Reminds me of the time when I was assigned a New York City phone number that had previously belonged to a gentleman who had placed an ad in a paper called The Advocate. He had said he was an "aggressive top."
I hated being woken at all hours, but the calls were really amusing. I turned off the ringer and bought an answering machine.
If you go to the mp3 newsgroups, where I've been expanding my collection for years, you'll find the vast majority of encodes are 128 kbps. This was a decision made by the earliest adapters of mp3 (adnittedly, at a time when dial-up was the rule, broadband a rare exception), and is in my opinion a reasonable trade-off between size and quality. The only difference I see between 128 and 160 is a slightly "crisper" sound. (A similar crisp sound can be obtained from a 128 bit mp3 with any number of dsp "enhancer" plugins available for winamp...I know purists will scream at the thought, but these people seem more motivated by religion than by science.)
128 is quite adequate in conveying the qualities of a musician's performing and composition skills, which are what I think most people enjoy about music.
I've heard many people claim that such low bitrates are offensive to their ears, I just don't see it myself. It's way better than cassette tapes or FM radio, for instance -- but it isn't fidelity issues that have killed or wounded those media.
Now that broadband is here, perhaps it's justified to expect an "upgrade" to higher bitrate mp3, but I'm not throwing several thousand 128 kbps mp3s.
And, though I download a lot less than I did when I first subscribed to Emusic, I'm still one of their happy campers, and I expect I will remain so unless Vivendi changes the service.
Frankly, I doubt that they will change the service. I suspect they view Emusic as a useful, low-profile hedge, in case it turns out that consumers will reject all the proprietary-format copy-protected services.
My smart card came with a free reader and serial cable, so I could use it on the internet - use the card occasionally in the real world cause of the low intro APR...haven't done anything with the reader yet, still in the box... Any suggestions?
Free email and storage provided by the guv'mnt is no problem for me, but why should a "multi-million-dollar contract" be needed to proviode such basis?
*Look* at all the unnecessary foo-faw SimDesk provides. You really think the digitally deprived need a spreadsheet, a contact manager and remote printing capability?
This looks more like taxpayer money applied to a dot-com bailout than anything of real use.
In Excite's case it's part of a larger story, where ATT chairman Michael Armstrong decided to make a new media company out of att by buying up a lot of cable companies at an exorbitant price. His rationale was that the debts the company incurred would be offset by the potential of nascent network they would own, and use for market domination as consumerist culture moved online. Inflated stock market valuations of similar endeavors suggested that this approach would work.
But the bubble burst, and Armstrong's multi-billion-dollar network lost value fast. While the "paper value" of a company doesn't mean much, it means a lot when a company is deep in debt.
Excite's situation is a fractal reiteration of the Armstrong situation, the same story repeated within the larger story.
Excite may be losing money on each customer, as many Internet providers are, but they need to keep prices low to recruit more customers so they can pro-rate their costs (especially the cost of debt maintenance) over wider numbers; so, even with a per-capita loss, recruiting more customers does not increase their losses. And they cannot recruit them fats enough.
With the Internet bubble burst, investors want to see profit now. And a lack of investors makes refinancing of existing debt impossible.
If you want to build a device that pops up a pepsi sign when a coke ad comes on, sure, that's fine. Consumers "jamming" ads within their own 'domain' is perfectly legal.
But these people are all in the web-advertising business. One advertiser "jamming" another advertiser is an unfair business practice. It will be stopped.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the surveillance system. This is a matter of a photo run in a magazine, with an irresponsible caption, identifed by a fallible human being.
/.'s heading for this report "Florida Surveillance Cameras Claim a Victim" is quite inaccurate.
I am fond of my privacy, and opposed to the surveillance systems. But setting up this kind of "straw dog" does no help to real critics of such systems.
AT&T's cut-rate internet service (4.95/mo) does extensive profiling of its users. It's not likely to be popular with the/. crowd, but it's very clear when you sign up that you are exchanging privacy for the low-cost service.
If you go to automotive sites, the ATT software will start delivering car ads. These ads will be unrelated to the sites you are visiting, except by topic. Are you contending that, if a customer mistakes one of ATT's ads for part of a site, that is deliberately misleading?
If you go to a Circuit City site and a Best Buy ad pops up, are you suggesting that the typical surfer is so ignorant that he knows no difference between the two?
Rentibng a billboard across the street from Circuit City and putting up a Best Buy ad is not illegal. This does not seem much different.
When you install these bundled packages, the software installed is listed with a series of checkboxes. It's your choice whether to leave the items checked or uncheck them, your option to read the EULA or not.
I'm a liberal on most issues, but the obligation of law to protect people from their own stupidity has its limits.
When the tiny handful of parties who control such things decide against openness in the media format that is about to be thrust upon the entire population, it is no longer a question of "the freedom for individuals and organisations to make deals between each other out of free will."
The ability to use a digital video recorder is not "freeloading." Nor is the ability to "timeshift" your viewing by any other means; courts decided that this was perfectly legitimate behavior.
There are other aspects of IP I am sure we would disagree on, but that would involve more arguing than I'd care to deal with....
Prince has declared war against the major labels, particularly Warner Brothers (which issues 1999). If you have money to spend go to npgmusicclub.com where Prince is trying hard to create an alternative.
They haven't stopped anyone from doing anything. Note that no one even knows what cd is protected.
Law is clearly not the way the use of technology is determined. When you outlaw MP3's, you make every computer user a criminal. Lotsa safety in those numbers.
Granted that corporations have a bigger voice than consumers in Congress (which is an issue I do care about), I expect garbage like this to happen. I am much more concerned about the larger issue than such side-effects.
I don't mind being made into an outlaw so much, as long as I retain my privacy. Interestingly, the encroachment of laws that make more and more PC users into criminals is one of the things convincing "Joe Sixpack" (I dislike this epithet, but I'm using your term) that privacy rights, onnline and offline, are important.
We "abandoned" the Mujahideen at the same time that the Mujahideen alienated many of its supporters both within and outside of Afghan, inside and outside of the Moslem world. An agreement to fight a perceived "common enemy" is not a carte blanche endorsement of your ally's future political hooliganism.
This ruling will be enforced by the "Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice." I don't think the establishment of such ruling bodies is something we hoped to achieve with this alliance.
"Controversial discussion website adequacy.org had an interesting article talking about ESR's penchant for the endangered bird, the Puffin..."
"The extremely controversial discussion website adequacy.org has a very interesting and controversial remedy for this..."
"This is why I was interested to read an article at the somewhat notorious discussion site adequacy.org detailing how to make space travel and exploration less elitist and more widespread..."
"I read an interesting article on this topic at adequacy.org, the controversial discussion site, regarding the education of children..."
His adequacy plugs do seem spouted in an obligatory fashion...and what's driving the 'defenders' that have popped up to answer his critic?
All kinds strange if you ask me. (I know, you didn't.)
No one objects to painting all the phone support guys with a wide brush as "tech support bozos," but indicate there are a few "stoopit guys" in the programming field and it's an issue.
In my years as a "tech support bozo," as you like to put it, I've run into plenty of "professional programmers" who couldn't find the Network control panel until after I'd led them through half the alphabet.
Why don't geeks realize, and make peace with, the concept that content, and the media that carries that content, are interchangeable in common usage?
I watched television=I watched Seinfeld. I listened to the radio=I listened to easy listening hour. It was on the Internet=It was in Usenet.
.net is passport is hailstorm is authentication services...in common usage. It's not so hard to distinguish conversational posts, which do not need to be more precise than this, and technical posts. Language is meant to convey meaning, and we all know what the guy meant, your quibble does not change the point of his post.
One of the penalties of living in a free society, afraid you'll have to live with it, or turn the mod filter up so zero-rated comments dont show up for you...click on preferences, you'll find it there. this sorta stuff is always rated zero or less.
It sounds like you should be looking for a new employer anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore, the word "email" is no longer an abbreviation of electronic mail, it is now a word in its own right, derived from that archaic term.
I hated being woken at all hours, but the calls were really amusing. I turned off the ringer and bought an answering machine.
Jon Katz is now a "they?" Possible, I guess. It is Katz. (I mean, they are Katz.)
His entire essay is about 1-on-1 emails.
If you go to the mp3 newsgroups, where I've been expanding my collection for years, you'll find the vast majority of encodes are 128 kbps. This was a decision made by the earliest adapters of mp3 (adnittedly, at a time when dial-up was the rule, broadband a rare exception), and is in my opinion a reasonable trade-off between size and quality. The only difference I see between 128 and 160 is a slightly "crisper" sound. (A similar crisp sound can be obtained from a 128 bit mp3 with any number of dsp "enhancer" plugins available for winamp...I know purists will scream at the thought, but these people seem more motivated by religion than by science.)
128 is quite adequate in conveying the qualities of a musician's performing and composition skills, which are what I think most people enjoy about music.
I've heard many people claim that such low bitrates are offensive to their ears, I just don't see it myself. It's way better than cassette tapes or FM radio, for instance -- but it isn't fidelity issues that have killed or wounded those media.
Now that broadband is here, perhaps it's justified to expect an "upgrade" to higher bitrate mp3, but I'm not throwing several thousand 128 kbps mp3s.
And, though I download a lot less than I did when I first subscribed to Emusic, I'm still one of their happy campers, and I expect I will remain so unless Vivendi changes the service.
Frankly, I doubt that they will change the service. I suspect they view Emusic as a useful, low-profile hedge, in case it turns out that consumers will reject all the proprietary-format copy-protected services.
My smart card came with a free reader and serial cable, so I could use it on the internet - use the card occasionally in the real world cause of the low intro APR...haven't done anything with the reader yet, still in the box... Any suggestions?
*Look* at all the unnecessary foo-faw SimDesk provides. You really think the digitally deprived need a spreadsheet, a contact manager and remote printing capability?
This looks more like taxpayer money applied to a dot-com bailout than anything of real use.
But the bubble burst, and Armstrong's multi-billion-dollar network lost value fast. While the "paper value" of a company doesn't mean much, it means a lot when a company is deep in debt.
Excite's situation is a fractal reiteration of the Armstrong situation, the same story repeated within the larger story.
Excite may be losing money on each customer, as many Internet providers are, but they need to keep prices low to recruit more customers so they can pro-rate their costs (especially the cost of debt maintenance) over wider numbers; so, even with a per-capita loss, recruiting more customers does not increase their losses. And they cannot recruit them fats enough.
With the Internet bubble burst, investors want to see profit now. And a lack of investors makes refinancing of existing debt impossible.
But these people are all in the web-advertising business. One advertiser "jamming" another advertiser is an unfair business practice. It will be stopped.
I am fond of my privacy, and opposed to the surveillance systems. But setting up this kind of "straw dog" does no help to real critics of such systems.
AT&T's cut-rate internet service (4.95/mo) does extensive profiling of its users. It's not likely to be popular with the /. crowd, but it's very clear when you sign up that you are exchanging privacy for the low-cost service.
If you go to automotive sites, the ATT software will start delivering car ads. These ads will be unrelated to the sites you are visiting, except by topic. Are you contending that, if a customer mistakes one of ATT's ads for part of a site, that is deliberately misleading?
If you go to a Circuit City site and a Best Buy ad pops up, are you suggesting that the typical surfer is so ignorant that he knows no difference between the two?
Rentibng a billboard across the street from Circuit City and putting up a Best Buy ad is not illegal. This does not seem much different.
When you install these bundled packages, the software installed is listed with a series of checkboxes. It's your choice whether to leave the items checked or uncheck them, your option to read the EULA or not.
I'm a liberal on most issues, but the obligation of law to protect people from their own stupidity has its limits.
The ability to use a digital video recorder is not "freeloading." Nor is the ability to "timeshift" your viewing by any other means; courts decided that this was perfectly legitimate behavior.
There are other aspects of IP I am sure we would disagree on, but that would involve more arguing than I'd care to deal with....
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
Prince has declared war against the major labels, particularly Warner Brothers (which issues 1999). If you have money to spend go to npgmusicclub.com where Prince is trying hard to create an alternative.
Reason not to replace Metallica:
They suck.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
They haven't stopped anyone from doing anything. Note that no one even knows what cd is protected.
Law is clearly not the way the use of technology is determined. When you outlaw MP3's, you make every computer user a criminal. Lotsa safety in those numbers.
Granted that corporations have a bigger voice than consumers in Congress (which is an issue I do care about), I expect garbage like this to happen. I am much more concerned about the larger issue than such side-effects.
I don't mind being made into an outlaw so much, as long as I retain my privacy. Interestingly, the encroachment of laws that make more and more PC users into criminals is one of the things convincing "Joe Sixpack" (I dislike this epithet, but I'm using your term) that privacy rights, onnline and offline, are important.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
The original poster's off-hand mention of aa doesn't justify such sermonizing in response.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
Legal guns and, of course, the capslock key.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
This ruling will be enforced by the "Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice." I don't think the establishment of such ruling bodies is something we hoped to achieve with this alliance.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
"The extremely controversial discussion website adequacy.org has a very interesting and controversial remedy for this..."
"This is why I was interested to read an article at the somewhat notorious discussion site adequacy.org detailing how to make space travel and exploration less elitist and more widespread..."
"I read an interesting article on this topic at adequacy.org, the controversial discussion site, regarding the education of children..."
His adequacy plugs do seem spouted in an obligatory fashion...and what's driving the 'defenders' that have popped up to answer his critic?
All kinds strange if you ask me. (I know, you didn't.)
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
No one objects to painting all the phone support guys with a wide brush as "tech support bozos," but indicate there are a few "stoopit guys" in the programming field and it's an issue.
jeez...
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?50@@.f218930
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
Takes all kinds.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
Folks like me think that this is +3; Funny, tho we certainly don't expect others to share our tastes.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
"It was on the internet."
"Damn your eyes! Usenet!=the Internet!"
Why don't geeks realize, and make peace with, the concept that content, and the media that carries that content, are interchangeable in common usage?
I watched television=I watched Seinfeld. I listened to the radio=I listened to easy listening hour. It was on the Internet=It was in Usenet.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
It sounds like you should be looking for a new employer anyway.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and