come from? Who's talking about backyards?
In my part of the country we have a special term for that, "NIMBYism" -- Not In My Back Yard:)
Anyway, try reading this site below. It's ugly and doesn't work well on anything but IE, but it has lots and lots of links to supporting information, and has been quoted by a very conservative senator in his increasingly loud requests for people to consider the real problem:
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just a liberal conspiracy. Uh huh. Whatever, read the two pages of the site and decide for yourself based on some real facts. The SUV drivers may or may not be fueling the middle east monetarily, but the collective lack of interest in the whole subject is fueling the downfall of civilization as we know it.
The fact of the matter is that big corps have been getting whatever the hell they want out of the current administration for 5 years now, and you'd think that if they wanted to build refineries they'd damned well find a way to do it. If increasing oil flow was as easy as working around some "environmentalist hippies", they'd have done it a long time ago. They haven't. What do they know that we don't?
'Course if you want to ignore it, go right ahead and carry on. It's likely there's nothing any of us can do to stop it now, especially with China jumping on the oil consumption bandwagon. You can at least try to get yourself positioned though.
Chairman Bill Gates has been working on a solution to the film industry's piracy problem since making a now legendary pitch to the industry in September 2002. Showing a video of himself dressed in a sailor suit...
Am I the only one that thought of this? ARRGGGHHH!!!
*scrubs brain madly to vainly try to remove subsequent image*
I remember the good old days when it was almost always about Linux and related Linux topics.
Good old days? User #561297?:) I remember back when it was more than a place to post company press releases, generate ad revenue for places like Forbes and Cnet, and troll. It's become pretty sad these days.
In my experience, ONLY getting three years out of a Mac IS extraordinary. I typically see three years as the minimum length of service for a Mac, typical is more like 5 years.
I 100% agree. My wife's been using a blue and white G3 from 1998, upgraded with a few new pieces. It just became our new Linux server last night since we both have laptops now.:)
I've got a 7300/200 sitting on the shelf next to it which does scanning and has a Wacom tablet hooked to it, running OS 9. That machine is probably from around '95. And it still feels plenty fast and does everything most people would want from a computer. Just amazing.
On the other hand, sitting next to that is a dual Celeron 500 running Linux which has been our server for years. Problem is, most people don't want to use anything but Windows on a PC, which effectively end-of-lifes them faster than they'd normally be.
Admittedly I can't see the meat of the article since their site seems to be slashdotted already, but if you got that sort of a negative reinforcement for hitting snooze, why wouldn't you just learn not to hit snooze? I don't mean you actually get up, but you start just adjusting the time for 10 minutes later instead of hitting the snooze bar. I used to do that all the time anyway since my clocks had very short or very long snoozes.
Perhaps if they made it where the alarm time is only settable from a docking station on your PC or something...
First of all, you need to get the metering right, which is far from trivial. You also need to be able to auto-focus, which is also far from trivial.
I think that's actually a great reason to have hacked firmware on your camera. As someone who spent a lot of childhood time playing with a real SLR camera, it drives me absolutely nutty when I can't just tell the stupid thing to focus or use the light settings that I want. I find myself trying to trick the camera into doing what I want it to do, and then the screen is too small to see if what I did had the effect I actually wanted.
And of course the camera manufacturers want to charge you a lot of extra $$$ for those capabilities, so that explains the motive...
Art is one of those things that you generally have to have a knack for or all the practice in the world isn't going to help.
I disagree. It is precisely practice that helps you dig your way out of that hole. Practice, and the ability to look at the problem in a way suitable to making art, using your right brain.
It's this attitude, that there's something mystical or unachievable about art, that makes people give up so easily. They usually believe it themselves before even really getting started, so it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not helped by much more accomplished artists often laughing at a beginner's work or deriding it. A similar thing happens in programming with people who start out with VB or whatever.
I've watched a number of friends over the years who practice very diligently go from "completely hopeless" artists to "freaking awesome" artists. It's a matter of taking constructive advice from people, not being afraid to draw (this is a serious part of it really), and having the drive and ambition to become a good artist (read: lots of time to spend). A lot like becoming a programmer, really.
I very much recommend this book to anyone who is interested in actually getting good at drawing, especially technically and scientifically minded people:
Once you "get it" as far as mindset goes, it's just a matter of practice, pratice, practice. Draw lots of really awful stuff and learn ways to make things that look good, as well as the ways of thinking that lead to making things that look good. Again, a lot like learning how to code well -- practice, practice, practice; study others' work; learn how to think about it such that good code is produced.
Once you've obtained the "knack" (i.e. the mindset) it is applicable to any sort of drawing, graphics work, etc, much like learning one programming language makes it that much easier to learn many more. Just another set of tools to explore and figure out.
(I am a programmer and a wannabe artist, but I am parroting what much more accomplished artists have told me, so...)
And FYI, even if you never come to anything (and your stuff always look awful) I have found it very theraputic and relaxing to sit down and draw random things using the methods in the above book. Pure right brain expression makes time and worries sort of vanish for you. It's like a mini-vacation.
That's pretty funny (and probably true, your post even puts a picture in my head... *shudder*:)
But there are actually legitimate reasons why people would want those sorts of components. Namely if you are a hardware experimenter. I bought a good number of pieces of "throwaway" equipment at Goodwill Computers in Austin because I wanted to rip a rare component off of it, take its connectors, or even just have a piece of test equipment (one of my projects involved building an ISA bus).
It had nothing to do with the price, I probably would have been willing to pay more than the going rate for an equivalent piece of modern equipment in some cases. Finding a store that actually stocks that stuff is pretty hard these days. After I moved away from Austin I ended up having to wait until I took a visit back there to get some stuff like that!
Re:and a slightly more cynical view...
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 1
I'm with ya... got 3 Linux servers in my office and my wife and I both use Macs as desktops now. We were both multi-year Linux desktop users (yeah, laugh it up, wife using Linux by choice, etc etc) but we both gave it up finally.
I got a Blue and White G3 tower from Craigslist for $250 and spent another $200 or so jacking it up to run OSX.3 pretty well. Woo, that's expensive computing there!
What I like to tell people though is that Apple is the BMW of computer equipment. Lots of people love BMW and swear by it, lots of evangelists, lots of people hate 'em (a lot of the time because they're jealous and want one themselves). BMWs cost more than the average car, but for that premium you get a well-tuned, bad-ass car that lasts a long time, a great community, good support and service, etc. Oh and higher resale value (if you don't believe me, again go to Craigslist).
Also like BMW, if you don't want to pay a premium, it's possible to get an entry-level car. You may not get it brand spanking new, but you can still get a pretty good deal on it; once you're "in the club" you'll still find plenty of support for it.
There's also a lot of "dealer stupidity" on both sides like trying to make them only work with Apple-branded DVD and CD burners, just like there's a lot of things where they try to make you buy BMW factory equipment for your car. If you know what you're doing you can usually overclock and work around it if you really want to. Or you can just go with what they give you. I find that in most cases that also works just fine.
*shrug* What you said: use whatever you want to use to get the job done, if it makes you happy.
I also found that the "DDR workout" was really good for helping with my asthma-like symptoms. Much better exercise for the lungs than just sitting around all day in front of a PC...
I of course have to take this opportunity to plug our homebrew music beat game for the Dreamcast, Feet of Fury. Like DDR, but with player vs player modes, the ability to create user Swap CDs of your own music, and of course a Typing of Fury mode!
It's not free software, but I maintain the toolkit used to develop it (KOS) under a BSD license, and this toolkit is used by pretty much all DC homebrewers now (with the notable exceptions of DSNES and SCUMMVM). Two new homebrew games just came out actually... check 'em out here if you have a DC and want some more games: Games Of All Types. Yes, I know what you're thinking.. but that's a safe link;)
Spend a few minutes talking to any user of an Apple product and you'll understand that Apple Gets It on this topic. Macs, iPods, etc, are all very personable computers, with interfaces designed to feel very organic (like the pulsing, heartbeat-like glow on sleeping monitors / iBooks, rounded edges on windows, shadows, etc).
Dodge also Got It in a big way back with the Neon, though unrelated to cars. Anyone remember the ads that had the Neons bouncing up and down and saying "Hi!"? Anyone who owned a Neon knows that everything down to the horn's sound reinforces that image:) (Yes, I owned one of those too...)
My spam has ramped up again lately, and I'm not even to blame for it -- it was after the Debian project put up the unfiltered mail archives on their web site from a couple of lists I was on that I started getting bombarded. As far as I know those are pretty permanent too, so this address is pretty much destroyed unless I fight the spam flood back.
Yeah, on a good week I get over 1000 spams, which is probably about 80% of my mail. This is on an address that's about 8 years old.
And anyway, to paraphrase Michael Bolton in Office Space, why should I have to change my email address? They're the ones that suck!!
My wife and I use this because we have a basement that's separate from the upstairs of the house (you have to walk outside and back in). Her office is down there, mine is up here, so it's a bit of a pain to talk back and forth.
We also had AIM reliability issues (and I dislike the unencrypted chatter going out and back in) so I set up Jabber on our server here. Works great -- even when the cable modem goes out it's still there. No one else snooping in on the conversations, etc. Also Gaim works with Jabber now (if somewhat buggily) so you don't need to switch clients or anything to add it.
While there might be some niche applications for OGG, it will be useless for the downtrodden masses. Basically the development of OGG has merely an academic value.
Some niche applications? From this and the responses to it, it seems like most people vastly underestimate the amount of applications that use embedded compressed audio (for example, video game soundtracks). Every one of these people/companies stands to benefit from OGG because it's as good as anything else out now quality-wise, but is totally free. We use it in our game projects, it's fantastic. The end-user neither sees nor knows what format the audio is in, unless you expose it for some reason. Less royalties on sound playback means a cheaper end-user price or more features or polish developed into the product for the same price.
That said, it doesn't seem to be catching on too much for people just encoding songs for themselves, but it's even done pretty well there all things considered.
I've read this series several times (generally right before a new book is about to come out, so I can have the full plot in mind) and I have to agree. It seems like all the Jordan fans I know agree as well. We all wait now until the new books hit the used shelf at the book store, and grab it at half price.
I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground (SPOILER:Morgase as a fraidy-cat servant?!:SPOILER) and spawn so many plot threads that he ignores entire major characters per book. And yeah, the several pages about a bath, or a bank of fog, or.... that gets kinda annoying too.
The sucker that I am though, I'm gonna finish reading the series as it comes out just because I want to know what happens. I can make some guesses, but he always seems to have a rabbit to pull out of the hat when you least expect it.:)
That's one thing I'll say about the series that is cool, I read over the WoT FAQ recently before starting reading again, and from the discussions in there and having read the later books already, it was truly amazing to me how early he had started laying down the plots that happen 8000 pages later.
Yeah, but did your company actually spend a "company lunch" ignoring incoming phone calls to watch Computer Boy? Yeeaaauuh dotcom:)
Am I the only one who burned that Oom-pa-pa song to CD and played it in the car? The artist used to have it on his mp3.com page, but apparently it got removed... there's apparently a "remix" here.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of these guys who wrote this are my co-workers at my day job. They're both really brilliant guys. IIRC Roice has actually solved a 3D cube behind his back before...
With 433 posted comments, it's probably way too late to comment on this story. But it's surprising to me that no one has looked at this from the DRM angle yet. One of the major threats against things like disc-to-screen locking of content is that the XNU DRM tie-ins have only a tenuous hold at best as long as you can hack and install your own kernel. Now they can make it that much harder to do that. With a TPM present in most Intel Macs, most of the pieces are now in place, and Apple can blithly point a finger to the pirates, if they even need to. Hmm, pointing at pirates to explain your actions.. sounds familiar. :P
I can't be the only one who heard "F'd" mentally when reading that headline... hopefully that's not a statement on the release or users who choose to install it. :D
(I love Ubuntu and their funky names.. bring it on!)
LGPL allows reuse of your code as a component part of a commercial software system - hence its alternative name of "library GPL". You don't need to release the code for anything that uses this code/library. However if you make changes to the LGPL code/library then you must release the changes. Again, credits are required.
This has a slight misconception actually, one you'll run into if you work in any sort of embedded software. If you distribute code that links to an LGPL piece, an average user (or developer, whatever) must be able to replace that piece with an updated version of their own choosing. So if it's statically linked, you must distribute your .o files at the very least. For consoles that have code signing, it's totally impossible, so they can't use LGPL libraries.
For standard PCs or whatever, there's no issue since most libraries will be dyn-linked anyway.
For some backup on this, check the plib library -- they specifically have an exception for this clause.
Do you work at Harmonix?
I just wanted to say, Frequency and Amplitude are high in my list of "best games ever" and I *still* play them regularly, even after beating Cosmonaut Zero finally. ;) The power-ups were even the inspiration for the PvP effects in Feet of Fury.
Thanks :)
(yes, sorry moderation-power people, I know it has nothing to do with videogame journalism... :)
And where did that come from? Who's talking about backyards?
In my part of the country we have a special term for that, "NIMBYism" -- Not In My Back Yard :)
Anyway, try reading this site below. It's ugly and doesn't work well on anything but IE, but it has lots and lots of links to supporting information, and has been quoted by a very conservative senator in his increasingly loud requests for people to consider the real problem:
Life After the Oil Crash
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just a liberal conspiracy. Uh huh. Whatever, read the two pages of the site and decide for yourself based on some real facts. The SUV drivers may or may not be fueling the middle east monetarily, but the collective lack of interest in the whole subject is fueling the downfall of civilization as we know it.
The fact of the matter is that big corps have been getting whatever the hell they want out of the current administration for 5 years now, and you'd think that if they wanted to build refineries they'd damned well find a way to do it. If increasing oil flow was as easy as working around some "environmentalist hippies", they'd have done it a long time ago. They haven't. What do they know that we don't?
'Course if you want to ignore it, go right ahead and carry on. It's likely there's nothing any of us can do to stop it now, especially with China jumping on the oil consumption bandwagon. You can at least try to get yourself positioned though.
Chairman Bill Gates has been working on a solution to the film industry's piracy problem since making a now legendary pitch to the industry in September 2002. Showing a video of himself dressed in a sailor suit...
Am I the only one that thought of this? ARRGGGHHH!!!
*scrubs brain madly to vainly try to remove subsequent image*
What is this 'BAM!' key of which you speak?
It's the one Steve Jobs has on his little remote for WWDC presentations. Or so I gather from his commentary.
I remember the good old days when it was almost always about Linux and related Linux topics.
Good old days? User #561297? :) I remember back when it was more than a place to post company press releases, generate ad revenue for places like Forbes and Cnet, and troll. It's become pretty sad these days.
In my experience, ONLY getting three years out of a Mac IS extraordinary. I typically see three years as the minimum length of service for a Mac, typical is more like 5 years.
I 100% agree. My wife's been using a blue and white G3 from 1998, upgraded with a few new pieces. It just became our new Linux server last night since we both have laptops now. :)
I've got a 7300/200 sitting on the shelf next to it which does scanning and has a Wacom tablet hooked to it, running OS 9. That machine is probably from around '95. And it still feels plenty fast and does everything most people would want from a computer. Just amazing.
On the other hand, sitting next to that is a dual Celeron 500 running Linux which has been our server for years. Problem is, most people don't want to use anything but Windows on a PC, which effectively end-of-lifes them faster than they'd normally be.
Admittedly I can't see the meat of the article since their site seems to be slashdotted already, but if you got that sort of a negative reinforcement for hitting snooze, why wouldn't you just learn not to hit snooze? I don't mean you actually get up, but you start just adjusting the time for 10 minutes later instead of hitting the snooze bar. I used to do that all the time anyway since my clocks had very short or very long snoozes.
Perhaps if they made it where the alarm time is only settable from a docking station on your PC or something...
First of all, you need to get the metering right, which is far from trivial. You also need to be able to auto-focus, which is also far from trivial.
I think that's actually a great reason to have hacked firmware on your camera. As someone who spent a lot of childhood time playing with a real SLR camera, it drives me absolutely nutty when I can't just tell the stupid thing to focus or use the light settings that I want. I find myself trying to trick the camera into doing what I want it to do, and then the screen is too small to see if what I did had the effect I actually wanted.
And of course the camera manufacturers want to charge you a lot of extra $$$ for those capabilities, so that explains the motive...
Where's my damn cape then?
Come on, we all know that superheros with capes never come to a good end. ;)
(Sorry, just saw that movie and thought it was awesome... if you haven't seen it, you won't get the above.)
Art is one of those things that you generally have to have a knack for or all the practice in the world isn't going to help.
I disagree. It is precisely practice that helps you dig your way out of that hole. Practice, and the ability to look at the problem in a way suitable to making art, using your right brain.
It's this attitude, that there's something mystical or unachievable about art, that makes people give up so easily. They usually believe it themselves before even really getting started, so it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not helped by much more accomplished artists often laughing at a beginner's work or deriding it. A similar thing happens in programming with people who start out with VB or whatever.
I've watched a number of friends over the years who practice very diligently go from "completely hopeless" artists to "freaking awesome" artists. It's a matter of taking constructive advice from people, not being afraid to draw (this is a serious part of it really), and having the drive and ambition to become a good artist (read: lots of time to spend). A lot like becoming a programmer, really.
I very much recommend this book to anyone who is interested in actually getting good at drawing, especially technically and scientifically minded people:
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Amazon)
Once you "get it" as far as mindset goes, it's just a matter of practice, pratice, practice. Draw lots of really awful stuff and learn ways to make things that look good, as well as the ways of thinking that lead to making things that look good. Again, a lot like learning how to code well -- practice, practice, practice; study others' work; learn how to think about it such that good code is produced.
Once you've obtained the "knack" (i.e. the mindset) it is applicable to any sort of drawing, graphics work, etc, much like learning one programming language makes it that much easier to learn many more. Just another set of tools to explore and figure out.
(I am a programmer and a wannabe artist, but I am parroting what much more accomplished artists have told me, so...)
And FYI, even if you never come to anything (and your stuff always look awful) I have found it very theraputic and relaxing to sit down and draw random things using the methods in the above book. Pure right brain expression makes time and worries sort of vanish for you. It's like a mini-vacation.
That's pretty funny (and probably true, your post even puts a picture in my head... *shudder* :)
But there are actually legitimate reasons why people would want those sorts of components. Namely if you are a hardware experimenter. I bought a good number of pieces of "throwaway" equipment at Goodwill Computers in Austin because I wanted to rip a rare component off of it, take its connectors, or even just have a piece of test equipment (one of my projects involved building an ISA bus).
It had nothing to do with the price, I probably would have been willing to pay more than the going rate for an equivalent piece of modern equipment in some cases. Finding a store that actually stocks that stuff is pretty hard these days. After I moved away from Austin I ended up having to wait until I took a visit back there to get some stuff like that!
I'm with ya... got 3 Linux servers in my office and my wife and I both use Macs as desktops now. We were both multi-year Linux desktop users (yeah, laugh it up, wife using Linux by choice, etc etc) but we both gave it up finally.
I got a Blue and White G3 tower from Craigslist for $250 and spent another $200 or so jacking it up to run OSX.3 pretty well. Woo, that's expensive computing there!
What I like to tell people though is that Apple is the BMW of computer equipment. Lots of people love BMW and swear by it, lots of evangelists, lots of people hate 'em (a lot of the time because they're jealous and want one themselves). BMWs cost more than the average car, but for that premium you get a well-tuned, bad-ass car that lasts a long time, a great community, good support and service, etc. Oh and higher resale value (if you don't believe me, again go to Craigslist).
Also like BMW, if you don't want to pay a premium, it's possible to get an entry-level car. You may not get it brand spanking new, but you can still get a pretty good deal on it; once you're "in the club" you'll still find plenty of support for it.
There's also a lot of "dealer stupidity" on both sides like trying to make them only work with Apple-branded DVD and CD burners, just like there's a lot of things where they try to make you buy BMW factory equipment for your car. If you know what you're doing you can usually overclock and work around it if you really want to. Or you can just go with what they give you. I find that in most cases that also works just fine.
*shrug* What you said: use whatever you want to use to get the job done, if it makes you happy.
I also found that the "DDR workout" was really good for helping with my asthma-like symptoms. Much better exercise for the lungs than just sitting around all day in front of a PC...
I of course have to take this opportunity to plug our homebrew music beat game for the Dreamcast, Feet of Fury. Like DDR, but with player vs player modes, the ability to create user Swap CDs of your own music, and of course a Typing of Fury mode!
It's not free software, but I maintain the toolkit used to develop it (KOS) under a BSD license, and this toolkit is used by pretty much all DC homebrewers now (with the notable exceptions of DSNES and SCUMMVM). Two new homebrew games just came out actually... check 'em out here if you have a DC and want some more games: Games Of All Types. Yes, I know what you're thinking.. but that's a safe link ;)
Spend a few minutes talking to any user of an Apple product and you'll understand that Apple Gets It on this topic. Macs, iPods, etc, are all very personable computers, with interfaces designed to feel very organic (like the pulsing, heartbeat-like glow on sleeping monitors / iBooks, rounded edges on windows, shadows, etc).
Dodge also Got It in a big way back with the Neon, though unrelated to cars. Anyone remember the ads that had the Neons bouncing up and down and saying "Hi!"? Anyone who owned a Neon knows that everything down to the horn's sound reinforces that image :) (Yes, I owned one of those too...)
My spam has ramped up again lately, and I'm not even to blame for it -- it was after the Debian project put up the unfiltered mail archives on their web site from a couple of lists I was on that I started getting bombarded. As far as I know those are pretty permanent too, so this address is pretty much destroyed unless I fight the spam flood back.
Yeah, on a good week I get over 1000 spams, which is probably about 80% of my mail. This is on an address that's about 8 years old.
And anyway, to paraphrase Michael Bolton in Office Space, why should I have to change my email address? They're the ones that suck!!
You should always be careful when you squeeze the Sharman!
Ba-dum-psshh.. thanks, I'll be here all evening. Tip your waitresses and try the buffet.
My wife and I use this because we have a basement that's separate from the upstairs of the house (you have to walk outside and back in). Her office is down there, mine is up here, so it's a bit of a pain to talk back and forth.
We also had AIM reliability issues (and I dislike the unencrypted chatter going out and back in) so I set up Jabber on our server here. Works great -- even when the cable modem goes out it's still there. No one else snooping in on the conversations, etc. Also Gaim works with Jabber now (if somewhat buggily) so you don't need to switch clients or anything to add it.
While there might be some niche applications for OGG, it will be useless for the downtrodden masses. Basically the development of OGG has merely an academic value.
Some niche applications? From this and the responses to it, it seems like most people vastly underestimate the amount of applications that use embedded compressed audio (for example, video game soundtracks). Every one of these people/companies stands to benefit from OGG because it's as good as anything else out now quality-wise, but is totally free. We use it in our game projects, it's fantastic. The end-user neither sees nor knows what format the audio is in, unless you expose it for some reason. Less royalties on sound playback means a cheaper end-user price or more features or polish developed into the product for the same price.
That said, it doesn't seem to be catching on too much for people just encoding songs for themselves, but it's even done pretty well there all things considered.
I've read this series several times (generally right before a new book is about to come out, so I can have the full plot in mind) and I have to agree. It seems like all the Jordan fans I know agree as well. We all wait now until the new books hit the used shelf at the book store, and grab it at half price.
I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground (SPOILER:Morgase as a fraidy-cat servant?!:SPOILER) and spawn so many plot threads that he ignores entire major characters per book. And yeah, the several pages about a bath, or a bank of fog, or.... that gets kinda annoying too.
The sucker that I am though, I'm gonna finish reading the series as it comes out just because I want to know what happens. I can make some guesses, but he always seems to have a rabbit to pull out of the hat when you least expect it. :)
That's one thing I'll say about the series that is cool, I read over the WoT FAQ recently before starting reading again, and from the discussions in there and having read the later books already, it was truly amazing to me how early he had started laying down the plots that happen 8000 pages later.
Am I the only one that had Magic Carpet Ride going through my head while reading this article? :D
I kept reading "hybrid rocket motor" as "hyperspace motor"... ack... too much Asimov :)
Yeah, but did your company actually spend a "company lunch" ignoring incoming phone calls to watch Computer Boy? Yeeaaauuh dotcom :)
Am I the only one who burned that Oom-pa-pa song to CD and played it in the car? The artist used to have it on his mp3.com page, but apparently it got removed... there's apparently a "remix" here.
"It's ... Swedish..."