When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible for helping to create the environment (in an economic and legislative sense) that fostered the development of the Internet.
I would contend that this is not what Gore was saying. If he had intended people to believe that created the proper environment for the internet then why didn't he say "I took the initiative in creating the environment in which the internet grew.", or "I took the initiative in helping to create the Internet.", or even "Myself and teams of experts worked together to help the Internet grow into what it is today."
No, what Gore said was "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." The only thing that you can properly infer from that statement is that Mr. Gore wanted people to think that he alone was the smart guy who came up with the Internet. He gave no credit to the true people who created the Internet, the teams of hardware, software, and system engineers who pieced the Internet together so it could grow from a few educational and military institutions to encompass the entire Earth.
Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet -- but the hysterical right-wing press claimed he did, and repeated the lie so often that people believed it.
Oh he didn't? If you take a look at this site you will see the actual statement made by Al Gore in an interview on CNN when he was talking about how he is different from his rival, Bill Bradley:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
WHY is that? WHAT do Apple's programmers and designers have the Linux/GNOME programmers do not? Is there any (technical) reason someone could not hack together a smooth Mac OS X work-a-like on top of Linux?
I'll give you at least 3 very big reasons why Apple has been so successful with making its UI "feel" more complete.
First of all, Apple has a ton of design and user-interface engineers. These are people whose only job is to sit with their feet up on the desk and think of better ways for users to interact with their systems. With Linux you are dealing with mostly programmers and system engineers. They are great at "hacking together" work-a-likes but they aren't so good at getting all of the pieces to "feel" smooth.
Secondly, Apple makes the whole widget from start to finish. They design the computer, they design the software, they design the keyboards and mice. They have pretty much full control of all aspects of the computer system and can ensure that all parts work smoothly with as few glitches and inconsistencies as possible. With Linux you are not only dealing with many different versions of the kernel but also with different ways the kernel can be configured, different userlands, and different hardware setups.
Lastly, Apple has laid down the law and convinced its developers to follow Apple's User Interface Guidelines as closely as possible. Pretty much every program on MacOS has a very similar interface to every other program, making it very easy to learn the basics of working a program and even easier to apply your knowledge to new programs. This sort of user interface consistency is a key factor in making the UI work "smoothly". With Linux you have a hard enough time convincing people to use the same UI skin not to mention the same UI program or the same placement of menus and options from window to window. Programming and UI design on Linux are pretty much left up to each developer and there are so many groups and personalities that it is almost impossible to get them to even agree what end an egg should be broken on.
Although Linux is a fine operating system, it lacks this kind of fit-and-finish that Apple has managed to pull off. Linux has come a long way with the various UI that are available for it, but it is just much harder for a truly "smooth" UI to come about for Linux. Even simply copying the look of MacOS won't make the Linux UI feel "smooth", there is a lot of behind the scenes factors that affect the feel of an operating system. The overall quality of the programming makes Linux an excellent server platform and the overall UI quality on makes a Macintosh and excellent desktop platform. The two systems should work together instead of fighting against each other, we will all be better off for it.
I think the real problem here is if every Joe Downloader will find tracks 2,3,6, and 8 "good" on the album and disregard the rest. They'll have spent only $4 then for music and even at a greater per track revenue, they could be losing money on an album.
True but this doesn't count the fact that even though you may lose sales on the album itself you probably would not have gotten those sales in the first place! Those people who are just buying a track or two were probably not going to buy the entire album but since the tracks are available as singles they bought them.
Overall choice is a good thing. If you make good songs then people will probably buy all the tracks on an album. Those people who only want 1 or 2 tracks on an album probably would not have bought the entire album so you can count those sales as extra gravy on top of your usual album sales. Sure you will lose a few whole album sales to singles but I'm willing to bet that a decent artist will make more money than they will lose.
$1,000,000 - leaving them basically with their original advance of $1,000,000
And they have to pay that advance back, so $1,000,000-$1,000,000 = $0.
No, they still get the million. It's just that the million comes from their royalties, not from out of the thin air. So instead of getting 1 million from the advance and another million from the money left over in the royalties the band gets just the 1 million from the advance. It's like if I loaned you $100 and you gave me the right to sell your guitar in return. I sell your guitar for $100 and so I keep the money from the proceeds. You still get $100, but you paid me back for my loan. That's how an advance works.
Actually we are both wrong. According to the RIAA website (warning, Slashdotters' eyes may burst into flame upon viewing this site), gold is 500 thousand albums and platinum is 1 million albums.
I agree that touring is usually a big win for artists, many of them do much better off of a tour than off of album sales. I included that when I said "This is not counting other sales such as concerts, commercials, product endorsements, book deals, celebrity freebies, and all the other perks of being a star."
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
Let's put this in perspective. $350,000 divided by 4 is $87,500. Now, I don't know about you but that is a lot of money to make in a year. There are people out there who earn $20,000 a year and live just fine on it. Maybe to Courtney Love that's chump change because she won't be able to support her coke habit but for the rest of us we could live pretty good off of $87,500 pre-tax.
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.
I'm sure that music videos can and do cost that much to make, but let's look at this a different way. Music videos are what, 5 minutes each? So we are talking about spending one million dollars on 10 minutes of video. There are independent film makers out there that make pretty damn good two-hour movies for well under a million. How about you hire someone young, hungry, and promising who doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to produce your movie rather than hiring Steven Spielberg to do it? Sure sure, you gotta spend money to make it and the video is an advertisement for the artist but either cut the cost or stop crying about how expensive it is.
Another thing I noticed in analyzing this piece written by Ms. Love. Her numbers don't add up. Take a look:
The band gets 2 million (20% of $11 million in sales) and then gets charged:
$2,000,000 - royalties
- $ 500,000 - 50% of 1 million for videos
- $ 200,000 - for the tour, which is really an investment for
the artist since tours MAKE money for artists
- $ 300,000 - for radio promotion, again an investment
that drives up their record sales
------------
$1,000,000 - leaving them basically with their original
advance of $1,000,000
The record company makes 11 million and has to pay out the following
$11,000,000 - her numbers for record company gross
- $ 500,000 - manufacture CDs
- $ 1,000,000 - band's advance
- $ 1,000,000 - video costs
(wait, didn't the band pay 1/2 of this?)
- $ 300,000 - radio promotion
(again, didn't the band pay for this?)
- $ 200,000 - tour support
(band paid, right? or maybe Ms. Love is just
incoherent at this point)
- $ 750,000 - music publishing royalties
(to who? the artists? the record company? very odd...)
- $ 2,200,000 - marketing
-------------
$ 5,050,000 - profit. wait, didn't she say they made $6.6 million?
by her numbers she is off by $1.55 million
I would say that the entire article is suspect, since it's clear that Ms. Love can't even do simple arithmetic. I'm sure that she feels slighted because she isn't getting 100% of the millions her albums make, but the fact is that she is living the rock star lifestyle and she has a lot more money and other advantages that most people don't enjoy. Sure, I agree that artists should get a decent cut of the profits from their music but I really hate to hear them cry about how they just aren't getting that extra million or two past the millions they have gotten. They should try working minimum wage scrubbing floors for a while and we'll see how much they cry about being a celebrity.
I'm a rapper and if I made it big, 12 cents wouldn't be enough
Oh really?
Well, let's say that you album only goes gold. That's 1 million albums sold, if you really made it big you'd most likely sell more. 1 million albums at $0.12 per song at let's say 10 songs an album equals $1.2 million in your pocket. Sure you have to pay tax, yadda yadda yadda but so does everyone. Do that once every 2 years or so and you'll make $600,000 a year. This is not counting other sales such as concerts, commercials, product endorsements, book deals, celebrity freebies, and all the other perks of being a star.
If you are lucky you may get to the terminal and do a reboot but never try to unmount the drive or even go to you/Volume/NFS directory if you do then your terminal will hang (Thus wishing you can run the same application twice).
You can, the easiest way is to make a second copy of the application in a different place or with a slightly different name. You then launch the second copy. It's generally safe to do this but I wouldn't save any shared documents while both are open, like preferences.
I believe there is a way to launch a second instance of an application through the terminal without copying the app first but I've never tried it and the Terminal is your problem in the first place...
Safari uses low-level Quartz calls to render text. Safari's faster because of that, but unfortunately, only Apple has access to this.
As others have stated, yes Safari uses some of the lower-level Quartz calls. The difference is that these calls are NOT undocumented and hidden. Anyone can find and use the full Quartz API, including Apple, Microsoft, Bob from 3 houses down the way, anyone at all. It's all documented and available to everyone.
It is in Apple's best interests to have all of their APIs as open and available as possible. Take for example Safari. Safari is really just a front-end to Apple's freely-available (and open-sourced) web engine, WebCore. WebCore is a wrapper around KHTML and other programs are starting to use WebCore as their HTML rendering engine. One of these programs is OmniWeb. It uses the WebCore engine to do all of its HTML rendering and so it provides all of the speed and quality of Safari but in a different package. This is a good thing because Omniweb can cater to one part of the browser market that perhaps Safari does not and the two of them can feed each other in development.
The point is that just about every programmer out there has nearly equal access to the MacOS when it comes down to application programming, Apple generally doesn't pull any nasty tricks of using hidden APIs at the application level.
I wouldn't put Omniweb into the "maybe soon again" category. The latest Omniweb (OmniWeb 4.5 beta 1) is using WebCore/KHTML and it renders at least as well as Safari with a ton more features than Safari has. It's very stable too, I'd hardly even call it a beta. Give it a try again, it's excellent now!
First, we are making explicit and binding the following policy. GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc. There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add suffices).
Second, we will be moving our operations to x86, and we are putting the ppc collection into maintenance mode
This certainly sounds like you have turned your back on ppc. You have put your ppc collection it into "maintenance mode", this obviously means that you are treating it differently then the x86 versions. Just what is your definition of "maintenance mode"? If you are continuing your support of ppc then why make such negative statements?
Honestly proclus, you have proven yourself to be just another troll on the various Macintosh forums. You come on these types of forums decrying doom and gloom upon all things Macintosh because of Apples so-called crimes of making proprietary code. You spam the forums with messages of inane questions that you answer yourself, pumping your post count up. You make all sorts of threats of taking your repackaged toys away from the ppc and then you turn right around and claim that your support is still 100% for the platform.
There are a lot of people who are sick of this. We don't need your utilities, we have plenty from Fink or DarwinPorts. If you want to play your social activist game, go play it somewhere else because it is just falling on deaf ears here.
click around a bit more... Ice Cube's Greatest Hits is $14.98.
That's why I said MOST albums are $10. I know that not all of them are. In fact MOST double albums, such as box sets and greatest hits, are $20. Makes sense since they are really 2 CDs worth of material so that's $10 per CD worth of material.
The issue I have with $.99 per song is that it is in most cases above the threshold of value to me. If, for instance, I would like to purchase all 12 tracks from an artist's album I would be required to pay Apple $12. However, I could most likely find the CD on Amazon marketplace or Half.com for $5-6. What is my incentive to purchase these tracks from Apple, considering the alternative of having the CD and the ability to convert the tracks into the format of my choice for half the price?
First of all, Apple has a flat-rate price of $10 per album for most albums, no matter how many songs they have. I've gotten a few albums with 16 or 18 songs for $10.
Second, buying a CD on Amazon or Half.com is not the same as buying on the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). You get your song instantly on iTMS, you have to wait for the other stores. Apple's music comes pre-encoded from original masters, the CD you get from the other stores might be scratched and scuffed up. With iTMS you can still convert the AAC file to another format by either burning the song to a CD and then re-encoding or by using Audio Hijack Pro to grab the song from iTunes.
Third, you might also only want a song or two from an album. With iTMS you would only spend $1-$2 for that, with the other stores you would still spend $5-6. iTMS also does not have shipping costs, whereas the other stores you need to pay to have the items shipped to you on top of whatever you paid for them.
Overall, I'd say it is closer than most people think. Sure Amazon or Half.com might be a bit cheaper than iTMS, but you trade off ease-of-use and instant gratification for a dollar or two of savings. It's up to the individual to determine if it's worth it or not, but I definitely feel that iTMS is a service that is worth it.
Re:Ender's Game (Score:1, Flamebait) by Graff (532189) on Thursday May 29, @10:37AM (#6067473) I would definitely recommend Ender's Game as well as its sequels...
Whoot, my first flamebait ever on Slashdot! I just wish I knew what I was flaming in the parent post here. The post seemed perfectly on-topic and calm and all.
Oh well, it's not like karma really matters or anything. I've been maxed out for some time now and I'm hardly in danger of losing my karma bonus anytime soon. Nice waste of mod points there!
I would definitely recommend Ender's Game as well as its sequels. The later books change character a bit from the first one, but they are enjoyable and they not only tell a good story they also talk about philosophy, morality, and the nature of being. Pretty heavy stuff but written in a very accessible and fun fashion.
You can hardly go wrong with any of Orson Scott Cards's books, although the latest ones aren't as good as his older stuff, with the exception of the new books in the Ender's Game series. Card has a set of awesome books of short stories, get them if you can. Some of the stories are just brutal in what occurs in them, but totally great reads.
Another great author is Stephen R. Donaldson. His series, "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" are extremely well-written and powerful. There are 2 trilogies in the series and although the middle books in each series drag a bit all 6 books are well worth reading. He also has another great series called "Mordant's Need" which consists of two books - "The Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through".
Right now I'm reading George R. R. Martin's "A Clash of Kings", sequel to "A Game of Thrones". Great novels, lots of political backstabbing and battles, the series is well-worth a look at.
Even during offpeak hours with low server population, the game is plagued by severe lag and rubber-banding.
Not to mention that I have been a part of two different cities that have had 3 major ToL problems. One time the ToL stopped allowing people to manage city assets properly and no one new could be friended to it. It was replaced and then the new ToL blew up a week or so later, leaving buildings stuck in the middle of hillsides and trees as the city grid reverted to what it was before the tree was placed. The last tree problem was in a different city, the tree kept on disappearing and reappearing at odd times. A CCR came by and removed it and replaced it. Things were normal for a bit until we realized that there was still a phantom tree there that was completely open and people could bind to. It was right in the middle of our city so we had all sorts of griefers coming in through it and there was nothing we could do about it.
I tried to quit after the free month but I was informed that the free month came AFTER my paid period, not before like it said when I signed up for the service. I had signed up for a year believing that the free trial month would allow me to try the service. So now they are trying to stick me for $40 for the software and $120 for the service. Nope, not gonna do it - I called up my credit card company immediately and contested the charges. The grounds? I was sold a product that was not working and I was being charged for services that I could not use.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to play Shadowbane. I signed up with the full intention of playing for at least a year, probably more. The game has some real potential with its storyline, history, and other concepts. What I will not do is pay for something that I spend more time trying to log in than I do playing it. Maybe if the game is still around in 6 months or so and if it is working properly I will try it again.
Weird, your experience has been completely opposite of mine. I can actually reboot my machine from a hard freeze (I hit the stupid windows menu key during a battle, after which I then ripped the key off of the keyboard) fire up shadowbane, and log back in in under 10 minutes. I was back in the fight before the monster was dead.
It is wierd. It seems like there are a few people who don't have much trouble at all. I can honestly say that the majority of people I have talked to about the game have had some sort of login/game server trouble. Many people have had client problems also. I'm glad that you have not had any troubles, but judging from the ratio of complaints to people who have not had problems, I would say that the majority of people do have problems with the game. This is even accounting for the tendency for people to complain more than they praise.
As for me, I'm running a system with pretty much TRIPLE the minimum requirements. I'm on a Macintosh and I have a 1 gHz G4, 640 megs RAM, 64 meg Radeon 8500, fast cable modem. The minimum requirements of the game are 350 mHz G3, 128 megs RAM, 32 meg ATI Rage 128, 56k modem. Now if I'm that far above the minimum requirements then I don't expect to have many problems. Like I said, my system runs just fine for other 3D games out there and I would expect it to do so for Shadowbane.
As far as the "uber-guilds" I have no problems with large and thriving guilds. The problem that I have is that there is no way to get away from a large guild that wants to crush a server into submission. If it was possible to move far enough away from a large guild that they wouldn't be able to affect you too much then it would be just fine for me. This can't happen in Shadowbane, however, because no matter where you are there is an easy way for that large guild to get a group of hundreds to attack you. All they have to do is get 1 summoner near your city and then start a summon chain. Before you know it your city is camped, baned, and smoking.
AFAIK, every server has had at least one battle that would put some of EQ's big raids to shame.
Perhaps so but with pretty much every one of those big battles you have more than 1/2 the participants either lagged to death or forced out of the game due to client or server crashes. It happens just about every time there is a battle of 50+ people.
It is not a matter of having a good computer or connection. The servers themselves start to lag in big battles. There have been many times when I've been on a completely different continent and I've heard of a big raid on a city. Sure enough the server lags horribly just about then and sometimes even crashes. Now maybe on some of the less populated servers this is not as evident but I played on Deception, which is one of the top 3 most populated of the servers.
Not only that but the client sucks too. I'm on a computer that handles Unreal Tournament 2003 at over 50 fps with all the eye candy turned up and in huge fights. The graphics of Shadowbane don't even come close to comparing to UT2003 and they barely pass 40 fps when nothing is going on. If I wander into a city with lots of walls, people, and other objects then the frame rates drop into the teens even with all the graphics turned down. Make this a huge battle and many people start getting 1 frame every few seconds. There are some pretty substantial memory leaks and so the game starts to lag even harder once it exhausts your physical RAM and begins to need to page to disk. On top of all of this the client crashes randomly and often.
The kicker is that once you crash or need to re-log into the game due to the buggy client you will often need to try to get back in for 1/2 hour or more because the login servers are horrible. God forbid that more than a few dozen people need to log in at once, you could be there all night trying to get back into the game. A typical night of playing Shadowbane would be: sit down at computer and attempt to log in, 1/2 hour later get to character selection screen, select character and wait 15 more minutes to get on the game server, play for an hour and then get bumped out of game for some odd reason, rinse and repeat.
I know that I'm not alone in this because there have been droves of people leaving for pretty much the same reasons I've stated here. Just look at the message boards and you'll see plenty of people saying the same thing I just have.
I'm not going to even get into the gameplay issues such as amount of farming needed to support a city, unbalanced classes, missing game features, horrible interfaces, lack of content, game exploits, the hard "soft" cap of level 60, the extreme tendency of servers developing uber-guilds that make it nearly impossible to have more than 1 major nation per server, etc.
A leap year is just because somebody screwed up with time (which I personally think that if we could accept the 1.25 year year, then we'd be a lot better for it)
Hmm, so instead of a year being 365 days long you would want it to be 456 days long? (365 days * 1.25 = 465 days)
A leap year has nothing to do with anyone screwing up. The problem is that a year does not have an integral number of days. A year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes (365.2424 Universal days)*. That means that it takes about 526,297 minutes for the Earth to make a full trip around the sun. After the Earth has rotated about its axis 365 times it will still take about 350 minutes until it reaches the same spot it started from.
That means that if you tried to have the year be an even number of days, say 365, you would fall behind almost 1 full day every 4 years. It's not much but if you let it go for a while you will start having winter during the hottest times of the year. There are a few other rules that adjust the calendar besides the "extra day every 4 years" rule and because of these rules we are able to keep the seasons approximately where they should be.
To learn more about how the calandars were changed visit this web site.
Dunno why you have it on the front page but it's not a front page to me both when I was not logged in and when I was logged in. Isn't there some sort of setting that moves stuff to the front page if it is checked? Maybe you have that turned on.
This was posted in the Apple section, which it is appropriate for. It's funny that the two numbers are the same, even though it's not major news or anything. So it does matter to me, I got a laugh out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I did and here is what they had to say:
I would contend that this is not what Gore was saying. If he had intended people to believe that created the proper environment for the internet then why didn't he say "I took the initiative in creating the environment in which the internet grew.", or "I took the initiative in helping to create the Internet.", or even "Myself and teams of experts worked together to help the Internet grow into what it is today."
No, what Gore said was "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." The only thing that you can properly infer from that statement is that Mr. Gore wanted people to think that he alone was the smart guy who came up with the Internet. He gave no credit to the true people who created the Internet, the teams of hardware, software, and system engineers who pieced the Internet together so it could grow from a few educational and military institutions to encompass the entire Earth.
Oh he didn't? If you take a look at this site you will see the actual statement made by Al Gore in an interview on CNN when he was talking about how he is different from his rival, Bill Bradley:
I'll give you at least 3 very big reasons why Apple has been so successful with making its UI "feel" more complete.
First of all, Apple has a ton of design and user-interface engineers. These are people whose only job is to sit with their feet up on the desk and think of better ways for users to interact with their systems. With Linux you are dealing with mostly programmers and system engineers. They are great at "hacking together" work-a-likes but they aren't so good at getting all of the pieces to "feel" smooth.
Secondly, Apple makes the whole widget from start to finish. They design the computer, they design the software, they design the keyboards and mice. They have pretty much full control of all aspects of the computer system and can ensure that all parts work smoothly with as few glitches and inconsistencies as possible. With Linux you are not only dealing with many different versions of the kernel but also with different ways the kernel can be configured, different userlands, and different hardware setups.
Lastly, Apple has laid down the law and convinced its developers to follow Apple's User Interface Guidelines as closely as possible. Pretty much every program on MacOS has a very similar interface to every other program, making it very easy to learn the basics of working a program and even easier to apply your knowledge to new programs. This sort of user interface consistency is a key factor in making the UI work "smoothly". With Linux you have a hard enough time convincing people to use the same UI skin not to mention the same UI program or the same placement of menus and options from window to window. Programming and UI design on Linux are pretty much left up to each developer and there are so many groups and personalities that it is almost impossible to get them to even agree what end an egg should be broken on.
Although Linux is a fine operating system, it lacks this kind of fit-and-finish that Apple has managed to pull off. Linux has come a long way with the various UI that are available for it, but it is just much harder for a truly "smooth" UI to come about for Linux. Even simply copying the look of MacOS won't make the Linux UI feel "smooth", there is a lot of behind the scenes factors that affect the feel of an operating system. The overall quality of the programming makes Linux an excellent server platform and the overall UI quality on makes a Macintosh and excellent desktop platform. The two systems should work together instead of fighting against each other, we will all be better off for it.
True but this doesn't count the fact that even though you may lose sales on the album itself you probably would not have gotten those sales in the first place! Those people who are just buying a track or two were probably not going to buy the entire album but since the tracks are available as singles they bought them.
Overall choice is a good thing. If you make good songs then people will probably buy all the tracks on an album. Those people who only want 1 or 2 tracks on an album probably would not have bought the entire album so you can count those sales as extra gravy on top of your usual album sales. Sure you will lose a few whole album sales to singles but I'm willing to bet that a decent artist will make more money than they will lose.
Lol, good one. I should have seen that one coming.
No, they still get the million. It's just that the million comes from their royalties, not from out of the thin air. So instead of getting 1 million from the advance and another million from the money left over in the royalties the band gets just the 1 million from the advance. It's like if I loaned you $100 and you gave me the right to sell your guitar in return. I sell your guitar for $100 and so I keep the money from the proceeds. You still get $100, but you paid me back for my loan. That's how an advance works.
Actually we are both wrong. According to the RIAA website (warning, Slashdotters' eyes may burst into flame upon viewing this site), gold is 500 thousand albums and platinum is 1 million albums.
I agree that touring is usually a big win for artists, many of them do much better off of a tour than off of album sales. I included that when I said "This is not counting other sales such as concerts, commercials, product endorsements, book deals, celebrity freebies, and all the other perks of being a star."
Let's put this in perspective. $350,000 divided by 4 is $87,500. Now, I don't know about you but that is a lot of money to make in a year. There are people out there who earn $20,000 a year and live just fine on it. Maybe to Courtney Love that's chump change because she won't be able to support her coke habit but for the rest of us we could live pretty good off of $87,500 pre-tax.
I'm sure that music videos can and do cost that much to make, but let's look at this a different way. Music videos are what, 5 minutes each? So we are talking about spending one million dollars on 10 minutes of video. There are independent film makers out there that make pretty damn good two-hour movies for well under a million. How about you hire someone young, hungry, and promising who doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to produce your movie rather than hiring Steven Spielberg to do it? Sure sure, you gotta spend money to make it and the video is an advertisement for the artist but either cut the cost or stop crying about how expensive it is.
Another thing I noticed in analyzing this piece written by Ms. Love. Her numbers don't add up. Take a look:I would say that the entire article is suspect, since it's clear that Ms. Love can't even do simple arithmetic. I'm sure that she feels slighted because she isn't getting 100% of the millions her albums make, but the fact is that she is living the rock star lifestyle and she has a lot more money and other advantages that most people don't enjoy. Sure, I agree that artists should get a decent cut of the profits from their music but I really hate to hear them cry about how they just aren't getting that extra million or two past the millions they have gotten. They should try working minimum wage scrubbing floors for a while and we'll see how much they cry about being a celebrity.
Oh really?
Well, let's say that you album only goes gold. That's 1 million albums sold, if you really made it big you'd most likely sell more. 1 million albums at $0.12 per song at let's say 10 songs an album equals $1.2 million in your pocket. Sure you have to pay tax, yadda yadda yadda but so does everyone. Do that once every 2 years or so and you'll make $600,000 a year. This is not counting other sales such as concerts, commercials, product endorsements, book deals, celebrity freebies, and all the other perks of being a star.
So is 12 cents sounding a little better now?
Especially since most of those computers are running Windows 98...
Well it's not cooking with a fusion reactor, but using lava to cook may very well be the next best thing. Cooking with Mother Nature can be fun!
You can, the easiest way is to make a second copy of the application in a different place or with a slightly different name. You then launch the second copy. It's generally safe to do this but I wouldn't save any shared documents while both are open, like preferences.
I believe there is a way to launch a second instance of an application through the terminal without copying the app first but I've never tried it and the Terminal is your problem in the first place...
As others have stated, yes Safari uses some of the lower-level Quartz calls. The difference is that these calls are NOT undocumented and hidden. Anyone can find and use the full Quartz API, including Apple, Microsoft, Bob from 3 houses down the way, anyone at all. It's all documented and available to everyone.
It is in Apple's best interests to have all of their APIs as open and available as possible. Take for example Safari. Safari is really just a front-end to Apple's freely-available (and open-sourced) web engine, WebCore. WebCore is a wrapper around KHTML and other programs are starting to use WebCore as their HTML rendering engine. One of these programs is OmniWeb. It uses the WebCore engine to do all of its HTML rendering and so it provides all of the speed and quality of Safari but in a different package. This is a good thing because Omniweb can cater to one part of the browser market that perhaps Safari does not and the two of them can feed each other in development.
The point is that just about every programmer out there has nearly equal access to the MacOS when it comes down to application programming, Apple generally doesn't pull any nasty tricks of using hidden APIs at the application level.
I wouldn't put Omniweb into the "maybe soon again" category. The latest Omniweb (OmniWeb 4.5 beta 1) is using WebCore/KHTML and it renders at least as well as Safari with a ton more features than Safari has. It's very stable too, I'd hardly even call it a beta. Give it a try again, it's excellent now!
Hell the entire industry has been referring to Windows in this way for years...
This certainly sounds like you have turned your back on ppc. You have put your ppc collection it into "maintenance mode", this obviously means that you are treating it differently then the x86 versions. Just what is your definition of "maintenance mode"? If you are continuing your support of ppc then why make such negative statements?
Honestly proclus, you have proven yourself to be just another troll on the various Macintosh forums. You come on these types of forums decrying doom and gloom upon all things Macintosh because of Apples so-called crimes of making proprietary code. You spam the forums with messages of inane questions that you answer yourself, pumping your post count up. You make all sorts of threats of taking your repackaged toys away from the ppc and then you turn right around and claim that your support is still 100% for the platform.
There are a lot of people who are sick of this. We don't need your utilities, we have plenty from Fink or DarwinPorts. If you want to play your social activist game, go play it somewhere else because it is just falling on deaf ears here.
First of all, Apple has a flat-rate price of $10 per album for most albums, no matter how many songs they have. I've gotten a few albums with 16 or 18 songs for $10.
Second, buying a CD on Amazon or Half.com is not the same as buying on the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). You get your song instantly on iTMS, you have to wait for the other stores. Apple's music comes pre-encoded from original masters, the CD you get from the other stores might be scratched and scuffed up. With iTMS you can still convert the AAC file to another format by either burning the song to a CD and then re-encoding or by using Audio Hijack Pro to grab the song from iTunes.
Third, you might also only want a song or two from an album. With iTMS you would only spend $1-$2 for that, with the other stores you would still spend $5-6. iTMS also does not have shipping costs, whereas the other stores you need to pay to have the items shipped to you on top of whatever you paid for them.
Overall, I'd say it is closer than most people think. Sure Amazon or Half.com might be a bit cheaper than iTMS, but you trade off ease-of-use and instant gratification for a dollar or two of savings. It's up to the individual to determine if it's worth it or not, but I definitely feel that iTMS is a service that is worth it.
Whoot, my first flamebait ever on Slashdot! I just wish I knew what I was flaming in the parent post here. The post seemed perfectly on-topic and calm and all.
Oh well, it's not like karma really matters or anything. I've been maxed out for some time now and I'm hardly in danger of losing my karma bonus anytime soon. Nice waste of mod points there!
Lol. *shakes head*
I would definitely recommend Ender's Game as well as its sequels. The later books change character a bit from the first one, but they are enjoyable and they not only tell a good story they also talk about philosophy, morality, and the nature of being. Pretty heavy stuff but written in a very accessible and fun fashion.
You can hardly go wrong with any of Orson Scott Cards's books, although the latest ones aren't as good as his older stuff, with the exception of the new books in the Ender's Game series. Card has a set of awesome books of short stories, get them if you can. Some of the stories are just brutal in what occurs in them, but totally great reads.
Another great author is Stephen R. Donaldson. His series, "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" are extremely well-written and powerful. There are 2 trilogies in the series and although the middle books in each series drag a bit all 6 books are well worth reading. He also has another great series called "Mordant's Need" which consists of two books - "The Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through".
Right now I'm reading George R. R. Martin's "A Clash of Kings", sequel to "A Game of Thrones". Great novels, lots of political backstabbing and battles, the series is well-worth a look at.
Not to mention that I have been a part of two different cities that have had 3 major ToL problems. One time the ToL stopped allowing people to manage city assets properly and no one new could be friended to it. It was replaced and then the new ToL blew up a week or so later, leaving buildings stuck in the middle of hillsides and trees as the city grid reverted to what it was before the tree was placed. The last tree problem was in a different city, the tree kept on disappearing and reappearing at odd times. A CCR came by and removed it and replaced it. Things were normal for a bit until we realized that there was still a phantom tree there that was completely open and people could bind to. It was right in the middle of our city so we had all sorts of griefers coming in through it and there was nothing we could do about it.
I tried to quit after the free month but I was informed that the free month came AFTER my paid period, not before like it said when I signed up for the service. I had signed up for a year believing that the free trial month would allow me to try the service. So now they are trying to stick me for $40 for the software and $120 for the service. Nope, not gonna do it - I called up my credit card company immediately and contested the charges. The grounds? I was sold a product that was not working and I was being charged for services that I could not use.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to play Shadowbane. I signed up with the full intention of playing for at least a year, probably more. The game has some real potential with its storyline, history, and other concepts. What I will not do is pay for something that I spend more time trying to log in than I do playing it. Maybe if the game is still around in 6 months or so and if it is working properly I will try it again.
It is wierd. It seems like there are a few people who don't have much trouble at all. I can honestly say that the majority of people I have talked to about the game have had some sort of login/game server trouble. Many people have had client problems also. I'm glad that you have not had any troubles, but judging from the ratio of complaints to people who have not had problems, I would say that the majority of people do have problems with the game. This is even accounting for the tendency for people to complain more than they praise.
As for me, I'm running a system with pretty much TRIPLE the minimum requirements. I'm on a Macintosh and I have a 1 gHz G4, 640 megs RAM, 64 meg Radeon 8500, fast cable modem. The minimum requirements of the game are 350 mHz G3, 128 megs RAM, 32 meg ATI Rage 128, 56k modem. Now if I'm that far above the minimum requirements then I don't expect to have many problems. Like I said, my system runs just fine for other 3D games out there and I would expect it to do so for Shadowbane.
As far as the "uber-guilds" I have no problems with large and thriving guilds. The problem that I have is that there is no way to get away from a large guild that wants to crush a server into submission. If it was possible to move far enough away from a large guild that they wouldn't be able to affect you too much then it would be just fine for me. This can't happen in Shadowbane, however, because no matter where you are there is an easy way for that large guild to get a group of hundreds to attack you. All they have to do is get 1 summoner near your city and then start a summon chain. Before you know it your city is camped, baned, and smoking.
Perhaps so but with pretty much every one of those big battles you have more than 1/2 the participants either lagged to death or forced out of the game due to client or server crashes. It happens just about every time there is a battle of 50+ people.
It is not a matter of having a good computer or connection. The servers themselves start to lag in big battles. There have been many times when I've been on a completely different continent and I've heard of a big raid on a city. Sure enough the server lags horribly just about then and sometimes even crashes. Now maybe on some of the less populated servers this is not as evident but I played on Deception, which is one of the top 3 most populated of the servers.
Not only that but the client sucks too. I'm on a computer that handles Unreal Tournament 2003 at over 50 fps with all the eye candy turned up and in huge fights. The graphics of Shadowbane don't even come close to comparing to UT2003 and they barely pass 40 fps when nothing is going on. If I wander into a city with lots of walls, people, and other objects then the frame rates drop into the teens even with all the graphics turned down. Make this a huge battle and many people start getting 1 frame every few seconds. There are some pretty substantial memory leaks and so the game starts to lag even harder once it exhausts your physical RAM and begins to need to page to disk. On top of all of this the client crashes randomly and often.
The kicker is that once you crash or need to re-log into the game due to the buggy client you will often need to try to get back in for 1/2 hour or more because the login servers are horrible. God forbid that more than a few dozen people need to log in at once, you could be there all night trying to get back into the game. A typical night of playing Shadowbane would be: sit down at computer and attempt to log in, 1/2 hour later get to character selection screen, select character and wait 15 more minutes to get on the game server, play for an hour and then get bumped out of game for some odd reason, rinse and repeat.
I know that I'm not alone in this because there have been droves of people leaving for pretty much the same reasons I've stated here. Just look at the message boards and you'll see plenty of people saying the same thing I just have.
I'm not going to even get into the gameplay issues such as amount of farming needed to support a city, unbalanced classes, missing game features, horrible interfaces, lack of content, game exploits, the hard "soft" cap of level 60, the extreme tendency of servers developing uber-guilds that make it nearly impossible to have more than 1 major nation per server, etc.
Hmm, so instead of a year being 365 days long you would want it to be 456 days long? (365 days * 1.25 = 465 days)
A leap year has nothing to do with anyone screwing up. The problem is that a year does not have an integral number of days. A year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes (365.2424 Universal days)*. That means that it takes about 526,297 minutes for the Earth to make a full trip around the sun. After the Earth has rotated about its axis 365 times it will still take about 350 minutes until it reaches the same spot it started from.
That means that if you tried to have the year be an even number of days, say 365, you would fall behind almost 1 full day every 4 years. It's not much but if you let it go for a while you will start having winter during the hottest times of the year. There are a few other rules that adjust the calendar besides the "extra day every 4 years" rule and because of these rules we are able to keep the seasons approximately where they should be.
To learn more about how the calandars were changed visit this web site.
*source: Timeline of interesting calendar facts
Dunno why you have it on the front page but it's not a front page to me both when I was not logged in and when I was logged in. Isn't there some sort of setting that moves stuff to the front page if it is checked? Maybe you have that turned on.
This was posted in the Apple section, which it is appropriate for. It's funny that the two numbers are the same, even though it's not major news or anything. So it does matter to me, I got a laugh out of it.