Why does EVERY engineer...need to run "business applications"?!
Because every non-engineer, and a distressing number of engineers, send unnecessarily richly-formatted files. Ever been asked a yes-or-no question in the form of an Excel spreadsheet? I have.
That, and Outlook. For some reason the suits still don't see it as the enemy.
Self-destruction keeps coming up in this discussion. I don't think that's necessarily a likely outcome of technology alone. I think it's a not-too-unlikely outcome of technology and human nature, but that doesn't fully apply elsewhere, does it?
Has anyone wondered what our own world would be like without testosterone?
I remember 90K sigle-sided 5 1/4 disks used with an OS called FLEX. In high school each student had one disk, 'cause they were expensive. They'd often go bad with a damaged table of contents, but there was a utility that only I knew how to use that'd allow you to look at the disc a block at a time. I could randomly select blocks until I found one that was part of the table of contents and then follow the links forward and back, re-connecting files (also located by random discovery) to the TOC. I could usually recover almost everything, including deleted files. In retrospect I shoulda charged for this.
In the '70's I read a book about space colonization that said these orbiting microwave power stations were going to pay the hundred-billion-dollar cost of putting a 10,000-person space colony in orbit, by 2000 or so. Anyone remember that book?
I use a unique email address for all online vendors. The one I used for ftd.com is being spammed by what appears to be a single spammer. I've been unable to convince FTD that this is a security issue.
How long does it take to add "pick up milk" to a Palm-based to-do list, starting from turning the thing on. Tell me the steps to adding to the to-do list, including entering the text.
I know nothing about these Palm gizmos except that even the most techno-savy, gadget-happy dudes end up selling them.
how long will it be before we start seeing the cable companies (such as Comcast) start dropping their prices to levels which compete directly with dial-up?
That first day can be a real smack in the fanny, no? How's day two going?
If the RIAA would just allow their member companies to price their CD's at US$11.95 per album-length CD the incentive to pirate music would drop drastically.
Have you actually priced CDs lately? Go to amazon and put a bunch of stuff you might actually buy in your cart. Note the club price, too.
I've bought a few hundred CDs in recent months and I've averaged $10 each. That's less than your $12 figure, no?
Partial albums are another way of charging more. They don't offer the remaining tracks on a partial album at a discount if there are more than 10. A 14-track album that is missing a track will, for example, cost $13. And the missing track is generally a desirable one.
I wrote a pre-processor that'd do the line numbering for me. As soon as it was working I re-wrote it without line numbers and used it to pre-process itself. Then I added block if-then-else and other stuff.
Probably more than zero, which is what they get from the p2p networks.
you've... paid... for promotion and distribution expenses that were paid for several years ago by previous cd sales.
Older CDs tend to be less expensive.
I'll bet there are tens of thousands of people who instead of paying...
...stole it. And how much time did they spend looking for the same hundreds of CDs? And did they actually find those same hundreds of CDs? And did they get perfect copies?
I can earn money and buy CDs faster than I can find music on p2p networks. And by buying them I get everything I want, I get perfect copies, and the artists get something.
I don't have time to have the slashdot sense of entitlement to FREE STUFF! Someone suggested I could have vacationed in Bermuda with that money. That's just dumb. I'd have spent that time trawling p2p networks.
I personally laugh at the idea of buying a $10-$20 CD anymore
I keep reading how expensive CDs are and I don't get it. I've been on a music-buying binge the last six months or so. I've probably bought 300-400 in that time.
I have a CD club membership at amazon.com. It's so unobtrusive I don't remember who runs it, but it's one of those cooperative deals where amazon takes the order and some club sends the discs. The requirement is just to buy three discs in a year, which I did with my first order and have repeated many times since. Perhaps half of what I want is avaialable through the club at $7.50-$10. Most discs are $8.50 or $10.
When the club doesn't have it amazon usually sells it for $10-$13. Perhaps 1 in 5 discs I want cost more than that. Often they are also available through Amazon's "marketplace" of individual sellers. You have to pay $2.50 for shipping but I've almost always found a marketplace seller with a good rating than can sell what I'm looking for, with shipping, for under $12.
I keep my cart full of a couple dozen things I eventually want so that I can always easily find three or more discs to get my total to $25 for free shipping. There's also no sales tax. The same rules apply for club purchases (but for marketplace purchases shipping is always $2.50).
Barnesandnoble is usually more expensive but if I find a disc that seems pricey at amazon I check b&n. Sometimes they are cheaper.
If all that fails there's always secondspin.com or even ebay.
Bottom line, average over hundreds of recent purchases I pay about $10 per CD.
Explaining anything (an event, why the sun rises, why we exist etc..) by inventing a god is a weak answer because anyone can make it up and it shifts the question from 'how did the boat get there?'
A little more interesting, though, when the the religious explanation comes before the discovery, no?
Geologists say even though there is evidence of a flood in Mesopotamia in Sumerian times, it is not possible for a ship to make landfall at an altitude as high as Mount Ararat.
According to the Genesis account, the flood covered all the earth. If there is a God, he can do that, no? With more water than exists on the earth, no? Why is it always necessary to poo-poo religious ideas with scientific logic? Is that supposed to be convincing?
If there is a God he doesn't have to obey scientific principles. If you think he doesn't exist you can't prove you're right with science.
Yeah, I'm a scientist of sorts. My degree says I'm a physicist and a mathematician, and my work says I even practice some of it. Still, I missed the part that says I'm too smart to believe in God. Was that part included in the slashdot signup?:-)
If an ark is found higher than it possibly could be found that'd be the most important, and the coolest, discovery in human history, IMO. I'm not counting on it, though.
Are there any Linux users here that are now more likely to purchase from the iTunes Music Store? How about slimp3/squeezebox users? Non-iPod portable player users? I'm guessing this tool is of legitimate use to a vanishingly small number of people.
That said, I don't see how this can hurt Apple. For file sharers, AAC->CD->AAC may involve more quality loss but do file sharers care? Apple may make noises to protect its property but I doubt if this is the end of iTMS.
BTW, I considered getting a Squeezebox but didn't because I have a large number of iTMS-purchased AAC files, so I guess I'm a potential user. However, what I would probably have done is convert iTMS AAC->AIFF->FLAK. Even for the number of iTMS files I have we aren't talking about a huge difference in the size of my library. I have a lot more CD-ripped tracks than iTMS-purchased tracks. So I guess even for this purpose this tool is of limited use.
Amy
Canadian file sharing the only good joke this year
on
Introducing RMS-Lint
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· Score: 1
At least the Canadian legal file sharing story was a good read, though coming a day early I'd call it cheating. Is that going to be the only good joke this year?
You won't necessarily lose the likes of TechTV. It costs less to produce that type of programming than, say, NBC's well-paid swill. Who says TechTV can't offer its programming to the cable companies for less? That's certainly already the case. Therefore it'd take fewer subscribers to support it.
Discovery and the like are more popular than you may think, so I don't see that type of programming going away, either.
Adults are projected to watch, on average, 1,669 hours of television in 2004, about 70 days worth, according to census figures.
1669 hours... a perspective:
If you are awake 16 hours per day 1669 hours is 104 days, not "just" 70. Apparently, on average, adults watch TV 29% of their waking hours. If you work/commute 45 hours per week, your "free time" is, if you do nothing else, about 9 1/2 hours per day, of which, on average, you watch TV 4 1/2 hours.
So the average adult uses more than half of their available time watching TV.
if somebody's going to spend the extra $$ to buy a disc with super extra high quality, are they going to care about a lossy stereo encoding?
That was addressed in the article you and at least a couple moderators didn't read.
From the article:
The inclusion of a DVD-ROM zone upon a DVD-Audio disc is the choice of the label concerned and is likely to be based upon whether or not they believe the addition will behove the title. In other words, we're probably going to see lossy content for the likes of music PC and iPod users on a Britney Spears disc, but not as part of the latest freeform jazz title from The Other People.
In other words, it's there for the convenience of folks who want to use it on their PC or portable, but it's up to the labels to decide if it even makes sense to include it based on the likely purchaser of the particular title.
I'm a Unix hack at a Fortune 5 company. My standing joke: when are we doing a Mac port?
As everywhere, we've had to investigate porting to Windows. To please the bean counters. There are currently too many reasons not to do so, so once again we carry on writing Unix code.
Linux? Biggest reason we can't seriously consider that is there isn't another mega corporation we can get support from. That's important to the suits. They still think we'll need to go knocking on dormroom doors for support.
My Macintosh joke? Hmmm... not so funny anymore. The only piece missing for my part is our version control software isn't available. High-end graphics cards would help, too. But I could get the apps running.
Probably never gonna happen here, but at smaller companies I can see OS X making a dent in the Unix world. Given enough frustration over virus outbreaks I can also see OS X as a viable desktop for the corporate masses. Even our (cough!) beloved MS Office runs on OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Because every non-engineer, and a distressing number of engineers, send unnecessarily richly-formatted files. Ever been asked a yes-or-no question in the form of an Excel spreadsheet? I have.
That, and Outlook. For some reason the suits still don't see it as the enemy.
Amy
Has anyone wondered what our own world would be like without testosterone?
Amy
Try that on a 50G disc.
Amy
High Frontier: Human Colonies In Space
A.
A.
I use a unique email address for all online vendors. The one I used for ftd.com is being spammed by what appears to be a single spammer. I've been unable to convince FTD that this is a security issue.
I know nothing about these Palm gizmos except that even the most techno-savy, gadget-happy dudes end up selling them.
Are they really useful for note-taking?
Have you actually priced CDs lately? Go to amazon and put a bunch of stuff you might actually buy in your cart. Note the club price, too.
I've bought a few hundred CDs in recent months and I've averaged $10 each. That's less than your $12 figure, no?
I've written about this here.
Yeah, retail prices stink, but your price point is very handily met by a store that delivers.
Amy
Amy
Amy
Back in the days when programming was fun.
Amy
Probably more than zero, which is what they get from the p2p networks.
Older CDs tend to be less expensive.
I can earn money and buy CDs faster than I can find music on p2p networks. And by buying them I get everything I want, I get perfect copies, and the artists get something.
I don't have time to have the slashdot sense of entitlement to FREE STUFF! Someone suggested I could have vacationed in Bermuda with that money. That's just dumb. I'd have spent that time trawling p2p networks.
Amy
I keep reading how expensive CDs are and I don't get it. I've been on a music-buying binge the last six months or so. I've probably bought 300-400 in that time.
I have a CD club membership at amazon.com. It's so unobtrusive I don't remember who runs it, but it's one of those cooperative deals where amazon takes the order and some club sends the discs. The requirement is just to buy three discs in a year, which I did with my first order and have repeated many times since. Perhaps half of what I want is avaialable through the club at $7.50-$10. Most discs are $8.50 or $10.
When the club doesn't have it amazon usually sells it for $10-$13. Perhaps 1 in 5 discs I want cost more than that. Often they are also available through Amazon's "marketplace" of individual sellers. You have to pay $2.50 for shipping but I've almost always found a marketplace seller with a good rating than can sell what I'm looking for, with shipping, for under $12.
I keep my cart full of a couple dozen things I eventually want so that I can always easily find three or more discs to get my total to $25 for free shipping. There's also no sales tax. The same rules apply for club purchases (but for marketplace purchases shipping is always $2.50).
Barnesandnoble is usually more expensive but if I find a disc that seems pricey at amazon I check b&n. Sometimes they are cheaper.
If all that fails there's always secondspin.com or even ebay.
Bottom line, average over hundreds of recent purchases I pay about $10 per CD.
Amy
Amy
If there is a God he doesn't have to obey scientific principles. If you think he doesn't exist you can't prove you're right with science.
Yeah, I'm a scientist of sorts. My degree says I'm a physicist and a mathematician, and my work says I even practice some of it. Still, I missed the part that says I'm too smart to believe in God. Was that part included in the slashdot signup? :-)
If an ark is found higher than it possibly could be found that'd be the most important, and the coolest, discovery in human history, IMO. I'm not counting on it, though.
Karma shields up! :-)
Amy
That said, I don't see how this can hurt Apple. For file sharers, AAC->CD->AAC may involve more quality loss but do file sharers care? Apple may make noises to protect its property but I doubt if this is the end of iTMS.
BTW, I considered getting a Squeezebox but didn't because I have a large number of iTMS-purchased AAC files, so I guess I'm a potential user. However, what I would probably have done is convert iTMS AAC->AIFF->FLAK. Even for the number of iTMS files I have we aren't talking about a huge difference in the size of my library. I have a lot more CD-ripped tracks than iTMS-purchased tracks. So I guess even for this purpose this tool is of limited use.
Amy
Amy
Discovery and the like are more popular than you may think, so I don't see that type of programming going away, either.
Amy
1669 hours... a perspective:
If you are awake 16 hours per day 1669 hours is 104 days, not "just" 70. Apparently, on average, adults watch TV 29% of their waking hours. If you work/commute 45 hours per week, your "free time" is, if you do nothing else, about 9 1/2 hours per day, of which, on average, you watch TV 4 1/2 hours.
So the average adult uses more than half of their available time watching TV.
Pretty sad.
Amy
Well, yeah. WMA. Wal-Mart Audio. What did you think it stood for? A.
That was addressed in the article you and at least a couple moderators didn't read.
From the article:
In other words, it's there for the convenience of folks who want to use it on their PC or portable, but it's up to the labels to decide if it even makes sense to include it based on the likely purchaser of the particular title.
Amy
As everywhere, we've had to investigate porting to Windows. To please the bean counters. There are currently too many reasons not to do so, so once again we carry on writing Unix code.
Linux? Biggest reason we can't seriously consider that is there isn't another mega corporation we can get support from. That's important to the suits. They still think we'll need to go knocking on dormroom doors for support.
My Macintosh joke? Hmmm... not so funny anymore. The only piece missing for my part is our version control software isn't available. High-end graphics cards would help, too. But I could get the apps running.
Probably never gonna happen here, but at smaller companies I can see OS X making a dent in the Unix world. Given enough frustration over virus outbreaks I can also see OS X as a viable desktop for the corporate masses. Even our (cough!) beloved MS Office runs on OS X.
Amy
Amy
Think you can trace email better than they can? What are you offering?
Amy