I downloaded "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" from PG a few days ago for a car trip. I was very pleasently surprised at the quality of the book. The reader had a great voice, great pacing and a terrific feal for the attitudes and emotions of the characters.
I sure hope they get some more talented humans to do some reading. I'd much rather stare at a wall than listen to the computer read versions.
For all of you non-programmers looking for a way to 'give back' for all the software you make use of, this would be an excellent place to start.
No fair, you stole my joke! But I was going to say Notepad, which everone knows would be much funnier.
Seriously though, they did leave out two very important points in Windows favor.
1. Games. Yes, PC gamers much prefer the selection of Windows games over the selection of Linux games. It's not that Linux doesn't have a few gems, just that I had to use the word 'few' in this sentence.
2. With Windows, you get to have the exact same warts as all of your friends and family. a) misery loves company and b) there's a much better chance your brother in law is going to be able to help you with a Windows issue than a Linux issue. Market share alone will fix this problem just as market share alone caused it, but until then the social networking of Windows users helping other Windows users with should not be underestimated.
TW
P.S. I know there's this whole internet thing with lots of friendly people just waiting to help you with your Linux issues. Grandma will not use it. She will ask her husband, then her son, then every other family member until someone can help. If none of those people use Linux, she'll be out of luck. If some of those people use Mac or Windows, they'll try to convert her to a "better" OS.
The problem with this DRM doesn't have much to do with fairnes, but rather with lock-in. If you borrow from this library you better be sporting Windows.
This line from the article kind of sums it up: Just as the lack of a standard digital audio format has fragmented the music download market, it affects audiobooks.
In days past, you could buy, rent, borrow from just about anyone and be able to play it on the prevailing media player of the day. In the new digital millenium, you lock yourself out of a significant part of the media world based on your choice of player.
Yeah, you could point to Beta and VHS as an example of what happened in the past, but at least one of those choices was a choice for a variety of companies who make sorce material and media players. This is more like Beta vs. Beta; no matter what you choose, you choose lock-in to one company or another.
I happen to own a Windows SmartPhone, so I could borrow from this library, but I couldn't let my daughter use it on her iPod. If this happend ot be FairPlay instead of WMA, then she could have borrowed it and I'd be stuck. The only way for consumers to win with DRM will be for all the players to agree on one standard, but the weather forcast still looks quite hot in hades at the moment.
that line should have been: "They're building this adult portable gaming and media market from scratch and despite sales numbers less than the DS, I think they're largely succeeding.
And one more observation. I've never seen anyone under 15 with a PSP, but I was at the doctor's office the other day and both me and another 30-something were playing away on our PSPs. The adult portable gamer is real, it just remains to be seen how many of us there are.
To the designer of SUVs, what happens is the economy car market is, to a large extent, irrelevant.
I think the comment about relevancy was more to point out the difference in the markets than to say the DS isn't an important consumer product. Clearly the DS is being bought, but the PSP isn't going after the same sort of person who's interested in Nintendogs. It's going for the Grand Theft Auto crowd.
When the PS1 hit the market it basically ignored NES, SNES buyers and went to a demograhic that was quite a bit older. All of their initial advertising reflected this (remember the dominatrix chick?). They basically built that market and it turned out that 15-30 market was quite lucritive.
Now they're attempting the same thing with the PSP. They don't have half naked chicks trying to sell it, but they do have a game lineup that's decidedly _not_ cute. Even the UMD movies are largely PG-13 and above. They're building this portable gaming and media market from scratch and despite sales numbers less than the DS, I think they're largely succeeding.
Clearly under these circumstances, the DS is quite "irrelevant."
I work in an environment where the reverse has been true. Very bright people routinely got put in management and I'd be happy to have our CTO at any engineer position.
I'm in management myself now and I consider myself to be roughly parrellel in level of knowledge to my staff. This situation has brought with it a very interesting observation: Bright people don't know stuff.
Ya see, the Novell guy, the ADS guy and they router guy aren't always the best at fixing their PCs. They're too focused on their main job and the PC is just a distraction. On the other hand, the really bright guy we hired to do magic with our PC images doesn't have a clue about our Exchange servers.
As the boss of all of these guys, I find myself both giving knowledge and asking for it on a regular basis. Do they think I'm stupid because I don't understand the exact thing they're working on? Maybe. But if they were a little smarter themselves they'd realize there's no way I could know it all. And if I did, I probably wouldn't need them.
Oh heck yeah! There's a theater like that a little way from where I live, but it was second run movies. I got to see the Matrix while me and my buddy drank a pitcher of beer. One of my most memorable theater experiences.
It's exactly the kind of thing that theaters should be thinking about, how they can increase the value to the patron and keep them comming back for more. Amazingly, companies that think like that have a tendency to make lots of money.
...and there's still a pretty huge difference between seeing a movie on a widescreen TV vs. an actual theater screen which is however many feet tall and wide.
I bought some mid-high end Klipsh speakers and a mid-range Pioneer surround sound receiver. It's not even dialed in properly because I accidently reset the reciever to factory defaults and haven't had a chance to dial it in again.
My TV is a nice, but not exceptional. When new, it was awesome, but it pales by comparison to today's DLP HDTVs. It's a 37" standard def. Mitsubishi Megaview.
Since I've had this setup, I've had continual disappointment of the quality on most occasions that I've gone to the theater. The sound is almost never as good, and even though the screen is usually better, scratchs on the print and projection equipment being set too dim have been common occurances. I thought it was just my local theater at first, but I've gone to several others in the area and out of town. On average my sound kicks butt over the theaters and my video is only slightly worse (and on a few occasions better).
From TFA: DVD sales, while still robust, are no longer rising exponentially, and some analysts say that a poor box office performance this summer will lead to poor DVD sales this winter.
Let's see how this actually pans out. My guess is some of the poor movies aren't going to sell well on DVD either, but that if you add up DVDs sold and box office tickets sold you'll find the total industry "units sold" is still far ahead of anything the industry saw with box office + tapes in the mid nineties.
The movie theater has always been better than what most people get in their home. Still is for many people. But as Wal-Mart sells more and more boxed surround sound and starts getting HDTV off the ground, joe average is going to start liking his home better than the multiplex. I think the best way for theaters to deal with this is to:
A)STOP WHINING! Complaining that I'm not buying your product is not the best way to get me to start. Samsung never whines about me not buying their HDTVs.
B)Improve your sound. Don't just have surround sound, but get high quality speakers that capture nice low sounds while still giving a focused punch for those explosions. You're competing with people sitting in "the sweet spot" at home, many of them with good equipment.
C)Improve your print. Go digital or have equipment that won't scratch your print. You're competing with a perfect digital presention via HDTV or DVD.
D)Improve your screen. Get high quality projection screens and play your movies at the proper brightness settings. You're competing with 53" DLP
E)Improve your environment. Stadium seating, comfy chairs, raisable arm rests, wider arm rests so you don't have to share with your neibor, wider, more comfortable seats. You're competing with my couch.
If the theaters do all these things, people will still continue to view them as the superior viewing environment. If they don't, many people, like me, will find the home viewing experience wins.
I had to go back and re-read TFA after reading this post. On first reading I had thought the books were being transferred to other nearby shools rather than within the same school. This, of course, becomes a complete non-issue if the books are still readily available to students at that school.
However, this has gotten people to talking about the differences between gathering info on a computer and gathering info from books. I have to point out that regardless of which method is "better," the vast majority of the books in question are simply not available for free "checkout" in electronic form. Project Guttenburg is awesome and would be my first stop for classics, but it would be a pretty big mistake to think 20th and 21st century authors are irrelivant.
Until students can get a huge cross-section of copyrighted authors available to them online, we have to keep the print libraries.
In our IT department it has been made very clear that we never snoop in anyone's email or home directory without either the prior concent of the 'owner' or the fact that there is some kind of an emergency that must be addressed. Similarly, we've directed our PC techs to only browse the folder structure as appears necessary to complete the task at hand.
Yes, we have the law on our side and can look at anything we damn well want on our network. We don't snoop, not because we're required not to snoop, but because our whole job is to serve the end user community and it's just plain rude to snoop on someone you're serving.
I know there are a lot of different views on this and I know the law says that the company owns everything. The law also says you can kill your dog for any reason or even no reason whatsoever. People need to realize that the law does not always follow what is right and in those cases where it doesn't, doing what's right is always the best course of action.
I always wondered about mail for astronauts. Resupply ships couldn't possibly bring all the mail, but I suppose they could get a 'priority' 'message' once in a while. At about $5,000 per pound on the space shuttle that would be one expensive subscription.
DO NOT PURCHASE SONGS BACKED BY THE RIAA. It is only increasing their finances which are used to back legislation and smear campaigns to further erode fair-use rights.
I didn't go quite that far, but I considered, and put back, a CD with copy protection simply because it had copy protection. I'm not a zealot either. I decided not to buy it because I listen to a lot of music on my PSP and the PSP is MP3 only.
I was neither going to restrict my music to times I had a CD player handy, nor was I going to buy a different device to listen to WMAs. I can't download it from an authorized sorce in MP3 format. So is my quest to listen to high quality digital music legaly on my device at an end?
Ok, there are alternatives. I can flat out pirate the CD. I can buy it and then pirate it. I can use allofmp3 (probably the same as pirating). I can buy it on iTunes and then burn, then rip (there goes "high quality" out the window). Is it just me or does every options available to me include either pirating, low quality, lots of work or all of the above?
In the end, my decision was clear. I decided that though I liked the band, there were plenty of other bands I also liked so I bought a CD from someone else. I stayed legal, got very high quality rips and didn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them. If they made me mud wrestle Ron Jeremy to get chocolate ice cream, you can bet I'd develop a taste for vanilla instead.
a product such as this can make a real difference. I also get better leverage by using a mini keyboard and putting the mouse up on the keyboard surface rather than using the mouse tray as shown. I've loved the logitech mice I've had over the years, but their keyboards are so large that I don't hassle with them. Logitech, if you're listening, you should make something like the Nostromo N52, but wireless if you want to get a little extra of my money.
I don't know much about mice and keyboards for consoles, but PC gaming in the livingroom rocks. My home theatre speakers are many times better than my computer speakers and gaming on such a big screen is just plain fun.
What chance do operating systems like BEOS stand against Mac and Windows? What advantages are there to using BEOS?
I liked the mention of hobby. It explains a great deal of open source projects. I have no problem whatsoever with hobbiests just dinking around with an OS or app. I think it's pretty cool. But people should be a little more clear about their aspirations for a project and not try to pretend like their hobby will change the world (or even be useful at all).
It's kind of like writing poetry or painting for the vast majority of people. It's rewarding and enriching, but chances are no one but your closest friends will ever be interested in it.
You are very wrong. Companies that target the poor make big bucks. Wal-Mart is an excellent example. There's even a saying to go along with it: "If you want to be rich, sell to the poor. If you want to be poor, sell to the rich."
The fact is, there are way more poor people than rich. World-wide, there are way more poor people than middle class. Most of those poor people are buying soap, clothes and food. Many of them are buying entertainment too.
Cash strapped people can and do buy gaming consoles and will pick the lower priced ones when the cost comes down low enough. Sony still makes money off the PS1. It's still making tons of money off the PS2 as well. You can be sure the rich and middle class bought their PS1 or PS2 years ago, meaning a whold lot of that profit is coming from... you got it, cash strapped people that can only just now afford it.
I hope they do it with the PC too! I want to use only Microsoft licensed keyboards, mice and hard drives. I want the CPUs to be hand-picked by MS and I only want to use MS-approved HD-DVD instead of that yucky Blue-Ray.
In fact, I don't know what I ever saw in the ability to choose products based on their merits. Having a big brother to help me make these choices will really enhance my life. It's double-plus good.
To go with something you know will do the job and that additionally your IT staff is familiar with is the very definition of competence. On the other hand, going with something you've never heard of just because it's 'free' is an incompetent thing to do.
I use Apache and MySQL, but I'd hesitate to recommend them to someone who has never heard of them. If they're not even familiar enough with open source to know the big players then it's questionable they'll get the value they deserve from them. There's tremendous value in using products you already know well, even if those products are relatively expensive.
P.S. Has anyone ever successfully bought a used iTunes track? Are there any used iTunes stores? Have you ever checked the bins at those used iTunes stores and found this gem of a classic track that's out of distribution? Did you ever have a friend who sold their entire iTunes track collection for a few hundred bucks so they could pay the rent when times were rough?
If you can't sell 'em, then what do you really own? Maybe it doesn't bother you to not have any resale 'rights' but at least take some time to understand that your CD collection has a value attached to it but your iTunes collection has no value. When you die, your kids are will be forced to re-buy your favorite music in order to play it at your funeral.
TW
Re:So much for selling used books
on
Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There are few areas where everyone can win by circumventing some economic thing, but school books are one of them. Buy and sell books from other students and avoid being gouged by bookstores who are raking in absurd percentages.
half.com is doing it. I got all my books during a recent semester for $200, in good condition. I went through the bookstore and totaled up what they would have cost new: $750.
You have just become the embodyment of the real fear of media compaies in the digital age... loss of control. As the internet brings us closer together, distribution channels change. PSP only available in Japan? No problem, I'll buy from Japan. Books expensive at the student book store? Got it covered, I'll buy from half.com.
Make no mistake, DRM is only partialy about copying. The other part is plain and simple control of distribution. DVD region codes do nothing to stop illegal copying. Putting a time limit on your new e-book is not a copy protection gimick. In the first case they want to control who buys when so they can build buzz on their terms and get the maximum manipulation of the audience. In the second case they want to make sure that everybody buys a new book so they can maximize their profits. All of a sudden, half.com is irrelevant and "pirates" aren't even a tiny part of the equation.
In some cases the DRM itself becomes the the control method. Since iTunes has an effective monopoly in online music distribution, the record lables can continue their practice of shaping how their message reaches the consumer. The promise of online music is that you can buy music from any source and put it on any device, but the practice of putting DRM on every track effectively short circuits this dream. Now the music companies get to control distribution in roughly the same way that they always have including the wonderful practices of price fixing and offering horrible contracts to bands because they have no other realistic way of making use of the distribution channels.
Did you read 'piracy' somewhere in that last paragraph? Neither did I. DRM is marketed to lawmakers and consumers as just this little, tiny inconvience to stop the horrible scourge of the evil pirates. If that was what we were buying, it might even be acceptable. But what what we're really buying, in this case, is the complete removal of an entire used book industry. In the case of music and movies, we're buying the continued presence of the distributor to control and overprice what we watch and hear. I don't want those things, but as long as the lawmakers and consumers keep hearing the message of "piracy", I'm gonna have little choice.
I've always suspected that the modest rate of homosexuality was not an evolutionary problem, but I didn't have any good examples of how a homosexual gene might be beneficial. I think your post's comparison to non-sexual members of other species helped clear that up for me. Thanks!
But can I ask you for more? Can you think of a mammal species whos homo or non sexuality has been studied and thought to be benneficial? I fear the insect examples might be to far removed to make a comparison that a non-scientist might understand.
Be careful of this kind of question. I know many people who'd send you a Bible or other religous text as an answer. Of course, when they hand it to you you could always ask if it's the official, authorized copy while looking all over for the hologram as proof of authenticity.
ok, ya got me. Teaches me to make blanket statements. I'm thinking now of other examples as well, but they all come with a very significant private component. Even the presense of private road crews working in a competitive environment is neccessary to keep our current roads in good running order.
First off, parent and grandparent are wrong. Neither the military, nor government agencies have been able to make major infrastructural changes in our country. It's always been industry. Don't get me wrong, the military and the government have, on occasion, done a great deal to get things started (think darpanet), but it's always been the free enterprise system that's balooned those things to global significance (think cisco and intel).
On the other hand, the article was wrong too. According to the article: "But once we go down this road, there are no guarantees that other countries will play by our rules. Hey, guess what? There's no guarentee they'll play by our rules even if we don't go down this path. If I were china and I didnt want the US to use some of it's coolest weapons, I'd take out GPS. I wouldn't even have to try very hard as the US has shown me just how to do it back in 1985 with fighter jet launched anti-satallite missles.
But finally, the premise is wrong. Why would the US launch critical military infrastructure (the GPS) without protecting it? When have we ever done anything like that? The US had squadrons of stealth fighters before we ever admited to having them. We're obviously capable of building very large, very expensive infrastructure clandestinely and then denying that it exists. I don't know for a fact that we already have space-based weapons, but when you add it up, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that it's already a done deal.
Too true, but me and my wife are still having trouble concieving. I've told her a thousand times that sperm is absorbed through the skin on her stomach and back, but she thinks she might have heard something different in sex ed.
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I think Microsoft is realising that locking up Office document formats isn't going to work for much longer...
Hasn't stopped them from keeping Windows Media formats, the Xbox, and Instant Messaging protocols locked up.
Microsoft doesn't mind a fight if they think they think lock-up will make them money and they believe they have a shot at winning.
I downloaded "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" from PG a few days ago for a car trip. I was very pleasently surprised at the quality of the book. The reader had a great voice, great pacing and a terrific feal for the attitudes and emotions of the characters.
I sure hope they get some more talented humans to do some reading. I'd much rather stare at a wall than listen to the computer read versions.
For all of you non-programmers looking for a way to 'give back' for all the software you make use of, this would be an excellent place to start.
TW
No fair, you stole my joke! But I was going to say Notepad, which everone knows would be much funnier.
Seriously though, they did leave out two very important points in Windows favor.
1. Games. Yes, PC gamers much prefer the selection of Windows games over the selection of Linux games. It's not that Linux doesn't have a few gems, just that I had to use the word 'few' in this sentence.
2. With Windows, you get to have the exact same warts as all of your friends and family. a) misery loves company and b) there's a much better chance your brother in law is going to be able to help you with a Windows issue than a Linux issue. Market share alone will fix this problem just as market share alone caused it, but until then the social networking of Windows users helping other Windows users with should not be underestimated.
TW
P.S. I know there's this whole internet thing with lots of friendly people just waiting to help you with your Linux issues. Grandma will not use it. She will ask her husband, then her son, then every other family member until someone can help. If none of those people use Linux, she'll be out of luck. If some of those people use Mac or Windows, they'll try to convert her to a "better" OS.
One question though: Does it run on linux?
Nah. It doesn't run Mac either.
The problem with this DRM doesn't have much to do with fairnes, but rather with lock-in. If you borrow from this library you better be sporting Windows.
This line from the article kind of sums it up: Just as the lack of a standard digital audio format has fragmented the music download market, it affects audiobooks.
In days past, you could buy, rent, borrow from just about anyone and be able to play it on the prevailing media player of the day. In the new digital millenium, you lock yourself out of a significant part of the media world based on your choice of player.
Yeah, you could point to Beta and VHS as an example of what happened in the past, but at least one of those choices was a choice for a variety of companies who make sorce material and media players. This is more like Beta vs. Beta; no matter what you choose, you choose lock-in to one company or another.
I happen to own a Windows SmartPhone, so I could borrow from this library, but I couldn't let my daughter use it on her iPod. If this happend ot be FairPlay instead of WMA, then she could have borrowed it and I'd be stuck. The only way for consumers to win with DRM will be for all the players to agree on one standard, but the weather forcast still looks quite hot in hades at the moment.
TW
that line should have been: "They're building this adult portable gaming and media market from scratch and despite sales numbers less than the DS, I think they're largely succeeding.
And one more observation. I've never seen anyone under 15 with a PSP, but I was at the doctor's office the other day and both me and another 30-something were playing away on our PSPs. The adult portable gamer is real, it just remains to be seen how many of us there are.
TW
To the designer of SUVs, what happens is the economy car market is, to a large extent, irrelevant.
I think the comment about relevancy was more to point out the difference in the markets than to say the DS isn't an important consumer product. Clearly the DS is being bought, but the PSP isn't going after the same sort of person who's interested in Nintendogs. It's going for the Grand Theft Auto crowd.
When the PS1 hit the market it basically ignored NES, SNES buyers and went to a demograhic that was quite a bit older. All of their initial advertising reflected this (remember the dominatrix chick?). They basically built that market and it turned out that 15-30 market was quite lucritive.
Now they're attempting the same thing with the PSP. They don't have half naked chicks trying to sell it, but they do have a game lineup that's decidedly _not_ cute. Even the UMD movies are largely PG-13 and above. They're building this portable gaming and media market from scratch and despite sales numbers less than the DS, I think they're largely succeeding.
Clearly under these circumstances, the DS is quite "irrelevant."
TW
I work in an environment where the reverse has been true. Very bright people routinely got put in management and I'd be happy to have our CTO at any engineer position.
I'm in management myself now and I consider myself to be roughly parrellel in level of knowledge to my staff. This situation has brought with it a very interesting observation: Bright people don't know stuff.
Ya see, the Novell guy, the ADS guy and they router guy aren't always the best at fixing their PCs. They're too focused on their main job and the PC is just a distraction. On the other hand, the really bright guy we hired to do magic with our PC images doesn't have a clue about our Exchange servers.
As the boss of all of these guys, I find myself both giving knowledge and asking for it on a regular basis. Do they think I'm stupid because I don't understand the exact thing they're working on? Maybe. But if they were a little smarter themselves they'd realize there's no way I could know it all. And if I did, I probably wouldn't need them.
TW
Oh heck yeah! There's a theater like that a little way from where I live, but it was second run movies. I got to see the Matrix while me and my buddy drank a pitcher of beer. One of my most memorable theater experiences.
It's exactly the kind of thing that theaters should be thinking about, how they can increase the value to the patron and keep them comming back for more. Amazingly, companies that think like that have a tendency to make lots of money.
TW
...and there's still a pretty huge difference between seeing a movie on a widescreen TV vs. an actual theater screen which is however many feet tall and wide.
I bought some mid-high end Klipsh speakers and a mid-range Pioneer surround sound receiver. It's not even dialed in properly because I accidently reset the reciever to factory defaults and haven't had a chance to dial it in again.
My TV is a nice, but not exceptional. When new, it was awesome, but it pales by comparison to today's DLP HDTVs. It's a 37" standard def. Mitsubishi Megaview.
Since I've had this setup, I've had continual disappointment of the quality on most occasions that I've gone to the theater. The sound is almost never as good, and even though the screen is usually better, scratchs on the print and projection equipment being set too dim have been common occurances. I thought it was just my local theater at first, but I've gone to several others in the area and out of town. On average my sound kicks butt over the theaters and my video is only slightly worse (and on a few occasions better).
From TFA: DVD sales, while still robust, are no longer rising exponentially, and some analysts say that a poor box office performance this summer will lead to poor DVD sales this winter.
Let's see how this actually pans out. My guess is some of the poor movies aren't going to sell well on DVD either, but that if you add up DVDs sold and box office tickets sold you'll find the total industry "units sold" is still far ahead of anything the industry saw with box office + tapes in the mid nineties.
The movie theater has always been better than what most people get in their home. Still is for many people. But as Wal-Mart sells more and more boxed surround sound and starts getting HDTV off the ground, joe average is going to start liking his home better than the multiplex. I think the best way for theaters to deal with this is to:
A)STOP WHINING! Complaining that I'm not buying your product is not the best way to get me to start. Samsung never whines about me not buying their HDTVs.
B)Improve your sound. Don't just have surround sound, but get high quality speakers that capture nice low sounds while still giving a focused punch for those explosions. You're competing with people sitting in "the sweet spot" at home, many of them with good equipment.
C)Improve your print. Go digital or have equipment that won't scratch your print. You're competing with a perfect digital presention via HDTV or DVD.
D)Improve your screen. Get high quality projection screens and play your movies at the proper brightness settings. You're competing with 53" DLP
E)Improve your environment. Stadium seating, comfy chairs, raisable arm rests, wider arm rests so you don't have to share with your neibor, wider, more comfortable seats. You're competing with my couch.
If the theaters do all these things, people will still continue to view them as the superior viewing environment. If they don't, many people, like me, will find the home viewing experience wins.
TW
I had to go back and re-read TFA after reading this post. On first reading I had thought the books were being transferred to other nearby shools rather than within the same school. This, of course, becomes a complete non-issue if the books are still readily available to students at that school.
However, this has gotten people to talking about the differences between gathering info on a computer and gathering info from books. I have to point out that regardless of which method is "better," the vast majority of the books in question are simply not available for free "checkout" in electronic form. Project Guttenburg is awesome and would be my first stop for classics, but it would be a pretty big mistake to think 20th and 21st century authors are irrelivant.
Until students can get a huge cross-section of copyrighted authors available to them online, we have to keep the print libraries.
TW
In our IT department it has been made very clear that we never snoop in anyone's email or home directory without either the prior concent of the 'owner' or the fact that there is some kind of an emergency that must be addressed. Similarly, we've directed our PC techs to only browse the folder structure as appears necessary to complete the task at hand.
Yes, we have the law on our side and can look at anything we damn well want on our network. We don't snoop, not because we're required not to snoop, but because our whole job is to serve the end user community and it's just plain rude to snoop on someone you're serving.
I know there are a lot of different views on this and I know the law says that the company owns everything. The law also says you can kill your dog for any reason or even no reason whatsoever. People need to realize that the law does not always follow what is right and in those cases where it doesn't, doing what's right is always the best course of action.
TW
Nah...All you need is a playboy subscription.
I always wondered about mail for astronauts. Resupply ships couldn't possibly bring all the mail, but I suppose they could get a 'priority' 'message' once in a while. At about $5,000 per pound on the space shuttle that would be one expensive subscription.
TW
DO NOT PURCHASE SONGS BACKED BY THE RIAA. It is only increasing their finances which are used to back legislation and smear campaigns to further erode fair-use rights.
I didn't go quite that far, but I considered, and put back, a CD with copy protection simply because it had copy protection. I'm not a zealot either. I decided not to buy it because I listen to a lot of music on my PSP and the PSP is MP3 only.
I was neither going to restrict my music to times I had a CD player handy, nor was I going to buy a different device to listen to WMAs. I can't download it from an authorized sorce in MP3 format. So is my quest to listen to high quality digital music legaly on my device at an end?
Ok, there are alternatives. I can flat out pirate the CD. I can buy it and then pirate it. I can use allofmp3 (probably the same as pirating). I can buy it on iTunes and then burn, then rip (there goes "high quality" out the window). Is it just me or does every options available to me include either pirating, low quality, lots of work or all of the above?
In the end, my decision was clear. I decided that though I liked the band, there were plenty of other bands I also liked so I bought a CD from someone else. I stayed legal, got very high quality rips and didn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them. If they made me mud wrestle Ron Jeremy to get chocolate ice cream, you can bet I'd develop a taste for vanilla instead.
TW
a product such as this can make a real difference. I also get better leverage by using a mini keyboard and putting the mouse up on the keyboard surface rather than using the mouse tray as shown. I've loved the logitech mice I've had over the years, but their keyboards are so large that I don't hassle with them. Logitech, if you're listening, you should make something like the Nostromo N52, but wireless if you want to get a little extra of my money.
I don't know much about mice and keyboards for consoles, but PC gaming in the livingroom rocks. My home theatre speakers are many times better than my computer speakers and gaming on such a big screen is just plain fun.
TW
Is there anything but a hobby going on here?
What chance do operating systems like BEOS stand against Mac and Windows? What advantages are there to using BEOS?
I liked the mention of hobby. It explains a great deal of open source projects. I have no problem whatsoever with hobbiests just dinking around with an OS or app. I think it's pretty cool. But people should be a little more clear about their aspirations for a project and not try to pretend like their hobby will change the world (or even be useful at all).
It's kind of like writing poetry or painting for the vast majority of people. It's rewarding and enriching, but chances are no one but your closest friends will ever be interested in it.
TW
You are very wrong. Companies that target the poor make big bucks. Wal-Mart is an excellent example. There's even a saying to go along with it: "If you want to be rich, sell to the poor. If you want to be poor, sell to the rich."
The fact is, there are way more poor people than rich. World-wide, there are way more poor people than middle class. Most of those poor people are buying soap, clothes and food. Many of them are buying entertainment too.
Cash strapped people can and do buy gaming consoles and will pick the lower priced ones when the cost comes down low enough. Sony still makes money off the PS1. It's still making tons of money off the PS2 as well. You can be sure the rich and middle class bought their PS1 or PS2 years ago, meaning a whold lot of that profit is coming from... you got it, cash strapped people that can only just now afford it.
TW
I hope they do it with the PC too! I want to use only Microsoft licensed keyboards, mice and hard drives. I want the CPUs to be hand-picked by MS and I only want to use MS-approved HD-DVD instead of that yucky Blue-Ray.
In fact, I don't know what I ever saw in the ability to choose products based on their merits. Having a big brother to help me make these choices will really enhance my life. It's double-plus good.
TW
Not all businesses have competent IT people.
To go with something you know will do the job and that additionally your IT staff is familiar with is the very definition of competence. On the other hand, going with something you've never heard of just because it's 'free' is an incompetent thing to do.
I use Apache and MySQL, but I'd hesitate to recommend them to someone who has never heard of them. If they're not even familiar enough with open source to know the big players then it's questionable they'll get the value they deserve from them. There's tremendous value in using products you already know well, even if those products are relatively expensive.
TW
P.S. Has anyone ever successfully bought a used iTunes track? Are there any used iTunes stores? Have you ever checked the bins at those used iTunes stores and found this gem of a classic track that's out of distribution? Did you ever have a friend who sold their entire iTunes track collection for a few hundred bucks so they could pay the rent when times were rough?
If you can't sell 'em, then what do you really own? Maybe it doesn't bother you to not have any resale 'rights' but at least take some time to understand that your CD collection has a value attached to it but your iTunes collection has no value. When you die, your kids are will be forced to re-buy your favorite music in order to play it at your funeral.
TW
There are few areas where everyone can win by circumventing some economic thing, but school books are one of them. Buy and sell books from other students and avoid being gouged by bookstores who are raking in absurd percentages.
half.com is doing it. I got all my books during a recent semester for $200, in good condition. I went through the bookstore and totaled up what they would have cost new: $750.
You have just become the embodyment of the real fear of media compaies in the digital age... loss of control. As the internet brings us closer together, distribution channels change. PSP only available in Japan? No problem, I'll buy from Japan. Books expensive at the student book store? Got it covered, I'll buy from half.com.
Make no mistake, DRM is only partialy about copying. The other part is plain and simple control of distribution. DVD region codes do nothing to stop illegal copying. Putting a time limit on your new e-book is not a copy protection gimick. In the first case they want to control who buys when so they can build buzz on their terms and get the maximum manipulation of the audience. In the second case they want to make sure that everybody buys a new book so they can maximize their profits. All of a sudden, half.com is irrelevant and "pirates" aren't even a tiny part of the equation.
In some cases the DRM itself becomes the the control method. Since iTunes has an effective monopoly in online music distribution, the record lables can continue their practice of shaping how their message reaches the consumer. The promise of online music is that you can buy music from any source and put it on any device, but the practice of putting DRM on every track effectively short circuits this dream. Now the music companies get to control distribution in roughly the same way that they always have including the wonderful practices of price fixing and offering horrible contracts to bands because they have no other realistic way of making use of the distribution channels.
Did you read 'piracy' somewhere in that last paragraph? Neither did I. DRM is marketed to lawmakers and consumers as just this little, tiny inconvience to stop the horrible scourge of the evil pirates. If that was what we were buying, it might even be acceptable. But what what we're really buying, in this case, is the complete removal of an entire used book industry. In the case of music and movies, we're buying the continued presence of the distributor to control and overprice what we watch and hear. I don't want those things, but as long as the lawmakers and consumers keep hearing the message of "piracy", I'm gonna have little choice.
TW
Bees?
I've always suspected that the modest rate of homosexuality was not an evolutionary problem, but I didn't have any good examples of how a homosexual gene might be beneficial. I think your post's comparison to non-sexual members of other species helped clear that up for me. Thanks!
But can I ask you for more? Can you think of a mammal species whos homo or non sexuality has been studied and thought to be benneficial? I fear the insect examples might be to far removed to make a comparison that a non-scientist might understand.
TW
Be careful of this kind of question. I know many people who'd send you a Bible or other religous text as an answer. Of course, when they hand it to you you could always ask if it's the official, authorized copy while looking all over for the hologram as proof of authenticity.
TW
ok, ya got me. Teaches me to make blanket statements. I'm thinking now of other examples as well, but they all come with a very significant private component. Even the presense of private road crews working in a competitive environment is neccessary to keep our current roads in good running order.
TW
First off, parent and grandparent are wrong. Neither the military, nor government agencies have been able to make major infrastructural changes in our country. It's always been industry. Don't get me wrong, the military and the government have, on occasion, done a great deal to get things started (think darpanet), but it's always been the free enterprise system that's balooned those things to global significance (think cisco and intel).
On the other hand, the article was wrong too. According to the article: "But once we go down this road, there are no guarantees that other countries will play by our rules. Hey, guess what? There's no guarentee they'll play by our rules even if we don't go down this path. If I were china and I didnt want the US to use some of it's coolest weapons, I'd take out GPS. I wouldn't even have to try very hard as the US has shown me just how to do it back in 1985 with fighter jet launched anti-satallite missles.
But finally, the premise is wrong. Why would the US launch critical military infrastructure (the GPS) without protecting it? When have we ever done anything like that? The US had squadrons of stealth fighters before we ever admited to having them. We're obviously capable of building very large, very expensive infrastructure clandestinely and then denying that it exists. I don't know for a fact that we already have space-based weapons, but when you add it up, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that it's already a done deal.
TW
Too true, but me and my wife are still having trouble concieving. I've told her a thousand times that sperm is absorbed through the skin on her stomach and back, but she thinks she might have heard something different in sex ed.