As I see it, the point is record companies make pure profit on their share of the price, whatever it is. Manufacturing and distribution, traditionally their responsibility, is not an issue for them anymore.
And yes they are seeing the big successs of the ringtone-sellers, who charge 3 bucks per tonally challenged, abbreviated song and actually get that. So by their logic they should be able to sell their "CD quality" song at 5 bucks.
What they are essentially trying to do is reimplement the single market into the new medium.
I wonder if we could manage to take up that opportunity and create a market that is a little better for the artists and get rid of the dinosaurs. podshow is interesting, but they sound a little like they just want to replace one dinosaur with another. I currently have an eye on AMP since their approach somehow feels right. But yes, there areothers.
Sorry I had to feed my pet peeve for a moment. Now were are we? Oh yes, the rec companies wanting their share on ipod sales - wouldn't be a something like the canadian music tax, imposed by some ASCAP-like organisation, be something like that?
In Canada it seems to be illegal, but is it here?
I'd like to point out that if he's been getting 3.5 million a year he probably has a high cost of living...
I can see your point, but to me it sounds a little like a 35 year old football player complaining he doesn't get ten million dollar contracts any more.
Just because you earn more money doesn't mean you don't have to budget.
According to the Washington Post, the new anti-obscenity squad, which will consist of eight agents, a supervisor, and assorted staff,
Considering the size of the FBI, this "Unit" is just a small nod to bush's fundamentalist voters, who can then continue to say: "He always begins his day on his knees, praying, such a good christian." and completely forget about the katrina disaster, the poverty increase, the cronyism, the bloated, intrusive government and all the other things going wrong.
The company expects older workers nearing retirement to be the most likely candidates
and
"From then on, the IBM people would become school employees -- the program will encourage them to work in public schools but they can go private if they wish -- and leave Big Blue's payroll."
In other words: The company can cut down on retirement funds, thus increasing shareholder value, with the added benefit of sustaining workforce reinforcement at a very low cost.
I can't help but wonder why people get all excited about a company beeing selfish.
In case you haven't noticed, that's Microsofts new marketing strategy:-) Invent some feature name that sparks association with a competitors product to make the buyer think they are of similar capabilities. Apple's Aqua feature became Aero, Apple's Quartz feature became Glass, so Sparkle seems to be quite creative, I mean they could have named it Glitter.
You see, since it is inevitable that Cthulhu is coming and devours all mankind, I would rather wake him now and see to it that I'm eaten first. My personal freedom has no value, the only goal is to secure the end is coming. (raises voice to high pitched trembling whine) The End!
Incidentially, that has nothing to do with the fact that I look like a frog. Now where's my pitchfork I have some strangers to chase out of the village before sunrise.
Now, I know somebody will point out OpenFirmware [...] This is nothing more than the Maximalist approach [...]
[The OpenFirmware drivers] are good enough to boot the system, and then get replaced by OS specific drivers [...]
You are thinking too black-and-white. Nothing is stopping you from using a hardware and OS independant approach like Open Firmware and then instead of booting a kernel, bring up a device hardware abstraction layer that boots a kernel.
It hasn't been done yet (to my knowledge) but that shouldn't stop you right?;-)
Reading your text I think you have a few misconceptions on what Open Firmware is and which features it provides. I suggest reading this very insightful introduction.
If you are an embedded systems engineer, what do you think about alternate approaches like Tinyboot?
"Not victory Obi won. The shroud of the darkside has fallen. Begun the clone war has."
Yes there are rules. But they are not set in stone you know. And as soon as one starts "salting" a passphrase it should be very difficult.
I think you underestimate peoples inventiveness in breaking the rules - although to a certain extent I have to agree with you: unless you let a computer generate a good random password for you there are always patterns in your password.
The brain itself is a pattern generation/recognition machine and not too able to overcome this, so if you invent a password yourself, the generation part is always security by obscurity. Luckily the brain is quite inventive if it comes to inventing new patterns, so guessing the underlying patterns plus the password should be almost as hard as brute forcing the password itself.
You say that like it's a bad thing under this administration.
Well I think it's one thing to vigorously disagree with what your government is doing, but I strongly believe that one absolutely never should shut out discussion with fellow citizens, just because one thinks they are doing something really stupid.
The best way to combat stupidity is to educate. If you fail, then maybe you should revisit your methods and/or basic assumptions. (and don't waste your time on the hopeless 10%)
I've learned this the hard way when I was young and a mac zealot. People would just stop talking with you about certain themes.
While I think not beeing asked about Windows problems is an actual benefit, I think it's important in politics to always talk with another, since it's very easy to forget the huge common ground all of us citizens in a democracy stand on if one just focuses on the differences (like the current hype-driven media), artificialy deviding into groups that aren't really there.
Of course, the problem with that is that little SEC mandated qualifier: "Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results".
Good Point. Nobody can see into the future. The thing is both the privatization and the conservative (as in "to conserve") development plan for the social security system rely on the assumption of a relatively stable economy.
Since both rely on the same preconditions I think it makes a bad distinction parameter, what do you think?
I agree that there is action required if one want's to decide on the future of this system. I wish I could remember the paper I read a month ago about how the system could be saved by raising taxes by a relatively low amount (i thought is was something arund 0.7%) now, but I cannot seem to find it:(.
which, if we do not have the national deficit under control BEFORE that point, will have major negative domestic economic impacts-- and may risk in the US having to defer or default on some debts.
I agree too, that the debt-plunging in 2018 doesn't sound good and with the current... erm.. "underperforming" deficit management of this government - a radical change seems to be necessary.
But wouldn't it be easier to get the national deficit under control? If that would solve issues easier? I mean even a whimp like Clinton could do it;-)
What do you think about the estimate of the Congressional Budget Office actuaries that the current administrations plan would actually advance the date of the debt-shifting ("the crisis") from 2018 to between 2006 and 2010? (mentioned as a conclusion in the same report further down)
From the way you describe it, given the current fiscal situation, and assuming their assumption is correct, wouldn't this be something like a death blow to the social security system?
If this just has a grain of truth in it, why even consider this President's Commission proposal if one wants to prevent a dip into debt of the current system?
Is the conclusion of the analysis flawed? Or is this "stop dipping into debt" just the make-believe point to sell a different agenda that has a point, but is very difficult to "sell to the public"?
Seperation of Facts and Fiction
on
State of the Union
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Whoa, what's the matter with you people? I've seen waaay too much bashing in this thread and waayy too much discussion about interpretation of minor stuff. But no juice.
Is this country really that divided? I mean there's no question the situation in iraq is dead serious.
And on social security privatization there are waay too many smoke dischargers working. If you want the facts available you should look here.
If we have a common ground on the facts, only then you could argue wether the solidarity system currently in place is worth to be saved for the price of for example one percent of your income our if you want your lifesavings to be donated to the good cause of lockheed martin.
The level of calling-each-other-asshats is just amazing and ultimatively helps noone.
Keep in mind that mplayer uses win32 dlls, so if your game is non-x86-32 then it's useless.
Well I can play Quicktime films on LinuxPPC (i.e. no windows dlls) with both mplayer and vlc.
Not all, but some of the more obscure ones like, for example this one.
Also, I have found no problems with.mp4 files (with MPEG-4 video/ and both mp3 and mp4 (aka AAC) audio): they play in quicktime on mac os x and with vlc on any other platform.
technically how is this different from, say prodigem?
With prodigem you can also point the service to *any* file on the net and it creates and hosts the bittorrent and first seed for you - a solution that I would describe as technically superior to this "vendor lock in" solution.
News for nerds? hardly.
Instead disguised advertisement for h.e. sounds about right.
Well, the guys must be extremely busy, since the official mac development page for darwinia was last updated on november 12th;-)
does anyone know if the linux port is done inhouse or by an outsider too? (i.e. any interesting devel logs about this game out there?)
I was taught that it was God-Father's (Yahweh's) wish that God-Son (Jesus) were sent to Earth to die by torture.
Huh? I read that book, but cannot remember this part. Maybe you (or your teachers) are just interpreting "To live and die as a human among humans" as "To die a gruesome death, just because"?
as I said: mod parent up, it deserves more modpoints than these measily three.
some of the big porting to mac studios have an inhouse DirectX -> Mac library.
ok, I know this is a (more or less direct) quote from someone well known, who visited the SDI program's labs and said about the workers there something along the lines of:
"They are extremely bright, talented people
with absolutely no common sense"
Anyone has an idea who the author of this quote could be? I used google to no avail, maybe someone wants to earn modpoints ?;-)
"The zip disk is not especially good evidence, since bad drives kill disks just as well as bad disks kill drives"
Interesting. I "tried" the disk on 2 factory new drives. I wouldn't say these drives were both "bad" from the beginning, since they both played all other zips before. The zip disk was anecdotal evidence not overall proof. My point was that a soul-eating, drive-damaging medium is in the realm of the possible.
What's the Click of Death? Never heard about it...
(goes to read the linked report)
I think you read the wrong section. the section you quote is page 8, and "oral toxicity" means ingestion, not inhalation. The important part is about inhalation of Uranium particles (p6).
says the article: "Soluble components of uranium absorbed from the pulmonary tree are deposited in the skeleton within a few weeks, with a biological half-life in the lungs of 120 days. A considerably longer pulmonary retention of 1,470 days is expected in the case of inhalation of uranium oxides."
I conclude evil Uranium Oxides, if inhaled, lasts about four years in your lung.
The WHO site on depleted uranium has a report too.
sez the report: "Due to the pyrophoric nature of uranium metal and the extreme temperatures generated on impact of depleted uranium ammunition on a hard target, it ignites and produces an aerosol of fine particles of uranium oxides."
it goes on to explain that three components formed will be "U3O8" "UO2" and "UO3". We already know that they are not very nasty when ingested, but when inhaled?
says the article: "it has been postulated that uranium is mobilized from the lungs into systemic circulation, over 60% ending in the bone and kidney and 40% excreted in urine"
Now we have a radioactive, toxic compound, that lasts four years in your lungs and then deposits itself into your bones. nice.
Whats more: "KFOR informed the mission that it did not exclude the possibility that traces of plutonium could be present in depleted uranium."
Ahhh so we have yet another toxid metal we inhale, with an estimated ld50 (50% of an exposed population dies) of about 0.0002 to 0.003 g/Individual (seems to be disputed, since the lower number is actually the percentage you need to inhale to develop cancer for sure, thus dying of cancer, not plutonium) and deadly dose of about 0.025 g/Individual when inhaled.
I'd say since Areas of DU-use and increased cancer and mutations of newborns in the civil population are that overlapping that a possible link cannot be dismissed. That's the only reason I'd need to ban DU ammo.
While corrupted firmware due to some region coding might be possible in case of the standalone DVD-player, I think it's highly unlikely that this happens twice, with a completely different DVD player/firmware combination.
But regardless of cause the firmware update seems to be a must, just to repair anything that got borked;-)
Ahhh, and yes it is possible for a medium to trash a device. I still have a zip disk that does this to all the newer zip drives. (yes its just the content, it's the copy of another zipdisk that does the same.)
No, more likely it's some guy trying to use Windows 2000 Pro as a webserver. It has a ten connection limit
Ahhh, thats interesting, thx. that sheds some light on ms's business strategies:
Step One: Sell user Overpriced OS advertising "so you can host your own Web site on the Internet"
Step Two: Profit!
Step Three: Post story from user's internet page to slashdot.
Step Four: User upgrades to server version.
Step Five: More Profit! ;-)
"
So, after the ice age coming back, global warming destroying us, acid rain eating us and the oil supply being exhausted by 2010 I take science headlines with a grain of salt.
"
I understand your reservations on clueless journalists that blow scientific findings out of proportion to produce eye-catching (and often scientific wrong) headlines. But to use these misrepresentations to discredit the scientists that actually do the work is just stupid.
"
they lie, steal, cheat and grab for headlines as reagularly as any normal person would.
"
I think you are mixing personal life with scientific work.
One may cheat on her significant other while doing "overtime lab hours", but that does not automatically invalidate her scientific findings.
And as the other poster pointed out your wording is rather questionable. It could easily misinterpreted as accusing scientists in general of lying, stealing and cheating as part of their work.
"
I mention this because our geek culture has a way of worshiping the words of scientists and as a result some amusing lies have drifted in and out of school text books
"
I do not worship. I verify.
I find your unfounded generalisations offensive.
Tell me one, just one, "lie" that has entered any reputable schoolbook.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes they are seeing the big successs of the ringtone-sellers, who charge 3 bucks per tonally challenged, abbreviated song and actually get that. So by their logic they should be able to sell their "CD quality" song at 5 bucks.
What they are essentially trying to do is reimplement the single market into the new medium.
I wonder if we could manage to take up that opportunity and create a market that is a little better for the artists and get rid of the dinosaurs. podshow is interesting, but they sound a little like they just want to replace one dinosaur with another. I currently have an eye on AMP since their approach somehow feels right. But yes, there are others.
Sorry I had to feed my pet peeve for a moment. Now were are we? Oh yes, the rec companies wanting their share on ipod sales - wouldn't be a something like the canadian music tax, imposed by some ASCAP-like organisation, be something like that?
In Canada it seems to be illegal, but is it here?
I can see your point, but to me it sounds a little like a 35 year old football player complaining he doesn't get ten million dollar contracts any more.
Just because you earn more money doesn't mean you don't have to budget.
I can't help but wonder why people get all excited about a company beeing selfish.
In case you haven't noticed, that's Microsofts new marketing strategy :-) Invent some feature name that sparks association with a competitors product to make the buyer think they are of similar capabilities. Apple's Aqua feature became Aero, Apple's Quartz feature became Glass, so Sparkle seems to be quite creative, I mean they could have named it Glitter.
Incidentially, that has nothing to do with the fact that I look like a frog. Now where's my pitchfork I have some strangers to chase out of the village before sunrise.
That said, slashdot needs +1, Irony.
and -1, Irony, too.
It hasn't been done yet (to my knowledge) but that shouldn't stop you right?
Reading your text I think you have a few misconceptions on what Open Firmware is and which features it provides. I suggest reading this very insightful introduction.
If you are an embedded systems engineer, what do you think about alternate approaches like Tinyboot?
Yes there are rules. But they are not set in stone you know. And as soon as one starts "salting" a passphrase it should be very difficult.
Another example:
"Alpha-Omega-Thau-Aleph-©e Chi-Squared-delta+small-R-noob directory"
I think you underestimate peoples inventiveness in breaking the rules - although to a certain extent I have to agree with you: unless you let a computer generate a good random password for you there are always patterns in your password.
The brain itself is a pattern generation/recognition machine and not too able to overcome this, so if you invent a password yourself, the generation part is always security by obscurity. Luckily the brain is quite inventive if it comes to inventing new patterns, so guessing the underlying patterns plus the password should be almost as hard as brute forcing the password itself.
Well I think it's one thing to vigorously disagree with what your government is doing, but I strongly believe that one absolutely never should shut out discussion with fellow citizens, just because one thinks they are doing something really stupid.
The best way to combat stupidity is to educate. If you fail, then maybe you should revisit your methods and/or basic assumptions. (and don't waste your time on the hopeless 10%)
I've learned this the hard way when I was young and a mac zealot. People would just stop talking with you about certain themes.
While I think not beeing asked about Windows problems is an actual benefit, I think it's important in politics to always talk with another, since it's very easy to forget the huge common ground all of us citizens in a democracy stand on if one just focuses on the differences (like the current hype-driven media), artificialy deviding into groups that aren't really there.
Good Point. Nobody can see into the future. The thing is both the privatization and the conservative (as in "to conserve") development plan for the social security system rely on the assumption of a relatively stable economy. Since both rely on the same preconditions I think it makes a bad distinction parameter, what do you think?
I agree that there is action required if one want's to decide on the future of this system. I wish I could remember the paper I read a month ago about how the system could be saved by raising taxes by a relatively low amount (i thought is was something arund 0.7%) now, but I cannot seem to find it :(.
which, if we do not have the national deficit under control BEFORE that point, will have major negative domestic economic impacts-- and may risk in the US having to defer or default on some debts.
I agree too, that the debt-plunging in 2018 doesn't sound good and with the current ... erm.. "underperforming" deficit management of this government - a radical change seems to be necessary. ;-)
But wouldn't it be easier to get the national deficit under control? If that would solve issues easier? I mean even a whimp like Clinton could do it
What do you think about the estimate of the Congressional Budget Office actuaries that the current administrations plan would actually advance the date of the debt-shifting ("the crisis") from 2018 to between 2006 and 2010? (mentioned as a conclusion in the same report further down)
From the way you describe it, given the current fiscal situation, and assuming their assumption is correct, wouldn't this be something like a death blow to the social security system?
If this just has a grain of truth in it, why even consider this President's Commission proposal if one wants to prevent a dip into debt of the current system?
Is the conclusion of the analysis flawed? Or is this "stop dipping into debt" just the make-believe point to sell a different agenda that has a point, but is very difficult to "sell to the public"?
Is this country really that divided? I mean there's no question the situation in iraq is dead serious.
And on social security privatization there are waay too many smoke dischargers working. If you want the facts available you should look here.
If we have a common ground on the facts, only then you could argue wether the solidarity system currently in place is worth to be saved for the price of for example one percent of your income our if you want your lifesavings to be donated to the good cause of lockheed martin.
The level of calling-each-other-asshats is just amazing and ultimatively helps noone.
Well I can play Quicktime films on LinuxPPC (i.e. no windows dlls) with both mplayer and vlc.
Not all, but some of the more obscure ones like, for example this one.
Also, I have found no problems with .mp4 files (with MPEG-4 video/ and both mp3 and mp4 (aka AAC) audio): they play in quicktime on mac os x and with vlc on any other platform.
With prodigem you can also point the service to *any* file on the net and it creates and hosts the bittorrent and first seed for you - a solution that I would describe as technically superior to this "vendor lock in" solution.
News for nerds? hardly.
Instead disguised advertisement for h.e. sounds about right.
Well, the guys must be extremely busy, since the official mac development page for darwinia was last updated on november 12th ;-)
does anyone know if the linux port is done inhouse or by an outsider too? (i.e. any interesting devel logs about this game out there?)
Huh? I read that book, but cannot remember this part. Maybe you (or your teachers) are just interpreting "To live and die as a human among humans" as "To die a gruesome death, just because"?
as I said: mod parent up, it deserves more modpoints than these measily three. some of the big porting to mac studios have an inhouse DirectX -> Mac library.
"They are extremely bright, talented people
with absolutely no common sense"
Anyone has an idea who the author of this quote could be? I used google to no avail, maybe someone wants to earn modpoints ? ;-)
Interesting. I "tried" the disk on 2 factory new drives. I wouldn't say these drives were both "bad" from the beginning, since they both played all other zips before. The zip disk was anecdotal evidence not overall proof. My point was that a soul-eating, drive-damaging medium is in the realm of the possible.
What's the Click of Death? Never heard about it...
(goes to read the linked report)
I think you read the wrong section. the section you quote is page 8, and "oral toxicity" means ingestion, not inhalation. The important part is about inhalation of Uranium particles (p6).
says the article: "Soluble components of uranium absorbed from the pulmonary tree are deposited in the skeleton within a few weeks, with a biological half-life in the lungs of 120 days. A considerably longer pulmonary retention of 1,470 days is expected in the case of inhalation of uranium oxides."
I conclude evil Uranium Oxides, if inhaled, lasts about four years in your lung.
The WHO site on depleted uranium has a report too.
sez the report: "Due to the pyrophoric nature of uranium metal and the extreme temperatures generated on impact of depleted uranium ammunition on a hard target, it ignites and produces an aerosol of fine particles of uranium oxides."
it goes on to explain that three components formed will be "U3O8" "UO2" and "UO3". We already know that they are not very nasty when ingested, but when inhaled?
says the article: "it has been postulated that uranium is mobilized from the lungs into systemic circulation, over 60% ending in the bone and kidney and 40% excreted in urine"
Now we have a radioactive, toxic compound, that lasts four years in your lungs and then deposits itself into your bones. nice.
Whats more: "KFOR informed the mission that it did not exclude the possibility that traces of plutonium could be present in depleted uranium."
Ahhh so we have yet another toxid metal we inhale, with an estimated ld50 (50% of an exposed population dies) of about 0.0002 to 0.003 g/Individual (seems to be disputed, since the lower number is actually the percentage you need to inhale to develop cancer for sure, thus dying of cancer, not plutonium) and deadly dose of about 0.025 g/Individual when inhaled.
I'd say since Areas of DU-use and increased cancer and mutations of newborns in the civil population are that overlapping that a possible link cannot be dismissed. That's the only reason I'd need to ban DU ammo.
But regardless of cause the firmware update seems to be a must, just to repair anything that got borked
Ahhh, and yes it is possible for a medium to trash a device. I still have a zip disk that does this to all the newer zip drives. (yes its just the content, it's the copy of another zipdisk that does the same.)
Ahhh, thats interesting, thx. that sheds some light on ms's business strategies:
Step One: Sell user Overpriced OS advertising "so you can host your own Web site on the Internet"
;-)
Step Two: Profit!
Step Three: Post story from user's internet page to slashdot.
Step Four: User upgrades to server version.
Step Five: More Profit!
Combined with AmphetaOutlines it is really powerfull.
Maybe if we hit reload more often the site will become accessible again ;-)
This is really a testament of strength of yet another MS product.
On a more serious note, anybody has a mirror?
But to use these misrepresentations to discredit the scientists that actually do the work is just stupid. I think you are mixing personal life with scientific work.
One may cheat on her significant other while doing "overtime lab hours", but that does not automatically invalidate her scientific findings.
And as the other poster pointed out your wording is rather questionable. It could easily misinterpreted as accusing scientists in general of lying, stealing and cheating as part of their work. I do not worship. I verify.
I find your unfounded generalisations offensive.
Tell me one, just one, "lie" that has entered any reputable schoolbook.
Everything else would be emulated, so why insisting on this two-sided, archaic worlview?.