I'm willing to bet that the biggest cost in your box of Cheerios is transportation. The profit margin involved for everyone, from General Mills down to the local grocery store, is very small. It's only sustainable because of the quantities involved.
Although the ingredients may be cheap, and the packaging may be cheap, and the ink on the box and the toy inside may be cheap, putting everything together and delivering it to your neighborhood is not.
I'm not sure whether they do or not, but I've always thought it would be a good idea for cereal manufacturers to be more like Coca-Cola: manufacture the critical components in one place (the cheerios) and then distribute them in bulk and package them locally. I think the transportation costs for individual boxes of Cereal must be enormous. Maybe they have no other choice because of freshness/QC issues, though.
Except that they could go higher than CDDA. Significantly higher, assuming that they have access to the master tapes made during mastering -- which are probably at a much higher bitrate than 44.1k/16bit.
MP3 is capable of delivering better sound quality than CD, if you use really high bitrates and provide it with appropriate source material. Of course it rarely ever does, and in most cases people don't care enough about quality to even give it a high enough rate to come near uncompressed 44.1/16, but that doesn't mean that the format isn't capable of it.
I remember reading that the iPod (an older version anyway) maxes out at 16 bits at 48kHz, although it has the decoding power to do higher definition stuff. In fact I bet the newer versions could probably have enough processing power to do DSD-type formats like SACD used.
It probably won't happen for a long time though, because there's limited consumer demand (however it is there, and it's not as much of a niche market as you'd think) coupled with an unwillingness by the music companies to sell high-def audio recordings that aren't horribly encumbered by DRM, which drives away potential customers and helps further the first problem.
Just wondering, what server software do you use to share the music throughout your house? I've always wanted to do a music server system like that, but there are actually so many ways a person could do it that I haven't gotten around to sorting through them and picking out which I want to try first.
What I'd really like is what iTunes USED to do, before Apple crippled it (at the behest of the music companies): you could check a box in your preferences and any computer on the local network would automatically find the other's music library, and you could play songs from it, all within iTunes. God, that was sweet. And in the original version you could type in a remote computer's IP address and link to it, even if it wasn't on your subnet and automatically discovered. Now the whole sharing feature is pretty much dead.
Has anyone come up with a FOSS replacement that's anywhere near as easy to use? Preferably one that you can access using iTunes as the client? (Assuming they haven't crippled the client-side features of iTunes in recent versions also.)
The music companies are multinational. They don't care what country the music is from -- in fact I think that in Japan, Sony has even greater marketshare than they do here in the States. So you can buy as much Japanese music as you want, and the RIAA isn't going to complain, because the RIAA is basically an organ of the multinational record companies.
Now if you started buying a lot of independent foreign music, which was somehow imported and sold without somehow causing a palm at Sony/BMI to be greased, and we actually representative of a significant portion of the music-buying public, you can bet they'd have their lobbyists painting you as one step down from a terrorist.
Well speaking as a general fan of Wikipedia -- I mostly read sort of basic technical articles more than anything -- the "cultural" or "political" articles there are decidedly quite leftist. I think this is just representative of the people writing and contributing however, so I don't fault the system for it. It just comes with the territory. I basically avoid most of the non-technical articles; although they generally do a good job of illustrating the feelings of the Slashdot/FOSS/Linux-using 'hive mind' on internet controversies (e.g. Cedega, Sveasoft) and particularly how they change over time.
But you're right to point out that there is a clear underlying bias in many of the articles, and the anti-Israel / pro-Palestine one is just the tip of the iceberg. But frankly I think you could say the same thing about Time or Newsweek.
Give back his job, hell, he should be tried in court for libel.
I agree with this. I am quite certain however that the guy would not be found guilty, because it takes quite a lot to prove libel or slander, especially when the slandered person is a celebrity. However in this case it doesn't seem like it's actually going to happen, since Sigenthaler seems more interested in going after Wikipedia than the actual person who "slandered" him.
This whole thing is stupid. Nobody who can get themselves an editorial spot in the Washington Post essentially on demand, after some anonymous guy says something nasty about them in Wikipedia has any place asserting libel. It's ridiculous that people keep going around saying it, because it would never stick.
Speaking of shoddy journalism, perhaps the Register should do some research into what "libel" means in the context of a public figure in the U.S., since they seem to enjoy using that word so much. I think they'd be surprised. So far I've not seen any U.S.-based publication use the terms 'libel' or 'slander' in relation to this controversy, except as direct quotes from somebody else.
That's actually cheaper than I can find it in the U.S. for (and that price includes 25% tax??).
Meritline.com, which traditionally sells media quite cheap, has a 1GB MMC-RS for $95 USD. A regular MMC costs $58 for the same capacity. CompactFlash is about the same -- however CF has the additional advantage of going all the way up to about 8GB also.
The kicker for me is that if they had used a regular MMC slot, they would have given consumers the choice of either format, since you can put an RS-MMC into a MMC slot with an adaptor. By choosing the smaller format when there really wasn't any reason to, they've locked people in to the smaller and more expensive version forever.
I can understand wanting to go with the small one on a cellphone, but not on something that's as big as this tablet is.
"Well, I was going to work on a cryptographic key recovery system, but that violated the DMCA and the University got threatened with a lawsuit. So in order to find something else that we could do with our thousands of dollars of test equipment and samples, I built this dynamically adapting 'Hairy Man Ass Filter.' It was supported by a grant from Concerned Parents of America. I hope this meets the qualifications for the PhD review committee."
The good thing for the Japanese: the barrier of entry for cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer will be high.
This is what I don't believe. U.S. investors will be falling over themselves to be the first to build a production line to turn these things out wherever labor is cheapest. Hell, that's pretty much all we ever do now -- outsource it to China; and not just shoddy molded-plastic stuff.
The manufacturers will want to maximize profits at a given price point, and that means driving down production costs as low as possible. Maybe the initial 'early adopter' and 'videophile' units will be made in Japan, but when it comes time to try and capture the mass market with a model that you can sell at Wal-Mart, it will be made in China. And it will probably be made there in a factory paid for by Japanese and American corporate investment, regardless of the perceived "security" concerns.
The electronics manufacturers will only go so far in order to protect the studio's DRM. Something that impacts their bottom line so significantly as not being able to outsource the production is not going to happen.
I'm sure a suitably knowledgable and motivated person could also just open up the DVD player or TV and poke around with a good scope or analyzer while playing some sort of test pattern and figure out a place where you can get the unencrypted digital bitstream. Especially if it's something like a LCD television (or a CRT television, obviously you can get an analog output from the signals being fed to the guns) there has to be the signal there someplace. Sure the manufacturers can pot the boards in epoxy and try to make it difficult (and expensive as hell for the rest of us, thanks guys) but DRM is inherently flawed.
There are quite a few electrical engineers in other countries who I'm sure would have more than enough economic incentive to spend a few weeks tinkering with a digital TV to figure out how to break the system, so that the big Asian pirated-movie producers can keep stamping out bootlegs.
Of course in a situation like this it's us -- the first-world consumers -- who lose out. Because we get stuck with the costs for "securing" the televisions and DVD players, plus we have the onerous DRM on movies we buy, plus we probably spend millions of taxpayer dollars trying to enforce import restrictions on the resulting Asian bootlegs. Who wins? The Chinese, mostly, since they're the ones who will probably be making the DVD players to begin with, and cracking them and making the bootlegs, and in a few years selling the mod chips that people here in the States and in Europe will be selling on shady websites.
Although I'm not sure how much computer time on the systems that do this costs, you can also just shoot a scene with the actors holding a "green screen" object and then replace it later. You'd have to be pretty careful with it, but they've gotten rather freakishly good with the computer-aided chroma keying lately; e.g. George Lucas swapping out objects that weren't even originally filmed this way in the DVD release of E.T. I could totally see a situation where in the original shot the actor just holds a green can-shaped object, and then the network release of the show has a Pepsi can dubbed in, while the DVD release has a brand-neutral generic one.
If I was George Lucas, I'd be calling up the network executives and telling them the pricing options for doing this sort of work today. You could even go so far as to create different advertisement versions for different regional markets. (Someone walks into a grocery store -- in New England it's a Big Y, but in the mid-Atlantic it's a Harris Teeter, etc.)
Last season I started to watch the Shield on FX, after having watched the previous season on my computer by bittorrenting the episodes a day or two after they were released, and I found that the downloaded episodes made for a 1000% better TV-watching experience. No sliders, no moving graphics in the bottom of the screen, no station ID logos, and higher quality than my analog TV.
Someone should clue the local TV stations into a phrase: "value added." They have none. Right now they exist only because they have a monopoly on content (at least at the level of effort that most non-technical users are willing to expend). But as that monopoly breaks down and viewers start to get flooded with content from other places, they're going to be in real trouble.
I still watch a few TV shows, mostly as a social thing with friends, but if it weren't for the fact that we just enjoy getting together once a week and ordering pizza, I'd probably just cancel everything but my basic cable subscription and watch tv shows when they hit NetFlix.
What's with that RS-MMC crap that only Nokia is using? There is no way they couldn't afford the space for an SD slot. They are as bad as Sony in this regard trying to push yet-another-memory-card that nobody has a good reason to buy.
I'm right with you on that one. Using some bizarro memory-card format that's only used on some cellphones (I don't care if they're Nokia's cellphones) was the nail in the coffin of my interest in this device. I hope it's successful because I like the concept, but they shot themselves in the foot with the execution, especially with the memory card. If they had gone with a format that has a bigger form factor, at least there would have been the theoretical possibility of an adaptor to use these mini MMC cards that they've got such a ridiculous hardon for. But by making that the computer's built-in reader's form factor, they rule out ever using a bigger card in anything approaching an elegant fashion.
It reeks of arrogance on the part of the designers -- they have their pet memory card format and they think they can just shove it down the user's throats. It sucks just as much when Sony does it with Memory Stick, but at least with that there are an order of magnitude more devices that use it. I've never even heard of anything non-Nokia that uses this format (actually I'd never heard of it period, before today). I'll never buy a PSP because of it's stupid memory card format, but if I was really interested there, I could probably argue to myself that at least there will be an economy of scale involved and the prices on the cards will come down -- these RS-MMC things will probably always be expensive.
They should have given a call down to Pontis in Germany, asked them how their MP3 player sales are going. Pontis had one of the first practical MP3 players I'd ever used, but it was crippled because of some strange proprietary filesystem on the cards that required special readers and driver software to load songs. At least they used basically standard physical cards, but in the end they got out-maneuvered (at least in the U.S. market) by cheaper solid-state players that worked like Mass Storage devices. I'm not sure what their marketshare numbers are now, but I've never seen one in stores in years. Take a hint, Nokia. Nobody likes storage that's a pain in the ass to use.
... wanting to love it for certain elements, but being seriously disappointed by the slow processor and limited RAM, which he says are probably a function of the low price point ($359). This is in contrast with something like OQO which looks to be very cool, but costs $1299 (MSRP). Honestly, I'd like to see something OQO'ish in the $599 price point range that can run Linux. That would probably be the best of both worlds.
In other news, I really wanted to like the Kia Rio, but was seriously disappointed by the 110-horsepower engine, which is probably a function of the low price point ($10,570). This is in contrast with something like the Ferarri F430 which looks to be very cool, but costs $174,585. Honestly, I'd like to see something Ferarri-ish in the $15,000 price point range that can do a 13-second quarter mile. That would probably be the best of both worlds.
I think you turn your soul in when you sign your contract, and if you survive until retirement you get it back during your exit interview. It's kind of like a deposit.
As you're going out the door, soul restored and gold watch in hand, it hits you: "What the fuck did I just spend 25 years doing?"
Yeah, I almost pointed that out as well, but I figured that some people would say that even $20 or whatever a legitimate bellows or extension tube costs is big bucks to them, and how dare I suggest that it was cheap.:)
But you're right, the part he's replacing isn't a terribly expensive one. And frankly I don't have a bunch of extra body caps sitting around either. (For some reason I'm always short them, probably because you only get one with each camera body, and they like to grow legs and wander off.)
Some of the macro bellows can get quite pricey -- I just did a quick google and some of them are $500+ (for Leicas I think), however there are also ones on ebay for less than $60, so I don't doubt that a person could find one cheap if they looked for more than five minutes. The actual Canon extension tube that this pringles can is simulating retails for about $170, and I'm sure there are generic parts for a lot less.
In short I think this review might be interesting for someone who wants to try macro photography, but unless you're dirt poor and inherited the camera or received it as a gift or something, it's not terribly expensive to get a real extension tube, and I think anyone would be a lot happier.
Plus with a real tube, there's not the same risk of having the lens fall off the front of it and go crashing to the ground. And no pringles grease on your lens, either -- frankly this is what would keep me from ever putting my lens inside a Pringles tin. Can you say oily?
You really should have called or written to their corporate HQ about that.
That's the second thing I've heard recently about Best Buy managers being totally out of line. I think that their district or regional managers are definitely cutting the store managers too much slack, or not giving them enough oversight. The thing I heard more recently was some very shift practices regarding xBox360 "bundles" -- they were advertising the straight-up price for the console in the flyers, but if you went into the store, the employees had been instructed not to sell them except as part of bundles with many expensive, high-profit add-ons. Eventually people got annoyed enough that they called corporate, which said that the 'bundles only' thing was BS (as they should, since it amounts to false advertising and creation of a clear bait-and-switch). However some people still ran into problems when they tried to return all the bundled add-ons; some stores were refusing the returns.
The thing smacks to me of some store managers basically going rogue and violating company policy in order to get their numbers up by the end of the year. I've talked to some people at BB and they have sales goals for high-margin stuff (especially service plans / extended warranties) and add-ons, and they thought this would be a great way to stick people for them. However the corporate side is guilty also, for creating the incentive structure that's so warped in the first place. How about some oversight?
Yeah I'll defintely second you on B&H. When I was looking to buy a digital camera, there were always a few places that had better prices than them, but all of them seemed to be one kind of sketchy or another. There is an outfit called "Broadway Photo" in particular that if it's still around, I'd advise everyone to avoid like the plague. (They've probably changed names three times now -- but they were a classic bait/switch/upcharge scam.)
But B&H and Adorama are both great. I've never bought anything from J&R but I've visited their store and if I was ever going to get some computer-audio equipment I'd probably look at them (well, them and Sweetwater, who I can say have the best customer service of any company I've ever dealt with, for anything).
The thing I like about B&H is that they offer you a choice generally of the U.S. or "Imported"/Graymarket/Made-for-export equipment. If you buy U.S. stuff, you get a warranty; if you get the Imported version (which is a misnomer, it's probably manufactured in the same factory) then it's slightly cheaper but the warranty is through B&H instead of the mfr. To me it's worth it to get the U.S. version on cameras and equipment, but I routinely buy Made-for-export film at the savings of a few dollars a roll on the more exotic Kodak stuff.
Basically what the guy does is take a SLR body cap, cut it up with a dremel and use it as a mounting ring to attach a pringles can, which is essentially an extension ring to move a inexpensive 50mm prime lens further away from the film plane. I'm not knocking this guy's work -- it's a pretty neat idea -- but really he's doing a DIY extension tube, not a lens.
Couldn't you do this better with a packet sniffer? Some sort of script that monitored the packet stream and told you exactly how many packets had gone in and out to a specific IP? (You'd have to reset the count every time you wanted to measure a different page at the same site...)
But that would give you the "true transfer" involved in loading a particular webpage.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of an easy-to-setup Squid distro? Something that runs maybe as a live CD, with minimal or easy configuration? (Like Smoothwall, basically...)
There are a few places I know of that are really dying for web cache servers, because even without looking at the logs I can tell that they are probably spending GB a month downloading the same banner ads and Google splashscreen to every user on the network. It's a situation where there are hundreds of users and they're all basically doing the same thing as each other.
Last time I took a look at Squid -- granted this was a few years ago -- it was still a bit intimidating to set up for most people, especially if you wanted something that was transparent to the users (i.e. works without having to point your browser to it as a proxy).
Thoughts? I'm hoping there's some sort of CD that you can pop in and turn a disused box into an instant cache server. Or if not, maybe somebody will give the idea some thought. There is a lot of traffic being created at schools and small networks that's entirely redundant, but where the admins don't have (or think they don't have) the resources to set up a cache.
If you're browsing Slashdot, for instance, you know that there aren't going to be any graphics on the page that you really need to see. It's all text, the only graphics are ads. So wasted bandwidth, essentially.
However if you were reading some howto article or news story, that referenced a graphic, then you could click on it and download.
It's not very hard; you just wait until you either need to see something because it's referenced in the text, or because the page doesn't make sense otherwise. I don't think it's beyond most people's capabilities. And if you go to sites that give any kind of a damn at all about compatibility or accessibility, there should be ALTs on everything raster.
This would be a very slick system. I can think of a few other instances where it would be very useful, although your example is a good one.
Where I'd want it is working on multiuser systems: say I work on a software project with hundreds of megabytes of documentation. We have version control for our code, but not really a good system for the docs. Right now we use MS Word's versioning and track changes capabilities, but they cause the files to balloon in size hugely, and there's no way to check out and branch a specific version easily. And the file format isn't something that you can just run diff on to get a list of changes -- you have to combine it from within Word if you want to bring someone's changes back into the main document later. Some of the documents are heavy on tables, which Word does a crummy job of tracking changes to IMO. Overall it's very kludgy, but we make it hobble along at the cost of massive amounts of storage.
I've actually been thinking recently that a wikitext-like system wouldn't be bad for what we do, but I'm imagining how a system like the one you describe would work. You'd begin by starting/baselining a new document. Then another user comes along and makes some changes, it gets stored as a new version; if someone wants to make changes at the same time they have the document checked out, a branch is created which can be remerged (if desired) later. Maybe the ideal way to do this would be to attach it to the CVS system for the code, although for complicated reasons the documentation on this project doesn't always parallel the development of the code, and isn't written by the same people.
I've heard it mentioned (can't find the article now) that the new IBM portal thing -- the one that will supposedly use OpenDocument -- has some document management features built in, so maybe it will be a solution. But it seems like there is a demand for change tracking in excess, or better implemented, than MS Word's that's currently not being served.
Someone further up mentioned LaTeX and CVS -- that sounds interesting, although I'm not very familiar with CVS; I'll have to look into it though. I can see a point on our project where the MS Word based system isn't going to fly anymore, and when it gets there we're going to have a problem.
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I'm willing to bet that the biggest cost in your box of Cheerios is transportation. The profit margin involved for everyone, from General Mills down to the local grocery store, is very small. It's only sustainable because of the quantities involved.
Although the ingredients may be cheap, and the packaging may be cheap, and the ink on the box and the toy inside may be cheap, putting everything together and delivering it to your neighborhood is not.
I'm not sure whether they do or not, but I've always thought it would be a good idea for cereal manufacturers to be more like Coca-Cola: manufacture the critical components in one place (the cheerios) and then distribute them in bulk and package them locally. I think the transportation costs for individual boxes of Cereal must be enormous. Maybe they have no other choice because of freshness/QC issues, though.
Except that they could go higher than CDDA. Significantly higher, assuming that they have access to the master tapes made during mastering -- which are probably at a much higher bitrate than 44.1k/16bit.
MP3 is capable of delivering better sound quality than CD, if you use really high bitrates and provide it with appropriate source material. Of course it rarely ever does, and in most cases people don't care enough about quality to even give it a high enough rate to come near uncompressed 44.1/16, but that doesn't mean that the format isn't capable of it.
I remember reading that the iPod (an older version anyway) maxes out at 16 bits at 48kHz, although it has the decoding power to do higher definition stuff. In fact I bet the newer versions could probably have enough processing power to do DSD-type formats like SACD used.
It probably won't happen for a long time though, because there's limited consumer demand (however it is there, and it's not as much of a niche market as you'd think) coupled with an unwillingness by the music companies to sell high-def audio recordings that aren't horribly encumbered by DRM, which drives away potential customers and helps further the first problem.
Great post. And sounds like a really neat system.
Just wondering, what server software do you use to share the music throughout your house? I've always wanted to do a music server system like that, but there are actually so many ways a person could do it that I haven't gotten around to sorting through them and picking out which I want to try first.
What I'd really like is what iTunes USED to do, before Apple crippled it (at the behest of the music companies): you could check a box in your preferences and any computer on the local network would automatically find the other's music library, and you could play songs from it, all within iTunes. God, that was sweet. And in the original version you could type in a remote computer's IP address and link to it, even if it wasn't on your subnet and automatically discovered. Now the whole sharing feature is pretty much dead.
Has anyone come up with a FOSS replacement that's anywhere near as easy to use? Preferably one that you can access using iTunes as the client? (Assuming they haven't crippled the client-side features of iTunes in recent versions also.)
The music companies are multinational. They don't care what country the music is from -- in fact I think that in Japan, Sony has even greater marketshare than they do here in the States. So you can buy as much Japanese music as you want, and the RIAA isn't going to complain, because the RIAA is basically an organ of the multinational record companies.
Now if you started buying a lot of independent foreign music, which was somehow imported and sold without somehow causing a palm at Sony/BMI to be greased, and we actually representative of a significant portion of the music-buying public, you can bet they'd have their lobbyists painting you as one step down from a terrorist.
Well speaking as a general fan of Wikipedia -- I mostly read sort of basic technical articles more than anything -- the "cultural" or "political" articles there are decidedly quite leftist. I think this is just representative of the people writing and contributing however, so I don't fault the system for it. It just comes with the territory. I basically avoid most of the non-technical articles; although they generally do a good job of illustrating the feelings of the Slashdot/FOSS/Linux-using 'hive mind' on internet controversies (e.g. Cedega, Sveasoft) and particularly how they change over time.
But you're right to point out that there is a clear underlying bias in many of the articles, and the anti-Israel / pro-Palestine one is just the tip of the iceberg. But frankly I think you could say the same thing about Time or Newsweek.
Give back his job, hell, he should be tried in court for libel.
I agree with this. I am quite certain however that the guy would not be found guilty, because it takes quite a lot to prove libel or slander, especially when the slandered person is a celebrity. However in this case it doesn't seem like it's actually going to happen, since Sigenthaler seems more interested in going after Wikipedia than the actual person who "slandered" him.
This whole thing is stupid. Nobody who can get themselves an editorial spot in the Washington Post essentially on demand, after some anonymous guy says something nasty about them in Wikipedia has any place asserting libel. It's ridiculous that people keep going around saying it, because it would never stick.
Speaking of shoddy journalism, perhaps the Register should do some research into what "libel" means in the context of a public figure in the U.S., since they seem to enjoy using that word so much. I think they'd be surprised. So far I've not seen any U.S.-based publication use the terms 'libel' or 'slander' in relation to this controversy, except as direct quotes from somebody else.
That's actually cheaper than I can find it in the U.S. for (and that price includes 25% tax??).
Meritline.com, which traditionally sells media quite cheap, has a 1GB MMC-RS for $95 USD. A regular MMC costs $58 for the same capacity. CompactFlash is about the same -- however CF has the additional advantage of going all the way up to about 8GB also.
The kicker for me is that if they had used a regular MMC slot, they would have given consumers the choice of either format, since you can put an RS-MMC into a MMC slot with an adaptor. By choosing the smaller format when there really wasn't any reason to, they've locked people in to the smaller and more expensive version forever.
I can understand wanting to go with the small one on a cellphone, but not on something that's as big as this tablet is.
"Well, I was going to work on a cryptographic key recovery system, but that violated the DMCA and the University got threatened with a lawsuit. So in order to find something else that we could do with our thousands of dollars of test equipment and samples, I built this dynamically adapting 'Hairy Man Ass Filter.' It was supported by a grant from Concerned Parents of America. I hope this meets the qualifications for the PhD review committee."
The good thing for the Japanese: the barrier of entry for cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer will be high.
This is what I don't believe. U.S. investors will be falling over themselves to be the first to build a production line to turn these things out wherever labor is cheapest. Hell, that's pretty much all we ever do now -- outsource it to China; and not just shoddy molded-plastic stuff.
The manufacturers will want to maximize profits at a given price point, and that means driving down production costs as low as possible. Maybe the initial 'early adopter' and 'videophile' units will be made in Japan, but when it comes time to try and capture the mass market with a model that you can sell at Wal-Mart, it will be made in China. And it will probably be made there in a factory paid for by Japanese and American corporate investment, regardless of the perceived "security" concerns.
The electronics manufacturers will only go so far in order to protect the studio's DRM. Something that impacts their bottom line so significantly as not being able to outsource the production is not going to happen.
I'm sure a suitably knowledgable and motivated person could also just open up the DVD player or TV and poke around with a good scope or analyzer while playing some sort of test pattern and figure out a place where you can get the unencrypted digital bitstream. Especially if it's something like a LCD television (or a CRT television, obviously you can get an analog output from the signals being fed to the guns) there has to be the signal there someplace. Sure the manufacturers can pot the boards in epoxy and try to make it difficult (and expensive as hell for the rest of us, thanks guys) but DRM is inherently flawed.
There are quite a few electrical engineers in other countries who I'm sure would have more than enough economic incentive to spend a few weeks tinkering with a digital TV to figure out how to break the system, so that the big Asian pirated-movie producers can keep stamping out bootlegs.
Of course in a situation like this it's us -- the first-world consumers -- who lose out. Because we get stuck with the costs for "securing" the televisions and DVD players, plus we have the onerous DRM on movies we buy, plus we probably spend millions of taxpayer dollars trying to enforce import restrictions on the resulting Asian bootlegs. Who wins? The Chinese, mostly, since they're the ones who will probably be making the DVD players to begin with, and cracking them and making the bootlegs, and in a few years selling the mod chips that people here in the States and in Europe will be selling on shady websites.
Although I'm not sure how much computer time on the systems that do this costs, you can also just shoot a scene with the actors holding a "green screen" object and then replace it later. You'd have to be pretty careful with it, but they've gotten rather freakishly good with the computer-aided chroma keying lately; e.g. George Lucas swapping out objects that weren't even originally filmed this way in the DVD release of E.T. I could totally see a situation where in the original shot the actor just holds a green can-shaped object, and then the network release of the show has a Pepsi can dubbed in, while the DVD release has a brand-neutral generic one.
If I was George Lucas, I'd be calling up the network executives and telling them the pricing options for doing this sort of work today. You could even go so far as to create different advertisement versions for different regional markets. (Someone walks into a grocery store -- in New England it's a Big Y, but in the mid-Atlantic it's a Harris Teeter, etc.)
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Last season I started to watch the Shield on FX, after having watched the previous season on my computer by bittorrenting the episodes a day or two after they were released, and I found that the downloaded episodes made for a 1000% better TV-watching experience. No sliders, no moving graphics in the bottom of the screen, no station ID logos, and higher quality than my analog TV.
Someone should clue the local TV stations into a phrase: "value added." They have none. Right now they exist only because they have a monopoly on content (at least at the level of effort that most non-technical users are willing to expend). But as that monopoly breaks down and viewers start to get flooded with content from other places, they're going to be in real trouble.
I still watch a few TV shows, mostly as a social thing with friends, but if it weren't for the fact that we just enjoy getting together once a week and ordering pizza, I'd probably just cancel everything but my basic cable subscription and watch tv shows when they hit NetFlix.
What's with that RS-MMC crap that only Nokia is using? There is no way they couldn't afford the space for an SD slot. They are as bad as Sony in this regard trying to push yet-another-memory-card that nobody has a good reason to buy.
I'm right with you on that one. Using some bizarro memory-card format that's only used on some cellphones (I don't care if they're Nokia's cellphones) was the nail in the coffin of my interest in this device. I hope it's successful because I like the concept, but they shot themselves in the foot with the execution, especially with the memory card. If they had gone with a format that has a bigger form factor, at least there would have been the theoretical possibility of an adaptor to use these mini MMC cards that they've got such a ridiculous hardon for. But by making that the computer's built-in reader's form factor, they rule out ever using a bigger card in anything approaching an elegant fashion.
It reeks of arrogance on the part of the designers -- they have their pet memory card format and they think they can just shove it down the user's throats. It sucks just as much when Sony does it with Memory Stick, but at least with that there are an order of magnitude more devices that use it. I've never even heard of anything non-Nokia that uses this format (actually I'd never heard of it period, before today). I'll never buy a PSP because of it's stupid memory card format, but if I was really interested there, I could probably argue to myself that at least there will be an economy of scale involved and the prices on the cards will come down -- these RS-MMC things will probably always be expensive.
They should have given a call down to Pontis in Germany, asked them how their MP3 player sales are going. Pontis had one of the first practical MP3 players I'd ever used, but it was crippled because of some strange proprietary filesystem on the cards that required special readers and driver software to load songs. At least they used basically standard physical cards, but in the end they got out-maneuvered (at least in the U.S. market) by cheaper solid-state players that worked like Mass Storage devices. I'm not sure what their marketshare numbers are now, but I've never seen one in stores in years. Take a hint, Nokia. Nobody likes storage that's a pain in the ass to use.
... wanting to love it for certain elements, but being seriously disappointed by the slow processor and limited RAM, which he says are probably a function of the low price point ($359). This is in contrast with something like OQO which looks to be very cool, but costs $1299 (MSRP). Honestly, I'd like to see something OQO'ish in the $599 price point range that can run Linux. That would probably be the best of both worlds.
In other news, I really wanted to like the Kia Rio, but was seriously disappointed by the 110-horsepower engine, which is probably a function of the low price point ($10,570). This is in contrast with something like the Ferarri F430 which looks to be very cool, but costs $174,585. Honestly, I'd like to see something Ferarri-ish in the $15,000 price point range that can do a 13-second quarter mile. That would probably be the best of both worlds.
I think you turn your soul in when you sign your contract, and if you survive until retirement you get it back during your exit interview. It's kind of like a deposit.
As you're going out the door, soul restored and gold watch in hand, it hits you: "What the fuck did I just spend 25 years doing?"
Yeah, I almost pointed that out as well, but I figured that some people would say that even $20 or whatever a legitimate bellows or extension tube costs is big bucks to them, and how dare I suggest that it was cheap. :)
But you're right, the part he's replacing isn't a terribly expensive one. And frankly I don't have a bunch of extra body caps sitting around either. (For some reason I'm always short them, probably because you only get one with each camera body, and they like to grow legs and wander off.)
Some of the macro bellows can get quite pricey -- I just did a quick google and some of them are $500+ (for Leicas I think), however there are also ones on ebay for less than $60, so I don't doubt that a person could find one cheap if they looked for more than five minutes. The actual Canon extension tube that this pringles can is simulating retails for about $170, and I'm sure there are generic parts for a lot less.
In short I think this review might be interesting for someone who wants to try macro photography, but unless you're dirt poor and inherited the camera or received it as a gift or something, it's not terribly expensive to get a real extension tube, and I think anyone would be a lot happier.
Plus with a real tube, there's not the same risk of having the lens fall off the front of it and go crashing to the ground. And no pringles grease on your lens, either -- frankly this is what would keep me from ever putting my lens inside a Pringles tin. Can you say oily?
So, does that make you a Nazi Nazi?
You really should have called or written to their corporate HQ about that.
That's the second thing I've heard recently about Best Buy managers being totally out of line. I think that their district or regional managers are definitely cutting the store managers too much slack, or not giving them enough oversight. The thing I heard more recently was some very shift practices regarding xBox360 "bundles" -- they were advertising the straight-up price for the console in the flyers, but if you went into the store, the employees had been instructed not to sell them except as part of bundles with many expensive, high-profit add-ons. Eventually people got annoyed enough that they called corporate, which said that the 'bundles only' thing was BS (as they should, since it amounts to false advertising and creation of a clear bait-and-switch). However some people still ran into problems when they tried to return all the bundled add-ons; some stores were refusing the returns.
Here's an Inquirer article about it, I think I originally heard about it from my local (dead tree) paper:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28056
The thing smacks to me of some store managers basically going rogue and violating company policy in order to get their numbers up by the end of the year. I've talked to some people at BB and they have sales goals for high-margin stuff (especially service plans / extended warranties) and add-ons, and they thought this would be a great way to stick people for them. However the corporate side is guilty also, for creating the incentive structure that's so warped in the first place. How about some oversight?
Yeah I'll defintely second you on B&H. When I was looking to buy a digital camera, there were always a few places that had better prices than them, but all of them seemed to be one kind of sketchy or another. There is an outfit called "Broadway Photo" in particular that if it's still around, I'd advise everyone to avoid like the plague. (They've probably changed names three times now -- but they were a classic bait/switch/upcharge scam.)
But B&H and Adorama are both great. I've never bought anything from J&R but I've visited their store and if I was ever going to get some computer-audio equipment I'd probably look at them (well, them and Sweetwater, who I can say have the best customer service of any company I've ever dealt with, for anything).
The thing I like about B&H is that they offer you a choice generally of the U.S. or "Imported"/Graymarket/Made-for-export equipment. If you buy U.S. stuff, you get a warranty; if you get the Imported version (which is a misnomer, it's probably manufactured in the same factory) then it's slightly cheaper but the warranty is through B&H instead of the mfr. To me it's worth it to get the U.S. version on cameras and equipment, but I routinely buy Made-for-export film at the savings of a few dollars a roll on the more exotic Kodak stuff.
Yeah really. It was Slashdotted before there were any posts on the article, I think. Is that a record?
r o-photography-on-a-budget/
The Coral Cache seems to be working okay. Some of the photos seem to be missing, though, and the background is a little messed up (although perhaps it's that way on the 'real' site also). Link for the lazy:
http://www.photocritic.org.nyud.net:8090/2005/mac
Basically what the guy does is take a SLR body cap, cut it up with a dremel and use it as a mounting ring to attach a pringles can, which is essentially an extension ring to move a inexpensive 50mm prime lens further away from the film plane. I'm not knocking this guy's work -- it's a pretty neat idea -- but really he's doing a DIY extension tube, not a lens.
Couldn't you do this better with a packet sniffer? Some sort of script that monitored the packet stream and told you exactly how many packets had gone in and out to a specific IP? (You'd have to reset the count every time you wanted to measure a different page at the same site...)
But that would give you the "true transfer" involved in loading a particular webpage.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of an easy-to-setup Squid distro? Something that runs maybe as a live CD, with minimal or easy configuration? (Like Smoothwall, basically...)
There are a few places I know of that are really dying for web cache servers, because even without looking at the logs I can tell that they are probably spending GB a month downloading the same banner ads and Google splashscreen to every user on the network. It's a situation where there are hundreds of users and they're all basically doing the same thing as each other.
Last time I took a look at Squid -- granted this was a few years ago -- it was still a bit intimidating to set up for most people, especially if you wanted something that was transparent to the users (i.e. works without having to point your browser to it as a proxy).
Thoughts? I'm hoping there's some sort of CD that you can pop in and turn a disused box into an instant cache server. Or if not, maybe somebody will give the idea some thought. There is a lot of traffic being created at schools and small networks that's entirely redundant, but where the admins don't have (or think they don't have) the resources to set up a cache.
You use ALT tags and context.
If you're browsing Slashdot, for instance, you know that there aren't going to be any graphics on the page that you really need to see. It's all text, the only graphics are ads. So wasted bandwidth, essentially.
However if you were reading some howto article or news story, that referenced a graphic, then you could click on it and download.
It's not very hard; you just wait until you either need to see something because it's referenced in the text, or because the page doesn't make sense otherwise. I don't think it's beyond most people's capabilities. And if you go to sites that give any kind of a damn at all about compatibility or accessibility, there should be ALTs on everything raster.
... But will it come with a "Smite" button?
This would be a very slick system. I can think of a few other instances where it would be very useful, although your example is a good one.
Where I'd want it is working on multiuser systems: say I work on a software project with hundreds of megabytes of documentation. We have version control for our code, but not really a good system for the docs. Right now we use MS Word's versioning and track changes capabilities, but they cause the files to balloon in size hugely, and there's no way to check out and branch a specific version easily. And the file format isn't something that you can just run diff on to get a list of changes -- you have to combine it from within Word if you want to bring someone's changes back into the main document later. Some of the documents are heavy on tables, which Word does a crummy job of tracking changes to IMO. Overall it's very kludgy, but we make it hobble along at the cost of massive amounts of storage.
I've actually been thinking recently that a wikitext-like system wouldn't be bad for what we do, but I'm imagining how a system like the one you describe would work. You'd begin by starting/baselining a new document. Then another user comes along and makes some changes, it gets stored as a new version; if someone wants to make changes at the same time they have the document checked out, a branch is created which can be remerged (if desired) later. Maybe the ideal way to do this would be to attach it to the CVS system for the code, although for complicated reasons the documentation on this project doesn't always parallel the development of the code, and isn't written by the same people.
I've heard it mentioned (can't find the article now) that the new IBM portal thing -- the one that will supposedly use OpenDocument -- has some document management features built in, so maybe it will be a solution. But it seems like there is a demand for change tracking in excess, or better implemented, than MS Word's that's currently not being served.
Someone further up mentioned LaTeX and CVS -- that sounds interesting, although I'm not very familiar with CVS; I'll have to look into it though. I can see a point on our project where the MS Word based system isn't going to fly anymore, and when it gets there we're going to have a problem.