I just saw this evening a report on CNN citing one HMV employee who told that about 3% of the retail price of a CD goes to the label whereas 37% is profit margin charged by the retailer.
Is it true that the greed is on the retailer's end and not labels' ?
Feeding the poor, doing the good...
on
Building the A380
·
· Score: 1
... and postponing the consequences of whatever caused them to have no food to eat. What a sensible policy.
Guess I'll stick to Office 2000. Mind you, my employer still insists to use Office 97 due to major compatibility issues with macros and VBA (and it is a 400+ people company)!!!!
Credit cards do not have PINs because in some countries credit card transactions are captured by physical means. Paper and carbon-copying-paper, that is. This is the very reason why credit card numbers are embossed and not print with plain ink, the latter being way cheaper. When you capture a transaction with paper and carbon paper, the embossing prints the paper through the carbon.
Now, PINs do not constitute a better security feature. They do help control fraud but you can still borrow a card and ask for the PIN. When was the last time a store clerk checked your card against some other form of photo ID? As for me, never.
Smartcard credit cards will have PINs, but the embossed thing will stay with us for quite a while, especially for cards that can be used abroad.
Targetting Windows users is not a bad idea, since the problem is with Microsoft pointing their guns against paying Opera customers who happen to run Windows.
Now, a message box popping up with a message explaining that users should expect difficulties when running MS sites would be more instructive...
If you can read the license plate, then it should be possible to do a lookup on DMV (or equivalent) registries and charge a percentage on the street value of the car for a given make year and model. Your problem is solved!
This phenomenum of social inclusion/exclusion in these terms were also discussed by C. S. Lewis in an insightful essay intitled "The Inner Ring".
I just guess that this might be just a by product of human gatherings, even if not in physical terms.
Paraphrasing Lewis: you can't explain, but it is there. You cannot really tell whether you're in or out, but once you're in (or out, for that matter) you can surely affirm it. Once you get there, you realize that there are more people who is more in than you. If your really in, you wish you were out, because being really in usually is not exciting as you once thought when you were out. You cant draw boundaries, but you know who else is in or out. You can push someone out, but it is really hard to get in. It doesnt matter where you are, but you know, and cant explain
In this sense, corporations are no worse than the mafia or other similar criminal organizations. The only difference is that they pay taxes.
Making an analogy to the music industry's pricing schemes, governments could lower their taxes so corporations and individuals would lose their incentives to be on the sidelines of the economy. Just like ripped CDs are on the sidelines of music.
Three years ago, when I worked in a bank, we used to go to www.fed.gov to get statistical data from the Federal Reserve. One day, I got distracted and typed www.fed.com, trying to reach them as usual. Surprise: it pointed to a pr0n site. I almost got fired.
Does not ice move around? If so, how can a road withstand such movements? Snowmobiles arent a better way for moving around instead of cars?
Why? Why? Why?
All that is needed, Mr. Blaze wrote, is access to a key and to the lock that it opens, as well as a small number of uncut key blanks and a tool to cut them to the proper shape.
How different is this from making an ordinary copy of a key, like people all around the world do everyday? It's like I borrowed the keys to someone's house, made a copy, gave the original back, and used the copy to open the door.
Seems way too much noise for such a everyday thing.
Here in Brazil we also ran out of numbers. Old 7-digit telephone numbers got an extra digit at the beginning (230-5932 became 3230-5932).
For long distance calls, we used to dial 0 followed by the two or three long distance city prefix.
If a call is made to my city, Sao Paulo, you'd dial 011-3230-5932.
And then they privatised the telcos. And you have a choice of long distance carriers,you select when dialing. The telcos have a two digit number that goes between the zero and the two digit city number. Suppose you decide to use Telefonica's services for your long distance (code 15):
0-15-11-3230-5932
Phew. 13-digit dialing is just f**** up.
International calls require the obligatory prefix 00 folowed by the carrier code, the country code, city code and telephone number. If we try to call NYC using Embratel international services (21), you'll end up with:
00-21-1-212-555-5555
That's 15 digits. And you did not use a calling card.
Hm. Dog was not event considered to be a pet in Korea until very recently and by foreign influence.
Now, since pigs are becoming a relatively common pet in California, I find those Friday's pork chops especially disgusting. You're eating my best friend! Yuck!
Yeah. IME programming for the Korean language is very complex. Besides having to handle 2-byte chars, you need a 2-byte char table that has all possible consonant+vowel+optional final consonant combinations that comprise a syllable.
Therefore, you end up with a very large char table and there is a lot of waste there, since many combinations, although feasible, are not used in any writing or speaking. They only exist because it is possible for them to exist. And there are Chinese ideograms (hanja), which are used interchangeably with Korean and are part of the language as well. You will see hanja used in contexts where ambiguity is undesired, such as corporate documents, etc, because a korean word may have different meanings. An ideogram, well, tends to be way more specific.
If you want hanja in your documents, you usually type the sound of that hanja in plain Korean, type a special key that fires up a dictionary of ideograms that match that sound. One does not have to type every ideogram separately. In a dicitionary fashion, long words with more than one hanja ideogram can be stored.
Still, due to the way Korean was implemented it is not trivially suited for letter-by-letter processing. You cant do a substr() and expect to get a single letter back (letter=vowel or consonant). If letter processing is needed, you'll need some function that decodes the 2-byte Unicode char and returns an array of letters, for example.
I guess that when storage and processing power were scarce, such shortcuts were needed.
Real life usage, however, shows that letter by letter is rarely (if ever) needed. Google does fine with 2-byte chars. MS Word does fine with them. Heck, even my cellphone worked fine and smoothly. You will need letter-by-letter processing when handling DNA sequences, for example. Daily use does not require it.
For the record, typing in Korean is extremely fast. Vowels to one side of the keyboard, consonants to the other. Typing Korean in cellphone is even faster, because there is that T9-like helper technology for typing. I find it faster than using T9 for Portuguese or English.
Japanese is different. In a purely syllabic system, there is a key combo to switch keyboards for both hiragana and katakana and each key is mapped to a syllable. I just wonder where the numbers go, since both keyboards use all keys (except keypad) for characters, plus some combinations with ctrl and shift.
Try Chinese, then. Processing is fairly simple, since a 2-byte char is a single letter. There is no letter compounding as Korean. But writing in Chinese is awkward. You may type it phonetically (yes, there are some special ideograms used to represent sounds) and use a special key to fire up a dictionary of matching ideograms. You may write each ideogram by compounding the characters from their basic roots, but you'll need to have a standard way to decompose characters into these roots. Note that these roots are not phonetic but they are based on meaning. It's a very abstract system. Kinda beautiful I guess, but shifts most complexity towards the users. There are a number of other Chinese IMEs, but I couldnt figure out how they work. Question for Chinese speakers: is there a Chinese language typewriter? How does it work?
Well. The point is that with enough processing power and well designed code, language complexities can be removed or diminished. The problem is more of the quality of implementation done to support these languages rather than a specific language deficiency of computer use. The idea that we must adapt ourselves to the computers is just plain dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it true that the greed is on the retailer's end and not labels' ?
... and postponing the consequences of whatever caused them to have no food to eat. What a sensible policy.
And the Kitchen Sink isnt a proper easter egg, just a nice XML page...
Someone ought make a military-grade ATM programmed in ADA someday. Or not?
Guess I'll stick to Office 2000. Mind you, my employer still insists to use Office 97 due to major compatibility issues with macros and VBA (and it is a 400+ people company)!!!!
Now, PINs do not constitute a better security feature. They do help control fraud but you can still borrow a card and ask for the PIN. When was the last time a store clerk checked your card against some other form of photo ID? As for me, never.
Smartcard credit cards will have PINs, but the embossed thing will stay with us for quite a while, especially for cards that can be used abroad.
Now, a message box popping up with a message explaining that users should expect difficulties when running MS sites would be more instructive...
If you can read the license plate, then it should be possible to do a lookup on DMV (or equivalent) registries and charge a percentage on the street value of the car for a given make year and model. Your problem is solved!
I just guess that this might be just a by product of human gatherings, even if not in physical terms.
Paraphrasing Lewis: you can't explain, but it is there. You cannot really tell whether you're in or out, but once you're in (or out, for that matter) you can surely affirm it. Once you get there, you realize that there are more people who is more in than you. If your really in, you wish you were out, because being really in usually is not exciting as you once thought when you were out. You cant draw boundaries, but you know who else is in or out. You can push someone out, but it is really hard to get in. It doesnt matter where you are, but you know, and cant explain
That's a genius!
The creator of that rendering of the DVD logo should be modded up +5 Genius!!!
What about hog farms? Wow.
In this sense, corporations are no worse than the mafia or other similar criminal organizations. The only difference is that they pay taxes.
Making an analogy to the music industry's pricing schemes, governments could lower their taxes so corporations and individuals would lose their incentives to be on the sidelines of the economy. Just like ripped CDs are on the sidelines of music.
Three years ago, when I worked in a bank, we used to go to www.fed.gov to get statistical data from the Federal Reserve. One day, I got distracted and typed www.fed.com, trying to reach them as usual. Surprise: it pointed to a pr0n site. I almost got fired.
Gosh, this kind of argument really doesnt easen my worries...
... and try to do that with /bin/echo !!!!
Does not ice move around? If so, how can a road withstand such movements? Snowmobiles arent a better way for moving around instead of cars? Why? Why? Why?
How different is this from making an ordinary copy of a key, like people all around the world do everyday? It's like I borrowed the keys to someone's house, made a copy, gave the original back, and used the copy to open the door.
Seems way too much noise for such a everyday thing.
Here in Brazil we also ran out of numbers. Old 7-digit telephone numbers got an extra digit at the beginning (230-5932 became 3230-5932).
For long distance calls, we used to dial 0 followed by the two or three long distance city prefix.
If a call is made to my city, Sao Paulo, you'd dial 011-3230-5932.
And then they privatised the telcos. And you have a choice of long distance carriers,you select when dialing. The telcos have a two digit number that goes between the zero and the two digit city number. Suppose you decide to use Telefonica's services for your long distance (code 15):
0-15-11-3230-5932
Phew. 13-digit dialing is just f**** up.
International calls require the obligatory prefix 00 folowed by the carrier code, the country code, city code and telephone number. If we try to call NYC using Embratel international services (21), you'll end up with:
00-21-1-212-555-5555
That's 15 digits. And you did not use a calling card.
Forget the call, just send me an email.
Just get a copy machine and your security scheme is blown up!
That day, we'll forget compression and all this talk. We'll share raw PCM files for music!
Isn't this a form of attaining unfair leverage?
"Yeah, I see. But does it also shows the current time and date?"
... because you cheerfully agree to pay it!
Now, since pigs are becoming a relatively common pet in California, I find those Friday's pork chops especially disgusting. You're eating my best friend! Yuck!
Therefore, you end up with a very large char table and there is a lot of waste there, since many combinations, although feasible, are not used in any writing or speaking. They only exist because it is possible for them to exist. And there are Chinese ideograms (hanja), which are used interchangeably with Korean and are part of the language as well. You will see hanja used in contexts where ambiguity is undesired, such as corporate documents, etc, because a korean word may have different meanings. An ideogram, well, tends to be way more specific.
If you want hanja in your documents, you usually type the sound of that hanja in plain Korean, type a special key that fires up a dictionary of ideograms that match that sound. One does not have to type every ideogram separately. In a dicitionary fashion, long words with more than one hanja ideogram can be stored.
Still, due to the way Korean was implemented it is not trivially suited for letter-by-letter processing. You cant do a substr() and expect to get a single letter back (letter=vowel or consonant). If letter processing is needed, you'll need some function that decodes the 2-byte Unicode char and returns an array of letters, for example. I guess that when storage and processing power were scarce, such shortcuts were needed.
Real life usage, however, shows that letter by letter is rarely (if ever) needed. Google does fine with 2-byte chars. MS Word does fine with them. Heck, even my cellphone worked fine and smoothly. You will need letter-by-letter processing when handling DNA sequences, for example. Daily use does not require it.
For the record, typing in Korean is extremely fast. Vowels to one side of the keyboard, consonants to the other. Typing Korean in cellphone is even faster, because there is that T9-like helper technology for typing. I find it faster than using T9 for Portuguese or English.
Japanese is different. In a purely syllabic system, there is a key combo to switch keyboards for both hiragana and katakana and each key is mapped to a syllable. I just wonder where the numbers go, since both keyboards use all keys (except keypad) for characters, plus some combinations with ctrl and shift.
Try Chinese, then. Processing is fairly simple, since a 2-byte char is a single letter. There is no letter compounding as Korean. But writing in Chinese is awkward. You may type it phonetically (yes, there are some special ideograms used to represent sounds) and use a special key to fire up a dictionary of matching ideograms. You may write each ideogram by compounding the characters from their basic roots, but you'll need to have a standard way to decompose characters into these roots. Note that these roots are not phonetic but they are based on meaning. It's a very abstract system. Kinda beautiful I guess, but shifts most complexity towards the users. There are a number of other Chinese IMEs, but I couldnt figure out how they work. Question for Chinese speakers: is there a Chinese language typewriter? How does it work?
Well. The point is that with enough processing power and well designed code, language complexities can be removed or diminished. The problem is more of the quality of implementation done to support these languages rather than a specific language deficiency of computer use. The idea that we must adapt ourselves to the computers is just plain dumb.