I don't believe that's the case. IIRC Connectix developed VPC from scratch. For a while VPC and SoftWindows/RealPC were competitors, but VPC had better compatibility and performance, so Insignia discontinued the product and sold the rights to FWB. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...
Man, am I really that much older than most other slashdotters (I'm 27)? Didn't you guys have to answer essay questions and the like for your exams in history or English (or other) class?
I hope not (27 here too). Yeah, I had essay questions, and I always printed. For me it was faster than cursive and I don't recall significant discomfort.
Cursive was specifically invented to allow people to write entire words without lifting the pen off the page. You have nice fluid motion that really is much nicer on your wrist and hands. And it's much faster to boot.
It wasn't faster for me (perhaps it could have been had I done it more), and I question the motion benefits. The pen stays on the page, but you have to make lots of tiny and relatively precise loops and curves. Meanwhile print is mostly straight lines and circles (and therefore usually much more readable), and I don't see why it's so bad to raise the pen slightly between letters.
Cursive really is much faster than printing. Same when I take notes at the physics seminars here at my university, cursive note-taking is really much much faster than printing. and much easier on my hands.
Use whatever works for you. I find the opposite is true for me, and as the article points out many people use a combination of print and cursive.
Taco, Hemos, etc, the PNG format won't succeed if people don't USE it. If it is truly and honestly your intention to support the PNG format over the gif format, then put your graphics where your mouth is.
I'm as far from a leftist as you can get (note sig), and I think this whole obsession with airport security is pointless. Regardless of a no-fly list, there will not be another 9/11, simply because the passengers and pilots will not permit it. (Reinforced cockpit doors help too, so even if terrorists gassed or otherwise incapacitated everyone they still couldn't get control). Meanwhile, there are any number of ways for terrorists to inflict far more harm than bombing an airplane, so continuing to throw resources at a relatively strong point is actually counterproductive.
Furthermore, there's a real possibility that inconveniencing passengers will cost lives. If flying becomes too much of a hassle, more people will drive, where they are far more likely to be killed.
AFAIK, IBM hasn't even started fabbing PPC970's in marketable quantities
Yeah, that's the big question. Last year IBM said that the 970 would be available the second half of 2003, and I don't think they've said anything since. It's a pretty safe assumption that Apple has dibs on the first production runs, so it's not unreasonable that 970 Macs could appear soon.
Oh I don't buy the excuse it's for employment either
I'm sure the reason is that they can convince most voters that it's for employment. Anybody with the slightest understanding of economics will recognize it as an obvious broken window fallacy, but a politician who opposes it will be demagogued as wanting to throw people out of work.
The G3 was introduced in Powerbooks and towers simultaneously.
# People say that this chip currently consumes to much power for laptop use.
I've heard conflicting numbers, but most say a 1.2 GHz 970 consumes roughly the same power as a 1.0 GHz G4. So it might be possible, although the motherboard upgrades needed to support the 970 might increase the power requirements too much.
If I were a member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I'd suggest that withholding is calculated to pay out large refunds at the end of the year to make people think they're "getting something".
Of course it is. I've heard people discussing how smart they were for increasing their withholding so they could "get a bigger refund". I tried to explain that they'd be better off putting the money that would have been withheld into any kind of interest-bearing account, but it was hopeless. The level of economic illiteracy is amazing (which also explains credit card debt levels).
50% of the people in this country are living at near or below abject poverty. Since the top 1% of the population owns over 90% of the wealth
Both of these statements are preposterous. The first requires that you have a truly bizarre defintion of "abject poverty", the second is flat-out wrong. (And that's from a site decrying the "unfair" wealth distribution).
Ludicrous. Ted Turner and Michael Eisner are obvious counterexamples.
Big Corporations are automagically in bed with conservative politics and political figures.
Again ludicrous. Corporations want to increase their profits, and they'll support anybody who will help them do that. For example, "Big Entertainment" is overwhelmingly liberal, which is why it's mostly Democrats pushing user-hostile DRM schemes.
because it is objectively bad to pollute, no matter what, for instance
Even more ludicrous. If you actually believed that you wouldn't be using a computer. There are costs and benefits to everything.
Big Business is anathema to life in general.
Please define "Big". I'm curious at what number of employees or what level of revenue an organization becomes unalterably evil.
Lots of money is not better than clean air, water, and open space.
Maybe not, but they tend to go together. Rich countries have better envrionmental conditions than poor countries.
The "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" makes all this possible. I still don't see, though, how it would be able to catch fire without legislation outlawing the general purpose computer.
Exactly. In the absence of such legislation, Palladium could be the best thing that ever happened to Apple and Linux.
it is incomprehensible to me (though admitedly I may be of a lesser mind that those running the simulation) why greater beings would waste CPU time on mere humans.
I'm not sure about that, after all The Sims is pretty popular.
I've always wondered if time actually is linear. We and our physics are stuck in the current space/time continuum, and therefore we would have no idea if time actually followed say, a sine wave, since we would have no other point of reference.
And does it even have to be continuous at all? Read Permutation City by Greg Egan which talks about this and many other things that will make your head hurt.
If safety interferes with fun, my vote is for safety every time
There's actually a more complex issue lurking here. Trying to increase safety at all costs can easily lead to unintended consequences. For example, a study found that allowing right turn on red at an intersection increased the rate of accidents at that intersection, but decreased accidents by a greater amount everywhere else. Looking at human nature this makes perfect sense; if a driver is forced to wait when he could easily turn safely, he may be more aggressive in the future to "make up for lost time".
Can you alter the DRM signature on those files you've paid for to reassign them to someone else, i.e. can there be a second hand market for those tracks?
Convert the file to AIFF, sell that, and destroy the originals. I don't know if that's legal, but it should be.
Ah, you say, I can burn it to CD, and copy that into MP3, and work from that - substantional artifacts and all
So work with the AIFF directly. And there are several ways to do the conversion without burning a CD.
Now, what happens when the copyright on those apple DRM'd files expires, in 95 years + the lifetime of the author.
Copyright expiring? You're quite optimistic:)
I fully agree with your criticisms of DRM. But I don't believe that they apply to the iTunes store, because its "DRM" is specifically not intended to impose hard limits. If you like, think of the iTMS as selling compressed AIFFs that you have to go through a somewhat inconvenient process to decompress.
I believe "genocide" usually specifically refers to ethnic cleansing-type activities, so shooting political dissidents doesn't count. Here's a site with information on "democide", defined as all murder committed by governments.
"Tee-hee, people should just look the other way, because some laws were meant to be broken, tee-hee."
More like "It's not possible to come up with a fixed code of laws that covers every possible situation without ambiguity, so we shouldn't turn enforcement over to machines".
In theory, you're right. If a law is routinely violated by most people, there's probably something wrong with the law (e.g. artifically low speed limits). But the law is *never* going to be perfect; there will always be corner cases where an activity is technically illegal but "obviously" should be permitted.
DRM cannot survive in a free market with equivalant non-DRM alternatives...I say let them use all the DRM they want! Just scrap all the f*ckign laws that enforce DRM! DRM is not the problem. LAWS are the problem.
If you want to be dishonest, it is trivial to get rid of the DRM, but I hope that you get prosecuted to the full extent of the law for it.
Um, you want people prosecuted for burning a CD, which Apple encourages, and ripping as MP3, which Apple also encourages? No.
The reason I don't mind iTunes DRM is that is is specifically designed *not* to be 100% effective. It doesn't prevent fair use (or unfair use for that matter), it just makes it mildly inconvenient.
Why not have a protection flag that will limit the maximum sound quality of a recording.
As with any "strong" DRM, in order for this to be effective you have to ban a whole lot of software. For starters, you can't allow any open source encoders because it would be trivial to modify them to ignore the flag.
The only way I see DRM being reasonable is if it is *not* intended to be effective. The iTunes store is an example of this; copying is only made inconvenient, not prohibited.
Re:Relation of time / real world currency to gamin
on
Law and Virtual Worlds
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· Score: 1
Even when you're working on widgets and selling them, it's reasonable from an economic point of view to base value on the amount of time invested.
The value of an item is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. If I produce something that turns out to be crap (in the opinion of potential buyers), it has a low value regardless of how much time I spent working on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe that's the case. IIRC Connectix developed VPC from scratch. For a while VPC and SoftWindows/RealPC were competitors, but VPC had better compatibility and performance, so Insignia discontinued the product and sold the rights to FWB. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...
I hope not (27 here too). Yeah, I had essay questions, and I always printed. For me it was faster than cursive and I don't recall significant discomfort.
Cursive was specifically invented to allow people to write entire words without lifting the pen off the page. You have nice fluid motion that really is much nicer on your wrist and hands. And it's much faster to boot.
It wasn't faster for me (perhaps it could have been had I done it more), and I question the motion benefits. The pen stays on the page, but you have to make lots of tiny and relatively precise loops and curves. Meanwhile print is mostly straight lines and circles (and therefore usually much more readable), and I don't see why it's so bad to raise the pen slightly between letters.
Cursive really is much faster than printing. Same when I take notes at the physics seminars here at my university, cursive note-taking is really much much faster than printing. and much easier on my hands.
Use whatever works for you. I find the opposite is true for me, and as the article points out many people use a combination of print and cursive.
Ditto.
Furthermore, there's a real possibility that inconveniencing passengers will cost lives. If flying becomes too much of a hassle, more people will drive, where they are far more likely to be killed.
Yeah, that's the big question. Last year IBM said that the 970 would be available the second half of 2003, and I don't think they've said anything since. It's a pretty safe assumption that Apple has dibs on the first production runs, so it's not unreasonable that 970 Macs could appear soon.
Not that I recall. And even if he did, if Apple has 970 Macs ready to go, they're certainly not going to sit on them. G4 sales are in the tank.
I'm sure the reason is that they can convince most voters that it's for employment. Anybody with the slightest understanding of economics will recognize it as an obvious broken window fallacy, but a politician who opposes it will be demagogued as wanting to throw people out of work.
The G3 was introduced in Powerbooks and towers simultaneously.
# People say that this chip currently consumes to much power for laptop use.
I've heard conflicting numbers, but most say a 1.2 GHz 970 consumes roughly the same power as a 1.0 GHz G4. So it might be possible, although the motherboard upgrades needed to support the 970 might increase the power requirements too much.
Of course it is. I've heard people discussing how smart they were for increasing their withholding so they could "get a bigger refund". I tried to explain that they'd be better off putting the money that would have been withheld into any kind of interest-bearing account, but it was hopeless. The level of economic illiteracy is amazing (which also explains credit card debt levels).
Since the top 1% of the population owns over 90% of the wealth
Both of these statements are preposterous. The first requires that you have a truly bizarre defintion of "abject poverty", the second is flat-out wrong. (And that's from a site decrying the "unfair" wealth distribution).
Ludicrous. Ted Turner and Michael Eisner are obvious counterexamples.
Big Corporations are automagically in bed with conservative politics and political figures.
Again ludicrous. Corporations want to increase their profits, and they'll support anybody who will help them do that. For example, "Big Entertainment" is overwhelmingly liberal, which is why it's mostly Democrats pushing user-hostile DRM schemes.
because it is objectively bad to pollute, no matter what, for instance
Even more ludicrous. If you actually believed that you wouldn't be using a computer. There are costs and benefits to everything.
Big Business is anathema to life in general.
Please define "Big". I'm curious at what number of employees or what level of revenue an organization becomes unalterably evil.
Lots of money is not better than clean air, water, and open space.
Maybe not, but they tend to go together. Rich countries have better envrionmental conditions than poor countries.
Exactly. In the absence of such legislation, Palladium could be the best thing that ever happened to Apple and Linux.
I'm not sure about that, after all The Sims is pretty popular.
Then for your sake I hope the universe isn't a big Python script.
And does it even have to be continuous at all? Read Permutation City by Greg Egan which talks about this and many other things that will make your head hurt.
There's actually a more complex issue lurking here. Trying to increase safety at all costs can easily lead to unintended consequences. For example, a study found that allowing right turn on red at an intersection increased the rate of accidents at that intersection, but decreased accidents by a greater amount everywhere else. Looking at human nature this makes perfect sense; if a driver is forced to wait when he could easily turn safely, he may be more aggressive in the future to "make up for lost time".
Convert the file to AIFF, sell that, and destroy the originals. I don't know if that's legal, but it should be.
Ah, you say, I can burn it to CD, and copy that into MP3, and work from that - substantional artifacts and all
So work with the AIFF directly. And there are several ways to do the conversion without burning a CD.
Now, what happens when the copyright on those apple DRM'd files expires, in 95 years + the lifetime of the author.
Copyright expiring? You're quite optimistic
I fully agree with your criticisms of DRM. But I don't believe that they apply to the iTunes store, because its "DRM" is specifically not intended to impose hard limits. If you like, think of the iTMS as selling compressed AIFFs that you have to go through a somewhat inconvenient process to decompress.
Exactly the point. A DRM system applies the letter of its "law", not the spirit.
I believe "genocide" usually specifically refers to ethnic cleansing-type activities, so shooting political dissidents doesn't count. Here's a site with information on "democide", defined as all murder committed by governments.
Correct. Thus the push for Hollings-style laws that make exercising control over your property a crime.
More like "It's not possible to come up with a fixed code of laws that covers every possible situation without ambiguity, so we shouldn't turn enforcement over to machines".
In theory, you're right. If a law is routinely violated by most people, there's probably something wrong with the law (e.g. artifically low speed limits). But the law is *never* going to be perfect; there will always be corner cases where an activity is technically illegal but "obviously" should be permitted.
Very well said.
Um, you want people prosecuted for burning a CD, which Apple encourages, and ripping as MP3, which Apple also encourages? No.
The reason I don't mind iTunes DRM is that is is specifically designed *not* to be 100% effective. It doesn't prevent fair use (or unfair use for that matter), it just makes it mildly inconvenient.
As with any "strong" DRM, in order for this to be effective you have to ban a whole lot of software. For starters, you can't allow any open source encoders because it would be trivial to modify them to ignore the flag.
The only way I see DRM being reasonable is if it is *not* intended to be effective. The iTunes store is an example of this; copying is only made inconvenient, not prohibited.
The value of an item is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. If I produce something that turns out to be crap (in the opinion of potential buyers), it has a low value regardless of how much time I spent working on it.