I was under the impression that SMS messages were made of inkjet printer ink. It's obviously expensive to compose a message, vaporize it, use the prevailing winds to get it where it needs to go, and then get it on the tiny scrap of e-paper in your phone.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac trolling fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while you attempt to rephrase a old troll from kottke.org. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be trolled more often, I'm rarely trolled once a year. If that.
In addition, during this trolling attempt, I can not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my assistant is straining to keep awake as you type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while waiting for your various trolls, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Wintel troll that has been posted faster than its Mac counterpart, despite Wintel users generally having less of a life, and more time to hang out on Slashdot. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs circles around you, and a small Perl script could out troll you most times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh troll is a superior troll.
Mac troll addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to troll a Mac user over other faster, cheaper, more stable people.
Actually, the transition period is over as of Jan 2007. I'm guessing you're seeing books printed before this date, as conversion to ISBN-13 is easy. Really, the only difference is in the display of the ISBN; you don't need to show the ISBN-10 anymore. Those who lag behind must have some infrastructure still needing to be adjusted to deal with the bigger number.
It covers the transition, placement, and some of the technical side of ISBN.
ISBN numbers are assigned, but ownership is not transfered - they remain the 'property' of the company that issues them.
OT, but interesting: In the early days of EAN or UPC-A (garden-varity barcode), those who bought a prefix (first 6 numbers) were allowed to 'resell' upc numbers to other entities. The issuing company was not happy about it, so changed the 'license' to prohibit that.
George J. Laurer, inventor of the barcode, goes into it further on his website, here.
He's not really cool with it:)
After Adobe bought Macromedia, the Macromedia guys took the Adobe Exchange, a fast and functional html site devoted to plugins and extensions, and rewrote it to work in flash. Now, it's slow, impossible to navigate, scrolling is disabled, the 'back' button is broken, it won't let the user determine font size, and searches are slow and not relevant. That's just a few of the problems...
They've effectively locked new and old users out, and repeated pleas to bring back the old site have gone unheeded and the issues with the new site have been ignored. Where there was once a thriving community of third party additions, now there is a stagnant pool, as uploads have trickled to nothing.
Way to go Adobe - you've just killed your golden goose.
Stopthe madness of flash for flash's sake! (Don't be surprised if these links don't load, evidently Adobe purchased Fark's old servers.)
I created a music player that plays zip files of my music encrypted with the names of prominent Congresswhores, such as 'Lamar Smith'. Obviously, he's disseminating my decryption keys unlawfully. There are over five infringing keys just on his home page, as well as sneaky attempts at avoiding detection by placing the key in images, and posting half of it preceeded by 'Congressman'.
The DMCA is obviously on my side, and I will be sending takedown notices to quite a few websites. The civil suit of 150,000 bucks per infringment won't be bad either - I can use it to lobby Congress to outlaw lobbyists, or even get some canidates who represent people, rather than industry groups.
Terra Naomi probably could have turned her internet fame into a career on her own. Instead she decided to sign with a major label, and let them ruin her. We've seen it before, a mass of overexposure that kills an artist, no support after a lackluster album (produced and written by others), and terms that make prisoners smile...
It may have taken longer and been more difficult, but most likely would have lent a longevity and authenticity to her that she's not going to find with a label.
I find it odd that someone who had those kind of pageviews wouldn't realize that they might be better off with no label. I'd be happy with one tenth of the traffic she's getting; then again, I'm not a girl on the internet. For some reason, that's still novel, and still rakes in traffic, interest, and a potential audience.
It remains to be seen how Island Records is going to treat her - will they help her build a lifelong career, or will they treat her like a William Hung flash-in-the-pan? The results will be telling. I'm curious to see how an organization that has proven itself to be internet-unsavvy will handle Naomi, who was an internet only phenom.
Pretty cool, all your changes are made in near real-time. I updated a current listing, and there's options to have them mail you a postcard, or make a call to that business.
I chose the call, and then picked, 'Call Now'. (As opposed to 5 min from now).
No sooner did I click it than the phone rang. I picked it up, and a female auto-voice had me punch in a 4 digit code from my screen.
It then told me they're updating every 4 weeks, and to expect it to take that long for my changes to show.
All in all, neato. Though the instant phone call tripped the tin-foil hat wearer in me.
"Mrs. Johnson, we've traced the call TO YOUR CHILD'S BEDROOM!!1!one!!"
They regard anything they do beyond the EULA a favor for which you should be grateful, just like they regard anything their software ever does for you.
I know I'm grateful whenever their software works.
I had this same issue in spades -- I finally tracked it down to the Pithhelmet plugin. It seems to choke on the little floaty dealy that controls hidden comments here on/. If I stopped the page from loading before that came up, I'd be fine (until I tried to expand a comment - crash!)
I disabled Pithhelmet, and tried Saft which works with/., but doesn't block as much as Pithhelmet -- but I've had so many other issues with Safari crashing that I've been trying to use FF more and more.
It seems that we need a 10.4.9 really bad. I've tried webkit, but it doesn't want to work with either plugin, and frankly, I can't deal with the web without ad-blocking.
10 Most mp3s are not hosted on websites. 20 The ones that are are usually on vinyl-lovin' music blogs that post semi-obscure music from the past. 30 Watermarking is only going to work on new music - how can you watermark something already released? 40 New music bites: GOTO 10
Simply stated, I have to work to live, why should someone write songs and do nothing more than live off of royalties? Musicians work should be their ability to perform, not their ability cash royalty cheques. The performance driven model also would have the added effect of cutting out the no-talent publicity-machine generated "stars" who cannot play an instrument, rely upon production tricks to sound good singing, etc.
I pay to see you play. Do a good job, and you too can charge $200+/ticket and I will hand over my money willingly and without complaint.
It's not that hard, people.
You show a lack of understanding of how it works. Do you think that good songs, say the ones the Police did years ago, just fall out of the sky? It's a lot of work, exhausting, emotionally draining work to write a good song. Sure, every now and again, you get an 'easy one', but you don't make a living from it. Why shouldn't someone who can consistently write good songs collect some money for the trouble? Who are you to define what a 'real job' is - The President of Jobs or my dad?
There are plenty of bands that put on a fantastic show, and could never charge 200 bucks a ticket - for two bills, I expect someone to play rhythym guitar behind Jesus (but they all want to be the lead singer of the band). Really, how do you think the Police got to charge what they're getting for this tour? Years of live shows? I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who will be going now who saw them the first time 'round is not that many.
It's the songs that made them, not shows. And yes, it is that hard.
If you haven't noticed, my band is called The Schmoejoes. We give everything away, DRM free. Why would we add a obstacle to someone who might be interested in the only indie-pop band in southern Minnesota?
There's two kinds of bands concerning DRM, the old school ones which are somehow oblivious to the changing 'biz', and use DRM to protect their songs - and the ones that saw the writing on the wall when they downloaded their first mp3. The days of rock stars are done - when you can taste an album before you buy it, you don't have to take a chance that the 'rest of the songs suck'.
We're going to be releasing a record by the end of the year (old school), and will be posting most if not all online (new
school). I still have reservations, because I grew up the old way, but I'm fighting through them.
One of the issues in all of this is getting the word out. DRM free music lets people email you a tune, "Check this out!" When my pal tried to email a track he bought from the iTunes store to me, I couldn't open it (our first real case of DRM).
He threw it into Protools and got an unprotected version - but notably, he won't do that anymore. It's a pain. So, any other bands he might have turned me or others on to go unheard. But, they 'protected their content', right?
I agree with some/.ers; people need a filter to find what they are interested in - MySpace is full of crap, and some gems, and it's not like anybody's going to accidentally come to my site, say 'Wow, I love this', and then fly to Mankato, MN to see us. Hell, at this point you need a filter to filter the sites that filter the music.
Great music that is DRM free IS everywhere, it's just that it is still harder to find than the tunes Clear Channel wants you to hear - and that is probably the biggest difference between the little indie-pop band and 'Insert Major Label Band here' - marketing. Familiarity is the thing that every band needs, and DRM Doesn't Really Matter when you've got millions of dollars pushing your flavor of the week.
So yeah. Click on my link, listen to the couple songs up there, come to a show. This link-filled post is all the marketing budget I have today.:)
our CGI, video-composited, fake children overlords?
Ugh. Since everything is done with the 'children' in mind, they are in fact becoming our overlords.
Seriously. Can't you just hang your keys higher on the wall? Tell your kids the difference between TV and Real Life? Put a kill switch on the vehicle?
I know this is a commercial and all, but really. Why does the extent of my life's experiences have to be dictated by your inability to parent your children?
Thanks, but no thanks. Vista will not be finding a spot on my Mac, nor my PC. I'm not even going to bother downloading the free, feature-added "Vista: Pirate Edition".
The movie industry is going to master a bunch of different versions of every movie, with different keys in each - hoping that it will stem the tide of 'piracy'. I don't think it's going to work.
I wanted to post this in the last story, but I just got around to it now.
Hell, most slashdotters do create copyrightable material. That email you sent to your sysadmin? Copyrightable (oops, almost said girlfriend there). That comment you wrote on Slashdot? Copyrightable (well, nevermind. Most are dupes).
As I understand it, both Pirate Bay and allofmp3.com are following the laws of the nations that they are in, but that's a whole 'nother thread.
The point I'm making is that this 'pre-crime' is BS. I can see links for torrents of copyrighted material, I can go to the sites that host the.torrent files, I can even download those.torrent files - but until I've actually got a copy of the file referenced in the torrent - I've done nothing wrong & I've infringed no copyright.
I can't agree - I think linking falls squarely into the first amendment. I can link to a site that describes in great detail how to murder someone - does that mean I'm 'encouraging' those who click on the link to go out and kill? Should I be held liable for those that do?
It seems that I could link to torrents all day if by doing so I was commenting on DRM or copyright or any number of other things. Intent may be different, but the act is still the same. Or is reporting/educational purposes not a valid reason?
I feel this goes in the category of, "Hammers can kill people, so owning a hammer should be banned."
Torrents of any sort should not be made illegal - that is a slippery slope that would only encourage John McCain's 'Neuternet'.
I've actually had my copyright infringed, and would link to the infringer to show you - except I could be liable if I do.
How about a real NOT in Spotlight? I know there's a nice lengthy command to do it, and this but it's hardly Mac-like. I'd like to search Spotlight like I search Google. There are a few 3rd party apps out there, but none make as it easy as it should be. If I want to find something that has a dash (or other characters in it, I'm out of luck.
I would love the Firefly universe put into the Fallout series of games. As far as story games went, they were the top IMO. I'm sure something could be done with graphics (though I'm fond of the pixely look in Fallout, and I think it would lend itself well to a western feel), but the story was great, and I emphasized with the characters. Some Homeworld action for the battles in space maybe?
A MMPORG sounds like a good way to kill off Firefly forever - there's just too many ways to screw this up, and then those who were interested in funding a comeback will point at the game and say, 'eh'. I'd rather it all be left alone.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be an adviser for Ted Stevens. I'm pleased to hear you have the situation well in hand.
I don't know why everyone acts so surprised.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac trolling fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while you attempt to rephrase a old troll from kottke.org. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be trolled more often, I'm rarely trolled once a year. If that.
In addition, during this trolling attempt, I can not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my assistant is straining to keep awake as you type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while waiting for your various trolls, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Wintel troll that has been posted faster than its Mac counterpart, despite Wintel users generally having less of a life, and more time to hang out on Slashdot. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs circles around you, and a small Perl script could out troll you most times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh troll is a superior troll.
Mac troll addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to troll a Mac user over other faster, cheaper, more stable people.
This is a pretty good resource, if you're looking for info on ISBN.
It covers the transition, placement, and some of the technical side of ISBN.
ISBN numbers are assigned, but ownership is not transfered - they remain the 'property' of the company that issues them.
OT, but interesting: In the early days of EAN or UPC-A (garden-varity barcode), those who bought a prefix (first 6 numbers) were allowed to 'resell' upc numbers to other entities. The issuing company was not happy about it, so changed the 'license' to prohibit that.
George J. Laurer, inventor of the barcode, goes into it further on his website, here. He's not really cool with it :)
They've effectively locked new and old users out, and repeated pleas to bring back the old site have gone unheeded and the issues with the new site have been ignored. Where there was once a thriving community of third party additions, now there is a stagnant pool, as uploads have trickled to nothing.
Way to go Adobe - you've just killed your golden goose. Stop the madness of flash for flash's sake! (Don't be surprised if these links don't load, evidently Adobe purchased Fark's old servers.)
I created a music player that plays zip files of my music encrypted with the names of prominent Congresswhores, such as 'Lamar Smith'. Obviously, he's disseminating my decryption keys unlawfully. There are over five infringing keys just on his home page, as well as sneaky attempts at avoiding detection by placing the key in images, and posting half of it preceeded by 'Congressman'.
The DMCA is obviously on my side, and I will be sending takedown notices to quite a few websites. The civil suit of 150,000 bucks per infringment won't be bad either - I can use it to lobby Congress to outlaw lobbyists, or even get some canidates who represent people, rather than industry groups.
Terra Naomi probably could have turned her internet fame into a career on her own. Instead she decided to sign with a major label, and let them ruin her. We've seen it before, a mass of overexposure that kills an artist, no support after a lackluster album (produced and written by others), and terms that make prisoners smile...
It may have taken longer and been more difficult, but most likely would have lent a longevity and authenticity to her that she's not going to find with a label.
I find it odd that someone who had those kind of pageviews wouldn't realize that they might be better off with no label. I'd be happy with one tenth of the traffic she's getting; then again, I'm not a girl on the internet. For some reason, that's still novel, and still rakes in traffic, interest, and a potential audience.
It remains to be seen how Island Records is going to treat her - will they help her build a lifelong career, or will they treat her like a William Hung flash-in-the-pan? The results will be telling. I'm curious to see how an organization that has proven itself to be internet-unsavvy will handle Naomi, who was an internet only phenom.
If it blows, there's a good chance the park won't be so crowded that year. I could finally go!
What happens when you play those nerves backwards?
You turn into Ozzy Osbourne?
Pretty cool, all your changes are made in near real-time. I updated a current listing, and there's options to have them mail you a postcard, or make a call to that business.
I chose the call, and then picked, 'Call Now'. (As opposed to 5 min from now).
No sooner did I click it than the phone rang. I picked it up, and a female auto-voice had me punch in a 4 digit code from my screen.
It then told me they're updating every 4 weeks, and to expect it to take that long for my changes to show.
All in all, neato. Though the instant phone call tripped the tin-foil hat wearer in me.
"Mrs. Johnson, we've traced the call TO YOUR CHILD'S BEDROOM!!1!one!!"
I know I'm grateful whenever their software works.
I had this same issue in spades -- I finally tracked it down to the Pithhelmet plugin. It seems to choke on the little floaty dealy that controls hidden comments here on /. If I stopped the page from loading before that came up, I'd be fine (until I tried to expand a comment - crash!)
/., but doesn't block as much as Pithhelmet -- but I've had so many other issues with Safari crashing that I've been trying to use FF more and more.
I disabled Pithhelmet, and tried Saft which works with
It seems that we need a 10.4.9 really bad. I've tried webkit, but it doesn't want to work with either plugin, and frankly, I can't deal with the web without ad-blocking.
10 Most mp3s are not hosted on websites.
20 The ones that are are usually on vinyl-lovin' music blogs that post semi-obscure music from the past.
30 Watermarking is only going to work on new music - how can you watermark something already released?
40 New music bites: GOTO 10
I pay to see you play. Do a good job, and you too can charge $200+/ticket and I will hand over my money willingly and without complaint.
It's not that hard, people.
You show a lack of understanding of how it works. Do you think that good songs, say the ones the Police did years ago, just fall out of the sky? It's a lot of work, exhausting, emotionally draining work to write a good song. Sure, every now and again, you get an 'easy one', but you don't make a living from it. Why shouldn't someone who can consistently write good songs collect some money for the trouble? Who are you to define what a 'real job' is - The President of Jobs or my dad?
There are plenty of bands that put on a fantastic show, and could never charge 200 bucks a ticket - for two bills, I expect someone to play rhythym guitar behind Jesus (but they all want to be the lead singer of the band). Really, how do you think the Police got to charge what they're getting for this tour? Years of live shows? I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who will be going now who saw them the first time 'round is not that many.
It's the songs that made them, not shows. And yes, it is that hard.
that the U.S. is Canada's Mexico.
If you haven't noticed, my band is called The Schmoejoes. We give everything away, DRM free. Why would we add a obstacle to someone who might be interested in the only indie-pop band in southern Minnesota? There's two kinds of bands concerning DRM, the old school ones which are somehow oblivious to the changing 'biz', and use DRM to protect their songs - and the ones that saw the writing on the wall when they downloaded their first mp3. The days of rock stars are done - when you can taste an album before you buy it, you don't have to take a chance that the 'rest of the songs suck'.
/.ers; people need a filter to find what they are interested in - MySpace is full of crap, and some gems, and it's not like anybody's going to accidentally come to my site, say 'Wow, I love this', and then fly to Mankato, MN to see us. Hell, at this point you need a filter to filter the sites that filter the music.
:)
We're going to be releasing a record by the end of the year (old school), and will be posting most if not all online (new school). I still have reservations, because I grew up the old way, but I'm fighting through them.
One of the issues in all of this is getting the word out. DRM free music lets people email you a tune, "Check this out!" When my pal tried to email a track he bought from the iTunes store to me, I couldn't open it (our first real case of DRM).
He threw it into Protools and got an unprotected version - but notably, he won't do that anymore. It's a pain. So, any other bands he might have turned me or others on to go unheard. But, they 'protected their content', right?
I agree with some
Great music that is DRM free IS everywhere, it's just that it is still harder to find than the tunes Clear Channel wants you to hear - and that is probably the biggest difference between the little indie-pop band and 'Insert Major Label Band here' - marketing. Familiarity is the thing that every band needs, and DRM Doesn't Really Matter when you've got millions of dollars pushing your flavor of the week.
So yeah. Click on my link, listen to the couple songs up there, come to a show. This link-filled post is all the marketing budget I have today.
our CGI, video-composited, fake children overlords?
Ugh. Since everything is done with the 'children' in mind, they are in fact becoming our overlords.
Seriously. Can't you just hang your keys higher on the wall? Tell your kids the difference between TV and Real Life? Put a kill switch on the vehicle?
I know this is a commercial and all, but really. Why does the extent of my life's experiences have to be dictated by your inability to parent your children?
So you're saying you actually listened to your parents? Sheesh. What are you, some kinda nerd?
I expect my hardware to work for me, not for you.
I wanted to post this in the last story, but I just got around to it now.
Copyright © me, 2006 I'm in ur Slashdot
Infringing ur copyrights
Fair Use in da house?
As I understand it, both Pirate Bay and allofmp3.com are following the laws of the nations that they are in, but that's a whole 'nother thread.
.torrent files, I can even download those .torrent files - but until I've actually got a copy of the file referenced in the torrent - I've done nothing wrong & I've infringed no copyright.
The point I'm making is that this 'pre-crime' is BS. I can see links for torrents of copyrighted material, I can go to the sites that host the
I can't agree - I think linking falls squarely into the first amendment. I can link to a site that describes in great detail how to murder someone - does that mean I'm 'encouraging' those who click on the link to go out and kill? Should I be held liable for those that do?
It seems that I could link to torrents all day if by doing so I was commenting on DRM or copyright or any number of other things. Intent may be different, but the act is still the same. Or is reporting/educational purposes not a valid reason?
I feel this goes in the category of, "Hammers can kill people, so owning a hammer should be banned."
Torrents of any sort should not be made illegal - that is a slippery slope that would only encourage John McCain's 'Neuternet'.
I've actually had my copyright infringed, and would link to the infringer to show you - except I could be liable if I do.
How about a real NOT in Spotlight? I know there's a nice lengthy command to do it, and this but it's hardly Mac-like. I'd like to search Spotlight like I search Google. There are a few 3rd party apps out there, but none make as it easy as it should be. If I want to find something that has a dash (or other characters in it, I'm out of luck.
I would love the Firefly universe put into the Fallout series of games. As far as story games went, they were the top IMO. I'm sure something could be done with graphics (though I'm fond of the pixely look in Fallout, and I think it would lend itself well to a western feel), but the story was great, and I emphasized with the characters. Some Homeworld action for the battles in space maybe?
A MMPORG sounds like a good way to kill off Firefly forever - there's just too many ways to screw this up, and then those who were interested in funding a comeback will point at the game and say, 'eh'. I'd rather it all be left alone.