> Wouldn't you like to pay $120 per year and be able > to "rent" any 60 songs at any time for as long as > you want???
No I wouldn't. So assuming I am not completely braindead and I pick on average mostly songs that I like, then on average I am going to be paying $2 dollars a year for a single song. Which given that I still listen to music I bought 10 years ago (along with all the music I have bought between then and now) on a regular basis that means if I buy the sweet alubum under this plan that has ten songs, it will cost me $200 dollars in order to listen to it for 10 years. That sounds like a totally Bad Idea[tm] from my point of view.
I think the only way I would use something like this is if I could pay 10 dollars for a single month then go through as many songs as I could, to try and find cool new music (since as we all know most 'preview' clips kind of suck and it would be nice to hear the whole song in all it's hifi glory before making a decision) then just buy the albums of what I really liked.
Another lame slashdot post that offers no real insight regardless of it's mod and takes the tired, tired approach of snubbing apple for no other reason than they appear upset apple is making products that might actually be competing for the cutting edge. Oh god, not that! NOOOO! Yawn Yawn, I need to stop reading slashdot, the trolls rule this town, the level of intelligence is so low it is sad. Look at this post for gods sake. Oye.
And the articles linked to by/. tend not to be up for very long. So one has to make assumptions. The assumption that thumbs/up down affects everyone seems vaguely reasonable because of the resources that one would need to track the ratings of ever user of the search engine on an individual basis. It is in fact the assumption I made, so you just better shoot me in the head for being such a dumbass.
THough I think they plan on making the ratings only apply to the individual leaving them, which prevents abuse, but probably is an interesting challenge to prevent it from using silly resources.
Every search engine does this as far as I'm aware, but knowing what links people clicked on in a result set still doesn't help you much in figuring out if the results were any good or not. The user can click the result, in 2 seconds decide it is crap, go back, click the next one, repeat. So you might think you could just say 'If the user comes back and clicks another link from the same result page in 2 seconds then the first link was crap' but that doesn't really work since a user could click a link see the answer they were looking for in under 2 seconds and go back and click another link to see if the answer is the same elsewhere. Or they can spend like 5 minutes before they decide the link is crap. And users all have different ideas about what is good and not good about results for the same keyword or phrase. For that matter dealing with phrases starts to make things even more of a mess since a large % of all search phrases are very unique, so it requires lots of data and resources to apply statistical methods and try to do something reasonable on the data, and of course then if you want to do it on a per user basis you end up multipling the resources you need even more.
Not that I'm saying useful things can't be done, but it is not a trivial problem to be solved. Of course I know a number of people at google who are really bright phd types (since that appears to be all they hire;) so I'm sure they are thinking about all these things as they are very engineering driven. Yay search engines!
Seems totally open to abuse, and there seem like their are issues with people not rating results and keeping the statistics meaningful. If they can get something up for doing ratings and figuring out if a user thinks a result is 'good' or 'bad' that is easy for the user to use, isn't abuseable, and has some kind of statistical validity I will be impressed, but I think it is much harder to do than most people think. Yar!
So IAMAL, but my layman understanding of music is that I buy a CD, and I'm not allowed to distribute any of the content on that CD because I don't own it. I am just buying the right to listen to the music, which seems like at least a vaguely reasonable justification for the insanely high prices of CDs (given that the media costs nothing) yet if the media is ever warped or scratched or for that matter screwed up from the factory I have to go out and rebuy the CD.
It seems like the record/movie companies want to have it both ways. That I have to pay for some physical product (and as such have to keep repaying for it every time I need a new copy, even though the physical product cost almost nothing in the store (and really nothing from someplace like apples music store)) but at the same time also saying I am really paying for the right to listen to the music and as such I can't distribute the content of the CDs because I don't own that. Now how is this at all a reasonable state of things? If I am going to be gouged my 11-18 dollars a CD for the right to listen to the album I would really like it more if I had some recourse when the content was inadvertantly lost. (Some people seem _so_ close to being there apple but haven't quite made it) I know the record companies are doing everything they can to bring legal action against everyone they can copying music in order to protect their ability to rip off the consumer, but are there any groups looking at either legal action, or working with the distribution companies to provide benifit to the consumer along the lines of not getting the shaft if the zero cost media is destroyed? And for that matter how do you feel about the law being used to protect a monopoly of distribution and dubious copyrights that don't really do anything for the artists (well they do something, but seemingly nothing when compared to the cash flow of the record companies?)
> The slashdot crowd is the cream of the crop when > it comes to nerds...
HAHAHAHAHA! What is the average demographic age here, 17? Maybe? Yeah, on average/. users are uninformed tools who think they know what they are talking about.
-
Now waiting for all the posts about how various individuals are not in fact tools. Sigh.
64bit, say it with me. These machines are quick. I think it is safe to say that apple hardware is definately at a close enough price/performance point that people can't really justify bitching about it. Not that I'll be buying one. I'm poor, I'm all bout spending my 400 bucks on ebay for something that will run linux and bsd.:) (Though if someone wants to order one of the g5s for me feel free.)
Besides why would you get the single 1.8 when you could spend 50% more cash and get a machine that is over twice as fast with better cool accessories?
and can be changed on various cards/systems because 'hardware' doesn't really mean unchangable. Sadly this does require driver support that the airport doesn't seem to have available at this time. It is just an orinico card though (i think) so maybe someone will work it out at somepoint. But it would certainly be useful so I can work on actually testing the securing of my wireless net.
hmmm, my iBook still doesn't seem to have any kind of reasonable max volume. I mean max volume just seems quiet! I was really hoping they had fixed that annoyance.
And I was hoping I would be able to set the MAC address on my airport. I mean how else am I supposed to test MAC based crap?
and you of course read all your end user agreements in full right? riiiiight....
From the context of how this seems to be presented to the users they are led to believe: "Hey I got a greeting card from an online site, here is that sites viewer software, lets go!" There isn't anything to lead them to believe that they would have spyware and adware installed on their machines. I.e., They are being dupped into 'agreeing' to all the nasty stuff since said company knows people never read those stupid fucking EULAs.
Of course what do I know, I don't use anything microsoft so I obviously don't have any experience selling my soul through EULAs.
I might actually motivate and get a new cell if it came with something like this. Of course convincing the phone makers to put it in might be a little hard considering how inbed they are with the telcos. God this country is so behind in some respects. Anyway, since the telcos seem to want to charge me an arm and leg everytime I access their crappy wireless net services I would be a big fan of being able to just tie into a mesh network for cheap. Of course one wonders about the powerdrain for people leaving their phones on in their pocket/bag and having them used as routers. Can't be good for battery life. Guess I'll have to wait for fuel cells afterall.
There is no billion dollar market for wireless web services, and their won't be until it is cheap and easy to use. I.e., years from now, possibly longer.
...a card with emergency numbers to call when you get into trouble south of the border. Which, of course, you will. Remember to stay away from the donkeys.
A little bizzare to see flamebait as an article (well...) but what the hell, maybe just a little response:
Microsoft hasn't been successfull because of their reliable, easy to use software that focuses on the big middleclass segment. They are successfull because of their fiendish devotion to SCREWING anyone who looks at them funny. It's amazing how well you do when you don't have any compitition - so I think they will probably try to keep it that way, suprise suprise.
Basic tenent from various disiplines: that nice guys will always get the shaft when put in compatition with people who are willing to screw you. I don't really want to get into how mircosoft achieves this screwing of other companies at the consumers expense, because I really don't have the time to write it, and unless you have no life, you probably don't have the time to read it.:)
>Can mySQL do that? My experience with support on >open-source solutions has been good, but not good >enough to bet my business on getting a problem >fixed in a few minutes instead of a few hours or >days...
Hahaha! Getting through to oracle support takes more than a few minutes. Let along talking to someone with a clue, having them open a ticket, then get back to you days later saying it is a but/unimplemented feature.
Needless to say I'm not really a huge fan of oracle these days.:)
If the non-compete says something like 'thou shall not work with computers for 20 years after leaving this company' I would love it. Think of the massive salary and benifits you could negotiate with something like that. Then think of the totall unenforcability of it. It would be like you signing a contract to be my dedicated slave for life. It just would never be valid in court regardless of how much you had signed it.
Lots of noncompetes are worded poorly enough that they can't be enforced. It's all about talking to a lawyer who knows what they are doing before you sign.
Not really. That was a case where the limited license MS had in Windows 1.0 for bit's of Mac OS pulled an alice and wonderland trick and grew into a mighty beast of death that let them rip the mac os to their hearts content. Look at:
http://www.madcapps.com/~Writings/lawsuit.htm
Now if only MS managed to rip it off more successfully maybe I wouldn't be so upset at those lamers. The start up screen in 2000 still uses dithered graphics for god sake.
> If you want the kernel or other fundamental, > low-level parts of the operating system to be > distributed, then you have a fundamentally > bad idea.
Not so. Take the virtual memory system. If you allow the backing store for the memory system to be distributed you get some totally reasonable benifits. Say you have 20 nice suns all sitting around connected with 100Mb or 1Gb connections. Gaining access to their RAM via the network is way faster than going to disk. So you can effectively increase the size of your 'physical' main memory with minimal speed penalty. Of course you have to do things like keep copies of the blocks locally on disk in case of network failure, and you only want to use other machines memory in certain classes of blocks and such. But it does offer gains, I read a paper about this stuff a while back. Pretty sweet, check it out.
there were still some interesting things. I don't recall the links but I think there was a lense based interface being worked on for a while (idea being you could look at your desktop through the normal lense then pull different types of lenses out and 'see' new properies of the system.) I'm thinking xerox park maybe?
There are also the hypertree widgets that are pretty cool. There are some java demos of those somewhere.
researchers do everything (assuming they can get some kind of funding)
>Linux fundamentally relies on 30-year-old >operating system technology and architecture.
Hope no-one mentions that the 30-year old technology is still better than windows...because then people might buy products based on their worth, not their marketing. sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
> Anyone hear anything about some research
> corporation finding an amazing processor in a
> robot from the future?
Where have you been? The robot is currently running the state of California, which needs cash to ease it's budget crisis. See, it all fits!!
> Wouldn't you like to pay $120 per year and be able
> to "rent" any 60 songs at any time for as long as
> you want???
No I wouldn't. So assuming I am not completely braindead and I pick on average mostly songs that I like, then on average I am going to be paying $2 dollars a year for a single song. Which given that I still listen to music I bought 10 years ago (along with all the music I have bought between then and now) on a regular basis that means if I buy the sweet alubum under this plan that has ten songs, it will cost me $200 dollars in order to listen to it for 10 years. That sounds like a totally Bad Idea[tm] from my point of view.
I think the only way I would use something like this is if I could pay 10 dollars for a single month then go through as many songs as I could, to try and find cool new music (since as we all know most 'preview' clips kind of suck and it would be nice to hear the whole song in all it's hifi glory before making a decision) then just buy the albums of what I really liked.
Yar!
Another lame slashdot post that offers no real insight regardless of it's mod and takes the tired, tired approach of snubbing apple for no other reason than they appear upset apple is making products that might actually be competing for the cutting edge. Oh god, not that! NOOOO! Yawn Yawn, I need to stop reading slashdot, the trolls rule this town, the level of intelligence is so low it is sad. Look at this post for gods sake. Oye.
And the articles linked to by /. tend not to be up for very long. So one has to make assumptions. The assumption that thumbs/up down affects everyone seems vaguely reasonable because of the resources that one would need to track the ratings of ever user of the search engine on an individual basis. It is in fact the assumption I made, so you just better shoot me in the head for being such a dumbass.
And those that think it is a bitchin' muscle car.
THough I think they plan on making the ratings only apply to the individual leaving them, which prevents abuse, but probably is an interesting challenge to prevent it from using silly resources.
Oh my god google click tracks you? No way!
;) so I'm sure they are thinking about all these things as they are very engineering driven. Yay search engines!
Every search engine does this as far as I'm aware, but knowing what links people clicked on in a result set still doesn't help you much in figuring out if the results were any good or not. The user can click the result, in 2 seconds decide it is crap, go back, click the next one, repeat. So you might think you could just say 'If the user comes back and clicks another link from the same result page in 2 seconds then the first link was crap' but that doesn't really work since a user could click a link see the answer they were looking for in under 2 seconds and go back and click another link to see if the answer is the same elsewhere. Or they can spend like 5 minutes before they decide the link is crap. And users all have different ideas about what is good and not good about results for the same keyword or phrase. For that matter dealing with phrases starts to make things even more of a mess since a large % of all search phrases are very unique, so it requires lots of data and resources to apply statistical methods and try to do something reasonable on the data, and of course then if you want to do it on a per user basis you end up multipling the resources you need even more.
Not that I'm saying useful things can't be done, but it is not a trivial problem to be solved. Of course I know a number of people at google who are really bright phd types (since that appears to be all they hire
Seems totally open to abuse, and there seem like their are issues with people not rating results and keeping the statistics meaningful. If they can get something up for doing ratings and figuring out if a user thinks a result is 'good' or 'bad' that is easy for the user to use, isn't abuseable, and has some kind of statistical validity I will be impressed, but I think it is much harder to do than most people think. Yar!
So IAMAL, but my layman understanding of music is that I buy a CD, and I'm not allowed to distribute any of the content on that CD because I don't own it. I am just buying the right to listen to the music, which seems like at least a vaguely reasonable justification for the insanely high prices of CDs (given that the media costs nothing) yet if the media is ever warped or scratched or for that matter screwed up from the factory I have to go out and rebuy the CD.
It seems like the record/movie companies want to have it both ways. That I have to pay for some physical product (and as such have to keep repaying for it every time I need a new copy, even though the physical product cost almost nothing in the store (and really nothing from someplace like apples music store)) but at the same time also saying I am really paying for the right to listen to the music and as such I can't distribute the content of the CDs because I don't own that. Now how is this at all a reasonable state of things? If I am going to be gouged my 11-18 dollars a CD for the right to listen to the album I would really like it more if I had some recourse when the content was inadvertantly lost. (Some people seem _so_ close to being there apple but haven't quite made it) I know the record companies are doing everything they can to bring legal action against everyone they can copying music in order to protect their ability to rip off the consumer, but are there any groups looking at either legal action, or working with the distribution companies to provide benifit to the consumer along the lines of not getting the shaft if the zero cost media is destroyed? And for that matter how do you feel about the law being used to protect a monopoly of distribution and dubious copyrights that don't really do anything for the artists (well they do something, but seemingly nothing when compared to the cash flow of the record companies?)
pre coffee rambing/>
Someone with physical access to your machine can access it!! WHO KNEW?! Call in the army reserve and physically secure access to all your machines!
> The slashdot crowd is the cream of the crop when
/. users are uninformed tools who think they know what they are talking about.
> it comes to nerds...
HAHAHAHAHA! What is the average demographic age here, 17? Maybe? Yeah, on average
-
Now waiting for all the posts about how various individuals are not in fact tools. Sigh.
64bit, say it with me. These machines are quick. I think it is safe to say that apple hardware is definately at a close enough price/performance point that people can't really justify bitching about it. Not that I'll be buying one. I'm poor, I'm all bout spending my 400 bucks on ebay for something that will run linux and bsd. :) (Though if someone wants to order one of the g5s for me feel free.)
Besides why would you get the single 1.8 when you could spend 50% more cash and get a machine that is over twice as fast with better cool accessories?
and can be changed on various cards/systems because 'hardware' doesn't really mean unchangable.
Sadly this does require driver support that the airport doesn't seem to have available at this time. It is just an orinico card though (i think) so maybe someone will work it out at somepoint. But it would certainly be useful so I can work on actually testing the securing of my wireless net.
hmmm, my iBook still doesn't seem to have any kind of reasonable max volume. I mean max volume just seems quiet! I was really hoping they had fixed that annoyance.
And I was hoping I would be able to set the MAC address on my airport. I mean how else am I supposed to test MAC based crap?
and you of course read all your end user agreements in full right? riiiiight....
From the context of how this seems to be presented to the users they are led to believe: "Hey I got a greeting card from an online site, here is that sites viewer software, lets go!" There isn't anything to lead them to believe that they would have spyware and adware installed on their machines. I.e., They are being dupped into 'agreeing' to all the nasty stuff since said company knows people never read those stupid fucking EULAs.
Of course what do I know, I don't use anything microsoft so I obviously don't have any experience selling my soul through EULAs.
I might actually motivate and get a new cell if it came with something like this. Of course convincing the phone makers to put it in might be a little hard considering how inbed they are with the telcos. God this country is so behind in some respects. Anyway, since the telcos seem to want to charge me an arm and leg everytime I access their crappy wireless net services I would be a big fan of being able to just tie into a mesh network for cheap. Of course one wonders about the powerdrain for people leaving their phones on in their pocket/bag and having them used as routers. Can't be good for battery life. Guess I'll have to wait for fuel cells afterall.
There is no billion dollar market for wireless web services, and their won't be until it is cheap and easy to use. I.e., years from now, possibly longer.
...a card with emergency numbers to call when you get into trouble south of the border. Which, of course, you will. Remember to stay away from the donkeys.
...any more power. I'm sorry Captain, I gave it all I got.
A little bizzare to see flamebait as an article (well...) but what the hell, maybe just a little response:
:)
Microsoft hasn't been successfull because of their reliable, easy to use software that focuses on the big middleclass segment. They are successfull because of their fiendish devotion to SCREWING anyone who looks at them funny. It's amazing how well you do when you don't have any compitition - so I think they will probably try to keep it that way, suprise suprise.
Basic tenent from various disiplines: that nice guys will always get the shaft when put in compatition with people who are willing to screw you. I don't really want to get into how mircosoft achieves this screwing of other companies at the consumers expense, because I really don't have the time to write it, and unless you have no life, you probably don't have the time to read it.
>Can mySQL do that? My experience with support on >open-source solutions has been good, but not good >enough to bet my business on getting a problem >fixed in a few minutes instead of a few hours or >days...
:)
Hahaha! Getting through to oracle support takes more than a few minutes. Let along talking to someone with a clue, having them open a ticket, then get back to you days later saying it is a but/unimplemented feature.
Needless to say I'm not really a huge fan of oracle these days.
is when are they going to make swanky 64+bit hardware I can actually afford? :)
If the non-compete says something like 'thou shall not work with computers for 20 years after leaving this company' I would love it. Think of the massive salary and benifits you could negotiate with something like that. Then think of the totall unenforcability of it. It would be like you signing a contract to be my dedicated slave for life. It just would never be valid in court regardless of how much you had signed it.
Lots of noncompetes are worded poorly enough that they can't be enforced. It's all about talking to a lawyer who knows what they are doing before you sign.
Not really. That was a case where the limited license MS had in Windows 1.0 for bit's of Mac OS pulled an alice and wonderland trick and grew into a mighty beast of death that let them rip the mac os to their hearts content. Look at:
http://www.madcapps.com/~Writings/lawsuit.htm
Now if only MS managed to rip it off more successfully maybe I wouldn't be so upset at those lamers. The start up screen in 2000 still uses dithered graphics for god sake.
> If you want the kernel or other fundamental,
> low-level parts of the operating system to be
> distributed, then you have a fundamentally
> bad idea.
Not so. Take the virtual memory system. If you
allow the backing store for the memory system to
be distributed you get some totally reasonable benifits. Say you have 20 nice suns all sitting
around connected with 100Mb or 1Gb connections. Gaining access to their RAM via the network is way faster than going to disk. So you can effectively
increase the size of your 'physical' main memory with minimal speed penalty. Of course you have to do things like keep copies of the blocks locally on disk in case of network failure, and you only want to use other machines memory in certain classes of blocks and such. But it does offer gains, I read a paper about this stuff a while back. Pretty sweet, check it out.
there were still some interesting things. I don't recall the links but I think there was a lense based interface being worked on for a while (idea being you could look at your desktop through the normal lense then pull different types of lenses out and 'see' new properies of the system.) I'm thinking xerox park maybe?
There are also the hypertree widgets that are pretty cool. There are some java demos of those somewhere.
researchers do everything (assuming they can get some kind of funding)
>Linux fundamentally relies on 30-year-old >operating system technology and architecture.
Hope no-one mentions that the 30-year old technology is still better than windows...because then people might buy products based on their worth, not their marketing. sigh.
peace,
--e;