"What if I do value the product? I like listening to music. I play guitar as well, and I like to play the music I listen to (*gasp*), it's a good way of learning."
"What I don't like and don't care for is people who are richer than me telling me how they need my 20 bucks. They don't."
If you value the product, then pay for it and don't complain. If it costs too much, then don't buy it. You're not Jean Valjean stealing bread for your family.
The more passionate you are in your conviction that how they act is wrong, then the more discomfort you should be willing to endure in your opposition to them. By using P2P to take their product you legitimise the product by creating demand, you legitimise their actions against P2P, and you take the easy, soft, cushy way out instead of really doing something that would make a difference and take control away from them.
If you are not small-minded, then really explore alternatives outside those you already know.
"The problem with people like you is that you are shilling for the record industry, reinforcing their view that only the music that they own and they control is desireable to download. This is simply out of touch with reality."
Excuse me, but I am encouraging people to put their money where their mouth is and completely reject the music industry instead of legitimising the RIAA and the flawed entertainment industry business model. I wrote:
"If you really mean what you say, respond by not accepting their product on any terms. Remove the demand entirely, and the market will react."
"Entertain yourself and those around you instead of relying on someone else (corporations) to provide your escapism for you. You will probably find yourself living a more rewarding life."
Just because I encourage people to stop whining and to take personal responsibility does not make me a shill for a corporation. Sucking on the teat of an industry while complaining of its unfairness and injustice is hypocritical and self-defeating, no matter how much legitimacy the complaints may have.
"I agree with this being a good idea, but you are missing the point. Not everybody can do this, or is willing to, and even if that were the case the point at hand is quite different.
Nobody should be forced to boycott the music industry because that just means that we are reinforcing the authority the RIAA claim to have over our lives. DRM is not something I will succumb to, even if it means I have to download torrents instead of buying my music at the store. We are supposedly citizens that have a right to decide the laws which govern private industries in the "free" world. We should not have to hide in caves and abandon our entertainment for something unconstitutional."
I am not missing the point. Anybody can do this (what did people do for entertainment up until 60-70 years ago?), and if they're not willing, then they shouldn't be complaining. It's that simple. Remember the old saying, if you don't vote, don't complain? If you're not willing to make a personal effort to change your own habits to reject something you oppose, then stop complaining.
If you download torrents, then you are empowering the industry which you say you oppose. You make them and their product relevant and important. It is that simple. Nobody has to hide in a cave or abandon entertainment; the suggestion that people would have to give up entertainment, that perhaps Disney-tainment is the only option available, is small-minded and naive.
If you're not willing to give up something as relatively insignificant as pop-culture product, and not willing to alter your product consumption habits, then what are you willing to do to stop this unconstitutional behaviour you oppose so much? How much pain or discomfort are you willing to endure to stand up for what you believe is right?
"I'm all for copyright and paying Authors and creators their due, but DRM violates the spirit of copyright because it has no time limitation."
If DRM needs to be fought for the sake of far-raching effects on culture and learning, then why keep feeding money to the side who are implementing DRM? Personally reject the industry and they will suffer. If they suffer then change will happen. Doing business as usual with the "other side" while vigourously opposing them on important issues is not a good way to try and bring about change. It might be the least painful in the short term, but the least productive in the long term.
"No. It's not about whether the music (or movie) is a classic or a piece of crap. It's not about the cost. It's about control and it goes way beyond entertainment."
You say "no", but you reiterate the main thrust of my comment: taking personal control. Perhaps I was not as clear as I should have been.
Stop relying on the corporations. Crying if they behave badly is not taking personal responsibility. Stand up, take personal responsibility, take control... take yourself out of the equation and don't be their consumer. Not accepting their product and finding alternatives to their business model is taking control. Accepting their product under one's own conditions (bypassing DRM, piracy, whatever) is not taking control. In that case the supply side still lies with the industry, and so they still control you, because they control the supply of product. Reject the supply altogether, and they are no longer in control, because their rules become irrelevant.
It's much like a junkie and a pusher - however the junkie gets his smack from the pusher (buying, stealing, cheating), the pusher still controls the supply, the market and the junkie. If the pusher alters the quality of the supply or its quantity, the junkie suffers. The pusher will still make his money by changing the rules of the market and charging more to those who pay, making more people unhappy, and the junkie suffers. Eliminate the addiction, and the pusher, the market, the rules and the supply are irrelevant.
Expecting an industry to change because you are unhappily buying their product, or fighting an industry's dirty tricks with more dirty tricks, are not taking personal responsibility to finding an alternative; they are expecting and/or forcing others to change to avoid personal change.
Yes, this certainly does go beyond entertainment, but the fight over entertainment seems to be the loudest, which in itself says a lot about our society and its expectations. However, taking personal control and responsibility, and finding real alternatives to established models, applies wherever an excessive imbalance of power and control exists.
You bring home a point about the entertainment industry that most people seem to forget. This is all about entertainment. The RIAA et al are up in arms because for them the whole piracy thing is about money, their bread and butter. It's show-biz.
However, the arguments which come out of anti-DRM people et al really come across as being pathetic at times. There is a pervading sense that fundamental human rights are being trampled on, when we are talking about entertainment product. Nobody needs the latest hit singles. Nobody needs box sets, DVD extras, or music libraries of 10,000 songs. We want them.
The entertainment industry, as in any other area of business, relies on supply and demand, and (as I have commented on before in/. threads), the huge amount of piracy which occurs only proves to the entertainment industry that demand is there. If you have never visited an Asian country, you have no idea how pervasive piracy of entertainment and software is throughout the world. It is huge.
Anyone who argues against DRM or says the entertainment industry is somehow ripping off "the people", yet fights this through anti-DRM software, or some sort of piracy, or other means of getting the industry product they want on their own terms, they lose some respect from me.
I say, put up or shut up. If you don't like what the RIAA does, if you think labels only offer music that sucks, if DVDs are overpriced or you don't like the "new release-newer release with extras" cycle, don't respond by taking their product on your own terms. That just says that you do indeed value that product and are willing to pay for it, just not in upfront cash - you are confirming the demand for the product.
If you really mean what you say, respond by not accepting their product on any terms. Remove the demand entirely, and the market will react.
Buy a guitar, a piano, an accordian or whatever, and learn how to play it. Go see a play in a local theatre instead of a major corporate Broadway tour. Don't initiate your kids into the corporate entertainment addiction by buying them cross-branded toys. Stop feeding the monkey on your back and turn off your fricking television. Entertain yourself and those around you instead of relying on someone else (corporations) to provide your escapism for you. You will probably find yourself living a more rewarding life.
"You know damned well that when (not if) iPod comes out with wireless, his tune on that will change in a hurry. Kind of like Intel was slow until Apple was using it."
I've been making a prediction for a long time concerning iPods and wireless - it's 50% prediction, and 50% personal desire. I haven't bought an iPod because I've been waiting for my prediction to come true. The thing about wireless in a music player is not whether or not the player has it, but how it can be utilised.
Inter-personal networking with music players seems very over-hyped and is something which I doubt even an enthusiast would use very often. The idea requires being immobile in one place long enough to go through the motions, and for someone to have a compatible player, and for them to be willing to accept your connection - many people already have negative experiences with bluetooth devices in this regard. This is not a great way to start.
Also, the success of this feature relies on receivers enjoying the music that has been shared with them, as it is a push model rather than pull. If people keep getting music they don't like from others, then the feature fails, and so Microsoft fails. Microsoft must rely on the public's interaction for this feature to be a success - too risky!
Then there's the apathy factor. Don't forget that iTunes had sharing years ago and still has it today. How many people care? How many people bother sharing their libraries looking for others? I've used it over a home network, and out of curiosity I sometimes leave it on over the internet. I have never seen a shared library come off the internet, and this is a pull model - if people used it, they could explore what others offer and listen to what they like, and still this does not seem to happen. Jobs probably has some numbers telling him how much people really care or not about sharing music with others.
I think a good way to look at the differences in approach between Apple's entertainment efforts and Microsoft's, is "personal behaviour" vs. "people's behaviour". Just about everything in the Apple home entertainment lineup is geared towards personal fulfillment. Every crowd is a bunch of individuals. The Zune approach seems like Microsoft looked a little too long at MySpace and how people behave in a group, and tried to adapt that group behaviour to a personal music player. Many personal networking websites have come and gone; does Microsoft expect personal networking music players to really be a long-term thing?
iPods need wireless to tie in with Airport Express. That would be very useful and the amount of hardware going into each unit would be put to good use on a regular basis, and it would result in personal gratification, not others imposing themselves upon you.
You come home, take the iPod out of your pocket, select your network and the speaker location you want, and music starts coming out of the stereo. As you move around your home, you switch speaker locations on the iPod and the music follows you. There is no need to go back and forth to the computer to switch locations (as is the case now) and there is no need for a remote because the iPod is the remote, streaming the music over the network - just tote the player around or plop it on the coffee table.
All the pieces are in place except the wireless iPod.
In graphic design and advertising, holding contests to develop and choose suitable product is considered spec work. It is recognised as being bad for business, bad for the industries, and is discouraged by professional organisations.
The power of contests lies with one client, who has a lot of people work for nothing so the client can get their finished product on the cheap, with little or no risk to themselves. The client who uses contests is demonstrating a lack of commitment to project development, and everyone else suffers financially, which drags the entire industry down. I don't see how it is any different in developing technology.
Re:Location, Location, Location
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Seatle or SF Areas? That should be a better question. It is the quaility of life, not the job."
Yes, quality of life is very important. As a recent grad, this might not be taking up a lot of your concern, but in a few years it will matter a lot more. As Marilyn Monroe once said, "A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night."
As for whether you'd be living in the SF or Seattle areas, it's not just a matter of which pastimes and entertainment are available, but how your salary compares to the local cost of living. Besides that, no matter where you live, if you don't have time for yourself, then the greatest location in the world doesn't mean much. It's up to you how important free time is or isn't.
I'm all for gaming - I've been doing it for years - but really, honestly, the effort a person puts into improving their Second Life world is effort taken away from improving their First Life world - you know, the one we really live in - the real world, where the video resolution and audio quality are far superior too.
Beyond any concern for internal net security, the Chinese internet agency should be concerned about acts like this because of their effect on internet access for the average citizen.
Countries who strictly control their citizens' internet access route all national traffic through proxies, and a block of IPs are assigned to each country. When hackers from China or Saudi Arabia go around messing with sites, a typical response is for the victim to block that IP. Over time, a large number of a country's IPs can be blocked by victim sites.
An example: when I lived in Saudi Arabia, for a while I had a hard time accessing slashdot (and some other sites) because it seemed about half the Saudi IPs were blocked by/. Every time a Saudi clicks on a link, a new IP is used for each request, and so to read/. articles I had to keep reloading until I got an IP which wasn't blocked. (I made a list of the blocked IPs, wrote in to/. about the problem and they did fix it)
Anyways, in such cases, the malicious actions of a very few ultimately result in an entire nation having its internet access blocked. It would be easy to say that such actions give the Chinese or Saudis a taste of their own medicine, but if we are to claim to be on the moral high ground, then we should not be making life so difficult for the average internet user in these countries. If the Chinese authorites have any interest in their citizens being able to access the international web (even if they restrict it themselves), then they should be concerned about the fallout from hackers in their countries and cooperate in tracking them down.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken quoted by Ken Iverson quoted by Jim Horning, 1979
" the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force."
The thing about these computers is that they are nice. Not everything in life needs to be practical, scalable or upgradable. Not everyone swaps motherboards or PCI cards or anything else out of their computer. Not every computer needs to be designed with these in mind.
In most instances, "nice" tends to be inefficient and impractical - luxury, even more so. This is the price of having something which is, well, nice. These computers don't compare to a moddable, upgradable box because it's not supposed to.
Some people want/need a pick-up truck, some people want/need a sports car.
So Jobs claims Apple is being more green in its business practices, and this guy throws around some sort of low-end consipiracy theory of the "real" reasons Apple is going green, and then at the end of his article says he wishes Apple would be more green in its business practices. wtf?
Didn't PayPal (supposedly) increase their customer service efforts a year or so ago? There's an old story which needs to be dug up.
The mode of the customer service isn't the problem, it's the quality. Even if there are live operators, that won't make any difference if they keep locking accounts for no apparent reason, or for reasons the customer isn't at fault for, or if the operators can't take reasonable action without customer acrobatics. The attitude and practices at PayPal are what need to be changed.
Of course, instead of lawsuits, websites and complaints, the easiest solution is to stop using PayPal. By the time I had made three Paypal transactions my account had been locked twice and I gave up on it; why use (and pay for) something if it offers no convenience?
Hmmm, yeah maybe, but in medical TV don't the stories usually involve the staff doing the best damned job they can, with occasionaly f-ups adding twists, excitement and pause for introspection? In an Office-geek show, techs who actually do their job well and cover all the bases would be the most boring to portray - a good tech has as little excitement as possible. Regular back-ups, triple-redundancy, and well-maintained desktop machines with up-to-date software don't add up to a lot of excitement. It's the idiot IT staff who do a poor job that would make for an entertaining TV show ("SHIT! SHIT! THE RAID IS GOING DOWN! SHIT! Oh, wait, our backups weren't properly maintained? What now?!?!? CRISIS!!!11!1!") - so to have an exciting show, you'd probably have to portray the profession as being staffed by idiots and slackers.
There are always all the pebkac stories - but if there were too much emphasis on pebkacs, then the viewing populace may grow weary of seeing their normal computer habits paraded in front of them and portrayed as being idiotic.
"If people want to buy a DVD, and Wal-Mart doesn't have it they'll go somewhere else."
Well, yes and no... the people who are looking for a specific title might do that, but to a large degree Hollywood allows movies to be a commodity - look at all the absolutely garbage movies which sell millions of copies - and in a commodity market, price is all the matters. A lot of people simply browse what's on the shelf, and people who want to browse will browse where prices are lowest.
Having said that, if one studio did lose distribution with Walmart, I'm sure Walmart would recognise the hole in its loss leader and switch to a different form of sucker bait.
"Wal-Mart may hate the idea and threaten and moan, but if all the studios jump onto the iTMS then Wal-Mart will buckle. They can't drop their entire DVD line unless they want to drop a whole market."
Walmart sells DVDs below cost, as a loss leader. This works for Walmart as it draws people into the store, and it works for Hollywood because they move tons of product at their normal wholesale price. Walmart could always find another loss leader to lure people into the stores, but Hollywood couldn't easily find an outlet willing to suck up millions in losses to move product.
I've posted a couple/few times in the past about my opinion that sci-fi is sick, out of ideas (more like "head up its ass, eating its own shit and declaring how delicious it is") and we are forced to look to the past for fantasy about the future - and so it seems to be the same even with sci-fi parody.
Here's an open letter from me:
Dear anybody/everybody involved with creating sci-fi entertainment product.
Years ago I tried to get Earthlink DSL service. I called and was told DSL was available at my house. My account is set up and the Earthlink person tells me they'd send me a package and then arrange for installation. Time passes and I don't receive the package. More time passes and I phone: I'm told that DSL is not available in my neighbourhood and so the package and my account was cancelled.
When I ask if perhaps Earthlink could have contacted me to tell me this a couple weeks earlier, the person on the phone tells me (without any hint of humour or irony) that I was sent an email. I never received an email. Yes, we sent an email. To which address I ask. They sent the email telling me that I could not have Earthlink service to the free Earthilink email address they had provided with my account. Super-Genius!
That may have been the stupidest customer service experience of my life and has forever tainted my opinion of anything having to do with Earhtlink.
"Boh the interviewer and interviewee appear to be relatively idiotic. This interview might have been marginally interesting if they had interviewed someone more on the cutting edge of cheating -- someone who actually creates the mods, or develops new cheating modalities."
Welcome to the internet, where people barely qualified to pass a grade 12 English class can become "writers" and "journalists" for "respected" websites publishing "news". This will only get worse before it gets better.
Slashdot Mirror
"What if I do value the product? I like listening to music. I play guitar as well, and I like to play the music I listen to (*gasp*), it's a good way of learning."
"What I don't like and don't care for is people who are richer than me telling me how they need my 20 bucks. They don't."
If you value the product, then pay for it and don't complain. If it costs too much, then don't buy it. You're not Jean Valjean stealing bread for your family.
The more passionate you are in your conviction that how they act is wrong, then the more discomfort you should be willing to endure in your opposition to them. By using P2P to take their product you legitimise the product by creating demand, you legitimise their actions against P2P, and you take the easy, soft, cushy way out instead of really doing something that would make a difference and take control away from them.
If you are not small-minded, then really explore alternatives outside those you already know.
"The problem with people like you is that you are shilling for the record industry, reinforcing their view that only the music that they own and they control is desireable to download. This is simply out of touch with reality."
Excuse me, but I am encouraging people to put their money where their mouth is and completely reject the music industry instead of legitimising the RIAA and the flawed entertainment industry business model. I wrote:
"If you really mean what you say, respond by not accepting their product on any terms. Remove the demand entirely, and the market will react."
"Entertain yourself and those around you instead of relying on someone else (corporations) to provide your escapism for you. You will probably find yourself living a more rewarding life."
Just because I encourage people to stop whining and to take personal responsibility does not make me a shill for a corporation. Sucking on the teat of an industry while complaining of its unfairness and injustice is hypocritical and self-defeating, no matter how much legitimacy the complaints may have.
"I agree with this being a good idea, but you are missing the point. Not everybody can do this, or is willing to, and even if that were the case the point at hand is quite different.
Nobody should be forced to boycott the music industry because that just means that we are reinforcing the authority the RIAA claim to have over our lives. DRM is not something I will succumb to, even if it means I have to download torrents instead of buying my music at the store. We are supposedly citizens that have a right to decide the laws which govern private industries in the "free" world. We should not have to hide in caves and abandon our entertainment for something unconstitutional."
I am not missing the point. Anybody can do this (what did people do for entertainment up until 60-70 years ago?), and if they're not willing, then they shouldn't be complaining. It's that simple. Remember the old saying, if you don't vote, don't complain? If you're not willing to make a personal effort to change your own habits to reject something you oppose, then stop complaining.
If you download torrents, then you are empowering the industry which you say you oppose. You make them and their product relevant and important. It is that simple. Nobody has to hide in a cave or abandon entertainment; the suggestion that people would have to give up entertainment, that perhaps Disney-tainment is the only option available, is small-minded and naive.
If you're not willing to give up something as relatively insignificant as pop-culture product, and not willing to alter your product consumption habits, then what are you willing to do to stop this unconstitutional behaviour you oppose so much? How much pain or discomfort are you willing to endure to stand up for what you believe is right?
"I'm all for copyright and paying Authors and creators their due, but DRM violates the spirit of copyright because it has no time limitation."
If DRM needs to be fought for the sake of far-raching effects on culture and learning, then why keep feeding money to the side who are implementing DRM? Personally reject the industry and they will suffer. If they suffer then change will happen. Doing business as usual with the "other side" while vigourously opposing them on important issues is not a good way to try and bring about change. It might be the least painful in the short term, but the least productive in the long term.
"No. It's not about whether the music (or movie) is a classic or a piece of crap. It's not about the cost. It's about control and it goes way beyond entertainment."
You say "no", but you reiterate the main thrust of my comment: taking personal control. Perhaps I was not as clear as I should have been.
Stop relying on the corporations. Crying if they behave badly is not taking personal responsibility. Stand up, take personal responsibility, take control... take yourself out of the equation and don't be their consumer. Not accepting their product and finding alternatives to their business model is taking control. Accepting their product under one's own conditions (bypassing DRM, piracy, whatever) is not taking control. In that case the supply side still lies with the industry, and so they still control you, because they control the supply of product. Reject the supply altogether, and they are no longer in control, because their rules become irrelevant.
It's much like a junkie and a pusher - however the junkie gets his smack from the pusher (buying, stealing, cheating), the pusher still controls the supply, the market and the junkie. If the pusher alters the quality of the supply or its quantity, the junkie suffers. The pusher will still make his money by changing the rules of the market and charging more to those who pay, making more people unhappy, and the junkie suffers. Eliminate the addiction, and the pusher, the market, the rules and the supply are irrelevant.
Expecting an industry to change because you are unhappily buying their product, or fighting an industry's dirty tricks with more dirty tricks, are not taking personal responsibility to finding an alternative; they are expecting and/or forcing others to change to avoid personal change.
Yes, this certainly does go beyond entertainment, but the fight over entertainment seems to be the loudest, which in itself says a lot about our society and its expectations. However, taking personal control and responsibility, and finding real alternatives to established models, applies wherever an excessive imbalance of power and control exists.
You bring home a point about the entertainment industry that most people seem to forget. This is all about entertainment. The RIAA et al are up in arms because for them the whole piracy thing is about money, their bread and butter. It's show-biz.
/. threads), the huge amount of piracy which occurs only proves to the entertainment industry that demand is there. If you have never visited an Asian country, you have no idea how pervasive piracy of entertainment and software is throughout the world. It is huge.
However, the arguments which come out of anti-DRM people et al really come across as being pathetic at times. There is a pervading sense that fundamental human rights are being trampled on, when we are talking about entertainment product. Nobody needs the latest hit singles. Nobody needs box sets, DVD extras, or music libraries of 10,000 songs. We want them.
The entertainment industry, as in any other area of business, relies on supply and demand, and (as I have commented on before in
Anyone who argues against DRM or says the entertainment industry is somehow ripping off "the people", yet fights this through anti-DRM software, or some sort of piracy, or other means of getting the industry product they want on their own terms, they lose some respect from me.
I say, put up or shut up. If you don't like what the RIAA does, if you think labels only offer music that sucks, if DVDs are overpriced or you don't like the "new release-newer release with extras" cycle, don't respond by taking their product on your own terms. That just says that you do indeed value that product and are willing to pay for it, just not in upfront cash - you are confirming the demand for the product.
If you really mean what you say, respond by not accepting their product on any terms. Remove the demand entirely, and the market will react.
Buy a guitar, a piano, an accordian or whatever, and learn how to play it. Go see a play in a local theatre instead of a major corporate Broadway tour. Don't initiate your kids into the corporate entertainment addiction by buying them cross-branded toys. Stop feeding the monkey on your back and turn off your fricking television. Entertain yourself and those around you instead of relying on someone else (corporations) to provide your escapism for you. You will probably find yourself living a more rewarding life.
"You know damned well that when (not if) iPod comes out with wireless, his tune on that will change in a hurry. Kind of like Intel was slow until Apple was using it."
I've been making a prediction for a long time concerning iPods and wireless - it's 50% prediction, and 50% personal desire. I haven't bought an iPod because I've been waiting for my prediction to come true. The thing about wireless in a music player is not whether or not the player has it, but how it can be utilised.
Inter-personal networking with music players seems very over-hyped and is something which I doubt even an enthusiast would use very often. The idea requires being immobile in one place long enough to go through the motions, and for someone to have a compatible player, and for them to be willing to accept your connection - many people already have negative experiences with bluetooth devices in this regard. This is not a great way to start.
Also, the success of this feature relies on receivers enjoying the music that has been shared with them, as it is a push model rather than pull. If people keep getting music they don't like from others, then the feature fails, and so Microsoft fails. Microsoft must rely on the public's interaction for this feature to be a success - too risky!
Then there's the apathy factor. Don't forget that iTunes had sharing years ago and still has it today. How many people care? How many people bother sharing their libraries looking for others? I've used it over a home network, and out of curiosity I sometimes leave it on over the internet. I have never seen a shared library come off the internet, and this is a pull model - if people used it, they could explore what others offer and listen to what they like, and still this does not seem to happen. Jobs probably has some numbers telling him how much people really care or not about sharing music with others.
I think a good way to look at the differences in approach between Apple's entertainment efforts and Microsoft's, is "personal behaviour" vs. "people's behaviour". Just about everything in the Apple home entertainment lineup is geared towards personal fulfillment. Every crowd is a bunch of individuals. The Zune approach seems like Microsoft looked a little too long at MySpace and how people behave in a group, and tried to adapt that group behaviour to a personal music player. Many personal networking websites have come and gone; does Microsoft expect personal networking music players to really be a long-term thing?
iPods need wireless to tie in with Airport Express. That would be very useful and the amount of hardware going into each unit would be put to good use on a regular basis, and it would result in personal gratification, not others imposing themselves upon you.
You come home, take the iPod out of your pocket, select your network and the speaker location you want, and music starts coming out of the stereo. As you move around your home, you switch speaker locations on the iPod and the music follows you. There is no need to go back and forth to the computer to switch locations (as is the case now) and there is no need for a remote because the iPod is the remote, streaming the music over the network - just tote the player around or plop it on the coffee table.
All the pieces are in place except the wireless iPod.
"the power of prizes to accelerate progress"
In graphic design and advertising, holding contests to develop and choose suitable product is considered spec work. It is recognised as being bad for business, bad for the industries, and is discouraged by professional organisations.
The power of contests lies with one client, who has a lot of people work for nothing so the client can get their finished product on the cheap, with little or no risk to themselves. The client who uses contests is demonstrating a lack of commitment to project development, and everyone else suffers financially, which drags the entire industry down. I don't see how it is any different in developing technology.
"Seatle or SF Areas? That should be a better question. It is the quaility of life, not the job."
Yes, quality of life is very important. As a recent grad, this might not be taking up a lot of your concern, but in a few years it will matter a lot more. As Marilyn Monroe once said, "A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night."
As for whether you'd be living in the SF or Seattle areas, it's not just a matter of which pastimes and entertainment are available, but how your salary compares to the local cost of living. Besides that, no matter where you live, if you don't have time for yourself, then the greatest location in the world doesn't mean much. It's up to you how important free time is or isn't.
I'm all for gaming - I've been doing it for years - but really, honestly, the effort a person puts into improving their Second Life world is effort taken away from improving their First Life world - you know, the one we really live in - the real world, where the video resolution and audio quality are far superior too.
Beyond any concern for internal net security, the Chinese internet agency should be concerned about acts like this because of their effect on internet access for the average citizen.
/. Every time a Saudi clicks on a link, a new IP is used for each request, and so to read /. articles I had to keep reloading until I got an IP which wasn't blocked. (I made a list of the blocked IPs, wrote in to /. about the problem and they did fix it)
Countries who strictly control their citizens' internet access route all national traffic through proxies, and a block of IPs are assigned to each country. When hackers from China or Saudi Arabia go around messing with sites, a typical response is for the victim to block that IP. Over time, a large number of a country's IPs can be blocked by victim sites.
An example: when I lived in Saudi Arabia, for a while I had a hard time accessing slashdot (and some other sites) because it seemed about half the Saudi IPs were blocked by
Anyways, in such cases, the malicious actions of a very few ultimately result in an entire nation having its internet access blocked. It would be easy to say that such actions give the Chinese or Saudis a taste of their own medicine, but if we are to claim to be on the moral high ground, then we should not be making life so difficult for the average internet user in these countries. If the Chinese authorites have any interest in their citizens being able to access the international web (even if they restrict it themselves), then they should be concerned about the fallout from hackers in their countries and cooperate in tracking them down.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
-- Howard Aiken quoted by Ken Iverson quoted by Jim Horning, 1979
" the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force."
Yeah, but there's good news: Walmart is hiring.
The thing about these computers is that they are nice. Not everything in life needs to be practical, scalable or upgradable. Not everyone swaps motherboards or PCI cards or anything else out of their computer. Not every computer needs to be designed with these in mind.
In most instances, "nice" tends to be inefficient and impractical - luxury, even more so. This is the price of having something which is, well, nice. These computers don't compare to a moddable, upgradable box because it's not supposed to.
Some people want/need a pick-up truck, some people want/need a sports car.
So Jobs claims Apple is being more green in its business practices, and this guy throws around some sort of low-end consipiracy theory of the "real" reasons Apple is going green, and then at the end of his article says he wishes Apple would be more green in its business practices. wtf?
Didn't PayPal (supposedly) increase their customer service efforts a year or so ago? There's an old story which needs to be dug up.
The mode of the customer service isn't the problem, it's the quality. Even if there are live operators, that won't make any difference if they keep locking accounts for no apparent reason, or for reasons the customer isn't at fault for, or if the operators can't take reasonable action without customer acrobatics. The attitude and practices at PayPal are what need to be changed.
Of course, instead of lawsuits, websites and complaints, the easiest solution is to stop using PayPal. By the time I had made three Paypal transactions my account had been locked twice and I gave up on it; why use (and pay for) something if it offers no convenience?
Journalists must stop claiming that any and every story which occured between 1945 and 1990 "was the height of the cold war".
Hmmm, yeah maybe, but in medical TV don't the stories usually involve the staff doing the best damned job they can, with occasionaly f-ups adding twists, excitement and pause for introspection? In an Office-geek show, techs who actually do their job well and cover all the bases would be the most boring to portray - a good tech has as little excitement as possible. Regular back-ups, triple-redundancy, and well-maintained desktop machines with up-to-date software don't add up to a lot of excitement. It's the idiot IT staff who do a poor job that would make for an entertaining TV show ("SHIT! SHIT! THE RAID IS GOING DOWN! SHIT! Oh, wait, our backups weren't properly maintained? What now?!?!? CRISIS!!!11!1!") - so to have an exciting show, you'd probably have to portray the profession as being staffed by idiots and slackers.
There are always all the pebkac stories - but if there were too much emphasis on pebkacs, then the viewing populace may grow weary of seeing their normal computer habits paraded in front of them and portrayed as being idiotic.
"If people want to buy a DVD, and Wal-Mart doesn't have it they'll go somewhere else."
Well, yes and no... the people who are looking for a specific title might do that, but to a large degree Hollywood allows movies to be a commodity - look at all the absolutely garbage movies which sell millions of copies - and in a commodity market, price is all the matters. A lot of people simply browse what's on the shelf, and people who want to browse will browse where prices are lowest.
Having said that, if one studio did lose distribution with Walmart, I'm sure Walmart would recognise the hole in its loss leader and switch to a different form of sucker bait.
"Wal-Mart may hate the idea and threaten and moan, but if all the studios jump onto the iTMS then Wal-Mart will buckle. They can't drop their entire DVD line unless they want to drop a whole market."
Walmart sells DVDs below cost, as a loss leader. This works for Walmart as it draws people into the store, and it works for Hollywood because they move tons of product at their normal wholesale price. Walmart could always find another loss leader to lure people into the stores, but Hollywood couldn't easily find an outlet willing to suck up millions in losses to move product.
The internet is free - free to crap on your sundae.
I've posted a couple/few times in the past about my opinion that sci-fi is sick, out of ideas (more like "head up its ass, eating its own shit and declaring how delicious it is") and we are forced to look to the past for fantasy about the future - and so it seems to be the same even with sci-fi parody.
Here's an open letter from me:
Dear anybody/everybody involved with creating sci-fi entertainment product.
Can we have new ideas please?
Thanks.
Years ago I tried to get Earthlink DSL service. I called and was told DSL was available at my house. My account is set up and the Earthlink person tells me they'd send me a package and then arrange for installation. Time passes and I don't receive the package. More time passes and I phone: I'm told that DSL is not available in my neighbourhood and so the package and my account was cancelled.
:P !!
When I ask if perhaps Earthlink could have contacted me to tell me this a couple weeks earlier, the person on the phone tells me (without any hint of humour or irony) that I was sent an email. I never received an email. Yes, we sent an email. To which address I ask. They sent the email telling me that I could not have Earthlink service to the free Earthilink email address they had provided with my account. Super-Genius!
That may have been the stupidest customer service experience of my life and has forever tainted my opinion of anything having to do with Earhtlink.
earthlink is dumbest!!1!
"Boh the interviewer and interviewee appear to be relatively idiotic. This interview might have been marginally interesting if they had interviewed someone more on the cutting edge of cheating -- someone who actually creates the mods, or develops new cheating modalities."
Welcome to the internet, where people barely qualified to pass a grade 12 English class can become "writers" and "journalists" for "respected" websites publishing "news". This will only get worse before it gets better.
The pink fuzzy one, right?