Why does the grocery store have to be the one filling the order, doing the delivery, or hosting the web site?
Here's a thought : affix a known order charge to the service, let people freeform their order or make a check list for them of known things with relatively known prices, when the order comes in print it out, drive to the grocery store, fill the basket, pay for it yourself, charge their credit card in the van on the way over (including the $10 or $15 or a % of the total) and drive them to their house.
Several reasons why this wouldn't work, the most important being stock tracking, the second most important being cost. What you're talking about could be done in absolutely any retail genre, but it isn't, because it's impossible to make money this way.
I use Freshdirect all the time now; I think it's a fantastic service. I have a full listing of all the products currently in their warehouse at the time of my order, the prices are similar to those I'd pay in a real store (sometimes higher, sometimes lower, overall about the same), and the delivery charge is just $4 - insignificant in the context of a $100 order. I also know who I'm dealing with, I have a guarantee of freshness, and I know what I'm going to get when I place an order.
With a system such as you're suggesting, costs would be ridiculously out of line, for one thing. You're basically talking about charging a markup over retail prices, *plus* a "$10-$15" delivery charge. And that for far worse service than I get wwith Freshdirect - I'd have no way of knowing whether what I order is in stock, I'd have no advance notice of new products, I'd have no way of knowing if the tomatoes I order are going to be fresh or rotten or what (believe me, it's tough getting a good tomato in New York - I don't know how Freshdirect does it, but they have to, because they guarantee it and if I don't like my tomatoes they give me my money back).
There have been various delivery services around for years for disabled or elderly people. Many of these are volunteer-based, some do charge. It's not a big business, though, as far as the average consumer, for the reasons listed above. To turn it into a big business that people will compare favorably with actually going to the store, the retailer does have to be involved. And the overall cheapest way to do it is for the retailer to just be involved all the way through the process.
It is a bad law - not because it won't do any good (infact I think it will do some good), but because it could have done a lot more good. It is also a bad law because it essentially turns some what was a gray area into a completely legal area instead of doing what the rest of the world is doing and outlawing spam entirely.
What "rest of the world"? Please provide us with some specific examples of how "the rest of the world" is outlawing spam. When you use a phrase like that, you'd better mean more than one or two countries, and you'd better really mean "outlawing entirely" rather than "placing restrictions upon" like the EU is doing and pretty much everybody else I can think of (nobody I know of has a law that says "the sending of any unsolicited email is a crime" - think about how draconian such a law would be). And that's what CAN-SPAM does too, albeit in a bit more relaxed fashion than some other laws. We've been over this before and pretty well all agreed it's impossible to "outlaw spam entirely", especially in the USA where we still have some vestiges of free speech (as in, you can now more easily outlaw speech deemed politically dangerous than in years past, but you still can't outlaw speech just because you find it inconvenient to wade through your inbox).
I'm not a big fan of CAN-SPAM either and feel it could have been a better law. But arguing against it at this point because it doesn't go far enough is like arguing against the assault weapons ban because it doesn't also cover handguns. There's rarely ever an all-or-nothing solution in politics or law; you have to fight for what you can, take what you can get, and then deal with the resulting law when it's done.
Right now, this is the only federal anti-spam law we have. It's not the best law anyone could have come up with, but it's better than nothing, and the best we could have gotten given the politics involved. And I don't see why you would argue against 100 of the worst spammers being prosecuted under it, just because you don't like the law. If a spammer's being prosecuted, a spammer's being prosecuted and that's all that matters.
I also don't see why this is filed under "your rights online". What passes for an online right these days on this site? Is it now Slashdot's position that it's a spammer's right to send spam? Are all government prosecutions bad, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the crime involved?
I think it's well written, well casted, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of it.
It's improving. It's no longer the unmitigated disaster it once was. The episode a few weeks back where T'Pol was wrestling with her addiction was really nicely done, and it was the first one I ever thought that about. (The episodes since have been pretty good as well, for the most part.) I have to say, Jolene Blalock is sure nice to look at, but she's also really excellent as a vulcan, and specifically as a tormented vulcan, which has always seemed really tough to pull off. Even Leonard Nimoy, the original, seemed to force it whenever he was given the task of showing emotion.
I'm still not very into this whole Xindi plotline and I hope they'll do something more recognizable on the Trek timeline next season. But it does seem like the writers have finally started hitting their stride within the framework they've been given so far, the actors are fine (and in some cases excellent), I've gotten used to the show's "look", etc.
I guess I'm saying I'm happy it's coming back, which I wouldn't have been after last season. I just hope they create a plot arc next year that's a bit more Trek-like.
Re:SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom
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Groklaw Turns One
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The remaining question for SCOX is "how low can it go"? Except for that bump in early April, when SCO tried, unsuccessfully, a stock buyback to prop up the price, the decline from 14 to 5 has been close to linear. If you just project the line out, SCOX goes to zero around late summer. It probably won't go to penny stock levels for a while, though; they have some cash left. But with no licensing revenue and a huge legal burn rate, they can't go on for all that long.
I need to at least try to correct this misconception a lot of people seem to have that a company's stock price is directly tied to its very existence. It isn't. In fact, as far as the company is concerned, it doesn't even really matter. If a company is dipping into its market cap to finance anything, it's in serious trouble to begin with - which SCO is, but not because its stock price is going down. SCO is in serious trouble because its business is failing, and its stock price is reflecting that. The cause/effect is reversed, you see.
If SCO's stock reaches penny-stock levels, they'll be de-listed. It happens occasionally, and a lot of companies are not even big enough to be listed to begin with. But they're still in business. And it won't affect their legal strategy, because they've got cash set aside for that.
I'm just saying, quit harping on the stock price. It doesn't matter except as a reflection of what a very small pool of not-very-influential people (ie. mostly small investors) think about SCO's future business prospects. It's no secret that their Unix business isn't doing well, they gave up on Linux and their legal strategy is working about as well as their FUD. Plus, BayStar and RBC want out. Add it up and obviously investors want out. But this has no direct effect on SCO's business.
SCO doesn't automatically go away if their stock drops to penny levels. They've got their cash, and if they burn through it, they'll just need to find some other sucke... er, VC firm to prop them up like BayStar and RBC did. You know MS is not going to let this die; they'll find some other proxy with which to funnel SCO whatever cash they need.
Also what kind of codec bias could you possibly be referring to?
Apparently he doesn't realize that this is a double-blind test - meaning neither the listener nor the tester knows what codec is being presented at any given time.
I'm taking the test now (well, not right now, taking a break) and it's about as scientific as I think you could make a public test taken in the home. Yes, the samples get compressed and then put in easily accessible folders with proper file name extensions, but you never know what you're actually listening to when you're running the testing program. All you have is a source file for comparison, then two buttons marked "1" and "2", one of which is the source again, the other a randomized codec. You never know which of the two buttons is the uncompressed source and you also never know which codec you're hearing. The results are also encrypted, so it's not as if you can just go into the results files and look at what codecs you favor.
I suppose someone who's truly got the Ear of the Gods could listen to the samples outside of the testing program, pick various identifiable traits out of each, then listen for those traits in the testing program and vote up or down whatever codecs he or she chose, but that would be exceedingly difficult and more than a little time-consuming. I can't see how it would be worth it, especially as no single test result is going to skew the overall results to any significant degree.
This is the first time I've ever taken a test like this and I am honestly pretty shocked at how good all of these codecs sound. I am having a really hard time even deciding which is the compressed track most of the time, and I consider myself something of an audiophile. I'm even listening in a fairly controlled environment with a good pair of headphones, at a volume loud enough to hear any background noise clearly but below any clipping whatsoever. I will be surprised if any codec really does significantly better than the others consistently when we see the final test results.
Like their keyboards and mice, they're damn fine products.
Let's not overdo it here. Their keyboards and mice are mediocre at best, just as their wi-fi equipment is. I owned an MN-500 when it was first released, and the thing wouldn't hold a connection for longer than 30 minutes. Turned out it was a known problem that a lot of other people had as well. I took it back, got myself a D-Link and haven't had a problem since. (Note: I'm not endorsing D-Link, just saying MS's products are no better.)
MS has a ton of competition in the wi-fi market. It does seem surprising that they don't see it as a viable revenue stream but it may just be a case of one too many products taking away from their core focus (which is still OS's and Office software). It would be very hard for them to really become dominant in wi-fi because the field is so crowded; it's not a case of beating one or two enemies, as it is in PDA's or game consoles. They'd have to take down many, many well-established and respected companies. They probably just decided it wasn't worth the effort.
As for their keyboards/mice, I just want to say that people who think these are the best of the breed just have not used a real keyboard and/or mouse. Find an IBM Model M or Northgate (Avant) keyboard and then tell me any MS model is even in the same class. MS's keyboards are the same "good enough" level of quality that everyone else seems content to make these days; rubber dome, mushy feel, questionable build quality. Calling them "damn fine" is like saying a Firebird is a damn fine sports car or the Sizzler makes a damn fine steak. Both are serviceable, but hardly in the same class as a Porsche or a Peter Luger. MS's wi-fi equipment followed the same pattern; nothing really to distinguish it from anybody else, and with the same intermittent firmware issues as every other manufacturer seems to have.
Maybe I should have done the NYT registration thing, and read the article, but the board is in japanese!
Uh, yeah. Kind of the point. This is a story about how a culture other than ours is using the internet for emotional release.
I work with japanese, and I understand a few words, but I just can't see what the hubbub about this article on a japanese board that I can't even read is.
Well, why don't you ask the people you work with? Maybe it would help you understand them a little better, which is the reason why articles such as this one are written. I'd think someone who apparently works at/for a karaoke bar would be a little more open-minded about other cultures. Not every article here exists to comment on your life personally.
That said, I do think articles like this are born out of a sort of well-intentioned naivete - the assumption being that people in other cultures should naturally be different than us, and it's somehow surprising and newsworthy when we learn they're not. It shouldn't be surprising that they would use internet forums in the same way we do. They do most things in the same way we do; they're a modern, technologically and socially advanced country with a political and economic infrastructure largely built by the United States.
But still, if this article makes western tech-heads realize that Japanese tech-heads are really pretty much the same as they are, I guess it's accomplished something.
"No due process, no suspect's rights, no Miranda warning, no 5th amendment, no court-appointed attorney, no judge, no jury, no appeals, no comfy jail cell, etc, etc, etc...."
No apology if they got the wrong guy.....
Saturday on Slashdot seems to bring out an even higher proportion of anti-government conspiracy theorists than usual (I'm using your post as an example, but there are dozens of others in the thread below this). Sometimes I wonder how many of the posters here actually are script kiddies themselves.
The fact is this guy confessed. And not only did he confess, he apparently provided great detail on various worms that he's created. They also found the source code on his PC. That seems like pretty compelling evidence to back up his confession.
I was surprised to read he's only eligible for 5 years in prison. My wife joked "well, he'll get a free dorm room for college". I'm sorry, but this is not a deterrent, which is the point of having criminal penalties in the first place. From the news article, it sounds like he's clearly not very scared. They need to extradite him somewhere where he can really be forced to pay the price for the damage he's caused.
Everybody here should support throwing the book at guys like this. This is the internet we're talking about here, and worms like sasser at best make it harder to use, at worst can take down corporate networks (which sasser did) and even 911 systems, defense networks, hospital networks, etc.
"Screw 'em"? Nice attitude. What if they have been looking and can't find another job? And my comment gets modded down? Geesh!
Then they should look elsewhere, or for a different kind of job.
I just quit (today!) a job that has been killing me (quite literally) for two and a half years. It's left me physically and emotionally drained and has raised my stress levels to the point where I'm having heart palpitations on a regular basis - I've been to the doctor more often because of this job than I ever have in my life for any other reason. It's also been keeping me away from my wife; we've pretty much missed out completely on our first year together.
One day, I thought, "you know, this is really just not worth it. It's only money." And so I gave my two weeks notice. My wife fully supported me. I have a bit of money saved in the bank and yes, I have contingency plans in case I really just can't find anything, but I also know that there's a possibility that I may end up having to do something completely different, starting at the bottom and working my way up again.
So it's hard for me to be sympathetic to SCO employees. They'll even get unemployment; I probably won't. But the reality is it's just work, and it's just money. There are more important things in life, and if they don't see that, too bad. I'd never work for a company like SCO, whether or not I could find another job in my field. I'd work at McDonald's first.
If my company was like SCO I'd have quit a long time ago, new job or not.
While I don't really like the dress code that is typical of work (thus I love my Intel internship), the office environment isn't replaceable. Even if I like what I am doing for work, distractions at home purely cost the company money. Distractions at work, on the other hand, largely provide to the company. At the very least the distraction is a team effort.
I don't think you're looking at this in the right way.
Say I have a project that needs to be done in 14 days; creating a small web site, for example. I have various milestones that need to be hit along the way; comps, flash buildouts, etc.
Whether those milestones get hit while I'm working "at" work, or while I'm working at home, doesn't matter to the company. What matters is that the milestones get hit and the project gets done on time. "Distractions" at home don't cost the company anything at all, because a) there is no "end of the day" where you suddenly stop working and go somewhere else (i.e. home), and b) the company is still getting the same amount of work out of you, a completed project on time.
Working at home has a lot of advantages, some of which have been touched on already, but a big one as far as the company is concerned is commute time savings. If an employee no longer has to commute 2 hours total each day, that's time he/she can potentially put back into their workday. Oh, sure, most of them won't, but they can if they need to (if they get behind) and they'll still be happy, because they know that overall they still have more non-working, non-commuting time to loaf around/spend with their families/go out/etc. Getting rid of the commute also gets rid of a potential source of lateness, which *does* cost a company money.
I don't think most telecommuters work the way you seem to think they do either. They treat the workday as a real workday. They don't sit around in their pajamas watching TV while they "work" (well, some of them probably do, but not the telecommuters I know). I think most people find that they need to think of their days as regular workdays in order to really be productive, and they set aside home offices to help them stay in that mindset.
Really this is just an extension of the way a lot of freelancers work, and have worked for a long time. The only difference is true telecommuters still get health benefits, etc. (and hopefully this will remain the case and employers won't use this an excuse to just start freelancing all their work).
If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.
Problem is it's not his responsibility to deny he said it; it's your (or whoever's accusing him's) responsibility to prove he did. Anybody can just accuse anybody else of saying anything; doesn't mean they did. Show me the proof. And the fact that a bunch of Slashdotters think he said it is not proof, so don't pass it off as such.
Nobody has ever come up with an original cite for this alleged quote, in all the times it's gone around the net. See here for Gates' own response, including his own call for a citation that he knows doesn't exist (and if it did, he'd finally be able to disprove this silly quote once and for all by digging up the original article cited and showing the world that the quote is not in it).
As Gates himself admits, he's said plenty of real stupid and dumb things, so I don't see why he'd choose to deny this particular quote and none of the others if he's lying about it.
For me, the only important information is right there on the first page:
"Native resolution: 1280x1024"
That's a 5:4 aspect ratio. Every CRT monitor and every other LCD native resolution has a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Not particularly important in an LCD, because 5:4 aspect LCD's are actually 5:4 screens. You actually do gain a bit more vertical space.
Running that resolution on a standard CRT means you're shrinking stuff vertically, because you're running a 5:4 resolution in a 4:3 aspect ratio. But on an LCD with a native 1280x1024, it's ok - you're still getting square pixels. Be happy with the few extra lines of space.
All modern games support 1280x1024, so there's no problem that I can see.
Of course, this Planar PL2010 that I'm currently looking at is much nicer at 1600x1200 native res:)
Betamax : Tried to push its own standard. Failed even though it was superior.
OT, but to correct this little urban legend... "superior" is in some ways relative, and in Beta's case applies to only one measure: resolution. Even there the difference was small and was more than offset by the tiny capacity of Beta tapes - you could fit far more on a VHS tape, so I'm not sure this is an overall technical win for Beta. Regardless, SuperVHS was on the market at the same time as consumer Beta and those wanting a sharper picture could simply opt for an SVHS machine (as I did) to get the best of all possible worlds. Obviously, VHS also offered the most choice in hardware and software, so I've always thought it questionable when I see Beta listed as "superior" to VHS. Beta was just poorly designed and implemented all around.
The Beta format is still used in news and other professional industries, though vastly upgraded over the consumer version (and with the obvious added expense). It's still not a "standard" though, as other tape formats are common as well.
Minidisc : See above
Minidisc was never superior to anything. ATRAC initially compressed music pretty badly, to the point where it was initially not much better than analog cassette tapes, let alone CD's or even MP3's. Capacity was always an issue with MD as well, as it was with beta. MD was (and to an extent still is) useful for certain things like recording live shows or DJ sets, where you could plug a portable player in and basically have a poor-man's DAT. Sound quality was not equal to DAT, but the discs were/are more durable and user-friendly.
MD did fairly well in Japan but it was despite its technical limitations, not because of any superiority. It really succeeded there because the discs and players were small, not for any other reason.
I guess my point is this music store is just another in a series of Sony blunders. They've had plenty of success stories as well, but they're no stranger to failure and this seems like another doomed venture to me. How many crippled music file sites can the market support, anyway? If iTunes cannot even meet its own expectations (despite Jobs' proclamation that it has "exceeded all expectations", 70 million is still a lot less than 100 million), then I don't see what vast untapped market Sony is expecting to materialize. They're going after the same tiny market of overpaying, choice-hating DRM-lovers that Apple is, and not very well, I might add.
You did not purchase the song. Read the agreement. You purchase the right to listen to the song subject to the conditions outlined in the agreement.
I have two words for you: bull, and shit.
I don't care what their agreement says. Nobody has to "purchase rights" to "listen" to a song. If I want to listen to a song that's playing out on the street as I happen to be walking along, nobody has any right to charge me for the privilege. Conversely, nobody is allowed to sign away their rights under the law. If I sign an agreement saying "I hereby grant you the right to kill me by strangulation" that still doesn't give you the right to kill me and it doesn't give me the right to commit suicide either (which is illegal in most states).
Copyright law is pretty clear and the first sale doctrine well established. If I buy a song from iTunes, it's mine and I can do what I want with it provided I don't do anything to violate copyright law. That includes stripping the DRM to exercise my rights as expressly provided in copyright law (don't forget, fair use is not some nebulous concept someone came up with on Slashdot, it is part of the actual law).
Now, you can try to quote various things from the DMCA if you want, but that won't win you many friends around here. And I don't interpret the DMCA as overriding fair use rights anyway, and neither does anyone else I know of.
If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.
But it should matter to the owner of the medium, because after all, ads can't exist without a medium to run on. Pissing off 99% of their users is not generally desirable for most web site owners, so I am not sure if this is going to fly. At the same time as pop-up blockers have become popular, site owners have realized they're actually hurting their own business by hosting them. No, not every site, and pop-ups do still exist (though as a Firefox user you can forgive me if I don't know this from experience), but there have been plenty of high-profile companies that have sworn them off recently. Even AOL's cutting back.
I think that's what's getting lost in all this. Advertisers are still at the mercy of the site owners, not the other way around (despite the bad economy... it only makes things worse to piss off your users). I doubt you'll ever see this technology used on a major commercial site; it'll probably be relegated to the internet red light district where most pop-ups seem to be served up these days to begin with.
When expanded to properly display the album art and the new large-format videos, iTunes balloons to a size that is far, far to large for any jukebox. It's almost to large to gracefully use on a PB12's display (thank god for exposé).
It seems the same size as 4.2, for me. iTunes can be as big or as small as you want. Obviously, the more info you want to see, the bigger the window will be.
The biggest issue for me by far is the fact that it's completely incompatible with previous versions of itself. As in, you can't even *browse* other libraries on a network unless those computers have also been updated to 4.5. This is a really boneheaded decision on Apple's part; it's the kind of thing that would cause howls of derision if this was a Microsoft product. It shocks me that nobody else seems to have brought it up so far.
One of the best features of iTunes is the ability to listen to the libraries of other people on a corporate LAN (or even a home LAN). We've got about 20 people with shared libraries on our LAN, and I listen more to their music than even to my own. If I'm the first to upgrade (and I was) it means I can no longer listen to any of that music. The solution? Downgrade back to 4.2.
This is a huge disincentive to upgrade. Nobody is going to want to be the first to do it, or even in the first half. And honestly, I didn't see much in the new app that was really all that compelling to me; I and most of my coworkers pretty much just have MP3's and AAC files to begin with, so we don't have any format problems, which seem like the major improvements in 4.5 anyway.
I don't really understand this upgrade then. It basically adds a few more formats that most people don't use, and it completely breaks compatibility with the most common version of the app. Is Apple trying to replicate MS's Office upgrade path or something? (I'm sure I'll get modded down as a "troll" - but I use iTunes all the time and this really does strike me as quite ridiculous.)
I'll take mine in PSD format thanks. With layers, text, notes and all sorts of other good stuff there's no reason not to use this format until you're ready to dump out a JPEG or similar.
The post you're answering (and most posts in this thread) is specifically referencing photos. PSD is fine but its intent is not for storing photos, nor is it necessary for photos. A photo is by definition one layer. And TIFF can support any exif data/notes that you'd want included, along with color space information. It can also support a variety of compression schemes (both lossless and lossy) and it's supported on all platforms in a variety of image viewers (including the native image viewers built into most OS's). It's the best format for storing photo masters.
There's nothing particularly wrong with PSD as a format for photos and you're not going to lose anything with it in terms of data loss, but you do lose compatibility, and you do lose compression options, with no real gain. If you want copyright info layers or whatever on top of your photos, that's fine, but you're just giving up a bit of compatibility and probably file size in the process. Most photographers prefer storing bare masters anyway, with no alterations at all, and also having PSD versions of whatever photos they want to alter and/or are in the process of altering. It's just a bit easier/safer that way.
I still find the idea of prequels in Star Trek rather silly. In Star Wars there was a storyline, so in that case it might have made some sense, but Star Trek?
Well, not to turn this into a Wars vs. Trek thing, but Star Trek has just as much backstory as Star Wars, and a lot less of it has been told. Star Wars' history does go back further than Trek's (thousands of years) but in reality it's just semantics... jedi still existed 1,000 years before A New Hope, they still used light sabers, etc. etc. The technology didn't really change all that much throughout the entirety of the history of Star Wars, and the political events that took place over that time could/would have happened in a decade in the real world. I've always been absolutely amazed at how *stable* the universe apparently is in Star Wars. One government ruling the galaxy for thousands of years, then a coup, then one government ruling the galaxy for another however long. Compare that to real-life Earth.
Trek has a shorter history but it's more complex. Partly for that reason it's not as reliant on a continuous set of characters, because the core plotlines, at least once you get past TOS (which was more character-driven) are about the politics and technological problems facing the galaxy.
For that reason I thought Enterprise was actually a really good idea. TOS sort of started in the middle of a far larger story and it really didn't tell much of it. Subsequent series moved up the timeline but there's a whole lot involved in the creation of the Federation, and before that to the human/vulcan alliance, the romulan wars, the discovery of all these various races, political alliances and rivalries (a-la the klingons) being formed, etc. And all that along with the humans' continuing technological advancements, which occured at a really rapid rate that I always thought was more realistic than the snail's pace things seem to move at in Star Wars. Even fashions change at a fairly realistic clip in Star Trek (though mostly based on whatever's popular in the real world at the time... but at least this is better than sticking to some arbitrary "look" that supposedly stuck around for thousands and thousands of years).
So Enterprise was a good idea but it was just completely mucked up by Berman and Bragga. It's like TOS in that it really isn't telling much of the story of Star Trek, which unfortunately at this point is what the people want to see. TOS was great, and it was necessarily character-driven as all new sci-fi franchises have to be, but now we know there's all this stuff that happened long ago and rather than show us these things, Enterprise is actually showing us other things that were never even mentioned in any previous series (like the Xindi) while completely ignoring everything important. It's as if in Star Wars Episode 1 you didn't see the beginnings of the fall of the Republic, you didn't see Padme Amidalla, you didn't see Anakin Skywalker, but instead were left following around a bunch of Ewoks as they battled with their newly discovered foes the Gungans. It's just not at all what people want to see.
So I still say there's hope that a "prequel" movie could be good, as long as Berman and Bragga are off in the Carribbean or something sipping mai-tais and soaking up rays while it's being planned, written, shot, edited and distributed.
Seriously, this has to be one of the ugliest handhelds I've ever seen in my life. I still don't see how it can possibly work as a phone, and it still has the same lame vertical screen that's so problematic for gaming. Plus those buttons look even less useful as actual game controls.
And am I the only one shocked that there's such a thing as an "N-Gage fan site" out there?
I can hear the software vendors right now. "Oh, sure, I'm going to label my software as 'pop-up', that'll bring in the customers, oh, yeah!" More likely, they'll fight it on the grounds of anyone who ever made or makes use of the Yes/No dialog box -- "That's a pop-up, too, make them label their software." Totally meaningless.
Oh, I don't know. You could have said the same thing about food labels, but the fact is a lot of the food industry actually wanted them. I would think the same about this. Honest software vendors (which is still the majority of the industry), I would think would jump at the chance to be part of something like this, because it would help distinguish why their software is better than the shyster spamware and adware companies' stuff. I mean what if on the one hand you have Real with a whole bunch of scary icons, and on the other you have Apple with only one or two for QuickTime/iTunes? If I were Apple I'd be very happy about this. That's just one example; the easiest that came to mind. In every category you'd have companies on both sides of the issue, depending on who would benefit; it just depends on who's got the most lobbying power in each specific case.
And btw, to respond to another early comment, I too wondered initially what a certain musical duo was doing putting forth software regulation recommendations when I first read the posting.
Just to play devils advocate, it's not as if people who bought their music from Apple weren't aware of the "limitations" of it's use. If they were, then it's no one's fault but their own.
And FairPlay is the main reason I never signed up for the iTunes store. I have 4 PC's at home alone, and one PC at work - what, I can only play the songs I purchase on 3 of them? Sorry, but that's BS.
Something like PlayFair would actually encourage me (and people like me, of which I know there are a lot on this site alone) to download music from iTunes. I want Apple's quality, I want the convenience, and I want to be legal. Why do Apple and the RIAA insist on making it so hard for me to use their service?
If you're listening to albums that only have one good song on them (at most), then you need to find some better artists to listen to.
I've never understood this argument for downloading music. We all know there are one-hit wonders out there but if one-hit wonders are all you listen to then you clearly are not a music lover.
I think that's why most people call it cruise control now, instead of auto-pilot.
Well I don't remember it ever being called "auto-pilot", but let me expand on your point a little bit regardless (and using that analogy).
The problem that I see with systems such as this is that they teach you to be a lousy driver. Notwithstanding some of the comments posted here, having to drive manually pretty much forces you to be competent. If you're not a competent driver, eventually you're probably going to die. And a lot of people do, but the point is the vast majority of drivers do not die in fiery car crashes, because they have basic driving skills required for being on the road.
Now, with systems like the ones being talked about here, you really need to pay a lot less attention to the road because your car will warn you if anything is seriously amiss with your driving. Need to get that CD out of the back seat while driving 70mph on the highway? No problem! Just look/reach back and get it - your car will tell you if you've veered too far to one side. And the way things are going, eventually we probably will have full auto-pilot, which means you won't need to pay any attention at all.
There are many, many problems I have with this. For one thing, people will come to over-rely on systems such as this just like your poor elderly couple did. Can anyone argue that cruise control has actually increased road safety? I've seen plenty of statistics that say otherwise. For another, the systems themselves cannot be foolproof. What if, as has happened on airplanes, there's some other problem that one of these automatic systems masks while it's on? Say the car won't let you steer too quickly in any direction - there might be an underlying problem with the steering that this system would correct for until it got so bad that the system was forced to switch off, leaving you careening out of control at highway speed.
And third (not last, but the last point I'll make here), these systems require that people know how to use them. If people are bad drivers now - which is exactly what these systems are supposed to help - what makes anyone think they'll take the time to learn what these various signals mean? Somebody's steering wheel starts shaking - ok, you think they've read the stupid manual and will be able to interpret that? More likely they'll just slam on the brakes in the middle of the freeway.
No thanks. And this is one situation where what other people do actually does affect me, so it's not a case of "to each their own". I don't want anybody on the road around me to be equipped with anything like this. Hell, if it were up to me, everybody on the road would still be using manual transmissions - force them to really drive.
Funny. Though I see no one else has noticed the "backup" copy of Vice City in his CD drive, no? Which is potentially a "real" copyright violation. I'm sure he's just exercising his fair use rights with that CDR - he's just got his real copy stashed away somewhere for safekeeping, right? (btw, I'm all for fair use - see some of my other posts - but let's be realistic. We all know what's going on here.)
I thought Palladium was supposed to prevent stuff like this? Or am I just way off? (I'm hoping it doesn't, but I thought stamping out piracy was one of the side benefits of "trusted computing".)
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Why does the grocery store have to be the one filling the order, doing the delivery, or hosting the web site?
Here's a thought : affix a known order charge to the service, let people freeform their order or make a check list for them of known things with relatively known prices, when the order comes in print it out, drive to the grocery store, fill the basket, pay for it yourself, charge their credit card in the van on the way over (including the $10 or $15 or a % of the total) and drive them to their house.
Several reasons why this wouldn't work, the most important being stock tracking, the second most important being cost. What you're talking about could be done in absolutely any retail genre, but it isn't, because it's impossible to make money this way.
I use Freshdirect all the time now; I think it's a fantastic service. I have a full listing of all the products currently in their warehouse at the time of my order, the prices are similar to those I'd pay in a real store (sometimes higher, sometimes lower, overall about the same), and the delivery charge is just $4 - insignificant in the context of a $100 order. I also know who I'm dealing with, I have a guarantee of freshness, and I know what I'm going to get when I place an order.
With a system such as you're suggesting, costs would be ridiculously out of line, for one thing. You're basically talking about charging a markup over retail prices, *plus* a "$10-$15" delivery charge. And that for far worse service than I get wwith Freshdirect - I'd have no way of knowing whether what I order is in stock, I'd have no advance notice of new products, I'd have no way of knowing if the tomatoes I order are going to be fresh or rotten or what (believe me, it's tough getting a good tomato in New York - I don't know how Freshdirect does it, but they have to, because they guarantee it and if I don't like my tomatoes they give me my money back).
There have been various delivery services around for years for disabled or elderly people. Many of these are volunteer-based, some do charge. It's not a big business, though, as far as the average consumer, for the reasons listed above. To turn it into a big business that people will compare favorably with actually going to the store, the retailer does have to be involved. And the overall cheapest way to do it is for the retailer to just be involved all the way through the process.
It is a bad law - not because it won't do any good (infact I think it will do some good), but because it could have done a lot more good. It is also a bad law because it essentially turns some what was a gray area into a completely legal area instead of doing what the rest of the world is doing and outlawing spam entirely.
What "rest of the world"? Please provide us with some specific examples of how "the rest of the world" is outlawing spam. When you use a phrase like that, you'd better mean more than one or two countries, and you'd better really mean "outlawing entirely" rather than "placing restrictions upon" like the EU is doing and pretty much everybody else I can think of (nobody I know of has a law that says "the sending of any unsolicited email is a crime" - think about how draconian such a law would be). And that's what CAN-SPAM does too, albeit in a bit more relaxed fashion than some other laws. We've been over this before and pretty well all agreed it's impossible to "outlaw spam entirely", especially in the USA where we still have some vestiges of free speech (as in, you can now more easily outlaw speech deemed politically dangerous than in years past, but you still can't outlaw speech just because you find it inconvenient to wade through your inbox).
I'm not a big fan of CAN-SPAM either and feel it could have been a better law. But arguing against it at this point because it doesn't go far enough is like arguing against the assault weapons ban because it doesn't also cover handguns. There's rarely ever an all-or-nothing solution in politics or law; you have to fight for what you can, take what you can get, and then deal with the resulting law when it's done.
Right now, this is the only federal anti-spam law we have. It's not the best law anyone could have come up with, but it's better than nothing, and the best we could have gotten given the politics involved. And I don't see why you would argue against 100 of the worst spammers being prosecuted under it, just because you don't like the law. If a spammer's being prosecuted, a spammer's being prosecuted and that's all that matters.
I also don't see why this is filed under "your rights online". What passes for an online right these days on this site? Is it now Slashdot's position that it's a spammer's right to send spam? Are all government prosecutions bad, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the crime involved?
I think it's well written, well casted, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of it.
It's improving. It's no longer the unmitigated disaster it once was. The episode a few weeks back where T'Pol was wrestling with her addiction was really nicely done, and it was the first one I ever thought that about. (The episodes since have been pretty good as well, for the most part.) I have to say, Jolene Blalock is sure nice to look at, but she's also really excellent as a vulcan, and specifically as a tormented vulcan, which has always seemed really tough to pull off. Even Leonard Nimoy, the original, seemed to force it whenever he was given the task of showing emotion.
I'm still not very into this whole Xindi plotline and I hope they'll do something more recognizable on the Trek timeline next season. But it does seem like the writers have finally started hitting their stride within the framework they've been given so far, the actors are fine (and in some cases excellent), I've gotten used to the show's "look", etc.
I guess I'm saying I'm happy it's coming back, which I wouldn't have been after last season. I just hope they create a plot arc next year that's a bit more Trek-like.
The remaining question for SCOX is "how low can it go"? Except for that bump in early April, when SCO tried, unsuccessfully, a stock buyback to prop up the price, the decline from 14 to 5 has been close to linear. If you just project the line out, SCOX goes to zero around late summer. It probably won't go to penny stock levels for a while, though; they have some cash left. But with no licensing revenue and a huge legal burn rate, they can't go on for all that long.
I need to at least try to correct this misconception a lot of people seem to have that a company's stock price is directly tied to its very existence. It isn't. In fact, as far as the company is concerned, it doesn't even really matter. If a company is dipping into its market cap to finance anything, it's in serious trouble to begin with - which SCO is, but not because its stock price is going down. SCO is in serious trouble because its business is failing, and its stock price is reflecting that. The cause/effect is reversed, you see.
If SCO's stock reaches penny-stock levels, they'll be de-listed. It happens occasionally, and a lot of companies are not even big enough to be listed to begin with. But they're still in business. And it won't affect their legal strategy, because they've got cash set aside for that.
I'm just saying, quit harping on the stock price. It doesn't matter except as a reflection of what a very small pool of not-very-influential people (ie. mostly small investors) think about SCO's future business prospects. It's no secret that their Unix business isn't doing well, they gave up on Linux and their legal strategy is working about as well as their FUD. Plus, BayStar and RBC want out. Add it up and obviously investors want out. But this has no direct effect on SCO's business.
SCO doesn't automatically go away if their stock drops to penny levels. They've got their cash, and if they burn through it, they'll just need to find some other sucke... er, VC firm to prop them up like BayStar and RBC did. You know MS is not going to let this die; they'll find some other proxy with which to funnel SCO whatever cash they need.
Also what kind of codec bias could you possibly be referring to?
Apparently he doesn't realize that this is a double-blind test - meaning neither the listener nor the tester knows what codec is being presented at any given time.
I'm taking the test now (well, not right now, taking a break) and it's about as scientific as I think you could make a public test taken in the home. Yes, the samples get compressed and then put in easily accessible folders with proper file name extensions, but you never know what you're actually listening to when you're running the testing program. All you have is a source file for comparison, then two buttons marked "1" and "2", one of which is the source again, the other a randomized codec. You never know which of the two buttons is the uncompressed source and you also never know which codec you're hearing. The results are also encrypted, so it's not as if you can just go into the results files and look at what codecs you favor.
I suppose someone who's truly got the Ear of the Gods could listen to the samples outside of the testing program, pick various identifiable traits out of each, then listen for those traits in the testing program and vote up or down whatever codecs he or she chose, but that would be exceedingly difficult and more than a little time-consuming. I can't see how it would be worth it, especially as no single test result is going to skew the overall results to any significant degree.
This is the first time I've ever taken a test like this and I am honestly pretty shocked at how good all of these codecs sound. I am having a really hard time even deciding which is the compressed track most of the time, and I consider myself something of an audiophile. I'm even listening in a fairly controlled environment with a good pair of headphones, at a volume loud enough to hear any background noise clearly but below any clipping whatsoever. I will be surprised if any codec really does significantly better than the others consistently when we see the final test results.
Like their keyboards and mice, they're damn fine products.
Let's not overdo it here. Their keyboards and mice are mediocre at best, just as their wi-fi equipment is. I owned an MN-500 when it was first released, and the thing wouldn't hold a connection for longer than 30 minutes. Turned out it was a known problem that a lot of other people had as well. I took it back, got myself a D-Link and haven't had a problem since. (Note: I'm not endorsing D-Link, just saying MS's products are no better.)
MS has a ton of competition in the wi-fi market. It does seem surprising that they don't see it as a viable revenue stream but it may just be a case of one too many products taking away from their core focus (which is still OS's and Office software). It would be very hard for them to really become dominant in wi-fi because the field is so crowded; it's not a case of beating one or two enemies, as it is in PDA's or game consoles. They'd have to take down many, many well-established and respected companies. They probably just decided it wasn't worth the effort.
As for their keyboards/mice, I just want to say that people who think these are the best of the breed just have not used a real keyboard and/or mouse. Find an IBM Model M or Northgate (Avant) keyboard and then tell me any MS model is even in the same class. MS's keyboards are the same "good enough" level of quality that everyone else seems content to make these days; rubber dome, mushy feel, questionable build quality. Calling them "damn fine" is like saying a Firebird is a damn fine sports car or the Sizzler makes a damn fine steak. Both are serviceable, but hardly in the same class as a Porsche or a Peter Luger. MS's wi-fi equipment followed the same pattern; nothing really to distinguish it from anybody else, and with the same intermittent firmware issues as every other manufacturer seems to have.
Maybe I should have done the NYT registration thing, and read the article, but the board is in japanese!
Uh, yeah. Kind of the point. This is a story about how a culture other than ours is using the internet for emotional release.
I work with japanese, and I understand a few words, but I just can't see what the hubbub about this article on a japanese board that I can't even read is.
Well, why don't you ask the people you work with? Maybe it would help you understand them a little better, which is the reason why articles such as this one are written. I'd think someone who apparently works at/for a karaoke bar would be a little more open-minded about other cultures. Not every article here exists to comment on your life personally.
That said, I do think articles like this are born out of a sort of well-intentioned naivete - the assumption being that people in other cultures should naturally be different than us, and it's somehow surprising and newsworthy when we learn they're not. It shouldn't be surprising that they would use internet forums in the same way we do. They do most things in the same way we do; they're a modern, technologically and socially advanced country with a political and economic infrastructure largely built by the United States.
But still, if this article makes western tech-heads realize that Japanese tech-heads are really pretty much the same as they are, I guess it's accomplished something.
"No due process, no suspect's rights, no Miranda warning, no 5th amendment, no court-appointed attorney, no judge, no jury, no appeals, no comfy jail cell, etc, etc, etc...."
No apology if they got the wrong guy.....
Saturday on Slashdot seems to bring out an even higher proportion of anti-government conspiracy theorists than usual (I'm using your post as an example, but there are dozens of others in the thread below this). Sometimes I wonder how many of the posters here actually are script kiddies themselves.
The fact is this guy confessed. And not only did he confess, he apparently provided great detail on various worms that he's created. They also found the source code on his PC. That seems like pretty compelling evidence to back up his confession.
I was surprised to read he's only eligible for 5 years in prison. My wife joked "well, he'll get a free dorm room for college". I'm sorry, but this is not a deterrent, which is the point of having criminal penalties in the first place. From the news article, it sounds like he's clearly not very scared. They need to extradite him somewhere where he can really be forced to pay the price for the damage he's caused.
Everybody here should support throwing the book at guys like this. This is the internet we're talking about here, and worms like sasser at best make it harder to use, at worst can take down corporate networks (which sasser did) and even 911 systems, defense networks, hospital networks, etc.
"Screw 'em"? Nice attitude. What if they have been looking and can't find another job? And my comment gets modded down? Geesh!
Then they should look elsewhere, or for a different kind of job.
I just quit (today!) a job that has been killing me (quite literally) for two and a half years. It's left me physically and emotionally drained and has raised my stress levels to the point where I'm having heart palpitations on a regular basis - I've been to the doctor more often because of this job than I ever have in my life for any other reason. It's also been keeping me away from my wife; we've pretty much missed out completely on our first year together.
One day, I thought, "you know, this is really just not worth it. It's only money." And so I gave my two weeks notice. My wife fully supported me. I have a bit of money saved in the bank and yes, I have contingency plans in case I really just can't find anything, but I also know that there's a possibility that I may end up having to do something completely different, starting at the bottom and working my way up again.
So it's hard for me to be sympathetic to SCO employees. They'll even get unemployment; I probably won't. But the reality is it's just work, and it's just money. There are more important things in life, and if they don't see that, too bad. I'd never work for a company like SCO, whether or not I could find another job in my field. I'd work at McDonald's first.
If my company was like SCO I'd have quit a long time ago, new job or not.
While I don't really like the dress code that is typical of work (thus I love my Intel internship), the office environment isn't replaceable. Even if I like what I am doing for work, distractions at home purely cost the company money. Distractions at work, on the other hand, largely provide to the company. At the very least the distraction is a team effort.
I don't think you're looking at this in the right way.
Say I have a project that needs to be done in 14 days; creating a small web site, for example. I have various milestones that need to be hit along the way; comps, flash buildouts, etc.
Whether those milestones get hit while I'm working "at" work, or while I'm working at home, doesn't matter to the company. What matters is that the milestones get hit and the project gets done on time. "Distractions" at home don't cost the company anything at all, because a) there is no "end of the day" where you suddenly stop working and go somewhere else (i.e. home), and b) the company is still getting the same amount of work out of you, a completed project on time.
Working at home has a lot of advantages, some of which have been touched on already, but a big one as far as the company is concerned is commute time savings. If an employee no longer has to commute 2 hours total each day, that's time he/she can potentially put back into their workday. Oh, sure, most of them won't, but they can if they need to (if they get behind) and they'll still be happy, because they know that overall they still have more non-working, non-commuting time to loaf around/spend with their families/go out/etc. Getting rid of the commute also gets rid of a potential source of lateness, which *does* cost a company money.
I don't think most telecommuters work the way you seem to think they do either. They treat the workday as a real workday. They don't sit around in their pajamas watching TV while they "work" (well, some of them probably do, but not the telecommuters I know). I think most people find that they need to think of their days as regular workdays in order to really be productive, and they set aside home offices to help them stay in that mindset.
Really this is just an extension of the way a lot of freelancers work, and have worked for a long time. The only difference is true telecommuters still get health benefits, etc. (and hopefully this will remain the case and employers won't use this an excuse to just start freelancing all their work).
If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.
Problem is it's not his responsibility to deny he said it; it's your (or whoever's accusing him's) responsibility to prove he did. Anybody can just accuse anybody else of saying anything; doesn't mean they did. Show me the proof. And the fact that a bunch of Slashdotters think he said it is not proof, so don't pass it off as such.
Nobody has ever come up with an original cite for this alleged quote, in all the times it's gone around the net. See here for Gates' own response, including his own call for a citation that he knows doesn't exist (and if it did, he'd finally be able to disprove this silly quote once and for all by digging up the original article cited and showing the world that the quote is not in it).
As Gates himself admits, he's said plenty of real stupid and dumb things, so I don't see why he'd choose to deny this particular quote and none of the others if he's lying about it.
For me, the only important information is right there on the first page:
:)
"Native resolution: 1280x1024"
That's a 5:4 aspect ratio. Every CRT monitor and every other LCD native resolution has a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Not particularly important in an LCD, because 5:4 aspect LCD's are actually 5:4 screens. You actually do gain a bit more vertical space.
Running that resolution on a standard CRT means you're shrinking stuff vertically, because you're running a 5:4 resolution in a 4:3 aspect ratio. But on an LCD with a native 1280x1024, it's ok - you're still getting square pixels. Be happy with the few extra lines of space.
All modern games support 1280x1024, so there's no problem that I can see.
Of course, this Planar PL2010 that I'm currently looking at is much nicer at 1600x1200 native res
Betamax : Tried to push its own standard. Failed even though it was superior.
OT, but to correct this little urban legend... "superior" is in some ways relative, and in Beta's case applies to only one measure: resolution. Even there the difference was small and was more than offset by the tiny capacity of Beta tapes - you could fit far more on a VHS tape, so I'm not sure this is an overall technical win for Beta. Regardless, SuperVHS was on the market at the same time as consumer Beta and those wanting a sharper picture could simply opt for an SVHS machine (as I did) to get the best of all possible worlds. Obviously, VHS also offered the most choice in hardware and software, so I've always thought it questionable when I see Beta listed as "superior" to VHS. Beta was just poorly designed and implemented all around.
The Beta format is still used in news and other professional industries, though vastly upgraded over the consumer version (and with the obvious added expense). It's still not a "standard" though, as other tape formats are common as well.
Minidisc : See above
Minidisc was never superior to anything. ATRAC initially compressed music pretty badly, to the point where it was initially not much better than analog cassette tapes, let alone CD's or even MP3's. Capacity was always an issue with MD as well, as it was with beta. MD was (and to an extent still is) useful for certain things like recording live shows or DJ sets, where you could plug a portable player in and basically have a poor-man's DAT. Sound quality was not equal to DAT, but the discs were/are more durable and user-friendly.
MD did fairly well in Japan but it was despite its technical limitations, not because of any superiority. It really succeeded there because the discs and players were small, not for any other reason.
I guess my point is this music store is just another in a series of Sony blunders. They've had plenty of success stories as well, but they're no stranger to failure and this seems like another doomed venture to me. How many crippled music file sites can the market support, anyway? If iTunes cannot even meet its own expectations (despite Jobs' proclamation that it has "exceeded all expectations", 70 million is still a lot less than 100 million), then I don't see what vast untapped market Sony is expecting to materialize. They're going after the same tiny market of overpaying, choice-hating DRM-lovers that Apple is, and not very well, I might add.
But then I fire up Mozilla FireFox to post to Slashdot, and your argument gets blown to pieces.
Ok, now you've got me pining for an Adobe web browser. Imagine the possibilities!
You did not purchase the song. Read the agreement. You purchase the right to listen to the song subject to the conditions outlined in the agreement.
I have two words for you: bull, and shit.
I don't care what their agreement says. Nobody has to "purchase rights" to "listen" to a song. If I want to listen to a song that's playing out on the street as I happen to be walking along, nobody has any right to charge me for the privilege. Conversely, nobody is allowed to sign away their rights under the law. If I sign an agreement saying "I hereby grant you the right to kill me by strangulation" that still doesn't give you the right to kill me and it doesn't give me the right to commit suicide either (which is illegal in most states).
Copyright law is pretty clear and the first sale doctrine well established. If I buy a song from iTunes, it's mine and I can do what I want with it provided I don't do anything to violate copyright law. That includes stripping the DRM to exercise my rights as expressly provided in copyright law (don't forget, fair use is not some nebulous concept someone came up with on Slashdot, it is part of the actual law).
Now, you can try to quote various things from the DMCA if you want, but that won't win you many friends around here. And I don't interpret the DMCA as overriding fair use rights anyway, and neither does anyone else I know of.
If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.
But it should matter to the owner of the medium, because after all, ads can't exist without a medium to run on. Pissing off 99% of their users is not generally desirable for most web site owners, so I am not sure if this is going to fly. At the same time as pop-up blockers have become popular, site owners have realized they're actually hurting their own business by hosting them. No, not every site, and pop-ups do still exist (though as a Firefox user you can forgive me if I don't know this from experience), but there have been plenty of high-profile companies that have sworn them off recently. Even AOL's cutting back.
I think that's what's getting lost in all this. Advertisers are still at the mercy of the site owners, not the other way around (despite the bad economy... it only makes things worse to piss off your users). I doubt you'll ever see this technology used on a major commercial site; it'll probably be relegated to the internet red light district where most pop-ups seem to be served up these days to begin with.
When expanded to properly display the album art and the new large-format videos, iTunes balloons to a size that is far, far to large for any jukebox. It's almost to large to gracefully use on a PB12's display (thank god for exposé).
It seems the same size as 4.2, for me. iTunes can be as big or as small as you want. Obviously, the more info you want to see, the bigger the window will be.
The biggest issue for me by far is the fact that it's completely incompatible with previous versions of itself. As in, you can't even *browse* other libraries on a network unless those computers have also been updated to 4.5. This is a really boneheaded decision on Apple's part; it's the kind of thing that would cause howls of derision if this was a Microsoft product. It shocks me that nobody else seems to have brought it up so far.
One of the best features of iTunes is the ability to listen to the libraries of other people on a corporate LAN (or even a home LAN). We've got about 20 people with shared libraries on our LAN, and I listen more to their music than even to my own. If I'm the first to upgrade (and I was) it means I can no longer listen to any of that music. The solution? Downgrade back to 4.2.
This is a huge disincentive to upgrade. Nobody is going to want to be the first to do it, or even in the first half. And honestly, I didn't see much in the new app that was really all that compelling to me; I and most of my coworkers pretty much just have MP3's and AAC files to begin with, so we don't have any format problems, which seem like the major improvements in 4.5 anyway.
I don't really understand this upgrade then. It basically adds a few more formats that most people don't use, and it completely breaks compatibility with the most common version of the app. Is Apple trying to replicate MS's Office upgrade path or something? (I'm sure I'll get modded down as a "troll" - but I use iTunes all the time and this really does strike me as quite ridiculous.)
I'll take mine in PSD format thanks. With layers, text, notes and all sorts of other good stuff there's no reason not to use this format until you're ready to dump out a JPEG or similar.
The post you're answering (and most posts in this thread) is specifically referencing photos. PSD is fine but its intent is not for storing photos, nor is it necessary for photos. A photo is by definition one layer. And TIFF can support any exif data/notes that you'd want included, along with color space information. It can also support a variety of compression schemes (both lossless and lossy) and it's supported on all platforms in a variety of image viewers (including the native image viewers built into most OS's). It's the best format for storing photo masters.
There's nothing particularly wrong with PSD as a format for photos and you're not going to lose anything with it in terms of data loss, but you do lose compatibility, and you do lose compression options, with no real gain. If you want copyright info layers or whatever on top of your photos, that's fine, but you're just giving up a bit of compatibility and probably file size in the process. Most photographers prefer storing bare masters anyway, with no alterations at all, and also having PSD versions of whatever photos they want to alter and/or are in the process of altering. It's just a bit easier/safer that way.
I still find the idea of prequels in Star Trek rather silly. In Star Wars there was a storyline, so in that case it might have made some sense, but Star Trek?
Well, not to turn this into a Wars vs. Trek thing, but Star Trek has just as much backstory as Star Wars, and a lot less of it has been told. Star Wars' history does go back further than Trek's (thousands of years) but in reality it's just semantics... jedi still existed 1,000 years before A New Hope, they still used light sabers, etc. etc. The technology didn't really change all that much throughout the entirety of the history of Star Wars, and the political events that took place over that time could/would have happened in a decade in the real world. I've always been absolutely amazed at how *stable* the universe apparently is in Star Wars. One government ruling the galaxy for thousands of years, then a coup, then one government ruling the galaxy for another however long. Compare that to real-life Earth.
Trek has a shorter history but it's more complex. Partly for that reason it's not as reliant on a continuous set of characters, because the core plotlines, at least once you get past TOS (which was more character-driven) are about the politics and technological problems facing the galaxy.
For that reason I thought Enterprise was actually a really good idea. TOS sort of started in the middle of a far larger story and it really didn't tell much of it. Subsequent series moved up the timeline but there's a whole lot involved in the creation of the Federation, and before that to the human/vulcan alliance, the romulan wars, the discovery of all these various races, political alliances and rivalries (a-la the klingons) being formed, etc. And all that along with the humans' continuing technological advancements, which occured at a really rapid rate that I always thought was more realistic than the snail's pace things seem to move at in Star Wars. Even fashions change at a fairly realistic clip in Star Trek (though mostly based on whatever's popular in the real world at the time... but at least this is better than sticking to some arbitrary "look" that supposedly stuck around for thousands and thousands of years).
So Enterprise was a good idea but it was just completely mucked up by Berman and Bragga. It's like TOS in that it really isn't telling much of the story of Star Trek, which unfortunately at this point is what the people want to see. TOS was great, and it was necessarily character-driven as all new sci-fi franchises have to be, but now we know there's all this stuff that happened long ago and rather than show us these things, Enterprise is actually showing us other things that were never even mentioned in any previous series (like the Xindi) while completely ignoring everything important. It's as if in Star Wars Episode 1 you didn't see the beginnings of the fall of the Republic, you didn't see Padme Amidalla, you didn't see Anakin Skywalker, but instead were left following around a bunch of Ewoks as they battled with their newly discovered foes the Gungans. It's just not at all what people want to see.
So I still say there's hope that a "prequel" movie could be good, as long as Berman and Bragga are off in the Carribbean or something sipping mai-tais and soaking up rays while it's being planned, written, shot, edited and distributed.
Seriously, this has to be one of the ugliest handhelds I've ever seen in my life. I still don't see how it can possibly work as a phone, and it still has the same lame vertical screen that's so problematic for gaming. Plus those buttons look even less useful as actual game controls.
And am I the only one shocked that there's such a thing as an "N-Gage fan site" out there?
I can hear the software vendors right now. "Oh, sure, I'm going to label my software as 'pop-up', that'll bring in the customers, oh, yeah!" More likely, they'll fight it on the grounds of anyone who ever made or makes use of the Yes/No dialog box -- "That's a pop-up, too, make them label their software." Totally meaningless.
Oh, I don't know. You could have said the same thing about food labels, but the fact is a lot of the food industry actually wanted them. I would think the same about this. Honest software vendors (which is still the majority of the industry), I would think would jump at the chance to be part of something like this, because it would help distinguish why their software is better than the shyster spamware and adware companies' stuff. I mean what if on the one hand you have Real with a whole bunch of scary icons, and on the other you have Apple with only one or two for QuickTime/iTunes? If I were Apple I'd be very happy about this. That's just one example; the easiest that came to mind. In every category you'd have companies on both sides of the issue, depending on who would benefit; it just depends on who's got the most lobbying power in each specific case.
And btw, to respond to another early comment, I too wondered initially what a certain musical duo was doing putting forth software regulation recommendations when I first read the posting.
Just to play devils advocate, it's not as if people who bought their music from Apple weren't aware of the "limitations" of it's use. If they were, then it's no one's fault but their own.
And FairPlay is the main reason I never signed up for the iTunes store. I have 4 PC's at home alone, and one PC at work - what, I can only play the songs I purchase on 3 of them? Sorry, but that's BS.
Something like PlayFair would actually encourage me (and people like me, of which I know there are a lot on this site alone) to download music from iTunes. I want Apple's quality, I want the convenience, and I want to be legal. Why do Apple and the RIAA insist on making it so hard for me to use their service?
Most albums have 0-1 decent songs on them.
If you're listening to albums that only have one good song on them (at most), then you need to find some better artists to listen to.
I've never understood this argument for downloading music. We all know there are one-hit wonders out there but if one-hit wonders are all you listen to then you clearly are not a music lover.
I think that's why most people call it cruise control now, instead of auto-pilot.
Well I don't remember it ever being called "auto-pilot", but let me expand on your point a little bit regardless (and using that analogy).
The problem that I see with systems such as this is that they teach you to be a lousy driver. Notwithstanding some of the comments posted here, having to drive manually pretty much forces you to be competent. If you're not a competent driver, eventually you're probably going to die. And a lot of people do, but the point is the vast majority of drivers do not die in fiery car crashes, because they have basic driving skills required for being on the road.
Now, with systems like the ones being talked about here, you really need to pay a lot less attention to the road because your car will warn you if anything is seriously amiss with your driving. Need to get that CD out of the back seat while driving 70mph on the highway? No problem! Just look/reach back and get it - your car will tell you if you've veered too far to one side. And the way things are going, eventually we probably will have full auto-pilot, which means you won't need to pay any attention at all.
There are many, many problems I have with this. For one thing, people will come to over-rely on systems such as this just like your poor elderly couple did. Can anyone argue that cruise control has actually increased road safety? I've seen plenty of statistics that say otherwise. For another, the systems themselves cannot be foolproof. What if, as has happened on airplanes, there's some other problem that one of these automatic systems masks while it's on? Say the car won't let you steer too quickly in any direction - there might be an underlying problem with the steering that this system would correct for until it got so bad that the system was forced to switch off, leaving you careening out of control at highway speed.
And third (not last, but the last point I'll make here), these systems require that people know how to use them. If people are bad drivers now - which is exactly what these systems are supposed to help - what makes anyone think they'll take the time to learn what these various signals mean? Somebody's steering wheel starts shaking - ok, you think they've read the stupid manual and will be able to interpret that? More likely they'll just slam on the brakes in the middle of the freeway.
No thanks. And this is one situation where what other people do actually does affect me, so it's not a case of "to each their own". I don't want anybody on the road around me to be equipped with anything like this. Hell, if it were up to me, everybody on the road would still be using manual transmissions - force them to really drive.
Isn't that a DMCA violation?
Funny. Though I see no one else has noticed the "backup" copy of Vice City in his CD drive, no? Which is potentially a "real" copyright violation. I'm sure he's just exercising his fair use rights with that CDR - he's just got his real copy stashed away somewhere for safekeeping, right? (btw, I'm all for fair use - see some of my other posts - but let's be realistic. We all know what's going on here.)
I thought Palladium was supposed to prevent stuff like this? Or am I just way off? (I'm hoping it doesn't, but I thought stamping out piracy was one of the side benefits of "trusted computing".)