According to Apple, the price hike rumor isn't true. They've have multiyear agreements with the record companies and have"flatly denied" that prices are changing.
It serves two points: 1) to increase the chance that maybe something will be done in either the editorial process or on the technical end to reduce the number of dupes we've been seeing and 2) to point people who may not know it's a dupe to more discussion on the same subject that they might have missed otherwise
Go to the *small* labels. I happen to like obscure music, so this approach works well for me. Warp, Astralwerks, Labrador, Ninjatune, Shadow Records, Eighteenth Street Lounge, Klein and others actually get it - generally for any artist you can either get 2-3 full length songs per album for download or 1:00 - 2:00 high quality sound clips from every song on the album. And you've got built-in "if you like this then you'll like this" sort of relationships because small labels like these tend to focus on specific subgenres.
Please note that I do not recommend this approach if you're looking for major label artists.
And a few other points no one seems to be making (probably because they don't RTFA):
4) If there truly are two copies of the data, redbook and protected, not shared data, then the capacity will effectively be cut in half, meaning this approach could never be applied across the board to Sony's whole catalog since the average album is too long to fit twice on the same CD. Which raises two interesting questions - is the data duplicated or shared? And is the protected data uncompressed, or are you getting a lossy version?
5) You only get one free key to listen to your music. Subsequent keys must be purchased. So if your hard drive fails, or you wipe your drive and forget to backup your keys, you get to buy your music all over again. Not to mention that if you want to listen to your new "CD" in your home office and your computer at work, you will have to pay for two keys.
6) The copy protection system requires an Internet connection, making it even more burdensome than it already is
7) You have to use Sony's proprietary player, like it or not.
All around it sounds like a a great system that is exactly what consumers are asking for. Way to go Sony!
Bear in mind that the Internet is a global medium and not eveyone speaks English as a first language. Most native English speakers posting on Slashdot can't even get their own language right, as it appears that very few of them understand the difference between its and it's, who and whom or less and fewer, just to mention a few of the most common mistakes. (I mention these only in the misguided hope that at least a couple people will take this opportunity to figure it out.)
The gaming press seems to me rather detached from the buying habits of gamers.
You could as easily blame the consumer - Ico and Mark of Kri are two recent games that have gotten consistently glowing reviews from the gaming press, but have only seen dismal sales. There's a reason game companies are putting their effort into Tomb Raider 23 and BMX XXX instead: consumer demand.
Ditto. I use my LCD for high-speed twitch games all the time, and I have no complaints whatsoever. I understand the technical arguments about why LCD is inferior for the display for moving images, but in practice when I play Unreal Tournament 2003 on my Samsung SyncMaster 150T it looks just fine to me, and I'm a picky bastard. I was leery of making the switch from CRT to LCD specifically because of the concerns about how LCD would work with games, but now that I've made the switch I have no regrets.
I've been trying to arrange something similar. My solution is to use a "spare" laptop that sits next to the couch. It accesses the music on my server via a wireless Ethernet card and the audio out runs to my stereo.
The real problem for me is software. I don't want to dig through my collection to put together a playlist. I want a smart jukebox, something that does more than just randomize a set of songs.
Does anyone know of a playlist generator that will use the ID3 tags to allow me to do things like say "Make a playlist that lasts 2 hours of songs that are from 1990 - 1993 in the genres of indie or alternative, without repeating any songs from the same artist"?
The last part is the one where all the solutions I've seen fail. I always end up with a list of "random" songs that will contain the same artist 10 times in a row, even though I have hundreds of artists in my collection.
Truly the most disturbing part of this is the implication that in the office of the future Microsoft will have extended their oh-so-clever-I-want-to-puke C# naming convention to the D# display. After getting a slew of MS products named ActiveSomething, and then suffering through the Product Year scheme started by Windows 95 and subsequently embraced by software companies outside of Redmond and continuing today (Unreal Tournament 2003 anyone?), we can now look forward to seeing such great products as E#, F#, G#....
Don't misunderstand the intent of my post - I'm not saying "Nyah nyah you're a liar, prove it." I'm saying that this subject, like many others, inevitably ends up in an unresolvable cycle of "A is as good/better than B" followed by "No it's not" followed by "Yes it is"...
I was hoping, based on your first post, that you could share some information that would allow the subject to be debated on a higher plane. But if your research is based on links to news releases, I suspect that people here will be looking for something a little more meaty before they crown a CPU king.
Do you actually own an Xbox, or just a Gamecube? I own a Gamecube, a PS2, and an Xbox. I play games on all of them and have plenty of opportunity to make comparisons between the systems. The PS2 has some great looking games, so does the Gamecube. But it's pretty clear to me that the Xbox has more sheer processing power behind it, assuming developers are able to take advantage of it.
I don't own Animal Crossing yet, but calling that "graphically amazing" - are you sure? Every review I've seen mentions that the graphics are closer to N64-level quality. That said, I'll take gameplay over graphics any day and will probably buy it soon.
But Animal Crossing is a Nintendo exclusive and the majority of games that come out now come out for at least a couple systems if not all 3 of the current crop. And knowing each of the systems as I do, I'll get the Xbox version of the game every time because I know it will simply look better on Xbox.
The Xbox's major problem is not having any exclusive killer titles, outside of Halo, that will make people want to buy it if they already own another system. That's why they bought Rare.
And for those of you unfamiliar with the acronym, he's talking about Timesplitters 2, which will be available for PS2, Gamecube and Xbox within the next couple weeks.
I went back and plotted the performance ratio between Moto and Intel and it has held steady around 2x Mhz since 1989.
Where did you get the data to plot this? Can you give us a link to that data and the methodology used for the comparison? Maybe then we could all elevate this debate above "is not/is too."
This isn't a story about the demise of photographers, it's a story about one person's failure to plan ahead and negotiate a suitable contract.
If I'm hired by a company as a freelancer to write code on a project, we have a contract that outlines the benefits and rights for both parties - generally that I get paid and that they own the copyright to any work I do. If I'm not comfortable with their terms, I can refuse the job.
If you want a photographer who will give you digital copies of the pictures on a CD and give up any rights to those images, make it clear when interviewing potential photographers that this is one of your requirements. They have the right to say no or charge you accordingly, and you have the right to insist on finding someone who agrees to your terms.
It's not that people are just doing the math wrong when trying to calculate the correct caloric intake for fat, protein and carbohydrates and that some slight adjustment would bring them back to a normal diet, when the real problem is degrees of magnitude worse. It starts with the fact that most people are completely ignorant of basic nutritional information (what does my body need and what am I actually putting into it) and then eating at McDonald's five times a week and chugging a gallon of soda every day. If you educate yourself about even the simplest information on nutrition and then eat everything in moderation it will make a world of difference.
If you want to get a degree so you can tell people you have a degree, working and going to school at the same time is a feasible approach. Pick a night class or a distance learning program that will certify what you already know without actually challenging you, so your future employers can tick off the "has a degree" checkbox.
If you want an education because it's become important to you to gain knowledge for knowledge's sake and not for the piece of paper that comes with it, strongly consider going back to school only when you can focus on doing so without significant distractions. You need to make your education a priority if you're serious about it, not just another thing crammed into your day.
Like many other posters on this topic, I was smart but unmotivated and directionless coming out of high school. I went to college because that's what I was supposed to do and was miserable as a result. After changing majors 3 or 4 times and never finding something I was interested in I was eventually asked to leave.
I got lucky, career-wise, founding two of my own companies and riding the dot-com wave to success and money. But over time I began to realize and value what I missed by not getting a degree. I finally realized what I was passionate about and found a direction in which to apply myself.
I took a night course for a while concurrent with a job and could have continued doing so easily until I got a degree because the classes were so non-demanding - open book tests, turn your homework in any time before the end of the semester and no one cares if you show up for class or not. After having worked as a software developer for 8 years, the material in CS courses certainly wasn't new or difficult for me. But it wasn't enough either. At 31 years old I'm ready for education in a way that I wasn't prepared for at 17. Now I demand more, both from myself and the experience. So I'm dropping off the career path and focusing all my energy on getting into one of the most prestigious and challenging programs in the US.
You need to decide what's most important to you. If it's running your business, then by all means do that. But you'll be wasting your time and money while probably not getting what it is your looking for yet again if you're treating education as a hobby. If a formal education is truly your priority, act accordingly.
This infuriates me with its ignorance. I've never seen such a piece of sensationalism posing as technical information. Well, outside of Redmond of course.
The author defines the very nature of the Web and then asks us to be concerned. It's like writing a book about an airplane and saying "When you get in an airplane you're actually traveling hundreds of miles an hour thousands of feet in the air strapped to tons of explosive. This is horribly dangerous!"
Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, "backward compatibility" sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie.
Backward compatibility does not mean supporting every single browser that was ever created since the dawn of the Web. How compatible to be is defined differently by each project. My decision on a small project may be to only support IE 5+ for Windows, but that decision would make no sense at all for Yahoo!.
And the cost is too high? How is too high defined, and for whom? If I can spend $10,000 in development costs to make my site available to another 5% of my target audience and I can predict that this will increase revenues by $100,000, then it makes sense to do so.
As a Web developer, allow me to generalize when I say that we do code to standards, standards being defined as what most people are using, whether those standards are open or closed, blessed by a standards organization or just de facto. I could code my sites to exactly follow the formal standards instead of the practical standards. In fact I have. Then I've watched the site not work across multiple browsers, even if I'm concerned with nothing other than IE 5 or higher and the latest Mozilla/Netscape on Mac and Windows. That's 97% of my traffic right there. If I don't implement a non-standard workaround, I lose my audience.
Whether the interests of a particular site are commercial or not, the goal of that site almost without exception is to be available to as many people who want to view it as possible. I'm going to code in whatever way maximizes my audience. If 83% of the people coming to my site use IE (current stats for my site, YMMVIANALFIIK) and IE doesn't follow the standards, I can't decide to alienate those people if it means I lose money, or fail to get my message out, or Mom and Dad can't read my blog.
So what am I supposed to do? Call Microsoft and complain that they better straighten up and fly right, because my 2400 page views a day say so? Or as an end-user maybe I should stop buying IE and send them a financial message. Oh wait...
Who says that someone has to abandon their morals in order to take on that job? Maybe it would violate your morals, and maybe it would violate mine too. But surely there is a damned good coder out there who loves working on security issues who also happens to think that DRM is a good idea and that businesses have a right to protect and control their proprietary systems.
Why is it that good programmers are automatically equated (at least on Slashdot) with rabidly anti-Microsoft anti-business anti-patent viewpoints? There are brilliant people on both sides of the fence. All you can really conclude is that Slashdot is not the place to post a help wanted ad for that particular job.
Usability is not the point - money is. Companies don't care about what sort of "desktop experience" their employees have. When corporations realize they can avoid the cost of XP/NT + Office on thousands of desktop systems, they'll keep their wallets in their pockets and let their users fend for themselves.
A rare mixup of effect/affect is a welcome change of pace from the 90% of Slashdot posters who don't know the difference between "its" and "it's", who say "there's 4 of them" instead of "there are 4 of them," or who use "who" when "whom" is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Apple, the price hike rumor isn't true. They've have multiyear agreements with the record companies and have"flatly denied" that prices are changing.
Try the book's site for a complete list of patterns, with diagrams and descriptions: http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/
It serves two points: 1) to increase the chance that maybe something will be done in either the editorial process or on the technical end to reduce the number of dupes we've been seeing and 2) to point people who may not know it's a dupe to more discussion on the same subject that they might have missed otherwise
Please note that I do not recommend this approach if you're looking for major label artists.
And a few other points no one seems to be making (probably because they don't RTFA):
4) If there truly are two copies of the data, redbook and protected, not shared data, then the capacity will effectively be cut in half, meaning this approach could never be applied across the board to Sony's whole catalog since the average album is too long to fit twice on the same CD. Which raises two interesting questions - is the data duplicated or shared? And is the protected data uncompressed, or are you getting a lossy version?
5) You only get one free key to listen to your music. Subsequent keys must be purchased. So if your hard drive fails, or you wipe your drive and forget to backup your keys, you get to buy your music all over again. Not to mention that if you want to listen to your new "CD" in your home office and your computer at work, you will have to pay for two keys.
6) The copy protection system requires an Internet connection, making it even more burdensome than it already is
7) You have to use Sony's proprietary player, like it or not.
All around it sounds like a a great system that is exactly what consumers are asking for. Way to go Sony!
Bear in mind that the Internet is a global medium and not eveyone speaks English as a first language. Most native English speakers posting on Slashdot can't even get their own language right, as it appears that very few of them understand the difference between its and it's, who and whom or less and fewer, just to mention a few of the most common mistakes. (I mention these only in the misguided hope that at least a couple people will take this opportunity to figure it out.)
You could as easily blame the consumer - Ico and Mark of Kri are two recent games that have gotten consistently glowing reviews from the gaming press, but have only seen dismal sales. There's a reason game companies are putting their effort into Tomb Raider 23 and BMX XXX instead: consumer demand.
First IBM needs to show how this new approach can lower customers' costs. If they can do that, then maybe it will work. If not, it won't.
With a DVD player that doesn't have a screen and battery life of 1.5 hours?
Ditto. I use my LCD for high-speed twitch games all the time, and I have no complaints whatsoever. I understand the technical arguments about why LCD is inferior for the display for moving images, but in practice when I play Unreal Tournament 2003 on my Samsung SyncMaster 150T it looks just fine to me, and I'm a picky bastard. I was leery of making the switch from CRT to LCD specifically because of the concerns about how LCD would work with games, but now that I've made the switch I have no regrets.
I've been trying to arrange something similar. My solution is to use a "spare" laptop that sits next to the couch. It accesses the music on my server via a wireless Ethernet card and the audio out runs to my stereo.
The real problem for me is software. I don't want to dig through my collection to put together a playlist. I want a smart jukebox, something that does more than just randomize a set of songs.
Does anyone know of a playlist generator that will use the ID3 tags to allow me to do things like say "Make a playlist that lasts 2 hours of songs that are from 1990 - 1993 in the genres of indie or alternative, without repeating any songs from the same artist"?
The last part is the one where all the solutions I've seen fail. I always end up with a list of "random" songs that will contain the same artist 10 times in a row, even though I have hundreds of artists in my collection.
Plus it emphasizes our love of the Simpsons.
Get with the times man. ActiveSX is so 1996. At least call youself SX 2003. Or The Artist Formerly Known As COM.
Truly the most disturbing part of this is the implication that in the office of the future Microsoft will have extended their oh-so-clever-I-want-to-puke C# naming convention to the D# display. After getting a slew of MS products named ActiveSomething, and then suffering through the Product Year scheme started by Windows 95 and subsequently embraced by software companies outside of Redmond and continuing today (Unreal Tournament 2003 anyone?), we can now look forward to seeing such great products as E#, F#, G#....
Don't misunderstand the intent of my post - I'm not saying "Nyah nyah you're a liar, prove it." I'm saying that this subject, like many others, inevitably ends up in an unresolvable cycle of "A is as good/better than B" followed by "No it's not" followed by "Yes it is"...
I was hoping, based on your first post, that you could share some information that would allow the subject to be debated on a higher plane. But if your research is based on links to news releases, I suspect that people here will be looking for something a little more meaty before they crown a CPU king.
Do you actually own an Xbox, or just a Gamecube? I own a Gamecube, a PS2, and an Xbox. I play games on all of them and have plenty of opportunity to make comparisons between the systems. The PS2 has some great looking games, so does the Gamecube. But it's pretty clear to me that the Xbox has more sheer processing power behind it, assuming developers are able to take advantage of it.
I don't own Animal Crossing yet, but calling that "graphically amazing" - are you sure? Every review I've seen mentions that the graphics are closer to N64-level quality. That said, I'll take gameplay over graphics any day and will probably buy it soon.
But Animal Crossing is a Nintendo exclusive and the majority of games that come out now come out for at least a couple systems if not all 3 of the current crop. And knowing each of the systems as I do, I'll get the Xbox version of the game every time because I know it will simply look better on Xbox.
The Xbox's major problem is not having any exclusive killer titles, outside of Halo, that will make people want to buy it if they already own another system. That's why they bought Rare.
And for those of you unfamiliar with the acronym, he's talking about Timesplitters 2, which will be available for PS2, Gamecube and Xbox within the next couple weeks.
I went back and plotted the performance ratio between Moto and Intel and it has held steady around 2x Mhz since 1989.
Where did you get the data to plot this? Can you give us a link to that data and the methodology used for the comparison? Maybe then we could all elevate this debate above "is not/is too."This isn't a story about the demise of photographers, it's a story about one person's failure to plan ahead and negotiate a suitable contract.
If I'm hired by a company as a freelancer to write code on a project, we have a contract that outlines the benefits and rights for both parties - generally that I get paid and that they own the copyright to any work I do. If I'm not comfortable with their terms, I can refuse the job.
If you want a photographer who will give you digital copies of the pictures on a CD and give up any rights to those images, make it clear when interviewing potential photographers that this is one of your requirements. They have the right to say no or charge you accordingly, and you have the right to insist on finding someone who agrees to your terms.
It's not that people are just doing the math wrong when trying to calculate the correct caloric intake for fat, protein and carbohydrates and that some slight adjustment would bring them back to a normal diet, when the real problem is degrees of magnitude worse. It starts with the fact that most people are completely ignorant of basic nutritional information (what does my body need and what am I actually putting into it) and then eating at McDonald's five times a week and chugging a gallon of soda every day. If you educate yourself about even the simplest information on nutrition and then eat everything in moderation it will make a world of difference.
If you want to get a degree so you can tell people you have a degree, working and going to school at the same time is a feasible approach. Pick a night class or a distance learning program that will certify what you already know without actually challenging you, so your future employers can tick off the "has a degree" checkbox.
If you want an education because it's become important to you to gain knowledge for knowledge's sake and not for the piece of paper that comes with it, strongly consider going back to school only when you can focus on doing so without significant distractions. You need to make your education a priority if you're serious about it, not just another thing crammed into your day.
Like many other posters on this topic, I was smart but unmotivated and directionless coming out of high school. I went to college because that's what I was supposed to do and was miserable as a result. After changing majors 3 or 4 times and never finding something I was interested in I was eventually asked to leave.
I got lucky, career-wise, founding two of my own companies and riding the dot-com wave to success and money. But over time I began to realize and value what I missed by not getting a degree. I finally realized what I was passionate about and found a direction in which to apply myself.
I took a night course for a while concurrent with a job and could have continued doing so easily until I got a degree because the classes were so non-demanding - open book tests, turn your homework in any time before the end of the semester and no one cares if you show up for class or not. After having worked as a software developer for 8 years, the material in CS courses certainly wasn't new or difficult for me. But it wasn't enough either. At 31 years old I'm ready for education in a way that I wasn't prepared for at 17. Now I demand more, both from myself and the experience. So I'm dropping off the career path and focusing all my energy on getting into one of the most prestigious and challenging programs in the US.
You need to decide what's most important to you. If it's running your business, then by all means do that. But you'll be wasting your time and money while probably not getting what it is your looking for yet again if you're treating education as a hobby. If a formal education is truly your priority, act accordingly.
This infuriates me with its ignorance. I've never seen such a piece of sensationalism posing as technical information. Well, outside of Redmond of course.
The author defines the very nature of the Web and then asks us to be concerned. It's like writing a book about an airplane and saying "When you get in an airplane you're actually traveling hundreds of miles an hour thousands of feet in the air strapped to tons of explosive. This is horribly dangerous!"
Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, "backward compatibility" sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie.
Backward compatibility does not mean supporting every single browser that was ever created since the dawn of the Web. How compatible to be is defined differently by each project. My decision on a small project may be to only support IE 5+ for Windows, but that decision would make no sense at all for Yahoo!.
And the cost is too high? How is too high defined, and for whom? If I can spend $10,000 in development costs to make my site available to another 5% of my target audience and I can predict that this will increase revenues by $100,000, then it makes sense to do so.
As a Web developer, allow me to generalize when I say that we do code to standards, standards being defined as what most people are using, whether those standards are open or closed, blessed by a standards organization or just de facto. I could code my sites to exactly follow the formal standards instead of the practical standards. In fact I have. Then I've watched the site not work across multiple browsers, even if I'm concerned with nothing other than IE 5 or higher and the latest Mozilla/Netscape on Mac and Windows. That's 97% of my traffic right there. If I don't implement a non-standard workaround, I lose my audience.
Whether the interests of a particular site are commercial or not, the goal of that site almost without exception is to be available to as many people who want to view it as possible. I'm going to code in whatever way maximizes my audience. If 83% of the people coming to my site use IE (current stats for my site, YMMVIANALFIIK) and IE doesn't follow the standards, I can't decide to alienate those people if it means I lose money, or fail to get my message out, or Mom and Dad can't read my blog.
So what am I supposed to do? Call Microsoft and complain that they better straighten up and fly right, because my 2400 page views a day say so? Or as an end-user maybe I should stop buying IE and send them a financial message. Oh wait...
Who says that someone has to abandon their morals in order to take on that job? Maybe it would violate your morals, and maybe it would violate mine too. But surely there is a damned good coder out there who loves working on security issues who also happens to think that DRM is a good idea and that businesses have a right to protect and control their proprietary systems.
Why is it that good programmers are automatically equated (at least on Slashdot) with rabidly anti-Microsoft anti-business anti-patent viewpoints? There are brilliant people on both sides of the fence. All you can really conclude is that Slashdot is not the place to post a help wanted ad for that particular job.
Usability is not the point - money is. Companies don't care about what sort of "desktop experience" their employees have. When corporations realize they can avoid the cost of XP/NT + Office on thousands of desktop systems, they'll keep their wallets in their pockets and let their users fend for themselves.
A rare mixup of effect/affect is a welcome change of pace from the 90% of Slashdot posters who don't know the difference between "its" and "it's", who say "there's 4 of them" instead of "there are 4 of them," or who use "who" when "whom" is correct.