When I had to format my main partition and reinstall Windows 2000, I considered Winamp 3. It had this really nifty multiple-playlist feature, and a neato browser that would let you put filters on your entire music collection, and coax generated playlists out of that. I thought that was a big improvement over the single-playlist model that Winamp 2 had.
But, ah! I was running an Athlon T-Bird 1000MHz with 512MB of memory. Winamp 2 comes up in under two seconds when the system is fully loaded with Gimp and Audacity and twenty Firefox tabs and whatnot. Winamp 3 takes closer to ten seconds to start up, even when nothing at all is running.
So that's why I still run Winamp 2, and am unlikely to change it.
Also why I run Media Player Classic. (Well, for that, I won't complain about the improved error messages for missing codecs. Sheesh, Microsoft, could you be any less helpful in the regular WMP?)
I will say, though, that in the switchover from the 95 series (98, ME) to the NT series (2k, XP), single apps were a lot less capable of crashing the whole shebang. I just dread that I'll ever have to actually move onto something other than 2k on the Windows box.
You neglected to mention the part where the device plays DVDs and DivX movies "without a hitch", in the words of the reviewers. There's a lot to be said for the value of a set-top box when you can make them about as small as a DVD player, and when you can make them entirely solid-state, playing ripped DVDs off network storage. Mmm, solid-state.
It might be possible. Now that I'm not at work, I can mention Computer Sciences Corporation, my employer. They're a ginormous outsourcing company, employing something like ninety thousand IT professionals. (Professional, me---ha!) They also have data centers and managed hosting in a number of places, including where I work. Big room with complicated doors and a Halon system. So maybe the "do mean things to P2P" application is hosted there.
Ha! They block my work IP (it's in 20.x.x.x, if that means anything). Clearly I work for a company that's mean to filesharers. Huh. I had no idea; I thought it was a tech support and hosting company.
Dear me, this takes me back. I remember the dot-com era as if it were yesterday. Of course, I was born a little late for it; I was still in high school until just before it all ended, and I realized that my job prospects had gone to shit.
I remember that the boundless optimism of the time, the techno-utopianism of Wired magazine, grated on me terribly, and I could never quite articulate why. Luckily for me, someone else did a fabulous job of it.
I remember reading The Guy I Almost Was and understanding that while technology holds brilliant, world-changing promise, the dot-commies wouldn't be the ones to bring it to us.
I remember Snarfblat (or was it Jason Farnon?) saying "now go make a link to HotWired, or better yet, to your mother".
I do not, however, remember the 2000 Super Bowl ads, which seems to be what everyone else remembers. Go figure.
The Tolkien Elves spoke Elvish languages, though there was no one language they would have called "Elvish". They mostly spoke either Sindarin (the vernacular) or Quenya (the Elvish Latin---the ancient language). Dwarves spoke Khuzdul, but nobody understands it except the dwarves, since they're so secretive. And the Men spoke Westron.
No, I'm not a real dork, I never managed to plow my way through the books. I just googled that up.
... where do I fit in on that taxonomy? I make a zillion janitorial changes (well, thirty-five hundred and counting as of last December) and occasionally create an article or two based on my own knowledge or quick research. I pick up loose ends that other people leave around. I fix others' dodgy markup. I tag images for copyright. I stardardize markup across articles in a category.
And images, too---I screenshot things, I scan things, I even take a few pictures here and there. But I'm not really good at writing in an encyclopedic way. So, which am I?
Strange that people with better things to do would wade into the comments section. It's good to know the spirit of openness and two-way communication hasn't disappeared from all large websites.
Remember, the main liability one has in using P2P services is in uploading them. Distributing the media is what makes you liable for criminal copyright infringement, financial ruin, and possible jail time.
My choices are, (a) pay a relatively high price to iTMS. The recording industry grows fat, the artists get paid, I don't get sued. (b) Pay a very low price to AllOfMP3. The industry and the artists get pretty much nothing, and my liability is pretty much nonexistent. (They don't arrest people for buying bootleg DVD, they arrest people for selling them.) (c) Pay nothing and use ed2k or the like. The industry and the artists get exactly nothing, and my liability is... who knows? The possibility always exists that I'll get sued into bankruptcy.
Clearly, the logical choice for the user who doesn't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock for the RIAA is (b). Which, really, is where their suing-people tactics have led.
People don't use AllOfMP3 because it's the best. (Though it looks pretty nice to me.) People use it out of fear of the RIAA's lawyer-thugs.
The standard deviation is supposed to be twenty, if I remember correctly. So a negative IQ would have to be... five sigmas out. Ignoring that the testing methodologies don't even provide for this, what sort of proportion does five sigmas make for? Is it more or less than one in six billion? Anyone remember how to do the math for that?
Nope, he's right and you're wrong. The point which he describes is not the average, but the median. As IQ is normally distributed (well, it's designed to be), it's symmetric about 100, so that its median and average (mean) are the same.
IQ tests are normalized based on scads and scads of results for lots and lots of people. A test taker is given a score of 100 because half of the people who took it in the calibration group scored higher, and half lower.
So, while the mean isn't necessarily the median, it sometimes is, and you won't always score cheap points by saying it isn't.
That's certainly one way of looking at it, though I'd point out that the early Americans did what you describe to a land that they'd never been to before, and America isn't a theocracy.
The Jews didn't flood in all at once after the Holocaust, either. True, there was a wave of immigration after World War II, but Jews had been moving to what is now Israel since the turn of the century and earlier.
In the early years of Israel's formation, it was proposed as a two-state deal, sort of like what the current "Road Map" is pointing towards, but with more land for the Arabs. The Jews accepted the two-state idea, the Arabs denied it, the Jews declared a state, the Arabs attacked and the hostilities began. After which, the Jews were booted from the surrounding Arab countries, and the Palestinians from Israel itself.
As of today, Muslims and Christians live in Israel, as citizens equal to any other. The Palestinians aren't citizens there; they've been camping on the borders for more than fifty years. Note that the Jews in the surrounding nations didn't see fit to do this.
Didn't Real learn a valuable lesson similar to this one when they had one of their media encoding tools stamp "RealNetworks" on all of its output? Companies will pay lots of money for production tools, but they won't stand for someone else piggybacking their advertising on their content.
Or maybe they will now, since the content itself isn't branded. What a crock. Sad thing is, Flash can be a really useful tool, but it's seldom used as such. (Unlike, say, the BLINK tag, which was a useless and pointless idea the second it rolled off the line.)
Tell me, is your knowledge of the American people limited to cowboy stereotypes? They're about as accurate as thinking of all Brits as effete limey wankers with last names like "Wyndham-Scunthorpe".
I mean, what's your encore? Do you engage in an interpretive dance in which you hunch forward, miming a deformed spine, put on a ten-gallon cowboy hat and ten-pound belt buckle in the shape of Texas, and say "Hyuck!" and "Y'all" in order to make... what sort of point?
What I get out of your comments is (1) you think Americans fit a stereotype, Texans doubly so. (2) You really, really don't like guns, so much that you're unable to discuss them without sinking to the level of a fifth-grader.
There's a wonderful and spirited debate to be had on the subject, but you've decided not to have it. I'm disappointed.
Okay, let's set the parameters of the discussion we're having. We're talking about two things---P2P and guns---which are tools, that is, which can be used for good or for evil, for legal and illegal things. We are furthermore talking about whether or not it is rational to outlaw them on the grounds that the evil uses are the only real reason people uses them. This is the "substantial non-infringing uses" argument for P2P.
Indeed, I cannot show that guns ought to be legal because they already are. I can, however, show that guns ought to be legal if they have substantial legal uses. (Remember, we're discussing the connection between a tool and its use.) If you think I meant that guns are only "used" when fired, then you misinterpreted me. I consider it a "use" when a gun is brandished as well as when it is fired. The rapist who holds a gun to a woman's head and the shopkeeper who scares off a robber with the Lupo under his countertop are both using the gun. Clearer now?
It's lovely that you don't use P2P for copyright infringement. And I'm certain that people use BitTorrent a lot to download their Linux ISOs. (I know I do.) But I tell you that a quick survey of the Direct Connect hub at any university (I know, I ran one for some time) will show that the proportion of legitimate to illegitimate trade is very, very lopsided toward the illegitimate. Any search of a public network such as ed2k or KaZaA will show that infringing material is more prevalent than free content.
My point, as it has been in the last two posts, is that both guns and P2P have substantial legal uses. If you accept the "substantial [legitimate] uses" argument, then if you accept P2P, then you must accept gun ownership.
Furthermore, note that the actual usage of P2P applications is more likely to be illegal than legal, while the actual usage of a gun is more likely to be legal than illegal. (Are you going to seriously tell me that guns are used for crimes at a faster rate than they are used for target shooting?) If anything, this only underscores my point.
Then again, if you consider shooting clay or paper targets evil, if you consider self-defense evil, I suppose I'm wasting my time trying to reason with you.
Ah, the Phantom Tenth Amendment. Ever since Congress started slapping everything with the Interstate Commerce Clause, it's gone out of vogue. Face it, the United States are no longer plural, and haven't been for a very long time. It's one nation under a strong central government.
Go try to apply the Tenth Amendment to that case in which Californians grew pot in accordance with state law, entirely in-state, to be controlled and used entirely in-state. Whoops, it could conceivably be used for interstate commerce, so send in the feds.
My APEX DVD player has been one of the most flexible, useful, reliable pieces of entertainment hardware I've ever owned. It played all the VCDs and SVCDs I threw at it, whereas brand-name players costing twice as much refused to play them. Aside from that, I never found a difference between the cheap foreign players and the expensive American ones.
Oh, and you could flash the APEX's firmware so it would display a different background image. That was kinda nifty.
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When I had to format my main partition and reinstall Windows 2000, I considered Winamp 3. It had this really nifty multiple-playlist feature, and a neato browser that would let you put filters on your entire music collection, and coax generated playlists out of that. I thought that was a big improvement over the single-playlist model that Winamp 2 had.
But, ah! I was running an Athlon T-Bird 1000MHz with 512MB of memory. Winamp 2 comes up in under two seconds when the system is fully loaded with Gimp and Audacity and twenty Firefox tabs and whatnot. Winamp 3 takes closer to ten seconds to start up, even when nothing at all is running.
So that's why I still run Winamp 2, and am unlikely to change it.
Also why I run Media Player Classic. (Well, for that, I won't complain about the improved error messages for missing codecs. Sheesh, Microsoft, could you be any less helpful in the regular WMP?)
I will say, though, that in the switchover from the 95 series (98, ME) to the NT series (2k, XP), single apps were a lot less capable of crashing the whole shebang. I just dread that I'll ever have to actually move onto something other than 2k on the Windows box.
--grendel drago
You neglected to mention the part where the device plays DVDs and DivX movies "without a hitch", in the words of the reviewers. There's a lot to be said for the value of a set-top box when you can make them about as small as a DVD player, and when you can make them entirely solid-state, playing ripped DVDs off network storage. Mmm, solid-state.
--grendel drago
I couldn't get this from work, but---"Admit how shallow you are and make a link to HotWired; or better yet to your mother." Such tales as "Wheaties, Semen and Blood", "It's High Time I Threw a Brick at You"> and the truly brilliant "Skinhead Hamlet".
Oh, yeah. That's the stuff. *snrrt*
--grendel drago
It might be possible. Now that I'm not at work, I can mention Computer Sciences Corporation, my employer. They're a ginormous outsourcing company, employing something like ninety thousand IT professionals. (Professional, me---ha!) They also have data centers and managed hosting in a number of places, including where I work. Big room with complicated doors and a Halon system. So maybe the "do mean things to P2P" application is hosted there.
--grendel drago
Wow. I... would not have thought of that. So they come from Middle-ear^WNew Zealand, then...
As for the analogous American snack, I think you may be talking about "3D Doritos".
--grendel drago
I'm going to invent a drinking game to go with that post.
--grendel drago
Damn, that's a tumble.
--grendel drago
What's a Cheezal?
Seriously, I'm curious.
--grendel drago
Ha! They block my work IP (it's in 20.x.x.x, if that means anything). Clearly I work for a company that's mean to filesharers. Huh. I had no idea; I thought it was a tech support and hosting company.
--grendel drago
Dear me, this takes me back. I remember the dot-com era as if it were yesterday. Of course, I was born a little late for it; I was still in high school until just before it all ended, and I realized that my job prospects had gone to shit.
I remember that the boundless optimism of the time, the techno-utopianism of Wired magazine, grated on me terribly, and I could never quite articulate why. Luckily for me, someone else did a fabulous job of it.
I remember reading The Guy I Almost Was and understanding that while technology holds brilliant, world-changing promise, the dot-commies wouldn't be the ones to bring it to us.
I remember Snarfblat (or was it Jason Farnon?) saying "now go make a link to HotWired, or better yet, to your mother".
I do not, however, remember the 2000 Super Bowl ads, which seems to be what everyone else remembers. Go figure.
--grendel drago
The Tolkien Elves spoke Elvish languages, though there was no one language they would have called "Elvish". They mostly spoke either Sindarin (the vernacular) or Quenya (the Elvish Latin---the ancient language). Dwarves spoke Khuzdul, but nobody understands it except the dwarves, since they're so secretive. And the Men spoke Westron.
No, I'm not a real dork, I never managed to plow my way through the books. I just googled that up.
--grendel drago
... where do I fit in on that taxonomy? I make a zillion janitorial changes (well, thirty-five hundred and counting as of last December) and occasionally create an article or two based on my own knowledge or quick research. I pick up loose ends that other people leave around. I fix others' dodgy markup. I tag images for copyright. I stardardize markup across articles in a category.
And images, too---I screenshot things, I scan things, I even take a few pictures here and there. But I'm not really good at writing in an encyclopedic way. So, which am I?
--grendel drago
Strange that people with better things to do would wade into the comments section. It's good to know the spirit of openness and two-way communication hasn't disappeared from all large websites.
--grendel drago
Oh, man, I suppose Britannica should get out of the "fact" business then, too.
Just 'cause there's no real public review process for Britannica (which is fine; none is advertised) doesn't mean they're not full of holes.
--grendel drago
Remember, the main liability one has in using P2P services is in uploading them. Distributing the media is what makes you liable for criminal copyright infringement, financial ruin, and possible jail time.
My choices are, (a) pay a relatively high price to iTMS. The recording industry grows fat, the artists get paid, I don't get sued. (b) Pay a very low price to AllOfMP3. The industry and the artists get pretty much nothing, and my liability is pretty much nonexistent. (They don't arrest people for buying bootleg DVD, they arrest people for selling them.) (c) Pay nothing and use ed2k or the like. The industry and the artists get exactly nothing, and my liability is... who knows? The possibility always exists that I'll get sued into bankruptcy.
Clearly, the logical choice for the user who doesn't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock for the RIAA is (b). Which, really, is where their suing-people tactics have led.
People don't use AllOfMP3 because it's the best. (Though it looks pretty nice to me.) People use it out of fear of the RIAA's lawyer-thugs.
--grendel drago
Didn't they make Debian stable for people like you?
--grendel drago
Nah, TeX already has that. METAFONT has a lock on e, too. So what do we use? Is there some kind of sexy constant between 2.6 and 3?
--grendel drago
The standard deviation is supposed to be twenty, if I remember correctly. So a negative IQ would have to be... five sigmas out. Ignoring that the testing methodologies don't even provide for this, what sort of proportion does five sigmas make for? Is it more or less than one in six billion? Anyone remember how to do the math for that?
--grendel drago
Nope, he's right and you're wrong. The point which he describes is not the average, but the median. As IQ is normally distributed (well, it's designed to be), it's symmetric about 100, so that its median and average (mean) are the same.
IQ tests are normalized based on scads and scads of results for lots and lots of people. A test taker is given a score of 100 because half of the people who took it in the calibration group scored higher, and half lower.
So, while the mean isn't necessarily the median, it sometimes is, and you won't always score cheap points by saying it isn't.
--grendel drago
That's certainly one way of looking at it, though I'd point out that the early Americans did what you describe to a land that they'd never been to before, and America isn't a theocracy.
The Jews didn't flood in all at once after the Holocaust, either. True, there was a wave of immigration after World War II, but Jews had been moving to what is now Israel since the turn of the century and earlier.
In the early years of Israel's formation, it was proposed as a two-state deal, sort of like what the current "Road Map" is pointing towards, but with more land for the Arabs. The Jews accepted the two-state idea, the Arabs denied it, the Jews declared a state, the Arabs attacked and the hostilities began. After which, the Jews were booted from the surrounding Arab countries, and the Palestinians from Israel itself.
As of today, Muslims and Christians live in Israel, as citizens equal to any other. The Palestinians aren't citizens there; they've been camping on the borders for more than fifty years. Note that the Jews in the surrounding nations didn't see fit to do this.
--grendel drago
Didn't Real learn a valuable lesson similar to this one when they had one of their media encoding tools stamp "RealNetworks" on all of its output? Companies will pay lots of money for production tools, but they won't stand for someone else piggybacking their advertising on their content.
Or maybe they will now, since the content itself isn't branded. What a crock. Sad thing is, Flash can be a really useful tool, but it's seldom used as such. (Unlike, say, the BLINK tag, which was a useless and pointless idea the second it rolled off the line.)
--grendel drago
Tell me, is your knowledge of the American people limited to cowboy stereotypes? They're about as accurate as thinking of all Brits as effete limey wankers with last names like "Wyndham-Scunthorpe".
I mean, what's your encore? Do you engage in an interpretive dance in which you hunch forward, miming a deformed spine, put on a ten-gallon cowboy hat and ten-pound belt buckle in the shape of Texas, and say "Hyuck!" and "Y'all" in order to make... what sort of point?
What I get out of your comments is (1) you think Americans fit a stereotype, Texans doubly so. (2) You really, really don't like guns, so much that you're unable to discuss them without sinking to the level of a fifth-grader.
There's a wonderful and spirited debate to be had on the subject, but you've decided not to have it. I'm disappointed.
--grendel drago
Okay, let's set the parameters of the discussion we're having. We're talking about two things---P2P and guns---which are tools, that is, which can be used for good or for evil, for legal and illegal things. We are furthermore talking about whether or not it is rational to outlaw them on the grounds that the evil uses are the only real reason people uses them. This is the "substantial non-infringing uses" argument for P2P.
Indeed, I cannot show that guns ought to be legal because they already are. I can, however, show that guns ought to be legal if they have substantial legal uses. (Remember, we're discussing the connection between a tool and its use.) If you think I meant that guns are only "used" when fired, then you misinterpreted me. I consider it a "use" when a gun is brandished as well as when it is fired. The rapist who holds a gun to a woman's head and the shopkeeper who scares off a robber with the Lupo under his countertop are both using the gun. Clearer now?
It's lovely that you don't use P2P for copyright infringement. And I'm certain that people use BitTorrent a lot to download their Linux ISOs. (I know I do.) But I tell you that a quick survey of the Direct Connect hub at any university (I know, I ran one for some time) will show that the proportion of legitimate to illegitimate trade is very, very lopsided toward the illegitimate. Any search of a public network such as ed2k or KaZaA will show that infringing material is more prevalent than free content.
My point, as it has been in the last two posts, is that both guns and P2P have substantial legal uses. If you accept the "substantial [legitimate] uses" argument, then if you accept P2P, then you must accept gun ownership.
Furthermore, note that the actual usage of P2P applications is more likely to be illegal than legal, while the actual usage of a gun is more likely to be legal than illegal. (Are you going to seriously tell me that guns are used for crimes at a faster rate than they are used for target shooting?) If anything, this only underscores my point.
Then again, if you consider shooting clay or paper targets evil, if you consider self-defense evil, I suppose I'm wasting my time trying to reason with you.
--grendel drago
Ah, the Phantom Tenth Amendment. Ever since Congress started slapping everything with the Interstate Commerce Clause, it's gone out of vogue. Face it, the United States are no longer plural, and haven't been for a very long time. It's one nation under a strong central government.
Go try to apply the Tenth Amendment to that case in which Californians grew pot in accordance with state law, entirely in-state, to be controlled and used entirely in-state. Whoops, it could conceivably be used for interstate commerce, so send in the feds.
Federalism ain't what it used to be.
--grendel drago
My APEX DVD player has been one of the most flexible, useful, reliable pieces of entertainment hardware I've ever owned. It played all the VCDs and SVCDs I threw at it, whereas brand-name players costing twice as much refused to play them. Aside from that, I never found a difference between the cheap foreign players and the expensive American ones.
Oh, and you could flash the APEX's firmware so it would display a different background image. That was kinda nifty.
--grendel drago