As far as I'm concerned the "product" of the iPhone includes unlimited internet access, because that was one of the advertised features. Removing that feature would be no different than, say, removing the ability to receive incoming calls.
Oooh I'll bet you he would NOT be fine with it. While he's handing out his 3,000 copies to "friends", the record company could be marketing it globally, selling a few hundred thousand copies, and stuffing their bank account with an extra couple of million dollars. You think he'd be fine with that?
I wonder how Mr Mouse would react if a record company decided to publish his copyrighted material without his permission?
Mash-ups are a great new form of creativity, but creativity doesn't give you free reign to publish other people's material without permission from the copyright holder.
Visual Voicemail on the iPhone should have "fixed" the user-unfriendly nature of traditional voicemail. But alas, here in the UK, it is all-too-frequently unavailabe, either due to lack of a mobile signal (even though the messages are stored on your phone, Visual Voicemail is disabled if you lose signal), or due to unspecified faults that result in you being told smply that Visual Voicemail is unavailable and you must dial in to access your voicemail manually. A potentially great service, crippled by some horrible "service DRM" that shuts it off as soon as the service isn't there.
Like many iPhone users, I often evangelise about the iPhone and encourage my friends to get one. But I always include one caveat: DON'T get it based on the attraction of Visual Voicemail. The feature is so often unavailable that you should regard it as non-existant.
I anticipate that treating the web as an archive will ultimately lead to a frustrating dungeon of page-not-found errors, expired domain names and pay-to-access newspaper web sites.
I used to have a caffeine addiction from drinking lots of Coke for many years. I got over it by having a cold. For 3-4 days I couldn't stand the taste of Coke, so didn't drink any. And, already being ill, the withdrawal symptoms didn't bother me. By the time I got over the cold, I didn't need caffeine any more. Simples!
"the advertising campaign would have been enough to inform parents that this game was not for children"
Anecdotal evidence (which is all I have) is that only a minority of parents exercise enforcement of age ratings. And children who are not allowed to buy adult games can still get hold of the games by borrowing them from a friend, playing them at a friend's house, etc.
The situation as it stands at the moment (with self-regulation that doesn't regulate) is that marketing a game as not-for-children is a great way of making it desirable to children, and the age rating does little to stop children from buying the game.
The most well-known example is the furore over Soldier of Fortune.
The game was marketed from conception to release as an adults-only product, unsuitable for children. Yet when the Canadian authorities officially classed it as adults-only (so it could not legally be sold to children) there was a court case to get the decision over-turned.
The logical conslusion, to my mind, is that the publisher wanted it to be legal to sell the game to children because they wanted children to buy it.
It was a ridiculous situation. We had a supposedly self-regulated industry imposing an age restriction on a game, and then taking a government to court over its support for that age restriction! It was almost as if the game's publisher was using the ESRB rating as some kind of cynical marketing device... but surely that couldn't be true?
"There are people who just don't believe in self regulation."
There are also people who do believe in self-regulation but have seen that the entertainment software industry is incapable of doing it. An industry claiming to regulate itself is not the same as an industry actually regulating itself.
The games industry has demonstrated time and again that it does not want age ratings to be enforced and will actively take steps to prevent this from happening. Therefore, if we want ratings to be enforced, third-party regulation is required.
The Canon 1Ds isn't wifi-enabled. You might be thinking of the Nikon D2h which has a wifi add-on and is approximately the same generation, although a little more recent. The newer generation of Canon DSLRs also have wifi add-ons available.
I was watching Wimbledon yesterday, and there was an interview with Maria Sharapova, the 17-year-old "next big thing" from Russia.
The interviewer asked her what she did in her spare time and she said something along the lines of: "I'm always listening to my iPod, always listening to my iTunes".
I'm not sure why but I found this quite sad. It's as if, to her, the artists and even the music itself has lost any uniqueness or individuality. The songs are just a collection of different products on "my iTunes".
I suppose it's no different from someone saying, ten years ago, that they like listening to the radio. I just felt... resentful? I think that's the best word to sum it up. I feel that people should consider each artist/song as something special, not just "my iTunes". Nobody would say "I like listening to music from HMV" or "I like listening to music from Walmart", so why do people have this fondness for iTunes? It's just another store with the single goal of making money.
It's an odd form of brand loyalty, and I have to say that I don't like it.
Some developers use license agreements which specifically state that the software *is* guaranteed to perform a particular function to a certain standard.
Have any of those developers been sued for bugs or defects?
Or is it the case that those developers do genuinely work to produce quality software while, as one might assume, the ones who disclaim all warranties are the ones who produce faulty products?
Parent post was a case of an Internet person commenting on the real world. As soon as I posted the comment I instinctively started thinking about the hypothetical business I mentioned, and it's obvious that 1000% profit would be downright impossible to achieve. I still think the spammer guy's an idiot/scum if he's only making 2x/3x profit by *spamming* but apologies for letting my ego run away with me.
Thats for a turnover of 6 times and a net profit of well over twice those initial spam-related costs
If any business of mine ever makes "well over twice" the running costs, ie: not enough to be expressed in thousands of percent, then I'd shut it down and start asking myself where I went wrong.
Seriously, just off the top of my head I can think of one much-needed business in my (very small) local town that this spammer guy could set-up and he'd make 10x what he made from spamming. Oh and I've just thought of another one.
The world is full of money-making opportunities if you stop thinking about money and start thinking about what people *want* and what useful products and services you can provide. I'm pretty sure you'll find that those opportunities are more profitable than all but the most serious financial crimes.
One day in 1992 or thereabouts, I was sat in the computer room at college, writing 3D code in Pascal instead of 'learning' about databases. The first step I took in simplifying the render process was to cull adjacent triangles with identical or closely similar normals. This was done to speed up rendering, not for the sake of data compression, although that was of course a happy side effect.
I'd put money on someone else having done the same thing before me. Decades before me.
So without wanting to sound bitchy or sarcastic, what's the big news here?
Researchers have stumbled upon a technique that must surely be used at some point in the development of every modern computer game?
My understanding of low-poly modelling is that high-poly models are created and then simplified, ie: imperceptible triangles are removed and adjacent triangles are expanded to cover their place.
Also, what about real-time distance-based simplifying? A game might use all 1000 triangles of a model when it's close-up, but simplify the model to 50 triangles when it's further away. Same principle.
This strikes me as a case of reinventing the wheel.
But the only portable device it supports is the iPod.
Oh well, I guess I'll stick to burning CDs.
Seems that the only way I can play music from iTunes on my MuVo is to burn a CD and then rip the CD, which is a bit more hassle than I'm willing to go to. So I'll pay a few pounds more, get the CD with the nice packaging, track listing, lyrics, etc, the eeeevil record companies will have more of my money and Apple will have none.
Apple wants to limit my use of their service so I'll limit it myself -- to zero.
It might not be an option if you work in an office but I work at home and I like to listen to DVD commentaries.
Put on the commentary for a film you like, especially if you like the actor/director who is doing the commentary, and two hours are gone before you know it.
How come in Slashdot discussions about music/film piracy, we get hundreds of posts from people arguing that piracy isn't theft, it's "sharing". But in this thread, everyone's talking about how the source code was "stolen".
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I'm concerned the "product" of the iPhone includes unlimited internet access, because that was one of the advertised features. Removing that feature would be no different than, say, removing the ability to receive incoming calls.
Hold on there old-timer, 30 disks?! Are you installing from floppies? But surely that would be more like 1,500 disks :-)
Oooh I'll bet you he would NOT be fine with it. While he's handing out his 3,000 copies to "friends", the record company could be marketing it globally, selling a few hundred thousand copies, and stuffing their bank account with an extra couple of million dollars. You think he'd be fine with that?
I wonder how Mr Mouse would react if a record company decided to publish his copyrighted material without his permission?
Mash-ups are a great new form of creativity, but creativity doesn't give you free reign to publish other people's material without permission from the copyright holder.
they spell out in large numbers
Shurely shome mishtake?
I'll show you a programmer building up its resume
"its" :-)
Visual Voicemail on the iPhone should have "fixed" the user-unfriendly nature of traditional voicemail. But alas, here in the UK, it is all-too-frequently unavailabe, either due to lack of a mobile signal (even though the messages are stored on your phone, Visual Voicemail is disabled if you lose signal), or due to unspecified faults that result in you being told smply that Visual Voicemail is unavailable and you must dial in to access your voicemail manually. A potentially great service, crippled by some horrible "service DRM" that shuts it off as soon as the service isn't there.
Like many iPhone users, I often evangelise about the iPhone and encourage my friends to get one. But I always include one caveat: DON'T get it based on the attraction of Visual Voicemail. The feature is so often unavailable that you should regard it as non-existant.
I anticipate that treating the web as an archive will ultimately lead to a frustrating dungeon of page-not-found errors, expired domain names and pay-to-access newspaper web sites.
I used to have a caffeine addiction from drinking lots of Coke for many years. I got over it by having a cold. For 3-4 days I couldn't stand the taste of Coke, so didn't drink any. And, already being ill, the withdrawal symptoms didn't bother me. By the time I got over the cold, I didn't need caffeine any more. Simples!
"the advertising campaign would have been enough to inform parents that this game was not for children"
Anecdotal evidence (which is all I have) is that only a minority of parents exercise enforcement of age ratings. And children who are not allowed to buy adult games can still get hold of the games by borrowing them from a friend, playing them at a friend's house, etc.
The situation as it stands at the moment (with self-regulation that doesn't regulate) is that marketing a game as not-for-children is a great way of making it desirable to children, and the age rating does little to stop children from buying the game.
The most well-known example is the furore over Soldier of Fortune.
The game was marketed from conception to release as an adults-only product, unsuitable for children. Yet when the Canadian authorities officially classed it as adults-only (so it could not legally be sold to children) there was a court case to get the decision over-turned.
The logical conslusion, to my mind, is that the publisher wanted it to be legal to sell the game to children because they wanted children to buy it.
It was a ridiculous situation. We had a supposedly self-regulated industry imposing an age restriction on a game, and then taking a government to court over its support for that age restriction! It was almost as if the game's publisher was using the ESRB rating as some kind of cynical marketing device... but surely that couldn't be true?
"There are people who just don't believe in self regulation."
There are also people who do believe in self-regulation but have seen that the entertainment software industry is incapable of doing it. An industry claiming to regulate itself is not the same as an industry actually regulating itself.
The games industry has demonstrated time and again that it does not want age ratings to be enforced and will actively take steps to prevent this from happening. Therefore, if we want ratings to be enforced, third-party regulation is required.
The Canon 1Ds isn't wifi-enabled. You might be thinking of the Nikon D2h which has a wifi add-on and is approximately the same generation, although a little more recent. The newer generation of Canon DSLRs also have wifi add-ons available.
Please don't undermine my pessimism with logic! :-)
You may well be right. My "single goal" comment was just lazy cynicism. I really don't know enough about Jobs to make an educated comment.
I was watching Wimbledon yesterday, and there was an interview with Maria Sharapova, the 17-year-old "next big thing" from Russia.
The interviewer asked her what she did in her spare time and she said something along the lines of: "I'm always listening to my iPod, always listening to my iTunes ".
I'm not sure why but I found this quite sad. It's as if, to her, the artists and even the music itself has lost any uniqueness or individuality. The songs are just a collection of different products on "my iTunes".
I suppose it's no different from someone saying, ten years ago, that they like listening to the radio. I just felt... resentful? I think that's the best word to sum it up. I feel that people should consider each artist/song as something special, not just "my iTunes". Nobody would say "I like listening to music from HMV" or "I like listening to music from Walmart", so why do people have this fondness for iTunes? It's just another store with the single goal of making money.
It's an odd form of brand loyalty, and I have to say that I don't like it.
Some developers use license agreements which specifically state that the software *is* guaranteed to perform a particular function to a certain standard.
Have any of those developers been sued for bugs or defects?
Or is it the case that those developers do genuinely work to produce quality software while, as one might assume, the ones who disclaim all warranties are the ones who produce faulty products?
Parent post was a case of an Internet person commenting on the real world. As soon as I posted the comment I instinctively started thinking about the hypothetical business I mentioned, and it's obvious that 1000% profit would be downright impossible to achieve. I still think the spammer guy's an idiot/scum if he's only making 2x/3x profit by *spamming* but apologies for letting my ego run away with me.
Seriously, just off the top of my head I can think of one much-needed business in my (very small) local town that this spammer guy could set-up and he'd make 10x what he made from spamming. Oh and I've just thought of another one.
The world is full of money-making opportunities if you stop thinking about money and start thinking about what people *want* and what useful products and services you can provide. I'm pretty sure you'll find that those opportunities are more profitable than all but the most serious financial crimes.
One day in 1992 or thereabouts, I was sat in the computer room at college, writing 3D code in Pascal instead of 'learning' about databases. The first step I took in simplifying the render process was to cull adjacent triangles with identical or closely similar normals. This was done to speed up rendering, not for the sake of data compression, although that was of course a happy side effect.
I'd put money on someone else having done the same thing before me. Decades before me.
So without wanting to sound bitchy or sarcastic, what's the big news here?
Researchers have stumbled upon a technique that must surely be used at some point in the development of every modern computer game?
My understanding of low-poly modelling is that high-poly models are created and then simplified, ie: imperceptible triangles are removed and adjacent triangles are expanded to cover their place.
Also, what about real-time distance-based simplifying? A game might use all 1000 triangles of a model when it's close-up, but simplify the model to 50 triangles when it's further away. Same principle.
This strikes me as a case of reinventing the wheel.
[nothing]
iTunes launches in the UK.
Great! Where can I sign-up?!
But the only portable device it supports is the iPod.
Oh well, I guess I'll stick to burning CDs.
Seems that the only way I can play music from iTunes on my MuVo is to burn a CD and then rip the CD, which is a bit more hassle than I'm willing to go to. So I'll pay a few pounds more, get the CD with the nice packaging, track listing, lyrics, etc, the eeeevil record companies will have more of my money and Apple will have none.
Apple wants to limit my use of their service so I'll limit it myself -- to zero.
It might not be an option if you work in an office but I work at home and I like to listen to DVD commentaries.
Put on the commentary for a film you like, especially if you like the actor/director who is doing the commentary, and two hours are gone before you know it.
I swear this isn't flamebait!
How come in Slashdot discussions about music/film piracy, we get hundreds of posts from people arguing that piracy isn't theft, it's "sharing". But in this thread, everyone's talking about how the source code was "stolen".