Buying on DVD is more cost-effective -- unfortunately, Buffy DVDs get released for the UK zone long before they get released for the US -- if they have even been released for the US DVD zone yet. The first season of Angel was also just released on DVD. Try the UK version of Amazon.com.
There is a Buffy comic book series already, as well as one called 'Fray' which is pretty similar. Ripper has been in the works for some time (this is why Giles left BTVS this season).
No one does good vs evil better than Joss Whedon, IMHO.
I can just see the next toy recalls:
"Buffy the Barfing Doll is being recalled due to misalignment of Buffy's two camera 'eyes'. It seems Buffy is crosseyed."
The basic issue is intellectual property rights, and how this applies to the artists who perform the music, and the record companies who market it. I'm not seeing much discussion about here, so I thought I'd do some research and post some more background.
The interesting thing to me is that recording artists and the record companies have vastly different opinions about the availability of music on the internet.
In general, artists would like to be able to sell their own music on the web -- however, they do want that music to be sold, not given away or stolen.
Artists who don't have labels are free to put their own stuff out there for download. They also have the ability to sell it on personally-made CDs or other media, although at this time they have no way to safeguard this media once it gets into someone else's hands.
Artists who are signed to a record company want to be able to market their music on the internet without going through their record companies (therefore getting the proceeds themselves, and not giving the record companies their 'cut'), presumably because the record companies are predatory. Predatory aspects of the record companies, for example, are a large part of Courtney Love's and LeAnn Rimes' opinions (below).
The record companies not only want to prevent 'their' CDs from showing up on morpheus, etc, they also want to prevent recording artists from putting other tracks onto the web for sale or for free. If artists could do this outside of their contracts, the record companies would of course lose money and customers.
Therefore, record companies want to prevent their CDs from being ripped or copied (hence this article), AND they want to prevent their artists from getting around their contracts by selling directly to consumers.
All in all, I think the record companies are RIGHT to try to keep their product from being pirated. However, not only is this basically impossible, but the MEANS they are going about it is going to cause a huge backlash and only hurt the record companies and the artists further.
"There's an important difference between authors and publishers that the current intellectual property system ignores. Authors still perform a valuable service by creating intellectual property. Publishers perform an increasingly useless service, copying information that individuals who own computers connected by the Internet can copy on their own...
"...Publishers have become useless middlemen rendered obsolete by digital technology. The laws of supply and demand are driving their profit margins to zero... Notably, nearly 30 states are now suing the top record labels alleging CD price fixing."
Some artists' opinions:
Courtney Love: "Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. " (from her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16, as quoted on Salon.com.)
"Musical artists represented by RAC want to be able to sell their music on the Internet without going through the bureaucracy of record labels. While many artists supported the copyright-infringement lawsuit the RIAA brought against Napster, they now want labels to aggressively award licensing deals to legitimate independent music Web sites in addition to the labels' own online services. That's something that isn't happening as fast as artists hoped."
a variety of artists at a Senate hearing in September, including Courtney Love, Don Henley, and LeAnn Rimes.
Alanis Morrissette (from Billboard.com):
"'Artists today are not being given a chance to experience the normal ebbs and flows that result in an artist's evolution.'
"In Morissette's opinion, the Internet at one time offered great promise. Such companies as MP3.com and Napster, she said, 'offered a link between artists and audiences and was a way for less-established artists to have a forum to reach those who will be touched by their art.' Now, she said, those same companies have been 'litigated, vilified, and ultimately consolidated to the point where these opportunities [don't exist].'
"Pointing to Napster's relationship with Bertelsmann, and the acquisition of MP3.com and Emusic by Vivendi Universal, Morissette said that the Internet has become 'a bottleneck for creativity,' because the media conglomerates are attempting to apply traditional, profit-oriented business models to the new medium."
You're right that simple eyeballing will tell a good stocker or store manager which products and brands are selling, and which aren't.
Better yet, point-of-sale software in grocery stores already is generally capable of determining which brands are selling faster at which stores in an automated fashion -- per-customer sales are mostly irrelevant for this purpose. (Unless, let's say, around July 4 you could tell from your card usage that relatively few customers purchase relatively large numbers of cases of beer, customers who generally don't purchase any beer at all -- in which case you could adjust your sales and quantity discount schemes. Of course, you could get this from sales receipts that are not associated with named customers, only with anonymous sales transactions.)
Believe me, stores know the sales patterns for their stores, even without customer cards -- which underscores the fact that the cards are used mostly for marketing purposes.
Yahoo web mail has a 'bulk mail' filter, enabled by default, which works really well for me (and has the advantage of being free). I get perhaps 1 or 2 spam messages that slip through to my 'real' inbox; all the rest are successfully filtered.
I would never use an ISP email account address for filling out forms, etc, either -- I use webmail (obviously), and if spamming gets out of hand, I can always get rid of a webmail account.
But... why else would they use this data? Whether it is intended to be used for personal or group marketing, it most certainly is intended to be used in an attempt to sell us all more wares.
Personally, I'm ok with that, as long as it doesn't get used for more nefarious purposes than ad-targeting and tv-show-ratings.
I'd suspect they'd use a 'timeout' of a couple of hours, which would be the simplest solution (I think) to filter out the sleeping watchers from the interested watchers. Web apps do it all the time.
As a matter of fact, Amazon.com will do this now. On a personalized level, it will build a page of recommendations for you based on past purchases and also your own stated preferences -- and it at least used to provide you a link to 'the page that you built', which was basically a list of the last several things you have browsed. Also, although this isn't personalized for you per se, when you look at an ad for one book or product, there's a list entitled (for books) "Customers who bought this book also bought...".
Personalization and even tracking are good, as long as you know about it when you're buying the product or using the service, and (I think this next point is where we are starting to fall down, societally) as long as the consumer is educated enough to know what he's giving up in exchange for the higher level of service, and the risks involved.
I can't get too worked up about this... as long as the consumer knows when he buys a Microsoft TV product that it 'comes with' this kind of monitoring. That, to me, is the key -- full and open disclosure, and a consumer educated enough to know what that means.
Really, if you have a Yahoo 'home page' configured, you're already providing information about your preferences -- voluntarily -- albeit on a lesser scale then what MS TV will do.
If you use one of those 'shopper discount' grocery store cards, you're also providing this kind of information, in even greater detail. If you purchased a pregnancy test or jock-itch ointment last week, it's in a database somewhere if you use one of those cards, and the fact that they don't individually target you NOW for marketing based on this information doesn't mean they won't in the future.
From the above article: "...61 percent of retailers surveyed either have or plan to have frequent-shopper programs. Already, more than a quarter of all supermarket sales are tracked with the cards."
That shopper discount card sounds much like what MS TV plans:
"Scott Oddo, director of research at Predictive Networks, said the collected information does not connect viewers' interests to their names or other personally identifiable information."
There's a homily about how, when everyone is a lawbreaker, government has total control over everyone -- there will always be a pretext for detaining any person.
As another poster mentioned, it is quite likely that none of us would like to have all of our keystrokes made public -- some of our innermost thoughts go right through our keyboards, and Magic Lantern wouls apparently make no distinction between keystrokes that you intend to publish on the web, and those intended to stay private (financial info, personal letters, diaries, medical correspondence). If you think this sort of tapping would only occur under warrant, you aren't following the latest news.
Since 9/11, we already see our government detaining people for more extended periods of time even when the detaineee has not been accused of a crime, refusing to share the evidence against those detained, and the Dept of Justice is even, per AG Ashcroft, allowed to monitor conversations between people in custody and their lawyers. That last one applies to everyone, and is not limited to suspected illegal immigrants.
This is the top of a very slippery slope. If we give away rights to privacy in our homes and with our legal counsel, we will never get these rights back.
"A man who gives up some of his liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"Whether or not legislation is truly moral
is often a question of who has the power
to define morality." -- Jerome Skolnick
Why were they honest about it now? Simple: this is the best political climate the FBI could have asked for to reveal something like this.
Surveys show that most people, given the 9-11 attacks, are more than willing to trade freedom for security.
"A recent ABC/Post survey found two out of three people expressing willingness to surrender 'some of the liberties we have in this country to crack down on terrorism.' Cole attributes this not only to a heightened concern for safety, but to the fact that the majority are not generally affected--that is, it's not their relatives being detained and questioned." (Taking Liberties: Fear and the Constitution)
"At times like this, a democracy must balance its need to protect itself with the freedoms that define it. Last week's terrorist attacks have raised the debate pitting homeland defense against civil liberties to a level not seen since World War II." (For now, security trumps liberties)
"From the very first surveys after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, most Americans told pollsters that the country would have to give up some rights to fight terrorism (79 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll in September). A Gallup survey conducted Nov. 26-27 found six in 10 Americans who said the Bush administration has been 'about right' in its limits on civil liberties, as opposed to 10 percent who said the administration had gone too far and 26 percent who think it hasn't gone far enough."
(Public Supports Domestic Crackdown on Terror)
After all, if you're innocent, what do you have to worry about anyway?:grin:
Why were they honest about it now? Simple: this is the best political climate the FBI could have asked for to reveal something like this. Surveys show that most people, given the 9-11 attacks, are more than willing to trade freedom for security.
"A recent ABC/Post survey found two out of three people expressing willingness to surrender "some of the liberties we have in this country to crack down on terrorism." Cole attributes this not only to a heightened concern for safety, but to the fact that the majority are not generally affected--that is, it's not their relatives being detained and questioned." (Taking Liberties: Fear and the Constitution)
After all, if you're innocent, what do you have to worry about anyway?:grin:
"Erotik providers are the only on-line industry, which writes black numbers." LOL!
German politicians would emphasize parental responsibility (to beat a skeletal horse) instead, via the use of personal filtering and monitoring tools, or even *gasp* supervision! Surely this would give them better results than attempting to regulate 'hours of operation' of porn sites over which they have no control whatsoever.
I love when politicians attempt to draft legislation around technical issues, without the slightest attempt to learn about the issue. There's really no excuse for it.
Documentation, decent training, and a complete GUI interface have to be there, to get general users to accept Linux. It's a guy with general-user skills who is most likely to be approving enterprise-scale budgets for purchasing servers and vendor support contracts -- not the Linux-hobbyist in the server room 5 floors down.
If Linux is serious about encroaching on NT's territory in the business market (corporate users and corporate administrators), people who market Linux distributions and Linux support packages are gonna have to get over these issues.
They will have to provide GUI tools that come with the distribution by default, and do not require separate installation, or kernel-recompiling.
Distributions for 'general users' need to be available -- with sensible configurations for general users. Like the article says, give 'em their documents, their spreadsheets, their web browser, and their email reader. It appears that progress has been made in this category, at least since the last time I tried Linux a couple of years ago.
They will have to provide actual user documentation. Not developer or administrator-level documentation, but user documentation. This documentation needs to come from the vendor, because it has to be very specific to their distribution. (This is where 'Linux for Dummies' falls short right now, because when things get specific, the 'Dummies' book has to refer the user to the current Linux distribution documentation, which is not written for general users.)
Competent training will have to be provided in more places, by more people, for more people.
It's unfortunate that documentation and training seem to be so undervalued in the Linux community. I think a general culture of 'newbie contempt' is the root of that particular evil.
I learned a couple of good things a while back:
You don't really *know* something as well as you think you do, until you try to teach and explain it to someone else (or write it down for someone else).
Teaching is a skill; it can be taught but must be practiced, and some are better at it than others. A good Linux guru is not necessarily a good Linux teacher.
Was it bypassable? I didn't see a 'skip intro' link, like most splash screens have. And you're right that it only shows up once.
I simply have a real philosophical problem with splash screens, particularly animated ones:) They always make me think, someone had waaaay too much time or money on their hands... that could have been better spent on actual content. Or making their fonts a bit larger. Or something.
"The 1997-98 El Niño Event and Related Wintertime Lightning Variations in the Southeastern United States" was selected as one of the "Highlight" articles appearing in the February 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The paper describes the increase in lightning activity in the northern Gulf of Mexico Basin in response to the 1997-98 El Niño event. The authors use two data sets to obtain this information. One data set was a 10-year (1989-99) database of U.S. cloud-to-ground lightning activity. The NASA Lightning Imaging Sensor on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Observatory was also used. The LIS gives the total (in-cloud and cloud-to-ground) lightning activity data recorded from space. Results showed that during 1997-8 a 100-150% increase in lightning days year-to-year and a nearly 200% increase in lightning hours (compared to 1996-7 and 1998-9) in the basin. They attribute these changes to an enhanced synoptic-scale forcing associated with ENSO and a stronger than normal upper-level jet stream. They also find good agreement between most of the recent warm ENSO events and cyclogenesis within the basin.
Cyclogenesis: Process of initiation or intensification of a cyclonic circulation in the atmosphere (source)
ENSO event: ENSO is the term currently used by scientists to describe the full range of the Southern Oscillation that includes both SST increases (a warming) as well as SST decreases (a cooling) when compared to a long-term average. (source)
I shudder to see the big, seizure-inducing, Micro$oft-ripoff of a splash-page animation that KPMG is using. A company that prides itself on being all about e-business should not be proud of a non-bypassable animated splash screen emblazoned with the latest buzzwords. It is a travesty and speaks ill of their customers, who I presume are impressed by this eye-candy.
I notice they used Razorfish in at least some part of this site design. I suppose you can't blame Razorfish... KPMG would be a big client, and what the client wants, the client gets.
Before this article and its mentions of KPMG and Ticketmaster, I had never heard of a company complaining when other sites linked to their site. I have often heard of site owners being angered when their content is loaded up in someone else's frameset. Remember all those 'break out of the frameset' links?
I doubt that such a 'linking agreement' is legally enforceable. This amounts to KPMG asking for veto power over every other site on the web, far beyond any precedent set by libel and slander cases.
He's marking waypoints on his GPS, and using it for navigation.
I see what he's mapping. His article discusses, in part, his nifty method of tracking this info. I stand by my post, although the application in question differs between the author of the article and, say, a pilot or driver using a GPS to mark gas stations or landing spots for future use.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example of 'quantity over quality'?
:D
Buying on DVD is more cost-effective -- unfortunately, Buffy DVDs get released for the UK zone long before they get released for the US -- if they have even been released for the US DVD zone yet. The first season of Angel was also just released on DVD. Try the UK version of Amazon.com.
There is a Buffy comic book series already, as well as one called 'Fray' which is pretty similar. Ripper has been in the works for some time (this is why Giles left BTVS this season).
No one does good vs evil better than Joss Whedon, IMHO.
I can just see the next toy recalls: "Buffy the Barfing Doll is being recalled due to misalignment of Buffy's two camera 'eyes'. It seems Buffy is crosseyed."
The basic issue is intellectual property rights, and how this applies to the artists who perform the music, and the record companies who market it. I'm not seeing much discussion about here, so I thought I'd do some research and post some more background.
The interesting thing to me is that recording artists and the record companies have vastly different opinions about the availability of music on the internet.
In general, artists would like to be able to sell their own music on the web -- however, they do want that music to be sold, not given away or stolen.
Artists who don't have labels are free to put their own stuff out there for download. They also have the ability to sell it on personally-made CDs or other media, although at this time they have no way to safeguard this media once it gets into someone else's hands.
Artists who are signed to a record company want to be able to market their music on the internet without going through their record companies (therefore getting the proceeds themselves, and not giving the record companies their 'cut'), presumably because the record companies are predatory. Predatory aspects of the record companies, for example, are a large part of Courtney Love's and LeAnn Rimes' opinions (below).
The record companies not only want to prevent 'their' CDs from showing up on morpheus, etc, they also want to prevent recording artists from putting other tracks onto the web for sale or for free. If artists could do this outside of their contracts, the record companies would of course lose money and customers.
Therefore, record companies want to prevent their CDs from being ripped or copied (hence this article), AND they want to prevent their artists from getting around their contracts by selling directly to consumers.
All in all, I think the record companies are RIGHT to try to keep their product from being pirated. However, not only is this basically impossible, but the MEANS they are going about it is going to cause a huge backlash and only hurt the record companies and the artists further.
Here's some more info:
From Intellectual Property Is an Oxymoron:
"There's an important difference between authors and publishers that the current intellectual property system ignores. Authors still perform a valuable service by creating intellectual property. Publishers perform an increasingly useless service, copying information that individuals who own computers connected by the Internet can copy on their own...
"...Publishers have become useless middlemen rendered obsolete by digital technology. The laws of supply and demand are driving their profit margins to zero... Notably, nearly 30 states are now suing the top record labels alleging CD price fixing."
Some artists' opinions:
Courtney Love: "Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. " (from her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16, as quoted on Salon.com.)
Business Week, writing about the Recording Artists Coalition (RAC) testimony at a Senate hearing in April:
"Musical artists represented by RAC want to be able to sell their music on the Internet without going through the bureaucracy of record labels. While many artists supported the copyright-infringement lawsuit the RIAA brought against Napster, they now want labels to aggressively award licensing deals to legitimate independent music Web sites in addition to the labels' own online services. That's something that isn't happening as fast as artists hoped."
a variety of artists at a Senate hearing in September, including Courtney Love, Don Henley, and LeAnn Rimes.
Alanis Morrissette (from Billboard.com): "'Artists today are not being given a chance to experience the normal ebbs and flows that result in an artist's evolution.'
"In Morissette's opinion, the Internet at one time offered great promise. Such companies as MP3.com and Napster, she said, 'offered a link between artists and audiences and was a way for less-established artists to have a forum to reach those who will be touched by their art.' Now, she said, those same companies have been 'litigated, vilified, and ultimately consolidated to the point where these opportunities [don't exist].' "Pointing to Napster's relationship with Bertelsmann, and the acquisition of MP3.com and Emusic by Vivendi Universal, Morissette said that the Internet has become 'a bottleneck for creativity,' because the media conglomerates are attempting to apply traditional, profit-oriented business models to the new medium."
That's no fun. I get maybe 2-5 a day on Yahoo.
You're right that simple eyeballing will tell a good stocker or store manager which products and brands are selling, and which aren't.
Better yet, point-of-sale software in grocery stores already is generally capable of determining which brands are selling faster at which stores in an automated fashion -- per-customer sales are mostly irrelevant for this purpose. (Unless, let's say, around July 4 you could tell from your card usage that relatively few customers purchase relatively large numbers of cases of beer, customers who generally don't purchase any beer at all -- in which case you could adjust your sales and quantity discount schemes. Of course, you could get this from sales receipts that are not associated with named customers, only with anonymous sales transactions.)
Believe me, stores know the sales patterns for their stores, even without customer cards -- which underscores the fact that the cards are used mostly for marketing purposes.
Yahoo web mail has a 'bulk mail' filter, enabled by default, which works really well for me (and has the advantage of being free). I get perhaps 1 or 2 spam messages that slip through to my 'real' inbox; all the rest are successfully filtered. I would never use an ISP email account address for filling out forms, etc, either -- I use webmail (obviously), and if spamming gets out of hand, I can always get rid of a webmail account.
But... why else would they use this data? Whether it is intended to be used for personal or group marketing, it most certainly is intended to be used in an attempt to sell us all more wares.
Personally, I'm ok with that, as long as it doesn't get used for more nefarious purposes than ad-targeting and tv-show-ratings.
I'd suspect they'd use a 'timeout' of a couple of hours, which would be the simplest solution (I think) to filter out the sleeping watchers from the interested watchers. Web apps do it all the time.
As a matter of fact, Amazon.com will do this now. On a personalized level, it will build a page of recommendations for you based on past purchases and also your own stated preferences -- and it at least used to provide you a link to 'the page that you built', which was basically a list of the last several things you have browsed. Also, although this isn't personalized for you per se, when you look at an ad for one book or product, there's a list entitled (for books) "Customers who bought this book also bought...".
Personalization and even tracking are good, as long as you know about it when you're buying the product or using the service, and (I think this next point is where we are starting to fall down, societally) as long as the consumer is educated enough to know what he's giving up in exchange for the higher level of service, and the risks involved.
I can't get too worked up about this... as long as the consumer knows when he buys a Microsoft TV product that it 'comes with' this kind of monitoring. That, to me, is the key -- full and open disclosure, and a consumer educated enough to know what that means.
Really, if you have a Yahoo 'home page' configured, you're already providing information about your preferences -- voluntarily -- albeit on a lesser scale then what MS TV will do.
If you use one of those 'shopper discount' grocery store cards, you're also providing this kind of information, in even greater detail. If you purchased a pregnancy test or jock-itch ointment last week, it's in a database somewhere if you use one of those cards, and the fact that they don't individually target you NOW for marketing based on this information doesn't mean they won't in the future.
From the above article: "...61 percent of retailers surveyed either have or plan to have frequent-shopper programs. Already, more than a quarter of all supermarket sales are tracked with the cards."
That shopper discount card sounds much like what MS TV plans:
"Scott Oddo, director of research at Predictive Networks, said the collected information does not connect viewers' interests to their names or other personally identifiable information."
There's a homily about how, when everyone is a lawbreaker, government has total control over everyone -- there will always be a pretext for detaining any person.
As another poster mentioned, it is quite likely that none of us would like to have all of our keystrokes made public -- some of our innermost thoughts go right through our keyboards, and Magic Lantern wouls apparently make no distinction between keystrokes that you intend to publish on the web, and those intended to stay private (financial info, personal letters, diaries, medical correspondence). If you think this sort of tapping would only occur under warrant, you aren't following the latest news.
Since 9/11, we already see our government detaining people for more extended periods of time even when the detaineee has not been accused of a crime, refusing to share the evidence against those detained, and the Dept of Justice is even, per AG Ashcroft, allowed to monitor conversations between people in custody and their lawyers. That last one applies to everyone, and is not limited to suspected illegal immigrants.
This is the top of a very slippery slope. If we give away rights to privacy in our homes and with our legal counsel, we will never get these rights back.
"A man who gives up some of his liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality." -- Jerome Skolnick
Why were they honest about it now? Simple: this is the best political climate the FBI could have asked for to reveal something like this.
:grin:
Surveys show that most people, given the 9-11 attacks, are more than willing to trade freedom for security.
"A recent ABC/Post survey found two out of three people expressing willingness to surrender 'some of the liberties we have in this country to crack down on terrorism.' Cole attributes this not only to a heightened concern for safety, but to the fact that the majority are not generally affected--that is, it's not their relatives being detained and questioned." (Taking Liberties: Fear and the Constitution)
"At times like this, a democracy must balance its need to protect itself with the freedoms that define it. Last week's terrorist attacks have raised the debate pitting homeland defense against civil liberties to a level not seen since World War II." (For now, security trumps liberties)
"From the very first surveys after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, most Americans told pollsters that the country would have to give up some rights to fight terrorism (79 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll in September). A Gallup survey conducted Nov. 26-27 found six in 10 Americans who said the Bush administration has been 'about right' in its limits on civil liberties, as opposed to 10 percent who said the administration had gone too far and 26 percent who think it hasn't gone far enough." (Public Supports Domestic Crackdown on Terror)
After all, if you're innocent, what do you have to worry about anyway?
Why were they honest about it now? Simple: this is the best political climate the FBI could have asked for to reveal something like this. Surveys show that most people, given the 9-11 attacks, are more than willing to trade freedom for security.
:grin:
"A recent ABC/Post survey found two out of three people expressing willingness to surrender "some of the liberties we have in this country to crack down on terrorism." Cole attributes this not only to a heightened concern for safety, but to the fact that the majority are not generally affected--that is, it's not their relatives being detained and questioned." (Taking Liberties: Fear and the Constitution)
After all, if you're innocent, what do you have to worry about anyway?
"Erotik providers are the only on-line industry, which writes black numbers." LOL!
German politicians would emphasize parental responsibility (to beat a skeletal horse) instead, via the use of personal filtering and monitoring tools, or even *gasp* supervision! Surely this would give them better results than attempting to regulate 'hours of operation' of porn sites over which they have no control whatsoever.
I love when politicians attempt to draft legislation around technical issues, without the slightest attempt to learn about the issue. There's really no excuse for it.
- They will have to provide GUI tools that come with the distribution by default, and do not require separate installation, or kernel-recompiling.
- Distributions for 'general users' need to be available -- with sensible configurations for general users. Like the article says, give 'em their documents, their spreadsheets, their web browser, and their email reader. It appears that progress has been made in this category, at least since the last time I tried Linux a couple of years ago.
- They will have to provide actual user documentation. Not developer or administrator-level documentation, but user documentation. This documentation needs to come from the vendor, because it has to be very specific to their distribution. (This is where 'Linux for Dummies' falls short right now, because when things get specific, the 'Dummies' book has to refer the user to the current Linux distribution documentation, which is not written for general users.)
- Competent training will have to be provided in more places, by more people, for more people.
It's unfortunate that documentation and training seem to be so undervalued in the Linux community. I think a general culture of 'newbie contempt' is the root of that particular evil.I learned a couple of good things a while back:
Faster Than Light Transmission of Signals; also, Communication faster than Light
And a dissenting opinion
All the known things that go faster than light today
Gotta love Google!
Was it bypassable? I didn't see a 'skip intro' link, like most splash screens have. And you're right that it only shows up once.
:) They always make me think, someone had waaaay too much time or money on their hands... that could have been better spent on actual content. Or making their fonts a bit larger. Or something.
I simply have a real philosophical problem with splash screens, particularly animated ones
1997-98 EL NIÑO EVENT INCREASED LIGHTNING ACTIVITY
"The 1997-98 El Niño Event and Related Wintertime Lightning Variations in the Southeastern United States" was selected as one of the "Highlight" articles appearing in the February 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The paper describes the increase in lightning activity in the northern Gulf of Mexico Basin in response to the 1997-98 El Niño event. The authors use two data sets to obtain this information. One data set was a 10-year (1989-99) database of U.S. cloud-to-ground lightning activity. The NASA Lightning Imaging Sensor on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Observatory was also used. The LIS gives the total (in-cloud and cloud-to-ground) lightning activity data recorded from space. Results showed that during 1997-8 a 100-150% increase in lightning days year-to-year and a nearly 200% increase in lightning hours (compared to 1996-7 and 1998-9) in the basin. They attribute these changes to an enhanced synoptic-scale forcing associated with ENSO and a stronger than normal upper-level jet stream. They also find good agreement between most of the recent warm ENSO events and cyclogenesis within the basin.
Cyclogenesis: Process of initiation or intensification of a cyclonic circulation in the atmosphere (source)
ENSO event: ENSO is the term currently used by scientists to describe the full range of the Southern Oscillation that includes both SST increases (a warming) as well as SST decreases (a cooling) when compared to a long-term average. (source)
I wonder how much of that is due to the 'heat islands' that exist on land and not at sea. Just another possible cause for the turbulence you mention.
Tell me this isn't cool...
This free 'lightning explorer' shows the most recent strikes in the U.S.
I don't think this one is as impressive.
I shudder to see the big, seizure-inducing, Micro$oft-ripoff of a splash-page animation that KPMG is using. A company that prides itself on being all about e-business should not be proud of a non-bypassable animated splash screen emblazoned with the latest buzzwords. It is a travesty and speaks ill of their customers, who I presume are impressed by this eye-candy. I notice they used Razorfish in at least some part of this site design. I suppose you can't blame Razorfish... KPMG would be a big client, and what the client wants, the client gets. Before this article and its mentions of KPMG and Ticketmaster, I had never heard of a company complaining when other sites linked to their site. I have often heard of site owners being angered when their content is loaded up in someone else's frameset. Remember all those 'break out of the frameset' links? I doubt that such a 'linking agreement' is legally enforceable. This amounts to KPMG asking for veto power over every other site on the web, far beyond any precedent set by libel and slander cases.
He's marking waypoints on his GPS, and using it for navigation. I see what he's mapping. His article discusses, in part, his nifty method of tracking this info. I stand by my post, although the application in question differs between the author of the article and, say, a pilot or driver using a GPS to mark gas stations or landing spots for future use.
Man, a zero?! My feelings are hurt!