YOU are fucking stupid, fan boy...
The point is the guy doesn't have to burn the stuff onto a DVD in order to play it. Stick it on his iPod, plug it into the HDTV and he's good to go.
Ah well, the AppleTV box will put this one to rest.
Yes, I hate when that happens. I spent thousands of dollars on DVDs, and now I want to play them at HD resolution on my BlueRay player, and I can't, I have to go buy all new DVD's because those evil DVD companies won't let me.
Do you have an iPod? One of the video models? Spend $30.00 on a video cable, sync it to your TV show library, and plug it into your TV. Look at that, kind of like a Tivo or DVR in your pocket! Great for taking movies on business trips to watch in the hotel, too.
The worst, and I have this song STILL stuck in my head... the Defender jingle from the early 80's for the Atari...
The Defender sees lots of alien ships
The defender sees lots of radar blips
Each blip is a ship
On a body snatching trip!
When you play a game of Atari...
Have you played Atari today!
You know, I heartily agree with you. Complacent is certainly a misnomer. The media were well-manipulated enablers of the U.S. government and its policies.
This is rich. The role of the free press was and IS to cast a skeptical and critical eye on the government. In recent years, at least here in the United States, the corporate media has either been complacent or cowed into not fulfilling its journalistic responsibility. We are told the "news" through their filter, and then we have an echo chamber of talking heads which tell us what to "think" about the news. You have certain media outlets that are essentially tools of a particular ideology, echoing talking points and spin by the party in power. Then you have other media outlets who are treading on eggshells because they don't want to upset their corporate masters who are afraid of the impact on the bottom-line when the government tells them they are unpatriotic. It is a real scary slide into fascism, and the media has got to grow some balls.
You have certain media outlets that are cheering the government on at one step, quashing dissension on the other hand through their editorial spin, selling fear fear fear, and if all of that fails, trotting out a feeding frenzy over a missing blonde, or a sex scandal, to keep the populace's attention.
The media is broke.
The web steps into the void and offers a lot of unfiltered information. The saavy consumer of information can gather information from a variety of sources. There are still some problems that arise, but if anything, politicians are less able to rely on the short attention spans of their public.
The whole municipal wifi thing sounds great on paper, but the reality of the service it delivers is sorely lacking. I stayed in a hotel in Mountain View which was covered by Google's municipal wifi. The connection was flakey, slow and unreliable. Indeed, in retrospect, I find it almost comical that local cable companies and ISPs are screaming against this sort of thing as being anticompetitive. The fact of the matter is that it sort of works, but not very well. Get a few users on it, and a few meters of walls, trees, whatever, through in some RFI, and it makes for a really crappy internet access experience.
Actually, you can deauthorize as many computers as you want. You can only do the "deauthorize everything and start fresh thing" once a year, but that is not really a limitation. A call to iTunes support, and they will do it for you any time you ask.
And again, the whole DRM thing in slashdot, is, as usual, through the eyes of the poor college student.
Bullsh@t. You own the media of the CD but you don't own its contents. We can all get high and mighty about how awful DRM is, but the sad truth about human nature is that if there is a freebie to be had most are going to take it. An official release of a movie put online in decent quality without DRM for $2.00? Who is going to buy it? How many are going to buy a copy and then through the magic of p2p spread about a million copies all over the internet.
It is easy for you kids to sit and blame the evil corporations for being evil with their awful DRM thing. Go and create something, software, a movie, music, whatever, watch it get copied, stolen all over the web and then get back to me on that. When you actually work for a living, I think your perspective changes. I have worked in the software industry for some 20 years, and I have had the "great pleasure" of seeing software for which I get royalties for my hard work show up all over the place thanks to the web. "I'm just sharing it with my friends - all ten million of them."
It's nice to b!tch and wail about the evils of DRM but the mindset is such that it ignores the realities of the digital media and human nature.
I don't know anyone who's NOT Anti-DRM. All DRM does is make buying music miserable for the people who are doing it legally.
Don't you KNOW IT. I cry everytime I click that one-click purchase button in iTunes to download a song. It's like crawling over broken glass when I have to take the extra ten seconds to authorize one of my computers to play my music the first time. Such a drag. It's an even bigger heap of misery when I need to deauthorize one of my five machines so that I can play my music on another machine. I wail everytime I need to burn a copy of a CD and I hit that 7 CD limit, and am forced to go through the extra ten seconds it takes to shuffle the songs around into a new playlist. It's awful.
You know, having those cash registers, security cases and the security gates at my local Tower Records is a drag, too. It is just punishing the law abiding people who actually pay for their CD's rather than lifting them.
People are sick of buying CD's on itunes and not being able to play them on their other players...as well as other music services trying to play on itunes.
Isn't this kind of the beta vs. vhs thing all over again?
Raskin was a bitter man. He is hardly the father of the final form of the Macintosh. Jobs never claimed that the Mac was developed by college drop-outs. The Apple I WAS developed by college drop outs.
Garbage collection is for programmers too lazy or sloppy to implement an allocation and deallocation policy, and stick to it. Regardless of how fast hardware is these days, having something pour over memory allocation, determine unused blocks, purge them, compress existing blocks, fix up the pointers referring to those moved blocks, etc, is just eating up processor time. How much freaking difficulty is it to periodically run a profiler on one's application during development, and see if any leaks are occurring? Why introduce additional overhead of an all-the-time garbage collector, when this stuff can be found during development time and eliminated?
I have written several very large commercial software applications for well-known companies, and we don't lament not having a garbage collector. We model our data, and we model the life-cycle of our objects and data, and knowing that we will sometimes frack-up, we profile our code and see if anything is being left behind.
... which is why in Cocoa when you allocate an object, within the init you take the newly allocated object and add it to the autorelease pool before returning it to the calling routine. That routine retains it when it is added to the collection. When the collection is ditched, it will do a release. No big deal.
You write:
"MHO, they're not a monopoly, and never has been. Whether they are3 or not we should let the free market decide rather than the courts. Look at AT&T, they were a monopoly and the government got involved and broke them apart into baby bells. Now we are facing the possibility of another bell monopoly, now without GTE."
How would the free market, pray tell, have broken up AT&T in the first place? The free market works great when there is competition, and when companies actually compete on the basis of innovation of product and process. Perhaps I am obtuse. I don't understand how your point of the courts breaking up AT&T and now we are getting another bell monopoly with GTE is an indication of something that the free market could have taken care of? If anything, the relaxation of communication regulation has been the thing that permits stuff like this to happen, rather than the interference of the court.
You have no idea what a monopoly is, then. It might be helpful for you to read about the history of Standard Oil. The parallels of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior are obvious to anyone but the most deluded fan boy.
You may point to the existence of choice in the market with a few small niche players. Standard Oil controlled perhaps 90% of the oil coming into the United States. The company used any means necessary to undercut and run out of business the competition, including the domination of the transport mechanism by which oil was delivered, usually the railroad.
Microsoft used similar tactics, in setting up license deals requiring manufacturers to pay for a windows license for any hardware sold. They also illegally tied products to their OS, in order to force out or exclude competition. Back in the days when the internet was relatively new, the browser war, the shit they pulled on Netscape, the bundling of Office, etc? The sheer crime of throwing their weight with vaporware to crush Go corporation? The list of offenses by this evil behemoth of a company is staggering. Having a monopoly is fine. Using it to kill competition, is not.
This is fscking ridiculous. They just passed laws (thanks to ranchers) bitching about wild horses consuming resources on the PUBLIC land that they get to graze their cattle. Incidentally, the cost of this land use is a pittance that they pay, but that's another matter altogether. These laws permit capture and transport with intention to slaughter horses of a certain age.
So this idiot has this great idea to let roam, on public lands, more of these great herbivores, that will do just as much damage if not more, as the wild horses? Reality check! Think the rancher lobby is gonna permit that?
Er, no.
I understand your points as well. I use a little Sony Ericsson thing that is quite small, and I can look at my email, text messages, and phone stuff, plus have reminders for my calendar etc. It is still quite small, and cost about $150.00 or so. I have a rather active lifestyle, so I need the compact phone, and something reasonably durable. The browsing on something this small is useless, and unessential at least for me... I usually just look at the weather and sometimes news headlines. But the thing IS cumbersome to use. My palm sits unused and gathering dust because it too, IS a pain in the ass to use, and ok at what it does, but not great at any of what it does. My experience with smart phones has been similar. They are interesting and fun for a few days, and then they just get kind of irritating to use once I get over my infatuation with their gee-whiz gimmicks. There is a limitation to how small you can shrink the things to the point where interacting with them becomes prohibitively cumbersome.
I was discussing this on another board, and someone was going on about using their Treo with Bluetooth to play music through the car stereo, while talking on the phone and running a GPS application, isn't that great? I was like, err, yeah, but my in-dash GPS is bigger and easier to see while I am driving, my iPod dock results in better sound and integration, and no matter how you cut it, cell phones suck, undependable pieces of garbage.
Look, I am not denying that some people will have a use for these type products, but for joe average consumer, these things will be like any other poorly realized tech fad, and go the way of the PDA.
When I read stuff like this, I shake my head. Just look at recent history, Bill. The PDA market is dying. The great promise of the PDA offering a convergence of functionality into one easy to use product was partially realized in the Newton, made cheaper, junkier, and more attainable in the Palm, and then that market went boom. Why? Because it didn't do anything particularly well.
And the laptop market has made that device omnipresent, so why carry a treo or smart phone, huge with all the junk, when you also already have your laptop with you. Redundancy, the same that caused the PDA to fade away.
All I want is a small phone that can text message, sync an address book, maybe read email and send off T9 email messages, and most important of all F*cking stay connected for more than 2 minutes.
I wish phone manufacturers would stop trying to add baubles and bangles to sh*t and trying to call it the next best thing.
When I read stuff like this, I shake my head. Just look at recent history, Bill. The PDA market is dying. The great promise of the PDA offering a convergence of functionality into one easy to use product was partially realized in the Newton, made cheaper, junkier, and more attainable in the Palm, and then that market went boom. Why? Because it didn't do anything particularly well.
And the laptop market has made that device omnipresent, so why carry a treo or smart phone, huge with all the junk, when you also already have your laptop with you.
All I want is a small phone that can text message, sync an address book, maybe read email and send off T9 email messages, and most important of all F*cking stay connected for more than 2 minutes.
I wish phone manufacturers would stop trying to add baubles and bangles to sh*t and trying to call it the next best thing.
Actually that's not true, regarding copyrighting style or asthetics. There are laws outlining "trade dress" which cover the look associated with a product. This is why Pepsi's soda bottle doesn't look like the Coke bottle, for example.
This is the charade of the whole open source ideal. For a small company with a niche product to endeavor to sell services, it is impractical, and requires an awful lot of overhead to generate revenue, far more than would be to produce a software product and sell it en masse.
Programmers who are out of college or grad school have a tendency to actually want to get paid for their work. And as a business developer OF a niche product, reworking the business model to provide "customization and service" is not going to enable me to make payroll. There is simply too much infrastructure required.
I often wonder how many proponents of Open Source software ARE actually small business owners, or indeed programmers or programming consultants who are actually in the industry right now, and NOT just some bored college kid who really doesn't have to do real work to eat for a living.
I have real bills to pay, and a business to keep running, and competitors. It's all well and good to talk about the idyllic benefits of free software, share it all, publish my code, but for a small company, the service model isn't really an option, if you want to stay viable.
Comcast has TV on demand where you can watch popular shows at any time. Quicker than download, I'd much rather have it come up almost instantly than pull it off of BitTorrent and view some ten hours later.
I would imagine this is the model that production companies would embrace, rather than the buy it and download it model.
I actually have one of the ORIGINAL Fox video rental-only copies from the very first video release... And it still plays. Wonder how much THAT little treasure is worth?
Slashdot Mirror
YOU are fucking stupid, fan boy... The point is the guy doesn't have to burn the stuff onto a DVD in order to play it. Stick it on his iPod, plug it into the HDTV and he's good to go. Ah well, the AppleTV box will put this one to rest.
Yes, I hate when that happens. I spent thousands of dollars on DVDs, and now I want to play them at HD resolution on my BlueRay player, and I can't, I have to go buy all new DVD's because those evil DVD companies won't let me.
Do you have an iPod? One of the video models? Spend $30.00 on a video cable, sync it to your TV show library, and plug it into your TV. Look at that, kind of like a Tivo or DVR in your pocket! Great for taking movies on business trips to watch in the hotel, too.
The worst, and I have this song STILL stuck in my head... the Defender jingle from the early 80's for the Atari... The Defender sees lots of alien ships The defender sees lots of radar blips Each blip is a ship On a body snatching trip! When you play a game of Atari... Have you played Atari today!
You know, I heartily agree with you. Complacent is certainly a misnomer. The media were well-manipulated enablers of the U.S. government and its policies.
This is rich. The role of the free press was and IS to cast a skeptical and critical eye on the government. In recent years, at least here in the United States, the corporate media has either been complacent or cowed into not fulfilling its journalistic responsibility. We are told the "news" through their filter, and then we have an echo chamber of talking heads which tell us what to "think" about the news. You have certain media outlets that are essentially tools of a particular ideology, echoing talking points and spin by the party in power. Then you have other media outlets who are treading on eggshells because they don't want to upset their corporate masters who are afraid of the impact on the bottom-line when the government tells them they are unpatriotic. It is a real scary slide into fascism, and the media has got to grow some balls. You have certain media outlets that are cheering the government on at one step, quashing dissension on the other hand through their editorial spin, selling fear fear fear, and if all of that fails, trotting out a feeding frenzy over a missing blonde, or a sex scandal, to keep the populace's attention. The media is broke. The web steps into the void and offers a lot of unfiltered information. The saavy consumer of information can gather information from a variety of sources. There are still some problems that arise, but if anything, politicians are less able to rely on the short attention spans of their public.
The whole municipal wifi thing sounds great on paper, but the reality of the service it delivers is sorely lacking. I stayed in a hotel in Mountain View which was covered by Google's municipal wifi. The connection was flakey, slow and unreliable. Indeed, in retrospect, I find it almost comical that local cable companies and ISPs are screaming against this sort of thing as being anticompetitive. The fact of the matter is that it sort of works, but not very well. Get a few users on it, and a few meters of walls, trees, whatever, through in some RFI, and it makes for a really crappy internet access experience.
Actually, you can deauthorize as many computers as you want. You can only do the "deauthorize everything and start fresh thing" once a year, but that is not really a limitation. A call to iTunes support, and they will do it for you any time you ask. And again, the whole DRM thing in slashdot, is, as usual, through the eyes of the poor college student.
Bullsh@t. You own the media of the CD but you don't own its contents. We can all get high and mighty about how awful DRM is, but the sad truth about human nature is that if there is a freebie to be had most are going to take it. An official release of a movie put online in decent quality without DRM for $2.00? Who is going to buy it? How many are going to buy a copy and then through the magic of p2p spread about a million copies all over the internet. It is easy for you kids to sit and blame the evil corporations for being evil with their awful DRM thing. Go and create something, software, a movie, music, whatever, watch it get copied, stolen all over the web and then get back to me on that. When you actually work for a living, I think your perspective changes. I have worked in the software industry for some 20 years, and I have had the "great pleasure" of seeing software for which I get royalties for my hard work show up all over the place thanks to the web. "I'm just sharing it with my friends - all ten million of them." It's nice to b!tch and wail about the evils of DRM but the mindset is such that it ignores the realities of the digital media and human nature.
You know, having those cash registers, security cases and the security gates at my local Tower Records is a drag, too. It is just punishing the law abiding people who actually pay for their CD's rather than lifting them.
Raskin was a bitter man. He is hardly the father of the final form of the Macintosh. Jobs never claimed that the Mac was developed by college drop-outs. The Apple I WAS developed by college drop outs.
Garbage collection is for programmers too lazy or sloppy to implement an allocation and deallocation policy, and stick to it. Regardless of how fast hardware is these days, having something pour over memory allocation, determine unused blocks, purge them, compress existing blocks, fix up the pointers referring to those moved blocks, etc, is just eating up processor time. How much freaking difficulty is it to periodically run a profiler on one's application during development, and see if any leaks are occurring? Why introduce additional overhead of an all-the-time garbage collector, when this stuff can be found during development time and eliminated? I have written several very large commercial software applications for well-known companies, and we don't lament not having a garbage collector. We model our data, and we model the life-cycle of our objects and data, and knowing that we will sometimes frack-up, we profile our code and see if anything is being left behind.
... which is why in Cocoa when you allocate an object, within the init you take the newly allocated object and add it to the autorelease pool before returning it to the calling routine. That routine retains it when it is added to the collection. When the collection is ditched, it will do a release. No big deal.
You write: "MHO, they're not a monopoly, and never has been. Whether they are3 or not we should let the free market decide rather than the courts. Look at AT&T, they were a monopoly and the government got involved and broke them apart into baby bells. Now we are facing the possibility of another bell monopoly, now without GTE." How would the free market, pray tell, have broken up AT&T in the first place? The free market works great when there is competition, and when companies actually compete on the basis of innovation of product and process. Perhaps I am obtuse. I don't understand how your point of the courts breaking up AT&T and now we are getting another bell monopoly with GTE is an indication of something that the free market could have taken care of? If anything, the relaxation of communication regulation has been the thing that permits stuff like this to happen, rather than the interference of the court.
You have no idea what a monopoly is, then. It might be helpful for you to read about the history of Standard Oil. The parallels of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior are obvious to anyone but the most deluded fan boy.
You may point to the existence of choice in the market with a few small niche players. Standard Oil controlled perhaps 90% of the oil coming into the United States. The company used any means necessary to undercut and run out of business the competition, including the domination of the transport mechanism by which oil was delivered, usually the railroad.
Microsoft used similar tactics, in setting up license deals requiring manufacturers to pay for a windows license for any hardware sold. They also illegally tied products to their OS, in order to force out or exclude competition. Back in the days when the internet was relatively new, the browser war, the shit they pulled on Netscape, the bundling of Office, etc? The sheer crime of throwing their weight with vaporware to crush Go corporation? The list of offenses by this evil behemoth of a company is staggering. Having a monopoly is fine. Using it to kill competition, is not.
This is fscking ridiculous. They just passed laws (thanks to ranchers) bitching about wild horses consuming resources on the PUBLIC land that they get to graze their cattle. Incidentally, the cost of this land use is a pittance that they pay, but that's another matter altogether. These laws permit capture and transport with intention to slaughter horses of a certain age. So this idiot has this great idea to let roam, on public lands, more of these great herbivores, that will do just as much damage if not more, as the wild horses? Reality check! Think the rancher lobby is gonna permit that? Er, no.
I understand your points as well. I use a little Sony Ericsson thing that is quite small, and I can look at my email, text messages, and phone stuff, plus have reminders for my calendar etc. It is still quite small, and cost about $150.00 or so. I have a rather active lifestyle, so I need the compact phone, and something reasonably durable. The browsing on something this small is useless, and unessential at least for me... I usually just look at the weather and sometimes news headlines. But the thing IS cumbersome to use. My palm sits unused and gathering dust because it too, IS a pain in the ass to use, and ok at what it does, but not great at any of what it does. My experience with smart phones has been similar. They are interesting and fun for a few days, and then they just get kind of irritating to use once I get over my infatuation with their gee-whiz gimmicks. There is a limitation to how small you can shrink the things to the point where interacting with them becomes prohibitively cumbersome. I was discussing this on another board, and someone was going on about using their Treo with Bluetooth to play music through the car stereo, while talking on the phone and running a GPS application, isn't that great? I was like, err, yeah, but my in-dash GPS is bigger and easier to see while I am driving, my iPod dock results in better sound and integration, and no matter how you cut it, cell phones suck, undependable pieces of garbage. Look, I am not denying that some people will have a use for these type products, but for joe average consumer, these things will be like any other poorly realized tech fad, and go the way of the PDA.
When I read stuff like this, I shake my head. Just look at recent history, Bill. The PDA market is dying. The great promise of the PDA offering a convergence of functionality into one easy to use product was partially realized in the Newton, made cheaper, junkier, and more attainable in the Palm, and then that market went boom. Why? Because it didn't do anything particularly well. And the laptop market has made that device omnipresent, so why carry a treo or smart phone, huge with all the junk, when you also already have your laptop with you. Redundancy, the same that caused the PDA to fade away. All I want is a small phone that can text message, sync an address book, maybe read email and send off T9 email messages, and most important of all F*cking stay connected for more than 2 minutes. I wish phone manufacturers would stop trying to add baubles and bangles to sh*t and trying to call it the next best thing.
When I read stuff like this, I shake my head. Just look at recent history, Bill. The PDA market is dying. The great promise of the PDA offering a convergence of functionality into one easy to use product was partially realized in the Newton, made cheaper, junkier, and more attainable in the Palm, and then that market went boom. Why? Because it didn't do anything particularly well. And the laptop market has made that device omnipresent, so why carry a treo or smart phone, huge with all the junk, when you also already have your laptop with you. All I want is a small phone that can text message, sync an address book, maybe read email and send off T9 email messages, and most important of all F*cking stay connected for more than 2 minutes. I wish phone manufacturers would stop trying to add baubles and bangles to sh*t and trying to call it the next best thing.
Actually that's not true, regarding copyrighting style or asthetics. There are laws outlining "trade dress" which cover the look associated with a product. This is why Pepsi's soda bottle doesn't look like the Coke bottle, for example.
This is the charade of the whole open source ideal. For a small company with a niche product to endeavor to sell services, it is impractical, and requires an awful lot of overhead to generate revenue, far more than would be to produce a software product and sell it en masse. Programmers who are out of college or grad school have a tendency to actually want to get paid for their work. And as a business developer OF a niche product, reworking the business model to provide "customization and service" is not going to enable me to make payroll. There is simply too much infrastructure required.
I often wonder how many proponents of Open Source software ARE actually small business owners, or indeed programmers or programming consultants who are actually in the industry right now, and NOT just some bored college kid who really doesn't have to do real work to eat for a living. I have real bills to pay, and a business to keep running, and competitors. It's all well and good to talk about the idyllic benefits of free software, share it all, publish my code, but for a small company, the service model isn't really an option, if you want to stay viable.
Comcast has TV on demand where you can watch popular shows at any time. Quicker than download, I'd much rather have it come up almost instantly than pull it off of BitTorrent and view some ten hours later.
I would imagine this is the model that production companies would embrace, rather than the buy it and download it model.
I actually have one of the ORIGINAL Fox video rental-only copies from the very first video release... And it still plays. Wonder how much THAT little treasure is worth?