I think that $15 is a bit too much considering the quality and the fact that you have already paid for that music. Also, all you're getting for your money is a cdr. They could a least throw in a poster or t-shirt.
On the other hand, since getting live recordings is not easy in file-sharing networks, it might just work, especially if you go to the concert with a couple of friends and split the cost between you;-)
Sales can also vary wildly depending on how well the band played. If the people love the concert they will probably pay to get to keep the music, even though they might regret it later. Think impulse-buying at the extreme.
Assuming a more reasonable price and half-decent quality, this is something I'm looking forward to.
Being greek, I have had the (mis)fortune of watching the movie with greek subtitling (thank god, we only have voice-overs for cartoons and brazilian soaps). Some of the best parts were:
"Your staff please" (to gandalf) traslated to the equivalent of "Your stuff please".
"A scout" translated to "A boy-scout".
"Our quarry is nowhere to be found" (refering to the orcs) to "Our mine is nowhere to be found".
"halfling" to "half-hobbit" (would that be a quarterling ?)
The adaption of the gollum's "precious" (when refering somebody, not the ring) was hillarious making him come off as almost gay (combine with sam & frodo also caming off pretty gay)
Now, this wasn't some bootleg copy or fan-made subtitles. These were the actual subtitles in the cinema.
Also, my first viewing of the movie was a special showing organized by the local rpg shop. Between the abysmal traslation, the lame dwarf jokes and some over the top scenes (legolas mounting l33t style and skating down the ladder) you had a bunch of rpg/tolkien geeks laughing and yelling every five minutes. I pitty the non-rpg people that found their way into that showing.
You have no choice, GSM is what you will eat, you will eat it long after it's been a cutting edge standard and you will wonder why you are stuck with an aging standard in a world that is spinning faster and faster by the day
Huh ? Most networks in europe are already 2.5G (as in GPRS) and have already got themselves some very expensive lisences for 3rd generation frequencies etc which I guess they will want to use ASAP.
but personally when I think of cell phone I think of phone, not device with sucky ergonomics to type messages in.
Obviously, you have not witnessed a 14 year old kid text message his friends. It's almost like your parents watching you type on a keyboard: they might think it's awkward and slow, but to you it feels natural.
Also, predictive text input like T9 can make your life a lot easier if your spelling is good: instead of pressing each button a number of times depending on which letter you want to get (2 for a, 22 for b, 222 for c...) you press the button just once. The phone then displays the most likely word that can be typed with those keys, updating its guess with each keypress. You can also cycle through the other maches.
Being expensive is certainly a very big factor but it's not the only one. SMS is imho very expensive (8 cents for 160 bytes) but i use it anyway. Why? because i find it useful enough to justify the cost.
Apart from the title there is no mention of 3g in the article. Is the author actually looking for a 3g solution (in which case i can't help because 3g is not available in most of the world, including where i live) or was the 3g buzzword just thrown in for good measure ?
(note: the following info is gsm-only because that's all i'm familiar with)
Getting your mail via webmail can only be done if you have a phone that can surf the web like the nokia 9210i (gsm 900/1800 only, old, no gprs), siemens sx45 (again 900/1800 only, kinda old) or the sony ericsson P800 (which works on gsm 1900 and looks way better than the other two). Apart from the cellphone, make sure your gsm network provider supports gprs, because data transfers without it are more painful and more expensive.
If you only need pop3, all you need is a phone with a pop3/imap client (there tons available). Again make sure your network supports gprs.
Of course you could always get phone with decent data capabilities and a pda. If you really want to impress you friends, make sure they both have bluetooth. (bluetooth products: nokiahp/compaqToshiba
Why is it necessary to check email, send email, surf the web, etc from a cell phone? I still don't understand why phones keep competing to do all of these things. (oh, fp!)
If you need a cell phone, it means you need to communicate on the go. For a lot of people email is an essential part of communication, so email on the cell phone is only natural. Besides, sms is like a crippled veriosn of email, so most geeks would like to have the real thing just for kicks. As for surfing the web, you'll be glad to hear that WAP has failed miserably.
But it said Europian rights were expiaring...Does this mean that you can only sell this music in Europe? Or only music recorded in Europe? Anyone know how this works?
The way europian was bold on the parent, it looked like a spellchecker had highlighted the error. I nearly fell off my chair laughing: an automatic spellchecker ? on slashdot of all places ?!?!
"Doesn't Nokia need to get along with their SyncML support?"
With the kind of market-share that Nokia has (36% last year, with second place being Motorola with 14.4% ),and the fact that a lot of people are jumping on the series60 bandwagon, they don't NEED to do anything. In fact they seem to have a thing for doing things their way and getting away with it.
In any case i would love to see nokia support in isync (and maybe built-in bluetooth in macs)
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it?
It goes like this:
x: here's a CD with mozilla o: what does it do? x: it's an internet browser, like IE, without the pop-up ads, and a mail client like outlook minus the viruses. o: cool, i'll try it!
OK, it's a bit optimistic, but you CAN get your windows-using friends/relatives/coworkers to try mozilla without too much effort. I bet that almost half of them are going to WANT to try it once they hear about pop-up blocking, and a good number of them will like tabbed browsing. They might even like type-ahead or gestures or google search in the location bar.
We are not talking about stuff like standards compatibility, personal data encryption, or being open-sourse that your average windows user could not care less about. Mozilla has cool features, and is reasonably easy to use. Sure, it's a little slow, but that is becoming less and less of a problem, as cpu speeds go up and mozilla gets more optimized/ less bloated (think phoenix).
Getting people to use linux is not as easy by a long shot: young peolpe who have plenty of free time and a desire to try things are instantly put off by the lack of games (and no, things like winex, don't cut it), while older people are VERY afraid to change their working enviroment (learning windows took them long enough, they sure as hell ain't changing now) no matter how much more stable/fast linux is. Plus, when trying to get people to use linux you probably have to help them back-up their files (think mp3), install linux and get it to a working shape, which takes a LOT of time, both yours and theirs.
Mozilla on the other hand takes 2 minutes to install, 5 minutes (with mailnews) to configure and one minute to tell people to middle/ ctrl click to open tabs.
So yes, i do believe that mozilla has an easier job than linux in getting to the end-users desktop.
The problem is not getting oggs in the ipod, the problem is getting the ipod to play them. This would require a firmware upgrade from either apple, or some very smart people.
Because it doesn't look the same in all character codings, and since slashdot doesn't bother to send a codepage, it will look mangled in people who's default codepage is not western(latin 1) or a m$ one (try your post on iso-8859-7 (greek) or iso-8859-15 (latin-9)).
I really have no idea about what charge plans are available in the USA, but here in europe you can get a GSM phone on a "pay as you go" or prepaid plan, where you don't pay a flat monthly fee, but instead buy scratch cards which give you airtime. So, you could buy a cheapass phone for less than $100 and then get a scratch card (sold practically everywhere) whenever you run out of airtime.
There is one small catch: you have to buy a scratch card at least once a year, so you are not disconnected. However that's no big deal, as the cheapest scratch cards cost $5-7. So you are just forced to use a minimum of $5-7 a year. Most people i know use way more than that per month, so it's only an issue if you get a cellphone only for incomming calls (which are free in europe) or emergencies.
(Prices in $ because slashdot would eat € in both POT and HTML)
But will you have to pay royalties if your phone rings in a crowd, and others hear it?
That would be a good thing. I'd love to see the idiots in movie theaters who don't put ther phones on silent/vibra mode pay big $$$ for spoiling my movie;-)
Re:excellent promotion for alternate browsers
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hmm... Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
Of course it can, in fact it even does so now:
Preferences> Advanced > Scripts & Plugins> Open unrequested windows.
I think it works by killing popups that are spawn by events like page loading and exiting, and allowing those that originate from user clicks. So it would work on these ads by dissallowing the evil popup in the first place.
1240000000000 characters * 8 bits/character = 9920000000000 bytes No, that would be 9920000000000 bits. So, all your nubmers below that are off by a factor of 8.
9920000000000 bytes/ 1024000 = 9687500 MB wtf? either use 1048576 to be exact or 1000000 for convenience.
Finally, using a whole byte for a single decimal digit is very very inefficient. A byte can hold 256 values (0-255) while a decimal digit can hold only 10 (0-9).
You could save a lot of space by using the full range of values that a bit can hold. (We can treat the nubmer as an integer since we know beforehand where the decimal point exists)
So the correct amount would be:
1240000000000 characters * log(10) (base 2)/character = 514898854708 bytes (rounding UP to the nearest integer)
Sure, electing representatives who then elect/appoint other officials who elect/appoint other people who... who finally decide about everything, makes you feel like you aren't really doing anything. But Imho, if you want democracy to scale you need to add layers to it. Of course a lot of people disagree with me but while they do a great job of bashing the current situation, I find their proposals to be lacking, absurd or a combination of the two.
I think that Direct democracy is next to impossible these days due to the size of our communities, since getting everydody together to argue and vote about every issue is impossible. You could argue that with computers and the internet you don't need to get everybody together, but you still have another problem: the number of issues to argue about and vote on is too great for a single person to manage even if he was arguing/ voting 24/7.
Finally there's the issue about the ignorant masses that you mention. Giving every fool the right to vote on everything would probably result in a mess VERY quickly. Think taxes for example: most idiots would vote them down to zero and then complain about the lack of public services. Sure, on the long run they might actually get a clue and vote in a reasonable way, but the initial damage might be too great (also, in the long run we are all dead *).
There are also those who oppose democracy in either form but, as with the direct democracy people their solutions are not my cup of coffee.
So, yes I can tell the difference betweed direct and representative democracy, and I sure as hell know that representative democracy is so far from perfect it isn't even funny, but I'm still scratching my head as to what would be better.
The EU
is run by five institutions, each playing a specific role:
* European Parliament (elected by the peoples of the Member States);
* Council of the Union (composed of the governments of the Member States);
* European Commission (driving force and executive body);
* Court of Justice (compliance with the law);
* Court of Auditors (sound and lawful management of the EU budget).
I trust that you'll believe me if I told you that the goverments of the member states are democratically elected.
The comission "has a college of 20 members. The President, the two Vice-Presidents and the 17 other Members of the Commission are chosen for their general competence, and all present guarantees of independence. They have all held political positions in their countries of origin, often at ministerial level.
The Commission is reappointed every five years, within six months of the elections to the European Parliament. This interval gives the new Parliament time to approve the Commission President proposed by the Member States, before the President designate constitutes his future team, in collaboration with the governments of the Member States. Parliament then gives its opinion on the entire college through a process of approval. Once accepted by the Parliament, the new Commission can officially start work the following January. "
That's ok for me, so let's go on to the Court
The judges and the advocates-general are appointed by joint agreement of the governments of the Member States for a renewable term of six years, with partial reappointment every three years. These are members of the highest national judiciary or jurisconsults of recognised competence presenting all the guarantees of independence.
Again, it sounds good to me
Finally, The Court of Auditors comprises 15 members appointed by the Council for a renewable term of six years, ruling unanimously after consultation with the European Parliament.
So the main bodies of the EU are either elected by the people or appointed by elected officials. I really don't see what your problem is.
SearchKing, Oklahoma's premiere parasitic link-farm, is suing Slashdot for slashdoting its servers to decrease SearchKing's speed, crash their servers and inflate their hosting bills. For future reference, the press release itself took 2 minutes to download. And yes, lower numbers are better. Slashdot representative cmdrtaco commented the suit was "-1, flamebait".
But that's not the funny part: the DMCA is wrong and stupid and unfair too, but at least it got passed because of lobbying. This law got passed out of sheer idiocity and ignorance. I shiver at the thought of what would come out if our polititians (i'm greek) where actually bribbed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that $15 is a bit too much considering the quality and the fact that you have already paid for that music. Also, all you're getting for your money is a cdr. They could a least throw in a poster or t-shirt.
;-)
On the other hand, since getting live recordings is not easy in file-sharing networks, it might just work, especially if you go to the concert with a couple of friends and split the cost between you
Sales can also vary wildly depending on how well the band played. If the people love the concert they will probably pay to get to keep the music, even though they might regret it later. Think impulse-buying at the extreme.
Assuming a more reasonable price and half-decent quality, this is something I'm looking forward to.
Now, this wasn't some bootleg copy or fan-made subtitles. These were the actual subtitles in the cinema.
Also, my first viewing of the movie was a special showing organized by the local rpg shop. Between the abysmal traslation, the lame dwarf jokes and some over the top scenes (legolas mounting l33t style and skating down the ladder) you had a bunch of rpg/tolkien geeks laughing and yelling every five minutes. I pitty the non-rpg people that found their way into that showing.
You can buy Apple Bananas which are smaller, fatter and sweeter...
Let me guess, they are called iBananas and instead of yellow, they come in white.
You have no choice, GSM is what you will eat, you will eat it long after it's been a cutting edge standard and you will wonder why you are stuck with an aging standard in a world that is spinning faster and faster by the day
Huh ? Most networks in europe are already 2.5G (as in GPRS) and have already got themselves some very expensive lisences for 3rd generation frequencies etc which I guess they will want to use ASAP.
but personally when I think of cell phone I think of phone, not device with sucky ergonomics to type messages in.
Obviously, you have not witnessed a 14 year old kid text message his friends. It's almost like your parents watching you type on a keyboard: they might think it's awkward and slow, but to you it feels natural.
Also, predictive text input like T9 can make your life a lot easier if your spelling is good: instead of pressing each button a number of times depending on which letter you want to get (2 for a, 22 for b, 222 for c...) you press the button just once. The phone then displays the most likely word that can be typed with those keys, updating its guess with each keypress. You can also cycle through the other maches.
Being expensive is certainly a very big factor but it's not the only one. SMS is imho very expensive (8 cents for 160 bytes) but i use it anyway. Why? because i find it useful enough to justify the cost.
Apart from the title there is no mention of 3g in the article. Is the author actually looking for a 3g solution (in which case i can't help because 3g is not available in most of the world, including where i live) or was the 3g buzzword just thrown in for good measure ?
(note: the following info is gsm-only because that's all i'm familiar with)
Getting your mail via webmail can only be done if you have a phone that can surf the web like the nokia 9210i (gsm 900/1800 only, old, no gprs), siemens sx45 (again 900/1800 only, kinda old) or the sony ericsson P800 (which works on gsm 1900 and looks way better than the other two). Apart from the cellphone, make sure your gsm network provider supports gprs, because data transfers without it are more painful and more expensive.
If you only need pop3, all you need is a phone with a pop3/imap client (there tons available). Again make sure your network supports gprs.
Of course you could always get phone with decent data capabilities and a pda. If you really want to impress you friends, make sure they both have bluetooth. (bluetooth products: nokia hp/compaq Toshiba
Why is it necessary to check email, send email, surf the web, etc from a cell phone? I still don't understand why phones keep competing to do all of these things. (oh, fp!)
If you need a cell phone, it means you need to communicate on the go. For a lot of people email is an essential part of communication, so email on the cell phone is only natural. Besides, sms is like a crippled veriosn of email, so most geeks would like to have the real thing just for kicks. As for surfing the web, you'll be glad to hear that WAP has failed miserably.
Uhm, maybe because font smoothing in the screencap is set for TFT?
But it said Europian rights were expiaring...Does this mean that you can only sell this music in Europe? Or only music recorded in Europe? Anyone know how this works?
The way europian was bold on the parent, it looked like a spellchecker had highlighted the error. I nearly fell off my chair laughing: an automatic spellchecker ? on slashdot of all places ?!?!
"Doesn't Nokia need to get along with their SyncML support?"
,and the fact that a lot of people are jumping on the series60 bandwagon, they don't NEED to do anything. In fact they seem to have a thing for doing things their way and getting away with it.
With the kind of market-share that Nokia has (36% last year, with second place being Motorola with 14.4% )
In any case i would love to see nokia support in isync (and maybe built-in bluetooth in macs)
The last two stories are:
17-inch flat-Panel iMac Dead
MicroBSD 0.6RC2 Released
shouldn't that be:
MicroBSD is Dead (or dying) and
17-inch flat-Panel Released (We've seen dupes, and late posts so why not)
just when you though you got things figured...
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it?
It goes like this:
x: here's a CD with mozilla
o: what does it do?
x: it's an internet browser, like IE, without the pop-up ads, and a mail client like outlook minus the viruses.
o: cool, i'll try it!
OK, it's a bit optimistic, but you CAN get your windows-using friends/relatives/coworkers to try mozilla without too much effort. I bet that almost half of them are going to WANT to try it once they hear about pop-up blocking, and a good number of them will like tabbed browsing. They might even like type-ahead or gestures or google search in the location bar.
We are not talking about stuff like standards compatibility, personal data encryption, or being open-sourse that your average windows user could not care less about. Mozilla has cool features, and is reasonably easy to use. Sure, it's a little slow, but that is becoming less and less of a problem, as cpu speeds go up and mozilla gets more optimized/ less bloated (think phoenix).
Getting people to use linux is not as easy by a long shot: young peolpe who have plenty of free time and a desire to try things are instantly put off by the lack of games (and no, things like winex, don't cut it), while older people are VERY afraid to change their working enviroment (learning windows took them long enough, they sure as hell ain't changing now) no matter how much more stable/fast linux is. Plus, when trying to get people to use linux you probably have to help them back-up their files (think mp3), install linux and get it to a working shape, which takes a LOT of time, both yours and theirs.
Mozilla on the other hand takes 2 minutes to install, 5 minutes (with mailnews) to configure and one minute to tell people to middle/ ctrl click to open tabs.
So yes, i do believe that mozilla has an easier job than linux in getting to the end-users desktop.
The problem is not getting oggs in the ipod, the problem is getting the ipod to play them. This would require a firmware upgrade from either apple, or some very smart people.
Because it doesn't look the same in all character codings, and since slashdot doesn't bother to send a codepage, it will look mangled in people who's default codepage is not western(latin 1) or a m$ one (try your post on iso-8859-7 (greek) or iso-8859-15 (latin-9)).
Also, see here for more fun with the euro sign.
I really have no idea about what charge plans are available in the USA, but here in europe you can get a GSM phone on a "pay as you go" or prepaid plan, where you don't pay a flat monthly fee, but instead buy scratch cards which give you airtime. So, you could buy a cheapass phone for less than $100 and then get a scratch card (sold practically everywhere) whenever you run out of airtime.
There is one small catch: you have to buy a scratch card at least once a year, so you are not disconnected. However that's no big deal, as the cheapest scratch cards cost $5-7. So you are just forced to use a minimum of $5-7 a year. Most people i know use way more than that per month, so it's only an issue if you get a cellphone only for incomming calls (which are free in europe) or emergencies.
(Prices in $ because slashdot would eat € in both POT and HTML)
Typo in slashdot story, news at 11...
hint: registry
But will you have to pay royalties if your phone rings in a crowd, and others hear it?
;-)
That would be a good thing. I'd love to see the idiots in movie theaters who don't put ther phones on silent/vibra mode pay big $$$ for spoiling my movie
Hmm... Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
Of course it can, in fact it even does so now:
Preferences> Advanced > Scripts & Plugins> Open unrequested windows.
I think it works by killing popups that are spawn by events like page loading and exiting, and allowing those that originate from user clicks. So it would work on these ads by dissallowing the evil popup in the first place.
Well, your numbers are quite off:
1240000000000 characters * 8 bits/character = 9920000000000 bytes
No, that would be 9920000000000 bits. So, all your nubmers below that are off by a factor of 8.
9920000000000 bytes/ 1024000 = 9687500 MB
wtf? either use 1048576 to be exact or 1000000 for convenience.
Finally, using a whole byte for a single decimal digit is very very inefficient. A byte can hold 256 values (0-255) while a decimal digit can hold only 10 (0-9).
You could save a lot of space by using the full range of values that a bit can hold. (We can treat the nubmer as an integer since we know beforehand where the decimal point exists)
So the correct amount would be:
1240000000000 characters * log(10) (base 2)/character = 514898854708 bytes (rounding UP to the nearest integer)
So, you'd need just a little less than 515GB
Sure, electing representatives who then elect/appoint other officials who elect/appoint other people who ... who finally decide about everything, makes you feel like you aren't really doing anything. But Imho, if you want democracy to scale you need to add layers to it. Of course a lot of people disagree with me but while they do a great job of bashing the current situation, I find their proposals to be lacking, absurd or a combination of the two.
I think that Direct democracy is next to impossible these days due to the size of our communities, since getting everydody together to argue and vote about every issue is impossible. You could argue that with computers and the internet you don't need to get everybody together, but you still have another problem: the number of issues to argue about and vote on is too great for a single person to manage even if he was arguing/ voting 24/7.
Finally there's the issue about the ignorant masses that you mention. Giving every fool the right to vote on everything would probably result in a mess VERY quickly. Think taxes for example: most idiots would vote them down to zero and then complain about the lack of public services. Sure, on the long run they might actually get a clue and vote in a reasonable way, but the initial damage might be too great (also, in the long run we are all dead *).
There are also those who oppose democracy in either form but, as with the direct democracy people their solutions are not my cup of coffee.
So, yes I can tell the difference betweed direct and representative democracy, and I sure as hell know that representative democracy is so far from perfect it isn't even funny, but I'm still scratching my head as to what would be better.
* John Maynard Keynes
and the EU isn't even democratically elected!
ok, I'll bite.
The EU is run by five institutions, each playing a specific role:
* European Parliament (elected by the peoples of the Member States);
* Council of the Union (composed of the governments of the Member States);
* European Commission (driving force and executive body);
* Court of Justice (compliance with the law);
* Court of Auditors (sound and lawful management of the EU budget).
I trust that you'll believe me if I told you that the goverments of the member states are democratically elected.
The comission "has a college of 20 members. The President, the two Vice-Presidents and the 17 other Members of the Commission are chosen for their general competence, and all present guarantees of independence. They have all held political positions in their countries of origin, often at ministerial level.
The Commission is reappointed every five years, within six months of the elections to the European Parliament. This interval gives the new Parliament time to approve the Commission President proposed by the Member States, before the President designate constitutes his future team, in collaboration with the governments of the Member States. Parliament then gives its opinion on the entire college through a process of approval. Once accepted by the Parliament, the new Commission can officially start work the following January. "
That's ok for me, so let's go on to the Court
The judges and the advocates-general are appointed by joint agreement of the governments of the Member States for a renewable term of six years, with partial reappointment every three years. These are members of the highest national judiciary or jurisconsults of recognised competence presenting all the guarantees of independence.
Again, it sounds good to me
Finally, The Court of Auditors comprises 15 members appointed by the Council for a renewable term of six years, ruling unanimously after consultation with the European Parliament.
So the main bodies of the EU are either elected by the people or appointed by elected officials. I really don't see what your problem is.
I think that by the time that phoenix reaches 1.0 it will be bigger than mozilla.
SearchKing, Oklahoma's premiere parasitic link-farm, is suing Slashdot for slashdoting its servers to decrease SearchKing's speed, crash their servers and inflate their hosting bills. For future reference, the press release itself took 2 minutes to download. And yes, lower numbers are better. Slashdot representative cmdrtaco commented the suit was "-1, flamebait".
Yes it is wrong. and stupid, and unfair.
But that's not the funny part: the DMCA is wrong and stupid and unfair too, but at least it got passed because of lobbying. This law got passed out of sheer idiocity and ignorance. I shiver at the thought of what would come out if our polititians (i'm greek) where actually bribbed.
Also, about 60 years ago, IBM and the German goverment got together and it wasn't exactly what you would call a Good Thing.