I fully agree that it is impossible for the entire world's population to enjoy the transportation (much less general standard of living) that the Western World takes for granted. I see a very dramatic curve of inequity between most of the world and the west (and parts of the east, but you know what I mean). That inquity is expressed by the consumption of natural resources, general mobility, and wealth.
I'm not saying that changing the mechanism of transportation alone will solve these issue -- I'm saying that it will simply help, and it will help more than tearing up the Interstates and planting trees (even though it would make for some lovely hiking corridors). Taking the bus instead of driving is good, riding your bike is better. It doesn't change the fact that you traveled from Point A to Point B, but it dramatically reduces the toll you take on the world.
Long distance transportation of people is has an almost negligible impact compared to innercity commuting: A loaded 737 gets 75+ miles per gallon per passenger flying across the United States, and requres far fewer resources to build and maintain than the number of consumer vehicles providing an equivalent level of service.
Tearing up the interstates won't help us significantly -- having more efficient local transportation will, and the best part about things like mass transit is that it can be applied effectively, it can be subsidized through public taxes to allow universal access, and it's easier to make significant improvements in a transit fleet than it is to to convince everyone to buy the latest hybrid vehicles.:)
Anyhow, I'm rambling on. Personally, I look forward to the day where businesses are held responsible for the services they provide, and people are mindful of the resources they consume. I just don't believe that this will happen at the expense of transportation.
It's getting late, but appreciate the discussion, so I'll check back tomorrow morning. (it's about 2am over here)
I don't think I've made the mistake of thinking that physical movement is necessary to bring people and ideas into closer contact: I'm quite aware of what we're doing at this very moment.:)
However, I'll argue that you do have to physically move yourself to achieve the experience of "other places." Experience is not simply knowledge: I can research everything there is to "know" about Ireland, however, it is simply impossible to experience the Burren or Irish hospitality without being there in person.
In addition, none of our communication technology (radio, television, the Internet, postal service, etc.) are possible or affordable without a massive, inexpensive, physical transportation infrastructure. Sending electrical pulses from here to there is entirely dependent on our ability to physically move materials and people around the world.
Subsidizing this infrastructure the only way to effectively provide essential services to a majority of people world wide: high yield farming, renewable energy, effective health care, and progressive education are all dependant on the ability to provide goods, services, and information to people who can not bear the cost of developing the infrastructure on their own.
I agree that there's an enormous amount of improvement to be made with regards to environmental preservation, but we need to change the method of conveyance, not conveyance itself. Again, transportation is not a seductive illusion -- it is one of the most critical aspects of human civilization.
Bah. Anyone who's lived in a densely populated, culturally diverse area knows that this is a load of tripe. Diversity and "place" thrives where people come together to share ideas and goods.
People cling to their native cultures and societal structures with rabid tenacity, particularly when "threatened" by outside influences. Take a look at Europe, India, or supposedly homogenous cultures like China, and you'll find that a sense of place is still very, very much intact. In fact, as our population grows and mingles, more "places" are created -- all of our cultures, societies, and sacred "places" are the product of thousands of years of travel and communication.
I agree that it is good to preserve the aspects of your culture that are important to you, but it's also critically important to learn from what others have to offer: it's quite possible that they have better ways of doing things; better in the sense that it "fits" you better, not necessarily that it's faster or easier.
Place, culture, society -- these are all dynamic things. Utopianism and antiwhateverisms are the seductive illusions you speak of, not the essential human tendencies to move about and socialize.
I've been put in place by a few Aikido senseis, so I'm pretty aware that it is very effective martial art form -- my attempted point was that it is philosophically geared towards defense, and it's not a particularly good pursuit if you're interested in bar fights or competing in the olympics.
Aikido is an excellent introduction to martial arts, because it's also a good gateway to other styles which may appeal to different personality types.
If I remember correctly, Aikido is a descendant of Judo, which in turn is a descendant of Jiujitsu. As you go up that ladder, the style becomes more aggressive, and less cerebral.
Aikido makes a good starting point for a lot of geeks, especially if you lack whole body coordination. It's almost entirely focused on balance and the conversion of motion, and is a strictly defensive martial art for those who have a pacifistic nature.
Judo is more sporting than Aikido, and a bit more aggressive. Modern Judo styles are often targetted towards one on one competition, and Judo is a well established and highly regarded international sport. If you enjoy competition, Judo is definitely a great opportunity.
Jiujitsu was developed for combat, and continues to be one of the most effective martial arts when it comes to disabling an opponent as quickly as possible, in either a defensive or offensive role. It is not "sporting" or "fair," but it is extraordinarily good at what it was designed to do. It's a brutal martial art to study, but it's an excellent way to discover your limits, both philosophically and physically (and fairly quickly).
Any martial art is an excellent way to get in touch with your body, and puts you in the position to test your personal philosophies. Every dojo I've been to will let you try a couple of classes for free, so there's no real excuse not to try it.:)
If I'm reading this correctly, the patent isn't about XML itself, but rather using XML as a container for various types of high level scripts.
From the summary of the patent:
The present invention incorporates the scripts of a computer system into a single file using Extensible Markup Language (XML) or another suitable format.
I'm seeing a conflict of interest with client-side web scripting, particularly Javascript and VBScript. Strangely enough, later on they even reference Javascript:
Within the <file> element, the "extension" attribute is used to indicate the language in which the script was written. For example, if the script was written in JavaScript, then the extension attribute in the file element would read "<file extension="js">".
Looks suspiciously like <script language="Javascript"> to me.
On the other hand, there's a lot of talk about "CDATA" in the patent. From what I grok, the patent is specific about using CDATA elements to encapsulate scripting languages. The listed example makes sure to encapsulate all the executable code within <!CDATA> tags.. can anyone clarify whether or not this means that a document must use the CDATA convention in order to be covered by this patent?
Aside from the fact that it's vaporware, products like this are never held from the market for economic reasons: in fact, they're brought to the market as quickly as possible, specifically for economic reasons.
The important thing to remember is that marketing and sales are about meeting customer's expectations at a reasonable price, and has very, very little to do with technology, or the cost of producing a product.
In general terms: If a product offers the same performance as a competing product, but is cheaper to produce, you sell it for slightly less than the competing product, and make a higher profit on the margin. Higher performance, higher price. Lower performance, lower price.
Specifically: The device you speak of would probably be sold for 80 cents per gigabyte, if hard drives were being sold for $1 per gigabyte, even if it only cost 1 cent per gigabyte to produce.
If a competitor came out with the same technology, a price battle would ensue which would put those who don't have the technology out of business. This, of course, is nothing new, and has happened many, many times over the course of history. Integrated circuits. The cotton gin. Asian manufacturing. The airplane. Gun powder. Splitting the atom. You get the idea.
This is why companies like IBM plow billions of dollars into R&D efforts. Particularly in the United States, the idea that things are held from the market because of "economic disruptions" is a crock -- these disruptions are exactly what businesses are looking for!
[note: I'm going to pull a lot of numbers out of my ass for this post, but it should, at the very least, help you grasp the magnitude of the iTMS business.]
Several people have pointed out that Apple's slice of the pie is 34 cents per download... that's after the RIAA, credit card companies, and music labels get their cuts.
Last week people downloaded 1.5 million songs from iTMS. That breaks down to about half a million bucks in revenue, per week, give or take a smidge.
Lets see where that money goes:
- People! The big money burners. If the average salary of a person working in the iTMS department is $60k (a tad high, I think), it would take 400-something employees working exclusively on the iTMS project to eat up all that cash.
- Hardware! Well, they probably have a nice contract with Akamai for content distribution, and/or fat pipes at some fancy data centers (think Exodus/C&W). If they're payin' $2M a year for iTMS hosting services alone, including hardware and what-not, that's about $40,000 per week. It could be double that, it could be half that. Hard to say, but I have a hard time thinking it would eat more than 20% of their weekly revenue ($100k).
- Development! iTunes for Windows and Mac... exciting stuff, but I think most of the expenses here can be rolled into the people section above, and the initial investments below.
- Advertising. Hard to say how much advertising costs, because they're "integrating" iTMS ads with all their other campaigns too: iPods, iMacs, and other iDoodads. Hmm. Lets say they're dropping $5M over the course of a year to promote iTMS, in addition to everything else.. that comes out to about $100k per week.
- The initial investment. This is probably why they're not "profitable" yet. Getting iTMS off the ground with that much content and usability testing probably put a dent in the war chest (which still has a few billions in it).
So, looking at this on a weekly basis: people (~200k), infrastructure (~75k), and marketing (~100k)... we've accounted for about 75% of the revenue generated by those itty 34 cents per song. The other 25%, or $125,000, gets shuffled back into a bank account to repay the initial investment. At the current rate of 1.5 million songs per week, that's about 6.5 million bucks in a year.
This is, of course, before the big promotions kick off, and before the Windows market embraces (maybe) iTMS.
I think the future is bright for Apple, and the notion that they're not going to make any money on iTMS is ridiculous, as is the idea that iTMS is merely a prop for the iPod.
---
So, considering my disclaimer at the top, I'm VERY keen to hear what other people think of these estimates. Did I miss anything big? Should I have gone to bed an hour ago?
... and... well, I guess that's it. Can I use it as a portable hard drive? Can I use it to sync calendars and contacts between work and home? Can I extend it with accessories for voice recording, download from compact flash cards, play games, or hack away with my own scripts?
I dunno. If I'm going to spend $300 on a gadget, it better do a hell of a lot more than simply play music. I think a full featured iPod with 10 GB of space is hell of a better deal than a 20 GB hard drive with a head phone jack.
Actually, no. Not at all. Apple has done some renders (notably the fuzzy X on the OSX boxes.. a tip of the hat to Monsters, Inc.), but most of those images are probably real photographs. If they're not, they may as well be.
I've worked extensively with product photographers, and the lighting and shooting techniques used are quite standard fare: large diffused lights, a couple of critically placed spots, a seamless backdrop, and a glass table. The reason you don't typically see images like these is two fold:
1) Most products just aren't very photogenic.
2) Most art directors are addicted to cheap gimicks and flashy effects.. partially because of #1.
IIRC - it served several purposes but primarily kept poor operators off the airwaves. It also showed that you had "technical prowess"...
Interesting. I would have thought that morse code would have been the cheapest, easiest way to get started. Forgive me for guessing, but don't you just need an oscillator, an amplifier, an antenna, and an easily toggled switch?
Heh. I think the "geek factor" is undeniable, though.
I use a program like Trillian to chat with my buddies across several networks. Most of my buddies use a similar type of program.
If it suddenly costs money to use the MSN network, then we have four other networks we could use instead. AIM. ICQ. YIM. Jabber.
I guess it's a good business move on Microsoft's part. It does cost money, and if the market is there, why not? I would *prefer* that they use a value added model... ie, just chatting is nice and free, but voice / video chat and 3+ user chat rooms would require $ (just as an example).
Lots o' ranting going on about how the music industry sucks. Understandable. But before ya'll get bent out of shape about how music sucks today, and how things are over produced, and how you have to look good to get any attention, and blah blah blah... take a look at http://www.cdbaby.com/
Looks intimidating. No familiar faces. Hmm. Could be sketchy.
But wait! By God, there's almost FIFTY THOUSAND hours of music you've never heard, from musicians you've probably never heard of. Independent musicians. Good musicians, too.
If you're tired of big label big production big boobies little talent Top 40 schmucks... there are options out there. Instead of complaining, spend a couple of bucks to try something new and support a local artist who isn't 0wn3d by the RIAA.
I wonder if SCO licensed that image. Looks almost exactly like a Sean Connery James Bond, down to the silenced pistol, cuffs, tie, pose, haircut, and bounding circle.
Did they pay United Artists / Danjaq for usage rights?
I'm keen to see SCO slapped with a copyright lawsuit.:)
Yes, dynamic modelling is better than static tables. Not only is the performance more in line with reality, but it allows people to design airfoils and aircraft with the included software, and test their performance before any parts are fabricated. No guess work. Real engineering.
It's a hackers dream, because ALL of the flight controls and flight data can be imported/exported over a network. It also has a very sensible plugin system, and the author encourages people to come up with new and cool tools without any licensing restrictions. It might not be open source, but the architecture is very open.
X-Plane is the flight simulator of choice for many companies, including Scaled Composites, the builders of Spaceship One. It's also FAA approved for training towards commercial, transport, and instrument certificates.
Not only is the flight model incredibly accurate, but you also have to deal with differences in traction between tires on a wet runway, damaged windscreens from hail, and more equipment failures than you can shake a stick at.
It's amazingly beautiful with a reasonable graphics card and the latest scenery plugins, and it can use real-time weather information from NOAA.
It's not a toy or a game, even though it may be fun. It's as close to flying as you can get on your PC. I could go on and on, but it's probably better that you head to the web site.:)
There are a few of ways to solve the problem, but only one of them ensures compatibility across many different platforms:
The first is the worst: having a separate metadata file accompany each of your files as they move between file systems. This is a logistical nightmare, and requires soooo many tools to be rebuilt that it's not even worth considering.
The second is the "bundle" concept, as popularly demonstrated in OS X. "iTunes.app" is actually a directory, not a big binary file. The directory is split-up into different sub directories, containing multiple binary formats, languages, etc. To transfer iTunes to another computer, just tar/zip the "iTunes.app" directory, and viola. Easy. Of course, the app will only run on platforms that recognize the bundle format, and can execute the binary. This rules out backwards compatability, and requires that all major system vendors agree on the same bundle format -- and that's not gonna happen.
The third way to do it is to keep metadata within a file (like MP3 tags), and then export them into the filesystem space. For example, an MP3 plugin would pull the data out of "my.mp3" and turn it into "my.mp3/title" "my.mp3/genre" etc. The nice thing about this is that it's platform independent, and backwards compatable.
I'd be keen to see option #3 implimented in a modern file system -- do any current FS's have an API that could support it?
Business jargoneers have a nasty tendency to rename common ideas, wrap them in market speak to create buzzwords, and resell them to the helpless souls who seem to collect in middle managment.
Bluetooth, MP3, RAM, cache, FIFO.. they mean very specific things, and are well suited for having their own names.
Now, if you want a thrill ride of superfluous jargon, take a gander at the business "self help" section of your local book store.
Or google for something called "Six Sigma."
Business jargoneers have a nasty tendency to rename common ideas, wrap them in market speak to create buzzwords, and resell them to the helpless souls who seem to collect in middle managment.
... as an interesting side note, I believe the english Harry Potter books were the first english books to ever hit #1 on the German best seller lists before the German edition arrived.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet advertising revenues are at least a billion bucks.
This site says the 2002 Winter olympics took in over $700M. 2000 Summer took in over $900M.
Yeow.
Give me a Sunfire. I'll install the software myself.
I fully agree that it is impossible for the entire world's population to enjoy the transportation (much less general standard of living) that the Western World takes for granted. I see a very dramatic curve of inequity between most of the world and the west (and parts of the east, but you know what I mean). That inquity is expressed by the consumption of natural resources, general mobility, and wealth.
:)
I'm not saying that changing the mechanism of transportation alone will solve these issue -- I'm saying that it will simply help, and it will help more than tearing up the Interstates and planting trees (even though it would make for some lovely hiking corridors). Taking the bus instead of driving is good, riding your bike is better. It doesn't change the fact that you traveled from Point A to Point B, but it dramatically reduces the toll you take on the world.
Long distance transportation of people is has an almost negligible impact compared to innercity commuting: A loaded 737 gets 75+ miles per gallon per passenger flying across the United States, and requres far fewer resources to build and maintain than the number of consumer vehicles providing an equivalent level of service.
Tearing up the interstates won't help us significantly -- having more efficient local transportation will, and the best part about things like mass transit is that it can be applied effectively, it can be subsidized through public taxes to allow universal access, and it's easier to make significant improvements in a transit fleet than it is to to convince everyone to buy the latest hybrid vehicles.
Anyhow, I'm rambling on. Personally, I look forward to the day where businesses are held responsible for the services they provide, and people are mindful of the resources they consume. I just don't believe that this will happen at the expense of transportation.
It's getting late, but appreciate the discussion, so I'll check back tomorrow morning. (it's about 2am over here)
Cheers.
I don't think I've made the mistake of thinking that physical movement is necessary to bring people and ideas into closer contact: I'm quite aware of what we're doing at this very moment. :)
However, I'll argue that you do have to physically move yourself to achieve the experience of "other places." Experience is not simply knowledge: I can research everything there is to "know" about Ireland, however, it is simply impossible to experience the Burren or Irish hospitality without being there in person.
In addition, none of our communication technology (radio, television, the Internet, postal service, etc.) are possible or affordable without a massive, inexpensive, physical transportation infrastructure. Sending electrical pulses from here to there is entirely dependent on our ability to physically move materials and people around the world.
Subsidizing this infrastructure the only way to effectively provide essential services to a majority of people world wide: high yield farming, renewable energy, effective health care, and progressive education are all dependant on the ability to provide goods, services, and information to people who can not bear the cost of developing the infrastructure on their own.
I agree that there's an enormous amount of improvement to be made with regards to environmental preservation, but we need to change the method of conveyance, not conveyance itself. Again, transportation is not a seductive illusion -- it is one of the most critical aspects of human civilization.
Bah. Anyone who's lived in a densely populated, culturally diverse area knows that this is a load of tripe. Diversity and "place" thrives where people come together to share ideas and goods.
People cling to their native cultures and societal structures with rabid tenacity, particularly when "threatened" by outside influences. Take a look at Europe, India, or supposedly homogenous cultures like China, and you'll find that a sense of place is still very, very much intact. In fact, as our population grows and mingles, more "places" are created -- all of our cultures, societies, and sacred "places" are the product of thousands of years of travel and communication.
I agree that it is good to preserve the aspects of your culture that are important to you, but it's also critically important to learn from what others have to offer: it's quite possible that they have better ways of doing things; better in the sense that it "fits" you better, not necessarily that it's faster or easier.
Place, culture, society -- these are all dynamic things. Utopianism and antiwhateverisms are the seductive illusions you speak of, not the essential human tendencies to move about and socialize.
Cheers.
Thanks for the clarification. :)
I've been put in place by a few Aikido senseis, so I'm pretty aware that it is very effective martial art form -- my attempted point was that it is philosophically geared towards defense, and it's not a particularly good pursuit if you're interested in bar fights or competing in the olympics.
Cheers
Aikido is an excellent introduction to martial arts, because it's also a good gateway to other styles which may appeal to different personality types.
:)
If I remember correctly, Aikido is a descendant of Judo, which in turn is a descendant of Jiujitsu. As you go up that ladder, the style becomes more aggressive, and less cerebral.
Aikido makes a good starting point for a lot of geeks, especially if you lack whole body coordination. It's almost entirely focused on balance and the conversion of motion, and is a strictly defensive martial art for those who have a pacifistic nature.
Judo is more sporting than Aikido, and a bit more aggressive. Modern Judo styles are often targetted towards one on one competition, and Judo is a well established and highly regarded international sport. If you enjoy competition, Judo is definitely a great opportunity.
Jiujitsu was developed for combat, and continues to be one of the most effective martial arts when it comes to disabling an opponent as quickly as possible, in either a defensive or offensive role. It is not "sporting" or "fair," but it is extraordinarily good at what it was designed to do. It's a brutal martial art to study, but it's an excellent way to discover your limits, both philosophically and physically (and fairly quickly).
Any martial art is an excellent way to get in touch with your body, and puts you in the position to test your personal philosophies. Every dojo I've been to will let you try a couple of classes for free, so there's no real excuse not to try it.
From the summary of the patent:
I'm seeing a conflict of interest with client-side web scripting, particularly Javascript and VBScript. Strangely enough, later on they even reference Javascript:
Looks suspiciously like <script language="Javascript"> to me.
On the other hand, there's a lot of talk about "CDATA" in the patent. From what I grok, the patent is specific about using CDATA elements to encapsulate scripting languages. The listed example makes sure to encapsulate all the executable code within <!CDATA> tags
Aside from the fact that it's vaporware, products like this are never held from the market for economic reasons: in fact, they're brought to the market as quickly as possible, specifically for economic reasons.
The important thing to remember is that marketing and sales are about meeting customer's expectations at a reasonable price, and has very, very little to do with technology, or the cost of producing a product.
In general terms: If a product offers the same performance as a competing product, but is cheaper to produce, you sell it for slightly less than the competing product, and make a higher profit on the margin. Higher performance, higher price. Lower performance, lower price.
Specifically: The device you speak of would probably be sold for 80 cents per gigabyte, if hard drives were being sold for $1 per gigabyte, even if it only cost 1 cent per gigabyte to produce.
If a competitor came out with the same technology, a price battle would ensue which would put those who don't have the technology out of business. This, of course, is nothing new, and has happened many, many times over the course of history. Integrated circuits. The cotton gin. Asian manufacturing. The airplane. Gun powder. Splitting the atom. You get the idea.
This is why companies like IBM plow billions of dollars into R&D efforts. Particularly in the United States, the idea that things are held from the market because of "economic disruptions" is a crock -- these disruptions are exactly what businesses are looking for!
[note: I'm going to pull a lot of numbers out of my ass for this post, but it should, at the very least, help you grasp the magnitude of the iTMS business.]
... that's after the RIAA, credit card companies, and music labels get their cuts.
... exciting stuff, but I think most of the expenses here can be rolled into the people section above, and the initial investments below.
.. that comes out to about $100k per week.
... we've accounted for about 75% of the revenue generated by those itty 34 cents per song. The other 25%, or $125,000, gets shuffled back into a bank account to repay the initial investment. At the current rate of 1.5 million songs per week, that's about 6.5 million bucks in a year.
Several people have pointed out that Apple's slice of the pie is 34 cents per download
Last week people downloaded 1.5 million songs from iTMS. That breaks down to about half a million bucks in revenue, per week, give or take a smidge.
Lets see where that money goes:
- People! The big money burners. If the average salary of a person working in the iTMS department is $60k (a tad high, I think), it would take 400-something employees working exclusively on the iTMS project to eat up all that cash.
- Hardware! Well, they probably have a nice contract with Akamai for content distribution, and/or fat pipes at some fancy data centers (think Exodus/C&W). If they're payin' $2M a year for iTMS hosting services alone, including hardware and what-not, that's about $40,000 per week. It could be double that, it could be half that. Hard to say, but I have a hard time thinking it would eat more than 20% of their weekly revenue ($100k).
- Development! iTunes for Windows and Mac
- Advertising. Hard to say how much advertising costs, because they're "integrating" iTMS ads with all their other campaigns too: iPods, iMacs, and other iDoodads. Hmm. Lets say they're dropping $5M over the course of a year to promote iTMS, in addition to everything else
- The initial investment. This is probably why they're not "profitable" yet. Getting iTMS off the ground with that much content and usability testing probably put a dent in the war chest (which still has a few billions in it).
So, looking at this on a weekly basis: people (~200k), infrastructure (~75k), and marketing (~100k)
This is, of course, before the big promotions kick off, and before the Windows market embraces (maybe) iTMS.
I think the future is bright for Apple, and the notion that they're not going to make any money on iTMS is ridiculous, as is the idea that iTMS is merely a prop for the iPod.
---
So, considering my disclaimer at the top, I'm VERY keen to hear what other people think of these estimates. Did I miss anything big? Should I have gone to bed an hour ago?
Cheers!
... and ... well, I guess that's it. Can I use it as a portable hard drive? Can I use it to sync calendars and contacts between work and home? Can I extend it with accessories for voice recording, download from compact flash cards, play games, or hack away with my own scripts?
I dunno. If I'm going to spend $300 on a gadget, it better do a hell of a lot more than simply play music. I think a full featured iPod with 10 GB of space is hell of a better deal than a 20 GB hard drive with a head phone jack.
I .. uhhh .. wow. That defies description. Sorry. I can't stop watching it.
Actually, no. Not at all. Apple has done some renders (notably the fuzzy X on the OSX boxes .. a tip of the hat to Monsters, Inc.), but most of those images are probably real photographs. If they're not, they may as well be.
.. partially because of #1.
I've worked extensively with product photographers, and the lighting and shooting techniques used are quite standard fare: large diffused lights, a couple of critically placed spots, a seamless backdrop, and a glass table. The reason you don't typically see images like these is two fold:
1) Most products just aren't very photogenic.
2) Most art directors are addicted to cheap gimicks and flashy effects
IIRC - it served several purposes but primarily kept poor operators off the airwaves. It also showed that you had "technical prowess" ...
Interesting. I would have thought that morse code would have been the cheapest, easiest way to get started. Forgive me for guessing, but don't you just need an oscillator, an amplifier, an antenna, and an easily toggled switch?
Heh. I think the "geek factor" is undeniable, though.
Three questions for all you hams:
- Why was morse code originally required for amatuer radio operators?
- How often is morse code used today?
- What advantages does morse code have, vs other forms of radio communication?
I use a program like Trillian to chat with my buddies across several networks. Most of my buddies use a similar type of program.
... ie, just chatting is nice and free, but voice / video chat and 3+ user chat rooms would require $ (just as an example).
If it suddenly costs money to use the MSN network, then we have four other networks we could use instead. AIM. ICQ. YIM. Jabber.
I guess it's a good business move on Microsoft's part. It does cost money, and if the market is there, why not? I would *prefer* that they use a value added model
Oh well!
Lots o' ranting going on about how the music industry sucks. Understandable. But before ya'll get bent out of shape about how music sucks today, and how things are over produced, and how you have to look good to get any attention, and blah blah blah ... take a look at http://www.cdbaby.com/
... there are options out there. Instead of complaining, spend a couple of bucks to try something new and support a local artist who isn't 0wn3d by the RIAA.
Looks intimidating. No familiar faces. Hmm. Could be sketchy.
But wait! By God, there's almost FIFTY THOUSAND hours of music you've never heard, from musicians you've probably never heard of. Independent musicians. Good musicians, too.
If you're tired of big label big production big boobies little talent Top 40 schmucks
Cheers!
I wonder if SCO licensed that image. Looks almost exactly like a Sean Connery James Bond, down to the silenced pistol, cuffs, tie, pose, haircut, and bounding circle.
:)
Did they pay United Artists / Danjaq for usage rights?
I'm keen to see SCO slapped with a copyright lawsuit.
Anyone know who to call?
Yes, dynamic modelling is better than static tables. Not only is the performance more in line with reality, but it allows people to design airfoils and aircraft with the included software, and test their performance before any parts are fabricated. No guess work. Real engineering.
:)
It's a hackers dream, because ALL of the flight controls and flight data can be imported/exported over a network. It also has a very sensible plugin system, and the author encourages people to come up with new and cool tools without any licensing restrictions. It might not be open source, but the architecture is very open.
X-Plane is the flight simulator of choice for many companies, including Scaled Composites, the builders of Spaceship One. It's also FAA approved for training towards commercial, transport, and instrument certificates.
Not only is the flight model incredibly accurate, but you also have to deal with differences in traction between tires on a wet runway, damaged windscreens from hail, and more equipment failures than you can shake a stick at.
It's amazingly beautiful with a reasonable graphics card and the latest scenery plugins, and it can use real-time weather information from NOAA.
It's not a toy or a game, even though it may be fun. It's as close to flying as you can get on your PC. I could go on and on, but it's probably better that you head to the web site.
http://www.x-plane.com/
There are a few of ways to solve the problem, but only one of them ensures compatibility across many different platforms:
The first is the worst: having a separate metadata file accompany each of your files as they move between file systems. This is a logistical nightmare, and requires soooo many tools to be rebuilt that it's not even worth considering.
The second is the "bundle" concept, as popularly demonstrated in OS X. "iTunes.app" is actually a directory, not a big binary file. The directory is split-up into different sub directories, containing multiple binary formats, languages, etc. To transfer iTunes to another computer, just tar/zip the "iTunes.app" directory, and viola. Easy. Of course, the app will only run on platforms that recognize the bundle format, and can execute the binary. This rules out backwards compatability, and requires that all major system vendors agree on the same bundle format -- and that's not gonna happen.
The third way to do it is to keep metadata within a file (like MP3 tags), and then export them into the filesystem space. For example, an MP3 plugin would pull the data out of "my.mp3" and turn it into "my.mp3/title" "my.mp3/genre" etc. The nice thing about this is that it's platform independent, and backwards compatable.
I'd be keen to see option #3 implimented in a modern file system -- do any current FS's have an API that could support it?
Hi.
Please refer to the rest of my post.
Business jargoneers have a nasty tendency to rename common ideas, wrap them in market speak to create buzzwords, and resell them to the helpless souls who seem to collect in middle managment.
Cheers.
I'll certainly realign my business paradigm with a successful restructuring based on these essential processes, in order to ... uhh ... make more money?
Heh. Good stuff.
True -- "six sigma" itself does mean something. But put it in a business management context, and all hell breaks loose. :)
Bluetooth, MP3, RAM, cache, FIFO .. they mean very specific things, and are well suited for having their own names.
Now, if you want a thrill ride of superfluous jargon, take a gander at the business "self help" section of your local book store.
Or google for something called "Six Sigma."
Business jargoneers have a nasty tendency to rename common ideas, wrap them in market speak to create buzzwords, and resell them to the helpless souls who seem to collect in middle managment.
... as an interesting side note, I believe the english Harry Potter books were the first english books to ever hit #1 on the German best seller lists before the German edition arrived.