If there's no pressure, it's not a challenge. If it's not a challenge there's no joy in doing a good job
My problem with this argument is that people seem to assume pressure must mean time pressure. Which I hate. My challenge is to do a good job; to create something functional, elegant, maintainable. I'll take as long as it needs to make sure that it works, and that it's done as well as I know how. Oh yes, I can do things quicker if necessary, but that means taking shortcuts, and handing over something that might not work properly, that's a mess, and/or that'll lead to problems in future. So in my case, time pressure just leads to shoddy work as well as stress -- both of which I hate!
Why do so few in management seem to understand that it's worth taking the time to do it right, because it'll save time in the long run? Or is it just that they've seen so many people who can't (or won't) do it right, they don't know any better?
This one's always confused me. Here in the UK, 'Lego' has always been a mass noun; the individual bits of plastic are known as 'Lego bricks' or 'bits of Lego'.
And yet I keep reading the word 'Legos', which makes no sense here. Is the term officially different in the US, or have you merkins been getting it wrong all the time (unthinkable!)?
There's an awful lot of stuff orbiting Saturn; much of it's in very small pieces, but there's a wide range of sizes all the way up to the few big moons that everyone knows. But AIUI there's no inherent difference between the very small bits and the medium-sized bits, so calling some of them 'moons' and some 'ring material' is just an arbitrary distinction, isn't it?
But then, the same applies to the rings, too. There are no physical rings, just lost of chunks of stuff. It looks like a solid ring if you stand far enough away, but as you get closer you see it split into smaller and smaller sections until you can see the individual chunks of material. Okay, some parts clump together closer than other parts, but there's no physical barrier between one 'ring' and another. The only objective ways of looking at it are either 'Saturn has a ring of stuff around it', or 'Saturn has an awful lot of chunks of stuff around it'. Isn't the rest just arguing with words?
The place to store this stuff is in the FS because the database is already there.
In an abstract, theoretical way, that makes sense, but I'm not so sure it applies readily to the real world.
Consider: there are many different filing systems in use, and people frequently transfer files from one to another. This loses metadata that can't be stored on most FSs.
Many file types (pictures, audio, even HTML) already include metadata embedded in the file.
And many types of metadata apply only to particular types of file.
So, if you put this in the FS itself, you risk losing metadata when transferring between filesystems, and you have issues syncing the FS metadata with any embedded metadata.
The more I hear about this, the more I think that maybe Apple's solution (Spotlight) is more realistic: you leave metadata embedded in the file, and have a generic way of accessing it that allows searching. That way, you make best use of the information that's already there, you don't have to create anything new that'll get lost in file transfers, it can work with any FS, and no changes are needed to applications.
Maybe the point is that people know exactly what that horse hair, gut, and wood should sound like. Similarly for pianos, voices, brass instruments, &c.
Electric instruments are amplified, tweaked, processed -- they're meant to sound different from the acoustic sound. Even worse, it's different every time, so there's no mental standard to compare to. But classical music, and other acoustic music, uses sounds that we can get to know very well, so we spot imperfections in the reproduction much easier.
At least, that's my guess. I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum from audiophiles - I'm a musician! (Amateur, but everything from early classical to electronic.) And we musicians often seem to be worst at distinguishing CD from LP from MP3 &c, and can be quite happy listening on far-from-ideal equipment. Personally, I think it's because we're so used to considering music in terms of notes, harmonies, timbres, chords, textures, melodies &c that we mentally 'fill in' the missing frequencies and other artefacts.
Nah, we've our work cut out for us explaining the differences between "your" and "you're"; "there", "their", and "they're"; "its" and "it's"; "anyway" and "any way"; "cue" and "queue"; "lay" and "lie"; and "affect" and "effect". Not to mention why the following are wrong: "seperate", "kernal", rediculous", "should of", "persue", "infact", "alot", "anymore", "english", "i"; and apostrophes in most plurals.
Then, if we ever get to the point where basic spelling seems to be less of a problem, we can get on to the interesting questions of grammar and semantics: when a 'that' is needed, and its difference from 'which'; how to get number, person, and tense to agree; why you don't need to use prepositions with verbs like 'meet' and 'check'; and which outdated, misguided language 'rules' it's okay to deliberately dispense with!
I'm with you here -- I've been a 5mx user for several years, and although more recent kit is more shiny and impressive, I haven't yet seen anything that I'd find anywhere near as useful as my Psion.
Of course, it depends on what you'll use it for. Many folks have PDAs in the Palm mould, and for light use (contacts, agenda, to-do lists, synced to a desktop) they obviously work well for lots of people.
Where the Psion really scores, though, is use beyond that. It's more than just a PDA in that sense -- I prefer to call it a 'pocket computer', as it's a full machine in its own right. I use it for umpteen things -- PDA stuff, but also email, route planning, reading books and other reference material, SMS messages, software development (Java, Perl, OPL). It has a full word processor, spreadsheet &c, and I've used it to write technical articles for publication. I connect it to my GPS to get moving maps and navigation. Of course, I've also got lots of games, though the only ones I tend to play much are Infocom adventures, crosswords, and Scrabble.
I have a library of novels and other books, and I find the screen comfortable enough that I read far more books on it than on paper. I also have a serious dictionary and thesaurus -- now they're always to hand, I find I refer to them much more than I ever did the paper ones. I also have a cut of the IMDB, and when I get a larger CF I'll put the whole of Wikipedia on it!
But my most-used application is a fairly specialist one: an Off-Line Reader (OLR) for the CIX conferencing system. My messagebase currently has over 200,000 messages in over 400 topics, taking up over 100MB, and it's great to be able to read new messages when I'm stuck on trains, staying with friends, on holiday... And of course the touch-type keyboard makes it easy to write my replies. Plus I use my mobile phone to upload replies and download new messages. (Disclaimer: I'm co-author of said OLR. Written entirely in OPL. On a Psion.)
It's really in a market of its own -- the trouser-pocket size makes it more portable and available than most subnotebooks, and yet the power and keyboard make it more than a PDA.
It's more than just a tick-list of features -- it's in the way they're put together and made into a useful package. But the important ones for me are: touch-type keyboard, long battery life (tens of hours), CF storage, IrDA, trouser-pocket size. If I could add anything to it, I'd probably want: Bluetooth, USB, sharper display (colour not necessary), headphone socket, and a bump in processor speed and internal memory wouldn't hurt.
What about players? They're forced to use it. And to license it.
Every DVD player shipped will have to be licensed, and pay M$ for the privilege -- or it's not a standard player, and won't work with some discs. If they want to call it a DVD Player (or whatever the new ones will be called), and carry the right logos and words, they'll be forced to support it and pay up.
Every software player sold, ditto.
Which means that it's impossible to write a legal piece of free software to play or handle the full standard...
Software patents. [fx: makes extremely rude gesture]
Mmm. Interestingly enough, if I recall the FAQ correctly, the idea that Deckard is a replicant was Ridley Scott's, not Dick's. [fx: checks] Yep. Apparently, in the book Deckard is human, and even has another Blade Runner give him the test to make sure. But in the film, even if it's not stated explicitly, there are so many parallels, and lines that have extra resonance if Deckard is the same as his quarry. (E.g. Gaff's final "It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?")
Normally, films have to dumb down a book, so it's great to see a director who not only understands the book and manages to put much of its depth on screen, but actually adds to that depth and complexity in such an appropriate way!
I think I'm glad I saw the theatrical version first. Much as the voiceovers spoil that objectivity, I think that without them I'd have found it even harder to follow what was going on. (I think Ridley enjoys making his audience work hard:)
I'm also reminded of another P.K.Dick-based film, Total Recall. Much of that is a little shallow (though fun!), but there are still some very interesting undercurrents. In particular, it's a shame that they didn't make more of that moment about 2/3 of the way through where it's suggested that the hero's whole experience is nothing but the fantasy he originally went to have implanted. That scenario seems to be rejected, but as the film progresses it actually becomes more and more like the fantasy -- it'd be nice for it to have acknowledged that somehow, especially at the rather unconvincing end...
the dubbing... makes the viewer tend to side with and identify with Deckard. That makes you see him as the hero even if he does questionable things. The Director's Cut lets you watch the movie as an impartial observer.
Interesting analysis!
I first saw the theatrical version (with dubbing); after that, the Director's Cut seemed to lack focus and drive, and the lack of explanation made things a little more confusing if you weren't paying extremely careful attention. So I tended to prefer the first one.
But I see your point. By fixing on Deckard's PoV, we tend to take his motives, and his humanity, for granted, and miss some of the parallels with the (other) replicants -- things that Scott clearly didn't want us to do. Maybe the distance that the Director's Cut brings encourages us question these things. Next time, I'll view it with this in mind. Thanks!
That's a little different, though. That case was knowing, deliberate, playful -- an 'in joke' if you like. The users knew its standard English plural perfectly well, but chose to resurrect an older English plural form for interest's sake.
Rather different from this case, which seems to result from pure ignorance.
Personally, what really irks me is the use of a Latinate plural for a naturalised English word. English already has a perfectly good mechanism for indicating a plural, one that's used by the huge majority of its words. 'Virus' may have originated (in some form) in Latin, but it's been used in English for over half a millennium! Can't we consider it naturalised enough to take an English plural?
No matter how you draw a map, where you place Kashmir is going to offend someone.
"What's wrong with wherever it is now?" (to quote Jim Hacker).
Okay, so how you colour it might cause problems, as might how you draw the various borders, but surely no-one's going to complain about its physical location... Not unless the average US software developer's knowledge of geography is even worse than I feared!
I can rip copies to AIFF or WAV and then convert these high-quality versions to any format I want
Are talking about storing the AIFFs on disc? If so, here speaks* a man** with either 1) a small CD collection, or 2) a massive storage array!
(* Well, writes. Or at least, types.)
(** Or woman. Or child. Or, well, fill in the rest yourself...)
As for 5), if that bitrate and format matches the one you'd choose for yourself anyway, and you're not likely to change it in the near future, then it's no big disadvantage.
Of course, that's why sites such as allofmp3 have become so popular, as they generally let you choose your own format, bitrate, &c, right up to AIFF.
Mind you, those with 3rd-gen and older iPods are probably safe. Doesn't look as if Apple are at all likely to release any kind of update for older machines... [fx: sigh]
Well, firstly there's all the software. You gotta do billing, session management, provision of downloads and metadata, all that. There's all the accounts and financial stuff behind that. Then you gotta get all the music data (and metadata) from somewhere -- setting that up can't be easy, and of course conversion and applying DRM isn't trivial. Some parts may be bought in, but I'd bet that a lot of it has to be bespoke, and it all has to be wired together.
Then there're the usual things that most companies have to do. Marketing, PR, legal, and probably loads more I've forgotten. For example, I'm sure you'll expect tech support people to be on hand to deal with your problems.
And of course there's all the stuff that cyberformer mentions: bandwidth and hosting, and before all that they have to rake most of it off to the RIAA &c.
So, just because the actual bits don't cost much, it can still take a lot of expense to get 'em to you.
Okay, it's probably not as bad bad as many of the others mentioned above, but I can't think of any other movies which were so thoroughly and deliberately vile and unpleasant. Maybe I just don't get Greenaway, but this just seemed pretentious, pointless, and nasty for the sake of it.
I've never actually walked out half-way through a film, but I was extremely close in this one. (The only other one was 'Alien', but that was a reflection on my squeamishness, and not the quality of the movie!)
Michael Keaton is... not an action adventure star.
Maybe; but that's fine, because Batman and Batman Returns are not action adventures. They're dark psychological fantasies. Yes, there were action sequences, stunts, and that sort of thing, but at the core they were looking at what bizarre circumstances drive someone to become a superhero or villain, what sort of twisted personality must result, and what sort of cold world needs a superhero.
If you like that sort of thing, you'll probably prefer the first two Batman films; if you don't, then you'll probably prefer the later ones, which were action adventures. Different folks like different things, and getting into an "X is better!" "No, Y is better!" argument is usually pointless.
Suffice it to say that the darker films are generally considered to be more original, more thought-provoking, more stylish, and an extremely successful reinvention of an existing franchise. The latter ones are generally considered to be more conventional, lacking the originality and dark tone.
It's posts like that that make me think I should have checked that 'Willing to moderate' button, so I can mod it up. Very well said.
By the time hatred and terrorism goes on as long as it has in this case, it's got beyond individual issues and circumstances. It's got ingrained as a simple them-and-us tribal hatred. That magical transformation has occurred whereby a group of people becomes 'The Enemy'.
And you can't stop being The Enemy by force. You can't hope that if you kill enough people, they'll start liking you again. You can't win their confidence and respect with air strikes. You may be able to quell a particular disturbance, or achieve a particular tactical goal, but that's just attacking the symptom. The cause just grows stronger, and sooner or later it'll reappear. With more hatred, and more reason for that hatred.
I don't pretend to know all the details of the Iraq situation, nor to understand all the underlying motives and politics. But it's become clearer and clearer that the US government wanted to go to war, and was determined to find (or manufacture) a pretext for doing so. Now, try to put yourselves into the shoes of an Iraqi. (Almost impossible, but try.) How do the US's actions look from there?
What if the US had marched into some other country with an oppressive leader? Maybe one of the South American countries, or perhaps an east European one? What if they'd invaded Romania when Ceausescu was still in power? Would you feel they had a right to do so then? Is Iraq really any different?
To digress for a moment, this reminds me of the Biblical injunction 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' (Exodus 21:24). These days, that sounds harsh, but at the time, AIUI, revenge could could be extremely disproportionate, and mild slights could lead to feuds that went on for generations. So the verse's intent might be better stated as 'ONLY an eye for an eye, ONLY a tooth for a tooth'. Maybe if the US had abided by that principle, we wouldn't be in the state we're in...
The key there is when you said 'this type'. I agree that e-books as something in a proprietary format, which only work on dedicated machines, is stupid.
However, e-books as I use and love 'em are a very different beast. I have a large library (>100MB) of stuff in Palm DOC format -- an open format, easily convertible to/from plain text. (This means I can edit the texts as needed to fix formatting, errors, convert to British English spellings, &c.) I keep them on my Psion 5mx -- a PDA that I already carry in my pocket anyway. I read them on its 640x240 backlit LCD, which I find easy enough on my eyes. I get them from various sources; legit ones include Fictionwise, which has a reasonable range of DRM-free stuff, though the biggest names are DRM-only; author's web sites Gutenberg; Baen Books; and various others.
The advantages are numerous: I always have reading material, without having to carry a book around with me, so when I find myself sitting in trains or in the Chinese take-away, the time's never wasted. I always have reference material to refer to (dictionaries, 3 Bible translations, the Jargon File, you name it -- shortly to include a full cut of Wikipedia), and can quote straight from my favourite books. I don't need to faff around with bookmarks. I can read in bed with the lights out. I have backups. I don't need to buy any more bookcases (and I've got enough already...) And so on. I'm not saying this would be right for you; but it certainly works for people like the grandparent poster and me.
alchemy was still considered a real science back then
Not at that point -- in fact, alchemical research was banned, and Newton had to conduct his experiments in secret. (On his deathbed, he extracted a promise that his writings on the subject wouldn't be published, which is why they're still relatively unknown.)
More on this in Wikipedia. In particular, it points out that alchemy wasn't so much about discovering new things as about rediscovering the supposed 'wisdom of the ancients'. Alchemists believed that the ancient Greeks and others knew much more about the world (e.g. gravity, the atomic structure of matter, &c) than they let on, and that this occult knowledge was somehow hidden inside ancient books and other records, that a suitably clever man could decode. Not a million miles from today's 'Bible Code' -- and of course it connects with Newton's work on Biblical interpretation, chronology, the Apocalypse, &c as well as his well-known mathematics and science.
Also, I find it amusing that many of the people who decried alchemy's assumed goal of turning lead into gold, on the basis that atoms are indivisible and eternal, have made just a grave a mistake! Of course, chemical processes couldn't do it, but nuclear ones can -- although the reverse direction seems much more likely...
...that you're using a monospaced font! Personally, I much prefer to use a proportional font.
Whoah there, all you folks who are about to reply questioning my eyesight, my coding abilities, or my sanity! Yep, I know what I'm doing. Yep, I've used 'vi' till it's come out of my ears (don't ask), and it's cool for certain types of editing. But I find that monospacing tends to give undue emphasis to small punctuation marks, and generally makes code far harder to read at a glance. I know code doesn't look exactly like English text, but I seem to read them in a similar enough way that similar layout works well for both.
Of course, I know I'm in a minority, so I don't expect everyone else on the project to do the same. But the important thing is that if the code is well formatted, you should be able to read it in whatever editor you prefer, in whatever font, with whatever other preferences. If you're laying out your code to match a particular editor, IDE, or whatever, then you're adding a dependency, and making it harder to switch in future.
But then, even with a monospaced font and an 80-character window, what's the major problem with the occasional long line? Any decent editor will scroll or wrap it for you, so following the needs of the code shouldn't cause that much inconvenience. (And if it does, you're probably using the wrong editor!)
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My problem with this argument is that people seem to assume pressure must mean time pressure. Which I hate. My challenge is to do a good job; to create something functional, elegant, maintainable. I'll take as long as it needs to make sure that it works, and that it's done as well as I know how. Oh yes, I can do things quicker if necessary, but that means taking shortcuts, and handing over something that might not work properly, that's a mess, and/or that'll lead to problems in future. So in my case, time pressure just leads to shoddy work as well as stress -- both of which I hate!
Why do so few in management seem to understand that it's worth taking the time to do it right, because it'll save time in the long run? Or is it just that they've seen so many people who can't (or won't) do it right, they don't know any better?
And yet I keep reading the word 'Legos', which makes no sense here. Is the term officially different in the US, or have you merkins been getting it wrong all the time (unthinkable!)?
There's an awful lot of stuff orbiting Saturn; much of it's in very small pieces, but there's a wide range of sizes all the way up to the few big moons that everyone knows. But AIUI there's no inherent difference between the very small bits and the medium-sized bits, so calling some of them 'moons' and some 'ring material' is just an arbitrary distinction, isn't it?
But then, the same applies to the rings, too. There are no physical rings, just lost of chunks of stuff. It looks like a solid ring if you stand far enough away, but as you get closer you see it split into smaller and smaller sections until you can see the individual chunks of material. Okay, some parts clump together closer than other parts, but there's no physical barrier between one 'ring' and another. The only objective ways of looking at it are either 'Saturn has a ring of stuff around it', or 'Saturn has an awful lot of chunks of stuff around it'. Isn't the rest just arguing with words?
In an abstract, theoretical way, that makes sense, but I'm not so sure it applies readily to the real world.
Consider: there are many different filing systems in use, and people frequently transfer files from one to another. This loses metadata that can't be stored on most FSs.
Many file types (pictures, audio, even HTML) already include metadata embedded in the file.
And many types of metadata apply only to particular types of file.
So, if you put this in the FS itself, you risk losing metadata when transferring between filesystems, and you have issues syncing the FS metadata with any embedded metadata.
The more I hear about this, the more I think that maybe Apple's solution (Spotlight) is more realistic: you leave metadata embedded in the file, and have a generic way of accessing it that allows searching. That way, you make best use of the information that's already there, you don't have to create anything new that'll get lost in file transfers, it can work with any FS, and no changes are needed to applications.
Electric instruments are amplified, tweaked, processed -- they're meant to sound different from the acoustic sound. Even worse, it's different every time, so there's no mental standard to compare to. But classical music, and other acoustic music, uses sounds that we can get to know very well, so we spot imperfections in the reproduction much easier.
At least, that's my guess. I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum from audiophiles - I'm a musician! (Amateur, but everything from early classical to electronic.) And we musicians often seem to be worst at distinguishing CD from LP from MP3 &c, and can be quite happy listening on far-from-ideal equipment. Personally, I think it's because we're so used to considering music in terms of notes, harmonies, timbres, chords, textures, melodies &c that we mentally 'fill in' the missing frequencies and other artefacts.
Then, if we ever get to the point where basic spelling seems to be less of a problem, we can get on to the interesting questions of grammar and semantics: when a 'that' is needed, and its difference from 'which'; how to get number, person, and tense to agree; why you don't need to use prepositions with verbs like 'meet' and 'check'; and which outdated, misguided language 'rules' it's okay to deliberately dispense with!
In short: you're stuck with us for a while yet...
Of course, it depends on what you'll use it for. Many folks have PDAs in the Palm mould, and for light use (contacts, agenda, to-do lists, synced to a desktop) they obviously work well for lots of people.
Where the Psion really scores, though, is use beyond that. It's more than just a PDA in that sense -- I prefer to call it a 'pocket computer', as it's a full machine in its own right. I use it for umpteen things -- PDA stuff, but also email, route planning, reading books and other reference material, SMS messages, software development (Java, Perl, OPL). It has a full word processor, spreadsheet &c, and I've used it to write technical articles for publication. I connect it to my GPS to get moving maps and navigation. Of course, I've also got lots of games, though the only ones I tend to play much are Infocom adventures, crosswords, and Scrabble.
I have a library of novels and other books, and I find the screen comfortable enough that I read far more books on it than on paper. I also have a serious dictionary and thesaurus -- now they're always to hand, I find I refer to them much more than I ever did the paper ones. I also have a cut of the IMDB, and when I get a larger CF I'll put the whole of Wikipedia on it!
But my most-used application is a fairly specialist one: an Off-Line Reader (OLR) for the CIX conferencing system. My messagebase currently has over 200,000 messages in over 400 topics, taking up over 100MB, and it's great to be able to read new messages when I'm stuck on trains, staying with friends, on holiday... And of course the touch-type keyboard makes it easy to write my replies. Plus I use my mobile phone to upload replies and download new messages. (Disclaimer: I'm co-author of said OLR. Written entirely in OPL. On a Psion.)
It's really in a market of its own -- the trouser-pocket size makes it more portable and available than most subnotebooks, and yet the power and keyboard make it more than a PDA.
It's more than just a tick-list of features -- it's in the way they're put together and made into a useful package. But the important ones for me are: touch-type keyboard, long battery life (tens of hours), CF storage, IrDA, trouser-pocket size. If I could add anything to it, I'd probably want: Bluetooth, USB, sharper display (colour not necessary), headphone socket, and a bump in processor speed and internal memory wouldn't hurt.
You say this as if it were a good thing...
Fellow train passengers must have been rather bemused watching my increasing frustration with the original game...
What about players? They're forced to use it. And to license it.
Every DVD player shipped will have to be licensed, and pay M$ for the privilege -- or it's not a standard player, and won't work with some discs. If they want to call it a DVD Player (or whatever the new ones will be called), and carry the right logos and words, they'll be forced to support it and pay up.
Every software player sold, ditto.
Which means that it's impossible to write a legal piece of free software to play or handle the full standard...
Software patents. [fx: makes extremely rude gesture]
Absolutely. But the real knack is knowing just how many times to multiply by three...
Normally, films have to dumb down a book, so it's great to see a director who not only understands the book and manages to put much of its depth on screen, but actually adds to that depth and complexity in such an appropriate way!
I think I'm glad I saw the theatrical version first. Much as the voiceovers spoil that objectivity, I think that without them I'd have found it even harder to follow what was going on. (I think Ridley enjoys making his audience work hard :)
I'm also reminded of another P.K.Dick-based film, Total Recall. Much of that is a little shallow (though fun!), but there are still some very interesting undercurrents. In particular, it's a shame that they didn't make more of that moment about 2/3 of the way through where it's suggested that the hero's whole experience is nothing but the fantasy he originally went to have implanted. That scenario seems to be rejected, but as the film progresses it actually becomes more and more like the fantasy -- it'd be nice for it to have acknowledged that somehow, especially at the rather unconvincing end...
Interesting analysis!
I first saw the theatrical version (with dubbing); after that, the Director's Cut seemed to lack focus and drive, and the lack of explanation made things a little more confusing if you weren't paying extremely careful attention. So I tended to prefer the first one.
But I see your point. By fixing on Deckard's PoV, we tend to take his motives, and his humanity, for granted, and miss some of the parallels with the (other) replicants -- things that Scott clearly didn't want us to do. Maybe the distance that the Director's Cut brings encourages us question these things. Next time, I'll view it with this in mind. Thanks!
Rather different from this case, which seems to result from pure ignorance.
Personally, what really irks me is the use of a Latinate plural for a naturalised English word. English already has a perfectly good mechanism for indicating a plural, one that's used by the huge majority of its words. 'Virus' may have originated (in some form) in Latin, but it's been used in English for over half a millennium! Can't we consider it naturalised enough to take an English plural?
"What's wrong with wherever it is now?" (to quote Jim Hacker).
Okay, so how you colour it might cause problems, as might how you draw the various borders, but surely no-one's going to complain about its physical location... Not unless the average US software developer's knowledge of geography is even worse than I feared!
Are talking about storing the AIFFs on disc? If so, here speaks* a man** with either 1) a small CD collection, or 2) a massive storage array!
(* Well, writes. Or at least, types.)
(** Or woman. Or child. Or, well, fill in the rest yourself...)
As for 5), if that bitrate and format matches the one you'd choose for yourself anyway, and you're not likely to change it in the near future, then it's no big disadvantage.
Of course, that's why sites such as allofmp3 have become so popular, as they generally let you choose your own format, bitrate, &c, right up to AIFF.
Mind you, those with 3rd-gen and older iPods are probably safe. Doesn't look as if Apple are at all likely to release any kind of update for older machines... [fx: sigh]
Then there're the usual things that most companies have to do. Marketing, PR, legal, and probably loads more I've forgotten. For example, I'm sure you'll expect tech support people to be on hand to deal with your problems.
And of course there's all the stuff that cyberformer mentions: bandwidth and hosting, and before all that they have to rake most of it off to the RIAA &c.
So, just because the actual bits don't cost much, it can still take a lot of expense to get 'em to you.
I've never actually walked out half-way through a film, but I was extremely close in this one. (The only other one was 'Alien', but that was a reflection on my squeamishness, and not the quality of the movie!)
Maybe; but that's fine, because Batman and Batman Returns are not action adventures. They're dark psychological fantasies. Yes, there were action sequences, stunts, and that sort of thing, but at the core they were looking at what bizarre circumstances drive someone to become a superhero or villain, what sort of twisted personality must result, and what sort of cold world needs a superhero.
If you like that sort of thing, you'll probably prefer the first two Batman films; if you don't, then you'll probably prefer the later ones, which were action adventures. Different folks like different things, and getting into an "X is better!" "No, Y is better!" argument is usually pointless.
Suffice it to say that the darker films are generally considered to be more original, more thought-provoking, more stylish, and an extremely successful reinvention of an existing franchise. The latter ones are generally considered to be more conventional, lacking the originality and dark tone.
(And, personally, I though they sucked...)
By the time hatred and terrorism goes on as long as it has in this case, it's got beyond individual issues and circumstances. It's got ingrained as a simple them-and-us tribal hatred. That magical transformation has occurred whereby a group of people becomes 'The Enemy'.
And you can't stop being The Enemy by force. You can't hope that if you kill enough people, they'll start liking you again. You can't win their confidence and respect with air strikes. You may be able to quell a particular disturbance, or achieve a particular tactical goal, but that's just attacking the symptom. The cause just grows stronger, and sooner or later it'll reappear. With more hatred, and more reason for that hatred.
I don't pretend to know all the details of the Iraq situation, nor to understand all the underlying motives and politics. But it's become clearer and clearer that the US government wanted to go to war, and was determined to find (or manufacture) a pretext for doing so. Now, try to put yourselves into the shoes of an Iraqi. (Almost impossible, but try.) How do the US's actions look from there?
What if the US had marched into some other country with an oppressive leader? Maybe one of the South American countries, or perhaps an east European one? What if they'd invaded Romania when Ceausescu was still in power? Would you feel they had a right to do so then? Is Iraq really any different?
To digress for a moment, this reminds me of the Biblical injunction 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' (Exodus 21:24). These days, that sounds harsh, but at the time, AIUI, revenge could could be extremely disproportionate, and mild slights could lead to feuds that went on for generations. So the verse's intent might be better stated as 'ONLY an eye for an eye, ONLY a tooth for a tooth'. Maybe if the US had abided by that principle, we wouldn't be in the state we're in...
However, e-books as I use and love 'em are a very different beast. I have a large library (>100MB) of stuff in Palm DOC format -- an open format, easily convertible to/from plain text. (This means I can edit the texts as needed to fix formatting, errors, convert to British English spellings, &c.) I keep them on my Psion 5mx -- a PDA that I already carry in my pocket anyway. I read them on its 640x240 backlit LCD, which I find easy enough on my eyes. I get them from various sources; legit ones include Fictionwise, which has a reasonable range of DRM-free stuff, though the biggest names are DRM-only; author's web sites Gutenberg; Baen Books; and various others.
The advantages are numerous: I always have reading material, without having to carry a book around with me, so when I find myself sitting in trains or in the Chinese take-away, the time's never wasted. I always have reference material to refer to (dictionaries, 3 Bible translations, the Jargon File, you name it -- shortly to include a full cut of Wikipedia), and can quote straight from my favourite books. I don't need to faff around with bookmarks. I can read in bed with the lights out. I have backups. I don't need to buy any more bookcases (and I've got enough already...) And so on. I'm not saying this would be right for you; but it certainly works for people like the grandparent poster and me.
Not at that point -- in fact, alchemical research was banned, and Newton had to conduct his experiments in secret. (On his deathbed, he extracted a promise that his writings on the subject wouldn't be published, which is why they're still relatively unknown.)
More on this in Wikipedia. In particular, it points out that alchemy wasn't so much about discovering new things as about rediscovering the supposed 'wisdom of the ancients'. Alchemists believed that the ancient Greeks and others knew much more about the world (e.g. gravity, the atomic structure of matter, &c) than they let on, and that this occult knowledge was somehow hidden inside ancient books and other records, that a suitably clever man could decode. Not a million miles from today's 'Bible Code' -- and of course it connects with Newton's work on Biblical interpretation, chronology, the Apocalypse, &c as well as his well-known mathematics and science.
Also, I find it amusing that many of the people who decried alchemy's assumed goal of turning lead into gold, on the basis that atoms are indivisible and eternal, have made just a grave a mistake! Of course, chemical processes couldn't do it, but nuclear ones can -- although the reverse direction seems much more likely...
Is that the same sort of thing as JavaDoc?
Whoah there, all you folks who are about to reply questioning my eyesight, my coding abilities, or my sanity! Yep, I know what I'm doing. Yep, I've used 'vi' till it's come out of my ears (don't ask), and it's cool for certain types of editing. But I find that monospacing tends to give undue emphasis to small punctuation marks, and generally makes code far harder to read at a glance. I know code doesn't look exactly like English text, but I seem to read them in a similar enough way that similar layout works well for both.
Of course, I know I'm in a minority, so I don't expect everyone else on the project to do the same. But the important thing is that if the code is well formatted, you should be able to read it in whatever editor you prefer, in whatever font, with whatever other preferences. If you're laying out your code to match a particular editor, IDE, or whatever, then you're adding a dependency, and making it harder to switch in future.
But then, even with a monospaced font and an 80-character window, what's the major problem with the occasional long line? Any decent editor will scroll or wrap it for you, so following the needs of the code shouldn't cause that much inconvenience. (And if it does, you're probably using the wrong editor!)