Well, I'm sure GSM has a bunch of optimizations to be more suitable for voice communication over wireless, but it isn't like there aren't really strong encrypted communications protocols out there (such as openssl). As others have pointed out only the wireless portion of the conversation is encrypted at all.
Could be worse. Remember back when they closed half of of DC because some guy parked a tractor in a shallow pool for a day or two? There were about 50 things they could have done to just take the guy into custody. Instead they put him under siege as if he had hostages and shut down all kinds of buildings for two days.
The 9/11 terrorists could probably have disrupted the Pentagon more if they just dressed somebody up as a clown with bulky clothing and had him stand in the parking lot for a week...
So, how do I keep adding files to the player over time, without keeping TWO copies of my library? Why do I need to keep files on my hard drive just so that they can exist in the player?
The problem is that there is NO way to accomplish this with itunes. It isn't even an option. I'm fine with it having a default behavior that I don't happen to like - but I should be able to copy files onto the player without having to waste space on them on a computer when they're not in my preferred format...
If you pick obscure formats for silly ideological reasons, don't complain when the market doesn't cater to your needs.
Ah, but it has. The iPod certainly hasn't, but there are a number of players out there which do support ogg, and as a result they've gotten my business. They also support drag/drop/etc.
Hey - it wasn't my brilliant idea to buy an ipod in the first place - I was just in the unfortunate position of trying to help out a friend...
The cost of lab equipment is insignificant compared to the cost of labor. And chemists don't make more than computer programmers.
But doctors sure do - and they are one of the biggest costs in drug development.
Now, basic research for drugs is a different story - which is why there are a lot of start-ups out there and biotechs that basically come up with an idea, develop a few molecules, and sell them off to big pharma companies to develop, often taking a cut of the final profits, or some up-front cash (or both). However, the big companies still make good money - because without any testing the molecule could easily turn out to be snake oil - it is the testing that costs all the money.
Even so, biotechs still end up being corporate entities and as a rule they will patent their designs. The reason is that at a biotech you might have 10 guys working on a project using about $500k in equipment easily. You don't get that kind of gear without funding, and you don't get funding without a business model. And if you work that closely with a few people for a long time, you tend to form a corporate mentality.
Even so, there are examples of corporate charity in the drug world - orphan drugs and such. They tend to be the result of a company doing R&D for something profitable and accidentally finding something unprofitable, but deciding to go ahead and put some cash into it for image purposes.
It is much harder to form distant partnerships in drug development - since so much physical material is involved.
Companies make deals to get tax breaks when creating plants all the time. The name of the company making the deal is hardly material. Either a tax break for a major corporation is appropriate, or it isn't. Why should it matter which one it is, as long as the corporation follows all the local laws (such as environmental regs, etc)?
What has the local community lost by making a deal with Google? If we were talking about seedy deals to relax waste disposal regs for some landfill or factory I could understand your concern. I'm sure the guys who brokered this deal will be applauded by the local voters.
Or you could look at it as costing North Carolina's taxpayers $89,000,000 that they should have gotten to improve their schools, infrastructure, health care, reduce homeowner's taxes, reduce income taxes, etc.
I bet that for every dollar in taxes that they saved they're paying 1-2 dollars in taxes that they DIDN'T save. So you could just as easily say that the unwillingness of some other states to strike a better deal is costing THEIR taxpayers several times as much.
Kind of like going to a car dealer - their choice is to either give you a deal, or lose the sale. They don't lose money by giving you a deal - they make money.
The nice thing about the USA on the state level is competition - you have 50 different choices of varying regulatory structures all with their pros and cons, and it is a free market for those willing to relocate.
You don't see it for the same reason that you don't see open-source drug design, car design, plane design, bridge-building, etc.
The beauty of software is that it takes no capital to develop it, and it is easy for thousands of people who have never met to collaborate. It also takes no capital to test. And it can be generally implemented on small scales as large as big ones.
Wikipedia started off as a site nobody ever heard of. Wiki itself started as an extension to the blog concept. I can run my own wikipedia in my living room if I want to - as long as I keep it quiet and don't have the whole world knocking on my door.
A search engine is useless unless it has indexed a substantial portion of the entire internet. You'd need GBs of data just to know if your algorithm is working. So, it is fundamentally a different problem. Even if you built up the database it is hard for people to collborate on it since they need access to all the data to test new algorithms. Wikipedia scales much better - you don't need to have the whole encyclopedia to test out a new interface model, and the back-end is all commodity software like mysql/apache/etc (that software does require more infrastructure to test - but it is somebody else's project and they could test large table performance in mysql just by having tables full of random data).
The same issues apply to other types of community-based projects. You want cheap drugs, and think open-source is the answer? Well, now you need a bunch of people with chemistry degrees and about $100k minimum worth of equipment in their basement. And even if by some miracle they come up with something how do you test it? Typically you have to pay volunteers to take your pills, and pay doctors to be bothered with handing them out. Oh, you also need to go out and inspect your doctors so that they don't just falsify reports and collect their checks without bothering with actual test subjects (it happens all the time - it would happen more if doctors didn't know that pharma companies would catch them and turn them over to the FDA - this is a punishable crime). That is one of the biggest areas of expense in pharma R&D. Similar issues apply to anything that involves physical reality - like engineering/etc. You can model a new plane on a computer, but at some point you need to build a test model and you can't do that without serious cash. Groups like the planetary society are always drawing up models for interstellar spacecraft, but there is no way to know if they'd work without testing...
Open source software is a wonderful development and in time I think it will transform the ENTIRE industry - just give it a generation. However, until we have star trek style replicators many industries will not be able to benefit from a similar model...
Why should they? I didn't ask for the iPod to play ogg files - I asked for its software, running on a powerful desktop computer, to be able to figure out how to convert it so that I could play the corresponding aac on the ipod. There is no reason this shouldn't be possible without major hassles.
Gosh - I'd have been happy if it just didn't delete all my files whenever I synced it after deleting the originals on my hard drive. I can easily bulk-convert ogg to aac/lossless/whatever - but I'd rather not keep those files around just so that itunes doesn't just delete them.
The reason that you don't just have drag-and-drop is for performance; a database is much faster than reading every file.
Why should a database and drag-and-drop be mutually exclusive? The iPod firmware should be running any time it is powered on, and it should index files as they're copied/deleted. Or, upon first reset after copying files it could re-index them.
My understanding is that Rockbox handles this just fine on the same hardware - so there is no reason Apple couldn't have just done it that way.
The thing that annoys me about Apple (and a bunch of other vendors) is that they get this idea into their head that their interface software is the best one out there and consequently everybody should just be using it for everything. Suppose I have three mp3 plays of different brands - that means I need three library management programs and I need to maintain my library three times. With some of the lousy software out there I might potentially have to maintain 3 COPIES of the whole library.
The way such programs should work is thus:
1. I have a library - it is a directory structure on the disk IN WHATEVER DESIGN I WANT IT TO BE. Perhaps it is just one HUGE directory with a bazillion files in it. 2. The library is generally untouched by the program unless I explicitly ask the program to reorganize it. 3. The program maintains a database index of the library in whatever format it likes. New files get indexed, if I delete a file it will be configurable as to whether it stays in the library and just gets marked to no longer be indexed, or whether the file gets purged. 4. No matter what formats the associated player handles the library stays in its original format. The interface program will convert on the fly as needed, and not keep hundreds of intermediate files around. The interface program will support plugins (preferably standard ones) to convert formats so that new ones can be supported in the future. 5. The player associated with the program will be designed to handle drag-and-drop file transfer - so that I can just maintain it manually if I prefer. Now, I realize that this would probably lose some benefits of the interface program (auto-conversion, some fancy indexing, etc) - but it should be functional.
It doesn't seem that hard to accomplish all of this. And it would eliminate half the mp3-player hassles I've had. Sure, everything is seamless right now if you only buy one brand of player, and keep your library in its preferred format. However, in the year 2007 we should expect more from our software than that. Amarok seems to work really well compared to my ideal requirements, but I can't vouch for its player syncing since I haven't used it - I just copy my files to my iAudio G3 manually.
after it's done, remove the OGGs from your library and let it sync the MP3s to the ipod.
Actually, I WANT to keep the oggs - that is my primary library. The mp3s are the files I don't want to keep around - I just want to copy them to the ipod and then delete them - since in theory they aren't needed any longer...
Well, this certainly didn't work on the shuffle I tried to get working in exactly this way. Sure, you could copy files onto it, but they couldn't be played as audio. I guess I can use it as a massively overpriced thumb drive, but that wasn't the point...
You're generally better off letting itunes handle it though, as it does a much better job.
If only that were true. Go ahead and let me know how to use itunes to handle this:
I have a collection of files in ogg format. I want to download them to my iPod. I realize that an ogg->aac conversion will lose some quality, but we can bump up the bitrate a little to compensate. Tell me how to do that with itunes.
I couldn't find any way to do it. I ended up batch-converting the files on my linux box, and then uploading them. Then when I deleted all the aac files that I no longer needed itunes was helpful enough to go ahead and delete them off the ipod on the next sync. Apparently I'd need to keep a whole set of aac junk files lying around just to keep itunes happy even though I'd never listen to them on a PC.
And yes, I did find a plugin that plays ogg in itunes - pity that it won't do a conversion when uploading to an ipod.
Suffice it to say the ipod was returned. It was actually a friend's device and not mine - I had advised against it all along figuring it would be a pain to get working...
I love my iAudio G3 - just copy files and it works. If for whatever reason I have to convert a file to upload it I don't need to keep the converted file on my hard drive. And I don't need any fancy software - works on any OS out there that handles USB drives...
I dunno - my iAudio G3 plays mp3, ogg, and wma, and I can drag/drop files in any way I want into its file structure and it finds them just fine. Works great from linux. Sure, I can use any of that other fancy software, but I don't have to.
Of course, if they just implemented the iPod as a USB mass storage device, there would probably not be any issues at all. They could still have a fancy front-end that loads files onto it.
It drives me nuts when you need to use fancy software to download/upload from your camera/mp3-player/etc. It isn't like there aren't standards out there that would work perfectly well...
If I were Asus/Cisco/USRobotics/DLink/Whatever I will be very worried of being forced to remove Linux from my embedded devices because of some agreement with their competition.
They have nothing to worry about as long as they distribute their source with their binaries, as long as they allow their users to make modifications to their products, and as long as they don't make side deals that would make it harder for their users to redistribute changes to their products.
FSF is going every day towards being Freaking Stupid Foundation. And OSS loses credibility every day because of these childish issues.
With who? They certainly don't with their constituency - which are people who want to promote copyleft/GPL/Free Software(TM).
The only people who this worries are companies that want to obtain the benefits of the community's work without having to give back. Honestly, I doubt many in the community care about that. I doubt RMS and Co lose sleep when some company decides to abandon linux/GNU/whatever - they're not looking to win a popularity contest. As long as free software works in the community they're happy.
If OpenSolaris goes GPLv3 I think we'll see a huge adoption - as you said much of the FOSS code out there could be ported over, and linux could not pull solaris code back in. I've heard a lot of good things about dtrace/etc, and I'd expect that with the commercial support that solaris would have much more user-friendly administrative features. I'm not sure how ZFS compares to LVM2, but it looks like it delivers all of that and possibly more.
If you start saying "You are free to do whatever you want with Linux so long as you support our ideals, but if you play nice with MS or other companies we don't like we'll take it away form you," well hell, you end up looking more restrictive than MS.
Uh, the GPL pretty much states that plain and clear. The intent of the GPL is for users to be able to:
1. Redistribute their software freely. 2. Obtain the source to their software.
If you distribute GPL software and you want to interfere with either of these goals you're going to be sued by the FSF if they hold copyright on your software.
If Novell/MS grant a free and redistributable license to any patented technologies in the GPL software they distribute then I'm sure the FSF will be perfectly happy to let them go on selling linux. What they object to is that user's and developer's rights to use, modify, and redistribute their software is being put in jeopardy by a software-patent loophole. The GPL v3 is being designed to explicitly close this loophole.
In any case, if you don't like the FSF's goals, then don't use their software. It is just like ANY other piece of software out there - if you want to go distributing it all over the earth you need a license from the copyright holder.
And last time I checked MS doesn't allow you to redistribute their software AT ALL. So, this is hardly being more restrictive than MS. The FSF isn't trying to stop Novell from USING linux - just redistributing it. If all of Novell's customers downloaded the GNU toolchain from gnu.org there would be no issues. If MS were taking issue with some company pressing Vista install CDs without authorization I doubt it would make this big of a splash...
Agreed - when you do backups you ask yourself "why am I doing backups - what is the scenario I'm preparing for?" If it is hard drive failure you don't do backups at all - you set up RAID. If it is a server farm fire you do offsite backups, or maybe offsite mirroring. If it is software glitches you do an offline backup. If it is human/software error that doesn't get spotted for 3 months then you save backups every day for 91 days. And so on...
If I were running free email service I'd protect against reasonable data-center failures and software glitches, but I wouldn't keep my backups more than a day or two - what would be the point? The data has ZERO value to me - I just need to have a half-decent reputation. If a user deletes their own data it won't harm my reputation, so I don't need to have a long retention on backups.
If lycos stores 50TB of email, then they need 50TB*retention of storage capacity for backups. I'm sure they look to trim as much as they can get away with for non-paying customers.
Now, if I were a corporation making money by productively using my data, then I'd be a lot more caring about it, and I'd spend a lot more keeping it safe.
For what it's worth, I'm a chemist working in drug research and I'm appalled at how lightly people take putting unnecessary foreign substances into their bodies.
You must really love the Japanese market then!:)
I'm torn on drugs - part of me wants to get rid of prescriptions entirely (it's your body - destroy it if you want to), except maybe for antibiotics. However that complicates the payment system even further (obviously no insurer will pay for an unnecessary $120 drug). But I also agree that less is more when it comes to medication...
I had this happen to me, my doc had me on one drug but changed it to anohter drug when I got a new insurnace policy. I asked her why she switched drugs and she said my new insurance didn't cover the old drug.
I heard that many pharma companies are considering greatly reducing marketing to doctors - it seems that more and more these days they don't get to pick the drug anyway. The money is better spent marketing to insurance companies, or to consumers (from a drug sales perspective)...
Actually, the most straightforward solution is to integrate the driver into the kernel - then you don't need multiple code paths since any given version of the driver will run on exactly one version of the kernel.
Yes, I realize this doesn't always work well for fringe drivers. But there are already a lot of fringe drivers in the kernel, so I guess they figure one more couldn't hurt...
1. If doctors didn't need marketing, but always prescribed whatever is best supported by the medical literature that they spend hours a day reading, then nobody would waste money on marketing in the first place. Every dollar not spent on marketing is another dollar in profits - and no company just advertises for the sake of advertising.
2. The pills that get prescribed are a result of a number of factors: the doctor's opinion as to what is best, the insurance company's opinion as to what is most cost-effective, and the patient's opinion as to what is best. All three have a significant influence - and the second one is probably one of the biggest ones.
3. While I'm sure society would work best if we left medicine to doctors, science to scientists, driving to cab drivers, morality to your favorite religious leader, and ruling to politicians, there is this nagging feeling inside of me that the person who has my best interests most at heart is myself. If I have a medical condition you bet I'm going to research everything I can. I'm going to go to websites not approved for patients in my country to read, I'm going to click on the "for heathcare providers only" link on drug websites, and I'm going to chat on forums. I will certainly take my doctor's opinion seriously, but in the end it is my life and not his that is on the line. If I make a bad call I pay for it with my life - which is incentive enough for me to listen to wise counsel. And if I kill myself taking the wrong drugs that shouldn't be anybody's business but my own.
4. Doctors are human just like everybody else. Their intelligence is generally no greater than that of an average professional employee, although they are highly trained in what they do. If you work in IT consider the variety of talent in your workplace - there is probably a guy who could have written apache singlehandedly, and there is probably also some guy who somehow managed to get a degree and hold a job, but nobody is quite sure how - probably because everybody else covers for him. You'll find the same situation in any medical system in the world.
5. Everybody has a right to be involved in decisions that affect their lives. If my neighbor asks me for computer advice I don't just give him a recommendation and then if he asks for my reasoning tell him to go ask somebody else if he can't be bothered to just take me at my word. My neighbor has a brain, and is capable of understanding moderately technical material. If I recommend gmail over yahoo I don't need to explain graylisting, baysian filtering, or AJAX to give him some reasons why one is better than the other. If some ad on TV causes patients to ask their doctors questions then some good has come about.
6. Frankly, I doubt that most doctors read journals at all, or even subscribe to them. I've met some who have greatly impressed me with their knowledge. And I've met some who have frankly frightened me. Just like anybody can babble on about gigabytes and petaflops and sound smart without having a clue, it is also easy to wow patients with talk of triglycerides and HDL/LDL without giving sound medical advice.
7. Advertising is designed to make consumers aware of products. It is almost always unbalanced. The arguments that are employed to suggest that pill ads should be banned would suggest that all ads should be banned.
8. If all pills on the market have been tested and have been shown in general to cause more benefit than harm, then in theory as long as doctors are following the indications and contraindications patients should do better taking the pills than not taking anything. Now, you can debate taking one pill vs another, but I'm sure most doctors would steer their patients in the right direction if it made a big difference. And if doctors don't bother to do that then I wouldn't count on them to prescribe the right pills if the patient doesn't ask for anything.
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Well, I'm sure GSM has a bunch of optimizations to be more suitable for voice communication over wireless, but it isn't like there aren't really strong encrypted communications protocols out there (such as openssl). As others have pointed out only the wireless portion of the conversation is encrypted at all.
Could be worse. Remember back when they closed half of of DC because some guy parked a tractor in a shallow pool for a day or two? There were about 50 things they could have done to just take the guy into custody. Instead they put him under siege as if he had hostages and shut down all kinds of buildings for two days.
The 9/11 terrorists could probably have disrupted the Pentagon more if they just dressed somebody up as a clown with bulky clothing and had him stand in the parking lot for a week...
So, how do I keep adding files to the player over time, without keeping TWO copies of my library? Why do I need to keep files on my hard drive just so that they can exist in the player?
The problem is that there is NO way to accomplish this with itunes. It isn't even an option. I'm fine with it having a default behavior that I don't happen to like - but I should be able to copy files onto the player without having to waste space on them on a computer when they're not in my preferred format...
If you pick obscure formats for silly ideological reasons, don't complain when the market doesn't cater to your needs.
Ah, but it has. The iPod certainly hasn't, but there are a number of players out there which do support ogg, and as a result they've gotten my business. They also support drag/drop/etc.
Hey - it wasn't my brilliant idea to buy an ipod in the first place - I was just in the unfortunate position of trying to help out a friend...
The cost of lab equipment is insignificant compared to the cost of labor. And chemists don't make more than computer programmers.
But doctors sure do - and they are one of the biggest costs in drug development.
Now, basic research for drugs is a different story - which is why there are a lot of start-ups out there and biotechs that basically come up with an idea, develop a few molecules, and sell them off to big pharma companies to develop, often taking a cut of the final profits, or some up-front cash (or both). However, the big companies still make good money - because without any testing the molecule could easily turn out to be snake oil - it is the testing that costs all the money.
Even so, biotechs still end up being corporate entities and as a rule they will patent their designs. The reason is that at a biotech you might have 10 guys working on a project using about $500k in equipment easily. You don't get that kind of gear without funding, and you don't get funding without a business model. And if you work that closely with a few people for a long time, you tend to form a corporate mentality.
Even so, there are examples of corporate charity in the drug world - orphan drugs and such. They tend to be the result of a company doing R&D for something profitable and accidentally finding something unprofitable, but deciding to go ahead and put some cash into it for image purposes.
It is much harder to form distant partnerships in drug development - since so much physical material is involved.
Companies make deals to get tax breaks when creating plants all the time. The name of the company making the deal is hardly material. Either a tax break for a major corporation is appropriate, or it isn't. Why should it matter which one it is, as long as the corporation follows all the local laws (such as environmental regs, etc)?
What has the local community lost by making a deal with Google? If we were talking about seedy deals to relax waste disposal regs for some landfill or factory I could understand your concern. I'm sure the guys who brokered this deal will be applauded by the local voters.
Or you could look at it as costing North Carolina's taxpayers $89,000,000 that they should have gotten to improve their schools, infrastructure, health care, reduce homeowner's taxes, reduce income taxes, etc.
I bet that for every dollar in taxes that they saved they're paying 1-2 dollars in taxes that they DIDN'T save. So you could just as easily say that the unwillingness of some other states to strike a better deal is costing THEIR taxpayers several times as much.
Kind of like going to a car dealer - their choice is to either give you a deal, or lose the sale. They don't lose money by giving you a deal - they make money.
The nice thing about the USA on the state level is competition - you have 50 different choices of varying regulatory structures all with their pros and cons, and it is a free market for those willing to relocate.
You don't see it for the same reason that you don't see open-source drug design, car design, plane design, bridge-building, etc.
The beauty of software is that it takes no capital to develop it, and it is easy for thousands of people who have never met to collaborate. It also takes no capital to test. And it can be generally implemented on small scales as large as big ones.
Wikipedia started off as a site nobody ever heard of. Wiki itself started as an extension to the blog concept. I can run my own wikipedia in my living room if I want to - as long as I keep it quiet and don't have the whole world knocking on my door.
A search engine is useless unless it has indexed a substantial portion of the entire internet. You'd need GBs of data just to know if your algorithm is working. So, it is fundamentally a different problem. Even if you built up the database it is hard for people to collborate on it since they need access to all the data to test new algorithms. Wikipedia scales much better - you don't need to have the whole encyclopedia to test out a new interface model, and the back-end is all commodity software like mysql/apache/etc (that software does require more infrastructure to test - but it is somebody else's project and they could test large table performance in mysql just by having tables full of random data).
The same issues apply to other types of community-based projects. You want cheap drugs, and think open-source is the answer? Well, now you need a bunch of people with chemistry degrees and about $100k minimum worth of equipment in their basement. And even if by some miracle they come up with something how do you test it? Typically you have to pay volunteers to take your pills, and pay doctors to be bothered with handing them out. Oh, you also need to go out and inspect your doctors so that they don't just falsify reports and collect their checks without bothering with actual test subjects (it happens all the time - it would happen more if doctors didn't know that pharma companies would catch them and turn them over to the FDA - this is a punishable crime). That is one of the biggest areas of expense in pharma R&D. Similar issues apply to anything that involves physical reality - like engineering/etc. You can model a new plane on a computer, but at some point you need to build a test model and you can't do that without serious cash. Groups like the planetary society are always drawing up models for interstellar spacecraft, but there is no way to know if they'd work without testing...
Open source software is a wonderful development and in time I think it will transform the ENTIRE industry - just give it a generation. However, until we have star trek style replicators many industries will not be able to benefit from a similar model...
Why should they? I didn't ask for the iPod to play ogg files - I asked for its software, running on a powerful desktop computer, to be able to figure out how to convert it so that I could play the corresponding aac on the ipod. There is no reason this shouldn't be possible without major hassles.
Gosh - I'd have been happy if it just didn't delete all my files whenever I synced it after deleting the originals on my hard drive. I can easily bulk-convert ogg to aac/lossless/whatever - but I'd rather not keep those files around just so that itunes doesn't just delete them.
The reason that you don't just have drag-and-drop is for performance; a database is much faster than reading every file.
Why should a database and drag-and-drop be mutually exclusive? The iPod firmware should be running any time it is powered on, and it should index files as they're copied/deleted. Or, upon first reset after copying files it could re-index them.
My understanding is that Rockbox handles this just fine on the same hardware - so there is no reason Apple couldn't have just done it that way.
The thing that annoys me about Apple (and a bunch of other vendors) is that they get this idea into their head that their interface software is the best one out there and consequently everybody should just be using it for everything. Suppose I have three mp3 plays of different brands - that means I need three library management programs and I need to maintain my library three times. With some of the lousy software out there I might potentially have to maintain 3 COPIES of the whole library.
The way such programs should work is thus:
1. I have a library - it is a directory structure on the disk IN WHATEVER DESIGN I WANT IT TO BE. Perhaps it is just one HUGE directory with a bazillion files in it.
2. The library is generally untouched by the program unless I explicitly ask the program to reorganize it.
3. The program maintains a database index of the library in whatever format it likes. New files get indexed, if I delete a file it will be configurable as to whether it stays in the library and just gets marked to no longer be indexed, or whether the file gets purged.
4. No matter what formats the associated player handles the library stays in its original format. The interface program will convert on the fly as needed, and not keep hundreds of intermediate files around. The interface program will support plugins (preferably standard ones) to convert formats so that new ones can be supported in the future.
5. The player associated with the program will be designed to handle drag-and-drop file transfer - so that I can just maintain it manually if I prefer. Now, I realize that this would probably lose some benefits of the interface program (auto-conversion, some fancy indexing, etc) - but it should be functional.
It doesn't seem that hard to accomplish all of this. And it would eliminate half the mp3-player hassles I've had. Sure, everything is seamless right now if you only buy one brand of player, and keep your library in its preferred format. However, in the year 2007 we should expect more from our software than that. Amarok seems to work really well compared to my ideal requirements, but I can't vouch for its player syncing since I haven't used it - I just copy my files to my iAudio G3 manually.
after it's done, remove the OGGs from your library and let it sync the MP3s to the ipod.
Actually, I WANT to keep the oggs - that is my primary library. The mp3s are the files I don't want to keep around - I just want to copy them to the ipod and then delete them - since in theory they aren't needed any longer...
Well, this certainly didn't work on the shuffle I tried to get working in exactly this way. Sure, you could copy files onto it, but they couldn't be played as audio. I guess I can use it as a massively overpriced thumb drive, but that wasn't the point...
You're generally better off letting itunes handle it though, as it does a much better job.
If only that were true. Go ahead and let me know how to use itunes to handle this:
I have a collection of files in ogg format. I want to download them to my iPod. I realize that an ogg->aac conversion will lose some quality, but we can bump up the bitrate a little to compensate. Tell me how to do that with itunes.
I couldn't find any way to do it. I ended up batch-converting the files on my linux box, and then uploading them. Then when I deleted all the aac files that I no longer needed itunes was helpful enough to go ahead and delete them off the ipod on the next sync. Apparently I'd need to keep a whole set of aac junk files lying around just to keep itunes happy even though I'd never listen to them on a PC.
And yes, I did find a plugin that plays ogg in itunes - pity that it won't do a conversion when uploading to an ipod.
Suffice it to say the ipod was returned. It was actually a friend's device and not mine - I had advised against it all along figuring it would be a pain to get working...
I love my iAudio G3 - just copy files and it works. If for whatever reason I have to convert a file to upload it I don't need to keep the converted file on my hard drive. And I don't need any fancy software - works on any OS out there that handles USB drives...
I dunno - my iAudio G3 plays mp3, ogg, and wma, and I can drag/drop files in any way I want into its file structure and it finds them just fine. Works great from linux. Sure, I can use any of that other fancy software, but I don't have to.
It isn't like it can't be done...
Of course, if they just implemented the iPod as a USB mass storage device, there would probably not be any issues at all. They could still have a fancy front-end that loads files onto it.
It drives me nuts when you need to use fancy software to download/upload from your camera/mp3-player/etc. It isn't like there aren't standards out there that would work perfectly well...
If I were Asus/Cisco/USRobotics/DLink/Whatever I will be very worried of being forced to remove Linux from my embedded devices because of some agreement with their competition.
They have nothing to worry about as long as they distribute their source with their binaries, as long as they allow their users to make modifications to their products, and as long as they don't make side deals that would make it harder for their users to redistribute changes to their products.
FSF is going every day towards being Freaking Stupid Foundation. And OSS loses credibility every day because of these childish issues.
With who? They certainly don't with their constituency - which are people who want to promote copyleft/GPL/Free Software(TM).
The only people who this worries are companies that want to obtain the benefits of the community's work without having to give back. Honestly, I doubt many in the community care about that. I doubt RMS and Co lose sleep when some company decides to abandon linux/GNU/whatever - they're not looking to win a popularity contest. As long as free software works in the community they're happy.
If OpenSolaris goes GPLv3 I think we'll see a huge adoption - as you said much of the FOSS code out there could be ported over, and linux could not pull solaris code back in. I've heard a lot of good things about dtrace/etc, and I'd expect that with the commercial support that solaris would have much more user-friendly administrative features. I'm not sure how ZFS compares to LVM2, but it looks like it delivers all of that and possibly more.
Competition is good for everyone!
If you start saying "You are free to do whatever you want with Linux so long as you support our ideals, but if you play nice with MS or other companies we don't like we'll take it away form you," well hell, you end up looking more restrictive than MS.
Uh, the GPL pretty much states that plain and clear. The intent of the GPL is for users to be able to:
1. Redistribute their software freely.
2. Obtain the source to their software.
If you distribute GPL software and you want to interfere with either of these goals you're going to be sued by the FSF if they hold copyright on your software.
If Novell/MS grant a free and redistributable license to any patented technologies in the GPL software they distribute then I'm sure the FSF will be perfectly happy to let them go on selling linux. What they object to is that user's and developer's rights to use, modify, and redistribute their software is being put in jeopardy by a software-patent loophole. The GPL v3 is being designed to explicitly close this loophole.
In any case, if you don't like the FSF's goals, then don't use their software. It is just like ANY other piece of software out there - if you want to go distributing it all over the earth you need a license from the copyright holder.
And last time I checked MS doesn't allow you to redistribute their software AT ALL. So, this is hardly being more restrictive than MS. The FSF isn't trying to stop Novell from USING linux - just redistributing it. If all of Novell's customers downloaded the GNU toolchain from gnu.org there would be no issues. If MS were taking issue with some company pressing Vista install CDs without authorization I doubt it would make this big of a splash...
Agreed - when you do backups you ask yourself "why am I doing backups - what is the scenario I'm preparing for?" If it is hard drive failure you don't do backups at all - you set up RAID. If it is a server farm fire you do offsite backups, or maybe offsite mirroring. If it is software glitches you do an offline backup. If it is human/software error that doesn't get spotted for 3 months then you save backups every day for 91 days. And so on...
If I were running free email service I'd protect against reasonable data-center failures and software glitches, but I wouldn't keep my backups more than a day or two - what would be the point? The data has ZERO value to me - I just need to have a half-decent reputation. If a user deletes their own data it won't harm my reputation, so I don't need to have a long retention on backups.
If lycos stores 50TB of email, then they need 50TB*retention of storage capacity for backups. I'm sure they look to trim as much as they can get away with for non-paying customers.
Now, if I were a corporation making money by productively using my data, then I'd be a lot more caring about it, and I'd spend a lot more keeping it safe.
I liked it back when the phone company, electric company, and other public utilities were advertising - BEFORE the advent of competition.
I mean - who else were you going to buy your electricity from anyway?
For what it's worth, I'm a chemist working in drug research and I'm appalled at how lightly people take putting unnecessary foreign substances into their bodies.
:)
You must really love the Japanese market then!
I'm torn on drugs - part of me wants to get rid of prescriptions entirely (it's your body - destroy it if you want to), except maybe for antibiotics. However that complicates the payment system even further (obviously no insurer will pay for an unnecessary $120 drug). But I also agree that less is more when it comes to medication...
I had this happen to me, my doc had me on one drug but changed it to anohter drug when I got a new insurnace policy. I asked her why she switched drugs and she said my new insurance didn't cover the old drug.
I heard that many pharma companies are considering greatly reducing marketing to doctors - it seems that more and more these days they don't get to pick the drug anyway. The money is better spent marketing to insurance companies, or to consumers (from a drug sales perspective)...
Actually, the most straightforward solution is to integrate the driver into the kernel - then you don't need multiple code paths since any given version of the driver will run on exactly one version of the kernel.
Yes, I realize this doesn't always work well for fringe drivers. But there are already a lot of fringe drivers in the kernel, so I guess they figure one more couldn't hurt...
A few issues with this line of reasoning:
1. If doctors didn't need marketing, but always prescribed whatever is best supported by the medical literature that they spend hours a day reading, then nobody would waste money on marketing in the first place. Every dollar not spent on marketing is another dollar in profits - and no company just advertises for the sake of advertising.
2. The pills that get prescribed are a result of a number of factors: the doctor's opinion as to what is best, the insurance company's opinion as to what is most cost-effective, and the patient's opinion as to what is best. All three have a significant influence - and the second one is probably one of the biggest ones.
3. While I'm sure society would work best if we left medicine to doctors, science to scientists, driving to cab drivers, morality to your favorite religious leader, and ruling to politicians, there is this nagging feeling inside of me that the person who has my best interests most at heart is myself. If I have a medical condition you bet I'm going to research everything I can. I'm going to go to websites not approved for patients in my country to read, I'm going to click on the "for heathcare providers only" link on drug websites, and I'm going to chat on forums. I will certainly take my doctor's opinion seriously, but in the end it is my life and not his that is on the line. If I make a bad call I pay for it with my life - which is incentive enough for me to listen to wise counsel. And if I kill myself taking the wrong drugs that shouldn't be anybody's business but my own.
4. Doctors are human just like everybody else. Their intelligence is generally no greater than that of an average professional employee, although they are highly trained in what they do. If you work in IT consider the variety of talent in your workplace - there is probably a guy who could have written apache singlehandedly, and there is probably also some guy who somehow managed to get a degree and hold a job, but nobody is quite sure how - probably because everybody else covers for him. You'll find the same situation in any medical system in the world.
5. Everybody has a right to be involved in decisions that affect their lives. If my neighbor asks me for computer advice I don't just give him a recommendation and then if he asks for my reasoning tell him to go ask somebody else if he can't be bothered to just take me at my word. My neighbor has a brain, and is capable of understanding moderately technical material. If I recommend gmail over yahoo I don't need to explain graylisting, baysian filtering, or AJAX to give him some reasons why one is better than the other. If some ad on TV causes patients to ask their doctors questions then some good has come about.
6. Frankly, I doubt that most doctors read journals at all, or even subscribe to them. I've met some who have greatly impressed me with their knowledge. And I've met some who have frankly frightened me. Just like anybody can babble on about gigabytes and petaflops and sound smart without having a clue, it is also easy to wow patients with talk of triglycerides and HDL/LDL without giving sound medical advice.
7. Advertising is designed to make consumers aware of products. It is almost always unbalanced. The arguments that are employed to suggest that pill ads should be banned would suggest that all ads should be banned.
8. If all pills on the market have been tested and have been shown in general to cause more benefit than harm, then in theory as long as doctors are following the indications and contraindications patients should do better taking the pills than not taking anything. Now, you can debate taking one pill vs another, but I'm sure most doctors would steer their patients in the right direction if it made a big difference. And if doctors don't bother to do that then I wouldn't count on them to prescribe the right pills if the patient doesn't ask for anything.
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Anybody