Northpoint stranded between 75,000 and 100,000 customers when they went under. Assuming 80,000 customers, each with a modem measuring 6x4x1 inches:
80,000 Northpoint DSL modems end to end is 7.5 miles.
80,000 modem power dongles, with 6 ft. cords would stretch between New York City and Philadelphia. (about 90 miles)
Stacking 80,000 DSL modems onto a 3x3 ft square, would be about as tall as a 10 story building.
80,000 DSL modems would be around 1,100 cubic feet. My 600 square foot New York apartment would be filled more than two feet deep.
Powers of Ten or The MegaPenny Project with DSL modems is no good for landfills. Scary part is how small these things are, and how many larger devices are tossed out every year.
From reading the notes, I doubt this will affect many people. I just ripped a few CDs tonight from SoundJam and it worked fine.
However there is an irony regarding the Napster/RIAA lawsuits if this was extrapolated out and the CDDB started restricting access to their database. In very measurable ways, the CDDB is helping the RIAA to filter Napster. Of course there is still the FreeDB (thankfully), but play along for fun.
The RIAA's injunction against Napster works by filtering file names, most of which come from the CDDB. Consistant file names make the injunction workable. Removing the CDDB would cause a large number of people to input their own names with all the associated inconsistancies, making filtering all the more difficult. I find this quite funny. It's only too bad the RIAA didn't target the CDDB and only later realize how much it was helping their jihad against their customers and themselves.
I see Napster and DeCSS as acts of pure curiosity and/or necessity. Once that necessity is validated in the free marketplace of ideas, removing the solution will create opportunity and a fixed bottom for future solutions.
The lawsuits attacked whatever weakness they could find in an unexpected entity. In a way, these ideas can be described through a supply and demand metaphor. Napster created the demand and thereby monopolized the supply. (Yes, I know about OpenNap etc, but I'm making a point)
Removing the supply by killing Napster does nothing to remove the demand that Napster created. Imagine if someone had invented Color TV before the networks could and made it freely available. If the networks succeeded in killing the Color TV product, they could do nothing to erase the knowledge that Color TV existed.
Right or wrong, Napster was ultimately the most convenient thing that has ever happened in the history of recorded music. It's usually faster to find a song on Napster than to get it from a CD on the shelf across the room. Killing Napster will do nothing to change that.
The RIAA has essentially clarified whatever weaknesses Napster had. One of the biggest was believing that anyone could make money from this. If there was no "business model" there would have been less of a clear target. The lawsuits have done nothing to prove that trading MP3s is bad, mostly because they can't. Additionally there is still no legitimate alternative. They have however succeeded in making alienating their customers in profound and far-reaching ways.
The Spawn of Napster will arrive into a different world than their forebear. They will know the threats, and they will know they will be welcomed by some and loathed by others. If the RIAA or MPAA thinks the next target is GNUtella, they're due for another surprise.
The slashdot community should know better than anyone that what matters most is information. Not inconsequentials like truth and accuracy. The RIAA is winning the war of information. My mother mentioned this report to me before it was posted here. False stories get headlines, retractions and corrections get small paragraphs at the bottom of page 3.
Most likely Napster is dead already. But this isn't completely a cause to mourn.
Most recent revolutions in digital media that have solid-media business shitting themselves have come from bored or curious teenagers and college students. CSS was cracked by a 16 year old. Hotline was created by a teenager. Napster (a conceptually modified Hotline, though no one mentions it) was set up by Sean Fanning when he was 20 or 21. Even Netscape was lead by Marc Andreesen before he graduated college. (please be gentle with slight factual errors, that was recounted from memory)
How long will it take before the uncontrollable throng of adolescent geniuses that big business hates and fears comes up with something better than Napster? About three months probably. Maybe less.
The RIAA has introduced a new market force. The capitalist mantra has always been "competition fosters innovation". This is the beginning of litigation fostering innovation. I'm sure this isn't what the RIAA and MPAA really want. Napster basically had a monopoly on peer-to-peer MP3 sharing. If that is monopoly is shut down, the marketplace will be thrown open to innovation, however a pure copy will not work. The RIAA lawsuits have established a clear technological baseline. Every spawn of Napster will have to start that much higher. And they will.
This attitude about Web design is one of the reasons the Internet went broke. (another one is lame, hopelessly flawed business plans)
Web designers need to remember that Web design is not print. Documents will be changed by users and users should have that freedom. Worry more about information architecture, it's the content that ultimately matters. Design shouldn't just be decoration that viewers have to conform to, design should help viewers to better comprehend the information they're seeing.
What about handicapped users? Or those who need larger type to see? What about celphone browsers? PalmOS? WebTV? Crappy WindowsCE appliances in the airport business lounge?
Web design extends traditional design towards architecture and engineering. Good Web design is flexible. It doesn't matter what the building looks like if it falls on your head.
Strict adherence to standards is the best thing we've got. Letting go of the bells and whistles is better for your clients, your audience, your bottom line and your sanity.
After my first post, I did some research to try and find more information on the relationship between Nutrasweet and memory loss. The claims are much bigger than I realized.
I'm posting this at the risk of seeming like a reactionary fruitcake, but make your own decisions:
US Air Force pilots are not allowed to consume Aspertame
More than 10,000 food products contain Aspertame, everything from mints to soda to cereal.
When heated above 86 F (30 C) Nutrasweet turns to Methanol (wood alcohol) This then digests as formaldehyde and Formic Acid.
The two main ingredients of Nutrasweet are: Phenylalanine and aspartic acid which are essentially natural, however are never found independent of other amino acids.
May cause autism by affecting unborn children (cases of autism has been on the rise for the past 20 years)
in 1996, 60 minutes showed a porportional rise between brain tumors in the US and use of Aspertame in the US since 1981. Why has this never been mentioned in the recent cell-phone cancer scare?
Additionally, these are the "92 symptoms" the FDA knew were associated with Aspertame when they approved it. These were discovered in an FDA document brought to light thanks to The Freedom of Information Act.
Abdominal Pain
Anxiety attacks
arthritis
asthma
Asthmatic Reactions
Bloating, Edema (Fluid Retention)
Blood Sugar Control Problems (Hypoglycemia or Hyperglycemia)
Brain Cancer (Pre-approval studies in animals)
Breathing difficulties
burning eyes or throat
Burning Urination
can't think straight
Chest Pains
chronic cough
Chronic Fatigue
Confusion
Death
Depression
Diarrhea
Dizziness
Excessive Thirst or Hunger
fatigue
feel unreal
flushing of face
Hair Loss (Baldness) or Thinning of Hair
Headaches/Migraines dizziness
Hearing Loss
Heart palpitations
Hives (Urticaria)
Hypertension (High Blood Pressure)
Impotency and Sexual Problems
inability to concentrate
Infection Susceptibility
Insomnia
Irritability
Itching
Joint Pains
laryngitis
"like thinking in a fog"
Marked Personality Changes
Memory loss
Menstrual Problems or Changes
Migraines and Severe Headaches (Trigger or Cause From Chronic Intake)
There is growing evidence of Aspertame (main ingredient of Nutrasweet) affectting short term memory.
Search Google for Nutrasweet and memory loss and you'll get a huge listing. Not just health-food stores either, several university studies come up too.
This is not just a conspiracy-theorist, natural-foods idea, the evidence is compelling. Researchers are linking consumption of nutrasweet to the rise in Alzheimers disease and it would also justify the research in this article.
..a lot of them said they were too embarrassed to ask for help at the polling station. People are there at the polling station to help out and if the voter doesn't take advantage of what is available that is their loss.
There are accounts of election officials being instructed to turn away anyone who needed assistance because it would slow down voting and turnout was much higher than normal. Because of this, people who did ask for help were turned away and their votes voided.
*I don't remember which paper I read that in, I'm reading about 10 these days from all over the place. It might have been in the New York Times or AP coverage of the NAACP hearings.
Even if we were to allow the wheels of government to grind along slowly, and give them a few more elections to get technology in place, effective information design is not new.
The private sector occasionally knows the importance clearly presented information. Ask for a picture menu at McDonalds sometime. Of course the private sector counts ever $.69, government is currently content to ignore thousands and thousands of votes each year.
The Palm Beach ballots were not alone in their incompetence. Evidence from all over the US indicates many ballots were as easy to understand as a Tax form, which is not at all. The nature of English reading (and all other horizontally read languages) is to read down one verticle column and then move on to the next column. This reminds me of those silly high school tests where there was a long list of convoluted directions with the last item in the list saying "ignore all previous directions."
A whole lot of people on both sides of the party fence are having their careers skewered over this. I feel bad for the local Democrat woman who approved the ballot. Her job was not to redesign the voting system, her job was to make sure the names were spelled correctly. Florida law indicated the order of candidates on the ballot, maybe it should have put everyone in the middle. A whole lot of grief could have been avoided if the ballot design had "wasted" a bit of paper and left some space between the candidates names. There appeared to be plenty of unused space at the bottom of the ballot card.
Regardless of who wins this election, wouldn't it be nice if Florida could get the same number in two separate recounts?
Some of the protest signs have been rather disturbing. I don't believe the people who screwed up their votes were "stupid" as I've heard and seen them referred to. But even if they were, we are all free to be stupid, and to be frail, confused, illiterate. All votes are equal, no one voter has any more importance whether they have an MBA or never went to high school.
on my DVD player, the FBI warning and Studio ads come up the instant you put the disk in. There is no way to stop this. You have to wait for the disk to finish "booting" before you can see the movie. Some disks have more than others, I think it's an authoring issue by the studios.
I probably shouldn't have bought a Sony.
What we need is an alternative minded, mainstream company to manufacture a DVD player that will blow off regioning, macrovision and play-control and let us use DVDs however we see fit.
The first time I saw this crap spewing from my DVD player I nearly exploded. I read fast, I don't need the FBI warning onscreen for 30 seconds, it's what, 40-60 words? Oh yeah, 40-60 meaningless, completely ignored words. Let me fastforward through it, or go to the menu, I have chosen to forfeit a few hours of my time, which is valuable, don't waste it by locking me out of my own stuff.
The very idea that someone can decide how I will view something I've purchased makes my blood boil. Yes it's a viewing license, no I don't technically "own" the movie, but damn it, I want to be able use this on my terms, in my house, in any way I see fit.
Actually, besides the excellent picture and sound, there is a lot on DVDs that sucks:
Viewer control Can't skip or fastforward through the FBI warning and studio crap, effectively creating an arbitrary "boot time".
No bookmarks on players? Come on, I've got more memory in my cel phone then the computers that landed men on the moon, how about a meager scrap of memory to bookmark timecodes for the last 20-30 disks?
Macrovision Yes it prevents casual taping of disks, but it is mostly just a nuisance for owners with non-standard hookups. Try running your DVD signal through a VCR, and you're hosed. There are plenty of reasons to do this besides piracy. Old TVs, TVs with one input, TVs in two different rooms...
Region encoding Words fail me. Create a huge management and manufacturing overhead to prevent users in different parts of the world from seeing anything other than that which is sanctioned for their particular area. This verges on mind-control.
Built in obsolescence The (NTSC) signal is 480 lines tall. Of course the MPAA did this so you will have to re-buy everything again whenever the industry finally switches over to HiDef TV. Jay Leno shouldn't look better than the movie you just purchased, but if you have a HDTV, he does.
If only VHS didn't look like crap and wasn't tape...
It's not a one-hit wonder, Creep is on there twice;-)
Seriously though, listen to that again (or just got DL from Napster, it's easier than finding the CD anyway). There are some really great tracks on that album besides Creep, "Thinking about You" "Stop Whispering", "Anyone can play Guitar"...
Remember, it was 1993. Pablo Honey was a very emotionally honest album. Creep did blow my mind at the time however...
This is just another step in the record companies long slow suicide. If they really had a clue about the future, they would not have shut down the lyrics databases when they should have just bought them out. They wouldn't be trying to stop Napster, they would be pressing ahead with colateral merchandise and expanded experiences. They would be giving music videos away and using the web to create affinity groups of music types, collect ad revenue and build brands. They would recreate themselves as a modern business capable of dealing with changes in the marketplace.
What do you do when you have a song stuck in your head? Since there are no lyrics databases left to search openly, I go straight to a text search engine like Altavista or Google and find whatever fragment of a phrase I can scrape together. Most popular lyrics seem to be online somewhere, and I usually find the song in a few searches.
Since the record companies have done absolutely nothing to help find one song on an album, let alone make it possible to buy just that song, hello Napster. Custom CDs are not the answer. When blank CDRs are for sale at KMart, it's a little late to try and convince us that CDs are hard to make. If I want one song, I want it now, and I don't want to be forced into buying 10-15 other songs for $20 and having to wait a week for delivery.
Music has been digital for years, and that means that there are no originals. Everything is a copy, the only original is the music being recorded. Without copies, there is no music. There is absolutely no difference between the content on a CD I purchased today and 10,000 of the same album purchased anywhere around the world.
I'm glad Radiohead came forward, again they prove to be among the most forward thinking musicians out there. I'm also glad I own all their albums. And I'm going to go download their live shows right now...
1. I have a door with a broken lock and I don't tell anybody.
2. I have a door with a broken lock and I put a sign in my front lawn reading, "I have a broken Brand X lock. Can somebody tell me where to get a new one?"
Thanks to my check-for-broken-door-lock robot, both doors are equal. It checks 1000 doors every second.
I had thought this was a Microsoft invention, I haven't been able to find any evidence pointing to the scroll-wheel as a Logitech invention. It would figure though, and keep up Microsoft's perfect batting average for innovation. This whole "only do what has already been proven to work" business plan seems to work pretty well.
I still believe that the mouse wheel was invented by either Habitrail or Fred Flintstone.
We need to make sure we can attribute the optical mouse to someone besides MS, I remember those crappy ones from 7-8 years ago with the funky aluminum gridded mouse "pads", but we have to make sure MS doesn't get any credit for the intellimouse.
Do you really think someone who writes about Apple and the Macintosh, someone who has so much to gain on a day like today, even someone so publicly wrong and potentially humiliated, would even consider shutting down their site during MacWorld New York?
Apple Legal was sending letters to websites AND the site's hosting ISP. Maybe MacJunkie's crappy ISP panicked and pulled the plug when they got the letter. Here's to freedom of the press...
Looks like someone ate their website instead of their shorts.
This could be the result of Apple Legal's letter to his ISP. Please make a note of his ISP to be sure to never, never, never use them for anything, ever.
No buttons might be interesting, don't know how gamers will react to the no-button thing,
It's amazing that they still haven't offered a 2-button mouse, or even a two no-button mouse, but what amazes me most is the absence of the greatest addition to input in the past 15 years:
THE SCROLL WHEEL*
I could never be without one again.
*unfortunate proof that Microsoft does occasionally come up with a good idea or two.
An interesting side note to the proliferation of do it yourself drug content online could be the decline in profit for drug dealers.
If everyone knew how to make their own drugs, that kid on 10th street would have to find something to do besides mumbling the drug-name-of-the week to passerbys all day.
Potentially, the amount of incidental crime associated to the drug trade could go down with demand. A bad side effect would be poor drug dealers who can't keep up their "lifestyle" resorting to muggings and robbery to keep them in chains and clothes.
Slashdot Mirror
Powers of Ten or The MegaPenny Project with DSL modems is no good for landfills. Scary part is how small these things are, and how many larger devices are tossed out every year.
Joe Maller
www.joemaller.com
From reading the notes, I doubt this will affect many people. I just ripped a few CDs tonight from SoundJam and it worked fine.
However there is an irony regarding the Napster/RIAA lawsuits if this was extrapolated out and the CDDB started restricting access to their database. In very measurable ways, the CDDB is helping the RIAA to filter Napster. Of course there is still the FreeDB (thankfully), but play along for fun.
The RIAA's injunction against Napster works by filtering file names, most of which come from the CDDB. Consistant file names make the injunction workable. Removing the CDDB would cause a large number of people to input their own names with all the associated inconsistancies, making filtering all the more difficult. I find this quite funny. It's only too bad the RIAA didn't target the CDDB and only later realize how much it was helping their jihad against their customers and themselves.
joe maller
Clarification, since you asked.
I see Napster and DeCSS as acts of pure curiosity and/or necessity. Once that necessity is validated in the free marketplace of ideas, removing the solution will create opportunity and a fixed bottom for future solutions.
The lawsuits attacked whatever weakness they could find in an unexpected entity. In a way, these ideas can be described through a supply and demand metaphor. Napster created the demand and thereby monopolized the supply. (Yes, I know about OpenNap etc, but I'm making a point)
Removing the supply by killing Napster does nothing to remove the demand that Napster created. Imagine if someone had invented Color TV before the networks could and made it freely available. If the networks succeeded in killing the Color TV product, they could do nothing to erase the knowledge that Color TV existed.
Right or wrong, Napster was ultimately the most convenient thing that has ever happened in the history of recorded music. It's usually faster to find a song on Napster than to get it from a CD on the shelf across the room. Killing Napster will do nothing to change that.
The RIAA has essentially clarified whatever weaknesses Napster had. One of the biggest was believing that anyone could make money from this. If there was no "business model" there would have been less of a clear target. The lawsuits have done nothing to prove that trading MP3s is bad, mostly because they can't. Additionally there is still no legitimate alternative. They have however succeeded in making alienating their customers in profound and far-reaching ways.
The Spawn of Napster will arrive into a different world than their forebear. They will know the threats, and they will know they will be welcomed by some and loathed by others. If the RIAA or MPAA thinks the next target is GNUtella, they're due for another surprise.
The slashdot community should know better than anyone that what matters most is information. Not inconsequentials like truth and accuracy. The RIAA is winning the war of information. My mother mentioned this report to me before it was posted here. False stories get headlines, retractions and corrections get small paragraphs at the bottom of page 3.
Most likely Napster is dead already. But this isn't completely a cause to mourn.
Most recent revolutions in digital media that have solid-media business shitting themselves have come from bored or curious teenagers and college students. CSS was cracked by a 16 year old. Hotline was created by a teenager. Napster (a conceptually modified Hotline, though no one mentions it) was set up by Sean Fanning when he was 20 or 21. Even Netscape was lead by Marc Andreesen before he graduated college. (please be gentle with slight factual errors, that was recounted from memory)
How long will it take before the uncontrollable throng of adolescent geniuses that big business hates and fears comes up with something better than Napster? About three months probably. Maybe less.
The RIAA has introduced a new market force. The capitalist mantra has always been "competition fosters innovation". This is the beginning of litigation fostering innovation. I'm sure this isn't what the RIAA and MPAA really want. Napster basically had a monopoly on peer-to-peer MP3 sharing. If that is monopoly is shut down, the marketplace will be thrown open to innovation, however a pure copy will not work. The RIAA lawsuits have established a clear technological baseline. Every spawn of Napster will have to start that much higher. And they will.
This attitude about Web design is one of the reasons the Internet went broke. (another one is lame, hopelessly flawed business plans)
Web designers need to remember that Web design is not print. Documents will be changed by users and users should have that freedom. Worry more about information architecture, it's the content that ultimately matters. Design shouldn't just be decoration that viewers have to conform to, design should help viewers to better comprehend the information they're seeing.
What about handicapped users? Or those who need larger type to see? What about celphone browsers? PalmOS? WebTV? Crappy WindowsCE appliances in the airport business lounge?
Web design extends traditional design towards architecture and engineering. Good Web design is flexible. It doesn't matter what the building looks like if it falls on your head.
Strict adherence to standards is the best thing we've got. Letting go of the bells and whistles is better for your clients, your audience, your bottom line and your sanity.
I'm posting this at the risk of seeming like a reactionary fruitcake, but make your own decisions:
Also check http://www.dorway.com/ for extensive background information.
- US Air Force pilots are not allowed to consume Aspertame
- More than 10,000 food products contain Aspertame, everything from mints to soda to cereal.
- When heated above 86 F (30 C) Nutrasweet turns to Methanol (wood alcohol) This then digests as formaldehyde and Formic Acid.
- The two main ingredients of Nutrasweet are: Phenylalanine and aspartic acid which are essentially natural, however are never found independent of other amino acids.
- May cause autism by affecting unborn children (cases of autism has been on the rise for the past 20 years)
- in 1996, 60 minutes showed a porportional rise between brain tumors in the US and use of Aspertame in the US since 1981. Why has this never been mentioned in the recent cell-phone cancer scare?
Someone scanned what claims to be a Department of Health and Human Services paper cataloging symptoms reported to the FDA.Additionally, these are the "92 symptoms" the FDA knew were associated with Aspertame when they approved it. These were discovered in an FDA document brought to light thanks to The Freedom of Information Act.
There is growing evidence of Aspertame (main ingredient of Nutrasweet) affectting short term memory.
Search Google for Nutrasweet and memory loss and you'll get a huge listing. Not just health-food stores either, several university studies come up too.
This is not just a conspiracy-theorist, natural-foods idea, the evidence is compelling. Researchers are linking consumption of nutrasweet to the rise in Alzheimers disease and it would also justify the research in this article.
How much diet coke do you drink?
..a lot of them said they were too embarrassed to ask for help at the polling station. People are there at the polling station to help out and if the voter doesn't take advantage of what is available that is their loss.
There are accounts of election officials being instructed to turn away anyone who needed assistance because it would slow down voting and turnout was much higher than normal. Because of this, people who did ask for help were turned away and their votes voided.
*I don't remember which paper I read that in, I'm reading about 10 these days from all over the place. It might have been in the New York Times or AP coverage of the NAACP hearings.
There is mention of it in this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/20 00/ 11/13/politics/13TOCK.html
Even if we were to allow the wheels of government to grind along slowly, and give them a few more elections to get technology in place, effective information design is not new.
The private sector occasionally knows the importance clearly presented information. Ask for a picture menu at McDonalds sometime. Of course the private sector counts ever $.69, government is currently content to ignore thousands and thousands of votes each year.
The Palm Beach ballots were not alone in their incompetence. Evidence from all over the US indicates many ballots were as easy to understand as a Tax form, which is not at all. The nature of English reading (and all other horizontally read languages) is to read down one verticle column and then move on to the next column. This reminds me of those silly high school tests where there was a long list of convoluted directions with the last item in the list saying "ignore all previous directions."
A whole lot of people on both sides of the party fence are having their careers skewered over this. I feel bad for the local Democrat woman who approved the ballot. Her job was not to redesign the voting system, her job was to make sure the names were spelled correctly. Florida law indicated the order of candidates on the ballot, maybe it should have put everyone in the middle. A whole lot of grief could have been avoided if the ballot design had "wasted" a bit of paper and left some space between the candidates names. There appeared to be plenty of unused space at the bottom of the ballot card.
Regardless of who wins this election, wouldn't it be nice if Florida could get the same number in two separate recounts?
Some of the protest signs have been rather disturbing. I don't believe the people who screwed up their votes were "stupid" as I've heard and seen them referred to. But even if they were, we are all free to be stupid, and to be frail, confused, illiterate. All votes are equal, no one voter has any more importance whether they have an MBA or never went to high school.
1.64 miles is 2.64 kilometers.
What ever happened to metric?
Didn't we learn from that nasa flub last year? The future is not in miles or feet or inches.
on my DVD player, the FBI warning and Studio ads come up the instant you put the disk in. There is no way to stop this. You have to wait for the disk to finish "booting" before you can see the movie. Some disks have more than others, I think it's an authoring issue by the studios.
I probably shouldn't have bought a Sony.
What we need is an alternative minded, mainstream company to manufacture a DVD player that will blow off regioning, macrovision and play-control and let us use DVDs however we see fit.
Operation Currently Prohibited by Disk
The first time I saw this crap spewing from my DVD player I nearly exploded. I read fast, I don't need the FBI warning onscreen for 30 seconds, it's what, 40-60 words? Oh yeah, 40-60 meaningless, completely ignored words. Let me fastforward through it, or go to the menu, I have chosen to forfeit a few hours of my time, which is valuable, don't waste it by locking me out of my own stuff.
The very idea that someone can decide how I will view something I've purchased makes my blood boil. Yes it's a viewing license, no I don't technically "own" the movie, but damn it, I want to be able use this on my terms, in my house, in any way I see fit.
Actually, besides the excellent picture and sound, there is a lot on DVDs that sucks:
Viewer control Can't skip or fastforward through the FBI warning and studio crap, effectively creating an arbitrary "boot time".
No bookmarks on players? Come on, I've got more memory in my cel phone then the computers that landed men on the moon, how about a meager scrap of memory to bookmark timecodes for the last 20-30 disks?
Macrovision Yes it prevents casual taping of disks, but it is mostly just a nuisance for owners with non-standard hookups. Try running your DVD signal through a VCR, and you're hosed. There are plenty of reasons to do this besides piracy. Old TVs, TVs with one input, TVs in two different rooms...
Region encoding Words fail me. Create a huge management and manufacturing overhead to prevent users in different parts of the world from seeing anything other than that which is sanctioned for their particular area. This verges on mind-control.
Built in obsolescence The (NTSC) signal is 480 lines tall. Of course the MPAA did this so you will have to re-buy everything again whenever the industry finally switches over to HiDef TV. Jay Leno shouldn't look better than the movie you just purchased, but if you have a HDTV, he does.
If only VHS didn't look like crap and wasn't tape...
It's not a one-hit wonder, Creep is on there twice ;-)
Seriously though, listen to that again (or just got DL from Napster, it's easier than finding the CD anyway). There are some really great tracks on that album besides Creep, "Thinking about You" "Stop Whispering", "Anyone can play Guitar"...
Remember, it was 1993. Pablo Honey was a very emotionally honest album. Creep did blow my mind at the time however...
This is just another step in the record companies long slow suicide. If they really had a clue about the future, they would not have shut down the lyrics databases when they should have just bought them out. They wouldn't be trying to stop Napster, they would be pressing ahead with colateral merchandise and expanded experiences. They would be giving music videos away and using the web to create affinity groups of music types, collect ad revenue and build brands. They would recreate themselves as a modern business capable of dealing with changes in the marketplace.
What do you do when you have a song stuck in your head? Since there are no lyrics databases left to search openly, I go straight to a text search engine like Altavista or Google and find whatever fragment of a phrase I can scrape together. Most popular lyrics seem to be online somewhere, and I usually find the song in a few searches.
Since the record companies have done absolutely nothing to help find one song on an album, let alone make it possible to buy just that song, hello Napster. Custom CDs are not the answer. When blank CDRs are for sale at KMart, it's a little late to try and convince us that CDs are hard to make. If I want one song, I want it now, and I don't want to be forced into buying 10-15 other songs for $20 and having to wait a week for delivery.
Music has been digital for years, and that means that there are no originals. Everything is a copy, the only original is the music being recorded. Without copies, there is no music. There is absolutely no difference between the content on a CD I purchased today and 10,000 of the same album purchased anywhere around the world.
I'm glad Radiohead came forward, again they prove to be among the most forward thinking musicians out there. I'm also glad I own all their albums. And I'm going to go download their live shows right now...
How is my house more likely to get broken into:
1. I have a door with a broken lock and I don't tell anybody.
2. I have a door with a broken lock and I put a sign in my front lawn reading, "I have a broken Brand X lock. Can somebody tell me where to get a new one?"
Thanks to my check-for-broken-door-lock robot, both doors are equal. It checks 1000 doors every second.
Your broken lock IS your sign...
- by downloading everything I can get my hands on.
Gee, my boycott was to share everything I have.
"bite the flowers"
Check out this statement on theMacJunkies: http://www.themacjunkie.com/readme.html
"Our site has been deleted. No, seriously."
Is this the revenge of MacOsRumors?
I think you mean Logitech, not Microsoft
I had thought this was a Microsoft invention, I haven't been able to find any evidence pointing to the scroll-wheel as a Logitech invention. It would figure though, and keep up Microsoft's perfect batting average for innovation. This whole "only do what has already been proven to work" business plan seems to work pretty well.
I still believe that the mouse wheel was invented by either Habitrail or Fred Flintstone.
We need to make sure we can attribute the optical mouse to someone besides MS, I remember those crappy ones from 7-8 years ago with the funky aluminum gridded mouse "pads", but we have to make sure MS doesn't get any credit for the intellimouse.
Please make note of the weary sarcasm.
Do you really think someone who writes about Apple and the Macintosh, someone who has so much to gain on a day like today, even someone so publicly wrong and potentially humiliated, would even consider shutting down their site during MacWorld New York?
Apple Legal was sending letters to websites AND the site's hosting ISP. Maybe MacJunkie's crappy ISP panicked and pulled the plug when they got the letter. Here's to freedom of the press...
Looks like someone ate their website instead of their shorts.
This could be the result of Apple Legal's letter to his ISP. Please make a note of his ISP to be sure to never, never, never use them for anything, ever.
Did anyone else immediately think of Star Trek when he grabbed that handle and pulled?
All that's needed now is a twist first. Oh and memory of little slivers of clear plastic.
No buttons might be interesting, don't know how gamers will react to the no-button thing,
It's amazing that they still haven't offered a 2-button mouse, or even a two no-button mouse, but what amazes me most is the absence of the greatest addition to input in the past 15 years:
THE SCROLL WHEEL*
I could never be without one again.
*unfortunate proof that Microsoft does occasionally come up with a good idea or two.
An interesting side note to the proliferation of do it yourself drug content online could be the decline in profit for drug dealers.
If everyone knew how to make their own drugs, that kid on 10th street would have to find something to do besides mumbling the drug-name-of-the week to passerbys all day.
Potentially, the amount of incidental crime associated to the drug trade could go down with demand. A bad side effect would be poor drug dealers who can't keep up their "lifestyle" resorting to muggings and robbery to keep them in chains and clothes.
Joe Maller
[no sig]
Now all we need is a coffee planet and I'm all set.
The first turning point should be up...especially right before spattering into the surface again.
Send another Rover, Mars needs gadgets.