I am not advocating this at all, and I'm certain many people already do it, just a point of discussion.
The article states that cd sales have descreased slightly over the last two years. While obviously some of this is due to piracy, I believe that the majority of the drop is due to A) The fact that cd's are just too expensive for B) The crap that artists are putting out now.
The second point being why I am in favor of individual track purchase online.
Anyway, one way to bring the average price down would be to simply purchase a CD new, rip the tracks and then sell the disk to a used cd store. The cd store is not in violation so they should be safe. So now what you've done is effectively saved a couple dollars off the CD's retail price, and given someone else the opportunity to buy a physically brand new disk for a discounted price.
While this does involve an illegal act on the original buyers part, do the ends justify the means? If the RIAA is told anonymously en mass that people who engage in this behavior would stop is cd prices were actually worth paying, maybe it could happen...
I agree with you to an extent, though I also think that you should choose your battles wisely. Why boycott the RIAA if it just keeps you from seeing a movie you'd really like to see? If you want the personal satisfaction that's one thing.
Alternatively, if you take my original post in mind, maybe a boycott isn't the answer or at least not alone. Some type of PSA or advertisement campaign to reach those that aren't educated on the matter could help more.
Even if all the technogeeks in the US boycotted the MPAA I don't think there would be much impact. Geeks are a huge minority in the US, and I don't think non geeks really care.
Most of the time people on/. are preaching to the choir about such initiatives.
-shane
Won't someone think about the Whales?
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Apparantly this only works one way. There have been a lot of articles out lately about Navy sonar and other artificially generated waves interfering with Whale communications.
I wonder what they would do if the Whales went and destroyed facilities developing the devices that mess with them. Now if only they could get them to do the main development on ships, then the time of the Whale will come upon us. MWUAHAHAHAHA
I think that simply being out there and trying to get somewhere is vastly important to expanding ourr reaches. While we may be going nowhere quick, we are still going. I think that our first goal should be to put a station on the moon simply for the shere idea of having one there. While it would provide vast scientific research opportunities it would also be that first big step towards branching our from earth. Any effort is needed if we are going to get anywhere. It's like the lottery, if you at least try then you have some small chance of hitting it big, if you don't chance the risk, then you have absolutely no chance.
I realize the monetary problem in this whole issue, but I still think it is vital to the moral and unification of the world. It worked for Star Trek!! Let's just forget about the whole WWIII though.
I agree with you. I myself only listen to mp3's of songs I own the albums too. I don't think the only good use for mp3 players is to pirate music, it is just my feeling that a lot of people do use pirated music on them. I would love to be wrong, it's just the feeling I have.
The local radio station around here often makes mention of going onto kazaa and getting the latest track from so and so. I think a lot of people don't realize that what they are doing is piracy, these people being the non techo-geeks found on/. . This is also a position taken by anti-piracy groups within large companies. They try to put our materials letting people know that copying and giving to others is illegal etc...
hehe, and P2P programs like Kazaa don't promote piracy?
I wasn't trying to imply that iPods were gateway devices to hardcore piracy, I just imagine that the majority of music on portable mp3 playing devices are probably illegal. Even if this is true I don't think they should be forced out of production or anything.
I work at an educational R&D lab of about 1200 technical people. We mainly do DoD contract projects. The most we get for xmas is a lab wide get together in the lab. It usually includes little sweet snack foods and not much else. They had chicken fingers the year before, but no more. My group has a pot luck xmas party. While that's ok, we also don't get anything else through out the year, except maybe a little ice cream.
After interning at Microsoft it was quite a change to go from the day to day bennies they offered to absolutely nothing. Like the story poster I don't really have to worry about my job, since DoD work is fairly slow and steady as far as the work force, but it would be nice is companies like mine realized that a small amount of effort really does go a long way.
IMO the biggest problem would be false positives, when the program takes (stupid?) humans for AI.
But what if there was no difference between a good AI and a stupid human? I guess that would be some level of sucess for AI's. The ultimate goal being to create an AI that humans, and AI's, can't detect. A lot of current AI systems that do the Turing test end up sounding like little children. Is this a bad thing, or just the first step?
Where I work we use Windows and Solaris, cause each provides something useful to us. Will someone please put a story on/. for us now? I think everyone should know this.
If it helps my credibility I interned at Microsoft twice.
Sun bugs do happen, but not that often. "Sun Security Patch Introduces Security Hole" is a pretty rare phenomenon, and even thou I don't use Sun gear, I do want to hear about it. Loud and Fast.
Have you ever actually managed a patching system for solaris? It's god aweful. At my last job I ended up writing a suite of scripts that managed all our patching and even then the patching was troublesome as numerous patches broke other things.
Sun currently has a bug in 108940-45 through -48 that they haven't fixed, and then they haven't made the last good version of the patch available.
As of two years ago sun had over 4GB of patches.
Half the problem is that everything is managed individually, so a lot of people don't actually patch until they have a direct need to do so, ie something doesn't work or they get attacked. It's too difficult to apply the latest patches and then make sure nothing was broken. I've been burned several times by sticking with the latest patches. It can easily take half of a full time employees time to keep a mmodestly sized network patched.
I'm not saying anyone is better off, but sometimes more is less.
I think it depends on the split keyboard. I currently have a MS ergo keyboard, which is split but not adjustable. I type above the keyboard so my wrists don't have to bend up, but if you were typing at a bad level I could see how you would have to bend them.
I currently have on order a split keyboard that allows you to adjust the angle of split as well as the y tilt. Something else I like about it is that it doesn't have a number pad and integrates the insert/home/... and arrows keys into the main key section so the width profile isn't much more than the main section. This is nice for me because most keyboard trays aren't made so that the main key section is centered in front of the user, it's off to the left.
If I'm not mistaken wrist splints/supports that aim to keep the wrist from moving are old news, and alone an ineffective solution. I think one of the best things to do is get a split keyboard of some kind. This alone helped my RSI out within days.
I think the cost of educating their employees for this one thing is more than the loss of the few customers by their employees not knowing. 50% loss of the 0.01% of their customers that would ask for this is nothing to them.
you got me, I didn't read the article first. However; after reading it I still think my original idea is valid.
I didn't expound on it, but the test given in the article is a single point test, not a volley of different determinations as is used in the turing test. In the turing test you have 5 minutes and a simple text display/intermediary, in this you have a single visual problem to solve.
What I was proposing was that you take the original confines of the turing test and replace the human interigator with a computer, where the communication mechanism is still a teletype or intermediary.
There is one thing the test in the article overlooks. As of now I believe that there are a number of AI systems that have been put to the turing test that behave similar to young children, including those that can't read. In the original turing test this isn't an issue. Also the articles method is not actual AI, but a simple "puzzle", I think it would be more interesting to see and actual AI agent that could tell the difference, or an AI agent that developed this "puzzle":P
A I mentioned at the bottom of this journal entry. I think a new version of the Turing test should be whether a computer can tell the difference between a Human and a Computer.
One thing that makes this a little worse than other addictions is that it can be done anywhere, thanks to thing like the gameboy.
I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a friend. It was me, another mutual friend, her, her parents and her brother.
Her Brother was about 26 I'd say, and he spent the entire time sitting amongs the rest of us on the couch playing Metroid Fusion on his BGA. He had headphones one and would make random comments like "Ah there it is!" or "Now where did he go." We would all look at him thinking he was addressing someone.
What's probably worse is that neither his parents nor his sister made him stop. They just let him be a zombie amongst us. I must admit that I was like this about 10 years ago with the first gameboy. In the car especially, but I was 13, he is 26 and no one seems to really care enough to do anything.
With most other addictions you have to be in a certain area to do it, or it costs a lot of money. ie. portable tv's aren't that cheap and don't get good reception, but gameboys, gamegears, etc.. work just as well anywhere and no one really looks at you oddle if you use one.
1. Network dependent. Since the code is on a 'mounted' drive, everything is slower. I have to go to the network for everything.
I don't know of many places that are willing to spend the money on CC that are not network dependant. Where I work, before we moved to CC we used CVS with pserver. Even if I choose not to use pserver my home account is on a central server.
I really don't think many places can escape the network aspect regaurdless of the tool they use
2. Integrates into Windows OS. If clearcase or the network has problems, I have to reboot.
*cough* *cough* Use Solaris;)
3. Takes to long. The whole integration stream, delivery, etc. takes about 10 button pushes and a good minute of time.
I've only been using CC for a couple weeks now, but I've come to find that while I'm not completely sure of what I'm doing, CC usually does what I intend to do. When we were using CVS I was a whiz and knew what the underlying level was doing. CC has a bit more abstraction, at least with UCM, but it does things properly even when I'm not sure what that is.:P
Slashdot Mirror
I am not advocating this at all, and I'm certain many people already do it, just a point of discussion.
The article states that cd sales have descreased slightly over the last two years. While obviously some of this is due to piracy, I believe that the majority of the drop is due to A) The fact that cd's are just too expensive for B) The crap that artists are putting out now.
The second point being why I am in favor of individual track purchase online.
Anyway, one way to bring the average price down would be to simply purchase a CD new, rip the tracks and then sell the disk to a used cd store. The cd store is not in violation so they should be safe. So now what you've done is effectively saved a couple dollars off the CD's retail price, and given someone else the opportunity to buy a physically brand new disk for a discounted price.
While this does involve an illegal act on the original buyers part, do the ends justify the means? If the RIAA is told anonymously en mass that people who engage in this behavior would stop is cd prices were actually worth paying, maybe it could happen...
I agree with you to an extent, though I also think that you should choose your battles wisely. Why boycott the RIAA if it just keeps you from seeing a movie you'd really like to see? If you want the personal satisfaction that's one thing. Alternatively, if you take my original post in mind, maybe a boycott isn't the answer or at least not alone. Some type of PSA or advertisement campaign to reach those that aren't educated on the matter could help more.
Even if all the technogeeks in the US boycotted the MPAA I don't think there would be much impact. Geeks are a huge minority in the US, and I don't think non geeks really care.
/. are preaching to the choir about such initiatives.
Most of the time people on
-shane
Apparantly this only works one way. There have been a lot of articles out lately about Navy sonar and other artificially generated waves interfering with Whale communications.
I wonder what they would do if the Whales went and destroyed facilities developing the devices that mess with them. Now if only they could get them to do the main development on ships, then the time of the Whale will come upon us. MWUAHAHAHAHA
I think that simply being out there and trying to get somewhere is vastly important to expanding ourr reaches. While we may be going nowhere quick, we are still going. I think that our first goal should be to put a station on the moon simply for the shere idea of having one there. While it would provide vast scientific research opportunities it would also be that first big step towards branching our from earth. Any effort is needed if we are going to get anywhere. It's like the lottery, if you at least try then you have some small chance of hitting it big, if you don't chance the risk, then you have absolutely no chance.
I realize the monetary problem in this whole issue, but I still think it is vital to the moral and unification of the world. It worked for Star Trek!! Let's just forget about the whole WWIII though.
A similar story was out on NPR 8 months ago.
I d=1140957
http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wf
I agree with you. I myself only listen to mp3's of songs I own the albums too. I don't think the only good use for mp3 players is to pirate music, it is just my feeling that a lot of people do use pirated music on them. I would love to be wrong, it's just the feeling I have.
/. . This is also a position taken by anti-piracy groups within large companies. They try to put our materials letting people know that copying and giving to others is illegal etc...
The local radio station around here often makes mention of going onto kazaa and getting the latest track from so and so. I think a lot of people don't realize that what they are doing is piracy, these people being the non techo-geeks found on
hehe, and P2P programs like Kazaa don't promote piracy?
I wasn't trying to imply that iPods were gateway devices to hardcore piracy, I just imagine that the majority of music on portable mp3 playing devices are probably illegal. Even if this is true I don't think they should be forced out of production or anything.
Is your america the same as my America? hehe
I often wonder how much music loaded onto iPod like devices are legal and not. I'm guessing there's a lot of illegal stuff, hence my comment.
Yes you are correct. I made a grammatical mistake, I know it never happens, especially on /. ;)
I hope more educated readers can see what I meant. It's not that hard.
Just imagine how much liability a company would open themselves up to by getting everyone an iPod. Can you say piracty central? :P
"Uh yes Apple, we'd like to order 500 iPods and notify the DMCA that they can raid us in about a week. Thanks."
I work at an educational R&D lab of about 1200 technical people. We mainly do DoD contract projects. The most we get for xmas is a lab wide get together in the lab. It usually includes little sweet snack foods and not much else. They had chicken fingers the year before, but no more. My group has a pot luck xmas party. While that's ok, we also don't get anything else through out the year, except maybe a little ice cream.
After interning at Microsoft it was quite a change to go from the day to day bennies they offered to absolutely nothing. Like the story poster I don't really have to worry about my job, since DoD work is fairly slow and steady as far as the work force, but it would be nice is companies like mine realized that a small amount of effort really does go a long way.
IMO the biggest problem would be false positives, when the program takes (stupid?) humans for AI.
But what if there was no difference between a good AI and a stupid human? I guess that would be some level of sucess for AI's. The ultimate goal being to create an AI that humans, and AI's, can't detect. A lot of current AI systems that do the Turing test end up sounding like little children. Is this a bad thing, or just the first step?
Where I work we use Windows and Solaris, cause each provides something useful to us. Will someone please put a story on /. for us now? I think everyone should know this.
If it helps my credibility I interned at Microsoft twice.
Sun bugs do happen, but not that often. "Sun Security Patch Introduces Security Hole" is a pretty rare phenomenon, and even thou I don't use Sun gear, I do want to hear about it. Loud and Fast.
Have you ever actually managed a patching system for solaris? It's god aweful. At my last job I ended up writing a suite of scripts that managed all our patching and even then the patching was troublesome as numerous patches broke other things.
Sun currently has a bug in 108940-45 through -48 that they haven't fixed, and then they haven't made the last good version of the patch available.
As of two years ago sun had over 4GB of patches.
Half the problem is that everything is managed individually, so a lot of people don't actually patch until they have a direct need to do so, ie something doesn't work or they get attacked. It's too difficult to apply the latest patches and then make sure nothing was broken. I've been burned several times by sticking with the latest patches. It can easily take half of a full time employees time to keep a mmodestly sized network patched.
I'm not saying anyone is better off, but sometimes more is less.
-shane
I think it depends on the split keyboard. I currently have a MS ergo keyboard, which is split but not adjustable. I type above the keyboard so my wrists don't have to bend up, but if you were typing at a bad level I could see how you would have to bend them.
I currently have on order a split keyboard that allows you to adjust the angle of split as well as the y tilt. Something else I like about it is that it doesn't have a number pad and integrates the insert/home/... and arrows keys into the main key section so the width profile isn't much more than the main section. This is nice for me because most keyboard trays aren't made so that the main key section is centered in front of the user, it's off to the left.
If I'm not mistaken wrist splints/supports that aim to keep the wrist from moving are old news, and alone an ineffective solution. I think one of the best things to do is get a split keyboard of some kind. This alone helped my RSI out within days.
Sounds like a good way to reduce land fill space. Just pulverize everything to the molecular level shake and let settle.
Seen it in action?
HAHAHA, the damn thing takes care of human feet just as well as chickens. And I thought it was just s snake-in-a-can joke. Damn toys
I think the cost of educating their employees for this one thing is more than the loss of the few customers by their employees not knowing. 50% loss of the 0.01% of their customers that would ask for this is nothing to them.
you got me, I didn't read the article first. However; after reading it I still think my original idea is valid.
:P
I didn't expound on it, but the test given in the article is a single point test, not a volley of different determinations as is used in the turing test. In the turing test you have 5 minutes and a simple text display/intermediary, in this you have a single visual problem to solve.
What I was proposing was that you take the original confines of the turing test and replace the human interigator with a computer, where the communication mechanism is still a teletype or intermediary.
There is one thing the test in the article overlooks. As of now I believe that there are a number of AI systems that have been put to the turing test that behave similar to young children, including those that can't read. In the original turing test this isn't an issue. Also the articles method is not actual AI, but a simple "puzzle", I think it would be more interesting to see and actual AI agent that could tell the difference, or an AI agent that developed this "puzzle"
A I mentioned at the bottom of this journal entry. I think a new version of the Turing test should be whether a computer can tell the difference between a Human and a Computer.
... about liquidating Liquid Audio.
That is all.
One thing that makes this a little worse than other addictions is that it can be done anywhere, thanks to thing like the gameboy.
I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a friend. It was me, another mutual friend, her, her parents and her brother.
Her Brother was about 26 I'd say, and he spent the entire time sitting amongs the rest of us on the couch playing Metroid Fusion on his BGA. He had headphones one and would make random comments like "Ah there it is!" or "Now where did he go." We would all look at him thinking he was addressing someone.
What's probably worse is that neither his parents nor his sister made him stop. They just let him be a zombie amongst us. I must admit that I was like this about 10 years ago with the first gameboy. In the car especially, but I was 13, he is 26 and no one seems to really care enough to do anything.
With most other addictions you have to be in a certain area to do it, or it costs a lot of money. ie. portable tv's aren't that cheap and don't get good reception, but gameboys, gamegears, etc.. work just as well anywhere and no one really looks at you oddle if you use one.
1. Network dependent. Since the code is on a 'mounted' drive, everything is slower. I have to go to the network for everything.
;)
:P
I don't know of many places that are willing to spend the money on CC that are not network dependant. Where I work, before we moved to CC we used CVS with pserver. Even if I choose not to use pserver my home account is on a central server.
I really don't think many places can escape the network aspect regaurdless of the tool they use
2. Integrates into Windows OS. If clearcase or the network has problems, I have to reboot.
*cough* *cough* Use Solaris
3. Takes to long. The whole integration stream, delivery, etc. takes about 10 button pushes and a good minute of time.
I've only been using CC for a couple weeks now, but I've come to find that while I'm not completely sure of what I'm doing, CC usually does what I intend to do. When we were using CVS I was a whiz and knew what the underlying level was doing. CC has a bit more abstraction, at least with UCM, but it does things properly even when I'm not sure what that is.