Who's gonna buy a PowerMac G5 in the next 18 months?
1. Every console game developers in the world. PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Revolution all use PPC CPU cores, and IIRC, they all use PowerMac G5 as the dev kit. The average lifetime of a game console is 5 years, so Apple basically OWNS the entire console game developement industry till 2010.
2. Audio/Video producers Audio/video production heavily relies on plugins, having native x86 host applications (like Final Cut, Logic and Cubase) is NOT ENOUGH. Many producers have hundreds of plugins, and they'll all have to be recompiled for x86 (they won't run in Rosetta because of Altivec).
Sure these are niche markets, but these are multi-billion dollar industries where Apple is a major player. In fact, these niche markets are the primary customers of the PowerMac G5. The PowerMac G5 will probably continue to sell pretty well in the next 2 years and more.
The low-end, like iMac and iBook (or even the PowerBook) won't sell so well in the next 12 months. I think that's why Apple choose to ship low-end x86 Macs at the beginning because they see that the sales of PowerMac G5 will actually be the least affected by the switch.
Actually, PalmSource is putting Palm OS Cobalt (the user-space environment) on top of the Linux kernel. They're not adopting QtEmbedded as their GUI. It's not gonna be any easier to port QtEmbedded apps to Palm OS Cobalt for Linux than Palm OS Cobalt proper (unless, of course, if you apps involves some kernel-level programming).
The problem with Cobalt right now it's the chicken-and-egg syndrome. PalmOne isn't gonna standardize on Cobalt unless there are enough apps on there, developers aren't gonna port to Cobalt unless there are enough Cobalt devices in the market. I don't see how using Linux as the kernel can change that.
And how a Linux kernel gonna benefit Cobalt? I don't see any tangible benefit unless there's any inherit design limitation in Cobalt's kernel. The only possible benefit of using Linux as Cobalt's kernel would be that PalmSource might be able to leaverage the open source model for driver development (driver development is traditionally the responsiblity of Palm OS licensees, AFAIK). The whole WiFi driver mess with Palm OS 5 is a pretty good indication that it does need a better strategy/design. I only imagine how monolithic the Palm OS 5 kernel is if they took so long to develop WiFi drivers and they had to do a specific version of the driver for each hardware model and WiFi card.
It still doesn't change the fact that Cobalt is an entirely new API and no developers are willing to develop for it unless its widely adopted, otherwise they'll just continue to developer Garnet (OS 5) apps since they'll run in Cobalt anyways. I always think that PalmSource should provide a Cobalt compatibility layer for Garnet, similiar to how Win95's "thunking" feature that made majority of the Win32 API calls available on Win95. That way, Cobalt apps can run unchanged on Garnet, and developers can just standardized on the new Cobalt API instead of dealing with 2 parallel platforms.
If PalmSource were serious about open source, what I think they should do is open source the Palm Desktop and do it right now, and promote it heavily as the free alternative to Outlook. Make it their mission to compete with Outlook, with the help of the open source community. It'll save development cost, generate publicity, attract people to the Palm OS platform (like what iTunes Windows does for iPod), and all without the risk of open sourceing their more precious proprietary code (like the Palm OS itself).
I love Palm OS, but there's not a single day I don't think about switching to the dark side. It's the 21st century and it still doesn't have memory protection and preemptive multitasking. PalmSource need to commit to a single API and push it. The longer they promote 2 different APIs parallelly, the longer this chicken-and-egg syndrome will last, while the competitions move full-speed ahead without the baggage of legacy support. Supporting yet another kernel when they can't even commit to an API is just addding to the problem.
Good UI design is hard. A good UI designer might not even be able to code and hardcore coders generally don't make very good UI designers. It's simply not what they're interested in and so it gets only as much time and effort as is absolutely necessary. We, as a community have built some wonderful code, but not many in the community are actually UI designers. We need to find and motivate more of these people.
Even if you got a number of coders with swamk UI skills, UI designs is inheritly much harder to manage. This is a result of the fundamental nature of how open source projects are always long-distance collabrative efforts. An application can be easily divided into modules, you can go so far as write out all the declarations and delegate to the coders to do all the rest. UI isn't so simple. You can't just draw a grid and say "you make the menu, you make the toolbar, you make this dialog box", and expect all these things to work together and behave consistently, and if a button get moved from a dialog box to a toolbar, a lot of the underlying code has to be change. It takes a huge effort to architect an application to facilitate rapid UI development (MVC comes to mind). Most project managers will choose monolithic UI design instead of MVC simply because it reduces time-to-market.
Mozilla is remarkable in this sense cuz its entire user interface is described in XUL and rendered at runtime. This is why it can allow rapid UI development and enable non-coding UI designers to easily modify the UI without any impact on the underlying code.
2) Documentation
Documentation is time consuming and not very rewarding for coders. As with UI designers, we need a large group of people who get kicks out of writing documentation and there are just too few of those special people. We need more of these people too. Trusting these tasks to the coders isn't enough.
In this day and age, every open source project should have a wiki. Sure, a wiki can be very disorganized. But that's why you have volunteers to refactor it and you own wiki conventions to impose some structures.
The developers will never have time to create documentations (hell, they won't even comment their code half the time.) Let the users to create documentations, or at least let them comment on existing ones directly (the Zope Book on Zope.org is a great example).
3) Feature-centric development
Features are rewarding for developers and guess where they put their time.. Project managers are meant to drive the scope and direction of a project. Most of time, the project manager is the lead coder by default. Got to entice a few of these management types over too..
Most open source projects are feature-driven because feature requests are the simplest thing to response to: a request comes, you code it. Debugging and usability testing are whole different matters, which requires broad supervisions and ongoing communications between end-users and programmers. It's obviously a management issue. Once again, because open source projects are typically long-distance colloborative efforts, it's horribly inefficient to achieve tasks that can't be agily managed.
4) Programming for the self
This has an almost identical effect to #1 and the solution is the same. People who are good at usability issues must be found and enticed to contribute. Unfortuantely, we don't have much to offer in reward. Recognition? Nope... The coders/project managers get the credit for the released program. Money? Nope.. We're not talking about commercial software. Beer and Pizza? That's probably our best shot, but I'm not convinced.
I think it's the same as #1, #2 and #3, and usability vs agile management in general. It's not that coders don't care about usability, but usability can't be agily managed like modules. The combination of agily
"I wasn't aware the labels were paying the artists a large part of the iTunes income."
Last time I checked, positive income was better than NO income.
Well, if you're signed to any labels represented by RIAA, chances are you'll be receiving no real income until the proceeds from you recordings has paid off your advance payments and inflated production/marketing costs.
"Anyone you know getting a check from RIAA?"
Yes. Me.
RIAA doesn't pay artists directly. They represents the **labels**. If anything $$ from RIAA ended up in the hands of artists, it'd have had been received indirectly through the labels, who would have already taken a substantial chunk out of it.
"Artists - don't - get - money - from - labels. Artists PAY labels for the privilege of making money for the labels."
People - don't - get - money - from - their - employers. Employees sign a contractual agreement that they WILL perform the work assigned to them, or are you not on salary?
It amazes me that there are still people so misinformed about the major labeels' system in this day and age.
Artists are not **employees** of the labels they belong to. In the world of major labels, artists sign an exclusive contract to be represented by the labels, artists are **required** to pay for all production, marketing and administrative costs incurred, all of them determined by the labels pratically arbituarily. Artists have no rights to argue the **costs**, they may not disclose or dispute the terms of the contract, the labels have exclusive rights to publish all recordings produced during the contract period (i.e. the artists cannot publish their copyrighted works elsewhere, even if its for free). The advance payments that artists received are effectively loans, which the artists most pay off with sales (after so-called **costs**, however arbituary they might be, are deduced). The artists are required to produced a number of albums (usally 5-7) within the term of the contract. However, the labels hold executive rights to decide whether an album is publishable or not, so artists may produce an album and the labels may reject it, left the artists in a finicial hole. Even if signed, artists are enitrely at the mercy of the labels when it comes to promotions. If a label decides to stop promoting for an artist, he/she can only wait for the contract to expire (typical term is 10 years), they cannot jump to a different label because the contract is exclusive.
Contracts with major labels are always written in such a way that the labels assume zero liability. Debts will always go to the artists first, profits always go to the labels first, and the labels always make a substantial amount from inflated production/administrative/marketing costs even if an album never actually gets published. The labels always **share** the copyrights with the artists for everything they published under their labels.
It's a well known fact that you don't make any money on a record unless you sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Selling any less put you in debt with the labels. For the sake of accurancy, all of the above are true ONLY for major labels (mostly members of RIAA). Indie labels are much more liberal with their terms. There's usually no advance payments involved. Most costs, liabilities and prmotional responsibilities are shared among the labels and artists, accounting materials are fairly accessible to the artists, copyrights ownership less restrictive, and non-exclusive contracts are very common.
In any case, labels do NOT employ artists, they represent them. Technically, in major label contracts, artists hire labels, with money that the labels loan them in advance and recordings they will produce in the future.
The main reason why iTMS succeeded where so many other online music services failed is its relatively painless implementation of DRM. You can play it on up to 3 computers (and they can increase that number anytime if they want), you can freely burn songs to CDs and sync to your iPod as many times as you want.
All DRM algorithm will be cracked eventually. The longetity of any given DRM algorithm will probably always be significantly shorter than the copyright term of the material it protects. Using DRM to prevents copying will **always** fail eventually. A better strategy would be to provide contents with a more convinient buying/replaying experience than casual copying, at a reasonable price and with the least restrictions possible.
Personally, I think DRM is being horribly misused by the misguided entertainment industry. DRM can be made consumer-friendly if it's merely viewed as a method to **slightly** inconvinient the consumer so that they would **think** about the consequences before they start copying, but doesn't entirely prohibit copying (as iTMS's DRM demonstrated). This is the position Apple takes with iTMS.
This **minor inconvinience** to the casual copying process existed in the analog age purely by the nature of analog materials: they degrate each generation, and the copies are usually on a less convinient recoradble media (e.g. tapes). Consumers have always been able to copy CDs to tapes, but we still bought CDs because it's a more convinient playback expriences than tapes (until CD-R became affordable). Likewise, most of us began listening to MP3s not because it's free, but because it's more convinient than CDs.
In the same token, the entertainment industry can focus on delivering a more convinient experience than P2P. Why use Kazaa to search and download 20 copies of the same song just to make sure you have the right, complete version without clicks and pops when you can get a perfect copy for 99 cents? Why search on P2P for days or even months for a rare remix if an online music store guranteed to carry all the remixes readily downloadable at high bandwidth? How about directly downloading to your phone or portable player at a kiosk via Bluetooth? What if you can download any of your previous iTMS purchases to your phone over-the-air, anytime you want? (Say, iTMS can take a cut of the GPRS fee incured.) People make copies primarily to enjoy content in a form that's more convinient to them. If you can deliever contents with a more convinient experience with the least restrictions at a reasonable price, people will gladly pay for it instead of copying it. iTMS and NetFlix are such examples.
Pop entertainment today is largely disposable anyways, so it should really be treated and priced accordingly. If I can download the same song to several devices directly (including computers, portable players, phones, or even car stereo), I wouldn't care to make a copy because: 1) I probably have it on another device, 2) I can download it again, 3) even if I had to pay to download it again, it's only 99 cents. This would also mean that I'll be more likely to be voluntarily binded to the online music service I'm using instead of going to P2P alternatives.
Betweeen the extremes of totalitarian copy restrictions of RIAA/MPAA and the all-for-free mentality of P2P, there's plenty of room for a comfortable middle ground of all of us. iTMS is the first time anyone who care enough about both sides of the arguements to take such a position. Apple deserves every praise it received.
If it's reasonably priced and more convinient than copying, most consumers will glady pay for it rather than copying it. If it's grossly overpriced, people will find whatever means to copy it no matter how hard it gets. It's a simple case of consumer economics.
1. Go to a corporate store of the particular carrier. An offical-looking store may not be an actual corporate store. Use their website or customer service # to locate one.
2. Go to the one downtown. Some corporate stores have working display phones, some don't. But the ones downtown usually do. It's best to call the stores and find out.
3. If a corporate store has dummy phones on display, ask the sales rep to show you a working one -- they usually have them behind the counter. (The exception here is Cingular, in my experiences.) Non-corporate stores probably won't have working models tugged behind the counter.
4. You won't really find out how a phone suit you by playing with a working phone for a few minutes. Ask your friends who have different models/manufacturers and ask them for their opinions. Best of all, these are first-hand opinions you can trust. If you use GSM, ask them if you can trade phones with them for a day. (Thank god for SIM cards.)
5. Here are some good phone sites I read (mostly GSM)...
1. Go to a corporate store of the particular carrier. An offical-looking store may not be an actual corporate store. Use their website or customer service # to locate one.
2. Go to the one downtown. Some corporate stores have working display phones, some don't. But the ones downtown usually do. It's best to call the stores and find out.
3. If a corporate store has dummy phones on display, ask the sales rep to show you a working one -- they usually have them behind the counter. (The exception here is Cingular, in my experiences.) Non-corporate stores probably won't have working models tugged behind the counter.
4. You won't really find out how a phone suits you by playing with them for a few minutes. Ask your friends who have different models/manufacturers and ask them for their opinions. Best of all, these are first-hand opinions you can trust. If you use GSM, ask them if you can trade phones with them for a day. (Thank god for SIM cards.)
5. Here are some good phone sites I read (mostly GSM)...
http://mobileburn.com/ (US)
http://threegmobile.net/ (HK)
http://mobile-review.com/ (RU)
http://howardforums.com/ (CA, forum)
MS Smartphones/PPC:
http://msmobiles.com/ (US)
http://modaco.com/ (UK, forum)
http://mpx200.org/
Symbian smartphones:
http://allaboutsymbian.com/
http://my-symbian.com/
I strongly recommend you to start at HowardForums, it's a very active and knowledgable community.
1. mMode is ATTWS's brandname for their GSM implementation. It's not 3G. USA doesn't have 3G yet (unless you count Verizon's recently launched 1xEV-DO, technically 3G by IMT 2000's definition, but it's data-only).
2. AFAIK, the adaptive codecs are primarily designed to improve voice call reliablilty when signal strength is low. It does allow them to put off constructing new towers, but it's an issue of coverage/signal strength rather than capacity. If all they wanted is capacity, they could've default the whole network to a half-rate codec and call it a day.
3. Agreed. Free nights + weekends = congestion. u get what u pay for.
4. Preferential bandwidth based on the type of accounts you have? That's nonsense. So suppose I have a business account, I make a call during a totally congested time, somehow the tower can retrive my account information, see that I have a business account, then it throttles down ALL OTHER CALLERS just to make enough room for me to make the call? Think about how ridiculous this sounds. I'm skeptical.
5. Very few dealers are capable of on-site unlocking. It's misleading to suggest that specialized phone/car stereo dealers are more likely to be able to do that. You also suggest that they can unlock phones for you by giving you an unlock code, which is also very misleading. Only the carrier and/or the manufacturer has the unlock code for a given phone, the dealers will have to either:
a. call the carrier to get you the unlock code (and u think the carrier would give it out for a new sales?)
b. unlock the phone for you on-site using cables (which means the dealer has to be VERY SPECIALIZED)
The exception being Nokia phones, whose unlock codes can be calculated by IMEI. Once again, I won't count on any local dealers know anything about that.
In my opinion, this movie is comparable to Kar-Wai Wong's movies -- mood movies. There's not much of a plot, the story doesn't advance much, there are many little insignificant (or even boring) little slices of life in the movie, all for a purpose of capturing a mood or a feeling.
Here in "Lost in Translation", that feeling it tried to capture is the feeling of being isolated and disconnected, particularly from the person you love most (their spouses). Obviously, being lost in the Japanese culture served only as a symbolism to that feeling.
There were quite a few ppl found it offensive how the movie poked fun @ the Japanese and how stereotypical those jokes were. Well, as stereotypical as the jokes were, they felt real (if you've ever been to Japan you'd know, e.g. it's really common and acceptable for Japanese men to go to strip clubs to socialize on a weekend). The fact that you might be offended clearly shows how different YOU are from THEM. Which is the purpose of those scenes (at least in the first half). They weren't meant to be condescending. And it's critical the the story and how those aforementioned feelings parallel each other.
In the beginning our main characters only see the differences between themselves and this foreign land around them, and it was amplified multifold by the utter loneliness they already felt before they got there, which they brought with them to this land. When Bob was at the photo shoot, and poke fun of the director's English, it was clear that he's not trying to be rude, but simply trying to make himself comfortable to survive the experience. ****** It was a parallel of his relationship with his wife. ****** You can immediately see that that's pretty much what his home life is like -- his wife babbling about things that he couldn't understand (like the tiles thing), while he cracks jokes just to show that he's at least listening and wonder how he ended up in this situation in the first place.
The young Charlotte wander around Tokyo alone in many little scenes. Many viewers found those scenes boring. I believe that they serve the purpose to show that maybe she was lonely and lost, but she's still ***searching****. Looking for a purpose, looking for a outlet. She hasn't given up on life and the possibilities like Bob Harris had.
It's rather important that you understand how she felt when she was talking to her friend (her mom??) on the phone and suddenly bursted into tears spontaneously. That's the kind of loneliness she brought with her to Tokyo, and just then and there did she fully realized it.
If you don't understand nor identify with that feeling, you probably won't enjoy the movie. I do believe the movie could've better explained their situations back at home so the audience can better understand the kind of loneliness they came from. But I understand that was what Sofia Coppola trying to do here: This is a movie that captures a feeling, and often times we don't know where our feeling came from and where it's going. This is a picture with no real beginning or a real ending, it's just a mood, a small snapshot of life. It's meant to be incomplete.
As much as Charlotte is still searching, Bob is still ***hoping***. He still loves his wife. The scene where he's in the bathtub and told her "I love you" after she hung up, the fact that his wife calls her at the most inconvinient time and he still picks up, etc. She's not just a responsibility to him, he still cares about her, he just doesn't know how to anymore.
And this is what the movie ultimately is about. It's not just about 2 strangers becoming friends for a few days in a foreign country and how they touched each other. It's about them discovering life and its possibilities once again. The real hope doesn't lie between them, but in each of them with their respective partner at home.
The romance felt very convincing. It's nice to see an American movie treat this May-October romance with self-awareness and realism. They bo
$200 my ass. Most tablet PCs average $2000. You can by a decent laptop somewhat under $1000, and it even has a keyboard!!!
Tablet PCs are not a bad idea, but it's just not worth the extra $700-$1000.
I personally wouldn't mind having a couple of those and run Reason and Ableton Live side-by-side. Tweaking knobs on screen in real-time using a stylus is much better than using a mouse.
But do I want to spend $2000 on a tablet PC? Or would I rather by 2 low-end laptops and a couple Wacom tablets?
>>>
The website industry including this site was started by amateurs who did it for fun, it became popular and alot of people got rich.
What makes you think musicians cant make money in the same way websites do?
Maybe it's the millions of dotcoms that built a mountain of hype for a market that didn't exist, ultimately plunged the Dows and how many people lost thier entire life-savings again???
Real musicians and artists deserved to making a living, opportunists and one-hit wonders do not deserve mega-fortunes out of blind luck.
Everything monetary has a cost assoiciated, someone has to be paying for those mega-fortunes.
>>> I don't know that the two devices necessarily hold up to direct comparison. >> In contrast, the portable gaming market is a long-existant and stabilized one. Many devices have come and gone, and pretty much succeeded and failed around that $100 price point.
I'm sure we can all agree that $99 is the magical price point for critical mass consumption. I do have a hard time believe the PSP can ever reach a $99 price point within 3 yrs of its launch since it has TFT LCD and an optical drive.
But as I have pointed out, consumer thresholds may increase (as it happened upon the release of the iPod).
Not to mentioned that $99 was the long standing critical mass price point for home consoles (in the 8-bit/16-bit era), until Playstation changed that to $149 (with the help of the release of FF7). Even today, PS2 and XBox are doing very well @ $179-199 while Nintendo isn't doing substantially better with a $149 price point.
$100 is more of a psychological barrier that a economical one, hence it'll be much harder to break.
Can PSP do it?
I just have to repeat myself again and say "I don't know".
Personally, it doesn't really matter how immerse a gaming experience PSP would be, it's still a 4" screen. I don't care even if it got Dolby Surround and Sniffivision, I ain't spending $200.
>>> Sony will find that too few people are willing to spend that kind of money for a portable system.
That's just the launch price. Price will go down eventually.
Is anyone willing to pay $150+ for a portable game player? I don't know. If I told you 2 years ago that a million people will pay $300-500 for a portable MP3 player, you'll probably think I'm smoking crack.
Then came the iPod.
All things considered, by the time PSP ships (if it's on schedule), the GBA SP will be going for $70 or less, with millions of GBA already sold. It'll take another 2-3 years for PSP to drop down to around $100. Nintendo still have about 3-4 years to get its shit together and design the next handheld to compete with PSP.
Disc-based storage (in a caddy) seems logical for the next generation handhelds. Though I'd like to note that the added mechanical components increases the manufacturing cost significantly. $99 will be likely as low as PSP can go.
Anyways, it's way to early in the game. We know nothing about the PSP, really. It can be vaporware, it can be another Virtual Boy.
Show me the hardware, then we'll talk.
Re:The Java.net creator is on to something
on
Sun Opens Java.net
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
>>> Java could really benifit from something along the lines of what CPAN has done for Perl
http://www.jpackage.org/
Not really the CJAN that we want, but it's a nice repository of Java software prepackaged in RPM.
It's not cross-platform, it's not a real standard for Java software/component distribution, but it's the best you got on Linux right now.:)
I think the offical AIM client and YIM has logging too. I use Trillian, which logs everything regardless of medium. So logging is likely to be strictly a client feature.
>>>>Lots of places in Asia and Latin America center almost entirely in ICQ and MSN, and most people don't even know AIM if they don't have any American contacts.
Agreed. In fact, ICQ has seamless SMS integration in major parts of the world.
This, mind you, is internationsl ICQ-SMS integration. I haven't tried it but it's been around for a couple years at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my 2 cents about the Osbourne effect....
Who's gonna buy a PowerMac G5 in the next 18 months?
1. Every console game developers in the world. PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Revolution all use PPC CPU cores, and IIRC, they all use PowerMac G5 as the dev kit. The average lifetime of a game console is 5 years, so Apple basically OWNS the entire console game developement industry till 2010.
2. Audio/Video producers Audio/video production heavily relies on plugins, having native x86 host applications (like Final Cut, Logic and Cubase) is NOT ENOUGH. Many producers have hundreds of plugins, and they'll all have to be recompiled for x86 (they won't run in Rosetta because of Altivec).
Sure these are niche markets, but these are multi-billion dollar industries where Apple is a major player. In fact, these niche markets are the primary customers of the PowerMac G5. The PowerMac G5 will probably continue to sell pretty well in the next 2 years and more.
The low-end, like iMac and iBook (or even the PowerBook) won't sell so well in the next 12 months. I think that's why Apple choose to ship low-end x86 Macs at the beginning because they see that the sales of PowerMac G5 will actually be the least affected by the switch.
And Lynx? TurboExpress? NeoGeo Pocket/Pocket Color? The consumers seem to decidedly choose battery life and size over features and specs everytime.
You'll need to parse the file every time someone ask for it. So you're just trading exceessive bandwidth usage for excessive CPU load.
Actually, PalmSource is putting Palm OS Cobalt (the user-space environment) on top of the Linux kernel. They're not adopting QtEmbedded as their GUI. It's not gonna be any easier to port QtEmbedded apps to Palm OS Cobalt for Linux than Palm OS Cobalt proper (unless, of course, if you apps involves some kernel-level programming).
The problem with Cobalt right now it's the chicken-and-egg syndrome. PalmOne isn't gonna standardize on Cobalt unless there are enough apps on there, developers aren't gonna port to Cobalt unless there are enough Cobalt devices in the market. I don't see how using Linux as the kernel can change that.
And how a Linux kernel gonna benefit Cobalt? I don't see any tangible benefit unless there's any inherit design limitation in Cobalt's kernel. The only possible benefit of using Linux as Cobalt's kernel would be that PalmSource might be able to leaverage the open source model for driver development (driver development is traditionally the responsiblity of Palm OS licensees, AFAIK). The whole WiFi driver mess with Palm OS 5 is a pretty good indication that it does need a better strategy/design. I only imagine how monolithic the Palm OS 5 kernel is if they took so long to develop WiFi drivers and they had to do a specific version of the driver for each hardware model and WiFi card.
It still doesn't change the fact that Cobalt is an entirely new API and no developers are willing to develop for it unless its widely adopted, otherwise they'll just continue to developer Garnet (OS 5) apps since they'll run in Cobalt anyways. I always think that PalmSource should provide a Cobalt compatibility layer for Garnet, similiar to how Win95's "thunking" feature that made majority of the Win32 API calls available on Win95. That way, Cobalt apps can run unchanged on Garnet, and developers can just standardized on the new Cobalt API instead of dealing with 2 parallel platforms.
If PalmSource were serious about open source, what I think they should do is open source the Palm Desktop and do it right now, and promote it heavily as the free alternative to Outlook. Make it their mission to compete with Outlook, with the help of the open source community. It'll save development cost, generate publicity, attract people to the Palm OS platform (like what iTunes Windows does for iPod), and all without the risk of open sourceing their more precious proprietary code (like the Palm OS itself).
I love Palm OS, but there's not a single day I don't think about switching to the dark side. It's the 21st century and it still doesn't have memory protection and preemptive multitasking. PalmSource need to commit to a single API and push it. The longer they promote 2 different APIs parallelly, the longer this chicken-and-egg syndrome will last, while the competitions move full-speed ahead without the baggage of legacy support. Supporting yet another kernel when they can't even commit to an API is just addding to the problem.
Even if you got a number of coders with swamk UI skills, UI designs is inheritly much harder to manage. This is a result of the fundamental nature of how open source projects are always long-distance collabrative efforts. An application can be easily divided into modules, you can go so far as write out all the declarations and delegate to the coders to do all the rest. UI isn't so simple. You can't just draw a grid and say "you make the menu, you make the toolbar, you make this dialog box", and expect all these things to work together and behave consistently, and if a button get moved from a dialog box to a toolbar, a lot of the underlying code has to be change. It takes a huge effort to architect an application to facilitate rapid UI development (MVC comes to mind). Most project managers will choose monolithic UI design instead of MVC simply because it reduces time-to-market.
Mozilla is remarkable in this sense cuz its entire user interface is described in XUL and rendered at runtime. This is why it can allow rapid UI development and enable non-coding UI designers to easily modify the UI without any impact on the underlying code.
In this day and age, every open source project should have a wiki. Sure, a wiki can be very disorganized. But that's why you have volunteers to refactor it and you own wiki conventions to impose some structures.
The developers will never have time to create documentations (hell, they won't even comment their code half the time.) Let the users to create documentations, or at least let them comment on existing ones directly (the Zope Book on Zope.org is a great example).
Most open source projects are feature-driven because feature requests are the simplest thing to response to: a request comes, you code it. Debugging and usability testing are whole different matters, which requires broad supervisions and ongoing communications between end-users and programmers. It's obviously a management issue. Once again, because open source projects are typically long-distance colloborative efforts, it's horribly inefficient to achieve tasks that can't be agily managed.
I think it's the same as #1, #2 and #3, and usability vs agile management in general. It's not that coders don't care about usability, but usability can't be agily managed like modules. The combination of agily
Last time I checked, positive income was better than NO income.
Well, if you're signed to any labels represented by RIAA, chances are you'll be receiving no real income until the proceeds from you recordings has paid off your advance payments and inflated production/marketing costs.
"Anyone you know getting a check from RIAA?"Yes. Me.
RIAA doesn't pay artists directly. They represents the **labels**. If anything $$ from RIAA ended up in the hands of artists, it'd have had been received indirectly through the labels, who would have already taken a substantial chunk out of it.
"Artists - don't - get - money - from - labels. Artists PAY labels for the privilege of making money for the labels."People - don't - get - money - from - their - employers. Employees sign a contractual agreement that they WILL perform the work assigned to them, or are you not on salary?
It amazes me that there are still people so misinformed about the major labeels' system in this day and age.
Artists are not **employees** of the labels they belong to. In the world of major labels, artists sign an exclusive contract to be represented by the labels, artists are **required** to pay for all production, marketing and administrative costs incurred, all of them determined by the labels pratically arbituarily. Artists have no rights to argue the **costs**, they may not disclose or dispute the terms of the contract, the labels have exclusive rights to publish all recordings produced during the contract period (i.e. the artists cannot publish their copyrighted works elsewhere, even if its for free). The advance payments that artists received are effectively loans, which the artists most pay off with sales (after so-called **costs**, however arbituary they might be, are deduced). The artists are required to produced a number of albums (usally 5-7) within the term of the contract. However, the labels hold executive rights to decide whether an album is publishable or not, so artists may produce an album and the labels may reject it, left the artists in a finicial hole. Even if signed, artists are enitrely at the mercy of the labels when it comes to promotions. If a label decides to stop promoting for an artist, he/she can only wait for the contract to expire (typical term is 10 years), they cannot jump to a different label because the contract is exclusive.
Contracts with major labels are always written in such a way that the labels assume zero liability. Debts will always go to the artists first, profits always go to the labels first, and the labels always make a substantial amount from inflated production/administrative/marketing costs even if an album never actually gets published. The labels always **share** the copyrights with the artists for everything they published under their labels.
It's a well known fact that you don't make any money on a record unless you sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Selling any less put you in debt with the labels. For the sake of accurancy, all of the above are true ONLY for major labels (mostly members of RIAA). Indie labels are much more liberal with their terms. There's usually no advance payments involved. Most costs, liabilities and prmotional responsibilities are shared among the labels and artists, accounting materials are fairly accessible to the artists, copyrights ownership less restrictive, and non-exclusive contracts are very common.
In any case, labels do NOT employ artists, they represent them. Technically, in major label contracts, artists hire labels, with money that the labels loan them in advance and recordings they will produce in the future.
I totally agree with you about iTMS.
The main reason why iTMS succeeded where so many other online music services failed is its relatively painless implementation of DRM. You can play it on up to 3 computers (and they can increase that number anytime if they want), you can freely burn songs to CDs and sync to your iPod as many times as you want.
All DRM algorithm will be cracked eventually. The longetity of any given DRM algorithm will probably always be significantly shorter than the copyright term of the material it protects. Using DRM to prevents copying will **always** fail eventually. A better strategy would be to provide contents with a more convinient buying/replaying experience than casual copying, at a reasonable price and with the least restrictions possible.
Personally, I think DRM is being horribly misused by the misguided entertainment industry. DRM can be made consumer-friendly if it's merely viewed as a method to **slightly** inconvinient the consumer so that they would **think** about the consequences before they start copying, but doesn't entirely prohibit copying (as iTMS's DRM demonstrated). This is the position Apple takes with iTMS.
This **minor inconvinience** to the casual copying process existed in the analog age purely by the nature of analog materials: they degrate each generation, and the copies are usually on a less convinient recoradble media (e.g. tapes). Consumers have always been able to copy CDs to tapes, but we still bought CDs because it's a more convinient playback expriences than tapes (until CD-R became affordable). Likewise, most of us began listening to MP3s not because it's free, but because it's more convinient than CDs.
In the same token, the entertainment industry can focus on delivering a more convinient experience than P2P. Why use Kazaa to search and download 20 copies of the same song just to make sure you have the right, complete version without clicks and pops when you can get a perfect copy for 99 cents? Why search on P2P for days or even months for a rare remix if an online music store guranteed to carry all the remixes readily downloadable at high bandwidth? How about directly downloading to your phone or portable player at a kiosk via Bluetooth? What if you can download any of your previous iTMS purchases to your phone over-the-air, anytime you want? (Say, iTMS can take a cut of the GPRS fee incured.) People make copies primarily to enjoy content in a form that's more convinient to them. If you can deliever contents with a more convinient experience with the least restrictions at a reasonable price, people will gladly pay for it instead of copying it. iTMS and NetFlix are such examples.
Pop entertainment today is largely disposable anyways, so it should really be treated and priced accordingly. If I can download the same song to several devices directly (including computers, portable players, phones, or even car stereo), I wouldn't care to make a copy because: 1) I probably have it on another device, 2) I can download it again, 3) even if I had to pay to download it again, it's only 99 cents. This would also mean that I'll be more likely to be voluntarily binded to the online music service I'm using instead of going to P2P alternatives.
Betweeen the extremes of totalitarian copy restrictions of RIAA/MPAA and the all-for-free mentality of P2P, there's plenty of room for a comfortable middle ground of all of us. iTMS is the first time anyone who care enough about both sides of the arguements to take such a position. Apple deserves every praise it received.
If it's reasonably priced and more convinient than copying, most consumers will glady pay for it rather than copying it. If it's grossly overpriced, people will find whatever means to copy it no matter how hard it gets. It's a simple case of consumer economics.
1. Go to a corporate store of the particular carrier. An offical-looking store may not be an actual corporate store. Use their website or customer service # to locate one.
2. Go to the one downtown. Some corporate stores have working display phones, some don't. But the ones downtown usually do. It's best to call the stores and find out.
3. If a corporate store has dummy phones on display, ask the sales rep to show you a working one -- they usually have them behind the counter. (The exception here is Cingular, in my experiences.) Non-corporate stores probably won't have working models tugged behind the counter.
4. You won't really find out how a phone suit you by playing with a working phone for a few minutes. Ask your friends who have different models/manufacturers and ask them for their opinions. Best of all, these are first-hand opinions you can trust. If you use GSM, ask them if you can trade phones with them for a day. (Thank god for SIM cards.)
5. Here are some good phone sites I read (mostly GSM)...
http://mobileburn.com/ (US)
http://threegmobile.net/ (HK)
http://mobile-review.com/ (RU)
http://howardforums.com/ (CA, forum)
MS Smartphones/PPC:
http://msmobiles.com/ (US)
http://modaco.com/ (UK, forum)
http://mpx200.org/
Symbian smartphones:
http://allaboutsymbian.com/
http://my-symbian.com/
I strongly recommend you to start at HowardForums, it's a very active and knowledgable community.
1. Go to a corporate store of the particular carrier. An offical-looking store may not be an actual corporate store. Use their website or customer service # to locate one. 2. Go to the one downtown. Some corporate stores have working display phones, some don't. But the ones downtown usually do. It's best to call the stores and find out. 3. If a corporate store has dummy phones on display, ask the sales rep to show you a working one -- they usually have them behind the counter. (The exception here is Cingular, in my experiences.) Non-corporate stores probably won't have working models tugged behind the counter. 4. You won't really find out how a phone suits you by playing with them for a few minutes. Ask your friends who have different models/manufacturers and ask them for their opinions. Best of all, these are first-hand opinions you can trust. If you use GSM, ask them if you can trade phones with them for a day. (Thank god for SIM cards.) 5. Here are some good phone sites I read (mostly GSM)... http://mobileburn.com/ (US) http://threegmobile.net/ (HK) http://mobile-review.com/ (RU) http://howardforums.com/ (CA, forum) MS Smartphones/PPC: http://msmobiles.com/ (US) http://modaco.com/ (UK, forum) http://mpx200.org/ Symbian smartphones: http://allaboutsymbian.com/ http://my-symbian.com/ I strongly recommend you to start at HowardForums, it's a very active and knowledgable community.
1. mMode is ATTWS's brandname for their GSM implementation. It's not 3G. USA doesn't have 3G yet (unless you count Verizon's recently launched 1xEV-DO, technically 3G by IMT 2000's definition, but it's data-only).
2. AFAIK, the adaptive codecs are primarily designed to improve voice call reliablilty when signal strength is low. It does allow them to put off constructing new towers, but it's an issue of coverage/signal strength rather than capacity. If all they wanted is capacity, they could've default the whole network to a half-rate codec and call it a day.
3. Agreed. Free nights + weekends = congestion. u get what u pay for.
4. Preferential bandwidth based on the type of accounts you have? That's nonsense. So suppose I have a business account, I make a call during a totally congested time, somehow the tower can retrive my account information, see that I have a business account, then it throttles down ALL OTHER CALLERS just to make enough room for me to make the call? Think about how ridiculous this sounds. I'm skeptical.
5. Very few dealers are capable of on-site unlocking. It's misleading to suggest that specialized phone/car stereo dealers are more likely to be able to do that. You also suggest that they can unlock phones for you by giving you an unlock code, which is also very misleading. Only the carrier and/or the manufacturer has the unlock code for a given phone, the dealers will have to either:
a. call the carrier to get you the unlock code (and u think the carrier would give it out for a new sales?)
b. unlock the phone for you on-site using cables (which means the dealer has to be VERY SPECIALIZED)
The exception being Nokia phones, whose unlock codes can be calculated by IMEI. Once again, I won't count on any local dealers know anything about that.
Here's what I wrote on IMDB today:
In my opinion, this movie is comparable to Kar-Wai Wong's movies -- mood movies. There's not much of a plot, the story doesn't advance much, there are many little insignificant (or even boring) little slices of life in the movie, all for a purpose of capturing a mood or a feeling.
Here in "Lost in Translation", that feeling it tried to capture is the feeling of being isolated and disconnected, particularly from the person you love most (their spouses). Obviously, being lost in the Japanese culture served only as a symbolism to that feeling.
There were quite a few ppl found it offensive how the movie poked fun @ the Japanese and how stereotypical those jokes were. Well, as stereotypical as the jokes were, they felt real (if you've ever been to Japan you'd know, e.g. it's really common and acceptable for Japanese men to go to strip clubs to socialize on a weekend). The fact that you might be offended clearly shows how different YOU are from THEM. Which is the purpose of those scenes (at least in the first half). They weren't meant to be condescending. And it's critical the the story and how those aforementioned feelings parallel each other.
In the beginning our main characters only see the differences between themselves and this foreign land around them, and it was amplified multifold by the utter loneliness they already felt before they got there, which they brought with them to this land. When Bob was at the photo shoot, and poke fun of the director's English, it was clear that he's not trying to be rude, but simply trying to make himself comfortable to survive the experience. ****** It was a parallel of his relationship with his wife. ****** You can immediately see that that's pretty much what his home life is like -- his wife babbling about things that he couldn't understand (like the tiles thing), while he cracks jokes just to show that he's at least listening and wonder how he ended up in this situation in the first place.
The young Charlotte wander around Tokyo alone in many little scenes. Many viewers found those scenes boring. I believe that they serve the purpose to show that maybe she was lonely and lost, but she's still ***searching****. Looking for a purpose, looking for a outlet. She hasn't given up on life and the possibilities like Bob Harris had.
It's rather important that you understand how she felt when she was talking to her friend (her mom??) on the phone and suddenly bursted into tears spontaneously. That's the kind of loneliness she brought with her to Tokyo, and just then and there did she fully realized it.
If you don't understand nor identify with that feeling, you probably won't enjoy the movie. I do believe the movie could've better explained their situations back at home so the audience can better understand the kind of loneliness they came from. But I understand that was what Sofia Coppola trying to do here: This is a movie that captures a feeling, and often times we don't know where our feeling came from and where it's going. This is a picture with no real beginning or a real ending, it's just a mood, a small snapshot of life. It's meant to be incomplete.
As much as Charlotte is still searching, Bob is still ***hoping***. He still loves his wife. The scene where he's in the bathtub and told her "I love you" after she hung up, the fact that his wife calls her at the most inconvinient time and he still picks up, etc. She's not just a responsibility to him, he still cares about her, he just doesn't know how to anymore.
And this is what the movie ultimately is about. It's not just about 2 strangers becoming friends for a few days in a foreign country and how they touched each other. It's about them discovering life and its possibilities once again. The real hope doesn't lie between them, but in each of them with their respective partner at home.
The romance felt very convincing. It's nice to see an American movie treat this May-October romance with self-awareness and realism. They bo
$200 my ass. Most tablet PCs average $2000. You can by a decent laptop somewhat under $1000, and it even has a keyboard!!!
Tablet PCs are not a bad idea, but it's just not worth the extra $700-$1000.
I personally wouldn't mind having a couple of those and run Reason and Ableton Live side-by-side. Tweaking knobs on screen in real-time using a stylus is much better than using a mouse.
But do I want to spend $2000 on a tablet PC? Or would I rather by 2 low-end laptops and a couple Wacom tablets?
Aren't any of you suspicious of the 1GB FSB claim?
Apple said it's 1GHz DDR, so 500Mhz actual clock. Doesn't that seem uber-inflated?
The latest P4 get a 800Mhz QDR FSB. That's 200Mhz actual clock.
How can Apple (or anyone else for that matter) produce a CPU with an external clock that high?
>>>
The website industry including this site was started by amateurs who did it for fun, it became popular and alot of people got rich.
What makes you think musicians cant make money in the same way websites do?
Maybe it's the millions of dotcoms that built a mountain of hype for a market that didn't exist, ultimately plunged the Dows and how many people lost thier entire life-savings again???
Real musicians and artists deserved to making a living, opportunists and one-hit wonders do not deserve mega-fortunes out of blind luck.
Everything monetary has a cost assoiciated, someone has to be paying for those mega-fortunes.
>>>
:)
I don't know that the two devices necessarily hold up to direct comparison.
>>
In contrast, the portable gaming market is a long-existant and stabilized one. Many devices have come and gone, and pretty much succeeded and failed around that $100 price point.
I'm sure we can all agree that $99 is the magical price point for critical mass consumption. I do have a hard time believe the PSP can ever reach a $99 price point within 3 yrs of its launch since it has TFT LCD and an optical drive.
But as I have pointed out, consumer thresholds may increase (as it happened upon the release of the iPod).
Not to mentioned that $99 was the long standing critical mass price point for home consoles (in the 8-bit/16-bit era), until Playstation changed that to $149 (with the help of the release of FF7). Even today, PS2 and XBox are doing very well @ $179-199 while Nintendo isn't doing substantially better with a $149 price point.
$100 is more of a psychological barrier that a economical one, hence it'll be much harder to break.
Can PSP do it?
I just have to repeat myself again and say "I don't know".
Personally, it doesn't really matter how immerse a gaming experience PSP would be, it's still a 4" screen. I don't care even if it got Dolby Surround and Sniffivision, I ain't spending $200.
Well, $129 maybe.
>> There is a finite amount of consumer cash out there, and the PS2 is nearing the end of its life cycle.
Dude, it's not even 3-yrs old!!!
A typical console's lifecycle is about 5 years.
But then, I won't be the first to suggest that the length of console lifcycle is generally decreasing.
>>> For the current PS2 owner, the number of worthwhile NEW titles is waning.
Maybe you should read some reports from E3 this year. There are plenty of great titles in the works.
I think you're speaking of the new titles available **NOW***. It's summertime, what do you expect?
>>> The problem is obviously piracy
:)
I know it was a joke, but still.....
Software privacy should actually stimulate hardware sales.
Not saying it's the solution to bearish console hardware sales, but, well, it's an option.
>>> Sony will find that too few people are willing to spend that kind of money for a portable system.
That's just the launch price. Price will go down eventually.
Is anyone willing to pay $150+ for a portable game player? I don't know. If I told you 2 years ago that a million people will pay $300-500 for a portable MP3 player, you'll probably think I'm smoking crack.
Then came the iPod.
All things considered, by the time PSP ships (if it's on schedule), the GBA SP will be going for $70 or less, with millions of GBA already sold. It'll take another 2-3 years for PSP to drop down to around $100. Nintendo still have about 3-4 years to get its shit together and design the next handheld to compete with PSP.
Disc-based storage (in a caddy) seems logical for the next generation handhelds. Though I'd like to note that the added mechanical components increases the manufacturing cost significantly. $99 will be likely as low as PSP can go.
Anyways, it's way to early in the game. We know nothing about the PSP, really. It can be vaporware, it can be another Virtual Boy.
Show me the hardware, then we'll talk.
>>> Java could really benifit from something along the lines of what CPAN has done for Perl
:)
http://www.jpackage.org/
Not really the CJAN that we want, but it's a nice repository of Java software prepackaged in RPM.
It's not cross-platform, it's not a real standard for Java software/component distribution, but it's the best you got on Linux right now.
>>> Bored bored bored bored! I need something new.
A brand new concept...
Yeah me too.
I need a real sequel to Jet Set Radio.
No, JSRF doesn't count. It was sooo dumbed down.
And I need NiGHTS. It's time to revive it.
Well... I guess I'll have to keep waiting...
>>> Silly rabbits! ICQ > MSN, AOL, YIM
Why? Logging and Offline messages!
YIM has offline msgs.
I think the offical AIM client and YIM has logging too. I use Trillian, which logs everything regardless of medium. So logging is likely to be strictly a client feature.
>>>>Lots of places in Asia and Latin America center almost entirely in ICQ and MSN, and most people don't even know AIM if they don't have any American contacts.
Agreed. In fact, ICQ has seamless SMS integration in major parts of the world.
This, mind you, is internationsl ICQ-SMS integration. I haven't tried it but it's been around for a couple years at least.