I would only need to purchase a whole new computer, video card, and monitor to support playback of movies in somewhat higher resolution. Hold me back...:p Do they really think that introducing new hurdles like HDCP and a "secure video path" to be able to watch this stuff will encourage people to buy and actually use it? Or do they just not care?
The answer (for music at least) really seems to be a return to the "business models" that existed long before the advent of pre-recorded media with worldwide distribution. Musical artists need to stop emphasizing the packaged album concept and go back to emphasizing live performances. People will obviously pay (often through the nose) for the live performance and the whole concert atmosphere. If you think back to classical music as an example, composers were generally paid for live performances and for teaching. The fact is that their actual music was widely copied and so that's not where they were even trying to make their money. If something has infinite supply, then it seems obvious that the money will not stem from that but instead will come from a scarce resource (each live show is unique).
The sad state of affairs is that, of all the possible video players, Flash is the most ubiquitous and easy to support right now. At any rate, there's nothing inherently low-quality about Flash video. It's just that YouTube, Google Video, and similar sites all want to use as little bandwidth as possible so the videos are encoded at low-quality bitrates (around 250 kbps video as I recall, with 64 kbps mono sound). If you have a decent source video and double that bitrate, the encoded Flash video actually looks quite good.
To store YouTube videos on your own machine, get the VideoDownloader extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/. Then go to the page for the YouTube (or Google Video or whatever) page of your choice, and click on their icon. A window pops up and you click on a button to download the actual.flv video. That's in Flash video format, which you'll probably want a player for: http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-pl ayer-updated. Now you can run that (on a Windows machine at least) and play.flv videos from YouTube locally. Voila!
They can't have changed the world that much, as this is the first I've ever heard of them. I've barely heard of DrudgeReport, and that only through someone else's parent. I'd be hard pressed to consider the Blogger.com web site itself to have changed much either, since blogging as a whole took off through a myriad of web sites as far as I recall. *shrug*
YouTube is nice, no doubt about it, but it'll have to change radically to survive in the long term and I really don't see any way around that.
1. A high percentage of the videos they host are coyprighted, and shouldn't be there in the first place. There seem to be extremely lax checks and balances on this. 2. They're burning through money and, so far as we've seen, don't really have a plan for how to stop burning through money.
Whether Dvorak likes it or not, we've all seen the.com bubble already and we all know exactly where this is heading. The most we can do is enjoy the ride for now, while it's still operating.
Can't say I've ever even heard of nerdcore, but The Great Luke Ski was who I thought of first. He does comedy music including parodies (a la Weird Al), and quite a bit of it is "white boy rap". But the key thing is that the vast majority of it is related to things that typically interest nerds and/or geeks, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, The Matrix, Simpsons, Futurama, etc. His 2002 album was even titled Uber Geek, and he recorded so many Star Trek and Star Wars related songs that he eventually ended up compiling all of them onto their own privately released CDs ("Trek-Wutchyalike" and "May The Farce Be With You").
They record us all the time ("This call is being monitored for quality assurance purposes...") so it's only fair that we be able to record them as well. Of course I know that security guards don't agree with the principle that since they're videotaping us, we ought to be able to videotape them as well.
This particular electric car does zero to sixty in three seconds, out-accelerating every car in existence other than the Bugatti Veyron. Naturally, it was someone in California who designed that particular electric car and not someone like GM or Ford.
He's correct about visitors that visit from many different IP addresses, particularly AOL users that weren't really mentioned. The same AOL user can have several different IP addresses on just one visit to a web site, due to the way that their proxies and such work. I distinctly remember phpBB running into this issue because it wanted to associate each user's login cookie with their IP address for security, but with AOL users there's just no rhyme nor reason to their IP addresses.
The flipside that's not considered at all though is the number of places that have any number of unique visitors all using the same IP address. Everyone in my office will have the same external IP address for any web site we visit. I know many other offices are exactly the same way.
What does this mean overall? I think they balance out for the most part. Some people are overreported, some are underreported, and it probably all balances out in the end.
I'm wearing sandals at work right now. My hair's down at the moment, but it'll be in a ponytail in around one hour when I get ready for Yoga class. No, I'm not kidding.:-)
I've also heard from some employers that if they get the same person's name from more than one headhunter, then they basically have to throw that person's resume in the trashcan. Because otherwise they'd be opening themselves up to lawsuits from whichever headhunter they didn't pay the fee to. Spamming out resumes to headhunters can actually shoot yourself in the foot it seems.
I'm only half kidding, but try "long lunches" for the occasional interview. It's kind of a running joke in the office sometimes when someone we know wants out ASAP suddenly starts taking "long lunches" twice a week, because we all know they're busy interviewing. Honestly if you're always at work, then you'll probably have to find time AT WORK to look for a new job. We all have our own ways of fitting personal things into our work schedules, and ways of hiding the fact that we're perusing job listings at our current job (or faxing out resumes using the office fax machine). And yet it seems like most people end up doing it at some point.
Figures that this would appear just two minutes after I figure out how to turn it off in preferences... I'm sure it's a useful feature, but after this many years of reading Slashdot it just didn't look "right" to me.
Why is it on Slashdot? To cue the avalanche of vaporware keyboard jokes. If the Duke Nukem Forever guys announced that they had developed a special joystick just for the game and that they were going to sell it separately, I'm sure it'd be here too.
As you can guess, Rockmore disagrees and comes with an analogy of his own. For him, analyzing paintings and drawings is like comparing chess and checkers. And for him, computer programs have already beaten men in chess tournaments. So will art historians be the next victims of computers? Time will tell.
On the other hand if you happened to choose chess and go, then you would reach a completely different conclusion. Since they're both two player strategy games with fairly simple rules, but while computers are obviously excellent at playing chess they've always sucked at playing go (and are highly likely to go on sucking in the forseeable future). Just because two problems are in a similar area doesn't mean they'll both be amenable to computer analysis.
Java is obviously the much more widely used language, and is more likely to be useful down the road I would think. I've used Java at several different workplaces, while I've never heard C# even mentioned. Granted, Microsoft shops will be quite different in that regard but I tend to avoid Microsoft shops for other reasons anyway.
It's pretty simple. If consumers are offered a choice between Product A which lets them do what they want and Product B which carries the MPAA seal of approval and actively prevents them from doing what they want, then it's a very simple choice for the consumer. Provided that they are informed about this topic that is, which granted may not happen until after they get Product B set up at home and suddenly discover that it actually won't let them do certain things. It's also a simple choice for the hardware manufacturer, as they're likely going to go with the model that will sell better unless the MPAA pays them off. With this legislation though, they would avoid all that by making it actually ILLEGAL to produce Product A in the first place.
I'm really not sure what they mean exactly by a "powerful" e-mail application. Evolution seemed to "heavy" to me, so I have been using Thunderbird for awhile now and am very happy with it. Webmail seems more like an adjunct to me than a replacement, particularly because I have no control over what the company providing the webmail does with my mail. At the moment I'm using a work POP account, a personal POP account, and Gmail. I also download from Gmail through POP just to have a copy of the e-mail somewhere other than Google.
I've always loathed real-time chat, including IRC and instant messaging. I'd rather people just e-mailed me in general, since then I can respond whenever I feel like or just ignore it. The moment I was hired at my current programming job though, I was required to set up a work specific AIM account from day one. The owners were overseas in Spain, and it turned out that AIM was their primary means of communication between Spain and the U.S. I've slacked a bit in the three years after that as far as my general loathing of it, but I still have yet to ever use instant messaging at home. The thing that's always scary to me is the sheer number of confidentail business conversations that have taken place over unencrypted AIM over the years. We've tried getting people to use GAIM with the encryption plug-in, but that's generally only used by the technical people and not the business people.
Slashdot Mirror
I would only need to purchase a whole new computer, video card, and monitor to support playback of movies in somewhat higher resolution. Hold me back...:p Do they really think that introducing new hurdles like HDCP and a "secure video path" to be able to watch this stuff will encourage people to buy and actually use it? Or do they just not care?
The answer (for music at least) really seems to be a return to the "business models" that existed long before the advent of pre-recorded media with worldwide distribution. Musical artists need to stop emphasizing the packaged album concept and go back to emphasizing live performances. People will obviously pay (often through the nose) for the live performance and the whole concert atmosphere. If you think back to classical music as an example, composers were generally paid for live performances and for teaching. The fact is that their actual music was widely copied and so that's not where they were even trying to make their money. If something has infinite supply, then it seems obvious that the money will not stem from that but instead will come from a scarce resource (each live show is unique).
That's odd, I had no problem whatsoever ripping my Poodle Hat CD into MP3s. Did this happen only in certain regions or something?
The sad state of affairs is that, of all the possible video players, Flash is the most ubiquitous and easy to support right now. At any rate, there's nothing inherently low-quality about Flash video. It's just that YouTube, Google Video, and similar sites all want to use as little bandwidth as possible so the videos are encoded at low-quality bitrates (around 250 kbps video as I recall, with 64 kbps mono sound). If you have a decent source video and double that bitrate, the encoded Flash video actually looks quite good.
To store YouTube videos on your own machine, get the VideoDownloader extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/. Then go to the page for the YouTube (or Google Video or whatever) page of your choice, and click on their icon. A window pops up and you click on a button to download the actual .flv video. That's in Flash video format, which you'll probably want a player for: http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-pl ayer-updated. Now you can run that (on a Windows machine at least) and play .flv videos from YouTube locally. Voila!
They can't have changed the world that much, as this is the first I've ever heard of them. I've barely heard of DrudgeReport, and that only through someone else's parent. I'd be hard pressed to consider the Blogger.com web site itself to have changed much either, since blogging as a whole took off through a myriad of web sites as far as I recall. *shrug*
YouTube is nice, no doubt about it, but it'll have to change radically to survive in the long term and I really don't see any way around that.
.com bubble already and we all know exactly where this is heading. The most we can do is enjoy the ride for now, while it's still operating.
1. A high percentage of the videos they host are coyprighted, and shouldn't be there in the first place. There seem to be extremely lax checks and balances on this.
2. They're burning through money and, so far as we've seen, don't really have a plan for how to stop burning through money.
Whether Dvorak likes it or not, we've all seen the
Can't say I've ever even heard of nerdcore, but The Great Luke Ski was who I thought of first. He does comedy music including parodies (a la Weird Al), and quite a bit of it is "white boy rap". But the key thing is that the vast majority of it is related to things that typically interest nerds and/or geeks, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, The Matrix, Simpsons, Futurama, etc. His 2002 album was even titled Uber Geek, and he recorded so many Star Trek and Star Wars related songs that he eventually ended up compiling all of them onto their own privately released CDs ("Trek-Wutchyalike" and "May The Farce Be With You").
They record us all the time ("This call is being monitored for quality assurance purposes...") so it's only fair that we be able to record them as well. Of course I know that security guards don't agree with the principle that since they're videotaping us, we ought to be able to videotape them as well.
You just need one of these:
s s2_wrightspeed/
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/04/technology/busine
This particular electric car does zero to sixty in three seconds, out-accelerating every car in existence other than the Bugatti Veyron. Naturally, it was someone in California who designed that particular electric car and not someone like GM or Ford.
So far, it looks like the prize for having a good design is a severe slashdotting of your server...
He's correct about visitors that visit from many different IP addresses, particularly AOL users that weren't really mentioned. The same AOL user can have several different IP addresses on just one visit to a web site, due to the way that their proxies and such work. I distinctly remember phpBB running into this issue because it wanted to associate each user's login cookie with their IP address for security, but with AOL users there's just no rhyme nor reason to their IP addresses.
The flipside that's not considered at all though is the number of places that have any number of unique visitors all using the same IP address. Everyone in my office will have the same external IP address for any web site we visit. I know many other offices are exactly the same way.
What does this mean overall? I think they balance out for the most part. Some people are overreported, some are underreported, and it probably all balances out in the end.
I'm wearing sandals at work right now. My hair's down at the moment, but it'll be in a ponytail in around one hour when I get ready for Yoga class. No, I'm not kidding. :-)
I've also heard from some employers that if they get the same person's name from more than one headhunter, then they basically have to throw that person's resume in the trashcan. Because otherwise they'd be opening themselves up to lawsuits from whichever headhunter they didn't pay the fee to. Spamming out resumes to headhunters can actually shoot yourself in the foot it seems.
I'm only half kidding, but try "long lunches" for the occasional interview. It's kind of a running joke in the office sometimes when someone we know wants out ASAP suddenly starts taking "long lunches" twice a week, because we all know they're busy interviewing. Honestly if you're always at work, then you'll probably have to find time AT WORK to look for a new job. We all have our own ways of fitting personal things into our work schedules, and ways of hiding the fact that we're perusing job listings at our current job (or faxing out resumes using the office fax machine). And yet it seems like most people end up doing it at some point.
Figures that this would appear just two minutes after I figure out how to turn it off in preferences... I'm sure it's a useful feature, but after this many years of reading Slashdot it just didn't look "right" to me.
Why is it on Slashdot? To cue the avalanche of vaporware keyboard jokes. If the Duke Nukem Forever guys announced that they had developed a special joystick just for the game and that they were going to sell it separately, I'm sure it'd be here too.
As you can guess, Rockmore disagrees and comes with an analogy of his own. For him, analyzing paintings and drawings is like comparing chess and checkers. And for him, computer programs have already beaten men in chess tournaments. So will art historians be the next victims of computers? Time will tell.
On the other hand if you happened to choose chess and go, then you would reach a completely different conclusion. Since they're both two player strategy games with fairly simple rules, but while computers are obviously excellent at playing chess they've always sucked at playing go (and are highly likely to go on sucking in the forseeable future). Just because two problems are in a similar area doesn't mean they'll both be amenable to computer analysis.
Java is obviously the much more widely used language, and is more likely to be useful down the road I would think. I've used Java at several different workplaces, while I've never heard C# even mentioned. Granted, Microsoft shops will be quite different in that regard but I tend to avoid Microsoft shops for other reasons anyway.
It's pretty simple. If consumers are offered a choice between Product A which lets them do what they want and Product B which carries the MPAA seal of approval and actively prevents them from doing what they want, then it's a very simple choice for the consumer. Provided that they are informed about this topic that is, which granted may not happen until after they get Product B set up at home and suddenly discover that it actually won't let them do certain things. It's also a simple choice for the hardware manufacturer, as they're likely going to go with the model that will sell better unless the MPAA pays them off. With this legislation though, they would avoid all that by making it actually ILLEGAL to produce Product A in the first place.
Our willingness to accept rocky performance from popular services is the only reason we're still reading Slashdot today...:-)
Well... they can be. I hear that the redesigned Tabula Rasa may be a shoot 'em up as well.
I'm really not sure what they mean exactly by a "powerful" e-mail application. Evolution seemed to "heavy" to me, so I have been using Thunderbird for awhile now and am very happy with it. Webmail seems more like an adjunct to me than a replacement, particularly because I have no control over what the company providing the webmail does with my mail. At the moment I'm using a work POP account, a personal POP account, and Gmail. I also download from Gmail through POP just to have a copy of the e-mail somewhere other than Google.
I knew I'd seen this movie already. Don't anyone go giving away the ending!
I've always loathed real-time chat, including IRC and instant messaging. I'd rather people just e-mailed me in general, since then I can respond whenever I feel like or just ignore it. The moment I was hired at my current programming job though, I was required to set up a work specific AIM account from day one. The owners were overseas in Spain, and it turned out that AIM was their primary means of communication between Spain and the U.S. I've slacked a bit in the three years after that as far as my general loathing of it, but I still have yet to ever use instant messaging at home. The thing that's always scary to me is the sheer number of confidentail business conversations that have taken place over unencrypted AIM over the years. We've tried getting people to use GAIM with the encryption plug-in, but that's generally only used by the technical people and not the business people.