Look at the notable members of the Footlights (Cambridge) and The Oxford Revue. The lists cover a fairly significant number of Britain's famous comedians from the last few decades. I couldn't find anything similar for Harvard or Yale, but admittedly that could be simply because I knew where to look for the British ones.
Admittedly a command line is pretty much the only thing that could be more minimal than the VLC interface, but you're probably in a fairly niche market if you find a CLI media player to be the most intuitive. Each to their own and all that, though.
Just to add backing to that: by my calculations 5GB of text data in a month would require typing at over 20,000 words per minute, 24 hours a day. I'd be very impressed to meet someone who types at almost 350 words per second without the requirement for food or sleep.
Seriously, though, while a 5GB cap is pretty crappy (even leaving last.fm running on one machine would push that, let alone video streaming) it's just making ones own argument look invalid to claim you're going to exceed it with email and IM.
It's a shame, actually, that they had a flash of insight and then let it drop. They finally realised that they only way to compete with free, high-quality content from torrents was to offer free, high-quality content for themselves - the radical thinking (compared to other big media companies, at least) was that while it may not earn as much as broadcasting on TV, it's preferable to earning nothing from torrent downloads.
Now set-top PCs and services like Boxee start to appear and gain a bit of mainstream attention - the inspiration is gone and they try to fight a battle they can't win rather than accepting (as they did before) that they can still make money, just not quite as much as they might've done before.
Surely if they were going down that road it would be easier to do a user-agent check? It's easy to argue that javascript is a generic technology that's intended to run on any given platform. Spoofing one's user-agent, on the other hand, could be considered 'lying' to the server.
It'd set a horrible precedent, sure, but it's probably a slightly less stupid argument than 'circumventing' the javascript obfuscation by simply running it exactly as intended.
The fact of the matter is that Hulu is co-owned by two of these "content providers" so in essence, Hulu *IS* the "content provider"
I'd be interested to know where the division lies, actually. Their blog posts when Boxee was cut off had a distinctly irritable tone - they were very much making their point that the content providers don't understand the new marketplace they're operating in; basically, they were saying of the content providers the exact same thing most of the posts on this story are saying of them.
To me, that means they're autonomous to a reasonable degree but the studios have the final say. I would guess that the Hulu team themselves made all the relevant points about how this obfuscation won't work, and were overruled - just because their company is owned by the studios, doesn't mean the employees working there share the same ideas.
Apple's standard RAM pricing ranges from the 'moderately acceptable' to 'insane' depending on a number of things.
The 4GB > 8GB pricing is overpriced, but not as far off standard market value as you might think. The iMac only has two slots, meaning 8GB RAM requires 4GB sticks; even on Newegg they're $360 each, and straight from Crucial they come in at $490. That puts Apple's upgrade at about $300 overpriced - certainly unpleasant, but then so's Crucial's.
Try explaining to a novice the difference between just closing the window and exiting the application. Most will still be calling you a week later asking why their computer has gotten so slow.
Isn't that an issue of a faulty user (or possibly faulty teacher) rather than of the OS itself?
I know OSX certainly does have its problems and limitations, but I wouldn't call that one of them. How hard is it to understand "That little dot underneath the icon means the program is running, even if it's not showing anything on the screen. If you have too much stuff running, it will take up resources and slow down the computer.". Maybe not intuitive right off the bat, even to an experienced non-mac user, but a ten second explanation to anyone with moderate intelligence, surely?
Isn't "better" a pointless term if you know it's not going to make any real tangible impact on performance?
It's unfortunate that I don't have the background knowledge to work out how much of an increase in error rates or decrease in speed you'll get with cheap memory. I'd be very surprised to see anything noticeable; maybe a test is in order: run two identical machines on the same task for a month, one with the cheapest RAM on the market and one with the most expensive, and compare their overall performance and any errors found.
You joke, but the interface is all that's new here. You can already do what the summary suggests using bookmark keywords - it is a useful feature, actually. I don't know how well-know it is, but basically you make a bookmark with a keyword for the address bar and a wildcard in the URL.
For example, if you make a bookmark with the keyword 'map' and the address 'http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=%s' (note the '%s' wildcard) you can then type 'map cleveland street london' straight into the address bar just as the summary suggests. All that they seem to be suggesting is having it come up in a 'floating' context box like the AwesomeBar rather than actually open in the tab.
When you know you're going to be thousands in debt whatever you do, it's very easy to end up thinking like that. Everyone knows that they're going to be paying it off for so long that money starts to lose its connection to tangible items.
Alternative open source solutions certainly have their place, but they're not always appropriate, particularly for courses that rely on audio, graphical or CAD software where knowledge and experience of a specific software package is often expected. Sure, it's fairly easy for a moderately competent user to switch from Word to Writer, and the mathematics doesn't change if you go from Matlab to Octave, but being expected to work with Photoshop at a high level if you've only been trained on Gimp would be surprisingly challenging.
You seem to be pulling these statements from some twisted preconceived notion of the classic 'spoiled rich kid' who may or may not actually exist, and then applying them indiscriminately to the entire university-going population.
Seriously, some people might behave like that, but I'd suggest (completely anecdotally, as in your posts) that most people would be very grateful to their parents for a $500-700 machine; it's not a huge amount of money to a lot of people and it's something that's likely to make the student's life more pleasant. As someone mentioned above, it's nice to have communications, entertainment and work all at your fingertips.
In one of your other posts you wrote off communication on the basis that you might not have net access in 100% of places, but you ignore the fact that it's damn useful in the 95% of places on campus that are covered. You also suggest spending $1000 on software is a necessity, with absolutely no explanation why, and then use it as if it's a valid argument. Basically I don't see what your problem with laptops is, because it seems very much like a preconceived notion with dubious arguments added to support it rather than a logical conclusion drawn from any actual experience or information.
No, not the same reputation, but it doesn't mean they're not asshats.
The first thing that springs to mind is the artificial price control - they're happy to sell their games in Russia or Thailand at a heavily discounted rate but they use Steam to block the use of those games in any other market. They're using technical measures to take advantage of the global market with none of the potential costs, at the expense of the consumer. They have also effectively destroyed the second-hand market for their games. You want a copy, you're going to have to pay exactly what they ask, basically taking market forces out of the equation.
Is it really necessary for every candy bar to be packaged in a plastic wrapper? Does every pair of cookies in an Oreo package have to be packaged in their own little plastic pouch? What's the deal with single use plastic bottles? I don't remember my candy tasting any worse when I was a kid and that stuff was sold wrapped in paper or the Coca Cola tasting any different when it shipped in glass bottles.
It's a simple matter of economics, as are so many environmental issues. If plastic wasn't the cheapest acceptable overall solution it wouldn't be used, that's all there is to it. That's taking into account the whole package: cost of the plastic itself, shelf-life and shipping advantages, the potential PR costs of being considered a polluter, money already invested in plastic bottling/wrapping plants, and so on. If any of those factors swung the advantage over to glass, or paper, or whatever it'd be switched in a second - why do you think McDonalds uses cardboard burger boxes now? It's sure as hell not because they care more about the environment than they do about money, even if it is based partly on the hard-to-quantify value of looking like 'the good guy'.
Hypothetically, but impractically, all we need to do is make every company directly responsible for the clean-up or recycling costs of its products. Those costs would then be passed down every stage of the supply chain, at which point the consumer would decide what presents them with the best value option, polluting, non-polluting or going without altogether. The problem, of course, is getting every company and government to co-operate and enforce this; it'll never happen. The closest that is usually managed is a few token taxes on some causes of pollution, and that's problematic partly because it artificially skews the market and partly because, as with any tax, the money collected is not directly linked to the problem it was supposed to solve, and thus the connection between cost and quantity of pollution is lost.
I'm possibly missing something blindingly obvious here, but what's the benefit of the eBay step in the insurance fraud scam? Just to make it look like they have a more legitimate reason for keeping 8 PS3s in their living room before they were 'robbed'?
Quite possibly. There's no good solution, and there are vested interests on both sides. eBay makes a cut of every sale, so they want as many as they can, no matter what the legitimacy of the items being sold. Tiffany makes nothing from second hand sales, so they'd love to destroy any market for them. Counterfeiting probably is more damaging to Tiffany than a legitimate resale market, but if they weren't angling to stop all 'unauthorised' sales of their products I doubt they'd be bringing a lawsuit where the only real solution is to ban any Tiffany products from eBay.
eBay can very easily be written off as assholes for a multitude of valid reasons, but for once I think we've got a situation where they can't be blamed. Short of manually approving every single auction there's not much more they can do to keep out the obvious fakes. Now add to that the ones that can't be spotted a mile off by anyone with a bit of experience and it's like asking them to send a team of experts to your house and confirm that the item you just listed is indeed genuine. Good luck with that.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I would guess the pricing on those things is partly due to the need for compatibility with multiple devices which weren't designed with it in mind and partly due to the niche market/'because we can' factor, right?
I'd be surprised if it were especially difficult to make a flash drive with hardware write-protection in mind, though. Considering what 4 or 8GB drives cost, even if you had to literally double up on every component in the drive and then physically switch between them for read only or read/write mode it should still come out on the slightly higher priced end of 'dirt cheap'. Whether there's sufficient demand to bother designing it, however, is probably another matter.
Do you mean USB sticks with little write-protect tabs like floppies? They do exist, you know - I have one somewhere. Admittedly it's a bit old and thus only 128MB, but the functionality is there nonetheless.
A quick bit of Googling reveals that PQI still makes them in more useful capacities, and that they retain the write-protect tab. They're even still the same colour!
Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.
You can use money for much more interesting things than 'stuff'. I guess you could still quite accurately describe me as a narcissist, and perhaps the rest of my post is just serving to prove your point, but I dislike the superior attitude that so many people show when it comes to talking about wealth, as if we should be 'higher' people with loftier goals than that distasteful pursuit of money, the assumption being that those who want it are after money simply for the sake of a bank balance with a big number.
To put it bluntly, I would like to be rich. If I succeed in this it will mean I can travel to interesting places, learn new skills, and generally do things that I enjoy. All of this requires money for a multitude of reasons - the ability to take time off work, the acquisition of relevant information/permits/whatever, the equipment needed, and so on. I consider the goals of visiting every country on earth, or learning aerobatic flight, or skydiving, or juggling, or whatever else, to be perfectly valid and interesting things to wish for in my life. Perhaps you disagree? I don't know, although I would be surprised if you do. Sure, a shiny house filled with shiny things would be somewhat fun, but certainly not worth devoting myself to - that's the impression most people seem to push when they talk about money.
Yes, they're also entirely self-centred goals, but if you were to offer most people the choice of that life or of a 9 to 5 at a stable and moderately well-paid job I think I know which they would choose. I'm also well aware of the fact that most of those with serious wealth in the world got there working about as hard as those in the 9 to 5s, maybe a bit more so, maybe a bit less so. What good reason is there to devote myself to trying to have a 'normal' life when there's some chance I can have a life much more interesting than that?
Almost everybody I knew in college didn't know the value of hard work
Look at the world around you and show me where 'hard work' is getting the best results for the worker.
The best ways to a life of comfort and excitement are luck, corruption, parental privilege, or a combination of all three. Good ideas might also get you somewhere, but only with a dose of luck attached. Sometimes, but certainly not always, these might need to be coupled with a workload that's maybe equivalent to that of a nurse or a teacher. Notice how said nurse and teacher are putting in equally hard work for a relative pittance?
The way monetary value is measured has become almost completely abstract, so it's unsurprising that those growing up in this system have different ideas to the older generation.
I'm guessing you've not opened an iMac since the G5 days, since those were a matter of a few screws for access to all the important parts.
Any of the Intel models require a credit card in the vent on the back to pop open the clips holding the front on, after which you need to unscrew the screen and remove the adhesive metal tape that's holding it in place to get to the actual components.
I've repaired/upgraded a few machines, and it's not a terribly difficult job, but it's not easy either. The use of adhesives over screws, and some very fiddly locations of the bits that are screwed in, make it a hassle when it needn't be one.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the notable members of the Footlights (Cambridge) and The Oxford Revue. The lists cover a fairly significant number of Britain's famous comedians from the last few decades. I couldn't find anything similar for Harvard or Yale, but admittedly that could be simply because I knew where to look for the British ones.
What was the intended alternative? Would it have worked better as the web scaled to the size it is today?
You're on Slashdot, commenting on an article about nuclear safety. That puts you way way above the level of 'everyday Joe' in this context.
Admittedly a command line is pretty much the only thing that could be more minimal than the VLC interface, but you're probably in a fairly niche market if you find a CLI media player to be the most intuitive. Each to their own and all that, though.
Just to add backing to that: by my calculations 5GB of text data in a month would require typing at over 20,000 words per minute, 24 hours a day. I'd be very impressed to meet someone who types at almost 350 words per second without the requirement for food or sleep.
Seriously, though, while a 5GB cap is pretty crappy (even leaving last.fm running on one machine would push that, let alone video streaming) it's just making ones own argument look invalid to claim you're going to exceed it with email and IM.
It's a shame, actually, that they had a flash of insight and then let it drop. They finally realised that they only way to compete with free, high-quality content from torrents was to offer free, high-quality content for themselves - the radical thinking (compared to other big media companies, at least) was that while it may not earn as much as broadcasting on TV, it's preferable to earning nothing from torrent downloads.
Now set-top PCs and services like Boxee start to appear and gain a bit of mainstream attention - the inspiration is gone and they try to fight a battle they can't win rather than accepting (as they did before) that they can still make money, just not quite as much as they might've done before.
Surely if they were going down that road it would be easier to do a user-agent check? It's easy to argue that javascript is a generic technology that's intended to run on any given platform. Spoofing one's user-agent, on the other hand, could be considered 'lying' to the server.
It'd set a horrible precedent, sure, but it's probably a slightly less stupid argument than 'circumventing' the javascript obfuscation by simply running it exactly as intended.
I'd be interested to know where the division lies, actually. Their blog posts when Boxee was cut off had a distinctly irritable tone - they were very much making their point that the content providers don't understand the new marketplace they're operating in; basically, they were saying of the content providers the exact same thing most of the posts on this story are saying of them.
To me, that means they're autonomous to a reasonable degree but the studios have the final say. I would guess that the Hulu team themselves made all the relevant points about how this obfuscation won't work, and were overruled - just because their company is owned by the studios, doesn't mean the employees working there share the same ideas.
Apple's standard RAM pricing ranges from the 'moderately acceptable' to 'insane' depending on a number of things.
The 4GB > 8GB pricing is overpriced, but not as far off standard market value as you might think. The iMac only has two slots, meaning 8GB RAM requires 4GB sticks; even on Newegg they're $360 each, and straight from Crucial they come in at $490. That puts Apple's upgrade at about $300 overpriced - certainly unpleasant, but then so's Crucial's.
Isn't that an issue of a faulty user (or possibly faulty teacher) rather than of the OS itself?
I know OSX certainly does have its problems and limitations, but I wouldn't call that one of them. How hard is it to understand "That little dot underneath the icon means the program is running, even if it's not showing anything on the screen. If you have too much stuff running, it will take up resources and slow down the computer.". Maybe not intuitive right off the bat, even to an experienced non-mac user, but a ten second explanation to anyone with moderate intelligence, surely?
Isn't "better" a pointless term if you know it's not going to make any real tangible impact on performance?
It's unfortunate that I don't have the background knowledge to work out how much of an increase in error rates or decrease in speed you'll get with cheap memory. I'd be very surprised to see anything noticeable; maybe a test is in order: run two identical machines on the same task for a month, one with the cheapest RAM on the market and one with the most expensive, and compare their overall performance and any errors found.
You joke, but the interface is all that's new here. You can already do what the summary suggests using bookmark keywords - it is a useful feature, actually. I don't know how well-know it is, but basically you make a bookmark with a keyword for the address bar and a wildcard in the URL.
For example, if you make a bookmark with the keyword 'map' and the address 'http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=%s' (note the '%s' wildcard) you can then type 'map cleveland street london' straight into the address bar just as the summary suggests. All that they seem to be suggesting is having it come up in a 'floating' context box like the AwesomeBar rather than actually open in the tab.
When you know you're going to be thousands in debt whatever you do, it's very easy to end up thinking like that. Everyone knows that they're going to be paying it off for so long that money starts to lose its connection to tangible items.
Alternative open source solutions certainly have their place, but they're not always appropriate, particularly for courses that rely on audio, graphical or CAD software where knowledge and experience of a specific software package is often expected. Sure, it's fairly easy for a moderately competent user to switch from Word to Writer, and the mathematics doesn't change if you go from Matlab to Octave, but being expected to work with Photoshop at a high level if you've only been trained on Gimp would be surprisingly challenging.
You seem to be pulling these statements from some twisted preconceived notion of the classic 'spoiled rich kid' who may or may not actually exist, and then applying them indiscriminately to the entire university-going population.
Seriously, some people might behave like that, but I'd suggest (completely anecdotally, as in your posts) that most people would be very grateful to their parents for a $500-700 machine; it's not a huge amount of money to a lot of people and it's something that's likely to make the student's life more pleasant. As someone mentioned above, it's nice to have communications, entertainment and work all at your fingertips.
In one of your other posts you wrote off communication on the basis that you might not have net access in 100% of places, but you ignore the fact that it's damn useful in the 95% of places on campus that are covered. You also suggest spending $1000 on software is a necessity, with absolutely no explanation why, and then use it as if it's a valid argument. Basically I don't see what your problem with laptops is, because it seems very much like a preconceived notion with dubious arguments added to support it rather than a logical conclusion drawn from any actual experience or information.
No, not the same reputation, but it doesn't mean they're not asshats.
The first thing that springs to mind is the artificial price control - they're happy to sell their games in Russia or Thailand at a heavily discounted rate but they use Steam to block the use of those games in any other market. They're using technical measures to take advantage of the global market with none of the potential costs, at the expense of the consumer. They have also effectively destroyed the second-hand market for their games. You want a copy, you're going to have to pay exactly what they ask, basically taking market forces out of the equation.
It's a simple matter of economics, as are so many environmental issues. If plastic wasn't the cheapest acceptable overall solution it wouldn't be used, that's all there is to it. That's taking into account the whole package: cost of the plastic itself, shelf-life and shipping advantages, the potential PR costs of being considered a polluter, money already invested in plastic bottling/wrapping plants, and so on. If any of those factors swung the advantage over to glass, or paper, or whatever it'd be switched in a second - why do you think McDonalds uses cardboard burger boxes now? It's sure as hell not because they care more about the environment than they do about money, even if it is based partly on the hard-to-quantify value of looking like 'the good guy'.
Hypothetically, but impractically, all we need to do is make every company directly responsible for the clean-up or recycling costs of its products. Those costs would then be passed down every stage of the supply chain, at which point the consumer would decide what presents them with the best value option, polluting, non-polluting or going without altogether. The problem, of course, is getting every company and government to co-operate and enforce this; it'll never happen. The closest that is usually managed is a few token taxes on some causes of pollution, and that's problematic partly because it artificially skews the market and partly because, as with any tax, the money collected is not directly linked to the problem it was supposed to solve, and thus the connection between cost and quantity of pollution is lost.
I'm possibly missing something blindingly obvious here, but what's the benefit of the eBay step in the insurance fraud scam? Just to make it look like they have a more legitimate reason for keeping 8 PS3s in their living room before they were 'robbed'?
Quite possibly. There's no good solution, and there are vested interests on both sides. eBay makes a cut of every sale, so they want as many as they can, no matter what the legitimacy of the items being sold. Tiffany makes nothing from second hand sales, so they'd love to destroy any market for them. Counterfeiting probably is more damaging to Tiffany than a legitimate resale market, but if they weren't angling to stop all 'unauthorised' sales of their products I doubt they'd be bringing a lawsuit where the only real solution is to ban any Tiffany products from eBay.
eBay can very easily be written off as assholes for a multitude of valid reasons, but for once I think we've got a situation where they can't be blamed. Short of manually approving every single auction there's not much more they can do to keep out the obvious fakes. Now add to that the ones that can't be spotted a mile off by anyone with a bit of experience and it's like asking them to send a team of experts to your house and confirm that the item you just listed is indeed genuine. Good luck with that.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I would guess the pricing on those things is partly due to the need for compatibility with multiple devices which weren't designed with it in mind and partly due to the niche market/'because we can' factor, right?
I'd be surprised if it were especially difficult to make a flash drive with hardware write-protection in mind, though. Considering what 4 or 8GB drives cost, even if you had to literally double up on every component in the drive and then physically switch between them for read only or read/write mode it should still come out on the slightly higher priced end of 'dirt cheap'. Whether there's sufficient demand to bother designing it, however, is probably another matter.
Do you mean USB sticks with little write-protect tabs like floppies? They do exist, you know - I have one somewhere. Admittedly it's a bit old and thus only 128MB, but the functionality is there nonetheless.
A quick bit of Googling reveals that PQI still makes them in more useful capacities, and that they retain the write-protect tab. They're even still the same colour!
I care. I care because they're wasting my tax money in order to spy on me for no reason.
You can use money for much more interesting things than 'stuff'. I guess you could still quite accurately describe me as a narcissist, and perhaps the rest of my post is just serving to prove your point, but I dislike the superior attitude that so many people show when it comes to talking about wealth, as if we should be 'higher' people with loftier goals than that distasteful pursuit of money, the assumption being that those who want it are after money simply for the sake of a bank balance with a big number.
To put it bluntly, I would like to be rich. If I succeed in this it will mean I can travel to interesting places, learn new skills, and generally do things that I enjoy. All of this requires money for a multitude of reasons - the ability to take time off work, the acquisition of relevant information/permits/whatever, the equipment needed, and so on. I consider the goals of visiting every country on earth, or learning aerobatic flight, or skydiving, or juggling, or whatever else, to be perfectly valid and interesting things to wish for in my life. Perhaps you disagree? I don't know, although I would be surprised if you do. Sure, a shiny house filled with shiny things would be somewhat fun, but certainly not worth devoting myself to - that's the impression most people seem to push when they talk about money.
Yes, they're also entirely self-centred goals, but if you were to offer most people the choice of that life or of a 9 to 5 at a stable and moderately well-paid job I think I know which they would choose. I'm also well aware of the fact that most of those with serious wealth in the world got there working about as hard as those in the 9 to 5s, maybe a bit more so, maybe a bit less so. What good reason is there to devote myself to trying to have a 'normal' life when there's some chance I can have a life much more interesting than that?
Look at the world around you and show me where 'hard work' is getting the best results for the worker.
The best ways to a life of comfort and excitement are luck, corruption, parental privilege, or a combination of all three. Good ideas might also get you somewhere, but only with a dose of luck attached. Sometimes, but certainly not always, these might need to be coupled with a workload that's maybe equivalent to that of a nurse or a teacher. Notice how said nurse and teacher are putting in equally hard work for a relative pittance?
The way monetary value is measured has become almost completely abstract, so it's unsurprising that those growing up in this system have different ideas to the older generation.
I'm guessing you've not opened an iMac since the G5 days, since those were a matter of a few screws for access to all the important parts.
Any of the Intel models require a credit card in the vent on the back to pop open the clips holding the front on, after which you need to unscrew the screen and remove the adhesive metal tape that's holding it in place to get to the actual components.
I've repaired/upgraded a few machines, and it's not a terribly difficult job, but it's not easy either. The use of adhesives over screws, and some very fiddly locations of the bits that are screwed in, make it a hassle when it needn't be one.