Well, I cannot make any claims as to the significance of the study.
However, for me it happens to be somewhat accurate. I had a subscription to emusic.com for about 6 months. I cancelled in the end because it was taking longer to find music I liked and I wasn't using it enough to justify a subscription fee. (If downloads were priced individually I'd still be a customer. If all the latest and greated music were available, I'd still be a customer.)
From my experience, finding what you want on a website in seconds, then downloading it at 1.5mb/s, completely blows the socks off P2P.
If the music companies got together and sold their music online for low prices in accessible formats, the only people left on P2P would be kids. My total spending on music would at least triple. As it is, I only buy buy music as gifts because knowing what it SHOULD be like, I can't be bothered with making a trip to the store to buy overpriced CDs that I might or might not like.
I agree completely on the fun part. I write a project called WebVCR+ [sourceforge.net] and the main reason that I did it was for fun.
Yes, I find a lot of irony in the assertion that hacking up a PVR is a waste of time. Certainly no more so than watching TV in the first place!
Re:The User Interface, or lack there of...
on
Build Your Own Linux PVR
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Obviously the linux box isn't a shrinkwrapped solution. But the homebrew might be more fun.
I just finshed a program to grab yahoo.com tv listings and rank the shows, using a bayesian network on a training set of previously watched programs. (The show's title, rating, stars, genre etc are used for scoring, not its actual content.) Fun stuff! But obviously not yet a consumer product like TiVo.
I also have the remote that came with my WinTV card... it transmits to a IR receiver that plugs into the serial port (of the laptop under the TV). One of these evenings I will get that working with mplayer's lirc support, but for now I'm usually working on the laptop while watching a movie anyways...
My setup consists of a desktop machine and two laptops, all with 802.11b cards. The desktop machine has the A->D card and big disk. One laptop has a tv-out and sits on the VCR for playback. The other laptop is the "remote" (I ssh into the player laptop and issue commands).
Your question is reasonable IF they are hand-picking sites to block. But if they are using some content-based technique - which would make sense, given how fast pages can be created and moved around - then you are bound to get some 'odd' results.
The question of who "made" what money has no objective answer.
Start out with a socialistic country like France. Who makes how much money? Now remove all law and come back in 5 years. Hmm, wealth has concentrated - somehow a few people are "making" more money, and most peple are "making" less. Now come back in another 5 years. Wow, fuedalism. You *could* argue that the Kings and Lords "made" all the money, since by the rules of cause and effect alone, only those with money can get more. But under such a system the poor people do all the work, and the total amount of wealth is really very small.
I would argue that the distribution of wealth should be whatever has the best results. I would argue that complete concentration of wealth under lawlessness and feudalism was lousy, and "equal" distribution of wealth under communism was almost as bad and not even self-sustaining.
So what is the balance? I think the US is moving too far towards feudalism. The very rich have no incentive to work because they can rake it in without working, and the poor and uneducated don't get anywhere by working hard anyways. It's the middle class, who have some but want more, who have the desire and means to move things forwards. We need to make sure that most people are in the middle class, while preserving the opportunity to become very wealthy through merit.
Come on, he spent 2/3 of his post answering that question - instead of letting out contracts, the govt. would offer a big bounty for the first company to achieve certain government-set goals.
"always recouped"? Do you really think NASA is really a risk-free money printing machine?
What exactly do we learn by filling up the space shuttle's gas tank 20 more times? Or writing a big check to the Russians that ends up misappropriated?
I don't understand why you asked whether we hate NASA today or love them. Look at the last 10 NASA-related slashdot stories. It is overwhelmingly amd *consistently* negative. All we ever get are some pretty false-color images, and those aren't from the I$$.
The cable/satellite fee subsidises the content to a degree, but it certainly doesn't cover the actual costs. If you want some actual figures, Seinfeld actors were getting something like $1 million/episode a piece. Likewise with Friends actors. Airing sports programs is ridiculously expensive largely because the franchises know the carriers will pick up the costs from sponsors.
...thus decreasing advertising revenue will cut program costs.
Is Football any better when the venues are named after companies and the players wear advertising? No. Is "Friends" any better than it was 8 years ago when it was produced for 10% the cost? No. The only "purpose" served by wasting 10 million man-hours on Friends commercials every week is to convince some one-hit wonders that they're worth $1e6 per week. TiVo is doing a real service to society.
I'd rather have a smaller number of commercial-free channels (like HBO) fighting for my hard-earned Cable TV dollar. Don't worry, "Joey" is set for life no matter what happens.
Re:32-bit compatible = a temporary half-solution
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 2
I was on a C++ project on Solaris that switched from 32 bit to 64 bit half way through. It was a piece of cake. In fact you could just pass a compiler switch to compile for one or the other.
Besides, remember those pointers address *virtual* memory. I can eaily imagine wanting to mmap a DVD or big database even if I didn't have that much RAM.
Why? Why is it good to try to have a single application for everything? "The Application" will have to reconfigure its interface for each type of task anyways. There is no benefit, only loss of modularity.
Re:pretty empty article
on
Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think this is a big issue in the whole matter. Giving up control. Companies try so hard to present everything with that shiny, deceptive sheen, and the actual product so rarely lives up to that.
I remember walking home to my dorm room with a shrinkwrapped Visual C++ 4.2 educational edition. "Only" $80. I suspected somebody would see it in my bag and be envious or impressed. What a chump I was. A nerdy chump. Somehow, apt-getting that latest gcc revision doesn't give me that buzz. But neither would shelling out for the hologram, anymore.
Just like when I was 14 and realized there wasn't really a 24x7 party going on down at radio station.
I really hope I can teach my kids to see through all the crap at an early age, but it's not easy. Last night my wife asked my 4 year old what his favorite movie his. He said it was the new Little Mermaid movie - which he has NEVER SEEN. It could only have come from seeing commercials on the Disney Channel.
I use the Gimp somewhat regularly, and I'm not terribly fond of the interface. My main beef is the difficulty of simple actions like drawing shapes onscreen.
To draw a line, you select a freehand drawing tool, draw a dot, then move somewhere else and shift+click.
To draw a rectangle, you use the rectangular selection tool, then right-click on the screen, then select "Edit... Stroke." (There's no toolbar button or hotkey for this).
In other words, how you draw a line has NOTHING to do with how you draw a rectangle, and both actions are side-effects of tools for other purposes. I'm sorry, but that's just weird.
Slashdot Mirror
However, for me it happens to be somewhat accurate. I had a subscription to emusic.com for about 6 months. I cancelled in the end because it was taking longer to find music I liked and I wasn't using it enough to justify a subscription fee. (If downloads were priced individually I'd still be a customer. If all the latest and greated music were available, I'd still be a customer.)
From my experience, finding what you want on a website in seconds, then downloading it at 1.5mb/s, completely blows the socks off P2P.
If the music companies got together and sold their music online for low prices in accessible formats, the only people left on P2P would be kids. My total spending on music would at least triple. As it is, I only buy buy music as gifts because knowing what it SHOULD be like, I can't be bothered with making a trip to the store to buy overpriced CDs that I might or might not like.
My company paid for Acrobat Reader, but it still nags me "Acrobat isn't just a reader! Buy the whole suite!"
The whole topic of this slashdot story is a guy who paid for quickbooks, but now it demands the inside scoop on all his business doings.
I'll bet slashdotters can think of lots of commercial apps that are similarly obnoxious.
an ASCII representation of PI would compress quite nicely, because each character it represented with 8 bits yet has only 10 possible values.
I just finshed a program to grab yahoo.com tv listings and rank the shows, using a bayesian network on a training set of previously watched programs. (The show's title, rating, stars, genre etc are used for scoring, not its actual content.) Fun stuff! But obviously not yet a consumer product like TiVo.
I also have the remote that came with my WinTV card... it transmits to a IR receiver that plugs into the serial port (of the laptop under the TV). One of these evenings I will get that working with mplayer's lirc support, but for now I'm usually working on the laptop while watching a movie anyways...
My setup consists of a desktop machine and two laptops, all with 802.11b cards. The desktop machine has the A->D card and big disk. One laptop has a tv-out and sits on the VCR for playback. The other laptop is the "remote" (I ssh into the player laptop and issue commands).
Start out with a socialistic country like France. Who makes how much money? Now remove all law and come back in 5 years. Hmm, wealth has concentrated - somehow a few people are "making" more money, and most peple are "making" less. Now come back in another 5 years. Wow, fuedalism. You *could* argue that the Kings and Lords "made" all the money, since by the rules of cause and effect alone, only those with money can get more. But under such a system the poor people do all the work, and the total amount of wealth is really very small.
I would argue that the distribution of wealth should be whatever has the best results. I would argue that complete concentration of wealth under lawlessness and feudalism was lousy, and "equal" distribution of wealth under communism was almost as bad and not even self-sustaining.
So what is the balance? I think the US is moving too far towards feudalism. The very rich have no incentive to work because they can rake it in without working, and the poor and uneducated don't get anywhere by working hard anyways. It's the middle class, who have some but want more, who have the desire and means to move things forwards. We need to make sure that most people are in the middle class, while preserving the opportunity to become very wealthy through merit.
Come on, he spent 2/3 of his post answering that question - instead of letting out contracts, the govt. would offer a big bounty for the first company to achieve certain government-set goals.
What exactly do we learn by filling up the space shuttle's gas tank 20 more times? Or writing a big check to the Russians that ends up misappropriated?
I don't understand why you asked whether we hate NASA today or love them. Look at the last 10 NASA-related slashdot stories. It is overwhelmingly amd *consistently* negative. All we ever get are some pretty false-color images, and those aren't from the I$$.
Is Football any better when the venues are named after companies and the players wear advertising? No. Is "Friends" any better than it was 8 years ago when it was produced for 10% the cost? No. The only "purpose" served by wasting 10 million man-hours on Friends commercials every week is to convince some one-hit wonders that they're worth $1e6 per week. TiVo is doing a real service to society.
I'd rather have a smaller number of commercial-free channels (like HBO) fighting for my hard-earned Cable TV dollar. Don't worry, "Joey" is set for life no matter what happens.
I was on a C++ project on Solaris that switched from 32 bit to 64 bit half way through. It was a piece of cake. In fact you could just pass a compiler switch to compile for one or the other.
Besides, remember those pointers address *virtual* memory. I can eaily imagine wanting to mmap a DVD or big database even if I didn't have that much RAM.
What, you think the NRA invented the idea of living things eating each other?
Are there any mainstream 802.11b cards without WEP? (Granted, WEP is fatally flawed, but that's different from not TRYING to provide security.)
Why? Why is it good to try to have a single application for everything? "The Application" will have to reconfigure its interface for each type of task anyways. There is no benefit, only loss of modularity.
I remember walking home to my dorm room with a shrinkwrapped Visual C++ 4.2 educational edition. "Only" $80. I suspected somebody would see it in my bag and be envious or impressed. What a chump I was. A nerdy chump. Somehow, apt-getting that latest gcc revision doesn't give me that buzz. But neither would shelling out for the hologram, anymore.
Just like when I was 14 and realized there wasn't really a 24x7 party going on down at radio station.
I really hope I can teach my kids to see through all the crap at an early age, but it's not easy. Last night my wife asked my 4 year old what his favorite movie his. He said it was the new Little Mermaid movie - which he has NEVER SEEN. It could only have come from seeing commercials on the Disney Channel.
That's cool!
To draw a line, you select a freehand drawing tool, draw a dot, then move somewhere else and shift+click.
To draw a rectangle, you use the rectangular selection tool, then right-click on the screen, then select "Edit... Stroke." (There's no toolbar button or hotkey for this).
In other words, how you draw a line has NOTHING to do with how you draw a rectangle, and both actions are side-effects of tools for other purposes. I'm sorry, but that's just weird.
Would you really get the bends if your space suit popped? It's only one atmosphere of difference. In diving that's, what, 32 feet?
You're responding to a joke.