It should be pointed out that America (the country) exists because of the extermination of tens of millions of Native Americans. Also nothing to sneeze at when talking about "murderous regimes ever to see the face of the globe". But somehow that never gets included.
Tens of millions, where do you get that? The highest current estimates of North American population before Columbus are around 10 million (Link). The decrease in their population was mostly due to disease, not extermination.
I am no expert on the subject, and I am aware that many thousands died fighting colonization, but I've never heard of a Stalin/Hitler-style systematic extermination, and I find tens of millions very hard to swallow.
Forbes magazine, one of the United States' foremost authorities on technology...
Of course you realize, we're all interpreting your post as sarcasm past this point:)
All the DRMd formats go in the same category as Sony's mini-disc: not bad for a particular application at a particular time, but useless for building a music collection. Just imagine if you'd spent on thousands on RealAudio tracks 5 years ago and were now forced to use their horrid, spam-ridden monstrosity of a player. Once these companies have a large enough base of locked-in customers, the temptation for abuse will be irresistable. Prepare for spamming, forced "upgrades," and everything else. And that's if you're lucky enough to choose a DRM music provider who stays in business at all.
We saw the dot com bubble burst after everyone decided thast the internet was the future of commerce, and we still have not fully recovered from that one.
Though interestingly, Christmas shopping on the Internet increased by 30 to 45% this year! I know I'm part of that statistic.
Since you and the article both mention it, how is VoIP free anyways? I'm drawn to it because I'm sick and tired of paying of several companies for essentially the same thing... bandwidth. I'd still be paying somebody, but the total cost would be less.
I remember seeing a (webcasted) talk given by the Clay Institute about their $1M math prizes, in particular, the one about P=NP. In it, the speaker said that "if P=NP is proven, then all the others are going to fall in short time, making that solution worth $8M" (or $1M * the number of problems).
Well, sure. If this vast class of problems thought to be intractable is found to be tractable, that would sure be nice. That doesn't mean it will ever happen. Realistically the only oddity is that nobody can prove P != NP, as is thought to be the case.
I was using a rather ancient Thinkpad (P233 - excellent screen and keyboard though!) whose battery life had progressively gotten worse. Once I was sitting there using it and the laptop went POP! I ripped out the battery as fast as I could. I didn't see any external leakage, so I just threw the battery away (oops, I know that's bad) and continue to use the computer sans battery.
Does killing a few birds per day have any effect on the population anyways? They are wild animals, so it seems like carrying capacity is the more important factor. Building a strip mall over a grain field probably DOES have an effect on the population, but killing some reasonable number might just increase the food supply and allow a few more chicks to survive after the next hatch.
I've been waiting and waiting for somebody to reduce prices by using volatile ram in an mp3 player (seriously). Palm Pilots work this way, nobody seems to mind, and they hold real data - not just copies of songs from a computer like an IPod.
You didn't even mention, cdbaby is not the RIAA in another form, they're fiercely independent. Even when it comes to operating systems:
Our servers are running 100% OpenBSD - the world's most secure operating system. Powered by Apache, PHP, and MySQL... No Microsoft products were used in the creation of this website.
..lead through laboratories where physicists, chemists, metallurgists, and computer engineers huddle over gurgling beakers, electron microscopes, and spectrophotometers....
The center's 1,800 engineers -- a quarter of them have PhDs -- are engaged in fundamental research for most of GE's 13 divisions.
Master and Commander is an interesting choice. Nothing in the movie looked fantastical or supernatural, it just looked like they somehow took movie cameras back a few hundred years. Did they really have two tall ships sailing around? In the Star Wars, on the other hand, yeah it's imaginative but it's obviously all CGI.
Anyways, I think it's cool they nominated a movie whose visual effects were subtle but convincing.
Eh gads, let the knockoffs begin. Somebody makes a successful movie, the entire industry has to crash the party. Ooh, let's all do a disaster movie! OK, now let's all do a Mars movie, now comic books, now fantasy! It's pathetic. Like the scene on Simpsons where the TV execs have a "brainstorming" session: they whip out remote controls and start flipping through the channels for "ideas."
My objection to "an answer to WinFS" is a bit different; I just think it's ill-conceived for a single developer to take on such a task as a side job. It takes years to develop a real filesystem. Maybe ReiserFS, with its new plug-in mechanism, should be the foundation? I don't know, I really don't see a great need for a radically different filesystem anyhow.
As it would happen, I was an emusic subscriber (before the changes), and I still have and enjoy the Mogwai collection. After the better part of a year it was taking longer and longer to find stuff I liked; I felt like I'd exausted their catalog (or at least gotten most of the low-hanging fruit) so I cancelled. But money I paid for the service was well spent.
Who cares about the user interface? It's these crappy restrictions that make delivering music on the Internet pointless. People building collections in restricted formats will be rebuying everything faster than yesteryear's 8-track victims. Some company goes out of business and millions of dollars in music purchases worldwide are rendered useless. What a concept.
But is the "test file" special, and the rest of the files restricted? If not, this would finally be the music service I've been waiting for. I'm willing to pay if I can built up a collection that's not restricted to particular players.
(Unfortunately my new Sony mp3 disc player can handle atrac3 but not wma - doh!)
Netscape had the perfect case against Microsoft: "we'll cut off their air supply." What came of that? MS was found guilty, but the govt. decided not to do anything about it. How do you go up against that?
You know, this whining about MS and DRM is getting old.
... If IntelTV has some kind of hardware DRM that won't let you TiVo or whatever, then don't buy one, and if enough people feel the same way and avoid the technology MS/Intel/whoever will have to adjust.
Obviously that's precisely the point of the "whining"... DRM is going to happen, the question is how much. The more people are convinced that it's bad, the less there will be.
I'm disappointed at the lack of any impressive benchmarks from the Opteron. I can only assume that the Opteron really isn't any faster than the P4. The extra address space might be nice though, for programmers at least.
How does a box the size of an orange fit into anyone's apparel? Even with the emphasis on thinness in the PDA/cellphone market, we have to choose between cargo pants and bulging pockets.
The poor guy goes to all the trouble to spell out "fanny pack" and you completely ignore it.
We have almost completely stopped circulating CD-ROMs of any sort because the patrons have an expectation that the library will help them make it work, and if you mix initially lousy or just plain old software ("this storybook requires you to install quicktime 2.1") with who-knows-what the patron's got at home, it spells customer service disaster.
This would be an equally good reason to stop lending books about home repair, chemistry, and (especially!) self-improvement.
Maybe the Walgreen's product is just plain pointless. But a $10 digicam NOT tied to Walgreen's, on the other hand, might have some potential. The main advantages over film are the electronically triggered shutter, and instant feedback.
I can hook it to the underside of my motorcycle and maybe get some cool shots before it's destroyed.
Maybe I can turn it into a webcam, buy 6 of them, and put them up around my house to find out whose dog is crapping on my lawn.
I can buy 30 of them and make one of those matrix stop-time setups where they seemingly pan the camera around during a single instant.
I can make a 3d object scanner, using software that can create a 3d model from a number of images at different viewpoints. Since each camera must be calibrated you don't want to use one camera and move it around.
Again, I see each of these applications as more suited to a cheap digital camera than a cheap film camera.
Of course this could also be a haven for computers that don't have the latest patches, have print/file sharing enabled, and don't have personal firewalls activated.
No more so than the wired Internet. (And what is a "personal" firewall?)
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All the DRMd formats go in the same category as Sony's mini-disc: not bad for a particular application at a particular time, but useless for building a music collection. Just imagine if you'd spent on thousands on RealAudio tracks 5 years ago and were now forced to use their horrid, spam-ridden monstrosity of a player. Once these companies have a large enough base of locked-in customers, the temptation for abuse will be irresistable. Prepare for spamming, forced "upgrades," and everything else. And that's if you're lucky enough to choose a DRM music provider who stays in business at all.
Since you and the article both mention it, how is VoIP free anyways? I'm drawn to it because I'm sick and tired of paying of several companies for essentially the same thing... bandwidth. I'd still be paying somebody, but the total cost would be less.
I was using a rather ancient Thinkpad (P233 - excellent screen and keyboard though!) whose battery life had progressively gotten worse. Once I was sitting there using it and the laptop went POP! I ripped out the battery as fast as I could. I didn't see any external leakage, so I just threw the battery away (oops, I know that's bad) and continue to use the computer sans battery.
Does killing a few birds per day have any effect on the population anyways? They are wild animals, so it seems like carrying capacity is the more important factor. Building a strip mall over a grain field probably DOES have an effect on the population, but killing some reasonable number might just increase the food supply and allow a few more chicks to survive after the next hatch.
I've been waiting and waiting for somebody to reduce prices by using volatile ram in an mp3 player (seriously). Palm Pilots work this way, nobody seems to mind, and they hold real data - not just copies of songs from a computer like an IPod.
I'd think online stores would be more likely to offer indie labels because the price of carrying stock is next to nothing.
Anyways, I think it's cool they nominated a movie whose visual effects were subtle but convincing.
Eh gads, let the knockoffs begin. Somebody makes a successful movie, the entire industry has to crash the party. Ooh, let's all do a disaster movie! OK, now let's all do a Mars movie, now comic books, now fantasy! It's pathetic. Like the scene on Simpsons where the TV execs have a "brainstorming" session: they whip out remote controls and start flipping through the channels for "ideas."
My objection to "an answer to WinFS" is a bit different; I just think it's ill-conceived for a single developer to take on such a task as a side job. It takes years to develop a real filesystem. Maybe ReiserFS, with its new plug-in mechanism, should be the foundation? I don't know, I really don't see a great need for a radically different filesystem anyhow.
As it would happen, I was an emusic subscriber (before the changes), and I still have and enjoy the Mogwai collection. After the better part of a year it was taking longer and longer to find stuff I liked; I felt like I'd exausted their catalog (or at least gotten most of the low-hanging fruit) so I cancelled. But money I paid for the service was well spent.
Who cares about the user interface? It's these crappy restrictions that make delivering music on the Internet pointless. People building collections in restricted formats will be rebuying everything faster than yesteryear's 8-track victims. Some company goes out of business and millions of dollars in music purchases worldwide are rendered useless. What a concept.
(Unfortunately my new Sony mp3 disc player can handle atrac3 but not wma - doh!)
Netscape had the perfect case against Microsoft: "we'll cut off their air supply." What came of that? MS was found guilty, but the govt. decided not to do anything about it. How do you go up against that?
Obviously that's precisely the point of the "whining"... DRM is going to happen, the question is how much. The more people are convinced that it's bad, the less there will be.
I'm disappointed at the lack of any impressive benchmarks from the Opteron. I can only assume that the Opteron really isn't any faster than the P4. The extra address space might be nice though, for programmers at least.
I can hook it to the underside of my motorcycle and maybe get some cool shots before it's destroyed.
Maybe I can turn it into a webcam, buy 6 of them, and put them up around my house to find out whose dog is crapping on my lawn.
I can buy 30 of them and make one of those matrix stop-time setups where they seemingly pan the camera around during a single instant.
I can make a 3d object scanner, using software that can create a 3d model from a number of images at different viewpoints. Since each camera must be calibrated you don't want to use one camera and move it around.
Again, I see each of these applications as more suited to a cheap digital camera than a cheap film camera.