Interesting that it will support Linux, Windows and OS X - is this the only music service that can claim this kind of compatibility?
Emusic used to claim this compatibility. They had a version of their download manager for Windows, Linux and Mac. Now it's just Windows and Mac, but you can still download the old Linux version of the download manager. I haven't used emusic in a while, but I seem to remember that you could also just click on download links through your browser. Inconvenient for album downloading, but still usable through Linux. I think some audio players for Linux (at one time) claimed compatibility with the emusic download system. I stopped using emusic when it went away from a subscription service to a pay-per-download service. Guess they had to pay the bills, though.
At what point did you think you were playing a "game" instead of sitting through a cutscene?
Did we play the same game? How about when you were pulling some of the most entertainingly gruesome combos ever seen on any game? There were hordes of varied enemies to battle with the greatest combat system I've ever seen in an action game. The whole game wasn't very long (most action games are pretty short, aside from RE4), but I don't remember many cutscenes.
First, let's distinguish between Java and J2EE. The whole deployment descriptor problem in J2EE is the problem you're describing, not so much an inherent problem with Java. XDoclet grew out of a desire to simplify the generation of deployment descriptors. If you've ever hand-coded a deployment descriptor, I think you'd be happy to read the manual for XDoclet. Generating deployment descriptors based on XDoclet tasks also makes it easier to keep a team synchronized, and helps avoid problems like having an EJB method which you forget to write the associated interface for.
Anyway, there seems to me to be two ways to solve this problem: add something to the language that makes it easy to express the attributes of a method (which is what annotations in Java 5.0 are supposed to do), or simplify J2EE deployment (which is what is supposed to be happening in EJB 3.0). I don't think the Java platform is a mess, and I think the J2EE platform is moving towards not being a mess.
Google hasn't done anything countless other companies have done.
Well, as long as other companies have done it, I guess it's ok, then.
The more China gets exposed to influences from other countries, the better off they are.
I fail to see how this happens when their government controls what search results are returned.
Google alone can't dictate policy in China.
Google is the number one search engine on the planet. It would be an embarrasment if their citizens only had access to MaoSearch (tm). Google, along with other companies which are number one in their sphere, can certainly influence policy in China.
But once they are established, change can occur.
How is this change? If you live in China, you could not obtain information on Tiananmen square, and you are still unable to obtain information on Tiananment square. If Google can stand up to their own government, why not China? I doubt China would drag them in to court...
Government-run programs are generally maintained by unionized public workers. These programs have little competition and often cost more than a private competitive market (note municipal water reclamation costs).
That sentiment can be true, but the key word there is "competitive". Where little competition exists, such as in the ISP business, the profit margins of the private companies are far more expensive than the extra cost of unionized workers. Maybe if the FCC stopped pretending that everything's fine when it comes to the US's track record WRT broadband provision, and the government instituted regulations such as Canada's, which forces infrastructure owners to lease out their pipes at reasonable rates, then we can rely on private companies to provide cost-effective internet access. If that doesn't happen, than I'm fine with municipalities like New Orleans and Philadelphia providing what the private sector has utterly failed at.
Not to start a apt vs. rpm flamewar here, but I just wanted to stick in a note in defense of Mandriva, as someone who had tried the last Ubuntu release, and went back. First of all, I haven't put up with rpm dependency hell since learning how to use urpmi. Although I wish Mandriva (and the other rpm-based distros) would just switch to apt as a basis for package management, I do like the Mandriva GUI for urpmi much better than Synaptic. Also, I like the distributions which have central configuration utilities. The Mandriva Control Centre is far more complete and easy to use than either of the KDE or Gnome utilities. Also, WTF is up with Ubuntu not setting up a root password on installation?!? I know that I can do it once I'm up and running with 'sudo passwd' or something like this, but this really screwed with me for a bit. I like the whole 'service servicename start|stop|status' that Mandriva (and I'm sure others) have, which Ubuntu lacks. It does have '/etc/init.d/servicename start|stop', but it's not as consistent, for instance my adsl connection is still turned on and off with 'pon|poff something', if memory serves. Both are Java-friendly, which I like. I can't find the package list, and I can't remember if Ubuntu comes with Eclipse, but the new Mandriva betas come with an extensive list of open-source Java applications (Eclipse, Tomcat, Xerces, Ant, etc.). I could go on, but those are the main points.
We're bitching because we don't want to give Microsoft an automatic cut of every PC sale on the planet. Every PC sold by Dell is $50-$90 in MS's pocket (all numbers pulled from the recesses of my memory, so someone can correct me if I'm off). Other posts have suggested that this cost is recovered by companies who pay Dell to put trial versions of their software on the computer. It doesn't seem enough to account for $50-$90 + $75 per PC, but I suppose this could be the case. I would prefer that Dell just come out and say that the "Premium Software and Security" that comes with the PC is really just commercials, and not some actual value that is being added to the computer.
Wasn't there some period of time where you could redeem unused Windows XP licenses for cash from Microsoft? Whatever happened to that?
a YaST config utility that works as well in xterm/tty (ncurses) mode as it does in graphical mode. This is quite unique;
Urpmi works from command-line; apt-get works from command-line. Are they talking about an ncurses interface? Anyone ssh'ing in to update stuff doesn't want an ncurses interface, they want a command they can script with. While I'm on this topic, can all you distributions (at least the ones that rely on precompiled packages) PICK A DAMN PACKAGE MANAGER. You don't have to standardize the packages, use.deb or.rpm or.foo for all I care, just use the same management system, and then you can all use the same GUI based on this management system. Is this that hard? Someone out there is going to tell me that choice is good, and that I can install apt/synaptic on many distributions. Fine, when all the standard repositories for all the distributions are apt-ready, and all the distributions integrate Synaptic into their central config utility, I'll do that. Until then, I have put up with a plethora of apt-wannabes, all with different pretty GUIs, all fixing their own bugs and implementing the same features.
I think the article takes issue with the FCC being mandated to ensure that consumers can "originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics and video telecommunications," and then turning around and defining the service adequate to accomplish this as 200Kbps. It is incorrect and shows an obvious hesitation on the part of the FCC to live up to their mandate.
The quote is from the 1996 Telecom act, which laid out this standard as a reasonable expectation of what service across the entire US should be. Many other countries in the world have accomplished this, so it is not an unreasonable goal.
He'll save the customer a surprising amount of money when they inevitably decide to support Firefox after all, though no-one will realise this.
A good developer will probably also be working for a good businessman, and the good businessman will likely not be too keen on saving the customer a surprising amount of money, especially when the customer is going out of their way to stipulate that they want the application written specifically for IE. If they change their mind 6 months or a year down the road, then that means repeat business. There's a small chance that the customer could say, "hey, these applications already work, we should always go with those compatibility guys" but it's doubtful. The customer is going to take it as perfectly reasonable that, if they change the development platform, additional work has to be done. A good developer listens to his/her boss, and writes code according to requirements, period.
How about we link to a service which is known to compensate artists, supports Linux, and offers high quality (192 avg bitrate VBR, lame encoded) mp3s without DRM for about $0.25 per track, like EMusic? The don't have the major artists that iTunes has, but at least they have a more substantial catalogue than Mindawn (who had heard of this site before reading this story?), comprised mainly of indie rock that college kids might be inclined to listen to. They're also cheaper than Mindawn, and they have artists that at least some segment of the population has heard of, namely those who pay attention to music criticism.
So, to show that the mp3 player market has not hit critical mass, you link to an inexpensive mp3 player which allows people to play mp3s through their tape deck? I don't get it...
What does Amazon have to bring to the table, other than not crushing them like a bug?
How about Netflix integration with Amazon shopping? For every DVD in Amazon's substantial catalogue, a link under "Add to Shopping Cart" that says "Add to Netflix Cart". Maybe a rent-to-own scenario where, if I like a film I rent, I can get a discount on the purchase. There are lots of things both Amazon and Netflix can do to help each other, like Amazon and Toys-R-Us do, or Amazon and HMV do.
A related question, one I get all the time from DB guys I know, is, "why are you putting all this persistence logic in the application instead of the DB (i.e. stored procedures)?". Can someone come up with a snappy comeback for me? I've been developing with java for less than a year.
Or, I could hop on over to any number of torrent trackers, which require any OS, any bittorrent client, and any media player. The television industry could compete with free, but it seems that they don't want to.
Unless Nero bypasses the operating system somehow, it has to use the same Linux APIs that k3b et al have to use, and the problems people have with burners are related to the OS-level configuration
Let me say first that I'm a big k3b fan, but often the burning in k3b does not "just work". The main reason I've found is that k3b relies on cdrecord for much of its work, and until lately, cdrecord often seemed to have weird issues with the 2.6 kernel. This meant that unless you matched the cdrecord version with the kernel version that was tested by the distribution (Mandrake for me), you would get weird issues (OPC failing, mainly). I can't RTFA, as it seems to be/.'ed, but I assume that Nero does not use cdrecord as its backend, so it could just work, although it seems that the article author says otherwise.
Am I the only one here who has a problem with bittorrent being used as a distribution medium for legally sold movies & albums?
Judging from the comments above, no, but I don't really see what the problem is. They're going to charge me $5 or so to download whatever movie I feel like watching, without leaving my house, and it's going to take about 2.5 hours or so (1GB @ 125KB/s), and in that time I'll upload about a third that. As other comments have stated, it would probably drive up their costs if their bandwidth bill was larger. What do I care, anyway? I personally have a large cap (30GB) that I don't come close to (thanks to my ISP not charging for bandwidth consumed in the wee hours of the morning), and many geeks have ISPs with no caps at all. There is no real cost to you.
If ABC wants to offer a service where I can get 350MB DivX Lost episodes for $2 apiece, and their chosen distribution mechanism is bittorrent, you won't see me whining about the 100MB @ 40KB/s I give up on the upstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that it will support Linux, Windows and OS X - is this the only music service that can claim this kind of compatibility?
Emusic used to claim this compatibility. They had a version of their download manager for Windows, Linux and Mac. Now it's just Windows and Mac, but you can still download the old Linux version of the download manager. I haven't used emusic in a while, but I seem to remember that you could also just click on download links through your browser. Inconvenient for album downloading, but still usable through Linux. I think some audio players for Linux (at one time) claimed compatibility with the emusic download system. I stopped using emusic when it went away from a subscription service to a pay-per-download service. Guess they had to pay the bills, though.
At what point did you think you were playing a "game" instead of sitting through a cutscene?
Did we play the same game? How about when you were pulling some of the most entertainingly gruesome combos ever seen on any game? There were hordes of varied enemies to battle with the greatest combat system I've ever seen in an action game. The whole game wasn't very long (most action games are pretty short, aside from RE4), but I don't remember many cutscenes.
First, let's distinguish between Java and J2EE. The whole deployment descriptor problem in J2EE is the problem you're describing, not so much an inherent problem with Java. XDoclet grew out of a desire to simplify the generation of deployment descriptors. If you've ever hand-coded a deployment descriptor, I think you'd be happy to read the manual for XDoclet. Generating deployment descriptors based on XDoclet tasks also makes it easier to keep a team synchronized, and helps avoid problems like having an EJB method which you forget to write the associated interface for.
Anyway, there seems to me to be two ways to solve this problem: add something to the language that makes it easy to express the attributes of a method (which is what annotations in Java 5.0 are supposed to do), or simplify J2EE deployment (which is what is supposed to be happening in EJB 3.0). I don't think the Java platform is a mess, and I think the J2EE platform is moving towards not being a mess.
Google hasn't done anything countless other companies have done.
Well, as long as other companies have done it, I guess it's ok, then.
The more China gets exposed to influences from other countries, the better off they are.
I fail to see how this happens when their government controls what search results are returned.
Google alone can't dictate policy in China.
Google is the number one search engine on the planet. It would be an embarrasment if their citizens only had access to MaoSearch (tm). Google, along with other companies which are number one in their sphere, can certainly influence policy in China.
But once they are established, change can occur.
How is this change? If you live in China, you could not obtain information on Tiananmen square, and you are still unable to obtain information on Tiananment square. If Google can stand up to their own government, why not China? I doubt China would drag them in to court...
I guess I have to just keep pointing the people I know to what should be the top albums of the year
There is no such thing as an XXX rating. There is no such thing as an XXX rating. There is no such thing as an XXX rating.
There is in the Maritime Provinces in Canada (repeat 3 times if you wish).
Government-run programs are generally maintained by unionized public workers. These programs have little competition and often cost more than a private competitive market (note municipal water reclamation costs).
That sentiment can be true, but the key word there is "competitive". Where little competition exists, such as in the ISP business, the profit margins of the private companies are far more expensive than the extra cost of unionized workers. Maybe if the FCC stopped pretending that everything's fine when it comes to the US's track record WRT broadband provision, and the government instituted regulations such as Canada's, which forces infrastructure owners to lease out their pipes at reasonable rates, then we can rely on private companies to provide cost-effective internet access. If that doesn't happen, than I'm fine with municipalities like New Orleans and Philadelphia providing what the private sector has utterly failed at.
Not to start a apt vs. rpm flamewar here, but I just wanted to stick in a note in defense of Mandriva, as someone who had tried the last Ubuntu release, and went back. First of all, I haven't put up with rpm dependency hell since learning how to use urpmi. Although I wish Mandriva (and the other rpm-based distros) would just switch to apt as a basis for package management, I do like the Mandriva GUI for urpmi much better than Synaptic. Also, I like the distributions which have central configuration utilities. The Mandriva Control Centre is far more complete and easy to use than either of the KDE or Gnome utilities. Also, WTF is up with Ubuntu not setting up a root password on installation?!? I know that I can do it once I'm up and running with 'sudo passwd' or something like this, but this really screwed with me for a bit. I like the whole 'service servicename start|stop|status' that Mandriva (and I'm sure others) have, which Ubuntu lacks. It does have '/etc/init.d/servicename start|stop', but it's not as consistent, for instance my adsl connection is still turned on and off with 'pon|poff something', if memory serves. Both are Java-friendly, which I like. I can't find the package list, and I can't remember if Ubuntu comes with Eclipse, but the new Mandriva betas come with an extensive list of open-source Java applications (Eclipse, Tomcat, Xerces, Ant, etc.). I could go on, but those are the main points.
We're bitching because we don't want to give Microsoft an automatic cut of every PC sale on the planet. Every PC sold by Dell is $50-$90 in MS's pocket (all numbers pulled from the recesses of my memory, so someone can correct me if I'm off). Other posts have suggested that this cost is recovered by companies who pay Dell to put trial versions of their software on the computer. It doesn't seem enough to account for $50-$90 + $75 per PC, but I suppose this could be the case. I would prefer that Dell just come out and say that the "Premium Software and Security" that comes with the PC is really just commercials, and not some actual value that is being added to the computer.
Wasn't there some period of time where you could redeem unused Windows XP licenses for cash from Microsoft? Whatever happened to that?
a YaST config utility that works as well in xterm/tty (ncurses) mode as it does in graphical mode. This is quite unique;
.deb or .rpm or .foo for all I care, just use the same management system, and then you can all use the same GUI based on this management system. Is this that hard? Someone out there is going to tell me that choice is good, and that I can install apt/synaptic on many distributions. Fine, when all the standard repositories for all the distributions are apt-ready, and all the distributions integrate Synaptic into their central config utility, I'll do that. Until then, I have put up with a plethora of apt-wannabes, all with different pretty GUIs, all fixing their own bugs and implementing the same features.
Urpmi works from command-line; apt-get works from command-line. Are they talking about an ncurses interface? Anyone ssh'ing in to update stuff doesn't want an ncurses interface, they want a command they can script with. While I'm on this topic, can all you distributions (at least the ones that rely on precompiled packages) PICK A DAMN PACKAGE MANAGER. You don't have to standardize the packages, use
And, up until the levy was removed for hard drive-based players, Apple paid in Canada as well. About a year ago there was a $30 "price drop" on iPods.
I think the article takes issue with the FCC being mandated to ensure that consumers can "originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics and video telecommunications," and then turning around and defining the service adequate to accomplish this as 200Kbps. It is incorrect and shows an obvious hesitation on the part of the FCC to live up to their mandate.
The quote is from the 1996 Telecom act, which laid out this standard as a reasonable expectation of what service across the entire US should be. Many other countries in the world have accomplished this, so it is not an unreasonable goal.
Didn't I do this when using the 'Paddle' on my Atari 2600 two decades ago?
I believe that the patent is for rotating an input device to navigate through a linear list of menu entries. I don't think you did this on your Atari.
He'll save the customer a surprising amount of money when they inevitably decide to support Firefox after all, though no-one will realise this.
A good developer will probably also be working for a good businessman, and the good businessman will likely not be too keen on saving the customer a surprising amount of money, especially when the customer is going out of their way to stipulate that they want the application written specifically for IE. If they change their mind 6 months or a year down the road, then that means repeat business. There's a small chance that the customer could say, "hey, these applications already work, we should always go with those compatibility guys" but it's doubtful. The customer is going to take it as perfectly reasonable that, if they change the development platform, additional work has to be done. A good developer listens to his/her boss, and writes code according to requirements, period.
How about we link to a service which is known to compensate artists, supports Linux, and offers high quality (192 avg bitrate VBR, lame encoded) mp3s without DRM for about $0.25 per track, like EMusic? The don't have the major artists that iTunes has, but at least they have a more substantial catalogue than Mindawn (who had heard of this site before reading this story?), comprised mainly of indie rock that college kids might be inclined to listen to. They're also cheaper than Mindawn, and they have artists that at least some segment of the population has heard of, namely those who pay attention to music criticism.
Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is "difficult" and declined to comment further.
...right next to your webserver.
Windows - the 8-bit operating system.
So they get it for half-price?
So, to show that the mp3 player market has not hit critical mass, you link to an inexpensive mp3 player which allows people to play mp3s through their tape deck? I don't get it...
What does Amazon have to bring to the table, other than not crushing them like a bug?
How about Netflix integration with Amazon shopping? For every DVD in Amazon's substantial catalogue, a link under "Add to Shopping Cart" that says "Add to Netflix Cart". Maybe a rent-to-own scenario where, if I like a film I rent, I can get a discount on the purchase. There are lots of things both Amazon and Netflix can do to help each other, like Amazon and Toys-R-Us do, or Amazon and HMV do.
A related question, one I get all the time from DB guys I know, is, "why are you putting all this persistence logic in the application instead of the DB (i.e. stored procedures)?". Can someone come up with a snappy comeback for me? I've been developing with java for less than a year.
planet.gnome.org - Switched site with planet.kde.org
planet.kde.org - Switched site with "could not be found"
Looks like the KDE people pulled a fool of their own...
Or, I could hop on over to any number of torrent trackers, which require any OS, any bittorrent client, and any media player. The television industry could compete with free, but it seems that they don't want to.
Unless Nero bypasses the operating system somehow, it has to use the same Linux APIs that k3b et al have to use, and the problems people have with burners are related to the OS-level configuration
/.'ed, but I assume that Nero does not use cdrecord as its backend, so it could just work, although it seems that the article author says otherwise.
Let me say first that I'm a big k3b fan, but often the burning in k3b does not "just work". The main reason I've found is that k3b relies on cdrecord for much of its work, and until lately, cdrecord often seemed to have weird issues with the 2.6 kernel. This meant that unless you matched the cdrecord version with the kernel version that was tested by the distribution (Mandrake for me), you would get weird issues (OPC failing, mainly). I can't RTFA, as it seems to be
Am I the only one here who has a problem with bittorrent being used as a distribution medium for legally sold movies & albums?
Judging from the comments above, no, but I don't really see what the problem is. They're going to charge me $5 or so to download whatever movie I feel like watching, without leaving my house, and it's going to take about 2.5 hours or so (1GB @ 125KB/s), and in that time I'll upload about a third that. As other comments have stated, it would probably drive up their costs if their bandwidth bill was larger. What do I care, anyway? I personally have a large cap (30GB) that I don't come close to (thanks to my ISP not charging for bandwidth consumed in the wee hours of the morning), and many geeks have ISPs with no caps at all. There is no real cost to you.
If ABC wants to offer a service where I can get 350MB DivX Lost episodes for $2 apiece, and their chosen distribution mechanism is bittorrent, you won't see me whining about the 100MB @ 40KB/s I give up on the upstream.