AAC is an international standard owned by MPEG - the NATURAL successor to MPEG-3. I believe ANY music store can use it, as long as it pays the licensing fees.. WMA was actually developed AFTER AAC, and I imagine that Microsoft set its fees at an aggressive level to attract other stores. Of course, there's no way Apple would choose to pay them anyway!
Bottom line is.. as far as I know, there's no reason other music players don't support AAC except economics(MS support vs paying AAC licensing).
The advantages of SkyWeb over a system like Curitiba's (Bus Rapid Transit) are: 1) taking up much less space. BRT's require a dedicated bus lane.. an issue in a packed city with tightly packed buildings. 2) not requiring heavy usage. a BRT system only starts paying off the investment(roads and buses) with heavy ridership. Curitiba worked because so there are so many people who need transportation but don't have their own cars. But it's not affordable to send large buses around frequently if you can't fill them enough. Having individual cars means that you can scale this to much smaller ridership levels. 3) lower operating costs. Diesel is cheaper than gasoline, but it's more expensive than electricity and its only going to get worse. It's also heavily polluting, although there ways to clean it up a little, like biodiesel, CNG, etc.
BRTs are a good solution in SOME cases.. large, open cities, for example. But SkyWeb is an interesting solution for areas that would be totally impractical for BRTs.
I remember reading the Time article and being so angry at them making generalizations from 2 films: LoTR and Harry Potter. And then trying to imply that things like Medieval Times and Renaissance fairs are a recent phenomenon. They've ALWAYS been there.
I'm a BIG sci-fi/fantasy fan and honestly, claiming any distinction between the two is really stretching it.
There is a SMALL segment of sci-fi that tries to be grounded in reality and hard science, but most of sci-fi is also in the business of world-building that isn't based in reality either.
The strength of sci-fi and fantasy is not "looking to the future" or "looking in the past". It's creating a universe where you can place characters in situations that wouldn't come up normally.
There IS an element of escapism involved, but it's equally true of sci-fi or even plain normal adventure novels. It has NOTHING to do with the genre. Like any other genre, sci-fi and fantasy have shallow silly books, and deep quality books.
I agree.
I considered a hybrid last year, but I couldn't justify paying an extra $5k up front. The fact is, gasoline is really really cheap in the US. So saving money can't be the right motivation, at least here. Gasoline prices ARE much higher everywhere else.
But the reason hybrids are so expensive now is because of the low volume. If Toyota moves totally over to hybrids, I assume they'll be able to achieve an equivalent kind of economy of scale.
2 scenarios:
1. people buy hybrids, use less gas -> we realize we don't need to keep subsidizing oil industry -> gas prices go up -> more people buy hybrids.
2. people buy hybrids, use less gas-> oil industry lobbies Congress for more subsidies->gas prices go down-> less people buy hybrids.
everything will change once oil starts running low. it could take a while, but it's better to be ready for it.
honeypot abuse
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If there WAS a honeypot symbol, wouldn't it have potential to be abused? As in, draw on your own sidewalk to scare away hackers. How do you know if it's real or not? Of course if this was done a lot, it would lose believability.
the answer is simple: share!
the OTHER advantage of broadband that people haven't mentioned is that it's enough bandwidth to split with a router. if you have more than 1 computer online at once, it's definitely worth getting broadband. 56k is (barely) enough for one, but no way would i split that with another person.
i've split with 3 other people before, bringing the cost down to $12-13/month, for an always-on connection that is STILL much faster than 56k.
throw in the possibilities of a WiFi network, and you have your solution right there.
i suppose if i were living by myself and had to pay $50/mo on my own, i might hesitate at getting broadband. but the fact is, one person web-surfing uses only a fraction of the bandwidth you pay for. the main draw of broadband is the "always-on" factor.
in college, i shared an apartment with 3 other guys. splitting the connection with a router pretty much had no noticeable impact on performance for us, and brought the cost down to something like 12-13 dollars per person. worth it? definitely!
now, i'm living with one other person, which makes it $25/person. still worth it. 56k might be bearable for one computer, but split, it's impossibly slow even for browsing. even worse would be having to limit ourselves to only 1 computer online at a time.
so what i'm saying is, if broadband seems too expensive, try SHARING it! even 2 people splitting the cost of a WiFi setup would probably find tons of benefits versus 2 dialup accounts. when you get more people, well, broadband can become dirt cheap!
ok, i suck. i forgot to preview and posted it as html. here it is in readable form.
i hate spyware and spam as much as anyone else, but both "principles" they violate are not commonly agreed on by the tech community.
1)privacy. it's easy to say on an abstract level that we should have absolute privacy. however, in practice we probably DON'T want everyone to be totally anonymous. just imagine a message board where everyone is anonymous, and where you have no means of tracking down/banning troublemakers. on a more serious note, tracking down criminals. privacy has to be balanced with accountability.
also, think convenience- if a site keeps track of my preferences in order to serve me better, i am perfectly fine with that!
i think we see here that privacy is not an all-or-nothing concept but a gradual scale on which i'm sure everyone has a different position.
2)freeloading. the tecnical problem with spam is that spammers use resources that don't belong to them - bandwidth is paid for others, who haven't even asked for this. i think if we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the tech community loves freeloading when they're the ones doing it. anyone ever say "information wants to be free"? anyone ever download mp3s? are we honestly claiming that the rights of bandwidth providers, of mail servers, are more valuable than record companies? or how about warez? the bnetd discussion here shows which side of most people here fall on that. this is called "pragmatic ethics" - whatever's good for us is ethically okay.
when we by our actions that property rights and copyright law don't matter to us, does the so-called "Hippocratic Oath for Coders" amount to "don't write code that is annoying and irritating to users?"
i hate spyware and spam as much as anyone else, but both "principles" they violate are not commonly agreed on by the tech community.
1)privacy. it's easy to say on an abstract level that we should have absolute privacy. however, in practice we probably DON'T want everyone to be totally anonymous. just imagine a message board where everyone is anonymous, and where you have no means of tracking down/banning troublemakers. on a more serious note, tracking down criminals. privacy has to be balanced with accountability.
also, think convenience- if a site keeps track of my preferences in order to serve me better, i am perfectly fine with that!
i think we see here that privacy is not an all-or-nothing concept but a gradual scale on which i'm sure everyone has a different position.
2)freeloading. the tecnical problem with spam is that spammers use resources that don't belong to them - bandwidth is paid for others, who haven't even asked for this. i think if we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the tech community loves freeloading when they're the ones doing it. anyone ever say "information wants to be free"? anyone ever download mp3s? are we honestly claiming that the rights of bandwidth providers, of mail servers, are more valuable than record companies? or how about warez? the bnetd discussion here shows which side of most people here fall on that. this is called "pragmatic ethics" - whatever's good for us is ethically okay.
when we by our actions that property rights and copyright law don't matter to us, does the so-called "Hippocratic Oath for Coders" amount to "don't write code that is annoying and irritating to users?"
Slashdot Mirror
AAC is an international standard owned by MPEG - the NATURAL successor to MPEG-3. I believe ANY music store can use it, as long as it pays the licensing fees..
WMA was actually developed AFTER AAC, and I imagine that Microsoft set its fees at an aggressive level to attract other stores. Of course, there's no way Apple would choose to pay them anyway!
Bottom line is.. as far as I know, there's no reason other music players don't support AAC except economics(MS support vs paying AAC licensing).
The advantages of SkyWeb over a system like Curitiba's (Bus Rapid Transit) are:
1) taking up much less space. BRT's require a dedicated bus lane.. an issue in a packed city with tightly packed buildings.
2) not requiring heavy usage. a BRT system only starts paying off the investment(roads and buses) with heavy ridership. Curitiba worked because so there are so many people who need transportation but don't have their own cars. But it's not affordable to send large buses around frequently if you can't fill them enough. Having individual cars means that you can scale this to much smaller ridership levels.
3) lower operating costs. Diesel is cheaper than gasoline, but it's more expensive than electricity and its only going to get worse. It's also heavily polluting, although there ways to clean it up a little, like biodiesel, CNG, etc.
BRTs are a good solution in SOME cases.. large, open cities, for example. But SkyWeb is an interesting solution for areas that would be totally impractical for BRTs.
I remember reading the Time article and being so angry at them making generalizations from 2 films: LoTR and Harry Potter. And then trying to imply that things like Medieval Times and Renaissance fairs are a recent phenomenon. They've ALWAYS been there.
I'm a BIG sci-fi/fantasy fan and honestly, claiming any distinction between the two is really stretching it.
There is a SMALL segment of sci-fi that tries to be grounded in reality and hard science, but most of sci-fi is also in the business of world-building that isn't based in reality either.
The strength of sci-fi and fantasy is not "looking to the future" or "looking in the past". It's creating a universe where you can place characters in situations that wouldn't come up normally.
There IS an element of escapism involved, but it's equally true of sci-fi or even plain normal adventure novels. It has NOTHING to do with the genre. Like any other genre, sci-fi and fantasy have shallow silly books, and deep quality books.
how big is the hard drive? that's somewhat important for a PVR..
also, if this thing had a dvd-r or even a cd-r it would definitely be a Tivo killer.
I agree. I considered a hybrid last year, but I couldn't justify paying an extra $5k up front. The fact is, gasoline is really really cheap in the US. So saving money can't be the right motivation, at least here. Gasoline prices ARE much higher everywhere else. But the reason hybrids are so expensive now is because of the low volume. If Toyota moves totally over to hybrids, I assume they'll be able to achieve an equivalent kind of economy of scale. 2 scenarios: 1. people buy hybrids, use less gas -> we realize we don't need to keep subsidizing oil industry -> gas prices go up -> more people buy hybrids. 2. people buy hybrids, use less gas-> oil industry lobbies Congress for more subsidies->gas prices go down-> less people buy hybrids. everything will change once oil starts running low. it could take a while, but it's better to be ready for it.
If there WAS a honeypot symbol, wouldn't it have potential to be abused? As in, draw on your own sidewalk to scare away hackers. How do you know if it's real or not? Of course if this was done a lot, it would lose believability.
the answer is simple: share! the OTHER advantage of broadband that people haven't mentioned is that it's enough bandwidth to split with a router. if you have more than 1 computer online at once, it's definitely worth getting broadband. 56k is (barely) enough for one, but no way would i split that with another person. i've split with 3 other people before, bringing the cost down to $12-13/month, for an always-on connection that is STILL much faster than 56k. throw in the possibilities of a WiFi network, and you have your solution right there.
i suppose if i were living by myself and had to pay $50/mo on my own, i might hesitate at getting broadband. but the fact is, one person web-surfing uses only a fraction of the bandwidth you pay for. the main draw of broadband is the "always-on" factor.
in college, i shared an apartment with 3 other guys. splitting the connection with a router pretty much had no noticeable impact on performance for us, and brought the cost down to something like 12-13 dollars per person. worth it? definitely!
now, i'm living with one other person, which makes it $25/person. still worth it. 56k might be bearable for one computer, but split, it's impossibly slow even for browsing. even worse would be having to limit ourselves to only 1 computer online at a time.
so what i'm saying is, if broadband seems too expensive, try SHARING it! even 2 people splitting the cost of a WiFi setup would probably find tons of benefits versus 2 dialup accounts. when you get more people, well, broadband can become dirt cheap!
ok, i suck. i forgot to preview and posted it as html. here it is in readable form.
i hate spyware and spam as much as anyone else, but both "principles" they violate are not commonly agreed on by the tech community.
1)privacy. it's easy to say on an abstract level that we should have absolute privacy. however, in practice we probably DON'T want everyone to be totally anonymous. just imagine a message board where everyone is anonymous, and where you have no means of tracking down/banning troublemakers. on a more serious note, tracking down criminals. privacy has to be balanced with accountability.
also, think convenience- if a site keeps track of my preferences in order to serve me better, i am perfectly fine with that!
i think we see here that privacy is not an all-or-nothing concept but a gradual scale on which i'm sure everyone has a different position.
2)freeloading. the tecnical problem with spam is that spammers use resources that don't belong to them - bandwidth is paid for others, who haven't even asked for this. i think if we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the tech community loves freeloading when they're the ones doing it. anyone ever say "information wants to be free"? anyone ever download mp3s? are we honestly claiming that the rights of bandwidth providers, of mail servers, are more valuable than record companies? or how about warez? the bnetd discussion here shows which side of most people here fall on that. this is called "pragmatic ethics" - whatever's good for us is ethically okay.
when we by our actions that property rights and copyright law don't matter to us, does the so-called "Hippocratic Oath for Coders" amount to "don't write code that is annoying and irritating to users?"
i hate spyware and spam as much as anyone else, but both "principles" they violate are not commonly agreed on by the tech community. 1)privacy. it's easy to say on an abstract level that we should have absolute privacy. however, in practice we probably DON'T want everyone to be totally anonymous. just imagine a message board where everyone is anonymous, and where you have no means of tracking down/banning troublemakers. on a more serious note, tracking down criminals. privacy has to be balanced with accountability. also, think convenience- if a site keeps track of my preferences in order to serve me better, i am perfectly fine with that! i think we see here that privacy is not an all-or-nothing concept but a gradual scale on which i'm sure everyone has a different position. 2)freeloading. the tecnical problem with spam is that spammers use resources that don't belong to them - bandwidth is paid for others, who haven't even asked for this. i think if we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the tech community loves freeloading when they're the ones doing it. anyone ever say "information wants to be free"? anyone ever download mp3s? are we honestly claiming that the rights of bandwidth providers, of mail servers, are more valuable than record companies? or how about warez? the bnetd discussion here shows which side of most people here fall on that. this is called "pragmatic ethics" - whatever's good for us is ethically okay. when we by our actions that property rights and copyright law don't matter to us, does the so-called "Hippocratic Oath for Coders" amount to "don't write code that is annoying and irritating to users?"