In many places like Los Angeles and New York you can't move closer to work. Its just not affordable.
Oh bullshit. I had a job in the Valley and I lived 2 blocks from my office. Then I got a job downtown LA so I moved to a place in downtown 8 blocks from work. Then I got a job in Hollywood so I moved to Silverlake, that was the farthest I ever commuted.
So don't say it isn't possible or affordable. It's all a matter of priorities. If gas is cheap, a shorter commute won't be a priority. Now gas is getting expensive, and people are developing new priorities.
I posted a relatively innocuous comment to that story earlier today, it was censored and did not appear. It read, in its entirety, "There is one thing conspicuously absent from the pictures: people." I must have hit a nerve. Sure the story was about the lab. But don't people use the lab? There are a couple of people who appear way in the background of one pic, so small you can hardly see them, but otherwise the pictures are totally devoid of human life. I am sure the set of photos required clearance from Microsoft management, did they object to publishing photos of their personnel as some sort of security risk? Microsoft has been conspicuously touchy about bloggers describing their Mac facilities, remember the blogger who got fired from his temp job for posting a pic of G5s on the MSFT loading dock? So it wouldn't surprise me if the absence of people in the photos was a deliberate choice by MS management. And that is a lot more intriguing than the pics of a bunch of server racks.
Phillips was just not thinking clearly when they invented this. There will be a flag at the start of commercials, and another at the end, to tell the anti-skip system when to activate. Just how long do you think it will be before someone figures out how to use the flags to start and stop the fast-forward button? This system of flags would be just as effective at automatically skipping ads.
Wow, I remember in the 1980s, I used to have corporate customers that would order 250 token ring cards at a time. Unfortunately, IBM couldn't deliver. They're probably still on backorder.
Look, I know all about osteopaths, an osteopath is an M.D. AND Chiropractor. I was once referred to one when I had a back injury, he did me absolutely no good, and in fact, bruised me seriously, causing further pain and injury. I was appalled at the stupid quackery that was promoted in his office, like silver solutions to cure childhood ear infections (nice, if you want permanently blue skin). I never went back.
Let me be absolutely clear, an osteopath is a quack, an M.D. who doesn't believe in medicine, and instead, promotes quack remedies like chiropractic and homeopathy. If you think you received real treatment and real relief from an osteopath, I recommend you learn about the Placebo Effect.
Your problems with contacts and CRTs may be due to a different problem than you realize. Ever notice how much dust is attracted to the CRT glass screen? CRTs are highly charged, and the cases usually carry a static electricity charge. This charge is highest on the CRT case but spreads out across your desk, keyboard, etc and even on to your hands, arms and body. The field attracts dust towards the CRT, and your work surface, even YOU as you touch the charged objects on your desk. You're working in a staticky environment, so the dust is attracted to your equipment, and YOU. Some of the dust goes straight into your eyes, some you rub in off your hands, etc. LCDs don't tend to have such static fields around them they're not based on such high voltage circuitry. So you get less dust and irritants in your environment and in your eyes. I'd always heard this, but the evidence really was blatant when I swapped out my old 22inch Sony Trinitron monitor for a nice new 30" Cinema Display. My desktop behind and around the CRT always needed constant cleaning and dusting, but the new LCD doesn't attract dust at all.
Osteopath?!?!? Let's all be clear on this, you're advocating CHIROPRACTIC to correct vision. What a total load of quackery. You cannot fix people's visual defects by cracking their spine. You, sir, are a gullible fool, to believe such quacks.
I thought I'd pop in a quick comment to beat the rush.. I've barely scanned through the document, but I've already noticed obvious and glaring errors.
For example, they cite the case of Adobe's claim that Nikon prevented them from decrypting their RAW format files. The facts as the EFF documents explains them, are just plain wrong. There was a brief outcry from some overwrought programmers at Adobe over this issue, but it turned out Nikon was always willing to license their proprietary code to developers like Adobe, even before this little dust-up. Nothing to see here, move along, it was just another testy outburst from a programmer who had too much coffee and didn't want to wait for his managers to finish negotiations with Nikon.
I'll go through the document in more detail, and I'm sure I'll find more deliberate misstatements of facts. The EFF always trumps up charges to inflate its case. Perhaps someday they will learn that this tactic undermines their efforts.
No, there are other legitimate reasons for using streaming, even on low bandwidth pipes like a modem. You start watching the video immediately, you don't have to wait for it to download, and you can jump to any point in a video instantly. This is significant when you put up long, long videos. The whole point of the web was to put users in control, some people (like me) have chosen to give the user the ability to instantly watch and instantly move to any point in their video, as a tradeoff for lower quality for low bandwidth users.
Streaming servers also have advantages for load balancing, I can easily place limits on total stream bandwidth, or balance it off to other servers. And then there's the ability to stream live video, I've done successful live events even on a tiny iMac G3/700 as a video server. Yep, there are plenty of reasons to use streaming instead of progressive download, it just depends on what you want to do.
Oh bullshit. Music video is produced as a promotional product for free distribution, nobody else can take credit for it, the band that created it is self-evident. My content is designed to be viewed in context, on my web page, with an accompanying text commentary, I don't even appear in the videos. Repost it and it loses context, and it strips me of the opportunity to explain it and take credit for it. The music video example, it has no context, it is self-contained. Some works are made for video, they can survive reposting, but some cannot. That's why I control access to my videos, they're only available through my website as streaming-only videos. My content IS special, it makes no sense without context.
Yeah sure, the sites don't scrape videos, people do it for them. Same difference. I know at least one videographer who created some original videos, posted them on his own site, they reappeared on iFilm a few weeks later. He put his website's address in the videos, but someone cut off the beginning and ending, deliberately removing the URL. It's getting so you'll have to put up a huge watermark across your video if you want to get any credit for it. This isn't such a big deal when you're posting some pirated music videos to YouTube, but for those of us who create new original video content, it is a bit galling to see our work reposted and stripped of any credit to the authors.
The one thing that annoys me terribly about these video sites is that they recompress video files available on other websites and present them in a low-bandwith Flash format. Sure Flash is crossplatform Mac/Win and runs almost everywhere, but it has the worst quality of any video codec. And recompressing video introduces significant artifacting. I've seen dozens of recompressed videos on sites like iFilm and YouTube that are easily available in high quality on the original websites, it's like iFilm and YouTube are scraping the web looking for content to populate their sites. And of course they don't provide a link to the original site, so you have no way to know there's a better quality version available. This is dragging video down to the lowest common denominator. I run a video blog website, and I use non-downloadable streaming video precisely because I don't want some other site scraping my content and recompressing it to make it look like crap.
If you can draw and draft compelling works by hand, your skills can be translated to CAD. The reverse is not true.
Agreed. I used to sell word processing in the early days of Wordstar and CP/M, and I always used to say that buying the world's greatest word processor won't make you a Great American Novelist. Nobody got it.
I started doing computer graphics when that meant FORTRAN and pen plotters, or if you were really lucky, you could wheedle some account time on a COM (computer output microfilm) machine. I dropped out of art school around 1977, after doing all the fundamental classes, because I got some good offers to do computer programming. Eventualy I discovered that the best preparation for computer graphics was my drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography classes. Let me give you an example.
I remember my first day in Drawing 101, we had to draw in charcoal on rough newsprint, the model was a bunch of paper sacks. Everyone hated drawing such a dumb subject, but the teacher insisted we had to learn to draw the lighting on the objects, not the objects. No hard lines allowed, only tones. We worked and worked for a couple of hours, and during the final critique, the teacher tore us all to shreds. Not one single student had observed the light source was coming from the upper left, all the drawings had inconsistent lighting that students just made up in their heads, rather than observing what was right in front of them. The drawings were all flat and lifeless. Then the teacher got up and drew a smeary charcoal sketch in a few seconds that followed the light accurately, it was cruder than any student drawing, but it stood out from all the others as the most 3 dimensional. Everyone was shocked. I never forgot that day's lesson: watch the light source.
OK, let's zoom forward about 20 years, I'm working in one of the top graphics bureaus in Los Angeles, I'm the shop's Photoshop whiz because I have a background in photography and printing. I notice the guy at the workstation next to me (a guitar player with no artistic skills whatsoever) is compositing some photos for a CD cover. There's a background scene of a room with a wall of windows, and he's compositing a human figure standing in the middle of the room. He's compositing some shadows under the figure, and beams of light coming in the window. He's working and working on the image and it just isn't working out, and he can't figure out what's wrong, it just doesn't look realistic. After a couple of hours of fiddling, he asks me to take a look at it, and I immediately notice, the only light source is coming in the windows, but the shadow cast under the guy is going the OPPOSITE direction, towards the light source instead of away from it. I tell the guy that the shadows have to be parallel to the beams of light coming in the window, shadows are never cast TOWARDS a light source, it violates the laws of physics. And if you don't have your shadows and lights consistent, it destroys the illusion of depth. So what do you think the non-artist said after I told him this? He ARGUED with me that it didn't make any difference WHICH WAY the shadows were cast! Sheesh!
After a many years dealing with total fucking idiots like this, I decided to go back to art school to finish my BFA. The professors who so intensely disliked my early computer graphics works, were now gearing up to get into computers. All I wanted to do was oil painting and drawing. The graphic arts teachers couldn't understand why someone would want to give up their long career in CG for the manual labor of painting and drawing. But the painting teachers knew why!
Huh? You mean "Trurl's Prescription," the story of the Steelypips and the THING that wouldn't go away? Don't be ridiculous, that's a universal human experience, not an exclusively Polish one.
Good catch. I always thought that the Golem XIV story was the sort of story that the Slashdot audience should appreciate (and more so than the usual lame crap that people here worship, like Ender's Game). But it is probably above the heads of most readers, it is one of his most abstract works, probably surpassed in sheer abstraction only by "His Master's Voice."
Anyway, that is what was so great about Lem, his best works were philosophical essays only wrapped in the superficial trappings of science fiction because those were the topics of the modern age. Lem even gave up SF writing because he refused to be associated with such rubbish as was being published lately. When Lem was active, up until the early 1980s, SF was still subversive and was the literary genre of ideas. But then it turned into Space Opera rubbish at the hands of morons like George Lucas who popularized it and turned it into mass-media pablum. There was no more room for thinkers like Lem, so he gave up on the genre entirely. And the world was a poorer place for it. Shame on everyone for buying tickets to Star Wars and not buying more Lem books.
I was just reading a Lem interview somewhere on the web today, he talks about Michael Kandel's translation. Lem said Kandel took a lot of liberties, rewriting passages and changing a lot of things beyond what was in the original text, but remained true to the intent of the book. Lem said he learned a lot from Kandel, that there was more to translation than a literal translation of the words. And it's true, Kandel's work was brilliant. There are whole chapters of The Cyberiad that are almost entirely poetry, like the tale of that THING that wouldn't go away. And I'll never forget the wonderful wordplay about dragonslaying with Quantum Draconics.
This is so obscenely overpriced at $35 per movie, hell, you could buy 2 or 3 DVDs for that price. Do the studios not realize that they are driving customers away by price-gouging? This is the same crap we heard from the music companies when vinyl records were going up to $9 and CDs came out, they were supposed to be cheaper than LPs because they were cheaper to manufacture. But music CDs are still way more than $9 (even accounting for inflation). The media companies look at every new format as an opportunity to raise prices, even when the cost of manufacturing and distribution drops significantly.
Precisely. I have been telling people for years, QuickTime is the crown jewel at Apple, and many of the most successful projects, like the iPod and iTunes, were created in the hopes of pushing QuickTime adoption on Windows.
As a web video and multimedia programmer, I have long wished for one universal standard based on QuickTime. Everyone's web experience would be so much better if we could all standardize around QT. But many times I encounter users who work in corporate IT environments with locked down PCs that are forbidden from installing QT. This seems to be a relic of olden times when online video and audio were seen as frivolous, and a big waste of bandwidth.
I figure I paid about $65 in extra interest charges over the 2 week hold period. But there are strict regulations on credit card payments. I recall reading regulations that they have to credit your account as of the postmarked date, if you send a check by mail, although they don't have to release your credit limit until they're sure the check cleared. This is to prevent them from grabbing more interest by kiting your check, or from zinging you with extra late fees while they hold your payment an arbitrary time. It seems to me the CC company violated this regulation in my case.
This same thing happened to me. I inherited some money when my mom died, so a couple of months ago, I paid off my $7500 credit card balance, I mailed them a check for the full amount. About a week later, the payment still wasn't credited, so I called them and they said it takes 7 to 10 days for such a large check to clear. Yeah right. They told me to call back if it wasn't credited after 10 days. It wasn't, I called back again, they said if it wasn't credited after 14 days, call back again. It wasn't, I called back again. THIS time, I insisted they get a 3 way call with my bank to confirm the check had cleared. They credited my account during the phone call. But after reading the article about the guy who got turned in to Homeland Security for paying $6500 on his JCPenneys account, now it all makes sense. I saw another version of this news article, it said the "bank security act" requires credit card companies to report large payments. I can't find any such law, there's a Bank Security Act of 1974 but that far predates the existence of Homeland Security. The closest regulation I can find is the requirement to report cash transactions larger than $10k to the IRS. This is all so much bullshit I can't believe it. It's some sort of secret law, or more likely Homeland Security has duped banks into playing along with an imaginary law, just to get more data on totally innocent people. I am infuriated. I can't wait to see what happens when I try to board an airplane, now that DHS thinks I'm a terrorist, I bet I'm on the No Fly List.
Well gee, let me see, there must be a few TV content producers releasing their content online in any form.
Like for example, through the iTunes distribution system, you can get shows from ABC, NBC, and soon CBS, SciFi TV, Comedy Central, Bravo, and other cable channels. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have news clips available for live streaming. Most Japanese TV networks have online streaming news, they like streaming as a moderate DRM method, rather than downloading.
A better question to ask is, who DOESN'T put their content available online? I keep looking and finding fewer and fewer video content producers who do not have an online presence.
ALL of this was enabled by DRM. Without DRM, none of these content providers would put their stuff online.
You've obviously never read the OSX86 website. The forums were full of links to torrents for pirated MacOS X disk images, and extensive discussion on specific techniques to break encryption and other DRM included on those images. The forums exist solely for the purpose of doing things the DMCA prohibits.
Like it or not, the DMCA is the law of the land, and it specifically states it is illegal to distribute methods of breaking DRM or to redistribute copyrighted materials. Apple was within its rights to demand the removal of the offending items. In fact, Apple is REQUIRED to enforce its legal rights, or it can lose all copyright protection for its work.
Some people whine that this DMCA action is an infringment of their First Amendment right to "Free Speach." OK, please cite the passages in the First Amendment that allow you to take the work of other persons or companies, work that has cost millions to develop, and you can use it freely without compensation. This whole idea is entirely opposite of the specific terms in the Constitution about patents and copyrights granting limited-term monopolies "to promote the useful arts and sciences."
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either Apple is entitled to profit from its R&D investments, or else NOBODY is (including YOU).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh bullshit. I had a job in the Valley and I lived 2 blocks from my office. Then I got a job downtown LA so I moved to a place in downtown 8 blocks from work. Then I got a job in Hollywood so I moved to Silverlake, that was the farthest I ever commuted.
So don't say it isn't possible or affordable. It's all a matter of priorities. If gas is cheap, a shorter commute won't be a priority. Now gas is getting expensive, and people are developing new priorities.
I posted a relatively innocuous comment to that story earlier today, it was censored and did not appear. It read, in its entirety, "There is one thing conspicuously absent from the pictures: people."
I must have hit a nerve. Sure the story was about the lab. But don't people use the lab? There are a couple of people who appear way in the background of one pic, so small you can hardly see them, but otherwise the pictures are totally devoid of human life. I am sure the set of photos required clearance from Microsoft management, did they object to publishing photos of their personnel as some sort of security risk? Microsoft has been conspicuously touchy about bloggers describing their Mac facilities, remember the blogger who got fired from his temp job for posting a pic of G5s on the MSFT loading dock? So it wouldn't surprise me if the absence of people in the photos was a deliberate choice by MS management. And that is a lot more intriguing than the pics of a bunch of server racks.
Phillips was just not thinking clearly when they invented this. There will be a flag at the start of commercials, and another at the end, to tell the anti-skip system when to activate. Just how long do you think it will be before someone figures out how to use the flags to start and stop the fast-forward button? This system of flags would be just as effective at automatically skipping ads.
Wow, I remember in the 1980s, I used to have corporate customers that would order 250 token ring cards at a time. Unfortunately, IBM couldn't deliver. They're probably still on backorder.
Look, I know all about osteopaths, an osteopath is an M.D. AND Chiropractor. I was once referred to one when I had a back injury, he did me absolutely no good, and in fact, bruised me seriously, causing further pain and injury. I was appalled at the stupid quackery that was promoted in his office, like silver solutions to cure childhood ear infections (nice, if you want permanently blue skin). I never went back.
Let me be absolutely clear, an osteopath is a quack, an M.D. who doesn't believe in medicine, and instead, promotes quack remedies like chiropractic and homeopathy. If you think you received real treatment and real relief from an osteopath, I recommend you learn about the Placebo Effect.
Your problems with contacts and CRTs may be due to a different problem than you realize. Ever notice how much dust is attracted to the CRT glass screen? CRTs are highly charged, and the cases usually carry a static electricity charge. This charge is highest on the CRT case but spreads out across your desk, keyboard, etc and even on to your hands, arms and body. The field attracts dust towards the CRT, and your work surface, even YOU as you touch the charged objects on your desk. You're working in a staticky environment, so the dust is attracted to your equipment, and YOU. Some of the dust goes straight into your eyes, some you rub in off your hands, etc.
LCDs don't tend to have such static fields around them they're not based on such high voltage circuitry. So you get less dust and irritants in your environment and in your eyes.
I'd always heard this, but the evidence really was blatant when I swapped out my old 22inch Sony Trinitron monitor for a nice new 30" Cinema Display. My desktop behind and around the CRT always needed constant cleaning and dusting, but the new LCD doesn't attract dust at all.
Osteopath?!?!? Let's all be clear on this, you're advocating CHIROPRACTIC to correct vision. What a total load of quackery. You cannot fix people's visual defects by cracking their spine. You, sir, are a gullible fool, to believe such quacks.
I thought I'd pop in a quick comment to beat the rush.. I've barely scanned through the document, but I've already noticed obvious and glaring errors.
For example, they cite the case of Adobe's claim that Nikon prevented them from decrypting their RAW format files. The facts as the EFF documents explains them, are just plain wrong. There was a brief outcry from some overwrought programmers at Adobe over this issue, but it turned out Nikon was always willing to license their proprietary code to developers like Adobe, even before this little dust-up. Nothing to see here, move along, it was just another testy outburst from a programmer who had too much coffee and didn't want to wait for his managers to finish negotiations with Nikon.
I'll go through the document in more detail, and I'm sure I'll find more deliberate misstatements of facts. The EFF always trumps up charges to inflate its case. Perhaps someday they will learn that this tactic undermines their efforts.
No, there are other legitimate reasons for using streaming, even on low bandwidth pipes like a modem. You start watching the video immediately, you don't have to wait for it to download, and you can jump to any point in a video instantly. This is significant when you put up long, long videos. The whole point of the web was to put users in control, some people (like me) have chosen to give the user the ability to instantly watch and instantly move to any point in their video, as a tradeoff for lower quality for low bandwidth users.
Streaming servers also have advantages for load balancing, I can easily place limits on total stream bandwidth, or balance it off to other servers. And then there's the ability to stream live video, I've done successful live events even on a tiny iMac G3/700 as a video server. Yep, there are plenty of reasons to use streaming instead of progressive download, it just depends on what you want to do.
IHBT.
I have videotapes older than you.
Oh bullshit. Music video is produced as a promotional product for free distribution, nobody else can take credit for it, the band that created it is self-evident. My content is designed to be viewed in context, on my web page, with an accompanying text commentary, I don't even appear in the videos. Repost it and it loses context, and it strips me of the opportunity to explain it and take credit for it. The music video example, it has no context, it is self-contained. Some works are made for video, they can survive reposting, but some cannot. That's why I control access to my videos, they're only available through my website as streaming-only videos. My content IS special, it makes no sense without context.
Yeah sure, the sites don't scrape videos, people do it for them. Same difference. I know at least one videographer who created some original videos, posted them on his own site, they reappeared on iFilm a few weeks later. He put his website's address in the videos, but someone cut off the beginning and ending, deliberately removing the URL. It's getting so you'll have to put up a huge watermark across your video if you want to get any credit for it. This isn't such a big deal when you're posting some pirated music videos to YouTube, but for those of us who create new original video content, it is a bit galling to see our work reposted and stripped of any credit to the authors.
The one thing that annoys me terribly about these video sites is that they recompress video files available on other websites and present them in a low-bandwith Flash format. Sure Flash is crossplatform Mac/Win and runs almost everywhere, but it has the worst quality of any video codec. And recompressing video introduces significant artifacting.
I've seen dozens of recompressed videos on sites like iFilm and YouTube that are easily available in high quality on the original websites, it's like iFilm and YouTube are scraping the web looking for content to populate their sites. And of course they don't provide a link to the original site, so you have no way to know there's a better quality version available. This is dragging video down to the lowest common denominator. I run a video blog website, and I use non-downloadable streaming video precisely because I don't want some other site scraping my content and recompressing it to make it look like crap.
Agreed. I used to sell word processing in the early days of Wordstar and CP/M, and I always used to say that buying the world's greatest word processor won't make you a Great American Novelist. Nobody got it.
I started doing computer graphics when that meant FORTRAN and pen plotters, or if you were really lucky, you could wheedle some account time on a COM (computer output microfilm) machine. I dropped out of art school around 1977, after doing all the fundamental classes, because I got some good offers to do computer programming. Eventualy I discovered that the best preparation for computer graphics was my drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography classes. Let me give you an example.
I remember my first day in Drawing 101, we had to draw in charcoal on rough newsprint, the model was a bunch of paper sacks. Everyone hated drawing such a dumb subject, but the teacher insisted we had to learn to draw the lighting on the objects, not the objects. No hard lines allowed, only tones. We worked and worked for a couple of hours, and during the final critique, the teacher tore us all to shreds. Not one single student had observed the light source was coming from the upper left, all the drawings had inconsistent lighting that students just made up in their heads, rather than observing what was right in front of them. The drawings were all flat and lifeless. Then the teacher got up and drew a smeary charcoal sketch in a few seconds that followed the light accurately, it was cruder than any student drawing, but it stood out from all the others as the most 3 dimensional. Everyone was shocked. I never forgot that day's lesson: watch the light source.
OK, let's zoom forward about 20 years, I'm working in one of the top graphics bureaus in Los Angeles, I'm the shop's Photoshop whiz because I have a background in photography and printing. I notice the guy at the workstation next to me (a guitar player with no artistic skills whatsoever) is compositing some photos for a CD cover. There's a background scene of a room with a wall of windows, and he's compositing a human figure standing in the middle of the room. He's compositing some shadows under the figure, and beams of light coming in the window. He's working and working on the image and it just isn't working out, and he can't figure out what's wrong, it just doesn't look realistic. After a couple of hours of fiddling, he asks me to take a look at it, and I immediately notice, the only light source is coming in the windows, but the shadow cast under the guy is going the OPPOSITE direction, towards the light source instead of away from it. I tell the guy that the shadows have to be parallel to the beams of light coming in the window, shadows are never cast TOWARDS a light source, it violates the laws of physics. And if you don't have your shadows and lights consistent, it destroys the illusion of depth. So what do you think the non-artist said after I told him this? He ARGUED with me that it didn't make any difference WHICH WAY the shadows were cast! Sheesh!
After a many years dealing with total fucking idiots like this, I decided to go back to art school to finish my BFA. The professors who so intensely disliked my early computer graphics works, were now gearing up to get into computers. All I wanted to do was oil painting and drawing. The graphic arts teachers couldn't understand why someone would want to give up their long career in CG for the manual labor of painting and drawing. But the painting teachers knew why!
Huh? You mean "Trurl's Prescription," the story of the Steelypips and the THING that wouldn't go away? Don't be ridiculous, that's a universal human experience, not an exclusively Polish one.
Good catch. I always thought that the Golem XIV story was the sort of story that the Slashdot audience should appreciate (and more so than the usual lame crap that people here worship, like Ender's Game). But it is probably above the heads of most readers, it is one of his most abstract works, probably surpassed in sheer abstraction only by "His Master's Voice."
Go read Golem XIV. Read it NOW.
Anyway, that is what was so great about Lem, his best works were philosophical essays only wrapped in the superficial trappings of science fiction because those were the topics of the modern age. Lem even gave up SF writing because he refused to be associated with such rubbish as was being published lately. When Lem was active, up until the early 1980s, SF was still subversive and was the literary genre of ideas. But then it turned into Space Opera rubbish at the hands of morons like George Lucas who popularized it and turned it into mass-media pablum. There was no more room for thinkers like Lem, so he gave up on the genre entirely. And the world was a poorer place for it. Shame on everyone for buying tickets to Star Wars and not buying more Lem books.
I was just reading a Lem interview somewhere on the web today, he talks about Michael Kandel's translation. Lem said Kandel took a lot of liberties, rewriting passages and changing a lot of things beyond what was in the original text, but remained true to the intent of the book. Lem said he learned a lot from Kandel, that there was more to translation than a literal translation of the words. And it's true, Kandel's work was brilliant. There are whole chapters of The Cyberiad that are almost entirely poetry, like the tale of that THING that wouldn't go away. And I'll never forget the wonderful wordplay about dragonslaying with Quantum Draconics.
This is so obscenely overpriced at $35 per movie, hell, you could buy 2 or 3 DVDs for that price. Do the studios not realize that they are driving customers away by price-gouging? This is the same crap we heard from the music companies when vinyl records were going up to $9 and CDs came out, they were supposed to be cheaper than LPs because they were cheaper to manufacture. But music CDs are still way more than $9 (even accounting for inflation).
The media companies look at every new format as an opportunity to raise prices, even when the cost of manufacturing and distribution drops significantly.
Precisely. I have been telling people for years, QuickTime is the crown jewel at Apple, and many of the most successful projects, like the iPod and iTunes, were created in the hopes of pushing QuickTime adoption on Windows.
As a web video and multimedia programmer, I have long wished for one universal standard based on QuickTime. Everyone's web experience would be so much better if we could all standardize around QT. But many times I encounter users who work in corporate IT environments with locked down PCs that are forbidden from installing QT. This seems to be a relic of olden times when online video and audio were seen as frivolous, and a big waste of bandwidth.
I figure I paid about $65 in extra interest charges over the 2 week hold period. But there are strict regulations on credit card payments. I recall reading regulations that they have to credit your account as of the postmarked date, if you send a check by mail, although they don't have to release your credit limit until they're sure the check cleared. This is to prevent them from grabbing more interest by kiting your check, or from zinging you with extra late fees while they hold your payment an arbitrary time. It seems to me the CC company violated this regulation in my case.
This same thing happened to me. I inherited some money when my mom died, so a couple of months ago, I paid off my $7500 credit card balance, I mailed them a check for the full amount. About a week later, the payment still wasn't credited, so I called them and they said it takes 7 to 10 days for such a large check to clear. Yeah right. They told me to call back if it wasn't credited after 10 days. It wasn't, I called back again, they said if it wasn't credited after 14 days, call back again. It wasn't, I called back again. THIS time, I insisted they get a 3 way call with my bank to confirm the check had cleared. They credited my account during the phone call.
But after reading the article about the guy who got turned in to Homeland Security for paying $6500 on his JCPenneys account, now it all makes sense. I saw another version of this news article, it said the "bank security act" requires credit card companies to report large payments. I can't find any such law, there's a Bank Security Act of 1974 but that far predates the existence of Homeland Security. The closest regulation I can find is the requirement to report cash transactions larger than $10k to the IRS.
This is all so much bullshit I can't believe it. It's some sort of secret law, or more likely Homeland Security has duped banks into playing along with an imaginary law, just to get more data on totally innocent people. I am infuriated. I can't wait to see what happens when I try to board an airplane, now that DHS thinks I'm a terrorist, I bet I'm on the No Fly List.
1. Fail frequently.
2. Success is a fluke.
3. If you do succeed, document it thoroughly after the fact, to make it look like you had a plan all along.
Well gee, let me see, there must be a few TV content producers releasing their content online in any form.
Like for example, through the iTunes distribution system, you can get shows from ABC, NBC, and soon CBS, SciFi TV, Comedy Central, Bravo, and other cable channels.
CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have news clips available for live streaming. Most Japanese TV networks have online streaming news, they like streaming as a moderate DRM method, rather than downloading.
A better question to ask is, who DOESN'T put their content available online? I keep looking and finding fewer and fewer video content producers who do not have an online presence.
ALL of this was enabled by DRM. Without DRM, none of these content providers would put their stuff online.
Sadly, there are too many homeless orphans and any Open Source method of adoption is welcome.
You've obviously never read the OSX86 website. The forums were full of links to torrents for pirated MacOS X disk images, and extensive discussion on specific techniques to break encryption and other DRM included on those images. The forums exist solely for the purpose of doing things the DMCA prohibits.
Like it or not, the DMCA is the law of the land, and it specifically states it is illegal to distribute methods of breaking DRM or to redistribute copyrighted materials. Apple was within its rights to demand the removal of the offending items. In fact, Apple is REQUIRED to enforce its legal rights, or it can lose all copyright protection for its work.
Some people whine that this DMCA action is an infringment of their First Amendment right to "Free Speach." OK, please cite the passages in the First Amendment that allow you to take the work of other persons or companies, work that has cost millions to develop, and you can use it freely without compensation. This whole idea is entirely opposite of the specific terms in the Constitution about patents and copyrights granting limited-term monopolies "to promote the useful arts and sciences."
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either Apple is entitled to profit from its R&D investments, or else NOBODY is (including YOU).