While i still am able to convert my own CD's to MP3 and use them on every device i have.. it is wonderfull magic.. its just different.
Are you asserting I can't do this? All of my music is DRM-free MP3s I ripped either from FreeBSD or iTunes and use on whatever device I choose. Have been for a decade now.
Most of the rest of what you wrote is bordering on incomprehensible, so I won't even try.
Until the media companies decide that constitutes copyright infringement.:(
Cue the re-opening of SeaLand as an off-site data store until the next 'fire'.
You know, no matter what the SeaLand people say, if they ever became pesky enough they would discover they have nowhere near the autonomy or legal protections they claim. It just doesn't work that way.
Absolutely no sovereign state recognizes them. If push came to shove, they're going to get stepped on like a bug.
Under the Patriot act, they can basically force US owned companies to hand over anything they like. As a result, companies here in Canada often can't use something hosted in the US (or owned by a US company) as it basically violates our legal protections. Nothing from the Federal government can go there, and likely some kinds of business run risks.
If you put data into the cloud, you lose control over who has access to it -- especially with multi-national companies being involved. If your data lands in a place where the government has given themselves ready access, there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Companies putting data into the cloud do so at some risk.
In short, the finest technology from the 70s is back:-P
*laugh* Why, yes. Now someone will likely point out that back in the 60s they had this as well.
That, or that they didn't have terminals in the 60s, and they had to toggle in the boot sequence on the front of the machine before they could even begin to start feeding the punch cards. Up hill, both ways. In the dark. And they had to get their own firewood to fire up the tape drives.;-)
Everything is rented. Why get fleeced once when you can get fleeced monthly.
Expect Microsoft and everybody else to copy this right away and get on with the fleecing.
iAppliance based. Run your iApp (be it movie player, image editor, skype or game) on any of your iPad/iPod/iPhone/iMac/iMini/iWhatever. Talk on your iPhone then when you get to work it shifts to your iMac. Play an iGame iApp on your iPad and when you get home shift it to your 42" iTV iAppliance.
In the 80's and 90's, Xerox used to call that ubiquitous computing. And, it's actually a cool idea if it ever happens.
Safety. Our walled garden is totally secure. All your interactions are done through iApps.
When Microsoft steal this idea, you will be locked in the garden with the land-mines and kept in with razor-wire. Walking on the grass will be prohibited. Occasionally, wolves will get in.
The reality is, everybody is likely going to try this. The user experience and amount of lock-in will differ. I bet MBAs all over the world are salivating as to how they can move absolutely everything to a subscription model, and if you stop paying, you lose all of the data you've ever had. Don't think this is unique to Apple.
Software is simply overpriced, vendors have been getting away with charging ridiculous amounts for years because they're greedy. Software sales are 99% profit
Horseshit. Pure horseshit.
Having worked as a professional developer for 13 years before my current job, unless you have a stable codebase which nobody is changing, you have expenses for developers, QA, documentation and tech writers, sales, marketing... plus you have to pay the accountants, lawyers, admin staff, IT staff, office costs, and executive bonuses.
There is no freaking way that software sales are 99% profit -- nowhere close. Building commercial software is an expensive, and resource intensive task. Anybody saying otherwise has likely never done it.
Just because some people can afford to/are willing to give away their labors for free (and I'm certainly a fan of free software) doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it. These people are either doing it because it's fun, or because they're students. In either case, they still need to pay their bills and couldn't afford to write free software if they weren't getting paid from something else (or had nothing better to do with their time).
How many of you have spent some time on Pirate Bay seeking torrents for CS5 because whilst you're honest, there is no way you can afford $$$$.$$ for your tools?
And how many of you who have gone out of your way to download CS5 really need it? I'm betting most people who think they "need" this are just downloading it because they want it -- you could probably use Inkscape or GIMP for most everything you do. If you're a business, buy the damned thing and write it off on your taxes... if you're playing with it because you think it's fun or cool, well, that doesn't mean you're entitled to it.
This will force greedy publishers to produce better more reliable software
This isn't about "greedy publishers". Special purpose software used for very heavy lifting is expensive to develop, and has a relatively small legitimate market, so the cost is going to be higher because there's fewer people likely to ever be buying it. Things which take years of development and millions of dollars to produce aren't cheap or free because you want them to be.
Small, lightweight software which does one or two things well and in a small footprint is an entirely different animal. However, what people are discovering, is they didn't really need to have the big honking general purpose software for many things.
This is the way forward, but not because it's going to make specialized software like CS5 cheap -- but because it's going to make small, useful utilities cheap and available.
I've noticed something wonderful about the whole "app" phenomenon, something I haven't seen in a decade of working in IT.
Lightweight apps.
I couldn't agree with this more -- small, simple apps that do one thing. Do it exceedingly well, and do it quickly is a huge thing. I've got more apps installed on my iPad than I typically do on my Windows machines -- largely because they're small, and I've only been downloading the free ones so there's no real cost to test drive something to see if it might be fun/useful/cool.
Yes, I realize that "fat apps" will not be replaced anytime soon by "thin apps", but it could force people to really decide if the fat app is worth the headache and expense.
And, the small apps aren't really a substitute for the fat apps. For me, gaming left me behind years ago. I have neither the patience, nor the manual dexterity to operate a modern game which needs 15+ buttons and all of that. However, on my iPad,I have a fairly large amount of small, easy (and largely goofy) games that keep my attention. I play them for a little bit and put them down. I'm not investing hundreds of hours in them (OK, Pocket Frogs so far might be up into that range), I'm not doing a level grind, and if I stop playing it or give up on it -- I'm not really out anything.
If instead of needing bleeding-edge hardware, gobs of diskspace, and way too much investment of time and money we are going to get stripped down apps, which focus on simple play/actions/whatever, and getting by with much more basic interfaces... well, like you, I'm all for it.
There is always going to be special purpose software, which has big requirements and you simply can't do without. However, there's definitely a parallel (or lower-end) market for these kinds of things.
I wonder if this might not balance out somewhat -- before you had to make physical boxed copies, and put it into as many stores as possible. People had to go out looking for it (or order it) and all that.
The App Store seems to provide you with a larger possible base, lower distribution costs as you don't need to make the physical boxes, and a ready distribution model.
Not saying this will help all software, but the App Store seems to give you a better chance at Economies of Scale than before. Hell, I see software on the App Store for iPads that runs $49.99 or $99.99, possibly even more. Specialty software will always run you a fair bit, but for some software shops, they could have a far larger market using this.
Really silly q, but why do the scripts seem to be just so Windows based/Windows friendly?
Because it's just so damned easy? Sadly, some of the "user friendly" settings Microsoft has done over the years makes some of this stuff happen pretty easily -- stuff like hiding the extension of well known documents so that evil-virus.jpg.exe looks like evil-virus.jpg.
Hell, at one point, Microsoft made an urban myth true -- that you could get a virus/malware without even clicking on it, just by reading the email that contained it as they decided to just go ahead and run it for you. Up until then, those of us in tech were telling our family who forwarded all of the urban legends that it simply wasn't true -- and then one day it was.
Microsoft has gotten a whole lot better over the years, but sometimes in order to "simplify" things for the user, they do something fairly boneheaded that ends up messing up everybody. Sometimes, the training wheels get caught in your pants and do more damage than if you'd only fallen and skinned your knee.:-P
Is it so hard to get Mac OS X, Linux or other OS's to run something perl like via a click click of something cute in a email?
Are you feeling left out or something? I can understand pissing and moaning that people don't make games and the like for Linux, but that the malware doesn't work? I don't get that one.
Part of me also suspects that it's a lot harder to encode that since you'd need to be executing code within the email (before anybody clicked on anything) to determine the platform and possibly actions. I don't think that's really feasible for the most part -- but I'm sure it's possible using something obscure. I just mostly suspect it's not worth the effort -- if 90%+ of people are running Windows, why go to the trouble for the rest to spread a virus?
The difference is, the words "checkers" and "chess" do not have any other meanings in the English language besides the games, so there is no ambiguity.
I'm still having a hard time understanding what technologies exist in 7 that don't in XP AND are something I ( or a business would need ).
I suspect just overall hardening and robustness.
I've bee running Vista for just about 2 years, and with a big enough machine that was new to Vista, it has been a good experience.
A friend has been raving about Windows 7, saying he found it less confusing than Vista, but as stable as he's ever seen anything. I've yet to try it, but I'm contemplating upgrading (and, if anybody cares to provide some handy links on doing an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, I'm all ears)... as much as I used to really hate Windows back in the day, I've been finding it to be a pretty decent OS -- granted, it hosts Firefox, iTunes, and VMWare where I do my "real" work, so it's mostly a desktop OS. But, it hasn't suffered from any of the warts I remember from past versions.
The only reason to upgrade from XP is because security updates are due to end soon. And while that's a valid reason, most businesses are going to be asking themselves why they should upgrade if that's the only reason.
Well, the reality of it is, XP will be EOL before long, and software updates won't necessarily support it. Sadly, some form of upgrade is more or less inevitable.
Having worked with upgrades in the past, if you wait too long at an enterprise level, upgrading becomes hard -- though, sometimes things like being tied to IE 6 prevent that, which really sucks.
I honestly can't give you an compelling reasons, but IME, if your machines are up to the task, the upgrade provides an overall 'better' experience.
I guess the problem with this kind of list is that _everything_ has an extreme. Pick something you like, and some millionaire probably has an obscenely expensive version of it. This list was mostly the extreme versions of things I have no interest in.
And that applies even if the symptoms are clearly exacerbated by real physical stimuli (such as milk).
In this case, the only reason I knew about the milk is someone (as a rather cruel prank) spiked something with dairy and said it didn't have any. Thirty minutes later, there was rather a mad sprint.
I'm disinclined to believe that something you aren't aware of can lead to a psychosomatic response.
I also don't know how they got the study past the scientific review board, which I thought, would laugh them out of the room.
Well, it's not like he endangered the placebo group any more than the control group.
I should think it would be an interesting conversation... "I'm going to do nothing with one group, and tell the other group I'm giving them a placebo and then I'm gonna see what happens".
Fun job though, medical studies without medicine.:-P
I can't prove it, but I suspect that a lot of modern chronic illnesses are psychosomatic and are a consequence of loneliness.
I can't speak to all chronic illness... but I've know at least two people with IBS. Trust me, loneliness wasn't the cause of it in either case. Milk, however, in one case had observable and, er, 'dramatic' results in a very short time.
It's easy to dismiss this stuff as purely psychosomatic, I'm just not sure that is always (or even mostly) the case. In its early stages, Multiple Sclerosis is pretty hard to diagnose and can be chalked up to all sorts of things.
You have to start with the premise that, generally speaking, people actually experience this stuff, even if you can't explain why.
So they expect it to still work. And because they expect it to work it does.
You know, if you could induce the placebo effect like that, it would be fairly astounding because the placebo effect is often as effective (or more) than the medicine. I suspect it would also turn modern medicine on its ear. "You're better because you want to be better" becomes something for some pretty serious investigation.
Part of me wonders if the patients understood this -- they were described as "like sugar pills", and it said placebo on the pill -- but it's possible that they just didn't realize that they were literally being given nothing whatsoever in terms of medicine.
This part intrigues me... "these findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual"... that would seem to imply that the human brain has a far greater capacity for fixing itself than Western medicine believes, no? At least, it might. At which point, prayer and dance have as much "medical" validity as actual medicine -- at least, for some conditions; if I'm in a car accident, I still want to see a trauma surgeon if need be.
Heck, leeching was considered medically useless for a long time too. And then there's that whole maggots thing.
I think the underlying mechanism for this (or at least explanation for it) is fairly interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you asserting I can't do this? All of my music is DRM-free MP3s I ripped either from FreeBSD or iTunes and use on whatever device I choose. Have been for a decade now.
Most of the rest of what you wrote is bordering on incomprehensible, so I won't even try.
No, they used the ELEVATOR!
Daleks are not challenged by stairs.
Until the media companies decide that constitutes copyright infringement. :(
You know, no matter what the SeaLand people say, if they ever became pesky enough they would discover they have nowhere near the autonomy or legal protections they claim. It just doesn't work that way.
Absolutely no sovereign state recognizes them. If push came to shove, they're going to get stepped on like a bug.
And, really, only if it was heavily encrypted.
Under the Patriot act, they can basically force US owned companies to hand over anything they like. As a result, companies here in Canada often can't use something hosted in the US (or owned by a US company) as it basically violates our legal protections. Nothing from the Federal government can go there, and likely some kinds of business run risks.
If you put data into the cloud, you lose control over who has access to it -- especially with multi-national companies being involved. If your data lands in a place where the government has given themselves ready access, there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Companies putting data into the cloud do so at some risk.
For a second, I thought you wrote, "nimbus".
What the heck does Harry Potter have to do with this? ;-)
*laugh* Why, yes. Now someone will likely point out that back in the 60s they had this as well.
That, or that they didn't have terminals in the 60s, and they had to toggle in the boot sequence on the front of the machine before they could even begin to start feeding the punch cards. Up hill, both ways. In the dark. And they had to get their own firewood to fire up the tape drives. ;-)
Expect Microsoft and everybody else to copy this right away and get on with the fleecing.
In the 80's and 90's, Xerox used to call that ubiquitous computing. And, it's actually a cool idea if it ever happens.
When Microsoft steal this idea, you will be locked in the garden with the land-mines and kept in with razor-wire. Walking on the grass will be prohibited. Occasionally, wolves will get in.
The reality is, everybody is likely going to try this. The user experience and amount of lock-in will differ. I bet MBAs all over the world are salivating as to how they can move absolutely everything to a subscription model, and if you stop paying, you lose all of the data you've ever had. Don't think this is unique to Apple.
We used to call them X-terminals.
Diskless, boots off the network and connects to a central machine. In this case, the "central" is "distributed", and it may or may not have a disk.
In short, the finest technology from the 80s is back. :-P
Horseshit. Pure horseshit.
Having worked as a professional developer for 13 years before my current job, unless you have a stable codebase which nobody is changing, you have expenses for developers, QA, documentation and tech writers, sales, marketing ... plus you have to pay the accountants, lawyers, admin staff, IT staff, office costs, and executive bonuses.
There is no freaking way that software sales are 99% profit -- nowhere close. Building commercial software is an expensive, and resource intensive task. Anybody saying otherwise has likely never done it.
Just because some people can afford to/are willing to give away their labors for free (and I'm certainly a fan of free software) doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it. These people are either doing it because it's fun, or because they're students. In either case, they still need to pay their bills and couldn't afford to write free software if they weren't getting paid from something else (or had nothing better to do with their time).
And how many of you who have gone out of your way to download CS5 really need it? I'm betting most people who think they "need" this are just downloading it because they want it -- you could probably use Inkscape or GIMP for most everything you do. If you're a business, buy the damned thing and write it off on your taxes ... if you're playing with it because you think it's fun or cool, well, that doesn't mean you're entitled to it.
This isn't about "greedy publishers". Special purpose software used for very heavy lifting is expensive to develop, and has a relatively small legitimate market, so the cost is going to be higher because there's fewer people likely to ever be buying it. Things which take years of development and millions of dollars to produce aren't cheap or free because you want them to be.
Small, lightweight software which does one or two things well and in a small footprint is an entirely different animal. However, what people are discovering, is they didn't really need to have the big honking general purpose software for many things.
This is the way forward, but not because it's going to make specialized software like CS5 cheap -- but because it's going to make small, useful utilities cheap and available.
I couldn't agree with this more -- small, simple apps that do one thing. Do it exceedingly well, and do it quickly is a huge thing. I've got more apps installed on my iPad than I typically do on my Windows machines -- largely because they're small, and I've only been downloading the free ones so there's no real cost to test drive something to see if it might be fun/useful/cool.
And, the small apps aren't really a substitute for the fat apps. For me, gaming left me behind years ago. I have neither the patience, nor the manual dexterity to operate a modern game which needs 15+ buttons and all of that. However, on my iPad,I have a fairly large amount of small, easy (and largely goofy) games that keep my attention. I play them for a little bit and put them down. I'm not investing hundreds of hours in them (OK, Pocket Frogs so far might be up into that range), I'm not doing a level grind, and if I stop playing it or give up on it -- I'm not really out anything.
If instead of needing bleeding-edge hardware, gobs of diskspace, and way too much investment of time and money we are going to get stripped down apps, which focus on simple play/actions/whatever, and getting by with much more basic interfaces ... well, like you, I'm all for it.
There is always going to be special purpose software, which has big requirements and you simply can't do without. However, there's definitely a parallel (or lower-end) market for these kinds of things.
I wonder if this might not balance out somewhat -- before you had to make physical boxed copies, and put it into as many stores as possible. People had to go out looking for it (or order it) and all that.
The App Store seems to provide you with a larger possible base, lower distribution costs as you don't need to make the physical boxes, and a ready distribution model.
Not saying this will help all software, but the App Store seems to give you a better chance at Economies of Scale than before. Hell, I see software on the App Store for iPads that runs $49.99 or $99.99, possibly even more. Specialty software will always run you a fair bit, but for some software shops, they could have a far larger market using this.
Because it's just so damned easy? Sadly, some of the "user friendly" settings Microsoft has done over the years makes some of this stuff happen pretty easily -- stuff like hiding the extension of well known documents so that evil-virus.jpg.exe looks like evil-virus.jpg.
Hell, at one point, Microsoft made an urban myth true -- that you could get a virus/malware without even clicking on it, just by reading the email that contained it as they decided to just go ahead and run it for you. Up until then, those of us in tech were telling our family who forwarded all of the urban legends that it simply wasn't true -- and then one day it was.
Microsoft has gotten a whole lot better over the years, but sometimes in order to "simplify" things for the user, they do something fairly boneheaded that ends up messing up everybody. Sometimes, the training wheels get caught in your pants and do more damage than if you'd only fallen and skinned your knee. :-P
Are you feeling left out or something? I can understand pissing and moaning that people don't make games and the like for Linux, but that the malware doesn't work? I don't get that one.
Part of me also suspects that it's a lot harder to encode that since you'd need to be executing code within the email (before anybody clicked on anything) to determine the platform and possibly actions. I don't think that's really feasible for the most part -- but I'm sure it's possible using something obscure. I just mostly suspect it's not worth the effort -- if 90%+ of people are running Windows, why go to the trouble for the rest to spread a virus?
Looks like the site has been eclipsed already. :(
Oh? Really
Both words have more than one meaning in English. You should stop making random assertions like that.
I suspect just overall hardening and robustness.
I've bee running Vista for just about 2 years, and with a big enough machine that was new to Vista, it has been a good experience.
A friend has been raving about Windows 7, saying he found it less confusing than Vista, but as stable as he's ever seen anything. I've yet to try it, but I'm contemplating upgrading (and, if anybody cares to provide some handy links on doing an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, I'm all ears) ... as much as I used to really hate Windows back in the day, I've been finding it to be a pretty decent OS -- granted, it hosts Firefox, iTunes, and VMWare where I do my "real" work, so it's mostly a desktop OS. But, it hasn't suffered from any of the warts I remember from past versions.
Well, the reality of it is, XP will be EOL before long, and software updates won't necessarily support it. Sadly, some form of upgrade is more or less inevitable.
Having worked with upgrades in the past, if you wait too long at an enterprise level, upgrading becomes hard -- though, sometimes things like being tied to IE 6 prevent that, which really sucks.
I honestly can't give you an compelling reasons, but IME, if your machines are up to the task, the upgrade provides an overall 'better' experience.
Cheers
The article says it's an exoskeleton. The LandWalker article says it's an exoskeleton ... what's the difference? No working arms?
I'd probably buy that distinction.
Try this. ;-)
I got a cougar. Would definitely buy again. :-P
But .... but ... exoskeleton!! Powered freaking exoskeleton.
Of course, I'd need the bigger LandWalker version, but it comes with guns, so that's OK.
Well, it's like the old joke ...
What's the difference between a software salesman and a used car salesman? The used car salesman knows he's lying to you. :-P
In this case, the only reason I knew about the milk is someone (as a rather cruel prank) spiked something with dairy and said it didn't have any. Thirty minutes later, there was rather a mad sprint.
I'm disinclined to believe that something you aren't aware of can lead to a psychosomatic response.
Just sayin'.
Well, it's not like he endangered the placebo group any more than the control group.
I should think it would be an interesting conversation ... "I'm going to do nothing with one group, and tell the other group I'm giving them a placebo and then I'm gonna see what happens".
Fun job though, medical studies without medicine. :-P
I can't speak to all chronic illness ... but I've know at least two people with IBS. Trust me, loneliness wasn't the cause of it in either case. Milk, however, in one case had observable and, er, 'dramatic' results in a very short time.
It's easy to dismiss this stuff as purely psychosomatic, I'm just not sure that is always (or even mostly) the case. In its early stages, Multiple Sclerosis is pretty hard to diagnose and can be chalked up to all sorts of things.
You have to start with the premise that, generally speaking, people actually experience this stuff, even if you can't explain why.
You know, if you could induce the placebo effect like that, it would be fairly astounding because the placebo effect is often as effective (or more) than the medicine. I suspect it would also turn modern medicine on its ear. "You're better because you want to be better" becomes something for some pretty serious investigation.
Part of me wonders if the patients understood this -- they were described as "like sugar pills", and it said placebo on the pill -- but it's possible that they just didn't realize that they were literally being given nothing whatsoever in terms of medicine.
This part intrigues me ... "these findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual" ... that would seem to imply that the human brain has a far greater capacity for fixing itself than Western medicine believes, no? At least, it might. At which point, prayer and dance have as much "medical" validity as actual medicine -- at least, for some conditions; if I'm in a car accident, I still want to see a trauma surgeon if need be.
Heck, leeching was considered medically useless for a long time too. And then there's that whole maggots thing.
I think the underlying mechanism for this (or at least explanation for it) is fairly interesting.