Children don't seem to have any problems with VCR's, Computers, remote controls, cable boxes, DVD players, and I would dare say with a TiVo. My nine year old daughter can work the above.
So what gives?
Children are busy learning how the whole world works. They haven't yet gotten too lazy to play with the devices and learn how they work. They have to be explicitly taught to turn off their brains, and that often takes at least fifteen years to learn.
It also never ceases to entertain me when customers will readily spend an extra $200 to get a machine with four features they don't need just so they can have more RAM. "But," I'll say, "You can walk right over there and get an additional X MB and pop it in. Do you really want to spend another $200?".
Sounds like you work at a decent place. Most places these days, you'd probably be fired on the spot for trying to save a customer money like that.
the size of IDE w/ current prices means you can get a huge hard drive for relatively cheap, which is almost impossible with SCSI.
Actually, you can get an adapter that turns a cheap IDE drive into a scsi drive. Chaeck out Acard's SCSI-IDE Bridge at http://www.acard.com/. I ordered one recently, and once I can squeeze a new hard drive into my budget, I'll be trying it out. Their FAQ says it handles IDE drives up to 128 GB.
Actually, it was "corporatism" that brought on this failure, not "capitalism". We've been moving away from capitalism here in America since the 1978 Supreme Court decision that defined corporate political donations as "free speech". Our biggest corporations essentially bought the 1980 elections after that decision.
That's when these corporations began a major paradigm shift away from "maximizing profits" and towards "controlling markets". Capitalism requires free markets, and doesn't function in controlled markets.
Re:This is what they should do, but still won't wo
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
·
· Score: 1
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em. Music and movies aren't cheap to produce. Somebody has to put up the cash to get 'em made.
Funny, you're almost hitting on the real motivation behind the RIAA/MPAA attacks on our industry. Sure, producing music and movies has historically been expensive. What's got the **AA cartels running scared is that we're making these a lot cheaper to produce.
Michael Straczynski, the guy who created Babylon 5, talked about this in an excellent book about screenplay-writing. Traditionally, TV shows would cost a couple million per episode to produce, and the networks would pay $800K per episode. Producers would have to convince a major studio to front the money and gamble that they'd make it back in syndication if the show was successful. He called this "deficit financing".
He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid, and how this made it possible to produce it independently instead of having to sell off his rights to a studio.
Journalism is often referred to as the "fourth estate" of government (the first three being the execitive, legislative and judicial branches, which are set up to check each others power). It is the independent watchdog that ensures the citizens know what their elected officials are doing.
If journalism is the "Fourth Estate", then I'd argue that corporate power is a "Fifth Estate" that is currently interfering with the proper functioning of the other four branches of government. Today's journalism has been thoroughly compromised by the media cartels.
Well, if the person created was the exact same down to the quantum level, it would be you, exactly. Your last memory would be a strange tingling as your body was torn apart at the quantum level to be stored, then once you were recreated your memories would begin again.
From someone else's point of view, the other guy may as well be me, However, from my point of view,
I've been murdered, my body vaporized, and some other guy is now walking around with my memories.
You ever tried to explain the difference between ftp.server.com and www.server.com to anyone who has not been on the internet for many years? No, ftp.myserver.com doesn't mean that is the ftp site for myserver.com (although it may.) ftp is the name of the server. Server they say? Isn't there only one? How can myserver.com have more than one server? Try explaining it sometime, is was harder than I thought last time I tried.
Try answering it with an analogy. "How can Main Street have more than one house on it?"
I must disagree with this. Corporations are not make up of "people"; they're made up of "jobs". People come into the loop as expendable resources: the jobs that make up the structure of a corporation are fueled by human labor. Human beings haven't been in control of corporations for over a hundred years now.
Corporations divide people into two classes: domesticated human resources (Employees), and feral humans (Consumers).
I finished reading the comments here, and I didn't see any mention of what I think the main point is.
As I understood it, UnitedLinux is being billed as a "standard" platform for commercial software vendors to port their software to, so they don't have to worry about file location and library verion number compatibility.
It would appear to me that Caldera and the others want to ensure that commercial applications will explicitly depend on the "naughty bits" that
can't be redistributed, with the goal that these applications won't work properly (or at all, perhaps) on any distribution that doesn't adopt the UL brand with its per-seat licenses and all.
It's not about more choices, it's actually about less choices. UnitedLinix looks to me like a blatant attempt to establish vendor lock-in for the whole commercial application market.
though I recognize uunet, I've never even heard of sri-nic. I'm sure someone knows about this; please inform!
In the days before DNS, hostnames on the Arpanet were in a flat namespace.
SRI-NIC maintained the master HOSTS.TXT file
and was responsible for doling out IP addresses
and hostnames. Every machine on the net had to download a fresh copy of HOSTS.TXT
periodically in order to stay up-to-date.
This didn't scale well as the network grew,
which is why DNS was developed to replace it.
SRI-NIC became InterNIC.net during the switchover,
and many years later Congress handed it over
to Network Solutions.
The movie industry needs to just let it go, man. If they would just stop this anal-retentive obsession over total control and focus on selling movies, they'd be making more money than ever.
The termite colony that's chewing up my neighbor's house needs to just let it go, man. If they would just stop this anal-retentive obsession over total destruction of the house and focus on eating trees...
Just out of curiousity, is there any way to make the centre-button-click open the linked document in a new tab, instead of a new window?
The easiest way to do that would be to
open the Preferences window to the
"Navigator::Tabbed Browsing" panel, and select
the "Middle-click or control-click of links
in a web page" checkbox.
The folks that came up with that gem have
other sayings, too. For instance,
"A place in heaven is guaranteed to folks
who fly airplanes into office buildings".
If my neighbor is an 800-lb gorilla who threatens
my children, that doesn't mean that the 7-ton
T-Rex down the street is my friend, even if it
does snack on the gorilla next door.
Thirdly, Support is great for both W2K and Linux, no hassles anywhere. Except for programming those extra buttons for the logitech keyboard in Linux. Oh well, maybe someday I'll figure out the keycodes and write a little hack to make the buttons work.
Actually, they're already defined in/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB:
XF86AudioLowerVolume:1008FF11
XF86AudioMute:1008FF12
XF86AudioRaiseVolume:1008FF13
XF86AudioPlay:1008FF14
XF86AudioStop:1008FF15
XF86AudioPrev:1008FF16
XF86AudioNext:1008FF17
XF86HomePage:1008FF18
XF86Mail:1008FF19
XF86Start:1008FF1A
XF86Search:1008FF1B
XF86AudioRecord:1008FF1C
XF86Calculator:1008FF1D
XF86Memo:1008FF1E
XF86ToDoList:1008FF1F
XF86Calendar:1008FF20
XF86PowerDown:1008FF21
...
Under the Sawfish window manager, the
Shortcuts control panel lets you define functions
for the keys. Most of the options are for
Window-Manager functions, but the
"Run shell command" binding is available for
anything you can run at the command-line.
So why do so many people still use Mozilla?...
I don't know, who would recomend a TimeWarner browser?
The Mozilla development isn't all AOL/TW; the
effort predates Netscape Corp's assimilation,
and thanks to the GPL the Mozilla development
was protected from assimilation. I consider the
Netscape-branded forks to be the actual
AOL/TW browser, and I've noticed that AOL/TW
has consistently removed the most important
user options and added a bunch of useless bloat
with each branded release, making it less
user-friendly and more advertiser-friendly
than the main Mozilla trunk.
As far as I'm concerned, Netscape 6.x is the
AOL/TW browser; Mozilla isn't.
Should the Unix/Linux world move away from POSIX? Redesign a system-call layer from the ground up, supporting [several important features], and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the [other OS] route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning POSIX completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a POSIX emulation layer in a single process.
Am I the only one whose ID3 tag info is sorely lacking across his entire collection?
I recently went through my collection, and I found some inconsistencies in the ID3v2 tags created by
different applications; mp3 files generated by iTunes on the Mac used completely different tags
than lame on Linux.
What I ended up doing is collecting the cddb info for each album and storing it with the mp3s, then
writing a simple script to read the cddb file s and retag the mp3s. Each album's mp3 files is stoared in a separate directory, along with the cddb file (CDDB.txt), the cover image (COVER.jpg), and a uwp-format lyrics file (LYRICS.txt).
Beyond that I set up a cron job that loads all the album and track info into mysql at 3am, and a cgi script for searching and displaying the info and creating playlists for xmms.
Re:Evolution and the corporate lifeform
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 1
I have begun to consider corporations a separate evolving lifeform.
It's important to understand the nature of that lifeform. For instance, describing it as "evil", as is commonly done, is not accurate; it implies that the corporation is actually capable of understanding good and evil in order to choose between them.
I see them more as dumb animals. Dangerous predators, to be sure, but I'd estimate corporate intelligence to be similar to a colony of termites. Termites don't scheme to destroy your house; they just do lunch, over and over, until the house collapses in on itself.
Dealing with the corporate problem isn't going to be easy. They went feral during the chaos of the Civil War, and achieved personhood in the 1886 Supreme Court decision of Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad. Fixing this will be a long and difficult struggle; two specific goals we can begin with are to start using the corporate death penalty again, and to get the corporate personhood decision repealed. Neither will be easily achieved, and they'd only be the first couple of steps in a long struggle.
A Roger Zelazny story (One of his more esoteric titles) about a guy who was one of the development team for the national identity database. He left a hole in the system so that he could assume any identity at will and made his living as a sort of glorified private eye. Maybe someone else can remember the title; it's eluding me at the moment.
He wrote a series of novellas about that character. Combined into the book ``My Name Is Legion''.
"Tape copies are analog, so they degrade with each copy."... "Sharing tape copies requires transfer of physical media"... "That's why tape copying is no longer seen as a threat, relative to the dangers of digital media copying."
That's certainly the current spin, but I'd disagree that that's really why tapes are considered "okay". The real reason is that they already fought, and lost, the war against tape copies. The current spin is merely trying to paint digital copies as something different, so that the older legal decisions won't apply.
They're not really conceding that taped copies are not a threat, either; at best they're just grudgingly accepting that they've already lost that battle.
You know, I'm getting sick of this "lowest common denominator" BS being thrown around. Perhaps no one's ever takken a class on Economics before, but it's really shouldn't be the lowest common denominator, it's the largest common denominator. Ie., companies produce for the largest market segment first, then (if the market is large enough to warrant it) the second largest, etc., etc.
That's not what the term means.
A denominator is the bottom part of a fraction; the smaller you make the denominator, the fewer separate pieces you've segmented the market into, and the larger each market segment is.
The mathematical terminology is "lowest common denominator" and "greatest common factor".
What you described about a largest market segment has nothing to do with denominators; and if there's a largest market segment, then they clearly don't all have a common (i.e., identical) size.
Slashdot Mirror
Children are busy learning how the whole world works. They haven't yet gotten too lazy to play with the devices and learn how they work. They have to be explicitly taught to turn off their brains, and that often takes at least fifteen years to learn.
Sounds like you work at a decent place. Most places these days, you'd probably be fired on the spot for trying to save a customer money like that.
Actually, you can get an adapter that turns a cheap IDE drive into a scsi drive.
Chaeck out Acard's SCSI-IDE Bridge at http://www.acard.com/. I ordered one recently, and once I can squeeze a new hard drive into my budget, I'll be trying it out. Their FAQ says it handles IDE drives up to 128 GB.
Actually, it was "corporatism" that brought on this failure, not "capitalism". We've been moving away from capitalism here in America since the 1978 Supreme Court decision that defined corporate political donations as "free speech". Our biggest corporations essentially bought the 1980 elections after that decision.
That's when these corporations began a major paradigm shift away from "maximizing profits" and towards "controlling markets". Capitalism requires free markets, and doesn't function in controlled markets.
Funny, you're almost hitting on the real motivation behind the RIAA/MPAA attacks on our industry. Sure, producing music and movies has historically been expensive. What's got the **AA cartels running scared is that we're making these a lot cheaper to produce.
Michael Straczynski, the guy who created Babylon 5, talked about this in an excellent book about screenplay-writing. Traditionally, TV shows would cost a couple million per episode to produce, and the networks would pay $800K per episode. Producers would have to convince a major studio to front the money and gamble that they'd make it back in syndication if the show was successful. He called this "deficit financing".
He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid, and how this made it possible to produce it independently instead of having to sell off his rights to a studio.
If journalism is the "Fourth Estate", then I'd argue that corporate power is a "Fifth Estate" that is currently interfering with the proper functioning of the other four branches of government. Today's journalism has been thoroughly compromised by the media cartels.
From someone else's point of view, the other guy may as well be me, However, from my point of view, I've been murdered, my body vaporized, and some other guy is now walking around with my memories.
Try answering it with an analogy. "How can Main Street have more than one house on it?"
If these kids will always have the television/cinema/radio, then why do they need to learn to read?
I must disagree with this. Corporations are not make up of "people"; they're made up of "jobs". People come into the loop as expendable resources: the jobs that make up the structure of a corporation are fueled by human labor. Human beings haven't been in control of corporations for over a hundred years now.
Corporations divide people into two classes: domesticated human resources (Employees), and feral humans (Consumers).
I finished reading the comments here, and I didn't see any mention of what I think the main point is.
As I understood it, UnitedLinux is being billed as a "standard" platform for commercial software vendors to port their software to, so they don't have to worry about file location and library verion number compatibility.
It would appear to me that Caldera and the others want to ensure that commercial applications will explicitly depend on the "naughty bits" that can't be redistributed, with the goal that these applications won't work properly (or at all, perhaps) on any distribution that doesn't adopt the UL brand with its per-seat licenses and all.
It's not about more choices, it's actually about less choices. UnitedLinix looks to me like a blatant attempt to establish vendor lock-in for the whole commercial application market.
In the days before DNS, hostnames on the Arpanet were in a flat namespace. SRI-NIC maintained the master HOSTS.TXT file and was responsible for doling out IP addresses and hostnames. Every machine on the net had to download a fresh copy of HOSTS.TXT periodically in order to stay up-to-date. This didn't scale well as the network grew, which is why DNS was developed to replace it.
SRI-NIC became InterNIC.net during the switchover, and many years later Congress handed it over to Network Solutions.
The termite colony that's chewing up my neighbor's house needs to just let it go, man. If they would just stop this anal-retentive obsession over total destruction of the house and focus on eating trees...
The easiest way to do that would be to open the Preferences window to the "Navigator::Tabbed Browsing" panel, and select the "Middle-click or control-click of links in a web page" checkbox.
The folks that came up with that gem have other sayings, too. For instance, "A place in heaven is guaranteed to folks who fly airplanes into office buildings".
If my neighbor is an 800-lb gorilla who threatens my children, that doesn't mean that the 7-ton T-Rex down the street is my friend, even if it does snack on the gorilla next door.
Actually, they're already defined in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB:
Under the Sawfish window manager, the Shortcuts control panel lets you define functions for the keys. Most of the options are for Window-Manager functions, but the "Run shell command" binding is available for anything you can run at the command-line.
The Mozilla development isn't all AOL/TW; the effort predates Netscape Corp's assimilation, and thanks to the GPL the Mozilla development was protected from assimilation. I consider the Netscape-branded forks to be the actual AOL/TW browser, and I've noticed that AOL/TW has consistently removed the most important user options and added a bunch of useless bloat with each branded release, making it less user-friendly and more advertiser-friendly than the main Mozilla trunk.
As far as I'm concerned, Netscape 6.x is the AOL/TW browser; Mozilla isn't.
Oops, forgot the smiley-face: :-P
Should the Unix/Linux world move away from POSIX? Redesign a system-call layer from the ground up, supporting [several important features], and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the [other OS] route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning POSIX completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a POSIX emulation layer in a single process.
I recently went through my collection, and I found some inconsistencies in the ID3v2 tags created by different applications; mp3 files generated by iTunes on the Mac used completely different tags than lame on Linux.
What I ended up doing is collecting the cddb info for each album and storing it with the mp3s, then writing a simple script to read the cddb file s and retag the mp3s. Each album's mp3 files is stoared in a separate directory, along with the cddb file (CDDB.txt), the cover image (COVER.jpg), and a uwp-format lyrics file (LYRICS.txt).
Beyond that I set up a cron job that loads all the album and track info into mysql at 3am, and a cgi script for searching and displaying the info and creating playlists for xmms.
It's important to understand the nature of that lifeform. For instance, describing it as "evil", as is commonly done, is not accurate; it implies that the corporation is actually capable of understanding good and evil in order to choose between them.
I see them more as dumb animals. Dangerous predators, to be sure, but I'd estimate corporate intelligence to be similar to a colony of termites. Termites don't scheme to destroy your house; they just do lunch, over and over, until the house collapses in on itself.
Dealing with the corporate problem isn't going to be easy. They went feral during the chaos of the Civil War, and achieved personhood in the 1886 Supreme Court decision of Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad. Fixing this will be a long and difficult struggle; two specific goals we can begin with are to start using the corporate death penalty again, and to get the corporate personhood decision repealed. Neither will be easily achieved, and they'd only be the first couple of steps in a long struggle.
That's certainly the current spin, but I'd disagree that that's really why tapes are considered "okay". The real reason is that they already fought, and lost, the war against tape copies. The current spin is merely trying to paint digital copies as something different, so that the older legal decisions won't apply.
They're not really conceding that taped copies are not a threat, either; at best they're just grudgingly accepting that they've already lost that battle.
That's not what the term means. A denominator is the bottom part of a fraction; the smaller you make the denominator, the fewer separate pieces you've segmented the market into, and the larger each market segment is. The mathematical terminology is "lowest common denominator" and "greatest common factor".
What you described about a largest market segment has nothing to do with denominators; and if there's a largest market segment, then they clearly don't all have a common (i.e., identical) size.