I bought the official audio book of 1984 directly from Amazon.com.
This is exactly Blount's point. You were willing to pay money to get an audio version. Audio books are a huge huge huge market (billions of dollars). E-books are a teeny tiny market (millions of dollars).
E-books are sold cheaply. Audio books command a premium because, as you youself noted, they have a value beyond the text that is worth paying for.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks. Sure they may sound crappy at the moment but this is likely to change.
Blount is just saying that publisher's need to charge kindle's e-book rights at a rate closer to audiobook rates. And if Amazon does not like that then they need to stop offering the audio conversion.
The tricky part of the argument is this. It's not the publishers who are fighting this. They love expanding the e-book market. Indeed the publisher selling the e-book rights might never have bought the audio rights from the author.
It's the writers who are objecting to having their e-books turned into audio books and not getting paid.
I think it's kinds arguable. THe tool bar controlls what happens in that tab not the other tabs so I don't see what you rpoint is there. it's tab specific. the bookmarks bar also controls what get opened in that tab. it too is tab specific as to where it directs the action. The exception being "open in tabs" which opens new tabs and also overwrites the current tab. But that's a lot like the right click "open in new tab" which also directs the opening of new tabs.
So I guess I'm not seeing you point. which is okay but I think it shows it's equivocal. Some tools are application type tools (the menu) and some are tools that operate on the current tab.
I thnk it only breaks the model on Windows computers but not on macs.
The difference is that on macs the menus items (which logically are hierarchically above the window) are at the top of the screen not the top of the window.
Tabs are just a way of organizing a set of windows. So having them at the top of the window actually makes sense.
The problem is that in windows apps, the menu goes below the title bar. So moving the tabs to the title bar now makes tabs superior to the menu which as you say is mentally wrong.
but it makes sense from the mac side.
And in general having a menu detached from the window and at the top of the screen still makes more sense. (and it will continue to do so till screens start getting massively larger than windows. They are not their yet)
At least, not by me. I imagine that most users will be confused by the presence of more than one "internet" on their machines, and one browser or another still has to be the default. Does MS have to make Firefox the default browser, too?
I agree. I know what I'm doing and I still find that this or that file or link opens by default in browser X when my main default browser is Y. for example Minefield grabs the firefox links some of the time etc..
As for my poor mom with a barely adequate supply of computer memory I constantly find her sluggish computer with two or three browsers running and causing page swaps. Her bookmarks scatterd on all of them and her calling me up because she can't find the one she needs.
Then there's the nag screens that ask you to make this or that your default browser. You don't dare click "don't ask me this again, because youi can never get that back again unless you know the magic about:: command on firefox.
You just don't want to that horror to come uninvited to novice users.
Consider the plane directly in front of the collector. this plane has a large area. Next consider the area of the detector. this is small. The ratio of these in area is probably something like 1000 since they assume it's 1000 times amplification.
This means that whatever the acceptance angle of the silicon detector, and lets be generous and assume this is 2pi sr, the acceptance angle of the plane in front of the panel must by louiville's theorem must be 1000th of this. Which is quite a small acceptance angle. if it did not track the sun then the duration where this would be usefully alligned with the sun would be something like 1/sqrt(1000) ~ 1/30 or perhaps about 15 minutes a day.
I think the assumptions and details of the application of the "classical optics" proof need to be spelled out a bit more. Does the argument cover non-imaging optics? What about optics where the light is concentrated at the edge of the sheet, as in the device in this article, thus having vectors that are in all directions within the plane of the device and a range of out-of-plane directions consistent with total internal reflection? I think the device to a large extent gives up specifying the directions from which the light arrives at the collector, thus being somewhat like the scattering exception to the phase-space argument. If so, this should relax the pointing accuracy needed.
Louivile's theorem is a harsh mistress. You can't compress phase space.
Optical concentration for solar cells using lenses or mirrors is of course old news. They work dandy except for the problem that the more you concentrate the more you have to track the sun's position. Tracking solar cells are an economic non-started except in certain applications.
Now classical optics says you cannot compress phase space with refractive or reflective optics. Ergo the claim being made is impossible unless they are 1) relying on non-refractive optics (e.g. scattering) 2) only gettin a boost no larger than the index of refraction of the material (i.e. immersion lenses can concetrate by a factor equal to the index of refraction as long as the absorption occurs inside the medium.
otherwise this is just back to tracking and thus useless.
PDF has become what it set out to be, the de facto truly portable document format.
The problem is acrobat keeps larding in new features all the time to the point where in a corprorate environment you get more and more pdfs that require acrobat to even see.
it's an embrace and extend approach.
the problem here is the problem microsoft occasionally runs into-- if you monocrop then their is huge exposure to the possibility that viruses can spread like wild fire.
But with microsoft we were always in that boat from the first day they introduced it. microsoft docs always went hand in hand with the application software environment creating a stable ecosystem for any potential virus. (I use the term virus liberally)
with pdf this was not the case. Pdf is a format. there are many readers.
but adobe's constant racheting of add ons is threatening this.
You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards.
...compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc). At least by having the new rendering mode the default it will encourage standards compliance (or at least IE's [admittedly improving] version of it.)
This makes no logical sense. If the html is on a cd it can't be changed to include a meta tag to use IE7 format. Yet IE8 format is the default which will break the CD html rendering. You need to be able to switch the browser to IE7 mode default for this to work.
Never underestimate the ignorance of many lawyer types.
I think the issue here is that this is situation lawyers seldom encounter. Namley it is a software that facilitiates mass communications. The exponent on the geometric progression of linkages here is a lot higher than for a telephone or even an e-mail mass mailer.
So when people are upset facebook gives them the tools to create an enlerging consensus of upset people with pitch forks.
This is really a new pardigm. The lawyers are not so much ignorant as unable to predict what would happen.
Because of the way USB is designed. If your device does not get attached to a driver, it is stuck on low power mode, which is not sufficient for charging a phone. When a driver is attached, the driver can ramp the port up into high power mode and charge the phone.
I take it this means that if I have a USB hub then my cell phone is always on low power charge mode. Otherwise I don't see how a computer could decide how much current to supply when multiple devices are attached in parallel via a hub.
So charging times must be dramatically reduced if I use a direct connection to the computer USB port rather than indierectly through a hub?
A second question is, why don't devices supply their own drivers when you plug them in?
cell phone cables need to be able to support digital data, power and analog multi-channel audio input(microphones) and output (speakers). Some also need to support RGB or S-video out
USB can do the first two. I may be mistaken but I don't think that USB can support those analog channels.
So the connectors are not "oh so special" they are actually accomodating what is needed.
If you want a minimalist approach of having a single docking connector then you need to have all that functionality.
the alternative is to have a lot of different input/output ports or even mulitle ways of doing it.
For my simple cell phone, I say yes! all I want is a USB charger so I can charge it off my laptop with any available cable. That's great. But for people with those uber-phones well USB is not going to hack it so it is kind of silly to complain.
Given the firewall issue and the sound card degradation it seems like windows 7 is begging to be run inside a Linux virtual machine so it can't get so cozy with the hardware.
Of course I have reason to believe they are already two steps ahed of me on that. When I run windows XP pro inside virtual box (host is Mac) then when I plug in my windows media device in the USB, windows media player only sees it as a USB disk not as a windows media device.
So i suspect that windows only sees those DRM devices if it can have direct hardware access. Presumably this is to prevent someone from making a software windows media device emulator.
Does the cuban model respect the patents on the pills?
Like digital music replication of medicines is not always expensive. But the R&D costs are enormous.
For example, just to get single drug through clinical trials is, according to Merc, about half a billion dollars, and most drugs in the pipeline will not make it all the way to the end. And that does not include any of the R&D costs to discover the drug.
If cuba just replicates drugs without royalties then one could presumably cut costs enormously for medicine.
How long before we see competing bills in congress allowing or preventing the re-importation of cheap 3rd world medicines. Recall the bills to allow/prevent canadian drug re-imports or imports of leatril from mexico.
I don't think you understand. The photons have an energy. You either absorb on of them or two of them. two of them is twice the energy and potentially twice the information. But it's not twice as much information per photon.
It's also not different than the information carried by structured light without entanglement.
Since everyting they report can be done with out using the word entanglement, why raise this red herring.
Well it appears that proclivity for social interaction is acquired. PLus it is somthing you can pass on to others without genetics.
What's not quite clear to me here is if the children mice were separated from the adults at birth. if not then perhaps the adult mice just are passign on behaviours. if so then maybe there is some extra genetic means of passing things on at the cellualr level or perhaps mice in the womb can experience the behaviours of their parents.
For example, if the preacher droning or the choir singing somehow releases endorphins in the mother that increase blood flow to the fetus, perhaps an association with certain sensory input can be learned at the fetal level.
Nice big sounding words. But you don't need to invoke entanglement here. if you have to absorb two photons to get J=2 then you have absorbed two photons. it's a structured light field if the two phont streams are encoding different messages.
With a bit of cleverness one could manage pay-per-view on broadcast tv. For example sacrifice a few channels for a rotating set of movies all requiring a decrypt (sent via the telephone).
add a tivo to this and everyone could have dozens of movies stored, ready to play as long as they subscribed to the decrypt code.
I don't actually believe that photons can have angular momentum. photons carry +/-1 angular momentum. You can't excite an atom to a j+2 state with a single photon.
light fields can induce a torque on macroscopic object but this is through the accumulation of single photon absorptions delivering then J+1 angular momentum.
As near as I can tell all instances of so-called orbital angular momentum are just structured light fields. this one is no exception.
You can deliver info via the structured light field but only if the antenna is larger than the size of the structured light field spatial modulation width.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought the official audio book of 1984 directly from Amazon.com.
This is exactly Blount's point. You were willing to pay money to get an audio version. Audio books are a huge huge huge market (billions of dollars). E-books are a teeny tiny market (millions of dollars).
E-books are sold cheaply. Audio books command a premium because, as you youself noted, they have a value beyond the text that is worth paying for.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks. Sure they may sound crappy at the moment but this is likely to change.
Blount is just saying that publisher's need to charge kindle's e-book rights at a rate closer to audiobook rates. And if Amazon does not like that then they need to stop offering the audio conversion.
The tricky part of the argument is this. It's not the publishers who are fighting this. They love expanding the e-book market. Indeed the publisher selling the e-book rights might never have bought the audio rights from the author.
It's the writers who are objecting to having their e-books turned into audio books and not getting paid.
I think it's kinds arguable. THe tool bar controlls what happens in that tab not the other tabs so I don't see what you rpoint is there. it's tab specific. the bookmarks bar also controls what get opened in that tab. it too is tab specific as to where it directs the action. The exception being "open in tabs" which opens new tabs and also overwrites the current tab. But that's a lot like the right click "open in new tab" which also directs the opening of new tabs.
So I guess I'm not seeing you point. which is okay but I think it shows it's equivocal. Some tools are application type tools (the menu) and some are tools that operate on the current tab.
I thnk it only breaks the model on Windows computers but not on macs.
The difference is that on macs the menus items (which logically are hierarchically above the window) are at the top of the screen not the top of the window.
Tabs are just a way of organizing a set of windows. So having them at the top of the window actually makes sense.
The problem is that in windows apps, the menu goes below the title bar. So moving the tabs to the title bar now makes tabs superior to the menu which as you say is mentally wrong.
but it makes sense from the mac side.
And in general having a menu detached from the window and at the top of the screen still makes more sense. (and it will continue to do so till screens start getting massively larger than windows. They are not their yet)
Safari 4 has restore session now.
I don't understand why Safari still offers no automatic session restore.
Safari 4 does have a restore session. Also since safari 3 there has been a prefernce for autorestore session.
Nitro has more street cred.
Squirrelfish sounds like a slimy little douchebag trying to get out from under a last call chick who has him pinned at the end of the bar.
an image of Steve Buscemi flashed before my eyes. SquirelFish is so Mr. Pink. Nitro is mr Blond
At least, not by me. I imagine that most users will be confused by the presence of more than one "internet" on their machines, and one browser or another still has to be the default. Does MS have to make Firefox the default browser, too?
I agree. I know what I'm doing and I still find that this or that file or link opens by default in browser X when my main default browser is Y. for example Minefield grabs the firefox links some of the time etc..
As for my poor mom with a barely adequate supply of computer memory I constantly find her sluggish computer with two or three browsers running and causing page swaps. Her bookmarks scatterd on all of them and her calling me up because she can't find the one she needs.
Then there's the nag screens that ask you to make this or that your default browser. You don't dare click "don't ask me this again, because youi can never get that back again unless you know the magic about:: command on firefox.
You just don't want to that horror to come uninvited to novice users.
Consider the plane directly in front of the collector. this plane has a large area. Next consider the area of the detector. this is small. The ratio of these in area is probably something like 1000 since they assume it's 1000 times amplification.
This means that whatever the acceptance angle of the silicon detector, and lets be generous and assume this is 2pi sr, the acceptance angle of the plane in front of the panel must by louiville's theorem must be 1000th of this. Which is quite a small acceptance angle. if it did not track the sun then the duration where this would be usefully alligned with the sun would be something like 1/sqrt(1000) ~ 1/30 or perhaps about 15 minutes a day.
Is that, as I child of the 70s, it brings to mind the act of exposing yourself. In the 70s the image of this was a pervert wearing a trenchcoat.
they should make the slashdot flash icon a trenchcoat
plus the survey was conducted using a flash pop-up
I think the assumptions and details of the application of the "classical optics" proof need to be spelled out a bit more. Does the argument cover non-imaging optics? What about optics where the light is concentrated at the edge of the sheet, as in the device in this article, thus having vectors that are in all directions within the plane of the device and a range of out-of-plane directions consistent with total internal reflection? I think the device to a large extent gives up specifying the directions from which the light arrives at the collector, thus being somewhat like the scattering exception to the phase-space argument. If so, this should relax the pointing accuracy needed.
Louivile's theorem is a harsh mistress. You can't compress phase space.
Neat idea, but how do they get rid of the heat of 1000 suns? Does the IR escape because it isn't reflected the same way?
No problemo. Once it hits 6000 Kelvin, it will be in equlibrium with the sub blackbody and not get any hotter.
Optical concentration for solar cells using lenses or mirrors is of course old news. They work dandy except for the problem that the more you concentrate the more you have to track the sun's position. Tracking solar cells are an economic non-started except in certain applications.
Now classical optics says you cannot compress phase space with refractive or reflective optics. Ergo the claim being made is impossible unless they are
1) relying on non-refractive optics (e.g. scattering)
2) only gettin a boost no larger than the index of refraction of the material (i.e. immersion lenses can concetrate by a factor equal to the index of refraction as long as the absorption occurs inside the medium.
otherwise this is just back to tracking and thus useless.
PDF has become what it set out to be, the de facto truly portable document format.
The problem is acrobat keeps larding in new features all the time to the point where in a corprorate environment you get more and more pdfs that require acrobat to even see.
it's an embrace and extend approach.
the problem here is the problem microsoft occasionally runs into-- if you monocrop then their is huge exposure to the possibility that viruses can spread like wild fire.
But with microsoft we were always in that boat from the first day they introduced it. microsoft docs always went hand in hand with the application software environment creating a stable ecosystem for any potential virus. (I use the term virus liberally)
with pdf this was not the case. Pdf is a format. there are many readers.
but adobe's constant racheting of add ons is threatening this.
You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards.
This makes no logical sense. If the html is on a cd it can't be changed to include a meta tag to use IE7 format. Yet IE8 format is the default which will break the CD html rendering. You need to be able to switch the browser to IE7 mode default for this to work.
Never underestimate the ignorance of many lawyer types.
I think the issue here is that this is situation lawyers seldom encounter. Namley it is a software that facilitiates mass communications. The exponent on the geometric progression of linkages here is a lot higher than for a telephone or even an e-mail mass mailer.
So when people are upset facebook gives them the tools to create an enlerging consensus of upset people with pitch forks.
This is really a new pardigm. The lawyers are not so much ignorant as unable to predict what would happen.
Be sure to tag this phenomena "aboutface"
Because of the way USB is designed. If your device does not get attached to a driver, it is stuck on low power mode, which is not sufficient for charging a phone. When a driver is attached, the driver can ramp the port up into high power mode and charge the phone.
I take it this means that if I have a USB hub then my cell phone is always on low power charge mode. Otherwise I don't see how a computer could decide how much current to supply when multiple devices are attached in parallel via a hub.
So charging times must be dramatically reduced if I use a direct connection to the computer USB port rather than indierectly through a hub?
A second question is, why don't devices supply their own drivers when you plug them in?
cell phone cables need to be able to support digital data, power and analog multi-channel audio input(microphones) and output (speakers). Some also need to support RGB or S-video out
USB can do the first two. I may be mistaken but I don't think that USB can support those analog channels.
So the connectors are not "oh so special" they are actually accomodating what is needed.
If you want a minimalist approach of having a single docking connector then you need to have all that functionality.
the alternative is to have a lot of different input/output ports or even mulitle ways of doing it.
For my simple cell phone, I say yes! all I want is a USB charger so I can charge it off my laptop with any available cable. That's great. But for people with those uber-phones well USB is not going to hack it so it is kind of silly to complain.
Given the firewall issue and the sound card degradation it seems like windows 7 is begging to be run inside a Linux virtual machine so it can't get so cozy with the hardware.
Of course I have reason to believe they are already two steps ahed of me on that. When I run windows XP pro inside virtual box (host is Mac) then when I plug in my windows media device in the USB, windows media player only sees it as a USB disk not as a windows media device.
So i suspect that windows only sees those DRM devices if it can have direct hardware access. Presumably this is to prevent someone from making a software windows media device emulator.
Does the cuban model respect the patents on the pills?
Like digital music replication of medicines is not always expensive. But the R&D costs are enormous.
For example, just to get single drug through clinical trials is, according to Merc, about half a billion dollars, and most drugs in the pipeline will not make it all the way to the end. And that does not include any of the R&D costs to discover the drug.
If cuba just replicates drugs without royalties then one could presumably cut costs enormously for medicine.
How long before we see competing bills in congress allowing or preventing the re-importation of cheap 3rd world medicines. Recall the bills to allow/prevent canadian drug re-imports or imports of leatril from mexico.
I don't think you understand. The photons have an energy. You either absorb on of them or two of them. two of them is twice the energy and potentially twice the information. But it's not twice as much information per photon.
It's also not different than the information carried by structured light without entanglement.
Since everyting they report can be done with out using the word entanglement, why raise this red herring.
Interesting eh? So how did it explained religion?
Well it appears that proclivity for social interaction is acquired. PLus it is somthing you can pass on to others without genetics.
What's not quite clear to me here is if the children mice were separated from the adults at birth. if not then perhaps the adult mice just are passign on behaviours. if so then maybe there is some extra genetic means of passing things on at the cellualr level or perhaps mice in the womb can experience the behaviours of their parents.
For example, if the preacher droning or the choir singing somehow releases endorphins in the mother that increase blood flow to the fetus, perhaps an association with certain sensory input can be learned at the fetal level.
Nice big sounding words. But you don't need to invoke entanglement here. if you have to absorb two photons to get J=2 then you have absorbed two photons. it's a structured light field if the two phont streams are encoding different messages.
With a bit of cleverness one could manage pay-per-view on broadcast tv. For example sacrifice a few channels for a rotating set of movies all requiring a decrypt (sent via the telephone).
add a tivo to this and everyone could have dozens of movies stored, ready to play as long as they subscribed to the decrypt code.
I don't actually believe that photons can have angular momentum. photons carry +/-1 angular momentum. You can't excite an atom to a j+2 state with a single photon.
light fields can induce a torque on macroscopic object but this is through the accumulation of single photon absorptions delivering then J+1 angular momentum.
As near as I can tell all instances of so-called orbital angular momentum are just structured light fields. this one is no exception.
You can deliver info via the structured light field but only if the antenna is larger than the size of the structured light field spatial modulation width.
Okay tell me why I'm wrong.