But what is a ringtone? How long can it be? What quality can it be recorded at? If I want my ringtone to be the entire song, encoded in MP3 at 128 kbps, then is that still a ringtone? And can people trading music on P2P or other networks now argue that they are just trading ringtones, which they are legally entitled to do?
Maybe Apple needs to be dealing with better record labels. eMusic sells songs for about $0.30 a song. Half goes to the artist/label, and half goes to eMusic. They're probably making more per song than Apple is. And the artists, because they are indie labels, are probably getting more per song too. And the customers are getting more songs for their money. That's what a song should cost. Although a song for a quarter would be nice. Make the purchase an non-decision. If you like it download it. With songs costing $0.99 they make me stop and think about whether I want to buy the song or not, same with CDs for $15. If things were priced cheap enough, like $0.25 for a song, or $5.00 for a physical CD, then people would just buy everything they like, instead of having to decide whether or not the purchase is actually worth it. I've spent more money on eMusic in the past year than I spent on CDs in the past 5 years, because I actually feel like I'm not being ripped off.
That feature may have been disabled by your cellphone provider. Cell phone providers do this stuff all the time. They disable the ability for you to load your own content onto the phone, so they can sell you the content. From what I understand, they make pretty good money doing it. What I would wonder is, if they provided the means for doing it, and actually provided a website with tons of content, couldn't they make more on ads on that website, as well as increased user base? They could also have related purchases. So if you buy th latest ringtone by the backstreet boys, they could also try to sell you the CD, or the actual song. Maybe free ringtone with the purchase of an album. Seems like a much better way to manage the thing than charging $3.00 for a ringtone or $1.50 for a 320x240 wallpaper for your phone. I guarantee that every 13-19 year old would immediately switch to that phone company if the air time was still at competitive rates.
You would have to have some pretty good filtering technology to filter out someones brain waves from another room with all the other ambient electromagnetic radiation going around. A standard action potential only fluctuates the membrane voltage by about 120 mV. Meanwhile, a CRT, which actually is vulnerable to Van Eck Phreaking, requires a voltage of 32,000 volts to display an image on the screen.
That kind of hits on my philosophy that all people are geeks. All people are geeks about something. Be it sports geeks (aka jocks), car geeks, hair geeks, computer geeks, math geeks, wilderness geeks, or knitting geeks. Its just that for some reason, anybody who does anything intellectual as a hobby seems to be viewed as a special kind of geek, and looked at as strange or unusual.
Most software has no idea whether you're using a SATA hard drive as opposed to IDE. It's called abstraction, and code reuse. The only thing caused by legacy hardware support, which is what we are talking about here, is bloated OSes, and security vulnerabilities from there being too much code to maintain. Also, on the software front. Why should the OS contain so much code just to run old legacy apps like MS Works 2. Granted I think that windows goes about the whole legacy software support in the wrong way. There should just be emulators for old OSes and hardware, like Apple did the two times it switched CPU architectures, instead of having to put tons of code in the main OS to support old software that most people don't use anymore.
Well, as a software developer, most laypersons would probably refer to me a computer genius, but compared to this guy, I am probably anything but. However, I can see how this happens. I'm not big on cars, but the mechanics who fix them seem to work wonders, and be car geniuses. Some of them anyway. There appears to be a lot of mechanics who all they can do is read the print out from the computer and then do a bad job at fixing it. Just like a lot of bad programmers. Anyway, that's another discussion. Then there's automotive engineers, who can tell you how each part of the car works, and could probably design it in a better way.
I got a laptop with a 1.5 GHz Celeron and 512 MB of RAM (Still available for Under $CDN 500). Anyway, Vista runs quite slow, and I can't even believe that they sell a machine with such low specs running Vista. However, Mandriva with Metisse runs quite smoothly, and would say it's the best $500 I've ever spent. If you're just looking for a laptop so you can browse the internet from the couch or watch stuff you've recorded from your TV Tuner in the bedroom, than this definitely does the trick.
You are right. However, I just said forget it at one point. I don't get the same games on my Wii/Gamecube that I got on my PC, and the experience isn't completely the same. However, I just learned to enjoy different games, because I was tired of the PC upgrade cycle, as well as all the games that didn't work because of drivers, or copy protection technologies, or other incompatibility issues. I still miss playing FPS games with a mouse and keyboard, or playing a nice RTS, but I'm happy I don't have to put up with the troubles of PC gaming. And my old copies of Quake 3, Descent 3, Starcraft, and C&C Tiberian sun still work fine, even on my outdated computer.
We have an old PowerPC mini that we use at work for testing websites in Safari. I wouldn't want to run Photoshop on it, at least not to edit large images used in print, but otherwise, it's a pretty respectable machine and can do the web/wordprocessing/email thing just fine. I think there are the perfect little thing for most homes. They take up a lot less space than any other home computer, and make almost no noise. Most people who just do web/email/wordprocessing and some light photo editing would be fine on a machine such as this.
Satellite is good when it's up, but living in Canada, with stormy weather, I hear lots of complaints from people with it that it cuts out too often. The one good thing about my cable service is that I can't even remember the last time I lost signal, if I ever have lost a signal. At least on the TV end anyway. Internet goes down once in a while, but again, it's pretty minimal.
My biggest problem with digital cable isn't the fuzzy analog channels. It's actually the over compressed digital cable that grind my gears. Once you know what the encoding artifacts looks like, such as colour bands where there should be a smoot gradient (such as a picture of the sky), or the big square blocks whenever the image changes too quickly. It's kind of sad when the first 70 channels, that are still sent as analog, recorded to MPEG2 by the TV tuner end up being better quality than the digital channels. Some digital channels end up looking as bad as when I re-encode those MPEG2 streams, to MPEG4. But what can you do when there's a cable monopoly in your city.
Well, at least they deserve the money. Do you know how much money those football teams generate in ticket sales alone? Let alone sale of licensed paraphernalia? I only with sports teams at Canadian universities generated so much money. Then the schools would have a lot more money to spend.
Put the computer in a well travelled room, and remove access to the computer when you're not in the house. Lock the case, with a physical lock, and use a hard to guess boot password. Disable booting off removable media. That will probably fix most issues. That's if you want to even bother. What kind of sites are they afraid of the kid accessing, and how much will they really be harmed by accessing the site? I was a kid once, and visited a lot of sites my parents would probably rather I didn't. I don't think I'm that messed up because of it.
However, when you're wired earphone comes out of your ear, it only falls a short distance, and never hits the ground. However, with wireless earbuds, if they were to fall out, they would probably land on the ground, and someone could step on it, or it could roll underneath something you couldn't lift, or fall into the sewer. The combined with having to replace or recharge the battery on my headphones would probably make this device next to useless. Bluetooth is good for phones, because you don't want cables getting in the way when you are trying to drive, but on a music only device, I don't see how it is worth it.
I've never understood why speed was so important to the Americans, especially in federal elections. They vote in November, and the new president doesn't come into office until January. There's lots of time to do the counting, and make sure it's done right. It's not like the counting has to be done before midnight, or the president will turn into a pumpkin.
They mention this is a threat to public key cryptography, but what about private key (aka symmetric) encryption? How is that affected by quantum computers, and these algorithms?
Isn't that what LiveCDs are for? So people can test out Linux before they have to install it? Optionally, couldn't they include QEMU and have Linux boot up from within Windows, so they don't have to touch the machine at all? If this thing actually ends up installing Linux to the hard drive, whether in a file or whatever, then it's going to have to mess with the boot sequence, which is probably a lot more dangerous than having somebody change a single setting so their computer will boot off CD.
I've always thought Software As A Service would work better if you pay them a monthly fee for support calls, software patches, and system upgrades. If you stop paying, you stop getting service and updates, but your software continues to work as it always did. Kind of like amortizing the cost of the software over a number of months, but giving the user the ability to stop paying if they find out your support sucks, or if your updates don't come quick enough. Windows currently isn't a good option for the user, because there's a huge upfront cost, and they offer no support, and upgrades come when MS gets around to it.
Nobody has to have Windows. Nobody even has to have a computer. There's lots of people without computers. Having a computer and having windows installed are both choices you make. You may even need Windows to operate your business. But then again, that's how you've chosen to do business. Or you clients require that you have Windows, to create MS Word compatible documents. But that's who you've decided to do business with. Nobody forces you to use Windows.
In all honesty, I'm not completely for or against Microsoft. I'm running Linux on my laptop, because I just use it to browse the web, do a little personal web development, and Linux runs faster. I'm also a software developer, and am currently working in an MS based shop. I use what suits me best for what I'm trying to do. If you don't like windows that much that you think they are completely evil, then just stop using it. If enough people do it, then maybe they will change their ways, or, if they don't and people continue not use it, they could even go out of business, or at least the OS market.
Regardless of the reasons, if you can pack more channels in, then it requires less bandwidth. You have to count the space around the channel that you can't broadcast another channel is as space used by that channel.
Actually, before you leave the village, you aren't even going on a quest. You're just some kid, hanging around in his small village. If you actually look at it from the character's (Link) point of view, then you'll see that what you're doing is just what any other person in that village would probably be doing. Helping the neighbour find the cat, rounding up some goats, sitting by the pond and fishing. The character doesn't know that he's going to go venturing into the forest and get attacked by creatures from some other dimension. The reason that Zelda doesn't interest you, is because you're not interested in that kind of game. That is, the kind of game that has a real story, and requires things that aren't just grabbing cats by the tail, or killing everything that moves. In the real world,, you can't just act like an idiot and bash down doors to get what you want, you have to help others, so that they will want to help you.
Actually, the fishing isn't boring, and only took me about 5 minutes to complete. However, I enjoyed it, so I kept on fishing for a little while afterwards. The people who are complaining about having to fish for half an hour must have done something wrong. I"ve found most of the stuff in Zelda to be quite interesting, and find the only complaints about it are from people who assume if they aren't killing something, then it's boring.
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But what is a ringtone? How long can it be? What quality can it be recorded at? If I want my ringtone to be the entire song, encoded in MP3 at 128 kbps, then is that still a ringtone? And can people trading music on P2P or other networks now argue that they are just trading ringtones, which they are legally entitled to do?
Maybe Apple needs to be dealing with better record labels. eMusic sells songs for about $0.30 a song. Half goes to the artist/label, and half goes to eMusic. They're probably making more per song than Apple is. And the artists, because they are indie labels, are probably getting more per song too. And the customers are getting more songs for their money. That's what a song should cost. Although a song for a quarter would be nice. Make the purchase an non-decision. If you like it download it. With songs costing $0.99 they make me stop and think about whether I want to buy the song or not, same with CDs for $15. If things were priced cheap enough, like $0.25 for a song, or $5.00 for a physical CD, then people would just buy everything they like, instead of having to decide whether or not the purchase is actually worth it. I've spent more money on eMusic in the past year than I spent on CDs in the past 5 years, because I actually feel like I'm not being ripped off.
That feature may have been disabled by your cellphone provider. Cell phone providers do this stuff all the time. They disable the ability for you to load your own content onto the phone, so they can sell you the content. From what I understand, they make pretty good money doing it. What I would wonder is, if they provided the means for doing it, and actually provided a website with tons of content, couldn't they make more on ads on that website, as well as increased user base? They could also have related purchases. So if you buy th latest ringtone by the backstreet boys, they could also try to sell you the CD, or the actual song. Maybe free ringtone with the purchase of an album. Seems like a much better way to manage the thing than charging $3.00 for a ringtone or $1.50 for a 320x240 wallpaper for your phone. I guarantee that every 13-19 year old would immediately switch to that phone company if the air time was still at competitive rates.
You would have to have some pretty good filtering technology to filter out someones brain waves from another room with all the other ambient electromagnetic radiation going around. A standard action potential only fluctuates the membrane voltage by about 120 mV. Meanwhile, a CRT, which actually is vulnerable to Van Eck Phreaking, requires a voltage of 32,000 volts to display an image on the screen.
That kind of hits on my philosophy that all people are geeks. All people are geeks about something. Be it sports geeks (aka jocks), car geeks, hair geeks, computer geeks, math geeks, wilderness geeks, or knitting geeks. Its just that for some reason, anybody who does anything intellectual as a hobby seems to be viewed as a special kind of geek, and looked at as strange or unusual.
Most software has no idea whether you're using a SATA hard drive as opposed to IDE. It's called abstraction, and code reuse. The only thing caused by legacy hardware support, which is what we are talking about here, is bloated OSes, and security vulnerabilities from there being too much code to maintain. Also, on the software front. Why should the OS contain so much code just to run old legacy apps like MS Works 2. Granted I think that windows goes about the whole legacy software support in the wrong way. There should just be emulators for old OSes and hardware, like Apple did the two times it switched CPU architectures, instead of having to put tons of code in the main OS to support old software that most people don't use anymore.
Well, as a software developer, most laypersons would probably refer to me a computer genius, but compared to this guy, I am probably anything but. However, I can see how this happens. I'm not big on cars, but the mechanics who fix them seem to work wonders, and be car geniuses. Some of them anyway. There appears to be a lot of mechanics who all they can do is read the print out from the computer and then do a bad job at fixing it. Just like a lot of bad programmers. Anyway, that's another discussion. Then there's automotive engineers, who can tell you how each part of the car works, and could probably design it in a better way.
I got a laptop with a 1.5 GHz Celeron and 512 MB of RAM (Still available for Under $CDN 500). Anyway, Vista runs quite slow, and I can't even believe that they sell a machine with such low specs running Vista. However, Mandriva with Metisse runs quite smoothly, and would say it's the best $500 I've ever spent. If you're just looking for a laptop so you can browse the internet from the couch or watch stuff you've recorded from your TV Tuner in the bedroom, than this definitely does the trick.
You are right. However, I just said forget it at one point. I don't get the same games on my Wii/Gamecube that I got on my PC, and the experience isn't completely the same. However, I just learned to enjoy different games, because I was tired of the PC upgrade cycle, as well as all the games that didn't work because of drivers, or copy protection technologies, or other incompatibility issues. I still miss playing FPS games with a mouse and keyboard, or playing a nice RTS, but I'm happy I don't have to put up with the troubles of PC gaming. And my old copies of Quake 3, Descent 3, Starcraft, and C&C Tiberian sun still work fine, even on my outdated computer.
We have an old PowerPC mini that we use at work for testing websites in Safari. I wouldn't want to run Photoshop on it, at least not to edit large images used in print, but otherwise, it's a pretty respectable machine and can do the web/wordprocessing/email thing just fine. I think there are the perfect little thing for most homes. They take up a lot less space than any other home computer, and make almost no noise. Most people who just do web/email/wordprocessing and some light photo editing would be fine on a machine such as this.
Satellite is good when it's up, but living in Canada, with stormy weather, I hear lots of complaints from people with it that it cuts out too often. The one good thing about my cable service is that I can't even remember the last time I lost signal, if I ever have lost a signal. At least on the TV end anyway. Internet goes down once in a while, but again, it's pretty minimal.
My biggest problem with digital cable isn't the fuzzy analog channels. It's actually the over compressed digital cable that grind my gears. Once you know what the encoding artifacts looks like, such as colour bands where there should be a smoot gradient (such as a picture of the sky), or the big square blocks whenever the image changes too quickly. It's kind of sad when the first 70 channels, that are still sent as analog, recorded to MPEG2 by the TV tuner end up being better quality than the digital channels. Some digital channels end up looking as bad as when I re-encode those MPEG2 streams, to MPEG4. But what can you do when there's a cable monopoly in your city.
Sorry, did I say key lock. I meant seal the case shut with epoxy. Leaving standard openings for airflow though.
Well, at least they deserve the money. Do you know how much money those football teams generate in ticket sales alone? Let alone sale of licensed paraphernalia? I only with sports teams at Canadian universities generated so much money. Then the schools would have a lot more money to spend.
Put the computer in a well travelled room, and remove access to the computer when you're not in the house. Lock the case, with a physical lock, and use a hard to guess boot password. Disable booting off removable media. That will probably fix most issues. That's if you want to even bother. What kind of sites are they afraid of the kid accessing, and how much will they really be harmed by accessing the site? I was a kid once, and visited a lot of sites my parents would probably rather I didn't. I don't think I'm that messed up because of it.
However, when you're wired earphone comes out of your ear, it only falls a short distance, and never hits the ground. However, with wireless earbuds, if they were to fall out, they would probably land on the ground, and someone could step on it, or it could roll underneath something you couldn't lift, or fall into the sewer. The combined with having to replace or recharge the battery on my headphones would probably make this device next to useless. Bluetooth is good for phones, because you don't want cables getting in the way when you are trying to drive, but on a music only device, I don't see how it is worth it.
I've never understood why speed was so important to the Americans, especially in federal elections. They vote in November, and the new president doesn't come into office until January. There's lots of time to do the counting, and make sure it's done right. It's not like the counting has to be done before midnight, or the president will turn into a pumpkin.
That's ok, the British still use stone to weigh themselves.
They mention this is a threat to public key cryptography, but what about private key (aka symmetric) encryption? How is that affected by quantum computers, and these algorithms?
Isn't that what LiveCDs are for? So people can test out Linux before they have to install it? Optionally, couldn't they include QEMU and have Linux boot up from within Windows, so they don't have to touch the machine at all? If this thing actually ends up installing Linux to the hard drive, whether in a file or whatever, then it's going to have to mess with the boot sequence, which is probably a lot more dangerous than having somebody change a single setting so their computer will boot off CD.
I've always thought Software As A Service would work better if you pay them a monthly fee for support calls, software patches, and system upgrades. If you stop paying, you stop getting service and updates, but your software continues to work as it always did. Kind of like amortizing the cost of the software over a number of months, but giving the user the ability to stop paying if they find out your support sucks, or if your updates don't come quick enough. Windows currently isn't a good option for the user, because there's a huge upfront cost, and they offer no support, and upgrades come when MS gets around to it.
Nobody has to have Windows. Nobody even has to have a computer. There's lots of people without computers. Having a computer and having windows installed are both choices you make. You may even need Windows to operate your business. But then again, that's how you've chosen to do business. Or you clients require that you have Windows, to create MS Word compatible documents. But that's who you've decided to do business with. Nobody forces you to use Windows.
In all honesty, I'm not completely for or against Microsoft. I'm running Linux on my laptop, because I just use it to browse the web, do a little personal web development, and Linux runs faster. I'm also a software developer, and am currently working in an MS based shop. I use what suits me best for what I'm trying to do. If you don't like windows that much that you think they are completely evil, then just stop using it. If enough people do it, then maybe they will change their ways, or, if they don't and people continue not use it, they could even go out of business, or at least the OS market.
Regardless of the reasons, if you can pack more channels in, then it requires less bandwidth. You have to count the space around the channel that you can't broadcast another channel is as space used by that channel.
Actually, before you leave the village, you aren't even going on a quest. You're just some kid, hanging around in his small village. If you actually look at it from the character's (Link) point of view, then you'll see that what you're doing is just what any other person in that village would probably be doing. Helping the neighbour find the cat, rounding up some goats, sitting by the pond and fishing. The character doesn't know that he's going to go venturing into the forest and get attacked by creatures from some other dimension. The reason that Zelda doesn't interest you, is because you're not interested in that kind of game. That is, the kind of game that has a real story, and requires things that aren't just grabbing cats by the tail, or killing everything that moves. In the real world,, you can't just act like an idiot and bash down doors to get what you want, you have to help others, so that they will want to help you.
Actually, the fishing isn't boring, and only took me about 5 minutes to complete. However, I enjoyed it, so I kept on fishing for a little while afterwards. The people who are complaining about having to fish for half an hour must have done something wrong. I"ve found most of the stuff in Zelda to be quite interesting, and find the only complaints about it are from people who assume if they aren't killing something, then it's boring.