If you're willing to use a mac, this would take maybe 15 minutes or less of applescripting iTunes and quicktime player.
Import the song into iTunes repeat until end-of-song select random song chunk paste into quicktime player end repeat save quicktime player document import back into iTunes
From what I understand, you can sort of do the same thing with that iTunes COM library?
One great thing that Engst mentioned (but it was sort of glossed over by the writer) was this: these e-things are promoted in Tidbits.
This gives them -the- major advantage over most eBooks: PR.
What people seem to have forgotten (though it was talked about a lot) is what publishing houses and music companies have: marketing channels. Marketing channels are huge, expensive to build, and expensive to maintain. But they're really the only barrier to entry in a lot of markets...but that's a big barrier.
How do you get your book noticed? Word of mouth? Internet newsgroups? Maybe you send free copies to book clubs or the local radio station?
Without the majors, your life will be tougher.
The companies that are succeeding are the ones that are trying to become marketing channels. Tidbits is one. google, of all things, is another. eBay is one. iTMS is one. Even O'Reilly is one - all the hot tech comes out in their books first.
The question is, how can you tell which companies are doing this? I don't think about it a lot, so I don't know the answer. It would be nice to hear other companies that are channels.
The problem with Apple licensing wasn't that the hardware was incompatible (though it was - the Mac back then had a huge ROM, 1MB or so, and most screens were CGA).
The problem was that PC users were dicks. Let me rephrase that - "mice are for wimps." The culture of business IT back then was "macho at all cost."
At the time, there was no client-server, no distributed systems. Computer people were basically mainframe guys. And what self-respecting mainframe guy back in the day wanted a GUI? Easy-to-use software? Interactive terminals?
Every computer that was easy-to-use was one more nail in the mainframe coffin, and a knife in the heart of batch job bozos. Would they actually buy something that made them obsolete?
Nope!
PCs were non-threatening things that they could turn into dumb terminals (can anyone say TN3270?).
Give an IT guy back then a Mac, and he'd freak out. It was only until Windows 95 that GUIs became "acceptable" to corporate users. Win 31 worked, and WfW sort of worked, but it was Win95 that brought the GUI to IT.
Before then, IT people would rather have eaten their left testicle than buy a GUI-based computer, much less a Mac. Let's get real.
If Apple had licensed the Mac, they would have tanked, pure and simple...much like the way Power Computing almost destroyed Apple back in the day.
It's amazing that people that cry "licensing" don't remember the times. It was 15-20 years ago, but still, you'd think that some of them would have exited puberty by then.
There's a fallacy embedded in the above: that a product is/can be perfect.
It's a common mistake in the technical world. Perfect = no bugs.
It's even more common in the intellectual worlds of academia and reportage. A perfect product is one you can't complain about, does everything you want, that's free. Heck, maybe it should perform fellatio and cunnilingus on demand.
In the real world, there's no such thing as a perfect product. There are only iterations of a product as you tweak it to your customers. There's learning and refining what you have, and understanding how and why people are buying and using your product.
The most important thing you can do is release a product, because that's the only way you'll know if your ideas work or not. The feedback you get is invaluable.
And it's not like the iPod wasn't a "perfect product." It had no serious bugs. It had a great interface. It was easy to use. Every generation after as tweaked it, but the core is the same.
Dell makes more money selling PCs, etc at a low cost than HP does doing everything it does. In fact, Dell probably sells its PCs at a price lower than HP's acquisition cost...and still makes money.
What you're saying is that HP couldn't compete on hardware, so it bought compaq to get into the higher-margin services business. If that was the case, then...why didn't HP just spin off the printer business (which is what Hewlett wanted) and keep going into services & hardware?
Because, like the Dell guy says, printing is subsidizing everything else.
Oh, and IBM didn't transform itself by buying also-ran competitors. It transformed itself by listening to its customers and providing what they needed & wanted.
What they do is keep it around, and you can call in after the auction to buy bunches of unsold items at a price.
For best results, do the webcast or go in person. There are massive deals to be had. At one auction I attended, a loaded Sun E450 (quad proc, 1gb ram, lots o disk) went for $900 + buyers premium of around 16%.
The downside to having many lots is the auctioneer will sometimes collapse identical lots into one to save time. If you've got the cash, it's a great way to get great deals. You can also propose lots, like "I'll take the next 10 sun boxes for $8000 total."
Auctions are a real trip, but you have to know how much stuff is worth, definitely. I've seen things go for above-retail prices, so be warned.
You know, it was the first Bush administration that caused this by failing to insert large, autonomous dynamos into the earth's crust. This would have stabilized the magnetic shift by generating huge electromagnetic fields.
Likewise, by killing the Texan supercollider the government stopped all research into magnetic field movements. This research would not only have helped in our understanding of magnetic fields, but would also have helped in the current War on Terror by providing valuable information on how subatomic particles can affect semi-psychotic behaviors.
And by ignoring the Kyoto protocols, the US has selfishly allowed its atmosphere to heat up, no doubt affecting the internal stability of the Earth's iron core, making the situation worse.
Plus, clear-cut logging no doubt has caused rotational differentials across the US and the world (due to less air resistence), placing undue stress on the earth's core.
Lastly, by killing millions, if not billions, of creatures, modern civilization has hastened the onset of this problem by robbing the world of counterbalancing "life" or "female" energy, energy that would have counteracted the obviously "male" and "destructive" magnetic shift.
PBS is about as non-commercial as Fox. The big difference is they call them "sponsors" and put them at the beginning or end of the program. Oh yeah, they also get tax dollars.
Let's face it, PBS could survive on basic (or pay) cable if it wanted to. But there's no reason for it to, with its mouth firmly planted on the government's teat. Plus they'd have to give up the tweed, which would be devastating.
Why aren't environmentalists up-in-arms about this type of arctic drilling? This is a pure, untouched ecosystem that's going to be contaminated by people for no real reason except for curiosity.
Don't those 500,000 year old microbes have just as many rights as the spotted owl, salmon, and those lizards in the West somewhere?
Stop this microbe genocide now, and prevent all drilling - whether it's for commerce (oil) or science!
Instead of indexing all the pages you've read (and allowing you to search backwards), keyword/match the current page and find pages that you might be interested in given the page you're reading now.
Basically you'd make the web a realtime wiki experience...or something like that. It might be pretty confusing, but it might also be really kind of neat.
One problem with the web is that it tends to remove the element of surprise (or coincidence, or accident) from the content you see. Unlike browsing in a bookstore, where all kinds of things are squished together, with the web you only see what's on your site. The above might make browsing a bit more cross-referenced, and provide some interesting contexts that would be too hard to do by yourself:|
What I'm wondering is this: where is Dell going to sell the submitted iPods? Are they just going to bury them out back?
It would be kind of embarassing if they made more money selling the returned iPods than the Dell DJ, wouldn't it? I know I'd buy a submitted iPod from Dell before I bought a Dell DJ.
How about that for morality and ethics in the world of reporters?
"I reasoned that a man would have been just as competitive as I am, and guessed that I was going to betray him on the ninth round--so he would have kept all $30 to himself on the eighth round. At least, most of the ones I know would have, although maybe a sample consisting mostly of journalists isn't entirely representative."
These tests would be an excellent way to see the norms inside each profession. This sort of attitude is the same one routinely lambasted by the press, but in the context of business people. If the CEO of a company had said that he'd be a heartless capitalist. But it turns out that he's not heartless, the reporter is just jealous.
That's what Apple says, but be leery of claims like this. Sony and Nintendo said the same thing about their console hardware, just to scare others off of the market. In fact, they made money off their consoles, just not very much. MS then entered the market, and really lost money on the consoles. Successful FUD!
Companies say "loss leader" in an attempt to invalidate the business assumptions of competitors. If you think about it, it's unlikely that iTMS is losing money. It's more likely that they're not making much money.
That phrase is working, though. The "iTMS is not a money maker" is driving others in the industry crazy, because competitors think they need hardware/iPod equivalents. Plus it's being parroted by members of the general public (ie: right here).
Dude, look how far the computer industry came when competition dried up. With the advent of Windows, Office, and the x86/PC architecture, computers became standardized enough that it was adopted by hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
It's funny, but Apple is getting into the consumer electronics business at a much deeper level than, say, Dell or Gateway.
When Dell or Gateway say "we're in the consumer electronics business," what they mean is "we sell consumer electronics." They compete against Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. That's a hard business to be in.
When Microsoft says "we're in the consumer electronics business," what they mean is "we make the software that allows someone else to make consumer electronic devices, and take a cut." Nobody likes this because nobody wants to pay someone else for their IP - and nobody wants to fund a competitor, either (ie: Microsoft).
When Apple says "we're in the consumer electronics business," they actually design, build, and sell products that are end-user targeted. They're like Panasonic, Pioneer, or Sony, in that they actually create and sell products. Except that the manufacturers don't have their own stores, but whatever.
What Apple's done is taken control of personal music distribution. What that means is they're an end-to-end solution provider of music to the individual. Buy music from iTMS, play music on your machine with iTMS, play music on your stereo with Airport Express, and bring your music with you with the iPod. Now with the BMW thing, you integrate your iPod with your car (at a minimal level).
Likely the next iPod will be an Airport Express-enabled, so you can wirelessly stream music from your iPod to your stereo. Then there are even more gadgets and doodads that extend the music "ecosystem," to use a somewhat abused word.
It'll be an interesting to see what's coming up...those guys are full of surprises, which is what invention (and innovation) is all about.
Doesn't matter if the DNS is closed or not
on
Open Source Life?
·
· Score: 1
If the DNA is "open," which it is, then it's just as targetable (maybe more so) than a "closed" version. The only difference would be a bit of time to sequence the "closed" version.
Come on, people. This is stupid. The word "open" is such a political term now that it has no meaning. "Public Domain" used to be what "Open Source" is now, except there was no way to make money off of it.
Open DNA? Closed DNA? Just sequence the freaking thing and your "Closed DNA" is open - to you.
And in the case stated, if someone wiped out the wheat, there's nothing that could be done in a short amount of time. The problem isn't the wheat DNA is closed, it's isolating the DNA of the agent of attack and trying to figure out what (if anything) could be done, then dispersing the antidote (or whatever it would be called). Hello?
One unintended side effect of the QC has been that answers started to show up before questions were put in. Researchers are investigating, but suspect they already know the answer...
Build stuff for fun, then make a career out of it. Don't go into CS, go into something that allows you to analyze big systems, like political economy or some such.
There is very little in CS that you can't learn yourself, especially in the undergrad world.
Learning assembly, even if it's not on your platform, is good mainly because it imparts discipline. That doesn't mean you have to hand-tweak and optimize every freaking line of code.
But what it might get you is the ability to make those little decisions with a bias towards effciency. When you write a function, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of little decisions you make. Inline it or break it out? Put it in a loop, or break it out of the loop? How many calls might that be?
All these little things add up. If you understand how the compiler optmizes (for example, hoisting or CSE) you can do it yourself and save a little time. A little time here & there add up.
For example, positive loop tests should be first because almost every CPU branch-predicts on the positive case. Doh!
Hoist constant expressions out of a loop. Why not? Your Java compiler is usually too dumb, it might save a lot of time.
You can also do stuff in Java, too. Check the output - did you know references to an object's instance variable is more expensive than copying it locally to the function? Save a million cycles in a big loop.
It's not like thinking like this is hard, once you've done assembly. It's kind of automatic. It's also hard, because you have to do only as much as necessary, not more.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're willing to use a mac, this would take maybe 15 minutes or less of applescripting iTunes and quicktime player.
Import the song into iTunes
repeat until end-of-song
select random song chunk
paste into quicktime player
end repeat
save quicktime player document
import back into iTunes
From what I understand, you can sort of do the same thing with that iTunes COM library?
One great thing that Engst mentioned (but it was sort of glossed over by the writer) was this: these e-things are promoted in Tidbits.
This gives them -the- major advantage over most eBooks: PR.
What people seem to have forgotten (though it was talked about a lot) is what publishing houses and music companies have: marketing channels. Marketing channels are huge, expensive to build, and expensive to maintain. But they're really the only barrier to entry in a lot of markets...but that's a big barrier.
How do you get your book noticed? Word of mouth? Internet newsgroups? Maybe you send free copies to book clubs or the local radio station?
Without the majors, your life will be tougher.
The companies that are succeeding are the ones that are trying to become marketing channels. Tidbits is one. google, of all things, is another. eBay is one. iTMS is one. Even O'Reilly is one - all the hot tech comes out in their books first.
The question is, how can you tell which companies are doing this? I don't think about it a lot, so I don't know the answer. It would be nice to hear other companies that are channels.
Are there any tablet users out there with experience? I'd think that dropping any tablet would cause catastrophic damage to it.
The same could be said with a laptop, I suppose, but laptops seem to have OK survivability.
The problem with Apple licensing wasn't that the hardware was incompatible (though it was - the Mac back then had a huge ROM, 1MB or so, and most screens were CGA).
The problem was that PC users were dicks. Let me rephrase that - "mice are for wimps." The culture of business IT back then was "macho at all cost."
At the time, there was no client-server, no distributed systems. Computer people were basically mainframe guys. And what self-respecting mainframe guy back in the day wanted a GUI? Easy-to-use software? Interactive terminals?
Every computer that was easy-to-use was one more nail in the mainframe coffin, and a knife in the heart of batch job bozos. Would they actually buy something that made them obsolete?
Nope!
PCs were non-threatening things that they could turn into dumb terminals (can anyone say TN3270?).
Give an IT guy back then a Mac, and he'd freak out. It was only until Windows 95 that GUIs became "acceptable" to corporate users. Win 31 worked, and WfW sort of worked, but it was Win95 that brought the GUI to IT.
Before then, IT people would rather have eaten their left testicle than buy a GUI-based computer, much less a Mac. Let's get real.
If Apple had licensed the Mac, they would have tanked, pure and simple...much like the way Power Computing almost destroyed Apple back in the day.
It's amazing that people that cry "licensing" don't remember the times. It was 15-20 years ago, but still, you'd think that some of them would have exited puberty by then.
It worked for HP. License the whole thing, not just the DRM. Plus Virgin could make Virgin-branded iPods (in red, no less).
Plus, the iTunes store is much nicer than the Virgin store.
There's a fallacy embedded in the above: that a product is/can be perfect.
It's a common mistake in the technical world. Perfect = no bugs.
It's even more common in the intellectual worlds of academia and reportage. A perfect product is one you can't complain about, does everything you want, that's free. Heck, maybe it should perform fellatio and cunnilingus on demand.
In the real world, there's no such thing as a perfect product. There are only iterations of a product as you tweak it to your customers. There's learning and refining what you have, and understanding how and why people are buying and using your product.
The most important thing you can do is release a product, because that's the only way you'll know if your ideas work or not. The feedback you get is invaluable.
And it's not like the iPod wasn't a "perfect product." It had no serious bugs. It had a great interface. It was easy to use. Every generation after as tweaked it, but the core is the same.
Dell makes more money selling PCs, etc at a low cost than HP does doing everything it does. In fact, Dell probably sells its PCs at a price lower than HP's acquisition cost...and still makes money.
What you're saying is that HP couldn't compete on hardware, so it bought compaq to get into the higher-margin services business. If that was the case, then...why didn't HP just spin off the printer business (which is what Hewlett wanted) and keep going into services & hardware?
Because, like the Dell guy says, printing is subsidizing everything else.
Oh, and IBM didn't transform itself by buying also-ran competitors. It transformed itself by listening to its customers and providing what they needed & wanted.
What they do is keep it around, and you can call in after the auction to buy bunches of unsold items at a price.
For best results, do the webcast or go in person. There are massive deals to be had. At one auction I attended, a loaded Sun E450 (quad proc, 1gb ram, lots o disk) went for $900 + buyers premium of around 16%.
The downside to having many lots is the auctioneer will sometimes collapse identical lots into one to save time. If you've got the cash, it's a great way to get great deals. You can also propose lots, like "I'll take the next 10 sun boxes for $8000 total."
Auctions are a real trip, but you have to know how much stuff is worth, definitely. I've seen things go for above-retail prices, so be warned.
You know, it was the first Bush administration that caused this by failing to insert large, autonomous dynamos into the earth's crust. This would have stabilized the magnetic shift by generating huge electromagnetic fields.
Likewise, by killing the Texan supercollider the government stopped all research into magnetic field movements. This research would not only have helped in our understanding of magnetic fields, but would also have helped in the current War on Terror by providing valuable information on how subatomic particles can affect semi-psychotic behaviors.
And by ignoring the Kyoto protocols, the US has selfishly allowed its atmosphere to heat up, no doubt affecting the internal stability of the Earth's iron core, making the situation worse.
Plus, clear-cut logging no doubt has caused rotational differentials across the US and the world (due to less air resistence), placing undue stress on the earth's core.
Lastly, by killing millions, if not billions, of creatures, modern civilization has hastened the onset of this problem by robbing the world of counterbalancing "life" or "female" energy, energy that would have counteracted the obviously "male" and "destructive" magnetic shift.
He ignores the fact that most people are neither creative nor capable (or desirous) of more learning.
PBS is about as non-commercial as Fox. The big difference is they call them "sponsors" and put them at the beginning or end of the program. Oh yeah, they also get tax dollars.
Let's face it, PBS could survive on basic (or pay) cable if it wanted to. But there's no reason for it to, with its mouth firmly planted on the government's teat. Plus they'd have to give up the tweed, which would be devastating.
Why aren't environmentalists up-in-arms about this type of arctic drilling? This is a pure, untouched ecosystem that's going to be contaminated by people for no real reason except for curiosity.
Don't those 500,000 year old microbes have just as many rights as the spotted owl, salmon, and those lizards in the West somewhere?
Stop this microbe genocide now, and prevent all drilling - whether it's for commerce (oil) or science!
Instead of indexing all the pages you've read (and allowing you to search backwards), keyword/match the current page and find pages that you might be interested in given the page you're reading now.
:|
Basically you'd make the web a realtime wiki experience...or something like that. It might be pretty confusing, but it might also be really kind of neat.
One problem with the web is that it tends to remove the element of surprise (or coincidence, or accident) from the content you see. Unlike browsing in a bookstore, where all kinds of things are squished together, with the web you only see what's on your site. The above might make browsing a bit more cross-referenced, and provide some interesting contexts that would be too hard to do by yourself
What I'm wondering is this: where is Dell going to sell the submitted iPods? Are they just going to bury them out back?
It would be kind of embarassing if they made more money selling the returned iPods than the Dell DJ, wouldn't it? I know I'd buy a submitted iPod from Dell before I bought a Dell DJ.
How about that for morality and ethics in the world of reporters?
"I reasoned that a man would have been just as competitive as I am, and guessed that I was going to betray him on the ninth round--so he would have kept all $30 to himself on the eighth round. At least, most of the ones I know would have, although maybe a sample consisting mostly of journalists isn't entirely representative."
These tests would be an excellent way to see the norms inside each profession. This sort of attitude is the same one routinely lambasted by the press, but in the context of business people. If the CEO of a company had said that he'd be a heartless capitalist. But it turns out that he's not heartless, the reporter is just jealous.
How about that, folks?
That's what Apple says, but be leery of claims like this. Sony and Nintendo said the same thing about their console hardware, just to scare others off of the market. In fact, they made money off their consoles, just not very much. MS then entered the market, and really lost money on the consoles. Successful FUD!
Companies say "loss leader" in an attempt to invalidate the business assumptions of competitors. If you think about it, it's unlikely that iTMS is losing money. It's more likely that they're not making much money.
That phrase is working, though. The "iTMS is not a money maker" is driving others in the industry crazy, because competitors think they need hardware/iPod equivalents. Plus it's being parroted by members of the general public (ie: right here).
Dude, look how far the computer industry came when competition dried up. With the advent of Windows, Office, and the x86/PC architecture, computers became standardized enough that it was adopted by hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
Is that a bad thing?
It's funny, but Apple is getting into the consumer electronics business at a much deeper level than, say, Dell or Gateway.
When Dell or Gateway say "we're in the consumer electronics business," what they mean is "we sell consumer electronics." They compete against Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. That's a hard business to be in.
When Microsoft says "we're in the consumer electronics business," what they mean is "we make the software that allows someone else to make consumer electronic devices, and take a cut." Nobody likes this because nobody wants to pay someone else for their IP - and nobody wants to fund a competitor, either (ie: Microsoft).
When Apple says "we're in the consumer electronics business," they actually design, build, and sell products that are end-user targeted. They're like Panasonic, Pioneer, or Sony, in that they actually create and sell products. Except that the manufacturers don't have their own stores, but whatever.
What Apple's done is taken control of personal music distribution. What that means is they're an end-to-end solution provider of music to the individual. Buy music from iTMS, play music on your machine with iTMS, play music on your stereo with Airport Express, and bring your music with you with the iPod. Now with the BMW thing, you integrate your iPod with your car (at a minimal level).
Likely the next iPod will be an Airport Express-enabled, so you can wirelessly stream music from your iPod to your stereo. Then there are even more gadgets and doodads that extend the music "ecosystem," to use a somewhat abused word.
It'll be an interesting to see what's coming up...those guys are full of surprises, which is what invention (and innovation) is all about.
If the DNA is "open," which it is, then it's just as targetable (maybe more so) than a "closed" version. The only difference would be a bit of time to sequence the "closed" version.
Come on, people. This is stupid. The word "open" is such a political term now that it has no meaning. "Public Domain" used to be what "Open Source" is now, except there was no way to make money off of it.
Open DNA? Closed DNA? Just sequence the freaking thing and your "Closed DNA" is open - to you.
And in the case stated, if someone wiped out the wheat, there's nothing that could be done in a short amount of time. The problem isn't the wheat DNA is closed, it's isolating the DNA of the agent of attack and trying to figure out what (if anything) could be done, then dispersing the antidote (or whatever it would be called). Hello?
Are you talking about the blitzsafe adapter?
If so, it's not quite the same thing. The BlitzSafe is just an aux-in, no control over the pod from the wheel, etc.
This one sounds like you can forward/reverse/etc.
Not a big deal, but pretty handy. If I didn't have a BlitzSafe (and a 2nd gen iPod), it would be worth it to get this one.
From what I've read over the years, every object found in the universe is unique. Why is this particular lump of rock any different?
Wow, I counted from 1 to 10,000, and it came out much faster. How good of an example is that?
One unintended side effect of the QC has been that answers started to show up before questions were put in. Researchers are investigating, but suspect they already know the answer...
Build stuff for fun, then make a career out of it. Don't go into CS, go into something that allows you to analyze big systems, like political economy or some such.
There is very little in CS that you can't learn yourself, especially in the undergrad world.
As for me, I'm spending my time learning golf.
Learning assembly, even if it's not on your platform, is good mainly because it imparts discipline. That doesn't mean you have to hand-tweak and optimize every freaking line of code.
But what it might get you is the ability to make those little decisions with a bias towards effciency. When you write a function, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of little decisions you make. Inline it or break it out? Put it in a loop, or break it out of the loop? How many calls might that be?
All these little things add up. If you understand how the compiler optmizes (for example, hoisting or CSE) you can do it yourself and save a little time. A little time here & there add up.
For example, positive loop tests should be first because almost every CPU branch-predicts on the positive case. Doh!
Hoist constant expressions out of a loop. Why not? Your Java compiler is usually too dumb, it might save a lot of time.
You can also do stuff in Java, too. Check the output - did you know references to an object's instance variable is more expensive than copying it locally to the function? Save a million cycles in a big loop.
It's not like thinking like this is hard, once you've done assembly. It's kind of automatic. It's also hard, because you have to do only as much as necessary, not more.