until then, hold off on playing "unusually" enticing QT files.Umm... QuickTime 6.1 was released on January 9th; I would think most people would already have this patched.
Just go on the Apple support forums and look at how many people are compaining about the bugs in leaked builds. If people actually had the level of common sense you're giving thhem credit for, this wouldn't be a problem, but sadly they don't.
Do you think even one percent of consumers have any idea who is on the board of the companies whose products they buy?
How many people here already knew that Mr. Gore works for Google? How many of them know all the other Apple board members?
I think you will eventually have to ask whether motion capture should be in a category with animation either; comparing the two techniques is rather like comparing photography to painting.
And I certainly don't think we should be looking to the Oscars for leadership; the award has lost what little credibility it ever had as an artistic recognition, and is now just a pat on the back for the latest American box office blockbuster (Gladiator and Shrek, anyone?). If your really wanted to know what the best animated films were, you would go look at the Annie winners; I'm sure as digital performances get more common, we'll see some proper awards be given out for them too.
The Yahoo! article specifically mentions that the new service will use AAC, which will be great. If you have QuickTime Pro, you absolutely have to create a 128K AAC file; it is reference quality, and even a 64-bit file sounds much better than a 160K MP3 or a 128K OGG. As for DRM, remember that Apple doesn't oppose DRM, they only require that DRM not interfere or inconvenience the user's fair use rights. Thus, Audible's DRM was approved because it lets you transfer your Audible files to any number of Macs that you own, transfer them to your iPod, and transfer them onto CD. I would expect this service to use a very similar technology
In fairness, the linked article never mentions any pricing scheme or any details whatsoever about the service, and C|Net's article specifically says that, "No details on pricing or possible content-protection technology were immediately available," so you're basing all this on speculation.
Personally, I think songs ought to have variable pricing, indeed it's a necessity. Is a 3:00 pop song going to cost as much as a 45:00 symphony? Is a new experimental track going to cost as much as a classic recording? They obviously should not, an doing so would be the death of experimental and diverse music. As for (b), I think the service ought to simply allow you to listen to a radio-quality version of the song before you buy. A return policy such as that would result in massive exploitation in a situation as impersonal as internet buying, and with a preview and a low price, most people would be happy with the vast majority of their music. I also think it's silly to say that marketing will be unnecessary; marketing will no longer dominate popular opiniion, but certainly people will always buy more publicized songs. If you're theory were true, marketing would have gone away with the creation of Amazon.com Music, where anyone can buy any CD, whether it gets shelf space at retail stores or not. Nevertheless, word of mouth advertizing will become dominant and independent bands will find it easy to get exposure when they don't have to ask anyone to finance the upfront costs of creating physical media and packaging.
I question not only why you would recycle a newer Mac, buy why you would recycle any Apple machine at all. An Apple II, circa 1976, goes for $50-$100 on eBay! If you're actually paying someone to take your machine, there's somthing seriously wrong.
For that matter, the $40 million for the jet iself was just a gesture. This is the way Steve made his new fortune: Jobs owns 30,000,001 shares of Pixar, currently valued at $1,563,000,000. The shares increased in value by about $690,000,000 in 2002, so the $1,200,000 he made for the jet last year is pretty meaningless.
And of course, I would expect the media to last many times longer in a business environment then one where people are storing the discs in their backpack (we literally had to remove peanut butter from one drive). But my experience with all modern floppies is that you're lucky to get 100 rewrites out of them. If you're using discs in two classes a day, and saving to them four times a class, that means your disc is shot after about two weeks.
As for booting, that's something Dell has to worry about: obviously Macs were CD-boot only for years before they dropped the floppy, but I'm sure Dell's system is more than mature enough for everyone to move on. In any event, in a school/business setting, the users aren't allowed to boot of removable media anyway. If you're support guy doesn't know how to boot off a CD, you have bigger problems.
One of the main reasons for doing this is support: floppy drives result in people having broken machines and lost data. Back in 1996-7 when I helped support a high school's computers, 75% of the hardware problems on the Dells and 100% of the hardware problems on the Macs were with floppy drives, and most of the other problems we had to deal with were people who had lost their paper by trying to rewrite a floppy disc too many times (people still think a floppy disc can last for a whole semester!). The next year when Apple dropped the floppy disc, we never had a hardware problem with the new Macs; it's easy to see why Dell wants to do the same: you can instantly cut support costs drastically and increase customer satisfaction.
Here you have to make a distinction between the company that sells the auto-mute/ff DVD player and the company that is outright selling edited movies. If all you do is provide scripts for when to fast forward/mute, that's definitely legal if you're giving the script away, but I think it's borderline when you're charging. The other company that sells edited versions of movies is clearly in the wrong, IMO (You did read the article and check out both of the companies, right?).
You mean how they let you use the scene select menu that was designed by the artists, to go to the chapter breaks that were put there by them? Yeah, that's really comparable. Your other comparison doesn't make any sense because you're comparing mechanical goods to reproductions of artwork; you don't have any "fair use" issues to make a gun: either you pay the company to make it or you make it yourself. You can't make a $5 copy of a $400 gun that still has the same utility.
While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media.
I would make a distinction between the individual's right to modify in any way works they have purchased, without redistributing them, and the right of a corporation to make big bucks selling a machine that has its sole utility in hacking apart other people's art. I have no problem with a machine that edits and replaces parts of the film with the consent and instruction of the artists, but selling unauthorized modifications to someone else's work is clearly not fair use: this is no different from a third party selling DVDs of modified scenes from the original work, it just includes a handy machine to also hack those scenes into the original DVD for you.
Of course, these objections are pure hypocrisy coming from the same media giants that speed up movies and squish the credits down to a quater of your screen, if they show them at all, but that's a separate issue.
First, I've never heard of police cars being equipped with live OCR equipment.
Obviously it's a waste of money to put OCR in the car when the officer can read the giant reflective letters just as well with his own two eyes. I think the poster's point was that it would be an astronomical waste of effort to scan the RFID in someone's tire with a bunch of special equipment, when you could just read the licence plate number: it's already linked to your VIN, and your drivers licence, vehicle registration, etc.
Second, the only reason to have such live OCR would be for aid in automating vehicle tracking. While the ACLU (or international counterparts) would be quick to try to plaster attention over this, people already consider it common.
You could make the same argument about the RFID; there's nothing saying what either technology will or won't be used for
Third, searches through public databases take time. It's not like they'll be able to identify you the moment their computer gets a lock on your identifying characteristic. Local caching would be prohibitively expensive for your average police department, no matter what the size of the city.
It takes maybe 5 seconds to run someone's plate if there's a laptop in the cruiser, otherwise maybe 20 seconds to read the plate over the radio and get the details from dispatch (this is why cops in precincts without laptops will follow you for a block before pulling you over). I don't see why an automated device would take longer than an officer. It would take much longer to search a database of RFIDs, since ther would be 5x as many records
Your other points are very valid, I just wanted to clarify those first three: for close-range, it's much easier to get someone's plate, and if they're parked, their VIN.
He didn't say it was an OS, he said it was a platform, which is what the goal of the Mozilla project became at some point. I agree with this, but rather than keeping IE, I would say wait until Phoenix hits 1.0, and then deploy that.
It's a Fox release, so a lot of the big stores like Wal Mart and Target carry it, although they usually only have one or two copies, if any. You can always get it from Amazon right here, or just wait for a better version:) The lack of widescreen certainly isn't the only dealbreaker: There's no original language track (although the Fox dub is quite good), and there are no special features at all. But it's only $11.24, so if you need a version of the film to tide you over, it'll do.
I would also reiterate that the lack of all these things isn't Fox's fault: it's just that they bought the rights to the dubbed, full-frame version of the movie through 2003, and nothing else. So it'll be at least a year before the Disney version, with all those extras, is available.
Hopefully Help Viewer will be one of the first apps to embed WebCore; it's truly amazing how long it can take to render all-text HTML 3.0 pages; with WebCore help viewing should be near instantaneous:)
Chimera (the Mac version of Phoenix) was out one year ago, although it was still at version 0.1, it gave clear proof that you could stip away the bloat in Mozilla.
A number of people have commented on Safari's UA string, which is as follows:
Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48
The portion of the UA string that seems to be stirring up controversy is the portion that says (like Gecko). The reason it is there is that in order to work with real-world DHTML sites you have essentially two options: you can claim to be MSIE or you can claim to be Gecko. We found that any other choice that we tried led to a significant portion of DHTML malfunctioning. You would not believe (well, maybe you would) how much DHTML exists out there that works only with MSIE or Gecko, and that uses proprietary extensions of each to accomplish the DHTML effects.
Had we released a browser with a UA string that did not superficially match either MSIE or Gecko, users would have downloaded Safari and experienced many malfunctioning Web sites. If anyone thinks that would have been a good idea, please step forward in your blog and explain why. I'm willing to listen.
Our solution was a compromise. We produced a user agent string that is different from Gecko's and easily distinguishable if you choose to sniff for it, but that at this time will pass most UA checks that sniff for Gecko. It may be that enough sites will start sniffing directly for our string that we can drop the "(like Gecko)" from our user agent string, but I'm not optimistic.
We chose to be more like Gecko than like MSIE because we wanted to be lumped into the standards compliant category, because fundamentally we are committed to supporting DOM 1&2, CSS1&2, and enough proprietary MSIE extensions and Gecko extensions (innerHTML, createContextualFragment, offsetWidth/Height, etc.) that we could be placed in a similar category.
That's all from my end. I welcome constructive feedback on this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
until then, hold off on playing "unusually" enticing QT files.Umm... QuickTime 6.1 was released on January 9th; I would think most people would already have this patched.
Safari's rendering engine is open source. You will have to supply your own shiny buttons.
Just go on the Apple support forums and look at how many people are compaining about the bugs in leaked builds. If people actually had the level of common sense you're giving thhem credit for, this wouldn't be a problem, but sadly they don't.
Do you think even one percent of consumers have any idea who is on the board of the companies whose products they buy? How many people here already knew that Mr. Gore works for Google? How many of them know all the other Apple board members?
There is this one little company that makes a modestly succesful vector graphics program ;)
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-39)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-14, mixed mode)
LimeWire(Acquisition)/0.8
LWMain A
SettingsManager: loadDefaults()
ConnectionManager initialize()
And so forth.
It should actually help Acquisition's performance too, since Acq uses the LimeWire backend.
I think you will eventually have to ask whether motion capture should be in a category with animation either; comparing the two techniques is rather like comparing photography to painting. And I certainly don't think we should be looking to the Oscars for leadership; the award has lost what little credibility it ever had as an artistic recognition, and is now just a pat on the back for the latest American box office blockbuster (Gladiator and Shrek, anyone?). If your really wanted to know what the best animated films were, you would go look at the Annie winners; I'm sure as digital performances get more common, we'll see some proper awards be given out for them too.
The Yahoo! article specifically mentions that the new service will use AAC, which will be great. If you have QuickTime Pro, you absolutely have to create a 128K AAC file; it is reference quality, and even a 64-bit file sounds much better than a 160K MP3 or a 128K OGG. As for DRM, remember that Apple doesn't oppose DRM, they only require that DRM not interfere or inconvenience the user's fair use rights. Thus, Audible's DRM was approved because it lets you transfer your Audible files to any number of Macs that you own, transfer them to your iPod, and transfer them onto CD. I would expect this service to use a very similar technology
Personally, I think songs ought to have variable pricing, indeed it's a necessity. Is a 3:00 pop song going to cost as much as a 45:00 symphony? Is a new experimental track going to cost as much as a classic recording? They obviously should not, an doing so would be the death of experimental and diverse music. As for (b), I think the service ought to simply allow you to listen to a radio-quality version of the song before you buy. A return policy such as that would result in massive exploitation in a situation as impersonal as internet buying, and with a preview and a low price, most people would be happy with the vast majority of their music. I also think it's silly to say that marketing will be unnecessary; marketing will no longer dominate popular opiniion, but certainly people will always buy more publicized songs. If you're theory were true, marketing would have gone away with the creation of Amazon.com Music, where anyone can buy any CD, whether it gets shelf space at retail stores or not. Nevertheless, word of mouth advertizing will become dominant and independent bands will find it easy to get exposure when they don't have to ask anyone to finance the upfront costs of creating physical media and packaging.
I question not only why you would recycle a newer Mac, buy why you would recycle any Apple machine at all. An Apple II, circa 1976, goes for $50-$100 on eBay! If you're actually paying someone to take your machine, there's somthing seriously wrong.
They're really trying not to, beleive me :)
For that matter, the $40 million for the jet iself was just a gesture. This is the way Steve made his new fortune: Jobs owns 30,000,001 shares of Pixar, currently valued at $1,563,000,000. The shares increased in value by about $690,000,000 in 2002, so the $1,200,000 he made for the jet last year is pretty meaningless.
As for booting, that's something Dell has to worry about: obviously Macs were CD-boot only for years before they dropped the floppy, but I'm sure Dell's system is more than mature enough for everyone to move on. In any event, in a school/business setting, the users aren't allowed to boot of removable media anyway. If you're support guy doesn't know how to boot off a CD, you have bigger problems.
One of the main reasons for doing this is support: floppy drives result in people having broken machines and lost data. Back in 1996-7 when I helped support a high school's computers, 75% of the hardware problems on the Dells and 100% of the hardware problems on the Macs were with floppy drives, and most of the other problems we had to deal with were people who had lost their paper by trying to rewrite a floppy disc too many times (people still think a floppy disc can last for a whole semester!). The next year when Apple dropped the floppy disc, we never had a hardware problem with the new Macs; it's easy to see why Dell wants to do the same: you can instantly cut support costs drastically and increase customer satisfaction.
Here you have to make a distinction between the company that sells the auto-mute/ff DVD player and the company that is outright selling edited movies. If all you do is provide scripts for when to fast forward/mute, that's definitely legal if you're giving the script away, but I think it's borderline when you're charging. The other company that sells edited versions of movies is clearly in the wrong, IMO (You did read the article and check out both of the companies, right?).
You mean how they let you use the scene select menu that was designed by the artists, to go to the chapter breaks that were put there by them? Yeah, that's really comparable. Your other comparison doesn't make any sense because you're comparing mechanical goods to reproductions of artwork; you don't have any "fair use" issues to make a gun: either you pay the company to make it or you make it yourself. You can't make a $5 copy of a $400 gun that still has the same utility.
I would make a distinction between the individual's right to modify in any way works they have purchased, without redistributing them, and the right of a corporation to make big bucks selling a machine that has its sole utility in hacking apart other people's art. I have no problem with a machine that edits and replaces parts of the film with the consent and instruction of the artists, but selling unauthorized modifications to someone else's work is clearly not fair use: this is no different from a third party selling DVDs of modified scenes from the original work, it just includes a handy machine to also hack those scenes into the original DVD for you.
Of course, these objections are pure hypocrisy coming from the same media giants that speed up movies and squish the credits down to a quater of your screen, if they show them at all, but that's a separate issue.
You could make the same argument about the RFID; there's nothing saying what either technology will or won't be used for
It takes maybe 5 seconds to run someone's plate if there's a laptop in the cruiser, otherwise maybe 20 seconds to read the plate over the radio and get the details from dispatch (this is why cops in precincts without laptops will follow you for a block before pulling you over). I don't see why an automated device would take longer than an officer. It would take much longer to search a database of RFIDs, since ther would be 5x as many records
Your other points are very valid, I just wanted to clarify those first three: for close-range, it's much easier to get someone's plate, and if they're parked, their VIN.
He didn't say it was an OS, he said it was a platform, which is what the goal of the Mozilla project became at some point. I agree with this, but rather than keeping IE, I would say wait until Phoenix hits 1.0, and then deploy that.
I would also reiterate that the lack of all these things isn't Fox's fault: it's just that they bought the rights to the dubbed, full-frame version of the movie through 2003, and nothing else. So it'll be at least a year before the Disney version, with all those extras, is available.
Hopefully Help Viewer will be one of the first apps to embed WebCore; it's truly amazing how long it can take to render all-text HTML 3.0 pages; with WebCore help viewing should be near instantaneous :)
Chimera (the Mac version of Phoenix) was out one year ago, although it was still at version 0.1, it gave clear proof that you could stip away the bloat in Mozilla.