How funny it would be if all the "where's OGG Vorbis support!?" people turned out to be 100% justified!
But I doubt it. This is just going to be an obscure extension, like the encryption built into the.zip spec. There's no reason to adopt mp3+DRM. Other codecs already compress better, the only advantage of mp3 is that it's unrestricted and ubiquitous, and mp3+DRM is neither.
It's fantastically disingenous to consider only the marginal cost of media to a piece of software's price tag, and to ignore the economic reality that developing a piece of software the scale of what MS delivers requires a huge up-front R&D investement.
Not quite so disingenuous, since we're talking about Office and Windows. Both have huge circulation and the MS divisions behind them reap 75% plus profit margins.
Get it through your head: when you buy Windows and Office, you're primarily NOT paying for programmers' salaries, nor even for the advertising or shrinkwrap. You're mostly paying for market inefficiency. That is the "economic reality... of what MS delivers."
I'm surprised they're switching both the video card AND cpu supplier for XBOX2. If this second and third marriage don't go well either they're not going to have any hardware friends left. (XBOX3... AMD and, uh, Trident?)
On a more practical note this doesn't hold out much hope for XBOX-1 game compatibility, does it?
The usual way to measure percentage of market share is in monetary units. I'm sure they have estimates of the size of the software market in China, and I'm sure they have estimates of how much software they import, so I don't see the big conundrum. Obviously such things can't be measured precisely, but neither can most other quantities in this realm like "profit," "gross domestic product," or "trade deficit."
BTW it's unlikely an automatic braking system will be easy to design...
Easy or not, I don't know. But Daimler first put radar-controlled braking for cruise control into Mercedes in 1998. I have ridden in a demonstration, and the system doesn't just shut off the cruise control when you come up on another car - it can hit the brakes quite hard. And apparently this is old news for trucks too:
American big-rig truck fleets are much further along. More than 10,000 trucks on highways are outfitted with radar-based collision-warning systems that alert drivers to fast-approaching danger and induce braking. Data collected over millions of miles shows the systems have reduced accident rates by 70 percent or more.
The proportion of the sentence to be served by offenders entering Federal prison increased from 58% during 1986 to about 87% during 1997.
I had thought that prison overcrowding was leading to lots of early releases, but unless things have changed in the past 7 years (since 1997) that's not true.
Let's see if he actually ends up serving 3 years. Maybe the judge had in mind that a 3 year sentence would be more like 1 or 1.5 after parole. A financial penalty alone isn't much of a penalty if he made all his money from the crime.
"The same road that brought you in will take you back out, and have fun in California!"
It's attitudes like that that have built the stereotype for Utahns...
I doubt you can name a state west of the Mississippi where it's uncommon for people to complain about the onslaught California transplants driving up real estate prices etc etc.
Popular science doesn't have the best record, but this stuff happens to be for real. I have seen a video demonstration of somebody playing pong via eeg (no invasive probes required). I'm not saying XBOX-2 will have a brain-machine interface, but this is not just another Popular Science sci-fi piece.
Seriously, I'm tired of reading this drech on Slashdot. A properly-implemented Swing is reasonably fast (see MacOS X for an example), but unfortunately the Windows implementation isn't one. Before slamming the language, however, try changing toolkits -- I recommend SWT, as used in Eclipse.
I'm not specifically accusing you, but *some* java fans defended AWT back when. Then Swing came out and they admitted AWT was junk but Swing was great. Now Swing is left for dead and here comes SWT.
The reason Java proponents are sick of hearing that it's slow is because the rest of us are sick of slow java programs. We've never bought a commercial Java app, and we've never accessed an applet that didn't take an annoyingly long time to load up the JVM plus that applet. I don't deny there's some appropriate application for Java out there, somewhere, but it's apparently not something that applies to most of us.
Java proponents should be asking themselves why Flash has taken over for most web apps and games.
If he's got a plasma screen, he's not going to want to give up any video quality, so recompression really isn't an option.
Maybe the best idea is to find him a high-quality DVD player and nice storage rack so that he can organize his 1000 DVD collection and show it off
It's digital data, the whole point is you can copy it losslessly! I realize DRM is supposed to wreck everything, but that's what we have tools like mencoder for, to break down the barriers.
As for doing things the hard way, I suggest he set up an automated system that rips when you pop in a disk. Then, instead of ripping all 1000 dvds, just rip a show when you want to watch it. This way, you invest no more effort than it would take to place the dvd into a player to watch it on the first viewing, and subsequently it's already on line for you.
Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for a car CD player which will automatically archive all the CD's I play through it. Is there such a thing?
Yes, the only logically consistent stance is to be pro-regulation or anti-regulation on every issue. Nevermind the issue itself, it's irrelevant. You must choose either anarchy or totalitarianism, because I, Anonymous Coward, will call you a hypocrite otherwise.
On a somewhat related note, it always amuses me how these artists who love to brag about all their cop killin', hoe bustin', drug pushing ways go berserk if anybody so much as utters their lyrics without buying a proper license. I mean, you have to expect some consequences for advertising lawlessness.
Build in =good= OCR software, and such a thing would actually be useful. Phones have pathetic storage.
Maybe they have pathetic storage because they never needed to store scanned documents before:) In this era of multi-gigabyte CF cards, there is no real reason not to do the digital camera thing... it comes with a cheap little 32 meg memory, and you upgrade it to whatever you want.
I think this is fantastic, I've long desired this functionality in my Palm. A doctor I know kind of likes how I have everything in my Palm, but he's stuck with his Franklin for now because he gets so many pieces of paper, which he punches holes in and puts in his planner. If this thing is workable you could pop paper documents right into your handheld organizer... fantastic.
And surely in the long run that role is NEGATIVE. Having a music collection tied to a single company is crazy, stupid idea (for consumers that is).
Maybe we need to distinguish between *integration*, which is a fine thing, vs. what you actually get today, which is *lock-in*, that is, exclusive integration with only one brand.
The Apache is a mixed bag. It was sent but never got operational in Kosovo, then did fine in Afghanistan, which is nice except I don't think the Taliban had any weapons besides AK-47 and RPGs. It's a lethal platform but it crashes a lot and takes a lot of maintainence, and isn't that tolerant of dusty environs. It's also vulnerable, even to small-arms fire (the Apache in this photo was later bombed into oblivion by one of our own fighter jets). The Apache's performance in Iraq wasn't all that stellar, but of course it will depend alot on whom you ask, and the articles I'm linking aren't presenting the glamorous side. The Apache had a lot of kills in Gulf War I.
Just as it's illegal for the feds to go through every home in america looking for a criminal, it should be (is?) illegal for them to search through private information about me without reasonable cause to suspect me.
But what is "private information?" In the US hardly any information is legally private; information about you is owned by whoever bothers to make note of it. Credit agencies can even sell *false* information about you with no liability for the damage they cause!
Then again, does it even matter? If (when) SCO loses to IBM, that's the end of SCO. The legal entity dies and all the people involved move on to their next gig. Whatever crimes they commit now are freebies.
Slashdot Mirror
But I doubt it. This is just going to be an obscure extension, like the encryption built into the .zip spec. There's no reason to adopt mp3+DRM. Other codecs already compress better, the only advantage of mp3 is that it's unrestricted and ubiquitous, and mp3+DRM is neither.
simple, monopolies don't let you vote.
Get it through your head: when you buy Windows and Office, you're primarily NOT paying for programmers' salaries, nor even for the advertising or shrinkwrap. You're mostly paying for market inefficiency. That is the "economic reality... of what MS delivers."
On a more practical note this doesn't hold out much hope for XBOX-1 game compatibility, does it?
The usual way to measure percentage of market share is in monetary units. I'm sure they have estimates of the size of the software market in China, and I'm sure they have estimates of how much software they import, so I don't see the big conundrum. Obviously such things can't be measured precisely, but neither can most other quantities in this realm like "profit," "gross domestic product," or "trade deficit."
Let's see if he actually ends up serving 3 years. Maybe the judge had in mind that a 3 year sentence would be more like 1 or 1.5 after parole. A financial penalty alone isn't much of a penalty if he made all his money from the crime.
Popular science doesn't have the best record, but this stuff happens to be for real. I have seen a video demonstration of somebody playing pong via eeg (no invasive probes required). I'm not saying XBOX-2 will have a brain-machine interface, but this is not just another Popular Science sci-fi piece.
The reason Java proponents are sick of hearing that it's slow is because the rest of us are sick of slow java programs. We've never bought a commercial Java app, and we've never accessed an applet that didn't take an annoyingly long time to load up the JVM plus that applet. I don't deny there's some appropriate application for Java out there, somewhere, but it's apparently not something that applies to most of us.
Java proponents should be asking themselves why Flash has taken over for most web apps and games.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
As for doing things the hard way, I suggest he set up an automated system that rips when you pop in a disk. Then, instead of ripping all 1000 dvds, just rip a show when you want to watch it. This way, you invest no more effort than it would take to place the dvd into a player to watch it on the first viewing, and subsequently it's already on line for you.
Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for a car CD player which will automatically archive all the CD's I play through it. Is there such a thing?
Yes, the only logically consistent stance is to be pro-regulation or anti-regulation on every issue. Nevermind the issue itself, it's irrelevant. You must choose either anarchy or totalitarianism, because I, Anonymous Coward, will call you a hypocrite otherwise.
On a somewhat related note, it always amuses me how these artists who love to brag about all their cop killin', hoe bustin', drug pushing ways go berserk if anybody so much as utters their lyrics without buying a proper license. I mean, you have to expect some consequences for advertising lawlessness.
They could put a *car* battery in the 17"
I think this is fantastic, I've long desired this functionality in my Palm. A doctor I know kind of likes how I have everything in my Palm, but he's stuck with his Franklin for now because he gets so many pieces of paper, which he punches holes in and puts in his planner. If this thing is workable you could pop paper documents right into your handheld organizer... fantastic.
Maybe we need to distinguish between *integration*, which is a fine thing, vs. what you actually get today, which is *lock-in*, that is, exclusive integration with only one brand.
The Apache is a mixed bag. It was sent but never got operational in Kosovo, then did fine in Afghanistan, which is nice except I don't think the Taliban had any weapons besides AK-47 and RPGs. It's a lethal platform but it crashes a lot and takes a lot of maintainence, and isn't that tolerant of dusty environs. It's also vulnerable, even to small-arms fire (the Apache in this photo was later bombed into oblivion by one of our own fighter jets). The Apache's performance in Iraq wasn't all that stellar, but of course it will depend alot on whom you ask, and the articles I'm linking aren't presenting the glamorous side. The Apache had a lot of kills in Gulf War I.
What are they going to down it with, a shotgun?
Then again, does it even matter? If (when) SCO loses to IBM, that's the end of SCO. The legal entity dies and all the people involved move on to their next gig. Whatever crimes they commit now are freebies.