I'm sure it has something to do with demographics -- Universal probably figures if they can sell out theatres even in smaller towns like ours (Providence), Hartford, etc., then the movie is going to do well. Of *course* they can sell out preview screenings in L.A. and N.Y., but everyone's been there & done that. Given the extensive questionnaire one has to fill out at these screenings, I'm sure they consider the smaller towns to contain more "typical" movie-goers who are less entertainment-saturated than people in those two large cities, and therefore more indicative of the general public's behavior come opening weekend.
Can someone explain the technology used to deploy the DRM? That is, it is said you cannot burn more than 10 times or use on more thant 3 computers.
How is this enforced, technologically speaking?
If they are finding out all this information about playing/burning frequency, I don't see how this can be anything but Apple spying on your hard drive.
Or, does the AAC file itself somehow increment a counter on itself, maybe in a binary version of a propertylist or other metadata portion of the encoding on the file?
Here's the rant I sent to Apple, here's hoping they improve. Or feh, we can just follow some people's example and use eMusic. ---
Hi! I am a big fan of Massive Attack, and am pleased to see you feature them in your "Exclusive" section in the "Music Store" section of iTunes4.
However, I cannot decide whether to buy the new exclusive album (or any tracks from it), because your 30-second preview is not a reliable indicator of what a song is actually like.
How do I know this? Because I already own some of the songs you preview.
For example, I bought the CD by Massive Attack "Protection" when it came out, so I know that your 30-second preview does no justice at all to the songs.
"Better Things" is a perfect example. Tracey Thorn doesn't start singing until 1:09, but by:30, your clip is over and you never get to hear her sing! I should think her beautiful voice would be a great selling point!
Also, why is "Protection" the song not featured for download from the "Protection" album by the same name? That's the very best song on the whole disk, and it isn't there at all. Even if it were, the preview would do no good for it, either, because for this song, Tracey doesn't start singing until:41, which is 11 seconds past your preview clip.
If you want to sell songs, you need to put in the extra work to grab the part of the clip that is most likely to get the listener's interest.
Where did you get that $13 cell phone deal? That sounds too good to be true.
I've never owned a cell and hope never to have to, but "for emergencies" if the car breaks down might be a good thing some day.
I looked into that Virgin Mobile "no plan" deal, but it is a sham because it turns out that you have to spend a certain amount of phone time every 90 days.
I know this sounds like doubling your headache, but get the cat a friend -- another cat. If it has a friend of its own species to play with, it won't be so needy towards you.
Don't think this will stop the neediness entirely, but it cuts down on it a whole lot.
The ideal cat pairs are two sisters from the same litter. Unlike brother-sister, brother-brother, or non-related cats, they still love each other after kittenhood, they don't fight much at all, and they really know how to keep one another company when you are not around.
Since you probably don't have that option, if the cat is a girl cat, you'll be much better off with a second girl cat than with a boy cat. Boy cats can get pretty mean to other cats, and they can spray, even if they are fixed (really, almost all cats should be fixed unless you are a cat breeder).
Also, another solution is to give your roommate a good talking-to -- the roommate is the person who should be responsible for the cat! If he knew he didn't have time to spend with it, he never should have gotten it.
Wow, it said you could go to Tools -> Web Development -> Live HTTP Headers to see the HTTP Headers, but there is no such item in my Mozilla 1.3 Tools menu.
Hmmm, looks like they haven't implemented it for Macintosh versions.
The other nice thing to have would be an item in the DOM inspector that would show you the XPath for the selected node.
Gotta be Death to Smoochy. Edward Norton's acting is great as always, Robin Williams and Vincent Schiavelli are really funny, Danny Devito is a kickass director, and Catherine Keener is brilliant and beautiful as always. And let's not forget Jon Stewart and Harvey Fierstein!
The only reason this film did badly and was misunderstood is that the studio did a VERY bad job of marketing it.
It is NOT a children's movie, it is a very, very adult movie, funny, cynical, amazing.
For the studio to market it in such a way as to make it seem like a whole different movie was just a crime.
I don't understand why someone would not know they should set a password. I assumed all wireless setup software was smart enough to goad you into setting a password. However, this is based on my Apple-only experience -- Apple definitely makes it seem obvious you should set a password. Do other OSes/wireless packages not do this?
One of my friends told me he went to a local Coffee place (not Starbucks, an actual local place) and got free wireless because the person in the apartment upstairs had an unprotected wireless setup. I think if you live in an old New England wooden (not concrete!) building right about a public gathering place like a coffee place, and you don't know enough to protect yourself, you are an unlucky fool.
I've used TaxAct twice, and also had no problems. Last year they didn't let me do my state return online, but this year I guess my state got its act together, and I got my state return two days ago (about a week after filing). The federal still has not been direct deposited, but based on last year will probably be by Monday. I'm very happy with the service -- they found some student loan money to deduct that I had completely forgotten about, making my refund a much happier puppy. Also note that I found out about them from the IRS website. It is probably a good idea to use one of the IRS's recommended preparers -- you're probably less likely to have your return rejected that way. Plus, if it does get rejected, places like TaxAct will let you know about the rejection via email within I think 24 to 72 hours of filing, so you don't have to wait forever to find out about the rejection. I highly recommend TaxAct. They even saved my employer's id number, state id number, and other niggling stuff from last year's return so I didn't have to tediously type it in. My one complaint about them was that my userid and password from last year did not work this year, but that is a small gripe, because they were still able to match my new info. correctly with the old and sync it up.
I cannot believe he didn't even mention turning on your firewall (which is so simple in OS X, since a GUI interface to the ipfw software that has always been there is now available right in System Preferences).
It is very irresponsible to tell people to set up a server without telling them how to protect it. Come on.
(I use BrickHouse instead of Apple's interface, but they both provide a GUI interface to ipfw, so it's pretty similar, just more full-featured.)
Also, the author does not mention alternatives to Sendmail. Many people consider Postfix to be superior. See Installing Postfix and UW IMAP on MacOS X Server for instructions on setting it up for OS X.
Just want to remind you that with the advent of OS X 10.2, the right and left buttons on two-button mice both work in OS X. Better late than never, and way easier than Ctrl-clicking as was the old practice.
It is because of social pressure that many girls and women do not want to be associated with geekdom in any way.
One reason people have not mentioned but which I have sometimes seen is the usual "one of the boys" argument -- a woman who is seen as being "one of the boys" because she is a geek is therefore sometimes seen as being a lesbian. This does not make sense and smacks of homophobia, but some people do see it that way. The social pressure to be a "normal" straight woman who has a life and career that are expected of straight women is quite strong. Being a lesbian myself, I've seen that there are actually a lot of lesbians who are programmer geeks, but there are also a lot of women in these fields who are straight. There's certainly no direct correlation. I also know a lot of gay man who are geeks. It's true that the computer industry has been historically more gay-friendly than most industries -- some companies had domestic partnership policies as early as the 1970s (Apple for example). So that's one extra thing about social pressure. As for intimidation, take this scenario -- woman is behind the Help Desk. User walks up. User ignores woman, and says to the off-duty male help desk person who is lounging off to the side "Can you help me?" assuming the woman, because she is a woman, is not even worth bothering to ask. This is especially true if the woman is feminine and pretty -- the users and the other consultants/help desk (guys) often condescend to the lone woman. Third, there's the misperception among all people of all genders and sexualities that the computer world is solely a technical domain. This is not true. For example, I worked for eight years in a place where the humanities melded well with computing, creating a beautiful mix -- a rich and rewarding environment in which to work.
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is. Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology.
Of course it is not necessarily a technology for universal data exchange (although, HTML, despite its rather horrible and semantically-devoid implementation of SGML/XML, has to some extent shown that it is), but rather a technology for domain-specific data exchange. There there are many domains in which people HAVE already agreed on a common set of descriptive elements for their given domain. Take DTDs such as the TEI, APA, DocBook, or any of the military's MIL/IETM DTDs, not to mention the DTDs used by the IRS, Sun Microsystems, the DOE, the Library of Congress, and the ATA, etc. etc. etc. Having worked with SGML (XML is merely SGML with a little less clutter) for more than ten years now, I can tell you that it is very useful.
Carole_Mah@brown.edu Senior Programmer/Analyst Brown University Scholarly Technology Group
Evidently Steve Wozniak visited Brown to play Tetris... this from today's Providence Journal:
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, and a self-described Tetris master, flew to Providence yesterday from his Los Gatos, Calif., home just to see the installation.
"When I tell people that I'm off to Rhode Island to play Tetris, people think that I'm stupid," Wozniak said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter from his plane yesterday afternoon. "I'm not stupid, just crazy."
The students credit Wozniak with encouraging them to "fulfill our dreams."
They befriended him in December when he was at Brown on a speaking engagement. Wozniak, who now teaches private computer courses to elementary school students in Los Gatos, said he told the Brown students in December he would return to see the project if they completed it.
In college, Wozniak was a big prankster, and this project impressed him, he said.
"This one really takes the cake," he said. "It's such an immense project."
Even though it's not all that useful, Wozniak said, projects like these, where students press their knowledge, often lead to real products that change the world, he said.
"Gosh, I think it should be on the cover of a magazine. I've read books about pranks at Cal Tech and at MIT. This is as good as any of them."
Where is YDL in this discussion? This article makes it sound as if Linux on an iMac is a new thing! YDL's been doing it for some time, and without all the hassle. See http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/.
Thanks for spanking the person who doesn't know sh*t about XML and probably does not even know what a DTD is.
You are very right that Microsoft does not control XML. But it is extremely irksome that XML (in its SGML incarnation) has been around and been used for over ten years now, and only when MS jumps on the bandwagon does the media and the world stand up and take notice (and that same media often proceeds to mis-attribute XML as MS's invention, AS IF!! poor Charles Goldfarb and the people who slaved over ISO 8879 and all the rest of us have the right to be pissed about this).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure it has something to do with demographics -- Universal probably figures if they can sell out theatres even in smaller towns like ours (Providence), Hartford, etc., then the movie is going to do well. Of *course* they can sell out preview screenings in L.A. and N.Y., but everyone's been there & done that. Given the extensive questionnaire one has to fill out at these screenings, I'm sure they consider the smaller towns to contain more "typical" movie-goers who are less entertainment-saturated than people in those two large cities, and therefore more indicative of the general public's behavior come opening weekend.
See this:
David G. Durand, Palimpsest: A Data Model for Revision Control.
Can someone explain the technology used to deploy the DRM? That is, it is said you cannot burn more than 10 times or use on more thant 3 computers.
How is this enforced, technologically speaking?
If they are finding out all this information about playing/burning frequency, I don't see how this can be anything but Apple spying on your hard drive.
Or, does the AAC file itself somehow increment a counter on itself, maybe in a binary version of a propertylist or other metadata portion of the encoding on the file?
Thanks for any insight into this.
200,000 songs? Amazon has way more, and all their clips that I have listened to have interesting middle clips, just like the smart.id said.
Here's the rant I sent to Apple, here's hoping they improve. Or feh, we can just follow some people's example and use eMusic.
:30, your clip is over and you never get to hear her sing! I should think her beautiful voice would be a great selling point!
:41, which is 11 seconds past your preview clip.
---
Hi! I am a big fan of Massive Attack, and am pleased to see you feature them in your "Exclusive" section in the "Music Store" section of iTunes4.
However, I cannot decide whether to buy the new exclusive album (or any tracks from it), because your 30-second preview is not a reliable indicator of what a song is actually like.
How do I know this? Because I already own some of the songs you preview.
For example, I bought the CD by Massive Attack "Protection" when it came out, so I know that your 30-second preview does no justice at all to the songs.
"Better Things" is a perfect example. Tracey Thorn doesn't start singing until 1:09, but by
Also, why is "Protection" the song not featured for download from the "Protection" album by the same name? That's the very best song on the whole disk, and it isn't there at all. Even if it were, the preview would do no good for it, either, because for this song, Tracey doesn't start singing until
If you want to sell songs, you need to put in the extra work to grab the part of the clip that is most likely to get the listener's interest.
-c
Where did you get that $13 cell phone deal? That sounds too good to be true.
I've never owned a cell and hope never to have to, but "for emergencies" if the car breaks down might be a good thing some day.
I looked into that Virgin Mobile "no plan" deal, but it is a sham because it turns out that you have to spend a certain amount of phone time every 90 days.
I know this sounds like doubling your headache, but get the cat a friend -- another cat. If it has a friend of its own species to play with, it won't be so needy towards you.
Don't think this will stop the neediness entirely, but it cuts down on it a whole lot.
The ideal cat pairs are two sisters from the same litter. Unlike brother-sister, brother-brother, or non-related cats, they still love each other after kittenhood, they don't fight much at all, and they really know how to keep one another company when you are not around.
Since you probably don't have that option, if the cat is a girl cat, you'll be much better off with a second girl cat than with a boy cat. Boy cats can get pretty mean to other cats, and they can spray, even if they are fixed (really, almost all cats should be fixed unless you are a cat breeder).
Also, another solution is to give your roommate a good talking-to -- the roommate is the person who should be responsible for the cat! If he knew he didn't have time to spend with it, he never should have gotten it.
Wow, it said you could go to Tools -> Web Development -> Live HTTP Headers to see the HTTP Headers, but there is no such item in my Mozilla 1.3 Tools menu.
Hmmm, looks like they haven't implemented it for Macintosh versions.
The other nice thing to have would be an item in the DOM inspector that would show you the XPath for the selected node.
Gotta be Death to Smoochy. Edward Norton's acting is great as always, Robin Williams and Vincent Schiavelli are really funny, Danny Devito is a kickass director, and Catherine Keener is brilliant and beautiful as always. And let's not forget Jon Stewart and Harvey Fierstein!
The only reason this film did badly and was misunderstood is that the studio did a VERY bad job of marketing it.
It is NOT a children's movie, it is a very, very adult movie, funny, cynical, amazing.
For the studio to market it in such a way as to make it seem like a whole different movie was just a crime.
I don't understand why someone would not know they should set a password. I assumed all wireless setup software was smart enough to goad you into setting a password. However, this is based on my Apple-only experience -- Apple definitely makes it seem obvious you should set a password. Do other OSes/wireless packages not do this?
One of my friends told me he went to a local Coffee place (not Starbucks, an actual local place) and got free wireless because the person in the apartment upstairs had an unprotected wireless setup. I think if you live in an old New England wooden (not concrete!) building right about a public gathering place like a coffee place, and you don't know enough to protect yourself, you are an unlucky fool.
I've used TaxAct twice, and also had no problems. Last year they didn't let me do my state return online, but this year I guess my state got its act together, and I got my state return two days ago (about a week after filing). The federal still has not been direct deposited, but based on last year will probably be by Monday. I'm very happy with the service -- they found some student loan money to deduct that I had completely forgotten about, making my refund a much happier puppy. Also note that I found out about them from the IRS website. It is probably a good idea to use one of the IRS's recommended preparers -- you're probably less likely to have your return rejected that way. Plus, if it does get rejected, places like TaxAct will let you know about the rejection via email within I think 24 to 72 hours of filing, so you don't have to wait forever to find out about the rejection. I highly recommend TaxAct. They even saved my employer's id number, state id number, and other niggling stuff from last year's return so I didn't have to tediously type it in. My one complaint about them was that my userid and password from last year did not work this year, but that is a small gripe, because they were still able to match my new info. correctly with the old and sync it up.
I cannot believe he didn't even mention turning on your firewall (which is so simple in OS X, since a GUI interface to the ipfw software that has always been there is now available right in System Preferences). It is very irresponsible to tell people to set up a server without telling them how to protect it. Come on. (I use BrickHouse instead of Apple's interface, but they both provide a GUI interface to ipfw, so it's pretty similar, just more full-featured.) Also, the author does not mention alternatives to Sendmail. Many people consider Postfix to be superior. See Installing Postfix and UW IMAP on MacOS X Server for instructions on setting it up for OS X.
Just want to remind you that with the advent of OS X 10.2, the right and left buttons on two-button mice both work in OS X. Better late than never, and way easier than Ctrl-clicking as was the old practice.
It is because of social pressure that many girls and women do not want to be associated with geekdom in any way.
One reason people have not mentioned but which I have sometimes seen is the usual "one of the boys" argument -- a woman who is seen as being "one of the boys" because she is a geek is therefore sometimes seen as being a lesbian. This does not make sense and smacks of homophobia, but some people do see it that way. The social pressure to be a "normal" straight woman who has a life and career that are expected of straight women is quite strong.
Being a lesbian myself, I've seen that there are actually a lot of lesbians who are programmer geeks, but there are also a lot of women in these fields who are straight. There's certainly no direct correlation. I also know a lot of gay man who are geeks. It's true that the computer industry has been historically more gay-friendly than most industries -- some companies had domestic partnership policies as early as the 1970s (Apple for example).
So that's one extra thing about social pressure.
As for intimidation, take this scenario -- woman is behind the Help Desk. User walks up. User ignores woman, and says to the off-duty male help desk person who is lounging off to the side "Can you help me?" assuming the woman, because she is a woman, is not even worth bothering to ask. This is especially true if the woman is feminine and pretty -- the users and the other consultants/help desk (guys) often condescend to the lone woman.
Third, there's the misperception among all people of all genders and sexualities that the computer world is solely a technical domain. This is not true. For example, I worked for eight years in a place where the humanities melded well with computing, creating a beautiful mix -- a rich and rewarding environment in which to work.
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is. Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology.
Of course it is not necessarily a technology for universal data exchange (although, HTML, despite its rather horrible and semantically-devoid implementation of SGML/XML, has to some extent shown that it is), but rather a technology for domain-specific data exchange. There there are many domains in which people HAVE already agreed on a common set of descriptive elements for their given domain. Take DTDs such as the TEI, APA, DocBook, or any of the military's MIL/IETM DTDs, not to mention the DTDs used by the IRS, Sun Microsystems, the DOE, the Library of Congress, and the ATA, etc. etc. etc. Having worked with SGML (XML is merely SGML with a little less clutter) for more than ten years now, I can tell you that it is very useful.
Carole_Mah@brown.edu
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Brown University Scholarly Technology Group
Evidently Steve Wozniak visited Brown to play Tetris ... this from today's Providence Journal:
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, and a self-described Tetris master, flew to Providence yesterday from his Los Gatos, Calif., home just to
see the installation.
"When I tell people that I'm off to Rhode Island to play Tetris, people think that I'm stupid," Wozniak said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter from his
plane yesterday afternoon. "I'm not stupid, just crazy."
The students credit Wozniak with encouraging them to "fulfill our dreams."
They befriended him in December when he was at Brown on a speaking engagement. Wozniak, who now teaches private computer courses to elementary school students in Los Gatos, said he told the Brown students in December he would return to see the project if they completed it.
In college, Wozniak was a big prankster, and this project impressed him, he said.
"This one really takes the cake," he said. "It's such an immense project."
Even though it's not all that useful, Wozniak said, projects like these, where students press their knowledge, often lead to real products that change the world, he said.
"Gosh, I think it should be on the cover of a magazine. I've read books about pranks at Cal Tech and at MIT. This is as good as any of them."
"I'm lucky to be able to see and experience it."
Where is YDL in this discussion? This article makes it sound as if Linux on an iMac is a new thing! YDL's been doing it for some time, and without all the hassle. See http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/.
Thanks for spanking the person who doesn't know sh*t about XML and probably does not even know what a DTD is.
You are very right that Microsoft does not control XML. But it is extremely irksome that XML (in its SGML incarnation) has been around and been used for over ten years now, and only when MS jumps on the bandwagon does the media and the world stand up and take notice (and that same media often proceeds to mis-attribute XML as MS's invention, AS IF!! poor Charles Goldfarb and the people who slaved over ISO 8879 and all the rest of us have the right to be pissed about this).