It works on either digital or analog [...] Why can't they do this with televisions?
They do -- there are a number of "digital-ready" tvs already out there, especially widescreen TVs.
They're the ones that cost $1000 more than the analog only ones. Why? Its not because the digital components are that much more expensive. They're not...and being digital, Moore's law kicks in as it does with anything with a chip in it, making the price of the component half every 18 months.
No, the real reason is that the makers still have not let a standard be decided from the 18 different standards available when the FCC first said "let the market decide".
(and how do you decide on a standard and test that standard on the consumer end with nobody broadcasting in digital to see the difference, yet without consumers no broadcaster would commit to a standard either...ultimate in catch 22, hence the current FCC mandate of digital by 2008)
So with 18 different standards for digital TV, you have 18+ different patents you have to sign on to and pay royalties for...
one can guess how much 18+ patents cost: about $1000 / unit.
there's really no reason to hate yourself...as with Harry Potter, the august release is definitely "Priced To Own", meaning at walmart/bj's you might be able to find it for as low as 17.99. That in itself is the same as renting it 3 times, which you'd be doing anyways for the 3 months until it hits HBO and you'd tape it off the TV. Or you can just the PPV for 5.99 in about a month after it hits stores...but then its a crap-shoot on whether or not its letterboxed (some movies are, some aren't, and there's no way of knowing 'til you've paid for it).
Of course, with the ever-changing privacy terms that some companies keep changing without notifying their user - it won't take much long until they'll take your credit cards info for 'verification' and who knows what they'll do with it.
No, they do inform us of changes, as they are often required to do so by laws of various states...Trouble is, they're allowed to change them and tell us later, by 4th class snail mail, taking 2-3 weeks to get to us, by which time its too late to re-file a complaint or a protest before they've already sold our info off.
The Librarian established September 1, 2002, as the effective date of the rates. That does not mean that no royalties are due for webcasters' activities prior to September 1. Webcasters and others using the statutory licenses will have to pay royalties for all of their activities under the licenses since October 28, 1998.
So either cough up 10s of thousands of dollars to pay for your theft of copyrights for the last 4 years, or take your hobby into the toilet. Doesn't matter that you only had, say, 10 listeners at a time or that the stuff you play doesn't belong to RIAA labels or that you had 0 income related to your webcasting. You still owe.
I don't see population growth as being that big a deal, since in spite of the world's increase from 3 to 5.5 billion since 1970, the united states has only gone from 210million to 270million, or numbers close to that effect. certainly not the near doubling effect the rest of the world (or at least, the third world) has seen.
What does make a difference in america though is the continual growth of the educated middle class, and/or the general growing affluence of even the lower classes, either in the cities or in the country.
More people can afford to go to movies more often, in spite of the increasing prices.
Verisign is, by offering the 9-year plan, making similar mistakes to IBM when they sold instead of leased their mainframe hardware.
So if everybody (who is a Verisign customer), were to go ahead and buy for 9 years, Verisign would actually see a good profit this year, then work that profit direction into future plans' budgets, only to have them fail utterly because nobody would be buying anything from them the next 3-8 years...
Stock prices would drop. Execs would be canned. Heads would roll...
ICANN rated their options on new names not by the quality of the names, but by their opinion that the registrar who proposed the name is able to sell it...
And so far, in every case, they've failed..biz,.name,.pro,.museum (well, that _might_ make it, but not at the price their offering), all 4 of those are current failures in our eyes. and they're failures not because the company couldn't handle the registrations; they're failures because they suck, and we know it.
Ok, fine. Let me blame M$'s buggy as hell (and contradictory in different versions) DLL system for the crap. The user perspective is the same.
And don't give me any crap about event-driven programming. I've been working X/Motif for 12 years, Java/AWT(w/Swing) for 6.
And so I probably feel that the degree to which these DLLs depend on the underlying app in order to make decisions for them is rediculous. A far better design is to only dispatch events for those who have registered an intention to handle them. Default behaviour in a system is default behaviour. If an app has said, "I want to override the default and handle the resize feature myself", then fine. But until an app does that, there is no reason in hell that the system should dispatch events to the app and wait for a reply before carrying out the users actions. Just resize and dispatch the results of the resize to the app...and even then, don't wait for the app to decide to do something about it. If an app doesn't care, don't hold up everything else because of it.
Come to think of it they claim a Window Manager is an integral part of an OS.
Which is rediculous. Much of the basic window management features (drawing the title bar, grabbing it w/ the mouse and dragging it around) are actually built into a windows app through the development libraries. The only OS ties are how the toolbar shows the icons, and even then, it defers any actions (move, close, etc) back down to the application. The application (well, the windows/mfc library) is in charge of its own ability to move around the desktop.
Which is why when an application hangs in Windows you can't even grab its title bar to move it out of the damn way...
> 2) Several times I got caught on the fact that there is no way to pass an int by reference. And I don't like Integer (see aboive)...
Create your own container class. But passing int's by reference doesn't sound very object oriented, perhaps a change in style would be more appropriate. I have never run into the problem myself. I sometimes do it in C++, but I consider it a bad habit...
Agreed, its a bad habit. Its a case of a function/method doing two or more things at once, improperly designed. If you need a return value to determine success, switch to a function that returns the changed/new value and fire an exception when failure happens. And just get used to catching exceptions.
In my case, it was the credit card debts that built up like nutso back in '93 and '94, when I was fresh outta school, and geeks weren't the valued commodity they are today...I now make 3 times what I made then and still am arguing with getting the cards gone...
No, the show itself was 1) very expensive to produce, and 2) really stretched the authors to the point of burn out.
The Prisoner was the same way. There were only 17 episodes of the Prisoner because they simply ran out of other things to do that wouldn't be repeating what they'd already done to some degree or another.
If someone is buying a book used (or even selling a book used), then the author already got money for the book sale.
This is not necessarilly true. There are five states of books not in the hands of happy readers: new on the shelf; in the trash/recycle bin/fireplace; bought new then put on sale as used; considered non-sale by the store, with cover ripped off to prevent resale, and eventually either destroyed, sold in that state for dirt-cheap, or returned to distributor/publisher (rare); and finally, written off as a non-sale to the publisher, then sold in new condition anyways at dirt-cheap.
The first two conditions we don't care about.
Right of First Sale protects the 3rd condition (bought new, resold used). This is still, probably, what most used sales are.
The worrysome issue is when the new-store retailer has written-off the book as damaged, destroyed, or after a limited time, unsold. Sometimes the retailer and publisher can negotiate a lower royalty rate for unsold books (books are never returned anymore because shipping costs are too prohibitive; this is unlike cds, b.t.w.)...this results in the bargain-bin setups at BN and Borders.
But when the retailer has written off a book as unsold and the publisher doesn't want it back (as noted, they never do), the retailer is supposed to damage or destroy the book themselves. The author's guild is worried that Amazon may be taking books they've written off as unsold and selling them as used anyways (which is probably illegal under breach of contract, or at least really really bad form). This results in amazon selling new-quality merchandise at no royalty to distributor or publisher (or author), directly in competition with still selling the book at full price as it is still in their system as being "in print", but would require ordering from the publisher again.
Or at least, that's my interpretation of the guild's concerns...
"Don't know what I'm gonna do with an extra hour?"
on
No More Rebooting?
·
· Score: 2
Easy -- get a second job, 'cause its probably going to cost all the extra cash you have to get stuff built with this, just because of the patent licensing rights...
My eldest cat adores the sound/feel of the Irish Uillean pipes. Whenever i'm playing irish folk music on the stereo, she goes to sleep on the speakers to the vibrations...
I just left my local B&N and overheard the managers talking about an upcoming revamping of the computer section. Seems Microsoft has outbid O'Reilly, Sun, and Oracle and is taking over ALL of that shelf space that used to be dedicated to those books and is having B&N put up exclusively.NET and Visual Studio books instead.
No, its not like the bookstores won't be stocking O'Reilly books anymore, its just that you'll have to go back to the old way of reading the spines to figure out what book you want...
Doesn't mean much to those who buy online, of course...but its similar to the tactic (also mentioned in the trial, b.t.w.) of M$ buying up tons of shelf space at computer software stores so there was no room on the shelves for competitors at all.
And in addition, after having written the part, he seems to really strive to go out of his way in the Council of Elrond to come up with reasons why Bombadil would be of no use and no interest in the War against Sauron/Sauruman. REALLY contrived reasons, if you ask me.
No -- remember a patent is valid from the date the application was sent to the PTO, not the date it was granted. If two or more companies/individuals send patent applications near each other on the same item, three things can happen : one gets it the others don't (and all get used), as with the telephone; both get it and lawsuits abound (LZW); none get it as it must be "obvious" if so many apply for it (never happens -- obviousness is no longer a PTO criteria as we all know).
But even if others don't apply for a patent on the thing, they're still vulnerable if their product went to market after the patent was applied for, even if the patent itself never went to market.
In the old days, with "real stuff", one would advertise if there were patent applications or patent pending on products. Now, with software and business methods, where the concept and not the invention is the patent, companies like to hide everything related to the patent and wait until they get it before they either 1) charge an arm and leg for it 'cause nobody else could possibly have known it was a pending patent (this instance), or 2) tell everybody else with the same thing to stuff it (amazon's one-click).
There are about 3 years between patent application and patent grant. Everybody in software knows that 3 years is two whole generations by software/internet standards, and programmer and designer creativity is going to come up with the same thing in different times because as programmers we're educated to think in a certain way.
I'd complain more, but at this point i think choir-preaching is all it'll come up with...
But a reminder of one fact -- the head of the PTO in a recent interview posted as a slashdot story a few years back explicity stated using these words that the PTO was in the "business of selling patents". Now if the PTO were to suddenly get smart and reasonable, and ditch applications for prior art and obviousness (like their congressional grant and law tells them to), they wouldn't be "selling" as many patents as they could, and patent application would be a higher risk, so fewer applications would be made, so the PTO would get less money.
So the only other solution to the PTO problem is to make applications and grants 100% free, so the PTO does not have a monetary incentive to grant patents to everything in site, obvious/prior-art or not.
Cringley wrote, back when the merger was first proposed, that this merger came about for one reason and one reason only : it bought Carly Fiorina another 18 months to two years at the top of HP, which she otherwise would have lost for having basically not produced a damn thing in the way of profit or improvement during her time there.
Compaq was at a desperate dead end, and Carly Fiorina of HP wants to keep her job. Buying Compaq effectively resets the shot clock, buying her another 18 to 24 months before the HP board gives her the boot. This whole $25 billion deal is about executive ego. No other explanation comes even close to making sense.
Banks have been after Credit Unions because Credit Unions are non-profit, and so they aren't taxed (as much) by the government. They exist solely to serve the interests (literally as figuratively) of their members.
CUs have all of the advantages of banks (and more so, given usually higher interest rates for savings and lower rates for loans), but none of the disadvantages (like the high taxes, and like being bought out -- no public shares means no-one can acquire enough to buy the place out).
well, that's because as an openly published protocol, it accomplishes enough on its own, for open data sources.
proprietary data sources use proprietary protocols. go to somewhere with an http link to a realmedia source, and you'll find the http link you downloaded was actually just a file containing another url, which has an "rtsp://" protocol, something only realnetworks software can understand.
as in why is it taking them months to repeat season four for those of use who tried to tape it but couldn't because our lousy f'in' cable went out that day...
I still haven't seen the end of Daemon Rising, much less any of My Two Bobs...
Slashdot Mirror
They do -- there are a number of "digital-ready" tvs already out there, especially widescreen TVs.
They're the ones that cost $1000 more than the analog only ones. Why? Its not because the digital components are that much more expensive. They're not...and being digital, Moore's law kicks in as it does with anything with a chip in it, making the price of the component half every 18 months.
No, the real reason is that the makers still have not let a standard be decided from the 18 different standards available when the FCC first said "let the market decide".
(and how do you decide on a standard and test that standard on the consumer end with nobody broadcasting in digital to see the difference, yet without consumers no broadcaster would commit to a standard either...ultimate in catch 22, hence the current FCC mandate of digital by 2008)
So with 18 different standards for digital TV, you have 18+ different patents you have to sign on to and pay royalties for...
one can guess how much 18+ patents cost: about $1000 / unit.
there's really no reason to hate yourself...as with Harry Potter, the august release is definitely "Priced To Own", meaning at walmart/bj's you might be able to find it for as low as 17.99. That in itself is the same as renting it 3 times, which you'd be doing anyways for the 3 months until it hits HBO and you'd tape it off the TV. Or you can just the PPV for 5.99 in about a month after it hits stores...but then its a crap-shoot on whether or not its letterboxed (some movies are, some aren't, and there's no way of knowing 'til you've paid for it).
No, they do inform us of changes, as they are often required to do so by laws of various states...Trouble is, they're allowed to change them and tell us later, by 4th class snail mail, taking 2-3 weeks to get to us, by which time its too late to re-file a complaint or a protest before they've already sold our info off.
Oddly enough, that bug's been a "feature" of Motif's FileSelectionBox for over a decade now. I wonder if Lesstif ever did anything about it...
So either cough up 10s of thousands of dollars to pay for your theft of copyrights for the last 4 years, or take your hobby into the toilet. Doesn't matter that you only had, say, 10 listeners at a time or that the stuff you play doesn't belong to RIAA labels or that you had 0 income related to your webcasting. You still owe.
What does make a difference in america though is the continual growth of the educated middle class, and/or the general growing affluence of even the lower classes, either in the cities or in the country.
More people can afford to go to movies more often, in spite of the increasing prices.
Verisign is, by offering the 9-year plan, making similar mistakes to IBM when they sold instead of leased their mainframe hardware.
So if everybody (who is a Verisign customer), were to go ahead and buy for 9 years, Verisign would actually see a good profit this year, then work that profit direction into future plans' budgets, only to have them fail utterly because nobody would be buying anything from them the next 3-8 years...
Stock prices would drop. Execs would be canned. Heads would roll...
"My God, it would be beautiful..."
And so far, in every case, they've failed. .biz, .name, .pro, .museum (well, that _might_ make it, but not at the price their offering), all 4 of those are current failures in our eyes. and they're failures not because the company couldn't handle the registrations; they're failures because they suck, and we know it.
And don't give me any crap about event-driven programming. I've been working X/Motif for 12 years, Java/AWT(w/Swing) for 6.
And so I probably feel that the degree to which these DLLs depend on the underlying app in order to make decisions for them is rediculous. A far better design is to only dispatch events for those who have registered an intention to handle them. Default behaviour in a system is default behaviour. If an app has said, "I want to override the default and handle the resize feature myself", then fine. But until an app does that, there is no reason in hell that the system should dispatch events to the app and wait for a reply before carrying out the users actions. Just resize and dispatch the results of the resize to the app...and even then, don't wait for the app to decide to do something about it. If an app doesn't care, don't hold up everything else because of it.
Which is rediculous. Much of the basic window management features (drawing the title bar, grabbing it w/ the mouse and dragging it around) are actually built into a windows app through the development libraries. The only OS ties are how the toolbar shows the icons, and even then, it defers any actions (move, close, etc) back down to the application. The application (well, the windows/mfc library) is in charge of its own ability to move around the desktop.
Which is why when an application hangs in Windows you can't even grab its title bar to move it out of the damn way...
Create your own container class. But passing int's by reference doesn't sound very object oriented, perhaps a change in style would be more appropriate. I have never run into the problem myself. I sometimes do it in C++, but I consider it a bad habit...
Agreed, its a bad habit. Its a case of a function/method doing two or more things at once, improperly designed. If you need a return value to determine success, switch to a function that returns the changed/new value and fire an exception when failure happens. And just get used to catching exceptions.
try {
...
i = nextIntFromDatabase(i);
} catch (SomeDatabaseException e) {
}
In my case, it was the credit card debts that built up like nutso back in '93 and '94, when I was fresh outta school, and geeks weren't the valued commodity they are today...I now make 3 times what I made then and still am arguing with getting the cards gone...
No, the show itself was 1) very expensive to produce, and 2) really stretched the authors to the point of burn out.
The Prisoner was the same way. There were only 17 episodes of the Prisoner because they simply ran out of other things to do that wouldn't be repeating what they'd already done to some degree or another.
So who else first saw that as "Intel Shows Off 'Bananas' Chip for Mobile Devices"
This is not necessarilly true. There are five states of books not in the hands of happy readers: new on the shelf; in the trash/recycle bin/fireplace; bought new then put on sale as used; considered non-sale by the store, with cover ripped off to prevent resale, and eventually either destroyed, sold in that state for dirt-cheap, or returned to distributor/publisher (rare); and finally, written off as a non-sale to the publisher, then sold in new condition anyways at dirt-cheap.
The first two conditions we don't care about.
Right of First Sale protects the 3rd condition (bought new, resold used). This is still, probably, what most used sales are.
The worrysome issue is when the new-store retailer has written-off the book as damaged, destroyed, or after a limited time, unsold. Sometimes the retailer and publisher can negotiate a lower royalty rate for unsold books (books are never returned anymore because shipping costs are too prohibitive; this is unlike cds, b.t.w.)...this results in the bargain-bin setups at BN and Borders.
But when the retailer has written off a book as unsold and the publisher doesn't want it back (as noted, they never do), the retailer is supposed to damage or destroy the book themselves. The author's guild is worried that Amazon may be taking books they've written off as unsold and selling them as used anyways (which is probably illegal under breach of contract, or at least really really bad form). This results in amazon selling new-quality merchandise at no royalty to distributor or publisher (or author), directly in competition with still selling the book at full price as it is still in their system as being "in print", but would require ordering from the publisher again.
Or at least, that's my interpretation of the guild's concerns...
Easy -- get a second job, 'cause its probably going to cost all the extra cash you have to get stuff built with this, just because of the patent licensing rights...
My eldest cat adores the sound/feel of the Irish Uillean pipes. Whenever i'm playing irish folk music on the stereo, she goes to sleep on the speakers to the vibrations...
No, its not like the bookstores won't be stocking O'Reilly books anymore, its just that you'll have to go back to the old way of reading the spines to figure out what book you want...
Doesn't mean much to those who buy online, of course...but its similar to the tactic (also mentioned in the trial, b.t.w.) of M$ buying up tons of shelf space at computer software stores so there was no room on the shelves for competitors at all.
And in addition, after having written the part, he seems to really strive to go out of his way in the Council of Elrond to come up with reasons why Bombadil would be of no use and no interest in the War against Sauron/Sauruman. REALLY contrived reasons, if you ask me.
No -- remember a patent is valid from the date the application was sent to the PTO, not the date it was granted. If two or more companies/individuals send patent applications near each other on the same item, three things can happen : one gets it the others don't (and all get used), as with the telephone; both get it and lawsuits abound (LZW); none get it as it must be "obvious" if so many apply for it (never happens -- obviousness is no longer a PTO criteria as we all know). But even if others don't apply for a patent on the thing, they're still vulnerable if their product went to market after the patent was applied for, even if the patent itself never went to market. In the old days, with "real stuff", one would advertise if there were patent applications or patent pending on products. Now, with software and business methods, where the concept and not the invention is the patent, companies like to hide everything related to the patent and wait until they get it before they either 1) charge an arm and leg for it 'cause nobody else could possibly have known it was a pending patent (this instance), or 2) tell everybody else with the same thing to stuff it (amazon's one-click). There are about 3 years between patent application and patent grant. Everybody in software knows that 3 years is two whole generations by software/internet standards, and programmer and designer creativity is going to come up with the same thing in different times because as programmers we're educated to think in a certain way. I'd complain more, but at this point i think choir-preaching is all it'll come up with... But a reminder of one fact -- the head of the PTO in a recent interview posted as a slashdot story a few years back explicity stated using these words that the PTO was in the "business of selling patents". Now if the PTO were to suddenly get smart and reasonable, and ditch applications for prior art and obviousness (like their congressional grant and law tells them to), they wouldn't be "selling" as many patents as they could, and patent application would be a higher risk, so fewer applications would be made, so the PTO would get less money. So the only other solution to the PTO problem is to make applications and grants 100% free, so the PTO does not have a monetary incentive to grant patents to everything in site, obvious/prior-art or not.
I'm inclined to agree...
CUs have all of the advantages of banks (and more so, given usually higher interest rates for savings and lower rates for loans), but none of the disadvantages (like the high taxes, and like being bought out -- no public shares means no-one can acquire enough to buy the place out).
my bad...sorry 'bout that...
well, that's because as an openly published protocol, it accomplishes enough on its own, for open data sources.
proprietary data sources use proprietary protocols. go to somewhere with an http link to a realmedia source, and you'll find the http link you downloaded was actually just a file containing another url, which has an "rtsp://" protocol, something only realnetworks software can understand.
I still haven't seen the end of Daemon Rising, much less any of My Two Bobs...