Seriously, slashdot: wtf? if you're not willing to approach this as a musical achievement, approach it as a technical achievement.
I think the point most people are making is that it's been done. It's not that most people are saying "oh, anyone could do this" or "this is terrible in a qualitative sense", what they're saying is that there's nothing revolutionary about it because other people have done the same thing before. I think they're commenting more on the submitter's point than on the video itself.
I doubt the guy who made this thought to himself "wow, this is something that nobody has ever done! and it's going to change the face of music!" He's not the one who's getting all hyperbolic about it. So nobody's trying to take him down. Obviously this was difficult. At the same time, though, a piece of entertainment needs to stand on its own - its difficulty doesn't really matter to the final product - and not everybody is going to be into the song he actually made.
But the submitter and/or original article did go way overboard. This is not the future of entertainment. People have been doing stuff like this for years. It may be a component of the future of entertainment, just as professionally produced, major label music will be. But it will probably be a relatively small component, as it is now and has been for the last 15-20 years.
Just because a band is able to sell millions of records does not in and of itself make it crap.
I agree, however it is true that most mainstream music sucks these days. It doesn't suck because it's mainstream, it sucks because it sucks.
You used to be able to see Billboard charts on iTunes going back like 60 years or something. It was pretty eye-opening, because normally that's protected info - you need to subscribe to their service to see it (and that's expensive). They issue takedowns to web sites that post it.
Anyway, in the 1960's and 70's you'd literally have stuff like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, etc. all over the top 40 charts. These were mainstream pop bands! It started changing in the 1980's, which is not coincidentally when radio moved to fixed formats (previously DJ's just played what they wanted on many stations) and when MTV started acting as gatekeeper to modern pop. Nowadays a band like the Rolling Stones would be lucky to get a record deal at all.
Most "indie" bands I know, and I do know quite a few of them, really don't sound much different from 1960's rock music, whether they call themselves "experimental" or not. They're usually no more experimental than Pink Floyd or the Beatles were in their later period. That stuff literally would have been top 40 material in the past.
Being a top 40, mainstream band used to be something everybody aspired to, whatever kind of music they were in. It didn't used to be derogatory, and you weren't considered a "sellout" if you reached that status. That's different now because the type of music on the top 40 chart is different now, and because those charts are now controlled by mega-conglomerates by way of their radio and TV networks colluding to shove this crap down people's throats.
Personally, if a great band manages to break onto the top 40 chart, it's certainly nothing I hold against them. I don't say "well, now they suck because other people like them." That's what a snob does.
But, that doesn't mean I don't think most bands on the top 40 these days do suck. They just suck for other reasons.
You're going to get a stock package that works, but isn't going to have much RAM, not much of a hard drive, a slow processor, a small screen, etc. And the parts you get are going to generally be the cheapest the system builder could find.
I know many might think it's a waste of money, but I'll buy the parts I want,
Yeah good luck with building your own laptop from parts you've bought.
I bought my wife's laptop at Best Buy and it is a better laptop in some ways than my own - and my own is a year newer and a ThinkPad that I had custom-built to order by Lenovo. And hers cost $400. RAM is cheap; if you're going to complain about not having much RAM, well good lord, spend fifteen bucks on an upgrade.
Best Buy is big enough that it gets custom configurations at prices lower than you can custom order the same model direct from the manufacturer web site (in this case, we're talking mostly HP, Sony and Acer). Office Depot occasionally gets similar deals.
Obviously I still believe in custom building to order because I did it myself, but I don't see that I got any particular advantage over my wife's pre-built laptop by doing so. In fact, my laptop's been in the shop twice over the first three months I've had it, whereas hers never has been. There's nothing I can do with my laptop that she can't. And I paid more for my machine.
If it's easier to look for a torrent, and download it than to just sit on a couch and watch your favorite show, then the TV people are doing something wrong.
To be fair, it's not easier if you have a DVR. Which a lot of people do, and the networks know that. There's not as much loathing of moving things around on the schedule anymore because the execs know that DVR's will find these shows automatically, so they're not as concerned about the con of potential audience loss anymore. The potential benefits outweigh the risks now.
In a sense, executives are doing what people here have always said they should do, which is moving away from schedule-based programming where you're expected to be in your seat at a specific, regular time each week to watch a show. They want to go all on-demand, and DVR's are part of that. It would solve a lot of their problems, like having to commit to full or half seasons and filming them all in sequence at roughly the same time. They'd love nothing more than to be able to do 2 or 3 episodes here and there and just put them on whenever they feel like it, knowing the fans will receive them automatically via "subscription".
There is one inherent flaw with this strategy, though, that nobody talks about. Even if everybody was on board with this, including the public, it still couldn't really work. Because the bottom line is there is still going to need to be a date and time that a new episode is released. People aren't going to stay interested in a show forever without knowing when or if it's going to come back, so you can't just have a couple month hiatus for a show and then suddenly dump 10 episodes out there all at once and expect people to even notice or care. Plus, whatever interest that does generate will dissipate once people have digested those episodes. It makes more logical sense to roll them out on a regular basis.
That means that fans will always be waiting for the next episode, and they will always know approximately when they're coming (and will get frustrated if the schedule isn't fairly regular). In the end, you are back to scheduled programming. I mean, even most web-only series operate on a schedule for those reasons. What you are talking about with p2p'ing is more of the post-release rental or purchase market; it's no different than renting a season of a show from Netflix or buying it as a box set. p2p, VOD and DVR's haven't changed that, just as they haven't changed the need for scheduled programming.
I think that, given the economy and all the technological changes happening, a lot of networks are experimenting with things right now to see if there are ways they can break established models. Some of those experiments are ill-advised. Ignoring regular schedules is one of those. Eventually, TV networks will figure out that even in an on-demand world, schedules still matter because the real fans of a show want to see the episodes as soon as they are released. It's no different than a movie, most of which make the majority of their money in the first weekend. That hasn't changed either; if anything, it's a trend that has accelerated over the past couple decades.
The bottom line is we have all these new technologies that allow us to get content in different ways, but the established models of distribution don't exist for purely technological reasons. They exist for behavioral and psychological reasons too, and new technologies won't change that. In fact, all these new technologies have only served to reinforce current models, not undermine them. (The only way they've undermined them is by asking whether or not you should have to pay for all this content. But they haven't changed our behavior in watching it.)
It's Japan. I don't care what you offer, it's going to be damn difficult for a 'Western' company to crack that nut. Doable, just difficult.
It's not really all that difficult. In fact, the iPod does just fine there. (The Walkman digital players are neck and neck, but that's to be expected - there is *some* home court advantage, just in the marketing and language if nothing else.)
In fact, there are not many categories of anything there over which we (meaning western companies) have not had at least some influence, and in many cases are market leaders. It's a total myth that the Japanese only like Japanese products. Well ok, then how do you explain Levi's, Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple (other than the iPhone), Microsoft, Chanel, Coach, hollywood movies, Mariah Carey, etc. etc.?
The fact is they love our stuff. They just don't love all of it equally, and why should they? We don't love all of our stuff equally either. They just happen to have slightly different priorities in what they're looking for, but they have no bias whatsoever in terms of where the products they use come from.
The companies that do best there are the ones that tweak their stuff to Japanese tastes and/or expectations. That should be obvious, but apparently it was not obvious to Apple with the iPhone, which is clearly on the low end of phones in Japan on specs... and uglier than most too. So it's no surprise that it would be unpopular.
But if it had an 8mp camera, a TV tuner, a cheaper rate plan, a higher-res screen, a clamshell design and proper buttons? It wouldn't matter who made it, people there would buy it.
I know it's a dupe, but I still love to see Gates say: "But that is just the start of the crap..."
It says it all right there. At least Microsoft knows about the problems with Windows. It is said that realizing there is an issue is the first step to resolving it:)
I don't think Bill Gates is really responsible for the problems with Windows. In fact, I think it's probably one reason why he left when he did. The company just got too big for him to manage day-to-day - he wasn't the one making relatively minor decisions like where Windows Movie Maker sits on the Microsoft web site or how to install it, somebody else was making those decisions. And little decisions like that, all added up together, are 95% of what makes Windows as maddening to use as it is. And he was as annoyed by that stuff as everybody else.
Worse for him, it was his job to defend it, which probably gave him never-ending heartburn.
I think he built this thing, saw what it had turned into, saw no easy way of fixing it (especially at his age and point of his career arc), and so decided to get out and leave it up to someone else. The two questions are:
a) are the people he left behind smart enough to recognize the problems he saw?
and
b) are they actually up to the task of fixing the OS's problems?
So far, Windows 7 seems like a step in the right direction, as is its quick turnaround time (suggesting these guys don't have their heads in the sand about Vista anymore), so I think there's some hope.
I guess exploring the aftermath of the Dominion War or giving a real sendoff to the TNG crowd would have been much to ask for.
Given the box office of the last couple TNG movies and the ratings at the end of DS9's run, yeah, it would have been too much to ask.
Star Trek isn't supposed to be a sci-fi series for geeks, which is what it turned into. The series started out as basically a western set in space, and while people didn't quite "get" that originally, they warmed up to it en masse as time went on (especially as TOS went into syndication). That's what most of the population used to think of when they thought of Star Trek, and it's what Abrams and co. are hoping to get back to.
DiFulco said the PA doesn't use falconry at LaGuardia because it is "effective against gulls, not geese." He said gulls are "the primary birds at issue at JFK, but not at LGA," where geese pose the main threat.
Then there are some counter-arguments made, but I can understand why they wouldn't be effective against geese. The geese that hit US Airways 1549 were apparently a flock of migrating birds at around 3,000 feet that just happened to wander into an airplane's flight path. They weren't "at" the airport, so I don't see how scaring them away would accomplish anything. Bad luck is bad luck; if they're in the area at all, an airplane can hit them. The gulls that the falcons are used to chase away at JFK loiter around the airport looking for food, especially at the ends of the runways where the water washes up various small fish and garbage. So the falcons are effective because their job is just to keep the gulls away from the airport perimeter and the runways.
I don't really see how you can prevent something like what happened to flight 1549. That happened at 3,000 feet, 3 minutes into the flight, which means about 9 miles from the airport. There's no feasible way I know of to clear that sort of a virtual dome around an airport.
Not to mention that some species of birds can fly at above 20,000 feet (true!), so really, yeah, not much you can do.
I think it's time we all just acknowledge this was a freak accident and move on. You can take reasonable precautions to scare away birds at airports themselves, but there's a limit to what you can do beyond that.
Is someone who uses gimp or photoshop to run some filters on a drawing a real artist? Is it sufficient that he or she "looks like an artist?"
The followup question that you didn't ask is "does it matter"?
I would argue that no, it doesn't. What matters is the result. If someone who doesn't know ow to use a real paint brush somehow manages to put out a modern-day Mona Lisa using Photoshop, then we should appreciate it for what it is. True appreciation of art is not an appreciation of technical skill; it's an appreciation of creativity and expression.
There will come a day when somebody actually uses auto-tune as part of a masterpiece of avant-garde music, or at least a new style of music. It has happened with every single other effect we've ever had, from distortion and reverb to fuzz and delay. All of these effects when used in a certain way can make musicians sound like they have more technical ability than they do, but so what? If the final result is good music, and something you haven't heard before, why do you care how fast or precisely the musicians can actually sing or play?
Ah, correction, writers are still making music. The "artists" or "singers" on the other hand, are finding more and more ways to artificially make themselves sound better than they really are.
Eh, and this is nothing new either.
What would you define as an ideal setup that allows, say, a rock musician to "sound as good as they really are"? Everything rock musicians have ever used have made them sound better than they are, right down to the amps they use to amplify their guitars, the effects they use (even amps from the 50's and 60's had reverb and could be overdriven), the pickups in the guitars themselves, the strings they choose to use, etc. A singer will sound better or worse based on the microphone they use, the equalization settings, etc.
This idea that there's ever been *any* unaltered recorded music out there is rubbish. There never has been. Even just a guy playing by himself with an acoustic and singing into a microphone is having his sound altered by various things during the recording, mixing and mastering.
I'm not arguing in favor of auto-tune, all I'm saying is that there are no absolutes and the line across which you do not (to quote Walter Sobchak) is different for everybody. And this is a generational thing; in the 1960's, people railed against rock music for exactly this same reason, citing some of the things I said above as making the music "fake". Today we consider those same things as being responsible for what we call "authentic" rock music. And now a new generation has new tools to make themselves sound the way they want, and we rail against it the same way our parents and grandparents did 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.
Ah, but you didn't pay for it. You paid for the right to very limited use of it.
I wonder about this. It's one thing to have a EULA that says "you agree not to copy this software blah blah blah" and for the company to then take you to court if it's determined that you have. From what I recall, this is a situation similar to the one in which the few EULA cases to ever go to trial have been decided on.
It's a different thing, though, for a piece of software to break, through a piece of programming code inserted there by the publisher. I don't see how a EULA covers that, because there are other laws that trump the EULA. Contract law is only binding in so far as it both adheres to and reiterates codified law. For example, you can't have a contract that legalizes murder. Murder is still murder and it's illegal; a contract that says otherwise is not valid.
Similarly, I can't see how a EULA that says "you agree that we're allowed to break your software through no fault of your own" would be a valid contract.
Also, if you're purchasing physical media, there is the question of what you actually purchased. Say the price of the physical media is higher than the price of the equivalent online download (through Steam or whatever) - as it almost always is. So, what is that extra $10 or $20 for? Obviously, both the physical packaging and the DVD.
But now, if the data on that DVD doesn't work, then the DVD itself doesn't work. You have bought that DVD (even if you only bought a license to the game, you've still bought the physical DVD that contains it), and it is defective. It's not really up to you to determine why your game isn't working; you are not being paid to QA some company's code or verify the physical integrity of the disc you bought.
I just don't see how a publisher would get themselves out of this situation if it went to trial. To my knowledge, no case like this actually has. But it would be interesting to see the question of what you actually bought and what the publisher's responsibilities really are finally clarified by the courts. I have no doubt that EULA's aren't nearly as strong as everybody thinks they are, despite the few court cases that have come down (which were all somewhat cut and dried copyright cases, IIRC).
Rob should know by now that laptops are not for color critical work. This has been blindingly obvious for years.
That's not really the point.
The point is a digital photographer has to take something with him/her on the road. So what do you take with you?
Just throwing up your hands and saying "all these panels suck! don't accept any of them!" is not really helpful. Because that's equivalent to saying "you can't work outside the office". And clearly that is not at all true - you can work outside the office, with any laptop. The question is just which laptop works best for this kind of thing?
Ever since I first started reading this site several years ago, there is always a certain group of people that take an absolute all or nothing kind of attitude, which just ends up being defeatist. Because it's not realistic. Nothing is perfect, and if you're going to expect it to be, then you're just not going to be able to work. That's reality.
But people do work, including photographers, and they work just fine even with imperfect equipment. That doesn't mean they don't want the best equipment available, but it does mean most people in the real world are (surprise) realists, and they will use whatever they have to to get their work done.
So yes, we should all be pressing manufacturers for better laptop displays. That doesn't mean displays that currently exist are "unacceptable" for photographic use. The vast majority of digital photos you've ever seen in any professional capacity, be it in a magazine, a newspaper, a book or a web site, were taken by a photographer walking around with both a camera and a laptop. Some of these were probably even viewed on laptops with (gasp) glossy screens. Most of them were no doubt viewed on laptops with TN screens.
So to make this blanket statement that laptops are "not for color critical work" is just not a statement you can make. They may not be ideal, but then nothing ever is. Hell, the cameras photographers use aren't perfect either, they're always a series of compromises. Does that mean every camera in the world is "unacceptable" for taking photographs?
A popular apology being offered here and elsewhere but not true. The display option is described by Apple as an "optional antiglare display". It is not matte but a glossy screen with a coating applied and the bezel replaced with the older style aluminum one.
Source? Lenovo advertised the screen I am currently viewing this on the exact same way, and it is clearly matte. I have no idea why Apple would bother taking a matte screen, applying a piece of glass or plastic to it, then applying *another* coating to it to make it look matte again, when they could simply not put any glossy coating on it in the first place and save the effort (and money).
I have little doubt that the 17" "antiglare" screen is the same matte display people are used to.
Note that Apple describes their Cinema Display HD's as having the same "antiglare coating" - I have one of these at work, and they're just matte screens. Apple has always described their matte screens like this.
I can't wait to be able to steal money just by walking through a crowded room and "charging" each person's phone $5.
This system's been in use in Japan for something like 10 years.
Not to say it couldn't happen, but the chances of it obviously aren't very high. A lot more people get struck by lightning every year (dozens) than have ever had their phone fraudulently charged by a remote reader (none that I've ever heard of).
Anyway, this is why you just don't load up your SUICA account with all that much money. Yet people in America are all too willing to walk around with debit cards that can access the full amount of their savings accounts, many of which with RFID chips embedded...
My bank card never runs out of battery, which is quite nice. Also, I get it for free from the bank.
And it's tied to your bank account, which Japanese mobile phones aren't. Much more dangerous to carry around a debit card, especially as so many carry RFID chips these days.
That's a mighty bold claim. The only country I've been to where cash is used more often that credit or debit cards, is Switzerland.
It may run counter to the article summary here, but Japan is also much more cash-based than credit or other card-based. A lot of first-time visitors to the country can't seem to get their head around this - they see people swiping their way through the Tokyo subway, or waving their phones at vending machines, but then they walk into a major clothing store chain and find they only accept cash. So they walk into another and find the same thing. So they go to a bank to get a cash advance and find that their credit cards don't even work.
The trick is, most of all this waving and swiping you see in Japan is linked to refillable cash accounts, not credit. And because of that, these networks are not linked to foreign banks. You can't go to Japan and pay for much with a US-based Chase bank or credit card. (Citibank is your best bet, but still most stores don't accept anything.) You have to have a local cash account specifically for these Japan-issued cards.
About the only places that credit cards work reliably in Japan is hotels.
Some of them (i.e. AmEx) come with an RFID chip which lets you just wave the card, rather than swiping it through a reader.
There are some big differences between this and what's done in Japan.
SUICA cards are tied to a cash account. They're like using a pre-paid phone - you refill as needed. If you have a zero balance, you can't use the card. That means if somebody steals your card, they can't do much with it if you only keep $20 or so on it at a time.
The accounts also don't really need to have your real info on them, from what I understand. They're like PayPal accounts. I don't know anybody in Japan that uses their real info on their SUICA card.
I am not sure about the phone situation, but my guess is that it either works like a SUICA card or it's just tied to your regular account (ie. you're billed). There's no way it's like an AMEX card where it's actually tied to your credit. That just wouldn't be accepted in Japan.
Japan is actually a very credit-averse society. And they're absolutely paranoid about privacy. They don't use credit cards much and most stores still won't accept them. RFID credit cards tied to your real info and your real bank or credit accounts like we have here I think would be seen as laughably unsafe. The few cards they do use are tied to refillable cash accounts (JCB is another one), not credit or savings accounts.
Aren't you legally required to accept cash? I.e., "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"?
Nobody "has to" accept any amount of cash, be it pennies, twenties or ten thousand dollar bills, regardless of what it says on the front.
The note about it being "legal tender" is telling you that it's an official bill. It's not saying anything about a private individual being required to accept it for payment. All it's saying is that it is a government-backed piece of paper. But a private company or person can choose to do with it, or not do with it, whatever it/she/he wants.
In fact, these days, when it's so easy to counterfeit, that "legal tender" line is more symbolic and traditional than anything else.
If I lose my mobile now, it's going to painful and annoying to get it replaced. If I lose it and it has cash deposited on it, then it's just more of a loss.
The money isn't tied to the phone, it's tied to an account to which the phone is tied. Big difference. The account goes nowhere if the phone is lost.
It's really no different than if you lost your phone now - would your phone bills suddenly stop coming? No, obviously your account is separate from your phone. Your bills will keep coming until you tell the wireless provider that you no longer have a phone. Same thing in reverse with payment. You have an account, your phone is tied to it to monitor usage but it's not as if all that money suddenly disappears with your phone if it's lost.
If somebody steals your phone, it's your responsibility to notify the carrier within a certain amount of time to avoid fraudulent charges; no different than our current system. You need to do the same now to avoid fraudulent usage charges; this is the same thing.
I have one of those DTV tuners on a USB stick. Where do I plug the TV into it? How can you "send your own MPEG stream and have it displayed" with it?
Apparently you have not heard of a video out cable going from your computer (presumably what you would be using to "send your own MPEG stream") to your TV set?
There's nothing you can do with a hacked converter box that you couldn't do *better* with a USB DTV tuner and the same computer you'd need anyway. You'll be able to view and watch in HD, and record too. Can't do that with a converter box. And you can watch on either your TV or your computer.
At least part of the reason to switch to the artefact-ridden compression-fest that digital TV is, is simply that it offers more chance to get some kind of DRM into the stream. And for this your chances to a hackable box decrease over time, when they find and patch more and more holes.
Europe != the United States.
Listen. The word "switchover" is kind of a misnomer. We're not switching "over", we're just switching "off". We've already got digital signals and have had them for years. That's how people get OTA HDTV. The standards are defined, the signals are being broadcast. All we're talking about doing here is turning *off* the analog broadcast. The digital feed is a known quantity.
Digital broadcasts in the United States are much, much better than their analog equivalents. You won't be getting HDTV with one of these converter boxes, but you'll be getting the SD sub-channel, which has the advantage over analog of zero static. There is nowhere that anyone who watches analog TV can claim that. Personally, I don't see any compression artifacts at all on OTA digital broadcasts, HD or SD, although obviously the SD channels are lower in resolution than the HD ones. Over the air digital broadcasts, which is what these converter boxes are for, are actually the only way to get a full-bandwidth signal currently. (All of the cable and satellite companies molest the signal in various ways to maximize bandwidth.)
And there's absolutely no DRM on OTA digital broadcasts. The industry tried to add some by asking the FCC to mandate a "broadcast flag", but that went nowhere. OTA signals are DRM-free - some *may* have the flag in a vain hope that the receiving hardware will respect it, but no currently-produced receiving hardware that I know of does. And I doubt any of the stations bother even inserting the flag anymore.
Older, hackable, boxes, i.e. the ones you buy now, might be grandfathered because they don't want this rollout nightmare to happen again.
They're not "rolling out" digital. It's already here. All this program is supposed to do is help people who haven't already upgraded, even though they've had about ten years to do so already.
The recent story of their cessation to "compile" the history of the case seems a bit premature now.
Why do you say that? This changes nothing.
SCO lost their case against Novell. They don't "own" jack and that's now been proven in court. Darl McBride can keep saying they own whatever he wants. Hell, I can say I own the moon and I'm going to go around suing everybody under the sun who even so much as talks about it. That doesn't mean I'm doing anything other than wasting a lot of people's time and money. It doesn't mean I'm not going to get laughed out of every court in the land. And it doesn't make me anything other than a complete loon.
There are a lot of crazy people in the world filing frivolous lawsuits. I'm not sure what SCO is doing at this point even rises to that level.
A few years back, EGM did a 12 page spread on Ralph Baer. Have you seen anything like that online anywhere? (At least anything that was current at the time, with a new interview with him, was well-written and well-organized, and visually interesting?)
It's no different than asking "what can a newspaper do that a blog can't?" Well, investigative reporting, for one. That stuff takes a long time, is expensive, and actually requires some journalistic skills. And it's really, really important - maybe the most important thing newspapers do. It's no different with a magazine, even a gaming magazine. Blogs and web sites can really only do the absolute most superficial stuff that print can, because web sites are so driven by being "first", not "best".
It's true that the internet is a better way to get "breaking" information, previews and even reviews. But at its best, EGM was a lot more than a simple buyer's guide. It seems like a lot of people have already forgotten (or just never grew up with) what real print journalism is all about. It's more than just regurgitating press releases. And that's pretty much the extent of what gaming web sites do these days.
Which trial are you referring to? There are multiple cases still pending.
What cases? The only one that matters, SCO already lost. They do not own the copyrights that everything else rests on.
They're appealing that, but a decision already exists. And given that, there are no cases currently "pending" that I know of - Novell had already waived IBM's licensing responsibilities, and they reiterated that after winning their case against SCO. So SCO has no basis on which to sue IBM. And they owe Novell a bunch of money - probably more than they can afford and stay in business.
There might be a few minor claims remaining related to financial things that SCO has against IBM, but it's no longer a major case even if so. More of a minor business dispute.
If SCO somehow wins its appeal, then sure. But the one case upon which everything else hinges is already decided; it would need to actually be overturned for any other cases to go forward. And judges don't like to overturn other judges without a really good reason. (And as PJ points out, it's not like SCO can present any further evidence - the new judge looks at the same evidence.)
The only way the keyboard is going away is with voice recognition that doesn't suck.
I doubt that would even do it. People don't talk coherently - it's a well-known fact of linguistics. When you're in a conversation, you sort of riff off the person you're talking to, responding to each other's body language with your own body language that supplements or even replaces your words. When you're trying to talk to an inanimate object, you still talk basically the same way out of habit, but at the same time you lose your bearings a bit because you have no visual feedback as you're talking. So you lose even further coherence.
Not to mention that working in an office where everybody is constantly talking to their computers is not really going to be very productive. We don't all have privacy. I have six people directly around me and if I had to listen to them all talking to their computers 8 hours out of the day, I think I'd go insane. (Also, I wouldn't be able to comment on Slashdot during working hours anymore!)
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, slashdot: wtf? if you're not willing to approach this as a musical achievement, approach it as a technical achievement.
I think the point most people are making is that it's been done. It's not that most people are saying "oh, anyone could do this" or "this is terrible in a qualitative sense", what they're saying is that there's nothing revolutionary about it because other people have done the same thing before. I think they're commenting more on the submitter's point than on the video itself.
I doubt the guy who made this thought to himself "wow, this is something that nobody has ever done! and it's going to change the face of music!" He's not the one who's getting all hyperbolic about it. So nobody's trying to take him down. Obviously this was difficult. At the same time, though, a piece of entertainment needs to stand on its own - its difficulty doesn't really matter to the final product - and not everybody is going to be into the song he actually made.
But the submitter and/or original article did go way overboard. This is not the future of entertainment. People have been doing stuff like this for years. It may be a component of the future of entertainment, just as professionally produced, major label music will be. But it will probably be a relatively small component, as it is now and has been for the last 15-20 years.
Just because a band is able to sell millions of records does not in and of itself make it crap.
I agree, however it is true that most mainstream music sucks these days. It doesn't suck because it's mainstream, it sucks because it sucks.
You used to be able to see Billboard charts on iTunes going back like 60 years or something. It was pretty eye-opening, because normally that's protected info - you need to subscribe to their service to see it (and that's expensive). They issue takedowns to web sites that post it.
Anyway, in the 1960's and 70's you'd literally have stuff like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, etc. all over the top 40 charts. These were mainstream pop bands! It started changing in the 1980's, which is not coincidentally when radio moved to fixed formats (previously DJ's just played what they wanted on many stations) and when MTV started acting as gatekeeper to modern pop. Nowadays a band like the Rolling Stones would be lucky to get a record deal at all.
Most "indie" bands I know, and I do know quite a few of them, really don't sound much different from 1960's rock music, whether they call themselves "experimental" or not. They're usually no more experimental than Pink Floyd or the Beatles were in their later period. That stuff literally would have been top 40 material in the past.
Being a top 40, mainstream band used to be something everybody aspired to, whatever kind of music they were in. It didn't used to be derogatory, and you weren't considered a "sellout" if you reached that status. That's different now because the type of music on the top 40 chart is different now, and because those charts are now controlled by mega-conglomerates by way of their radio and TV networks colluding to shove this crap down people's throats.
Personally, if a great band manages to break onto the top 40 chart, it's certainly nothing I hold against them. I don't say "well, now they suck because other people like them." That's what a snob does.
But, that doesn't mean I don't think most bands on the top 40 these days do suck. They just suck for other reasons.
You're going to get a stock package that works, but isn't going to have much RAM, not much of a hard drive, a slow processor, a small screen, etc. And the parts you get are going to generally be the cheapest the system builder could find.
I know many might think it's a waste of money, but I'll buy the parts I want,
Yeah good luck with building your own laptop from parts you've bought.
I bought my wife's laptop at Best Buy and it is a better laptop in some ways than my own - and my own is a year newer and a ThinkPad that I had custom-built to order by Lenovo. And hers cost $400. RAM is cheap; if you're going to complain about not having much RAM, well good lord, spend fifteen bucks on an upgrade.
Best Buy is big enough that it gets custom configurations at prices lower than you can custom order the same model direct from the manufacturer web site (in this case, we're talking mostly HP, Sony and Acer). Office Depot occasionally gets similar deals.
Obviously I still believe in custom building to order because I did it myself, but I don't see that I got any particular advantage over my wife's pre-built laptop by doing so. In fact, my laptop's been in the shop twice over the first three months I've had it, whereas hers never has been. There's nothing I can do with my laptop that she can't. And I paid more for my machine.
"They moved it around to death!"
And they wonder why people P2P TV episodes.
If it's easier to look for a torrent, and download it than to just sit on a couch and watch your favorite show, then the TV people are doing something wrong.
To be fair, it's not easier if you have a DVR. Which a lot of people do, and the networks know that. There's not as much loathing of moving things around on the schedule anymore because the execs know that DVR's will find these shows automatically, so they're not as concerned about the con of potential audience loss anymore. The potential benefits outweigh the risks now.
In a sense, executives are doing what people here have always said they should do, which is moving away from schedule-based programming where you're expected to be in your seat at a specific, regular time each week to watch a show. They want to go all on-demand, and DVR's are part of that. It would solve a lot of their problems, like having to commit to full or half seasons and filming them all in sequence at roughly the same time. They'd love nothing more than to be able to do 2 or 3 episodes here and there and just put them on whenever they feel like it, knowing the fans will receive them automatically via "subscription".
There is one inherent flaw with this strategy, though, that nobody talks about. Even if everybody was on board with this, including the public, it still couldn't really work. Because the bottom line is there is still going to need to be a date and time that a new episode is released. People aren't going to stay interested in a show forever without knowing when or if it's going to come back, so you can't just have a couple month hiatus for a show and then suddenly dump 10 episodes out there all at once and expect people to even notice or care. Plus, whatever interest that does generate will dissipate once people have digested those episodes. It makes more logical sense to roll them out on a regular basis.
That means that fans will always be waiting for the next episode, and they will always know approximately when they're coming (and will get frustrated if the schedule isn't fairly regular). In the end, you are back to scheduled programming. I mean, even most web-only series operate on a schedule for those reasons. What you are talking about with p2p'ing is more of the post-release rental or purchase market; it's no different than renting a season of a show from Netflix or buying it as a box set. p2p, VOD and DVR's haven't changed that, just as they haven't changed the need for scheduled programming.
I think that, given the economy and all the technological changes happening, a lot of networks are experimenting with things right now to see if there are ways they can break established models. Some of those experiments are ill-advised. Ignoring regular schedules is one of those. Eventually, TV networks will figure out that even in an on-demand world, schedules still matter because the real fans of a show want to see the episodes as soon as they are released. It's no different than a movie, most of which make the majority of their money in the first weekend. That hasn't changed either; if anything, it's a trend that has accelerated over the past couple decades.
The bottom line is we have all these new technologies that allow us to get content in different ways, but the established models of distribution don't exist for purely technological reasons. They exist for behavioral and psychological reasons too, and new technologies won't change that. In fact, all these new technologies have only served to reinforce current models, not undermine them. (The only way they've undermined them is by asking whether or not you should have to pay for all this content. But they haven't changed our behavior in watching it.)
It's Japan. I don't care what you offer, it's going to be damn difficult for a 'Western' company to crack that nut.
Doable, just difficult.
It's not really all that difficult. In fact, the iPod does just fine there. (The Walkman digital players are neck and neck, but that's to be expected - there is *some* home court advantage, just in the marketing and language if nothing else.)
In fact, there are not many categories of anything there over which we (meaning western companies) have not had at least some influence, and in many cases are market leaders. It's a total myth that the Japanese only like Japanese products. Well ok, then how do you explain Levi's, Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple (other than the iPhone), Microsoft, Chanel, Coach, hollywood movies, Mariah Carey, etc. etc.?
The fact is they love our stuff. They just don't love all of it equally, and why should they? We don't love all of our stuff equally either. They just happen to have slightly different priorities in what they're looking for, but they have no bias whatsoever in terms of where the products they use come from.
The companies that do best there are the ones that tweak their stuff to Japanese tastes and/or expectations. That should be obvious, but apparently it was not obvious to Apple with the iPhone, which is clearly on the low end of phones in Japan on specs... and uglier than most too. So it's no surprise that it would be unpopular.
But if it had an 8mp camera, a TV tuner, a cheaper rate plan, a higher-res screen, a clamshell design and proper buttons? It wouldn't matter who made it, people there would buy it.
I know it's a dupe, but I still love to see Gates say: "But that is just the start of the crap..."
It says it all right there. At least Microsoft knows about the problems with Windows. It is said that realizing there is an issue is the first step to resolving it :)
I don't think Bill Gates is really responsible for the problems with Windows. In fact, I think it's probably one reason why he left when he did. The company just got too big for him to manage day-to-day - he wasn't the one making relatively minor decisions like where Windows Movie Maker sits on the Microsoft web site or how to install it, somebody else was making those decisions. And little decisions like that, all added up together, are 95% of what makes Windows as maddening to use as it is. And he was as annoyed by that stuff as everybody else.
Worse for him, it was his job to defend it, which probably gave him never-ending heartburn.
I think he built this thing, saw what it had turned into, saw no easy way of fixing it (especially at his age and point of his career arc), and so decided to get out and leave it up to someone else. The two questions are:
a) are the people he left behind smart enough to recognize the problems he saw?
and
b) are they actually up to the task of fixing the OS's problems?
So far, Windows 7 seems like a step in the right direction, as is its quick turnaround time (suggesting these guys don't have their heads in the sand about Vista anymore), so I think there's some hope.
I guess exploring the aftermath of the Dominion War or giving a real sendoff to the TNG crowd would have been much to ask for.
Given the box office of the last couple TNG movies and the ratings at the end of DS9's run, yeah, it would have been too much to ask.
Star Trek isn't supposed to be a sci-fi series for geeks, which is what it turned into. The series started out as basically a western set in space, and while people didn't quite "get" that originally, they warmed up to it en masse as time went on (especially as TOS went into syndication). That's what most of the population used to think of when they thought of Star Trek, and it's what Abrams and co. are hoping to get back to.
I read recently an article about how they actually use falcons at JFK to prevent bird strikes.
This seems to be about that, though I'm not sure if it was the article I saw: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/02/01/2009-02-01_untitled__falcon01m.html
DiFulco said the PA doesn't use falconry at LaGuardia because it is "effective against gulls, not geese." He said gulls are "the primary birds at issue at JFK, but not at LGA," where geese pose the main threat.
Then there are some counter-arguments made, but I can understand why they wouldn't be effective against geese. The geese that hit US Airways 1549 were apparently a flock of migrating birds at around 3,000 feet that just happened to wander into an airplane's flight path. They weren't "at" the airport, so I don't see how scaring them away would accomplish anything. Bad luck is bad luck; if they're in the area at all, an airplane can hit them. The gulls that the falcons are used to chase away at JFK loiter around the airport looking for food, especially at the ends of the runways where the water washes up various small fish and garbage. So the falcons are effective because their job is just to keep the gulls away from the airport perimeter and the runways.
I don't really see how you can prevent something like what happened to flight 1549. That happened at 3,000 feet, 3 minutes into the flight, which means about 9 miles from the airport. There's no feasible way I know of to clear that sort of a virtual dome around an airport.
Not to mention that some species of birds can fly at above 20,000 feet (true!), so really, yeah, not much you can do.
I think it's time we all just acknowledge this was a freak accident and move on. You can take reasonable precautions to scare away birds at airports themselves, but there's a limit to what you can do beyond that.
Is someone who uses gimp or photoshop to run some filters on a drawing a real artist? Is it sufficient that he or she "looks like an artist?"
The followup question that you didn't ask is "does it matter"?
I would argue that no, it doesn't. What matters is the result. If someone who doesn't know ow to use a real paint brush somehow manages to put out a modern-day Mona Lisa using Photoshop, then we should appreciate it for what it is. True appreciation of art is not an appreciation of technical skill; it's an appreciation of creativity and expression.
There will come a day when somebody actually uses auto-tune as part of a masterpiece of avant-garde music, or at least a new style of music. It has happened with every single other effect we've ever had, from distortion and reverb to fuzz and delay. All of these effects when used in a certain way can make musicians sound like they have more technical ability than they do, but so what? If the final result is good music, and something you haven't heard before, why do you care how fast or precisely the musicians can actually sing or play?
Ah, correction, writers are still making music. The "artists" or "singers" on the other hand, are finding more and more ways to artificially make themselves sound better than they really are.
Eh, and this is nothing new either.
What would you define as an ideal setup that allows, say, a rock musician to "sound as good as they really are"? Everything rock musicians have ever used have made them sound better than they are, right down to the amps they use to amplify their guitars, the effects they use (even amps from the 50's and 60's had reverb and could be overdriven), the pickups in the guitars themselves, the strings they choose to use, etc. A singer will sound better or worse based on the microphone they use, the equalization settings, etc.
This idea that there's ever been *any* unaltered recorded music out there is rubbish. There never has been. Even just a guy playing by himself with an acoustic and singing into a microphone is having his sound altered by various things during the recording, mixing and mastering.
I'm not arguing in favor of auto-tune, all I'm saying is that there are no absolutes and the line across which you do not (to quote Walter Sobchak) is different for everybody. And this is a generational thing; in the 1960's, people railed against rock music for exactly this same reason, citing some of the things I said above as making the music "fake". Today we consider those same things as being responsible for what we call "authentic" rock music. And now a new generation has new tools to make themselves sound the way they want, and we rail against it the same way our parents and grandparents did 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.
Ah, but you didn't pay for it. You paid for the right to very limited use of it.
I wonder about this. It's one thing to have a EULA that says "you agree not to copy this software blah blah blah" and for the company to then take you to court if it's determined that you have. From what I recall, this is a situation similar to the one in which the few EULA cases to ever go to trial have been decided on.
It's a different thing, though, for a piece of software to break, through a piece of programming code inserted there by the publisher. I don't see how a EULA covers that, because there are other laws that trump the EULA. Contract law is only binding in so far as it both adheres to and reiterates codified law. For example, you can't have a contract that legalizes murder. Murder is still murder and it's illegal; a contract that says otherwise is not valid.
Similarly, I can't see how a EULA that says "you agree that we're allowed to break your software through no fault of your own" would be a valid contract.
Also, if you're purchasing physical media, there is the question of what you actually purchased. Say the price of the physical media is higher than the price of the equivalent online download (through Steam or whatever) - as it almost always is. So, what is that extra $10 or $20 for? Obviously, both the physical packaging and the DVD.
But now, if the data on that DVD doesn't work, then the DVD itself doesn't work. You have bought that DVD (even if you only bought a license to the game, you've still bought the physical DVD that contains it), and it is defective. It's not really up to you to determine why your game isn't working; you are not being paid to QA some company's code or verify the physical integrity of the disc you bought.
I just don't see how a publisher would get themselves out of this situation if it went to trial. To my knowledge, no case like this actually has. But it would be interesting to see the question of what you actually bought and what the publisher's responsibilities really are finally clarified by the courts. I have no doubt that EULA's aren't nearly as strong as everybody thinks they are, despite the few court cases that have come down (which were all somewhat cut and dried copyright cases, IIRC).
Rob should know by now that laptops are not for color critical work. This has been blindingly obvious for years.
That's not really the point.
The point is a digital photographer has to take something with him/her on the road. So what do you take with you?
Just throwing up your hands and saying "all these panels suck! don't accept any of them!" is not really helpful. Because that's equivalent to saying "you can't work outside the office". And clearly that is not at all true - you can work outside the office, with any laptop. The question is just which laptop works best for this kind of thing?
Ever since I first started reading this site several years ago, there is always a certain group of people that take an absolute all or nothing kind of attitude, which just ends up being defeatist. Because it's not realistic. Nothing is perfect, and if you're going to expect it to be, then you're just not going to be able to work. That's reality.
But people do work, including photographers, and they work just fine even with imperfect equipment. That doesn't mean they don't want the best equipment available, but it does mean most people in the real world are (surprise) realists, and they will use whatever they have to to get their work done.
So yes, we should all be pressing manufacturers for better laptop displays. That doesn't mean displays that currently exist are "unacceptable" for photographic use. The vast majority of digital photos you've ever seen in any professional capacity, be it in a magazine, a newspaper, a book or a web site, were taken by a photographer walking around with both a camera and a laptop. Some of these were probably even viewed on laptops with (gasp) glossy screens. Most of them were no doubt viewed on laptops with TN screens.
So to make this blanket statement that laptops are "not for color critical work" is just not a statement you can make. They may not be ideal, but then nothing ever is. Hell, the cameras photographers use aren't perfect either, they're always a series of compromises. Does that mean every camera in the world is "unacceptable" for taking photographs?
A popular apology being offered here and elsewhere but not true. The display option is described by Apple as an "optional antiglare display". It is not matte but a glossy screen with a coating applied and the bezel replaced with the older style aluminum one.
Source? Lenovo advertised the screen I am currently viewing this on the exact same way, and it is clearly matte. I have no idea why Apple would bother taking a matte screen, applying a piece of glass or plastic to it, then applying *another* coating to it to make it look matte again, when they could simply not put any glossy coating on it in the first place and save the effort (and money).
I have little doubt that the 17" "antiglare" screen is the same matte display people are used to.
Note that Apple describes their Cinema Display HD's as having the same "antiglare coating" - I have one of these at work, and they're just matte screens. Apple has always described their matte screens like this.
I can't wait to be able to steal money just by walking through a crowded room and "charging" each person's phone $5.
This system's been in use in Japan for something like 10 years.
Not to say it couldn't happen, but the chances of it obviously aren't very high. A lot more people get struck by lightning every year (dozens) than have ever had their phone fraudulently charged by a remote reader (none that I've ever heard of).
Anyway, this is why you just don't load up your SUICA account with all that much money. Yet people in America are all too willing to walk around with debit cards that can access the full amount of their savings accounts, many of which with RFID chips embedded...
My bank card never runs out of battery, which is quite nice.
Also, I get it for free from the bank.
And it's tied to your bank account, which Japanese mobile phones aren't. Much more dangerous to carry around a debit card, especially as so many carry RFID chips these days.
That's a mighty bold claim. The only country I've been to where cash is used more often that credit or debit cards, is Switzerland.
It may run counter to the article summary here, but Japan is also much more cash-based than credit or other card-based. A lot of first-time visitors to the country can't seem to get their head around this - they see people swiping their way through the Tokyo subway, or waving their phones at vending machines, but then they walk into a major clothing store chain and find they only accept cash. So they walk into another and find the same thing. So they go to a bank to get a cash advance and find that their credit cards don't even work.
The trick is, most of all this waving and swiping you see in Japan is linked to refillable cash accounts, not credit. And because of that, these networks are not linked to foreign banks. You can't go to Japan and pay for much with a US-based Chase bank or credit card. (Citibank is your best bet, but still most stores don't accept anything.) You have to have a local cash account specifically for these Japan-issued cards.
About the only places that credit cards work reliably in Japan is hotels.
Some of them (i.e. AmEx) come with an RFID chip which lets you just wave the card, rather than swiping it through a reader.
There are some big differences between this and what's done in Japan.
SUICA cards are tied to a cash account. They're like using a pre-paid phone - you refill as needed. If you have a zero balance, you can't use the card. That means if somebody steals your card, they can't do much with it if you only keep $20 or so on it at a time.
The accounts also don't really need to have your real info on them, from what I understand. They're like PayPal accounts. I don't know anybody in Japan that uses their real info on their SUICA card.
I am not sure about the phone situation, but my guess is that it either works like a SUICA card or it's just tied to your regular account (ie. you're billed). There's no way it's like an AMEX card where it's actually tied to your credit. That just wouldn't be accepted in Japan.
Japan is actually a very credit-averse society. And they're absolutely paranoid about privacy. They don't use credit cards much and most stores still won't accept them. RFID credit cards tied to your real info and your real bank or credit accounts like we have here I think would be seen as laughably unsafe. The few cards they do use are tied to refillable cash accounts (JCB is another one), not credit or savings accounts.
Aren't you legally required to accept cash? I.e., "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"?
Nobody "has to" accept any amount of cash, be it pennies, twenties or ten thousand dollar bills, regardless of what it says on the front.
The note about it being "legal tender" is telling you that it's an official bill. It's not saying anything about a private individual being required to accept it for payment. All it's saying is that it is a government-backed piece of paper. But a private company or person can choose to do with it, or not do with it, whatever it/she/he wants.
In fact, these days, when it's so easy to counterfeit, that "legal tender" line is more symbolic and traditional than anything else.
If I lose my mobile now, it's going to painful and annoying to get it replaced. If I lose it and it has cash deposited on it, then it's just more of a loss.
The money isn't tied to the phone, it's tied to an account to which the phone is tied. Big difference. The account goes nowhere if the phone is lost.
It's really no different than if you lost your phone now - would your phone bills suddenly stop coming? No, obviously your account is separate from your phone. Your bills will keep coming until you tell the wireless provider that you no longer have a phone. Same thing in reverse with payment. You have an account, your phone is tied to it to monitor usage but it's not as if all that money suddenly disappears with your phone if it's lost.
If somebody steals your phone, it's your responsibility to notify the carrier within a certain amount of time to avoid fraudulent charges; no different than our current system. You need to do the same now to avoid fraudulent usage charges; this is the same thing.
I have one of those DTV tuners on a USB stick. Where do I plug the TV into it? How can you "send your own MPEG stream and have it displayed" with it?
Apparently you have not heard of a video out cable going from your computer (presumably what you would be using to "send your own MPEG stream") to your TV set?
There's nothing you can do with a hacked converter box that you couldn't do *better* with a USB DTV tuner and the same computer you'd need anyway. You'll be able to view and watch in HD, and record too. Can't do that with a converter box. And you can watch on either your TV or your computer.
At least part of the reason to switch to the artefact-ridden compression-fest that digital TV is, is simply that it offers more chance to get some kind of DRM into the stream. And for this your chances to a hackable box decrease over time, when they find and patch more and more holes.
Europe != the United States.
Listen. The word "switchover" is kind of a misnomer. We're not switching "over", we're just switching "off". We've already got digital signals and have had them for years. That's how people get OTA HDTV. The standards are defined, the signals are being broadcast. All we're talking about doing here is turning *off* the analog broadcast. The digital feed is a known quantity.
Digital broadcasts in the United States are much, much better than their analog equivalents. You won't be getting HDTV with one of these converter boxes, but you'll be getting the SD sub-channel, which has the advantage over analog of zero static. There is nowhere that anyone who watches analog TV can claim that. Personally, I don't see any compression artifacts at all on OTA digital broadcasts, HD or SD, although obviously the SD channels are lower in resolution than the HD ones. Over the air digital broadcasts, which is what these converter boxes are for, are actually the only way to get a full-bandwidth signal currently. (All of the cable and satellite companies molest the signal in various ways to maximize bandwidth.)
And there's absolutely no DRM on OTA digital broadcasts. The industry tried to add some by asking the FCC to mandate a "broadcast flag", but that went nowhere. OTA signals are DRM-free - some *may* have the flag in a vain hope that the receiving hardware will respect it, but no currently-produced receiving hardware that I know of does. And I doubt any of the stations bother even inserting the flag anymore.
Older, hackable, boxes, i.e. the ones you buy now, might be grandfathered because they don't want this rollout nightmare to happen again.
They're not "rolling out" digital. It's already here. All this program is supposed to do is help people who haven't already upgraded, even though they've had about ten years to do so already.
The recent story of their cessation to "compile" the history of the case seems a bit premature now.
Why do you say that? This changes nothing.
SCO lost their case against Novell. They don't "own" jack and that's now been proven in court. Darl McBride can keep saying they own whatever he wants. Hell, I can say I own the moon and I'm going to go around suing everybody under the sun who even so much as talks about it. That doesn't mean I'm doing anything other than wasting a lot of people's time and money. It doesn't mean I'm not going to get laughed out of every court in the land. And it doesn't make me anything other than a complete loon.
There are a lot of crazy people in the world filing frivolous lawsuits. I'm not sure what SCO is doing at this point even rises to that level.
What can printed magazines offer?
In-depth features that web sites don't do.
A few years back, EGM did a 12 page spread on Ralph Baer. Have you seen anything like that online anywhere? (At least anything that was current at the time, with a new interview with him, was well-written and well-organized, and visually interesting?)
It's no different than asking "what can a newspaper do that a blog can't?" Well, investigative reporting, for one. That stuff takes a long time, is expensive, and actually requires some journalistic skills. And it's really, really important - maybe the most important thing newspapers do. It's no different with a magazine, even a gaming magazine. Blogs and web sites can really only do the absolute most superficial stuff that print can, because web sites are so driven by being "first", not "best".
It's true that the internet is a better way to get "breaking" information, previews and even reviews. But at its best, EGM was a lot more than a simple buyer's guide. It seems like a lot of people have already forgotten (or just never grew up with) what real print journalism is all about. It's more than just regurgitating press releases. And that's pretty much the extent of what gaming web sites do these days.
Which trial are you referring to? There are multiple cases still pending.
What cases? The only one that matters, SCO already lost. They do not own the copyrights that everything else rests on.
They're appealing that, but a decision already exists. And given that, there are no cases currently "pending" that I know of - Novell had already waived IBM's licensing responsibilities, and they reiterated that after winning their case against SCO. So SCO has no basis on which to sue IBM. And they owe Novell a bunch of money - probably more than they can afford and stay in business.
There might be a few minor claims remaining related to financial things that SCO has against IBM, but it's no longer a major case even if so. More of a minor business dispute.
If SCO somehow wins its appeal, then sure. But the one case upon which everything else hinges is already decided; it would need to actually be overturned for any other cases to go forward. And judges don't like to overturn other judges without a really good reason. (And as PJ points out, it's not like SCO can present any further evidence - the new judge looks at the same evidence.)
The only way the keyboard is going away is with voice recognition that doesn't suck.
I doubt that would even do it. People don't talk coherently - it's a well-known fact of linguistics. When you're in a conversation, you sort of riff off the person you're talking to, responding to each other's body language with your own body language that supplements or even replaces your words. When you're trying to talk to an inanimate object, you still talk basically the same way out of habit, but at the same time you lose your bearings a bit because you have no visual feedback as you're talking. So you lose even further coherence.
Not to mention that working in an office where everybody is constantly talking to their computers is not really going to be very productive. We don't all have privacy. I have six people directly around me and if I had to listen to them all talking to their computers 8 hours out of the day, I think I'd go insane. (Also, I wouldn't be able to comment on Slashdot during working hours anymore!)