As I understand it he would never make any money to begin with. The record label would front the money necessary to record, produce and market the album but the artist would be indebted for that amount. Any sales would first go towards recouping the record company's initial investment with a paltry amount left over for royalties. If the record sells well then the record company may pick up an option for a second album and the process starts again. To top it off, the cost of producing the album is grossly inflated by such things as manager fees, artificial production costs, etc. and while the artist retains the copyright on the sheet music the record contract most likely stipulates that the recording is a work for hire, which means the record company retains the copyright to the recorded work.
Again, from my understanding of the system this is why only albums that sell very well make the artist any money at all and those that do make money go on to create their own production companies to get out from under this system.
I think the Internet is the ideal way for small artists to make money. The catch is they have to use their own money to produce and market their record, but with a record contract they're doing that anyway. The old way of doing things is rapidly being replaced by the Internet reality and artists that embrace it will make money, I am sure of it.
or to any other used game store for that matter? They give you pennies on the dollar for your game. It only took me one experience at the local game store trying to sell my used Dreamcast games to realize I was cheating myself. I was offered $5 - $10 for my games when I glanced at the showcase and noticed the same games for $40 - $50 dollars. If they can sell the games for that much why couldn't I do the same? A want add in the paper is all it took to sell my games at a reasonable price for both the buyer and seller.
Used games are such a scam. I try to buy as much from friends, through Ebay (which is not as great a place to buy games as it once was) or through the local Buy and Sell want adds.
the average wage of an urban worker in China in 2004 was 9,422 yuan ($1,164), and a rural worker made just 2,936 yuan ($363) on average.
Average what? Year? Month? Day? Huge difference there. I guessed that the article was referring to the average yearly salary and checked the web, but it would help if the article was clear about this in the first place. Anyway, no wonder piracy is rampant in China. At a salary of a little over $1000/year (for an urban worker) who could afford the Xbox, a game, or even a DVD? Even pirated DVDs or games costing a few dollars have to be budgeted for when you make $97 a month. It's a reality that I did not recognize until now.
How can the record companies tell Apple how much to sell their songs for without being guilty of price fixing? The FTC investigated and fined record companies in the past for imposing a minimim pricing system on CDs on such retailers as HMV, I believe.
did you catch the segment of the video where it looks like the middle aged Japanese man with glasses is, umm, inserting the controller into something? Then he leans back in his chair as if exhausted from his "exertions".
The first thing I thought of was: Interactive Hentai!
I have the Windows version with the scroll wheel and I assume the wear and tear on a scroll wheel could cause premature breakage so Apple replaced it in subsequent versions. I bought my unit refurbished (with what appeared to be a brand new case) from Apple and would buy and second and third if I could. My scroll wheel has worked fine for the last two years, so I guess I've had good luck.
I completely agree that the physical feedback from the scroll wheel feels natural. I prefer it to the click wheel in that your touches aren't always interpreted correctly.
I found one particular bug in Safari that has been improved with the release of 2.01 but still not completely squashed is certain Javascript buttons not working, at least for me. For example, if I attempt to print a map from Google maps the print button will many times do nothing. I have waited and waited, still nothing. Closing the page and re-opening usually fixes the problem, but sometimes I have to restart Safari. A similar problem I have found is links sometimes fail to change the mouse cursor to a hand icon indicating a link. Maybe they're both part of the same problem?
I also had a weird problem with Dashboard where widgets I installed (not the default) would disappear. I ran Disk Utility, fixed the permissions and received a message, "We are using special permissions for the file or directory./Library/Widgets. New permissions are now XXXXXX" (or something similar). Which seemed to fix the problem for a few days until they disappeared again. I ran Disk Utility again and there was another permission problem which when fixed brought the widgets back. Once they were back, I deleted and re-installed them and haven't had the problem since.
There is also an update today to Java 1.3.1 release 2 and an Itunes phone driver for the ROKR phone from a few days ago.
but natural selection. I don't recall the source, but a physicist once said that chance does not exist but "uncaused effects" do. In other words, nothing happens without a series of events before it.
Science is really about distilling the inumerable naturalistic forces at work in the universe into coherent theories. At the macroscopic level, many of these forces appear random but so many forces come into play that is impossible to account for all of them in one observation.
I think it's the lack of certainty in the world that people object to more than anything else. The constant changes, alterations, and arguments to knowledge that science brings in attempting to answer some essential human questions disturbs a great many. The truth is science will never be able to answer with utter certainty these questions and will most often answer with a realm of probability rather than a black or white answer. Filling the gaps in human knowledge with "intelligent design" is just lazy thinking.
Imagine if intelligent design was applied to math, we'd end up with Pi to the value of 3 because 3.14.... ad infinitum is messy and reveals a level of unsettling uncertainty in the universe. Let's stop all scientific investigation and just apply a deus ex machina answer to all those niggling little science questions where the answer is never a round number, yes or no, true or false.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that you are welcome to the comfort of whatever designer you feel is necessary in your world. Just don't teach it as science and I won't ridicule and belittle your beliefs, because that's what those that believe intelligent design is science are doing to science.
Then again, I could be completely wrong about intelligent design since I am completely smashed and can barely find the backspace key...but that's another level of uncertainty in the universe for another time.
My Mac Mini running OS 10.4.2 has 32 MB of video RAM, 512 MB of system RAM and runs fairly smoothly with more eye candy then Windows XP, and by the looks of things maybe Vista.
I sent an email on this subject to Phil Plait at www.badastronomy.com, someone I consider an authority on astronomy and in particular supernova 1987a (it was the subject of his PhD).
Hopefully Phil will have the time to examine the claims and comment on their truth or falsity on his web site.
If you ever have a few hours to kill and want to read about some fascinating astronomy topics check out his web site. He spends a lot of time debunking claims made by "scientists" regarding such things as the face on Mars, the moon landing "hoax" and many other hugely engrossing topics.
My memory of the event is hazzy, but I recall a succesful lawsuit was filed against a key employee of a company that claimed they suffered financial loss when he left for another job. If memory serves he did not give them two weeks notice so the company had to scramble to find a replacement.
You might find it particularly onerous, but we don't seem to have "at will" employment in any province in Canada. You can't simply be fired for no reason and it appears that, at least in key positions, such consideration works both ways. I don't see McDonalds filing suit against an employee for leaving without notice. I wonder if such lawsuits would hold up in a state with "at will" employment?
that Call for Help never really went away, at least in Canada. Leo moved to Toronto and Call for Help continued on the Canadian version of G4. G4 in the U.S. is now rebroadcasting the Canadian episodes.
Don't worry though, you're not missing much from the Canadian version of G4 as Call for Help and Xplay are the only good shows on our version as well. The worst show has to be Arena. Why would I want to watch a nerd herd playing games I already own?
Anyway, glad to hear the Leo is back on U.S. television.
I have been reading about the "lawful access" proposal in various newspapers recently and the article in the Windsor Star is completely wrong about judicial oversight. You can read a much better article about the proposed legislation in the Globe and Mail here.
In summary, the government intends to insert computer network and cell phone communications into the existing criminal code wiretapping provisions which already conform to our Charter of Rights and provide strong judicial oversight. Legislatively, it appears quite simple, but technologicially the law will require a lot of work for ISPs to implement.
I think what is confusing many people (and journalists) is the requirement that ISPs maintain records of your internet activities such that those activities could then be accessed by law enforcement only after a warrant for such information was issued. As I understand it, this is also the point of contention for many civil libertarians: that all internet activities are logged before the application of a warrant. It is equivalent to requiring all telephone companies to record each and every telephone conversation so that the police would be able to review the calls after obtaining a warrant.
So, the legislation isn't the death knell to privacy that some journalists would have you believe. I understand the enormous pressures that police are under to prosecute crimes as they relate to the internet, but I am not convinced that we really need to log all internet access as it occurs so that police may review such activity after the fact. Further, even if the draft legislation did not include judical oversight provions there is no way the law would pass our fractured Parliament without those provisions nor would the law survive a Charter of Rights challenge.
I agree with a lot of your comments and would add:
3. Napster. Was great for a while and I bought quite a few CDs after getting to know a lot of new bands. Near the end though there was so much crap -- poorly encoded songs, songs that cut off before the end, etc. Even BitTorrent suffers from some of the same issues and I don't want to spend hours looking for a good rip of a song I want. Itunes is just so much more evolved and hassle free for me.
4. Concord. Loud, expensive and the sonic boom forced them to run transoceanic routes only. Admittedly cool though. There was work on a replacement that sought to significantly reduce or eliminate the sonic boom, but it fell off the rails.
5. GM's EV1. I saw one at a mall display and while the technology was interesting the styling did leave a lot to be desired. Hybrids appear to be a bridge between gas and electric for now.
6. Palm Pilot. I still use my Palm, a second generation color model. Pocket PCs look great and can do so much, but the cost just doesn't seem worth it when my cell phone (and old Palm) accomplishes the same tasks.
7. Keyboards. My mom still has her first office PC, an IBM XT. The keyboard weighs a ton and feels very solid, but I remember that the clicking drove sound me crazy. Modern keyboards also seem to take a lot less effort to push the keys than the old IBM keyboard.
9. LPs. Convert LPs to digital? Isn't that what a CD does (an admittedly simplistic interpretation)? I wonder if anyone has done a comparison of CD vs recorded to digital from LP? I know that all my Elvis CDs were remasted and cleaned up digitally from the original masters. I would think this would be an improvement.
On the whole, you would expect that technology continues to improve. I think the gist of the article is while technology might change, it doesn't necessarily improve over previous generations as styles and tastes change.
Truman had another option to end the war -- Godzilla. Yes, Godzilla.
We could have avoided the whole nuclear arms race if we'd only sent it Godzilla. Or giant robots. Ok, the robots wouldn't have worked without a nuclear power source, but still think of it -- Godzilla or giant robots!
Only problem is finding enough butterscotch pudding to control Gozilla. It's his favorite, by the way.
The GC controller is by far my favorite - and I have all three machines. You can identify each button by touch alone. Maybe I am a retard, but I am forever looking down on my Xbox controller to recall what buttons are where. I finished Prince of Persia and Medal of Honor on both my GC and my Xbox and while the graphics are that much better on the Xbox the controller superiority of the GC made the games a little easier.
Not that the GC controller couldn't use some small changes, such as the shoulder trigger buttons which I find big and cumbersome. I would also prefer if the Xbox and GC controller featured parallel analog sticks, like the PS2 controller.
is that Open Office could open a legacy MS Works document that Word 2003 will the proper file conversion utilities could not. I meant to point out that I was able to steer friends to OO through the same difficulties opening some legacy Word documents in the newer versions of Office, not MS Works. In fact, I had this problem the other day. I was charged with updating a long, tedious document in our office that was originally produced in Word 97. The damn thing would not format correctly in Office 2003, so I opened it in OO where it did and saved it. Weird, but it saved me a lot of work.:)
And actually, they did break compatibility with MS Works documents in Office XP/2003. Office 97 would open legacy MS Works documents back to version 1.0, if I am not mistaken. Even with the file conversion utilities installed in Office XP it would not open any legacy MS Works documents correctly. I have since learned it is better to save in multiple formats.
You make an excellent point that Word in Office is really more than most people need. It's just that Office is the defacto word processing standard and anyone in a professional environment would be familiar with the program. Ask anyone what you need to write a document in Windows and the instant answer would be "Office".
I haven't bought the Office suite from Microsoft for close to five years now with the introduction of free alternatives like Open Office.
What originally got me started was the inablity to open an old MS Works file in Office 2003, even with the proper conversion utilities installed. I was able to open the file in OO and make the necessary changes and save it in multiple formats for the future. I have recommended OO for precisely this problem to several friends and many have converted out of sheer spite for breaking compatibitlity between versions of Word.
Just slightly off topic, but I have never understood the logic in the U.S. as to how someone can have the maturity to make the decision to give his or her life for their country and yet lack the same capacity to make decisions regarding the use of alcohol.
The same arugments that are used to justify restricting alcohol sales to those under 21 can be used to justify restricting enlistment in the armed services. Does any 18 year old really understand the life and death decision they're making?
It's obvious to me that Pentagon officials understand this and exploit the naivite of young people in their drive for recruits.
Maybe this should have been a Slashdot poll. 35% download legally, 40% download illegally and 25%:
- Rip from CD - Breasts! - Mentally reconstruct the music by "reading" the grooves on an LP - Record off the radio - Rely on the voices in their head for all their entertainment - Cowboy Neal
In my opinion, there is very little chance of this passing. Parliament is set to recess for the summer and this bill would have to go through first reading, second reading and committee or report stage and finally third reading all before summer recess or risk dying on the order paper. The Liberals are having trouble enough getting the same-sex marriage legislation to third reading stage, never mind a bill introduced this late.
I think the bill was introduced as a way of deflecting criticism for delaying implementation of recent WIPO intellectual property agreements and to appease lobby groups clamouring for action on the "theft" of music and movies on the internets after several reverses by the courts.
but Lucas was instrumental in the creation of Indiana Jones as the original movie was born out of ideas each bounced off the other on a vacation to Hawaii. It's a collaborative effort between the two.
According to Wikipedia, Indiana Jones is the combination of Spielberg's desire for a James Bond type movie with Lucas' love of the serialized "Republic" adventures of his childhood. Lucas even suggested the name "Jones" when Spielberg objected to the original name, a bland sounding "Indiana Smith".
In the production of the past Indiana Jones series, if memory serves, Lucas produced and Spielberg directed. So, if Lucas was going to fuck up the franchise he would have done so by now.
I really wish they would explore an Atlantis theme along the lines of the "Fate of Atlantis" PC game, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it he would never make any money to begin with. The record label would front the money necessary to record, produce and market the album but the artist would be indebted for that amount. Any sales would first go towards recouping the record company's initial investment with a paltry amount left over for royalties. If the record sells well then the record company may pick up an option for a second album and the process starts again. To top it off, the cost of producing the album is grossly inflated by such things as manager fees, artificial production costs, etc. and while the artist retains the copyright on the sheet music the record contract most likely stipulates that the recording is a work for hire, which means the record company retains the copyright to the recorded work.
Again, from my understanding of the system this is why only albums that sell very well make the artist any money at all and those that do make money go on to create their own production companies to get out from under this system.
I think the Internet is the ideal way for small artists to make money. The catch is they have to use their own money to produce and market their record, but with a record contract they're doing that anyway. The old way of doing things is rapidly being replaced by the Internet reality and artists that embrace it will make money, I am sure of it.
or to any other used game store for that matter? They give you pennies on the dollar for your game. It only took me one experience at the local game store trying to sell my used Dreamcast games to realize I was cheating myself. I was offered $5 - $10 for my games when I glanced at the showcase and noticed the same games for $40 - $50 dollars. If they can sell the games for that much why couldn't I do the same? A want add in the paper is all it took to sell my games at a reasonable price for both the buyer and seller.
Used games are such a scam. I try to buy as much from friends, through Ebay (which is not as great a place to buy games as it once was) or through the local Buy and Sell want adds.
the average wage of an urban worker in China in 2004 was 9,422 yuan ($1,164), and a rural worker made just 2,936 yuan ($363) on average.
Average what? Year? Month? Day? Huge difference there. I guessed that the article was referring to the average yearly salary and checked the web, but it would help if the article was clear about this in the first place. Anyway, no wonder piracy is rampant in China. At a salary of a little over $1000/year (for an urban worker) who could afford the Xbox, a game, or even a DVD? Even pirated DVDs or games costing a few dollars have to be budgeted for when you make $97 a month. It's a reality that I did not recognize until now.
How can the record companies tell Apple how much to sell their songs for without being guilty of price fixing? The FTC investigated and fined record companies in the past for imposing a minimim pricing system on CDs on such retailers as HMV, I believe.
Am I wrong?
did you catch the segment of the video where it looks like the middle aged Japanese man with glasses is, umm, inserting the controller into something? Then he leans back in his chair as if exhausted from his "exertions".
The first thing I thought of was: Interactive Hentai!
I have the Windows version with the scroll wheel and I assume the wear and tear on a scroll wheel could cause premature breakage so Apple replaced it in subsequent versions. I bought my unit refurbished (with what appeared to be a brand new case) from Apple and would buy and second and third if I could. My scroll wheel has worked fine for the last two years, so I guess I've had good luck.
I completely agree that the physical feedback from the scroll wheel feels natural. I prefer it to the click wheel in that your touches aren't always interpreted correctly.
I found one particular bug in Safari that has been improved with the release of 2.01 but still not completely squashed is certain Javascript buttons not working, at least for me. For example, if I attempt to print a map from Google maps the print button will many times do nothing. I have waited and waited, still nothing. Closing the page and re-opening usually fixes the problem, but sometimes I have to restart Safari. A similar problem I have found is links sometimes fail to change the mouse cursor to a hand icon indicating a link. Maybe they're both part of the same problem?
./Library/Widgets. New permissions are now XXXXXX" (or something similar). Which seemed to fix the problem for a few days until they disappeared again. I ran Disk Utility again and there was another permission problem which when fixed brought the widgets back. Once they were back, I deleted and re-installed them and haven't had the problem since.
I also had a weird problem with Dashboard where widgets I installed (not the default) would disappear. I ran Disk Utility, fixed the permissions and received a message, "We are using special permissions for the file or directory
There is also an update today to Java 1.3.1 release 2 and an Itunes phone driver for the ROKR phone from a few days ago.
but natural selection. I don't recall the source, but a physicist once said that chance does not exist but "uncaused effects" do. In other words, nothing happens without a series of events before it.
Science is really about distilling the inumerable naturalistic forces at work in the universe into coherent theories. At the macroscopic level, many of these forces appear random but so many forces come into play that is impossible to account for all of them in one observation.
I think it's the lack of certainty in the world that people object to more than anything else. The constant changes, alterations, and arguments to knowledge that science brings in attempting to answer some essential human questions disturbs a great many. The truth is science will never be able to answer with utter certainty these questions and will most often answer with a realm of probability rather than a black or white answer. Filling the gaps in human knowledge with "intelligent design" is just lazy thinking.
Imagine if intelligent design was applied to math, we'd end up with Pi to the value of 3 because 3.14.... ad infinitum is messy and reveals a level of unsettling uncertainty in the universe. Let's stop all scientific investigation and just apply a deus ex machina answer to all those niggling little science questions where the answer is never a round number, yes or no, true or false.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that you are welcome to the comfort of whatever designer you feel is necessary in your world. Just don't teach it as science and I won't ridicule and belittle your beliefs, because that's what those that believe intelligent design is science are doing to science.
Then again, I could be completely wrong about intelligent design since I am completely smashed and can barely find the backspace key...but that's another level of uncertainty in the universe for another time.
Agreed.
My Mac Mini running OS 10.4.2 has 32 MB of video RAM, 512 MB of system RAM and runs fairly smoothly with more eye candy then Windows XP, and by the looks of things maybe Vista.
Why the hell will you need 256 MB of video RAM?
I sent an email on this subject to Phil Plait at www.badastronomy.com, someone I consider an authority on astronomy and in particular supernova 1987a (it was the subject of his PhD).
Hopefully Phil will have the time to examine the claims and comment on their truth or falsity on his web site.
If you ever have a few hours to kill and want to read about some fascinating astronomy topics check out his web site. He spends a lot of time debunking claims made by "scientists" regarding such things as the face on Mars, the moon landing "hoax" and many other hugely engrossing topics.
My memory of the event is hazzy, but I recall a succesful lawsuit was filed against a key employee of a company that claimed they suffered financial loss when he left for another job. If memory serves he did not give them two weeks notice so the company had to scramble to find a replacement.
You might find it particularly onerous, but we don't seem to have "at will" employment in any province in Canada. You can't simply be fired for no reason and it appears that, at least in key positions, such consideration works both ways. I don't see McDonalds filing suit against an employee for leaving without notice. I wonder if such lawsuits would hold up in a state with "at will" employment?
that Call for Help never really went away, at least in Canada. Leo moved to Toronto and Call for Help continued on the Canadian version of G4. G4 in the U.S. is now rebroadcasting the Canadian episodes.
Don't worry though, you're not missing much from the Canadian version of G4 as Call for Help and Xplay are the only good shows on our version as well. The worst show has to be Arena. Why would I want to watch a nerd herd playing games I already own?
Anyway, glad to hear the Leo is back on U.S. television.
violence it just makes me so angry that I want to turn off GTA: 3, put down my controller and punch them in the head!
I mean really, where's the god damn corrolation?
I have been reading about the "lawful access" proposal in various newspapers recently and the article in the Windsor Star is completely wrong about judicial oversight. You can read a much better article about the proposed legislation in the Globe and Mail here.
In summary, the government intends to insert computer network and cell phone communications into the existing criminal code wiretapping provisions which already conform to our Charter of Rights and provide strong judicial oversight. Legislatively, it appears quite simple, but technologicially the law will require a lot of work for ISPs to implement.
I think what is confusing many people (and journalists) is the requirement that ISPs maintain records of your internet activities such that those activities could then be accessed by law enforcement only after a warrant for such information was issued. As I understand it, this is also the point of contention for many civil libertarians: that all internet activities are logged before the application of a warrant. It is equivalent to requiring all telephone companies to record each and every telephone conversation so that the police would be able to review the calls after obtaining a warrant.
So, the legislation isn't the death knell to privacy that some journalists would have you believe. I understand the enormous pressures that police are under to prosecute crimes as they relate to the internet, but I am not convinced that we really need to log all internet access as it occurs so that police may review such activity after the fact. Further, even if the draft legislation did not include judical oversight provions there is no way the law would pass our fractured Parliament without those provisions nor would the law survive a Charter of Rights challenge.
I agree with a lot of your comments and would add:
3. Napster. Was great for a while and I bought quite a few CDs after getting to know a lot of new bands. Near the end though there was so much crap -- poorly encoded songs, songs that cut off before the end, etc. Even BitTorrent suffers from some of the same issues and I don't want to spend hours looking for a good rip of a song I want. Itunes is just so much more evolved and hassle free for me.
4. Concord. Loud, expensive and the sonic boom forced them to run transoceanic routes only. Admittedly cool though. There was work on a replacement that sought to significantly reduce or eliminate the sonic boom, but it fell off the rails.
5. GM's EV1. I saw one at a mall display and while the technology was interesting the styling did leave a lot to be desired. Hybrids appear to be a bridge between gas and electric for now.
6. Palm Pilot. I still use my Palm, a second generation color model. Pocket PCs look great and can do so much, but the cost just doesn't seem worth it when my cell phone (and old Palm) accomplishes the same tasks.
7. Keyboards. My mom still has her first office PC, an IBM XT. The keyboard weighs a ton and feels very solid, but I remember that the clicking drove sound me crazy. Modern keyboards also seem to take a lot less effort to push the keys than the old IBM keyboard.
9. LPs. Convert LPs to digital? Isn't that what a CD does (an admittedly simplistic interpretation)? I wonder if anyone has done a comparison of CD vs recorded to digital from LP? I know that all my Elvis CDs were remasted and cleaned up digitally from the original masters. I would think this would be an improvement.
On the whole, you would expect that technology continues to improve. I think the gist of the article is while technology might change, it doesn't necessarily improve over previous generations as styles and tastes change.
Just my take.
Truman had another option to end the war -- Godzilla. Yes, Godzilla.
We could have avoided the whole nuclear arms race if we'd only sent it Godzilla. Or giant robots. Ok, the robots wouldn't have worked without a nuclear power source, but still think of it -- Godzilla or giant robots!
Only problem is finding enough butterscotch pudding to control Gozilla. It's his favorite, by the way.
for Schwarzenegger's next movie!
They could combine the Terminator/RoboCop story line:
Prime Directives:
1. Get off my lawn!
2. Protect the elderly.
3. Uphold Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security.
maxi.pad?
The GC controller is by far my favorite - and I have all three machines. You can identify each button by touch alone. Maybe I am a retard, but I am forever looking down on my Xbox controller to recall what buttons are where. I finished Prince of Persia and Medal of Honor on both my GC and my Xbox and while the graphics are that much better on the Xbox the controller superiority of the GC made the games a little easier.
Not that the GC controller couldn't use some small changes, such as the shoulder trigger buttons which I find big and cumbersome. I would also prefer if the Xbox and GC controller featured parallel analog sticks, like the PS2 controller.
is that Open Office could open a legacy MS Works document that Word 2003 will the proper file conversion utilities could not. I meant to point out that I was able to steer friends to OO through the same difficulties opening some legacy Word documents in the newer versions of Office, not MS Works. In fact, I had this problem the other day. I was charged with updating a long, tedious document in our office that was originally produced in Word 97. The damn thing would not format correctly in Office 2003, so I opened it in OO where it did and saved it. Weird, but it saved me a lot of work. :)
And actually, they did break compatibility with MS Works documents in Office XP/2003. Office 97 would open legacy MS Works documents back to version 1.0, if I am not mistaken. Even with the file conversion utilities installed in Office XP it would not open any legacy MS Works documents correctly. I have since learned it is better to save in multiple formats.
You make an excellent point that Word in Office is really more than most people need. It's just that Office is the defacto word processing standard and anyone in a professional environment would be familiar with the program. Ask anyone what you need to write a document in Windows and the instant answer would be "Office".
I haven't bought the Office suite from Microsoft for close to five years now with the introduction of free alternatives like Open Office.
What originally got me started was the inablity to open an old MS Works file in Office 2003, even with the proper conversion utilities installed. I was able to open the file in OO and make the necessary changes and save it in multiple formats for the future. I have recommended OO for precisely this problem to several friends and many have converted out of sheer spite for breaking compatibitlity between versions of Word.
Just slightly off topic, but I have never understood the logic in the U.S. as to how someone can have the maturity to make the decision to give his or her life for their country and yet lack the same capacity to make decisions regarding the use of alcohol.
The same arugments that are used to justify restricting alcohol sales to those under 21 can be used to justify restricting enlistment in the armed services. Does any 18 year old really understand the life and death decision they're making?
It's obvious to me that Pentagon officials understand this and exploit the naivite of young people in their drive for recruits.
Maybe this should have been a Slashdot poll. 35% download legally, 40% download illegally and 25%:
- Rip from CD
- Breasts!
- Mentally reconstruct the music by "reading"
the grooves on an LP
- Record off the radio
- Rely on the voices in their head for all their entertainment
- Cowboy Neal
In my opinion, there is very little chance of this passing. Parliament is set to recess for the summer and this bill would have to go through first reading, second reading and committee or report stage and finally third reading all before summer recess or risk dying on the order paper. The Liberals are having trouble enough getting the same-sex marriage legislation to third reading stage, never mind a bill introduced this late.
I think the bill was introduced as a way of deflecting criticism for delaying implementation of recent WIPO intellectual property agreements and to appease lobby groups clamouring for action on the "theft" of music and movies on the internets after several reverses by the courts.
According to Wikipedia, Indiana Jones is the combination of Spielberg's desire for a James Bond type movie with Lucas' love of the serialized "Republic" adventures of his childhood. Lucas even suggested the name "Jones" when Spielberg objected to the original name, a bland sounding "Indiana Smith".
In the production of the past Indiana Jones series, if memory serves, Lucas produced and Spielberg directed. So, if Lucas was going to fuck up the franchise he would have done so by now. I really wish they would explore an Atlantis theme along the lines of the "Fate of Atlantis" PC game, which I thoroughly enjoyed.