You seem to drift topics. The APSL has nothing to do with FCP, Safari, or anything else in those lanes.
>FCP
Best of its class, hands down. This is called "making a competing product" and is normal business strategy--not forcing someone out of the market.
>Safari
You really need to stop drinking the Kool Aid.
No one really competes with Safari, not because Safari, but because Safari is *good*. Apple distributed a sucky version of IE as its standard web-browser and that has a *lot* to do with the user experience for a typical user. They needed to replace it, and no other web-browser for the mac quite cut it.
Once again. They produced a better product. Safari is now my primary web browser, not because I haven't used Mozilla or Camino, but because it is the best for what I do on the web (speed counts for a lot).
>Soundtrack
Who did Apple "force out" with this one?
They also needed something so that labels could publish music in m4p format, suitable for the iTMS.
You want an example? Take Watson. But none of your examples quite cut it.
> Well that's well and good... Say your hard drive crashes >and you have to rebuild your Mac from scratch. What >kind of special provisions are necessary so that your Mac >"remembers" that you have legally purchased these files?
1) Make as many backup copies as you like. You can keep the protected AAC file on as many computers/CDs/ZIP Disks/Tape Drives as you can find.
2) Reformating your hard-drive shouldn't remove your authorization and, if it does...
3) You can contact Apple. They even have a webpage set up so that you can send them a note explaining the situation.
> Sure. That makes it exactly as good as an mp3. And I >still want to know what's stopping people from ripping >the audio CDs they create this way and sharing the files... >If it's that easy to circumvent the DRM then why bother >pissing off your customer base?
A little fact checking please!
Nothing is to stop you from re-ripping it into an unprotected AAC file or an MP3 file. They admit this freely.
They haven't "pissed off [their] customer base" as near as I can tell.
> Okay that's fine if you don't mind spending $300 on the >modern equivalent of a Walkman. Will it still work with >my $69 Expanium CD-based mp3 player?
They are currently "the standard" for digital media players.
If it is CD-based then, by all means, it should work so long as you burn it to a CD first.
>. However it is not NEARLY as flexible as the alternative - >mp3's and audio CDs.
Well, I might call it *as* restrictive as a CD.
As for mp3s, do you *really* think that they could have set up this store without some form of protection? And what exactly are you doing that requires them to be more flexible?
>But I would most certainly have a problem with any DRM >system which will not allow me to make a mix CD for my >friend (which is currently legal.)...and you can do it with fairplay.
I also doubt your claim that it is legal, though that is secondary.
>Again, if the DRM is so easy to circumvent then what is >the point?
Because, unless I am feeling very motivated to share that piece of music with the world and not just with a few friends in a remixed CD, I am not going to go through the trouble of burning a CD and re-ripping it.
This prevents casual copyright infringement--you share your music folder with the world? Great! You aren't going to share these songs unless you go through the trouble of converting them.
> Madonna was just a convenient example.
Unfortunately, you can't use any specific artist as a judge of the range of content on a system.
Its kind of like saying "is 3 a random number" or "is 5 normally distributed"--these require evaluation of a range of data, not a single datapoint.
>The selection on both iTunes AND BuyMusic is woefully >lacking artists that people really want to listen to.
Then go talk to the labels and bands you want to hear and see if you can get them to try for a contract with Apple and/or Buy.
Their selection will improve. You want it to be full-featured with *your* favorite artists right out of the starting gate. This is an unreasonable expectation for a service--they are going to ramp up and Steve Jobs has *explicitly* stated that he would like to get as much and as broad a range of music as possible. So they don't have what you want now? Fine, they don't have everything I want now. It isn't like it costs me anything to browse until they either have what I am looking for or I find something interesting.
>No BT. No Prodigy. No Doors. No Zeppelin. No Beatles.
Prodigy does have a single on iTMS and that's a good indicator more are comming.
The Doors have 8 albums (5 full, 3 partial) on iTMS.
Zeppelin and the Beatles are under their own labels IIRC, so to speak, and thus would be slightly more
1) Have three licenses that will stay with me through an upgrade and which I can move between computers at will.
2) Burn it to as many CD's as I like.
3) Place it on as many iPods as I like, as many times as I like.
How is this a problem, again?
About the only thing I can't do--assuming I work on 3 or fewer computers--is send it to a friend over the internet. If I have more than that then Apple has provided a conveinant workaround by allowing me to rerip it to AAC from a CD.
>and worst of all the selection sucks! Don't believe me? >Try to download "Ray of Light" by Madonna from iTunes.
You are using madonna to justify a selection? So if I offered just madonna's Ray of Light on my own system, you would say that I had good selection, right?
That makes about as much sense as you judging iTunes selection based on one song by one artist.
Their selection *is* increasing. They are adding more songs daily, indie labels are comming into the fold, and unsigned artists will be able to put their work up via CDBaby. The selection, while not astounding, is decent (I've found a few things I like) and/is/ improving.
> What the hell good is a music service that only carries a > few select choons by artists that I may or may not give a > damn about?
Well, if you "give a damn" about them, then its quite good, thanks:-)
> I want to be able to get ANY music this way.
This is kind of like saying "well, yes, I know you provide the largest selection of movies in the world for me to rent, but you don't provide/all/ of them so you must suck". Does this make sense to you? They are rolling out in stages and they are/improving/ their selection.
>Apple has finally released the 1.3 Updater for older >Windows iPods....and this has been posted where most of the people who have older Windows iPods won't look for it...
"What a great way to fund future terrorism! All you have to do is load your bets on a target, then go blow it up! Talk about your self-fulfilling prophesies!"...and, in doing so, you have:
>Why not just ask those same experts what they think?
Simple. There are way too many of them and the Pentagon doesn't want to pay them all civillian contractor fees.
> The possibility that al-Qaeda, say, could use this to make >money from their own activities seems farfetched.
In doing so they are more likely to let the Pentagon know both who some of their members are and what their actions are going to be.
Do you *really* think that transactions here are going to be either anonymous or unwatched?
>Nevertheless, this strikes me as an inefficient and >downright ridiculous way to of trying to gather expert >opinions. Why not just hire the experts in the first place??
Actually it seems rather clever.
If I hire a group of experts I will hire them for one task, I have to make sure I represent a broad variety of experts (for instance, I need a water-politics expert, an oil-politics expert, a couple of cultural experts, translators, a religious consultant (or several!), a military consultant (or several!), some IPE people, etc) and I have to pay them all.
Then I have to wait for them to create a probability matrix for outcomes.
This is a good thing, it has many advantages. It also has many disadvantages: maybe I need more information to make an informed decision; perhaps the experts I've hired all come through academic or political connections and a few of them have an agenda; perhaps one of them is *really* good at Iranian water politics, but doesn't know a damned thing about Turkish water politics, and suddenly an issue comes up that relates to Turkey...
Lots of possabilities.
This lets them get the broadest scope of professional opinion, gives them clues as to what people's hunches are, and removes political bias and government regulations regarding contracting for finding out what people think.
Rather clever. I have no idea if it will work, but it has potential.
1) Too detailed. An individual suicide bomber is not the kinds of things these guys are looking for, if I am reading this correctly.
2) The US plans to destabilize Iran. A muckity-muck on the Pentagon posts something on how long it will take and then checks the probabilities experts in the field have put forth based on what each of them knows about local politics, etc. This helps us formulae our policy, give us a better idea what we are up against, and may keep us out in the first place. (This is all just guesswork, we'll know more when trading opens).
3) You are being reactionary. Take three deep breaths. It wouldn't be the first time someone celebrated a disaster and, no matter how macabre this may seem, its purpose is not to bring about celebration over loss.
4) The people who would celebrate under such circumstances would currently not care whether it happened anyways, nothing here is going to change.
5) This is not for "gamblers"--they want people who have studied the situations and areas we are talking about.
"Who would stop individuals connected with terrorists from buying futures on the next suicide bomber?"
I don't think this is going to be *nearly* that detailed.
This would be more like "Turkey will allow the US to use their land as a launch point" or "A terrorist attack will hit the US in this month". "The next suicide bomber" is more like saying "not only will the president of the US be assassinated, but the guy who does it will be wearing dockers!"--Too detailed.
"You can't prevent "insider trading." "
I don't think they want to.
Also, these are not quite like stocks. You might want to read the information on them.
"Leave finance to the finance people."
Actually, that's the idea. To bring experts in the Middle East into the mix and see what they have to say about what might happen.
This is a way for the government to tap the expertise of people who do analysis of the middle east and other areas of the world. It is essentially opening the field to experts who, while they might not have insider information, might have a good "gut instinct" for what's going on.
The Pentagon believes that knowing the probabilities that these people assign to different events will help them predict the likelyhood of those events (if I am reading this correctly)--there is something to be said for that.
As another poster pointed out, this is a kind of gambling. What the Pentagon is interested in, however, is not making money off of it: they want to know the probabilities that people are going to assign.
Will it be useful? Who knows. It has the potential to be and they think it is worth the cost of running such a service, I say let them. I'll be as interested in anyone in seeing how closely these predictions matrch reality.
>A project, in the singular as you state it, will more likely >then not have a single license, maybe 2 if a duel licensing >model is appropriate but most have just one.
Yes, and? The author's point is that you do not and/should not/ choose, say, GPL in advance of knowing what the project is.
>In choosing an Open Source license the original poster >was claiming that the GPL is supperior to BSD for the >types of development that are now under attack by SCO/ >MS/Sun/et. als. I infer this from the actual topic for the >thread
If PNG had been released under the GPL, it would have died a quiet death from lack of use. Since it wasn't, it gets a little more widely used than that.
Same way with ATLAS, which has found its way into numerous COTS products. Or the TCP Stack code.
Saying that the "GPL is superior" for this kind of programming, when the original intent for most of this code is for it to get widespread use/including in commercial applications/, you must be reading too much RMS.
The viral nature of the GPL makes even more of a hassel--I can't write source I even want non-GPL Open Source codecs to be able use.
The LGPL is better and created specifically for this purpose. It still has its issues though.
>just look at the brilliant success of PNG vs. Linux and >BSD'd code vs. GPL's code in general.
BSD wins, having found its way into both MS Windows and MacOS X products.
Repeatedly.
PNG is a standard graphical format which is supported by major browsers./Not just Open Source ones/.
>Perhaps because it is not possible for a closed source >company to grab code and bury it deep in there products >without ever giving anything back to the people who >developed it or the community at large.
Ah, you have a different definition of "successful".
This is the *point* of the BSD license. You release something under that license in the hopes that people will actually use it far and wide--you don't care if they "give anything back," you just want it to be used and to be useful.
> It's legal to bury BSD code in your product,
Except that you don't have to bury it. That's the point.
It went very well for Apple and ended in a settlement, IIRC, which gave Apple a confidence gesture ($150 million in non-voting stock that had to be kept for 3 years and was later sold at a profit), MS Software (which at the time was dead on the Mac), and and undisclosed additional sum.
Please, put your vitriol away before posting next time, geeze, if I didn't know better I would say you are resentful.
> Where on CDBaby site say they have ANY relationship > with ANYBODY???
<a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/ 06/06/1548241&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=188">This is the/. article</a>
<a href="http://cdbaby.net/itunes">This is on their website</a>
So either: 1) This business plan is unsubstantiated (i.e., they have not signed a contract), but they were offered one, turned it down, and are making this offer anyways.
2) They have a contract.
>What makes you "strongly" suspect anything?
The two above links--you can get the original fulltext of the article in the comments section.
> NOBODY knows who CDBaby is, nor do they have ANY > track record.
They have existed since c. 1998 and, while I haven't used their services personally, everyone I know who has used them has liked them and their services.
You are also going well past whether iTMS would support this, which is your original point.
>Even if it costs $1.00 per album per month to keep the >album available (electricity, server room, etc.) that means >that you need to sell at least 2 or 3 songs a month to >make it worthwhile.
Considering the number of songs that Apple has been seeling when they are hit an optimistic 3-5% of the market (once you factor in the Mac and the Software running on it), and they are releasing to the rest of the world in the next 6 months, I would say this is a non-issue.
I'm also going to guess that Apple thought of this when it sent the invitation out to the independent labels and worked it into their business plan.
I don't know whether they are going to turn-down offerings, or it it is in their contract at all to do so, but I strongly suspect that they can maintain it or have accounted for this possability.
> Somebody like CDBaby with NO TRACK RECORD will > have NOTHING but slow-movers.
Yet they (obviously) have bothered to invite them to the invitation only conference and CDBaby has managed to stay in business for 5 years by selling physical CDs this way.
> I'll tell you what. You give me $20 (1/2 of CDBaby) and >your digital distribution rights and I will guarantee your >album will do just as well as it would have with CDBaby.
Do you have a contract with Apple?
I strongly suspect that CDBaby does, considering the past announcement wrt independents comming in to the iTMS was from their website.
> Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like > ITune.
They get XServes and XServe RAID arrays at cost. At 1MB/min (approx, a little less actually) a 70 min album costs approximately 70 MB.
For *us* cost per GB on an XServe RAID is $4.36, or 0.00436 cents per MB. That means it would cost them about 31 cents to host the song, assuming that they pay what we do for memory (which, for a point, they don't--they get the machines at cost).
Yes, there are other issues (like the server to host them, &c), but these are not insurmountable obsticals when you can make storage that cheap.
> Why would Buy.com or ITunes take no name junk from > somebody like CDBaby when they don't have other "Hot" > titles to even things out???
Because CD-Baby is signing a contract with them and I think that just about anything that CD-Baby submits, they will host in accordance with that contract.
"...that's obscenely naive. So what's stopping me from putting one on your car and knowing everywhere you go? What if your wife does it? What if your boss does it? See, there's nothing at all that implies consent here. "
The technology for this has been available for years, to the general public, just not in quite this nice or unified a form.
I'm sure the tech isn't far behind to scan for these little bugs, so why worry?
After all, big brother is watching, so there's no need to panic;-)
>Checking pricewatch, you can buy a quad Xeon board for >under $500
I think you are referring to a board (AC450NX or the SC450NX) that takes 4 old Pentium II-style Xeons. All slot-2 connectors--it was produced in 1998.
The boards I've found on pricewatch which are 4-processor Pentium 4 Xeon boards are all $1500+ (please feel free to correct me, I'd like to know). You can get dual opteron mobos for closer to what you are thinking.
Then, four processors on top of that, we're looking at $2500+ and we haven't even broke into hard drive(s), graphics, a case, power supply, or any of the other niceties.
>and Xeons@2.4GHz for under $250.
Which would get summarily smoked, considering I *think* those Xeon Mobos use a shared pipe for four processors. Not even talking about the processors themselves.
>That leaves you with $2000 to spend on a power supply, >hard disks, etc, for a machine that will kick the crap out >of this great machine IBM will release sometime in the >future.
Any guaruntees that your choices will be better than IBM's or that they won't beat you in all of these areas?
My mother's family is from Cleburne going back four or five generations.
My father's family is from Fort Worth, he was threatening to fly to texas and get some dirt to spread around the operating room when I was born so I would be "born on Texas soil".
I'm quite familiar with Texas and their culture--from how they greet each other on the street to their humor to their way of life, is completely unlike anything I've seen in, say, Manhattan.
My sister was born in New York, I was born in Washington DC, went to college in Colorado, and I've spent most of my life in New Orleans. Each place has a different culture--we have a few similarities, but there is no/singular/ "American Culture."
There is no point in arguing with you, you are convinced that you are right and are more concerned with yelling than with truth.
<<Wer mit Ungeheuern kampft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.>> -- Nietzsche
Prove me wrong.
"*point #1: "Americas Army" vs. "Kill the President Imperialist", training tool or not, are in fact perfectly comparable as an analogy. There is nothing 'valient' about Americas Army that isn't 'valient' about a Muslim going off on Jihaad. Those guys that strap bombs to themselves and go off to make damage where they can, think they're 'valiant, brave, and justified' as well."
This would be calling the US Army "terrorists" and equating military action with terrorism.
Oh please. There was a reason that rules of war were drafted and the provisions for minimizing civilian casualities and dressing as soldiers in battle.
You don't think the government's cause there is justified? Great! Neither do I.
How would you respond if I started painting you in with Schröder on every decision he made?
"why? Because, as a joke, it will only be funny to Americans."
I've done a fair bit of technical writing; I've learned a bit of German, Turkish, and Spanish; traveled abroad; and I lived for a year with a Chinese roommate. One of the first things you learn is that humor is different in every culture and doesn't tend to transfer across country lines.
Hell, I don't even get some of the humor people in New York consider hillarious and I certainly don't find anything funny about the brain-dead humor of some of the movies we've had. Why should you define humor as only what both people in the US and Iraq both would find funny?
Also, just because we joke about something does not mean that we do not take it seriously. Sometimes the things a people take most seriously are the topics we joke about.
" Yeah, yeah, beat the "freedom" dead horse again. "
Simple. if you were to publish a game by the aforementioned title I would say "go for it". Stop having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "freedom".
"*point #4: Americans are not a 'race'. They are a cultural entity defined by their own borders and their own deeds."
We are several cultural entities thank-you-very-much (the people in New York bear very little resemblance to the people in Texas) and we do not appreciate being stereotyped and verbally-attacked on the basis of what our leaders decided to do.
Please, btw, *what* deeds have *I* done "as an American."
"This is not racism, this is not stereotyping:"
Which is why you start off the title of this thread as: "I hate this IRAQ Flippancy of Americans."
"this is taking offense to a mob-happy joke mentality about something which is seriously important to the rest of the world"
What makes you think it isn't to us?
Look. The War in Iraq is something we regard very seriously.
That said, America's Army is not about Iraq per se. It is a recruiting tool and it is supposed to glorify things and play to a culture which gets off on first person shooters.
We know it is a recruiting tool, don't be surprised that we are going to joke about its status as such. We are currently at war with Iraq, great, where are the jokes about the status of this game as a recruiting tool going to go?
Tell me, does this (part of a) poem offend you?
Life is a trifle Honor is all Shoulder the rifle Answer the call A nation of traders We'll show what we are Freedom's Crusaders Who war against war
"Honestly, this is a freakin' *WAR* people, its not a video game, and its not a walk in the park."
Yep, and I think the person who wrote that--along with every other person here--knows it. I made a comment above which is a Heinlein quote along the same lines, but I don't support our president in this (sorry, I didn't vote for him either).
It is also well known that "America's Army," the video game, is a recruiting tool for the US Army. Expect us to "show a little humor" with respect to that.
"What would you think about that if you were an actual Iraqi, reading/. on the Internet?"
I'm not in Iraq and I imagine a very small percentage of/.ers are, however, considering that the name of the game is "America's Army"...
"Wait, lets change this video game a little bit and rename it to "Washington DC Terrorist Attack - Kill the President before He Rapes The World", and port it to Nintendo."
False analogy. The two are not comparable on any level.
That being said: Go for it. Announce it on/.
You won't get moral outrage from me over it being sold--I won't purchase it, I won't play it, and I won't encourage others to play it, but I won't claim that it shouldn't be sold. Part of that "freedom of speech" thing.
"Does that then make it okay for someone to say "Play this game then go there, Brother, and kill the infidels!""
I wouldn't be insulted if the Information Ministry or Military in Iraq released a game called "Saddam Hussein's Army" and someone posted on/. "Get out there you chiggers and train for the US!"
Seriously, you are being oversensative. None of us care.
I'm opposed to the war, I still got a chuckle out of the "train for Iraq" line.
"Can Americans not plainly see that their perpetual arrogance and cultural irresponsibility is causing them more trouble than its worth?"
Can the hypothetical "rest of the world" (meaning you) see that sterotyping and generalized racism is causing us all more trouble than its worth?
""Americas War" is *NOT* something to be proud about, or defend eagerly, or even participate in willingly."
I'm not, I don't, and I'm not. Your point?
"It is the product of a sick and twisted culture!!"
Stop making leaps of logic that Orwell's Ministry of Truth would be proud of and you might get people to listen to you. Ranting about the Evils of America(TM) gets you nowhere in discussion, informing others, or in changing anyone's minds.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to drift topics. The APSL has nothing to do with FCP, Safari, or anything else in those lanes.
>FCP
Best of its class, hands down. This is called "making a competing product" and is normal business strategy--not forcing someone out of the market.
>Safari
You really need to stop drinking the Kool Aid.
No one really competes with Safari, not because Safari, but because Safari is *good*. Apple distributed a sucky version of IE as its standard web-browser and that has a *lot* to do with the user experience for a typical user. They needed to replace it, and no other web-browser for the mac quite cut it.
Once again. They produced a better product. Safari is now my primary web browser, not because I haven't used Mozilla or Camino, but because it is the best for what I do on the web (speed counts for a lot).
>Soundtrack
Who did Apple "force out" with this one?
They also needed something so that labels could publish music in m4p format, suitable for the iTMS.
You want an example? Take Watson. But none of your examples quite cut it.
> Well that's well and good... Say your hard drive crashes
...and you can do it with fairplay.
>and you have to rebuild your Mac from scratch. What
>kind of special provisions are necessary so that your Mac
>"remembers" that you have legally purchased these files?
1) Make as many backup copies as you like. You can keep the protected AAC file on as many computers/CDs/ZIP Disks/Tape Drives as you can find.
2) Reformating your hard-drive shouldn't remove your authorization and, if it does...
3) You can contact Apple. They even have a webpage set up so that you can send them a note explaining the situation.
> Sure. That makes it exactly as good as an mp3. And I
>still want to know what's stopping people from ripping
>the audio CDs they create this way and sharing the files...
>If it's that easy to circumvent the DRM then why bother
>pissing off your customer base?
A little fact checking please!
Nothing is to stop you from re-ripping it into an unprotected AAC file or an MP3 file. They admit this freely.
They haven't "pissed off [their] customer base" as near as I can tell.
> Okay that's fine if you don't mind spending $300 on the
>modern equivalent of a Walkman. Will it still work with
>my $69 Expanium CD-based mp3 player?
They are currently "the standard" for digital media players.
If it is CD-based then, by all means, it should work so long as you burn it to a CD first.
>. However it is not NEARLY as flexible as the alternative -
>mp3's and audio CDs.
Well, I might call it *as* restrictive as a CD.
As for mp3s, do you *really* think that they could have set up this store without some form of protection? And what exactly are you doing that requires them to be more flexible?
>But I would most certainly have a problem with any DRM
>system which will not allow me to make a mix CD for my
>friend (which is currently legal.)
I also doubt your claim that it is legal, though that is secondary.
>Again, if the DRM is so easy to circumvent then what is
>the point?
Because, unless I am feeling very motivated to share that piece of music with the world and not just with a few friends in a remixed CD, I am not going to go through the trouble of burning a CD and re-ripping it.
This prevents casual copyright infringement--you share your music folder with the world? Great! You aren't going to share these songs unless you go through the trouble of converting them.
> Madonna was just a convenient example.
Unfortunately, you can't use any specific artist as a judge of the range of content on a system.
Its kind of like saying "is 3 a random number" or "is 5 normally distributed"--these require evaluation of a range of data, not a single datapoint.
>The selection on both iTunes AND BuyMusic is woefully
>lacking artists that people really want to listen to.
Then go talk to the labels and bands you want to hear and see if you can get them to try for a contract with Apple and/or Buy.
Their selection will improve. You want it to be full-featured with *your* favorite artists right out of the starting gate. This is an unreasonable expectation for a service--they are going to ramp up and Steve Jobs has *explicitly* stated that he would like to get as much and as broad a range of music as possible. So they don't have what you want now? Fine, they don't have everything I want now. It isn't like it costs me anything to browse until they either have what I am looking for or I find something interesting.
>No BT. No Prodigy. No Doors. No Zeppelin. No Beatles.
Prodigy does have a single on iTMS and that's a good indicator more are comming.
The Doors have 8 albums (5 full, 3 partial) on iTMS.
Zeppelin and the Beatles are under their own labels IIRC, so to speak, and thus would be slightly more
>STILL has proprietary DRM
/is/ improving.
:-)
/all/ of them so you must suck". Does this make sense to you? They are rolling out in stages and they are /improving/ their selection.
The DRM, called FairPlay, allows me to:
1) Have three licenses that will stay with me through an upgrade and which I can move between computers at will.
2) Burn it to as many CD's as I like.
3) Place it on as many iPods as I like, as many times as I like.
How is this a problem, again?
About the only thing I can't do--assuming I work on 3 or fewer computers--is send it to a friend over the internet. If I have more than that then Apple has provided a conveinant workaround by allowing me to rerip it to AAC from a CD.
>and worst of all the selection sucks! Don't believe me?
>Try to download "Ray of Light" by Madonna from iTunes.
You are using madonna to justify a selection? So if I offered just madonna's Ray of Light on my own system, you would say that I had good selection, right?
That makes about as much sense as you judging iTunes selection based on one song by one artist.
Their selection *is* increasing. They are adding more songs daily, indie labels are comming into the fold, and unsigned artists will be able to put their work up via CDBaby. The selection, while not astounding, is decent (I've found a few things I like) and
> What the hell good is a music service that only carries a
> few select choons by artists that I may or may not give a
> damn about?
Well, if you "give a damn" about them, then its quite good, thanks
> I want to be able to get ANY music this way.
This is kind of like saying "well, yes, I know you provide the largest selection of movies in the world for me to rent, but you don't provide
Good for them.
I would, but the same javascript which protects their front page protects their feedback page! ;-)
>Apple has finally released the 1.3 Updater for older ...and this has been posted where most of the people who have older Windows iPods won't look for it...
>Windows iPods.
You must be new to United States politics. Whenever legislators pass a bill it is a fairly common practice for them to exempt themselves from it.
>At best, it is a honeypot.
I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing this.
Sure, a lot of what it generates may (or may not) be noise, but it has a lot of potential just as a trap.
I'm not sure "at best"--that may be their secondary intent--but I am sure that DARPA was thinking of this when they fronted the idea.
Not exclusively, but as a terrorist you would have to be daft to try and make any kind of serious money off of this.
"What a great way to fund future terrorism! All you have to do is load your bets on a target, then go blow it up! Talk about your self-fulfilling prophesies!" ...and, in doing so, you have:
1) Let the US Government know of your intentions.
2) Let the US Government know who you are.
Brilliant!
>Why not just ask those same experts what they think?
Simple. There are way too many of them and the Pentagon doesn't want to pay them all civillian contractor fees.
> The possibility that al-Qaeda, say, could use this to make
>money from their own activities seems farfetched.
In doing so they are more likely to let the Pentagon know both who some of their members are and what their actions are going to be.
Do you *really* think that transactions here are going to be either anonymous or unwatched?
>Nevertheless, this strikes me as an inefficient and
>downright ridiculous way to of trying to gather expert
>opinions. Why not just hire the experts in the first place??
Actually it seems rather clever.
If I hire a group of experts I will hire them for one task, I have to make sure I represent a broad variety of experts (for instance, I need a water-politics expert, an oil-politics expert, a couple of cultural experts, translators, a religious consultant (or several!), a military consultant (or several!), some IPE people, etc) and I have to pay them all.
Then I have to wait for them to create a probability matrix for outcomes.
This is a good thing, it has many advantages. It also has many disadvantages: maybe I need more information to make an informed decision; perhaps the experts I've hired all come through academic or political connections and a few of them have an agenda; perhaps one of them is *really* good at Iranian water politics, but doesn't know a damned thing about Turkish water politics, and suddenly an issue comes up that relates to Turkey...
Lots of possabilities.
This lets them get the broadest scope of professional opinion, gives them clues as to what people's hunches are, and removes political bias and government regulations regarding contracting for finding out what people think.
Rather clever. I have no idea if it will work, but it has potential.
A little bit of a bleeding heart there.
1) Too detailed. An individual suicide bomber is not the kinds of things these guys are looking for, if I am reading this correctly.
2) The US plans to destabilize Iran. A muckity-muck on the Pentagon posts something on how long it will take and then checks the probabilities experts in the field have put forth based on what each of them knows about local politics, etc. This helps us formulae our policy, give us a better idea what we are up against, and may keep us out in the first place. (This is all just guesswork, we'll know more when trading opens).
3) You are being reactionary. Take three deep breaths. It wouldn't be the first time someone celebrated a disaster and, no matter how macabre this may seem, its purpose is not to bring about celebration over loss.
4) The people who would celebrate under such circumstances would currently not care whether it happened anyways, nothing here is going to change.
5) This is not for "gamblers"--they want people who have studied the situations and areas we are talking about.
"Who would stop individuals connected with terrorists from buying futures on the next suicide bomber?"
I don't think this is going to be *nearly* that detailed.
This would be more like "Turkey will allow the US to use their land as a launch point" or "A terrorist attack will hit the US in this month". "The next suicide bomber" is more like saying "not only will the president of the US be assassinated, but the guy who does it will be wearing dockers!"--Too detailed.
"You can't prevent "insider trading." "
I don't think they want to.
Also, these are not quite like stocks. You might want to read the information on them.
"Leave finance to the finance people."
Actually, that's the idea. To bring experts in the Middle East into the mix and see what they have to say about what might happen.
This is a way for the government to tap the expertise of people who do analysis of the middle east and other areas of the world. It is essentially opening the field to experts who, while they might not have insider information, might have a good "gut instinct" for what's going on.
The Pentagon believes that knowing the probabilities that these people assign to different events will help them predict the likelyhood of those events (if I am reading this correctly)--there is something to be said for that.
As another poster pointed out, this is a kind of gambling. What the Pentagon is interested in, however, is not making money off of it: they want to know the probabilities that people are going to assign.
Will it be useful? Who knows. It has the potential to be and they think it is worth the cost of running such a service, I say let them. I'll be as interested in anyone in seeing how closely these predictions matrch reality.
You do realize that Apple licensed that project from Xerox, which Xerox considered a dead-end at the time, right?
As to "pilfering code" MS's use of BSD and GPL'd code has thusfar been shown to be in full compliance with the necessary licenses.
>A project, in the singular as you state it, will more likely
/should not/ choose, say, GPL in advance of knowing what the project is.
/including in commercial applications/, you must be reading too much RMS.
/Not just Open Source ones/.
>then not have a single license, maybe 2 if a duel licensing
>model is appropriate but most have just one.
Yes, and? The author's point is that you do not and
>In choosing an Open Source license the original poster
>was claiming that the GPL is supperior to BSD for the
>types of development that are now under attack by SCO/
>MS/Sun/et. als. I infer this from the actual topic for the
>thread
If PNG had been released under the GPL, it would have died a quiet death from lack of use. Since it wasn't, it gets a little more widely used than that.
Same way with ATLAS, which has found its way into numerous COTS products. Or the TCP Stack code.
Saying that the "GPL is superior" for this kind of programming, when the original intent for most of this code is for it to get widespread use
The viral nature of the GPL makes even more of a hassel--I can't write source I even want non-GPL Open Source codecs to be able use.
The LGPL is better and created specifically for this purpose. It still has its issues though.
>just look at the brilliant success of PNG vs. Linux and
>BSD'd code vs. GPL's code in general.
BSD wins, having found its way into both MS Windows and MacOS X products.
Repeatedly.
PNG is a standard graphical format which is supported by major browsers.
>Perhaps because it is not possible for a closed source
>company to grab code and bury it deep in there products
>without ever giving anything back to the people who
>developed it or the community at large.
Ah, you have a different definition of "successful".
This is the *point* of the BSD license. You release something under that license in the hopes that people will actually use it far and wide--you don't care if they "give anything back," you just want it to be used and to be useful.
> It's legal to bury BSD code in your product,
Except that you don't have to bury it. That's the point.
It went very well for Apple and ended in a settlement, IIRC, which gave Apple a confidence gesture ($150 million in non-voting stock that had to be kept for 3 years and was later sold at a profit), MS Software (which at the time was dead on the Mac), and and undisclosed additional sum.
Wait, I thought that was her music? ::ducks:: Sorry! Couldn't resist!
Wow, impressive lack of the use of the enter key.
/ 06/06/1548241&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=188">This is the /. article</a>
Please, put your vitriol away before posting next time, geeze, if I didn't know better I would say you are resentful.
> Where on CDBaby site say they have ANY relationship
> with ANYBODY???
<a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03
<a href="http://cdbaby.net/itunes">This is on their website</a>
So either:
1) This business plan is unsubstantiated (i.e., they have not signed a contract), but they were offered one, turned it down, and are making this offer anyways.
2) They have a contract.
>What makes you "strongly" suspect anything?
The two above links--you can get the original fulltext of the article in the comments section.
> NOBODY knows who CDBaby is, nor do they have ANY
> track record.
They have existed since c. 1998 and, while I haven't used their services personally, everyone I know who has used them has liked them and their services.
You are also going well past whether iTMS would support this, which is your original point.
>Even if it costs $1.00 per album per month to keep the
>album available (electricity, server room, etc.) that means
>that you need to sell at least 2 or 3 songs a month to
>make it worthwhile.
Considering the number of songs that Apple has been seeling when they are hit an optimistic 3-5% of the market (once you factor in the Mac and the Software running on it), and they are releasing to the rest of the world in the next 6 months, I would say this is a non-issue.
I'm also going to guess that Apple thought of this when it sent the invitation out to the independent labels and worked it into their business plan.
I don't know whether they are going to turn-down offerings, or it it is in their contract at all to do so, but I strongly suspect that they can maintain it or have accounted for this possability.
> Somebody like CDBaby with NO TRACK RECORD will
> have NOTHING but slow-movers.
Yet they (obviously) have bothered to invite them to the invitation only conference and CDBaby has managed to stay in business for 5 years by selling physical CDs this way.
> I'll tell you what. You give me $20 (1/2 of CDBaby) and
>your digital distribution rights and I will guarantee your
>album will do just as well as it would have with CDBaby.
Do you have a contract with Apple?
I strongly suspect that CDBaby does, considering the past announcement wrt independents comming in to the iTMS was from their website.
> Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like
> ITune.
They get XServes and XServe RAID arrays at cost. At 1MB/min (approx, a little less actually) a 70 min album costs approximately 70 MB.
For *us* cost per GB on an XServe RAID is $4.36, or 0.00436 cents per MB. That means it would cost them about 31 cents to host the song, assuming that they pay what we do for memory (which, for a point, they don't--they get the machines at cost).
Yes, there are other issues (like the server to host them, &c), but these are not insurmountable obsticals when you can make storage that cheap.
> Why would Buy.com or ITunes take no name junk from
> somebody like CDBaby when they don't have other "Hot"
> titles to even things out???
Because CD-Baby is signing a contract with them and I think that just about anything that CD-Baby submits, they will host in accordance with that contract.
"...that's obscenely naive. So what's stopping me from putting one on your car and knowing everywhere you go? What if your wife does it? What if your boss does it? See, there's nothing at all that implies consent here. "
;-)
The technology for this has been available for years, to the general public, just not in quite this nice or unified a form.
I'm sure the tech isn't far behind to scan for these little bugs, so why worry?
After all, big brother is watching, so there's no need to panic
The heat on those suckers would melt you, serious engine pilot if you weren't careful.
Oh, wait, we're not talking about Battletech?
>Checking pricewatch, you can buy a quad Xeon board for
>under $500
I think you are referring to a board (AC450NX or the SC450NX) that takes 4 old Pentium II-style Xeons. All slot-2 connectors--it was produced in 1998.
The boards I've found on pricewatch which are 4-processor Pentium 4 Xeon boards are all $1500+ (please feel free to correct me, I'd like to know). You can get dual opteron mobos for closer to what you are thinking.
Then, four processors on top of that, we're looking at $2500+ and we haven't even broke into hard drive(s), graphics, a case, power supply, or any of the other niceties.
>and Xeons@2.4GHz for under $250.
Which would get summarily smoked, considering I *think* those Xeon Mobos use a shared pipe for four processors. Not even talking about the processors themselves.
>That leaves you with $2000 to spend on a power supply,
>hard disks, etc, for a machine that will kick the crap out
>of this great machine IBM will release sometime in the
>future.
Any guaruntees that your choices will be better than IBM's or that they won't beat you in all of these areas?
My mother's family is from Cleburne going back four or five generations.
/singular/ "American Culture."
My father's family is from Fort Worth, he was threatening to fly to texas and get some dirt to spread around the operating room when I was born so I would be "born on Texas soil".
I'm quite familiar with Texas and their culture--from how they greet each other on the street to their humor to their way of life, is completely unlike anything I've seen in, say, Manhattan.
My sister was born in New York, I was born in Washington DC, went to college in Colorado, and I've spent most of my life in New Orleans. Each place has a different culture--we have a few similarities, but there is no
There is no point in arguing with you, you are convinced that you are right and are more concerned with yelling than with truth.
<<Wer mit Ungeheuern kampft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.>> -- Nietzsche
Prove me wrong.
"*point #1: "Americas Army" vs. "Kill the President Imperialist", training tool or not, are in fact perfectly comparable as an analogy. There is nothing 'valient' about Americas Army that isn't 'valient' about a Muslim going off on Jihaad. Those guys that strap bombs to themselves and go off to make damage where they can, think they're 'valiant, brave, and justified' as well."
This would be calling the US Army "terrorists" and equating military action with terrorism.
Oh please. There was a reason that rules of war were drafted and the provisions for minimizing civilian casualities and dressing as soldiers in battle.
You don't think the government's cause there is justified? Great! Neither do I.
How would you respond if I started painting you in with Schröder on every decision he made?
"why? Because, as a joke, it will only be funny to Americans."
I've done a fair bit of technical writing; I've learned a bit of German, Turkish, and Spanish; traveled abroad; and I lived for a year with a Chinese roommate. One of the first things you learn is that humor is different in every culture and doesn't tend to transfer across country lines.
Hell, I don't even get some of the humor people in New York consider hillarious and I certainly don't find anything funny about the brain-dead humor of some of the movies we've had. Why should you define humor as only what both people in the US and Iraq both would find funny?
Also, just because we joke about something does not mean that we do not take it seriously. Sometimes the things a people take most seriously are the topics we joke about.
" Yeah, yeah, beat the "freedom" dead horse again. "
Simple. if you were to publish a game by the aforementioned title I would say "go for it". Stop having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "freedom".
"*point #4: Americans are not a 'race'. They are a cultural entity defined by their own borders and their own deeds."
We are several cultural entities thank-you-very-much (the people in New York bear very little resemblance to the people in Texas) and we do not appreciate being stereotyped and verbally-attacked on the basis of what our leaders decided to do.
Please, btw, *what* deeds have *I* done "as an American."
"This is not racism, this is not stereotyping:"
Which is why you start off the title of this thread as:
"I hate this IRAQ Flippancy of Americans."
"this is taking offense to a mob-happy joke mentality about something which is seriously important to the rest of the world"
What makes you think it isn't to us?
Look. The War in Iraq is something we regard very seriously.
That said, America's Army is not about Iraq per se. It is a recruiting tool and it is supposed to glorify things and play to a culture which gets off on first person shooters.
We know it is a recruiting tool, don't be surprised that we are going to joke about its status as such. We are currently at war with Iraq, great, where are the jokes about the status of this game as a recruiting tool going to go?
Tell me, does this (part of a) poem offend you?
Life is a trifle
Honor is all
Shoulder the rifle
Answer the call
A nation of traders
We'll show what we are
Freedom's Crusaders
Who war against war
Its a joke, laugh.
/. on the Internet?"
/.ers are, however, considering that the name of the game is "America's Army"...
/.
/. "Get out there you chiggers and train for the US!"
"Honestly, this is a freakin' *WAR* people, its not a video game, and its not a walk in the park."
Yep, and I think the person who wrote that--along with every other person here--knows it. I made a comment above which is a Heinlein quote along the same lines, but I don't support our president in this (sorry, I didn't vote for him either).
It is also well known that "America's Army," the video game, is a recruiting tool for the US Army. Expect us to "show a little humor" with respect to that.
"What would you think about that if you were an actual Iraqi, reading
I'm not in Iraq and I imagine a very small percentage of
"Wait, lets change this video game a little bit and rename it to "Washington DC Terrorist Attack - Kill the President before He Rapes The World", and port it to Nintendo."
False analogy. The two are not comparable on any level.
That being said: Go for it. Announce it on
You won't get moral outrage from me over it being sold--I won't purchase it, I won't play it, and I won't encourage others to play it, but I won't claim that it shouldn't be sold. Part of that "freedom of speech" thing.
"Does that then make it okay for someone to say "Play this game then go there, Brother, and kill the infidels!""
I wouldn't be insulted if the Information Ministry or Military in Iraq released a game called "Saddam Hussein's Army" and someone posted on
Seriously, you are being oversensative. None of us care.
I'm opposed to the war, I still got a chuckle out of the "train for Iraq" line.
"Can Americans not plainly see that their perpetual arrogance and cultural irresponsibility is causing them more trouble than its worth?"
Can the hypothetical "rest of the world" (meaning you) see that sterotyping and generalized racism is causing us all more trouble than its worth?
""Americas War" is *NOT* something to be proud about, or defend eagerly, or even participate in willingly."
I'm not, I don't, and I'm not. Your point?
"It is the product of a sick and twisted culture!!"
Stop making leaps of logic that Orwell's Ministry of Truth would be proud of and you might get people to listen to you. Ranting about the Evils of America(TM) gets you nowhere in discussion, informing others, or in changing anyone's minds.