Napster started it, then Apple did it far better, then Real Networks jumped in
Napster did not start the online music store craze. If we're talking actual online stores (as opposed to subscription services), Apple was the first. All subsequent ones, including Napster, Musicmatch, etc, have been pale imitators.
Not to sound fanboyish (Trek fell out of favour for me around Voyager), but I think the FTL part keys in the moment "Picard to..." is uttered. After that point the computer would go into "high attentiveness" mode and do an analysis of every millisecond of whatever Picard is saying.
In other words, by the time Picard has said "Ri-" the computer would've already filtered it down to the likely recipient based on past communication requests, such that by the time Picard got to "Rik-" the computer will have already routed the initial call to Riker.
Real world semi-example: on the Mac there's a utility called Launchbar which learns what you want launched based on just a couple key presses, so after a few tries typing "fi" would narrow it down to Firefox, or "vp" would select Virtual PC.
Mind you, in the first season of TNG opening a comm channel was more like "Riker, from Picard". And of course current military's even more efficient, with "Conn, Sonar" indicating Sonar wants to talk to the Conn.
In any event, this is way over-analyzing something that should just be taken as part of a fictional TV show. For example, would anyone working in ship's engineering ever actually listen to the warnings spouted by the computer voice--multiple times even? How many of us just click "ok" or "cancel" without reading the dialogue boxes because we already know what the message is?
Actually, despite the timestamps on the story I'd swear this story didn't even show up for me a couple hours ago, when the Kodak lawsuit story was at the top, followed by the SCO one. This is definitely a story I'd have clicked on.
I considered this very thing when designing my webpage, where the menus are javascript-drawn.
My solution: load the links normally inside a <div id=...>, but after the page loads and the JS menus are drawn, it replaces the contents of the DIV using the innerHTML function. Consequently, web spiders are able to crawl down to my sub-pages despite not having JS (not that any engines *have* crawled them, mine's just a small personal site hosted on my university account, please don't/. it!), but anyone visiting with a JS-enabled browser will see it more or less as I intend.
My email's also JS-drawn using Hiveware's Email Enkoder (http://hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php), so spam harvesters would have to do some serious work to get at it.
Shoplifting costs stores money, but they sure as heck aren't going to just eat the cummulative costs, so they increase the prices.
So if you don't shoplift, are you a chump?
It's that attitude that's driving your insurance through the roof. If more and more people take that attitude and sue "because I'm not getting my money's worth (out of the premium)", then you're damn f'ing right your premiums are going to be higher! What goes around comes around.
Of course, I post this as a Canadian, with higher taxes to support our socialized, non-profit and somewhat less efficient but cheaper health care.
I wasn't even going to mention the neural suppressors, but now that you brought it up... that quick-fix really annoyed me. Not so much that they devised one (7 of 9 no doubt helped) but that it felt like such a cheat to fix the cliffhanger.
Bionic graftings--in the two-part ep where 7 is recaptured by the Borg, they go on an assimilation mission. IIRC the graftings were started on either a sphere or a tactical cube, and were started before the victims were even assimilated (i.e. conciousness suppressed)! So I don't buy that argument either.
Also, one thing trumps Borg efficiency--the queen's personal vengeance. That she didn't start doing all manner of nasty things to them (I'm not *really* a sadist, just a realist) the instant she had them in her grasp, those thorns in her side, speaks volumes about how dumb the Borg (via he queen) was written in Voyager.
In terms of the "magic reset button", I don't recall you complaining about Picard's borg implants having been entirely removed. Seems to me that Seven of Nine showed more long-term affects of having been assimilated than Picard. In terms of other illnesses or injuries being healed, you can attribute that to the extremely skilled, highly adaptive EMH.
Right, we're going to complain about something that wasn't even established (that implants might remain permanently) until Voyager's 7 of 9 came about in the first place!
Further, there was a direct lead-out to Picard's Borg experiences, where he almost quits Starfleet in the very next episode.
I'll throw your complaint right back at you--Janeway, Tuvok and Torres were assimilated in one episode and they likewise recovered without any implants stuck to them. Not only that, this was after First Contact and Voyager established that Borg routinely cut off body parts, replacing them with Borg equivalents, yet Janeway's all happy go-lucky in sickbay after their ordeal, with no ill effects the next episode.
You want a character-driven SF show? Firefly. I knew more about each of the nine characters after 6 of the 13 episodes, even the minor ones, than I've ever learned about Mayweather or Hoshi--or Harry Kim, who had 7 years to develop.
I've always been leery of VoiP or even cell phones replacing landlines entirely. Primus' voice over broadband service, for instance, needs a powerered voice/BB gateway. What happens when there's a blackout?
During the big blackout last August we at least had phone service, could have called 911 if necessary, for the half-day we were without power. Note that Primus' FAQ even says that 911 service isn't available yet.
Better hope the owners aren't Babylon 5 fans, otherwise every five years (Drazi years of course) purple and green lights will duke it out to determine which is the dominant illumination for the next five years...
And that's exactly what almost killed Apple back in the mid-90s. They'd always built Macs to last longer than cheaper PCs, but they lasted far longer. As a result you had labs full of Macs that were like 5 years old but still perfectly usable, versus the lab down the hall with the latest PCs that had replaced the old PCs which were unusable after 2 years (couldn't run Windows 95, for example). Then the ignorant masses draw conclusions, comparing 5-year old Macs with the latest PCs and pushing to replace the Macs with PCs as well.
Apple has learned their lesson. Macs still last longer than PCs and don't devaluate as quickly, but for "low cost" electronics there's no point making something that'll last 4 years and costs three times more than the competitor's product, which are replaced after 2 years.
Yes, I have an iPod, and I'm hoping the battery issue won't affect me for awhile. This doesn't blind me to business realities.
Which goes straight back to the whole "you're either with us or against us" mentality that Bush advocated after the 9/11 attacks. I hate such black and white, simplistic thinking.
Thankfully shades of gray have been allowed to come out of hiding since then.
(There's always traffic in NYC, traffic at 2am on the Cross Island Parkway...WHY?!)
One rare exception. We were returning home from NY on the morning of Sunday, July 4 (2000 I think), travelling along one of the major highways linking from the suburb to NYC proper. I swear, along a straight stretch with miles in front and miles behind, there was not another single car in sight.
One of the more eerie sights I've seen, for the city that never sleeps.
In the same vein, it's like saying how Windows security holes and poor OS design aren't a bad thing because they keep millions of MSCEs employed and the economy running strong...
Hmm, obsolete revenue model, misguided legislation to keep some sort of guaranteed revenue against a new and better technology, what does that remind me of...
Hasn't OS X taught Apple that you can design something that can both be minimalistic, and yet have enough features and power to satisfy any hard-core geek?.. Why can't iPod be like that?
Apples and oranges, pardon the pun. OSX is software, where it's easy to hide a bunch of powerful and hidden features from the ordinary user but accessible to advanced users. heck, we had "power" features accessible with modifier keys since at least as far back as System 7 in 1991.
The iPod is primarily hardware, and fairly small hardware at that. What little software it has must fit inside the operating code memory. Include a built-in FM tuner, or a mic/line in? Increase the unit size and price. And there's no easy way to hide the extra options to control these features from such a minimalist interface.
I interpreted the story like your #2, ie it was 10 minutes for the entire experience. Yes, I neglected to include the sledging after writing "...who then had to find a sledgehammer".
But then, I was responding to you writing "Certainly 10 minutes is longer than you expect for a sledgehammer to go through glass", which in my grammar book suggests you thought the act of sledging through the window itself took 10 minutes.
As for the 10 minutes not being a long time, the rest of my original comment, plus those of several others, should adequately explain why we think it is a long time under these circumstances, even if they weren't panicking inside the car.
You have to remember this was in Thailand, where if you're driving with windows up you by necessity need air conditioning. The passenger compartment starts cooking VERY quickly under a hot sun on a humid day, so even in the few minutes they were trapped in there it would have gotten very uncomfortable. Remember also they probably would have been in shirt, suits and ties, not shorts and T-shirt.
And what's wrong with the 10 minute figure? It didn't take 10 minutes to smash through the glass, it took ten minutes to attract someone without using a horn, who then notified a security guard, who then had to find a sledgehammer. I'm sure few have them strapped to their belts as standard equipment.
Every year here we have cases of babies locked inside cars on a hot summer day while the parent runs inside for some quick errands. In many cases these babies end up in the hospital, after not much more than 10 minutes of being in such conditions.
Not intending this to be a troll, but something about Bush's speeches always grated on me. I finally figured out why: his prolific use of words like "freedom" and "democracy". Not so much that he said them but the sheer frequency of its usage.
What bugged me was that he feels he needs to keep saying it. Ever notice that China is officially the "People's Republic of China" despite very little representation for or by the people? Then there's the "Democratic Republic of Congo", which isn't democratic. And let's not forget the "Democratic People's Republic of [North] Korea"--a 2-for-1 deal there.
My 2 cents: the more someone feels the need to use rhetoric to hammer a point, the less that point happens to be true.
Slashdot Mirror
Napster did not start the online music store craze. If we're talking actual online stores (as opposed to subscription services), Apple was the first. All subsequent ones, including Napster, Musicmatch, etc, have been pale imitators.
Not to sound fanboyish (Trek fell out of favour for me around Voyager), but I think the FTL part keys in the moment "Picard to..." is uttered. After that point the computer would go into "high attentiveness" mode and do an analysis of every millisecond of whatever Picard is saying.
In other words, by the time Picard has said "Ri-" the computer would've already filtered it down to the likely recipient based on past communication requests, such that by the time Picard got to "Rik-" the computer will have already routed the initial call to Riker.
Real world semi-example: on the Mac there's a utility called Launchbar which learns what you want launched based on just a couple key presses, so after a few tries typing "fi" would narrow it down to Firefox, or "vp" would select Virtual PC.
Mind you, in the first season of TNG opening a comm channel was more like "Riker, from Picard". And of course current military's even more efficient, with "Conn, Sonar" indicating Sonar wants to talk to the Conn.
In any event, this is way over-analyzing something that should just be taken as part of a fictional TV show. For example, would anyone working in ship's engineering ever actually listen to the warnings spouted by the computer voice--multiple times even? How many of us just click "ok" or "cancel" without reading the dialogue boxes because we already know what the message is?
Actually, despite the timestamps on the story I'd swear this story didn't even show up for me a couple hours ago, when the Kodak lawsuit story was at the top, followed by the SCO one. This is definitely a story I'd have clicked on.
Glitch in the Matrix?
I considered this very thing when designing my webpage, where the menus are javascript-drawn.
/. it!), but anyone visiting with a JS-enabled browser will see it more or less as I intend.
My solution: load the links normally inside a <div id=...>, but after the page loads and the JS menus are drawn, it replaces the contents of the DIV using the innerHTML function. Consequently, web spiders are able to crawl down to my sub-pages despite not having JS (not that any engines *have* crawled them, mine's just a small personal site hosted on my university account, please don't
My email's also JS-drawn using Hiveware's Email Enkoder (http://hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php), so spam harvesters would have to do some serious work to get at it.
Shoplifting costs stores money, but they sure as heck aren't going to just eat the cummulative costs, so they increase the prices.
So if you don't shoplift, are you a chump?
It's that attitude that's driving your insurance through the roof. If more and more people take that attitude and sue "because I'm not getting my money's worth (out of the premium)", then you're damn f'ing right your premiums are going to be higher! What goes around comes around.
Of course, I post this as a Canadian, with higher taxes to support our socialized, non-profit and somewhat less efficient but cheaper health care.
Exactly the point I was going to make.
Maybe it's BECAUSE all the smart people are getting out of jury duty that the justice system is so screwed up these days?
I wasn't even going to mention the neural suppressors, but now that you brought it up... that quick-fix really annoyed me. Not so much that they devised one (7 of 9 no doubt helped) but that it felt like such a cheat to fix the cliffhanger.
Bionic graftings--in the two-part ep where 7 is recaptured by the Borg, they go on an assimilation mission. IIRC the graftings were started on either a sphere or a tactical cube, and were started before the victims were even assimilated (i.e. conciousness suppressed)! So I don't buy that argument either.
Also, one thing trumps Borg efficiency--the queen's personal vengeance. That she didn't start doing all manner of nasty things to them (I'm not *really* a sadist, just a realist) the instant she had them in her grasp, those thorns in her side, speaks volumes about how dumb the Borg (via he queen) was written in Voyager.
Right, we're going to complain about something that wasn't even established (that implants might remain permanently) until Voyager's 7 of 9 came about in the first place!
Further, there was a direct lead-out to Picard's Borg experiences, where he almost quits Starfleet in the very next episode.
I'll throw your complaint right back at you--Janeway, Tuvok and Torres were assimilated in one episode and they likewise recovered without any implants stuck to them. Not only that, this was after First Contact and Voyager established that Borg routinely cut off body parts, replacing them with Borg equivalents, yet Janeway's all happy go-lucky in sickbay after their ordeal, with no ill effects the next episode.
You want a character-driven SF show? Firefly. I knew more about each of the nine characters after 6 of the 13 episodes, even the minor ones, than I've ever learned about Mayweather or Hoshi--or Harry Kim, who had 7 years to develop.
I've always been leery of VoiP or even cell phones replacing landlines entirely. Primus' voice over broadband service, for instance, needs a powerered voice/BB gateway. What happens when there's a blackout?
During the big blackout last August we at least had phone service, could have called 911 if necessary, for the half-day we were without power. Note that Primus' FAQ even says that 911 service isn't available yet.
Won't see this in the U.S., been trying to find a download of it since coming back from Australia but no luck. Goes something like this...
Beautiful woman is sitting at a restaurant table. The waiter delivers her drink and says "take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Woman: "You're joking!"
Waiter: "No, really!"
Woman: "Take my top off, that's all I need for a shot at $10000?"
Waiter: "That's right."
Woman has her already-skimpy top off in a flash. Cut back to the Waiter with a stunned expression.
"I meant the top off your Diet Coke..."
And that's exactly what almost killed Apple back in the mid-90s. They'd always built Macs to last longer than cheaper PCs, but they lasted far longer. As a result you had labs full of Macs that were like 5 years old but still perfectly usable, versus the lab down the hall with the latest PCs that had replaced the old PCs which were unusable after 2 years (couldn't run Windows 95, for example). Then the ignorant masses draw conclusions, comparing 5-year old Macs with the latest PCs and pushing to replace the Macs with PCs as well.
Apple has learned their lesson. Macs still last longer than PCs and don't devaluate as quickly, but for "low cost" electronics there's no point making something that'll last 4 years and costs three times more than the competitor's product, which are replaced after 2 years.
Yes, I have an iPod, and I'm hoping the battery issue won't affect me for awhile. This doesn't blind me to business realities.
Easy answer: because if anything goes wrong, the last thing they want is for a nuclear accident to happen on US soil.
At the same time, they're confident enough this won't happen such that they *don't* want the experimental reactor in France.
Which goes straight back to the whole "you're either with us or against us" mentality that Bush advocated after the 9/11 attacks. I hate such black and white, simplistic thinking.
Thankfully shades of gray have been allowed to come out of hiding since then.
they stick cigarette lighter into your portable!
One rare exception. We were returning home from NY on the morning of Sunday, July 4 (2000 I think), travelling along one of the major highways linking from the suburb to NYC proper. I swear, along a straight stretch with miles in front and miles behind, there was not another single car in sight.
One of the more eerie sights I've seen, for the city that never sleeps.
Nah, he's more like the white goop that dropped from one of the seagulls onto the docks as Marlin and Dory were trying to get away from the pelican.
... as Tun-Eh?
In the same vein, it's like saying how Windows security holes and poor OS design aren't a bad thing because they keep millions of MSCEs employed and the economy running strong...
Hmm, obsolete revenue model, misguided legislation to keep some sort of guaranteed revenue against a new and better technology, what does that remind me of...
*cough*RIAA*cough*MPAA...
Excuse me, I'm feeling a bit under the weather...
Beats being mistaken as part of Australia all the time ;-)
It's even better publicity if you remember the Matrix films were mostly shot in Sydney!
Apples and oranges, pardon the pun. OSX is software, where it's easy to hide a bunch of powerful and hidden features from the ordinary user but accessible to advanced users. heck, we had "power" features accessible with modifier keys since at least as far back as System 7 in 1991.
The iPod is primarily hardware, and fairly small hardware at that. What little software it has must fit inside the operating code memory. Include a built-in FM tuner, or a mic/line in? Increase the unit size and price. And there's no easy way to hide the extra options to control these features from such a minimalist interface.
But then, I was responding to you writing "Certainly 10 minutes is longer than you expect for a sledgehammer to go through glass", which in my grammar book suggests you thought the act of sledging through the window itself took 10 minutes.
As for the 10 minutes not being a long time, the rest of my original comment, plus those of several others, should adequately explain why we think it is a long time under these circumstances, even if they weren't panicking inside the car.
You have to remember this was in Thailand, where if you're driving with windows up you by necessity need air conditioning. The passenger compartment starts cooking VERY quickly under a hot sun on a humid day, so even in the few minutes they were trapped in there it would have gotten very uncomfortable. Remember also they probably would have been in shirt, suits and ties, not shorts and T-shirt.
And what's wrong with the 10 minute figure? It didn't take 10 minutes to smash through the glass, it took ten minutes to attract someone without using a horn, who then notified a security guard, who then had to find a sledgehammer. I'm sure few have them strapped to their belts as standard equipment.
Every year here we have cases of babies locked inside cars on a hot summer day while the parent runs inside for some quick errands. In many cases these babies end up in the hospital, after not much more than 10 minutes of being in such conditions.
Not intending this to be a troll, but something about Bush's speeches always grated on me. I finally figured out why: his prolific use of words like "freedom" and "democracy". Not so much that he said them but the sheer frequency of its usage.
What bugged me was that he feels he needs to keep saying it. Ever notice that China is officially the "People's Republic of China" despite very little representation for or by the people? Then there's the "Democratic Republic of Congo", which isn't democratic. And let's not forget the "Democratic People's Republic of [North] Korea"--a 2-for-1 deal there.
My 2 cents: the more someone feels the need to use rhetoric to hammer a point, the less that point happens to be true.