i'm never much with the opinion that games are photorealistic, the quotes around the text were to indicate that I was quoting the article which marketed the game as having photorealistic graphics. Also the article notes that the screen doubles as your rear vision mirror when not being used as the gaming display. So there isn't any additional hardware dropping down to play the game.
"Driver kills three after revved up on racing game."
They'd acuse the makers of trying to entice real-world drivers to speed, by supplying them with a "photorealistic" race experience through real world streets, which then entice the driver to perform along the same streets (as in the articles New York example.)
In Australia (home country warning) it's against advertising regulations to sells cars by showing how fast/aggressive they can drive. (Which is common-sense as you can never legally drive them like that on our bodgey streets.)
There was xTunes, then that turned into Sumi (funnily ignorant to Apple having the "sosumi" sound effect.) Plus there are numerous other iTunes copies out there, the reality is there is actually no demand for them and that is why these projects have little interest unlike for example the Mozilla project.
iTunes is not similar to Internet Explorer what so ever, unless you're on a Macintosh, you need to download it or install iTunes manually, it's a choice you make. You don't have to buy an iPod or use the iTunes Music Store. In fact you can happily go by using your computer and never have to know neither Apple nor iTunes.
Internet Explorer was the at the centre of a monopoly, it came preinstalled, full of bugs and consumers were crying for alternatives for almost 10 years before the Firefox project came and provided a reasonable "answer".
There are very few people out there crying for an iTunes alternative, the iTunes popularity is rather justly earnt and is only used by people who are interested in listening to music on an iPod or purchasing music from iTMS. Consumers aren't demanding that iPods or iTunes work with other online music stores or other music programs. In fact the only people I actually hear complaining are Real and Creative.
The other online stores are -amazingly- bad, poorly laid out, with pricing models that reflect one theme "greed", the model of "download as many or as few songs as you like, but pay for them until the day that you die otherwise we take them back from you" is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as the excessively under-designed garbage pieces of electronics they want you to play them on, where they franchise that a 64kbps Windows media file as a decent alternative to 128kbps AAC audio.
So if those are my "choices", I'm pretty pleased to be giving my attention to iTunes and Apple, as they certainly seem to have a much better clue about what they're doing and are satisfying what I'm asking for in technology vs. music and willing to upgrade their product regardless of what the competition is up to.
Adding laws and removing laws is an interesting analogy, but Laws to Government are things that you should follow and have had (hopefully) a lot of good public thought and process. On the otherside when using Wiki you need to keep in your mind that the information is public rasterisation of a set of events, so the information you are reading could be true (use your good judgement), could be entirely false, could be as we call on slashdot "flame-bait" and so on. In general you shouldn't take everything you read so seriously as there is always good chance that what you're reading is incredibly biased. Finally as with everything, you search your information from more than one source. (As per the doctors' second-opinion analogy.) With all the information together you can decide using your own judgement, and not be lazy and take someone else's opinion as your own.
With this in mind, Wiki fits in the picture perfectly as it's a good-will source of information and an excellent starting point.
While I agree to the point you make here. A free wifi network does compete with BellSouths business model. However two points need to be made.
1.) First the wifi network is another charity gift to the people of Louisiana, so they can get back on their feet, and wouldn't be doing too much damage to BellSouths bottom line anyway. 2.) Secondly once the network was established they were looking for a company to take over control of it, now because of BellSouths donation they were pretty much guaranteed that they were going to get this network to add to their own. (Probably even be allowed to introduce charges, or as a minimum offer pay-for premium services over this network.)
Instead BellSouth chucked a tanty, because they aren't happy that they may lose out on a few bucks between now and the point that they do the hand over.
Here is the thing, Google (like other websites) don't use any complicated or underhanded methods to obtain the website that they are sourcing the information from.
If a news site doesn't want google obtaining it's images/stories, it is a trivial process to block content to google's web crawler (or any other website's crawlers/spiders.)
This is just the companies wanting both the free advertising which google provides them and wanting some money for having their content seen in other web spaces.
The Internet is not a print publication, and linking to other websites or showing the content of other websites has been a core strength of the Internet as a whole. If a website begins asking for fees, then they will merely isolate themselves. Similar to how google doesn't index pay-for-services.
I was wondering how long it would take them to find an analogous system to compare it to, so they didn't have to keep calling it the "we're-greedy-price-tiering".
After-all if it was really a stock market they are going for, then some of their older songs would be about 3c for 100 songs, or "bankrupt" altogether. In short it's not a stock market, it's just marketing, this will never be a win for consumers.
You can see what is going to happen already "Oh Grease is on TV this Christmas weekend, so the grease sound track can take a $0.50 hike this next few weeks." Better still I can imagine them coordinating breast revealing "wardrobe malfunctions" with sudden peaks in that authors collection.
i work for a sunglass company in australia, we were offered these exact glasses from one of our vendors in china. We were going to use them for one of the local brands here, except a little research revealed that oakley holds a patent on sunglasses as mp3 players.. so depending on how these are sold, it's very likely to be patent infringement. and no the original vendor does not have a license from oakley.
"And unfortunately, the writer of the article is a bit new to the 3D monitor industry"
I think the author is new to the 3d industry altogether. This is a choice quote from the article "it was compatible with OpenGL and Direct Draw - both software components of the Microsoft Windows operating system that allow programmers to manipulate video for computer games."
I tend not to read much more when an author writes unfocussed information like this. OpenGL isn't actually installed in windows by default anymore, and opengl/direct draw aren't really confined to just "manipulating video". He would have been better to suggest that the system supports the two leading 3d platforms.
EULAs in general are difficult to enforce, because they are often ambiguous, have clashing clauses or as they say in the legal world "have more holes than a lattice fence". Legal documents are written with the intention of covering all possible situations, and often worded such that each clause is as broad as possible this is to avoid said lattice fence gaps. This is because once a gap appears it is exploited by lawyers to make the entire document sound ridiculous. (Which is often the case anyway.)
For example a lawyer will jump right onto this clause, and talk about all the other methods of research, they'll attempt to broadly classify what research is (including using the software at all.) His final point will be that it's impossible to satisfy the terms of the agreement in any way, making it an invalid document. For example the phrase "by reading this line you agree to not read this line", is obviously ridiculous, but essentially any lawyer will be able to make this EULA analogous to this.
Another good example is that Apple's new iMac comes with a remote control and software that is driven by this. This software has now been hack to run on all Apple hardware with very little effort, even though it's not meant to be used on non-iMac computers. Sure it runs, but it runs best when there is a remote control driving it. My point is that Apple have logical ways that entice people to spend their money rather than hack around it, if the mac is for convienience and luxury, then hacking, possible slowdowns via emulated hardware and losing stability are simply not on the agenda.
Additionally a similar argument is that alot of Mac software doesn't come with activation(when their intel counterparts do.) This is because there is strong correlation between people that purchase macs and people who are willing to cough up the dollars for software to run on it. A person who is unwilling to pay for software, is also someone who is unwilling to pay the premium prices that apple ask for.
And Another: You can burn all your DRM iTunes Music Store songs to CDs, re-rip them and put them on any device you like... but the majority are happy with just using it on an iPod.
My point is that, by taking away trivial hacks to make OSX work on generic hardware, the people who are likely to buy a mac, still will. The people who are never going to buy a mac, will hack it and run it on any hardware they like and probably aren't interested in purchasing an apple anyway; but this will just eat away a bit of that MS Windows marketshare. (Which makes Jobs happy.)
Then again, nothing really stopped people from running Mac OS X on Intel hardware even when it was still in PPC instructions. PearPC, etc. Also PPC Mac OS X ran fine on PPC IBM boxes.
I noticed a line in the article reading:
King said the "Open source isn't open" argument is Microsoft's attempt to wave the Unix fear flag.
Don't you find it interesting that the way Microsoft inspire fear is to claim that it is close to their own business model. They might as well say "Watch out don't use RedHat Linux because it will cost you money"....which is entirely different from Windows how?
The other interesting part of the microsoft argument is: A team has the capacity to change the OS code significantly. (which microsoft says will require redhat to write you custom patches which will cost you money.) But if the team is competent enough to change the OS so significantly that updates aren't compatible. Then they'll also be competent enough to review the updates from the OSS community and tailor them to work with their unique system.
It's not a fair assumption to say that your company is smart enough to change the code significantly, but then on the other hand suggest that your company is now too incompetent to apply new updates/patches without the help of RedHat. (What is fair to say is that: If your company function is so unique that you need to significantly alter a mainstream linux distro to make it work with your business, then you will likely have a permanent/contractual IT team growing and maintaining that same system, and quite likely never had to buy RedHat linux in the first place.)
I definitely agree with you on the pace of which broadband speeds have increased as well as the ability to be always online.
I agree that we will concede more applications to the web, but I think these services are designed more so that any big company can go from having a small web precense to one where they can offer all kinds of online services. E.g. for the Disney example, licensees could stitch together their own localised disney commercial, and have it burnt to disc and sent to them. Or use search to go through the hundreds of style guides and have collections put together for them based on search criteria. I think the services will be great in that regard. As these would be real world applications to each of the tools, rather than just having the iLife suite online.
Just putting your everyday apps online doesn't make it a killer service. I'd always prefer to run it locally, particularly with broadband speeds not being favourable to say editing HD footage.
Some things work well being able to be accessed online (Mail and schedules are the best examples I can think of.)
I feel that alot of the service components are going to go to waste with underuse.
The era of the laptop doesn't combine well with the all-online paradigm. The most successful approach I have seen with online tools, are ones that download to your device, and sync/update when you get back to an internet connection. Simpler models of this are music download services, and video download services (rather than video streaming services.) Basically so you can carry your content with you, and back it up quickly to devices. Consumers want freedom over their data.
The internet is an extension of ideas that we already had. Bulletin boards allowed small groups of people to interact, particularly with things like MOOs/MUDs. Then CompuServe was alot like the internet before the internet really took off, despite being a commercially owned entity, and yes it was a bit like pay tv.
A qualification means that you have the ability to do the tasks that the qualification outlines. It is however prone to people who have the ability to cram-study or cheat. Unlike the real world work environment where incompetence becomes clear quickly.(How many people at your work do you consider incompetant?)
If you're in the position where you need to learn something, and it's not all about the piece of paper, then online learning can be a great help at fast tracking this in an inexpensive way.
However if you need a piece of paper that says MIT on it so you can negotiate a 20K payrise, then your online-only university isn't going to be much of a help.
It's not the nature of being taught by correspondence, but rather the esteem of the university which issues the certification. Online courses available from certain ivy-league universities are still considered legitimate, because the issuer is considered with high regard.
The reason why people have negative feelings to online courses is because there is an over abundance of fake degrees available online, which use catch phrases such as "Earn a degree, based on your existing life experience", and "Qualifications in XX hours".
It's cool, but the styling is unoriginal (even microsoft do the "apple aqua" look now, of glass balls and table top reflections.) The layouts on the CDs and other materials are also familiar with the same way apple lay out their CDs. It's typical flattery-culture to take someone elses concept/styling and alter it for their own use.
Does anyone have a photo-list of the other top entries?
This information is bit confused. The situation Australia faced was that because there was no iTMS there was no legal way to put music on iPods As all legal-downloadable music available in Australia used a DRM format other than the FairPlay used on iPods.
It's true we have no "fair use" laws in Australia, as that was a test case which did not occur here. No companies here appear particularly worried by the continual illegal use of copyright material. We sell VCRs, DVD burning VR's, iPods, etc, etc. With only 20M population, we're hardly a threat in comparison to say China and many asian countries which we're near, which is far more blatant in their abuse of copyright. Additionally the sales of these electronic devices outweigh the damage they do to the industries through copyright abuse.
Also before someone jumps up and down and says that Australia is backwards for not having strict Fair Use, take a moment to think that we also don't have the PATRIOT Act, the DMCA and few other goodies.
Slashdot Mirror
i'm never much with the opinion that games are photorealistic, the quotes around the text were to indicate that I was quoting the article which marketed the game as having photorealistic graphics. Also the article notes that the screen doubles as your rear vision mirror when not being used as the gaming display. So there isn't any additional hardware dropping down to play the game.
They'd acuse the makers of trying to entice real-world drivers to speed, by supplying them with a "photorealistic" race experience through real world streets, which then entice the driver to perform along the same streets (as in the articles New York example.)
In Australia (home country warning) it's against advertising regulations to sells cars by showing how fast/aggressive they can drive. (Which is common-sense as you can never legally drive them like that on our bodgey streets.)
iTunes is not similar to Internet Explorer what so ever, unless you're on a Macintosh, you need to download it or install iTunes manually, it's a choice you make.
You don't have to buy an iPod or use the iTunes Music Store. In fact you can happily go by using your computer and never have to know neither Apple nor iTunes.
Internet Explorer was the at the centre of a monopoly, it came preinstalled, full of bugs and consumers were crying for alternatives for almost 10 years before the Firefox project came and provided a reasonable "answer".
There are very few people out there crying for an iTunes alternative, the iTunes popularity is rather justly earnt and is only used by people who are interested in listening to music on an iPod or purchasing music from iTMS. Consumers aren't demanding that iPods or iTunes work with other online music stores or other music programs. In fact the only people I actually hear complaining are Real and Creative.
The other online stores are -amazingly- bad, poorly laid out, with pricing models that reflect one theme "greed", the model of "download as many or as few songs as you like, but pay for them until the day that you die otherwise we take them back from you" is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as the excessively under-designed garbage pieces of electronics they want you to play them on, where they franchise that a 64kbps Windows media file as a decent alternative to 128kbps AAC audio.
So if those are my "choices", I'm pretty pleased to be giving my attention to iTunes and Apple, as they certainly seem to have a much better clue about what they're doing and are satisfying what I'm asking for in technology vs. music and willing to upgrade their product regardless of what the competition is up to.
With this in mind, Wiki fits in the picture perfectly as it's a good-will source of information and an excellent starting point.
1.) First the wifi network is another charity gift to the people of Louisiana, so they can get back on their feet, and wouldn't be doing too much damage to BellSouths bottom line anyway.
2.) Secondly once the network was established they were looking for a company to take over control of it, now because of BellSouths donation they were pretty much guaranteed that they were going to get this network to add to their own. (Probably even be allowed to introduce charges, or as a minimum offer pay-for premium services over this network.)
Instead BellSouth chucked a tanty, because they aren't happy that they may lose out on a few bucks between now and the point that they do the hand over.
If a news site doesn't want google obtaining it's images/stories, it is a trivial process to block content to google's web crawler (or any other website's crawlers/spiders.)
This is just the companies wanting both the free advertising which google provides them and wanting some money for having their content seen in other web spaces.
The Internet is not a print publication, and linking to other websites or showing the content of other websites has been a core strength of the Internet as a whole. If a website begins asking for fees, then they will merely isolate themselves. Similar to how google doesn't index pay-for-services.
After-all if it was really a stock market they are going for, then some of their older songs would be about 3c for 100 songs, or "bankrupt" altogether. In short it's not a stock market, it's just marketing, this will never be a win for consumers.
You can see what is going to happen already "Oh Grease is on TV this Christmas weekend, so the grease sound track can take a $0.50 hike this next few weeks."
Better still I can imagine them coordinating breast revealing "wardrobe malfunctions" with sudden peaks in that authors collection.
This is the sort of thing governments remember. So when it comes to a random trial in the future, don't expect bell-south to be coming up aces.
image how good flash could be if adobe cleaned up the interface (so say the properties box isn't different for every tool.)
i work for a sunglass company in australia, we were offered these exact glasses from one of our vendors in china. We were going to use them for one of the local brands here, except a little research revealed that oakley holds a patent on sunglasses as mp3 players..
so depending on how these are sold, it's very likely to be patent infringement.
and no the original vendor does not have a license from oakley.
rumours suggest intel powerbooks will be 25% thinner... if that is even possible.
a slashdotting is a birthday cake to them, ...so right about now they'd qualify to be a bakery. in any event they're toasted. *ding ding tssshh*
I think the author is new to the 3d industry altogether.
This is a choice quote from the article "it was compatible with OpenGL and Direct Draw - both software components of the Microsoft Windows operating system that allow programmers to manipulate video for computer games."
I tend not to read much more when an author writes unfocussed information like this. OpenGL isn't actually installed in windows by default anymore, and opengl/direct draw aren't really confined to just "manipulating video". He would have been better to suggest that the system supports the two leading 3d platforms.
Legal documents are written with the intention of covering all possible situations, and often worded such that each clause is as broad as possible this is to avoid said lattice fence gaps. This is because once a gap appears it is exploited by lawyers to make the entire document sound ridiculous. (Which is often the case anyway.)
For example a lawyer will jump right onto this clause, and talk about all the other methods of research, they'll attempt to broadly classify what research is (including using the software at all.) His final point will be that it's impossible to satisfy the terms of the agreement in any way, making it an invalid document. For example the phrase "by reading this line you agree to not read this line", is obviously ridiculous, but essentially any lawyer will be able to make this EULA analogous to this.
Sure it runs, but it runs best when there is a remote control driving it.
My point is that Apple have logical ways that entice people to spend their money rather than hack around it, if the mac is for convienience and luxury, then hacking, possible slowdowns via emulated hardware and losing stability are simply not on the agenda.
Additionally a similar argument is that alot of Mac software doesn't come with activation(when their intel counterparts do.) This is because there is strong correlation between people that purchase macs and people who are willing to cough up the dollars for software to run on it. A person who is unwilling to pay for software, is also someone who is unwilling to pay the premium prices that apple ask for.
And Another: You can burn all your DRM iTunes Music Store songs to CDs, re-rip them and put them on any device you like... but the majority are happy with just using it on an iPod.
My point is that, by taking away trivial hacks to make OSX work on generic hardware, the people who are likely to buy a mac, still will. The people who are never going to buy a mac, will hack it and run it on any hardware they like and probably aren't interested in purchasing an apple anyway; but this will just eat away a bit of that MS Windows marketshare. (Which makes Jobs happy.)
Then again, nothing really stopped people from running Mac OS X on Intel hardware even when it was still in PPC instructions. PearPC, etc. Also PPC Mac OS X ran fine on PPC IBM boxes.
I guess that's why they used the words tamper resistant, instead of tamper proof.
King said the "Open source isn't open" argument is Microsoft's attempt to wave the Unix fear flag.
Don't you find it interesting that the way Microsoft inspire fear is to claim that it is close to their own business model. They might as well say "Watch out don't use RedHat Linux because it will cost you money"....which is entirely different from Windows how?
The other interesting part of the microsoft argument is: A team has the capacity to change the OS code significantly. (which microsoft says will require redhat to write you custom patches which will cost you money.) But if the team is competent enough to change the OS so significantly that updates aren't compatible. Then they'll also be competent enough to review the updates from the OSS community and tailor them to work with their unique system.
It's not a fair assumption to say that your company is smart enough to change the code significantly, but then on the other hand suggest that your company is now too incompetent to apply new updates/patches without the help of RedHat. (What is fair to say is that: If your company function is so unique that you need to significantly alter a mainstream linux distro to make it work with your business, then you will likely have a permanent/contractual IT team growing and maintaining that same system, and quite likely never had to buy RedHat linux in the first place.)
I agree that we will concede more applications to the web, but I think these services are designed more so that any big company can go from having a small web precense to one where they can offer all kinds of online services. E.g. for the Disney example, licensees could stitch together their own localised disney commercial, and have it burnt to disc and sent to them. Or use search to go through the hundreds of style guides and have collections put together for them based on search criteria. I think the services will be great in that regard. As these would be real world applications to each of the tools, rather than just having the iLife suite online.
Some things work well being able to be accessed online (Mail and schedules are the best examples I can think of.)
I feel that alot of the service components are going to go to waste with underuse.
The era of the laptop doesn't combine well with the all-online paradigm. The most successful approach I have seen with online tools, are ones that download to your device, and sync/update when you get back to an internet connection. Simpler models of this are music download services, and video download services (rather than video streaming services.) Basically so you can carry your content with you, and back it up quickly to devices. Consumers want freedom over their data.
The internet is an extension of ideas that we already had. Bulletin boards allowed small groups of people to interact, particularly with things like MOOs/MUDs. Then CompuServe was alot like the internet before the internet really took off, despite being a commercially owned entity, and yes it was a bit like pay tv.
If you're in the position where you need to learn something, and it's not all about the piece of paper, then online learning can be a great help at fast tracking this in an inexpensive way.
However if you need a piece of paper that says MIT on it so you can negotiate a 20K payrise, then your online-only university isn't going to be much of a help.
It's not the nature of being taught by correspondence, but rather the esteem of the university which issues the certification. Online courses available from certain ivy-league universities are still considered legitimate, because the issuer is considered with high regard.
The reason why people have negative feelings to online courses is because there is an over abundance of fake degrees available online, which use catch phrases such as "Earn a degree, based on your existing life experience", and "Qualifications in XX hours".
When the CFO leaves, it's usually because they think they're in a sinking ship.
Does anyone have a photo-list of the other top entries?
It's true we have no "fair use" laws in Australia, as that was a test case which did not occur here. No companies here appear particularly worried by the continual illegal use of copyright material. We sell VCRs, DVD burning VR's, iPods, etc, etc. With only 20M population, we're hardly a threat in comparison to say China and many asian countries which we're near, which is far more blatant in their abuse of copyright. Additionally the sales of these electronic devices outweigh the damage they do to the industries through copyright abuse.
Also before someone jumps up and down and says that Australia is backwards for not having strict Fair Use, take a moment to think that we also don't have the PATRIOT Act, the DMCA and few other goodies.