So the researchers at the University of Utah determined that using your phone is worse than having a BAC of 0.08, the equivalent of one drink, not the equivalent of being drunk. How does the rubric stand up to two drinks? Four? As it is, the data don't suggest much. And don't be fooled by the "alcohol is involved in 40 percent of the 42,000 annual traffic fatalities" statistic, either. Most states derive that number from whenever any party, regardless of fault, has a BAC of 0.01 or more. In other words, you could eat a cherry cordial and a sober person could plow right through you and the state would consider your death an alcohol-related traffic fatality.
Most people aren't aware that MD is widely used for field recording for broadcast in the U.S. because it's more affordable, more portable, more versatile and more power-efficient than most DAT, flash memory, or hard drive recorders. True, you do pay a very small price in terms of audio fidelity when compared to professional-grade recorders but it's far better than using analog tapes, and even some of the newer pro recorders have had to trade off sound quality and user interface for portability. The newest Hi-MD recorder looks like it will be an invaluable tool because of its ability to upload and download from a USB 2.0 interface and added OS X compatibility.
The mere ability to change disks, batteries, and pre-amp levels, as well as bookmark your footage on the fly are near vital when you're out in the field.
As far as the music listening goes, while you may never have seen one in the U.S. or Europe, lots of stereo systems in Asia, especially mini-systems that you would find in bedrooms and kitchens, have slots from which to read and write MD disks.
While I might opt for something else if playback were the only issue, the MD's versatility is tough to argue with and it seems like a rare product where recording is one of its main features, not an afterthought or a hack.
When has MS ever had a reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? Windows 95 didn't come out until August of that year. Windows 98 didn't come out until June of that year. Windows XP came out in October, 2001. Hell, Office 2003 came out in November of that year. Hardly an impressive track record. Maybe it's just me, but MS could benefit from not using years in the names of its releases.
One of the biggest faults in the "online sales hurts CD sales" argument is that the mainstream American recording industry, depending on multi-media ads and promotion (like MTV), has helped to create a market based on singles. That doesn't work if one claims to depend on album sales. Even the most reliable measure of music sales in North America, Nielsen SoundScan, produces numbers for sales of albums, not singles. If album tracks are hampering sales, maybe it's time for a change in how music gets produced and promoted in the first place.
In other countries, artists frequently cut singles and make videos, then book TV performances and radio interviews to promote their work. Only after a series of singles do they release an album and then go on tour to promote it.
The RIAA might benefit by changing in this way and not dumping so much money into advertising and payola for music video and radio play. It's kind of like bloatware in that way. If a record has to go platinum in order to break even for the record company, the business model might very well be broken.
Roth makes some interesting points about the profit model but his premise is really weak because he doesn't understand the word he's using.
The reason otaku can mean a household or a hardcore geek fan is because it describes someone who is so into something, not necessarily cartoons, that they don't tend to get out of the house. They can have whatever it is they're into -- and food -- delivered. This does not describe what Roth is talking about.
I can think of a few people who would love nothing more than to watch DVDs of "Good Eats" and order All Clad cookware to experiment with, and they are more otaku than someone who really likes Furikuri.
Your movies are still going to have crappy artifacting as long as they have some lazy intern clicking his mouse on some button that says "ENCODE!" And they're still going to look crappy on low-res, interlaced TVs. So what could possibly take up all the extra space on these new discs? Another useless director's commentary?
Well, for one, it can be cheaper to pay the ASCAP fee than it is to pay to sample the original recording. It gets more complicated when there is any trace of vocal in a sample, which then means you have to ask the artist for permission to use her/his likeness. I've heard of more and more guilty pleasure cheesy dance producers having to re-construct segments of older songs when they can't sample them.
Most covers are done independently of the original recording. Most remixes are not, in the sense that they usually have to seek out some sort of permission, like buying a vocals-only track from a studio.
I am another journalist by trade, right now in between jobs. I've grown quite tired of the blogger issue because it really isn't one. Anyone can start a blog. Reporters must have the requisite training and skill. If Drudge got sued or imprisoned through some provision in the shield law, he could always start a new Web site or, hell, go back to his current one. Someone who's actually dealing with sensitive topics doesn't have that freedom, which is what we're trying to protect.
You can't just tell people not to do things
on
MyDoom Strikes Again
·
· Score: 1
It's like, "Tommy, don't stick your hand in the wall socket. You'll get electrocuted."
"Sales people, turn off your preview panes. You're going to get our server banned from the ISP again."
Step two wouldn't make sense except that Swarovski is one of the most elite crystal manufacturers in the world, and some Chairman Kaga type would pay big bucks for it.
I love my old HPC Pro, though it's getting more than worn around the edges.
I bought a Hitachi HPW600-ETM around 2000, which I still use as a word processor running full VGA (640x480) with no moving parts. That means I could accurately gauge my document length, I never had to worry about a hard drive (instant start-up!) and my battery life at its prime averaged 6-8 hours.
Most of all, I still detest typing on Chiclets, so I bought a cheap low-power USB keyboard to hook into the device.
At the time, it ran me $600 off of eBay.
I'm not sure I like the current crop of tablet PCs because they have added features (like swiveling screens) that compound form factor problems.
Actually, if you really want to know where you can get it, the virus deposits a text file, very cookie-like, in a Windows user's Temporary Internet Files folder that points to a site called http://russnelson.com which ostensibly belongs to a man who works for a software company in upstate New York. And if you really want to download that cookie (and potentially the.scr file), you can go to russnelson.com/mydoom.
I used to think that cubicles were an inefficient idea. They offered no real privacy and they turned offices into mazes. But then I started temping at this one company and was led into a room where I was seized by this Joseph Conradian Heart of Darkness terror when I saw that there were...no...cubicles... Just 50 heads all fully exposed to one another, all on the phones or typing, trying not to look at one another. I immediately flashed back to the movie "9 to 5" and wondered when Jane Fonda was going to start shooting a shotgun at Dabney Coleman with a plastic waste bin on his head.
Workbench is the cleanest OS I've ever run -- the only to never have crashed on me.
I still have my A1200-030 ready for action if anyone would develop software for it. I'd even be willing to switch it to a dual '060-PPC for backwards compatibility.
And I still don't understand the computer world's obsession of running in PAL screen sizes (4:3) instead of NTSC (8:5). All that unnecessary conversion...
One of the premises of this post is wrong: LEDs do not currently come in all colors. It's easy to think they do, though, as those keychain lights come in various colors to serve the candy raver community. Those are still, however, mostly red and yellow LEDs with colored filters on them.
In order to have an accurate display, you're going to need white LEDs, which have only just been produced in university labs and won't be ready for mass marketing for quite some time.
And in order to have accurate color representation on any given monitor, the display must emit light and there are just no two ways about it. Reflective surfaces are just too susceptible to color and light distortion from ambient light, so the only way to get that easy-on-the-eye newspaper or magazine is by trying to standardize values between the display and the printer through Pantone codes.
I don't really feel it benefits anyone for me to reiterate this for each and every post about digital rights, but this seems like a decent one to use my umbrella statement.
To all media distribution companies, big and small: You decided to go digital. Deal with it.
It is not your right to bend legislation at any level to secure your profit margin because that's not free trade. Go ahead and use any copy protection schemes you wish. But don't you even dare try to legally sanction somebody because they've figured out how to get around it: they've just acted more intelligently and more efficiently.
If you truly believed in free trade and the spirit of competition, you'd try to maximize quality while minimizing overhead. What causes so much overhead? Executive salaries and expense accounts, as well as advertising and payola. You've over-saturated your markets with expensive and inferior product, and people have gotten wise to you. The only companies who have any right to complain are the small independents, because the playing field isn't level to begin with.
This was the case with video games piracy and the resultant bankruptcies of production houses during the 1980s and 1990s. If only their distribution companies would have given more back to the people who originated these products instead of fattening their wallets, we might still have diversity in our software.
Creative people have a right to their intellectual property. Why not show them some respect by divvying up the rewards for their efforts more fairly?
Normally I don't have much of a problem with spyware. I scan at least once a day and it keeps the problems down to a minimum. But SearchSquire broke my registry and installed itself without my knowledge or consent. Of course, I was the dummy who broke my backup registry.
Check out this link for official lies posted by an alleged employee of SearchSquire who says it's an ActiveX script -- which should have prompted whether or not I wanted something installed.
The early part of the 20th century showed blurred lines between musicianship and show business, as live performance was show business. The only way most people got to hear studio recordings at this point was on the radio, as clay records and phonographs were prohibitively expensive. Even as late as the 1960s, most music was recorded live because studio time and studio musician time cost so much. Most of our favorite "oldies" contain imperfections that, if corrected, might completely alter the way we think of them.
Since then, the line between musicianship and show business grew a little clearer through the use of recording and visual technology, enabling both poor performers/good singers and poor singers/good performers to have their 15 minutes of fame. We ended up seeing a lot of people noting the differences between live performances and studio albums, often opting to not see their favorite acts live because their performances were mediocre.
Perhaps we experience some conflict over the difference between live performance and studio recording because we expect imperfections in live shows but want flawless recordings. Maybe we don't want "perfect" (sometimes read: inorganic) sounding music in such a spontaneous atmosphere but still want the show to sound like the studio record. The line between musicianship and show business is certainly blurring again, but is it cheating if our expectations have gotten too high?
Phone/PDA combinations aren't likely to overcome desktops because Average Joe (read "people who aren't tech geeks like us") can't afford them, with the exception of the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick, and even with that useless quarter-VGA screen, they do not want something that cumbersome. Then again, they also don't want something very small, as many people have had a hard time holding recent cell phones. Form factor is a critical issue here, and until we have PDAs that can switch to a horizontal display, people will still need something to type their papers and book reports on.
I mean, let's face it: Average Joe might use a pirated copy of Word but certainly not Latek. For this, he needs a desktop.
And who can use such a tiny screen to view cheesy free porn?
I, too, wonder why he didn't opt to use a P.O. Box. This is a business he's running (read "public").
While he couldn't have expected an influx of threats, threats in and of themselves are felonies in many states -- especially when IP addresses and phone calls can be traced. And those IP addresses are becoming less and less dynamic with everyone switching to broadband...
My big questions are: how does this guy access the internet? Why has his ISP not cut him off? How does he pay for all the bandwidth he must be using, if he really is that hardcore a spammer?
I've known many people who have worked for the computing services on the UCSB campus.
A few quick sound-bytes:
Most dorm computer users did not purchase NT-based systems of their own volition: they got them as part of a bundle or because mom and dad gave it to them. Therefore, they have had no real incentive to learn how to properly configurate their OS.
Thus, when someone leaves the admin password blank, they may not be more of a "security issue," as some have said, but they certainly become more of a pain in the ass: a logistical nightmare for the computing services people.
Hell, I've even had to teach people how to click "enable" on their network connections. And you expect them to set up an admin password?
Slashdot Mirror
So the researchers at the University of Utah determined that using your phone is worse than having a BAC of 0.08, the equivalent of one drink, not the equivalent of being drunk. How does the rubric stand up to two drinks? Four? As it is, the data don't suggest much. And don't be fooled by the "alcohol is involved in 40 percent of the 42,000 annual traffic fatalities" statistic, either. Most states derive that number from whenever any party, regardless of fault, has a BAC of 0.01 or more. In other words, you could eat a cherry cordial and a sober person could plow right through you and the state would consider your death an alcohol-related traffic fatality.
Looks like your server is down...
Most people aren't aware that MD is widely used for field recording for broadcast in the U.S. because it's more affordable, more portable, more versatile and more power-efficient than most DAT, flash memory, or hard drive recorders. True, you do pay a very small price in terms of audio fidelity when compared to professional-grade recorders but it's far better than using analog tapes, and even some of the newer pro recorders have had to trade off sound quality and user interface for portability. The newest Hi-MD recorder looks like it will be an invaluable tool because of its ability to upload and download from a USB 2.0 interface and added OS X compatibility.
The mere ability to change disks, batteries, and pre-amp levels, as well as bookmark your footage on the fly are near vital when you're out in the field.
As far as the music listening goes, while you may never have seen one in the U.S. or Europe, lots of stereo systems in Asia, especially mini-systems that you would find in bedrooms and kitchens, have slots from which to read and write MD disks.
While I might opt for something else if playback were the only issue, the MD's versatility is tough to argue with and it seems like a rare product where recording is one of its main features, not an afterthought or a hack.
When has MS ever had a reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? Windows 95 didn't come out until August of that year. Windows 98 didn't come out until June of that year. Windows XP came out in October, 2001. Hell, Office 2003 came out in November of that year. Hardly an impressive track record. Maybe it's just me, but MS could benefit from not using years in the names of its releases.
One of the biggest faults in the "online sales hurts CD sales" argument is that the mainstream American recording industry, depending on multi-media ads and promotion (like MTV), has helped to create a market based on singles. That doesn't work if one claims to depend on album sales. Even the most reliable measure of music sales in North America, Nielsen SoundScan, produces numbers for sales of albums, not singles. If album tracks are hampering sales, maybe it's time for a change in how music gets produced and promoted in the first place.
In other countries, artists frequently cut singles and make videos, then book TV performances and radio interviews to promote their work. Only after a series of singles do they release an album and then go on tour to promote it.
The RIAA might benefit by changing in this way and not dumping so much money into advertising and payola for music video and radio play. It's kind of like bloatware in that way. If a record has to go platinum in order to break even for the record company, the business model might very well be broken.
Foster's isn't even brewed in Australia.
Fosters: Canadian for beer.
(Just like most Asahi isn't brewed in Japan, it's brewed in Milwaukee and Canada.)
Roth makes some interesting points about the profit model but his premise is really weak because he doesn't understand the word he's using. The reason otaku can mean a household or a hardcore geek fan is because it describes someone who is so into something, not necessarily cartoons, that they don't tend to get out of the house. They can have whatever it is they're into -- and food -- delivered. This does not describe what Roth is talking about. I can think of a few people who would love nothing more than to watch DVDs of "Good Eats" and order All Clad cookware to experiment with, and they are more otaku than someone who really likes Furikuri.
Your movies are still going to have crappy artifacting as long as they have some lazy intern clicking his mouse on some button that says "ENCODE!" And they're still going to look crappy on low-res, interlaced TVs. So what could possibly take up all the extra space on these new discs? Another useless director's commentary?
You get all this and more for the price of DRM.
Well, for one, it can be cheaper to pay the ASCAP fee than it is to pay to sample the original recording. It gets more complicated when there is any trace of vocal in a sample, which then means you have to ask the artist for permission to use her/his likeness. I've heard of more and more guilty pleasure cheesy dance producers having to re-construct segments of older songs when they can't sample them.
Most covers are done independently of the original recording. Most remixes are not, in the sense that they usually have to seek out some sort of permission, like buying a vocals-only track from a studio.
I am another journalist by trade, right now in between jobs. I've grown quite tired of the blogger issue because it really isn't one. Anyone can start a blog. Reporters must have the requisite training and skill. If Drudge got sued or imprisoned through some provision in the shield law, he could always start a new Web site or, hell, go back to his current one. Someone who's actually dealing with sensitive topics doesn't have that freedom, which is what we're trying to protect.
It's like, "Tommy, don't stick your hand in the wall socket. You'll get electrocuted."
"Sales people, turn off your preview panes. You're going to get our server banned from the ISP again."
Step two wouldn't make sense except that Swarovski is one of the most elite crystal manufacturers in the world, and some Chairman Kaga type would pay big bucks for it.
I love my old HPC Pro, though it's getting more than worn around the edges. I bought a Hitachi HPW600-ETM around 2000, which I still use as a word processor running full VGA (640x480) with no moving parts. That means I could accurately gauge my document length, I never had to worry about a hard drive (instant start-up!) and my battery life at its prime averaged 6-8 hours. Most of all, I still detest typing on Chiclets, so I bought a cheap low-power USB keyboard to hook into the device. At the time, it ran me $600 off of eBay. I'm not sure I like the current crop of tablet PCs because they have added features (like swiveling screens) that compound form factor problems.
Actually, if you really want to know where you can get it, the virus deposits a text file, very cookie-like, in a Windows user's Temporary Internet Files folder that points to a site called http://russnelson.com which ostensibly belongs to a man who works for a software company in upstate New York. And if you really want to download that cookie (and potentially the .scr file), you can go to russnelson.com/mydoom.
I used to think that cubicles were an inefficient idea. They offered no real privacy and they turned offices into mazes. But then I started temping at this one company and was led into a room where I was seized by this Joseph Conradian Heart of Darkness terror when I saw that there were...no...cubicles... Just 50 heads all fully exposed to one another, all on the phones or typing, trying not to look at one another. I immediately flashed back to the movie "9 to 5" and wondered when Jane Fonda was going to start shooting a shotgun at Dabney Coleman with a plastic waste bin on his head.
You're making me cry.
Workbench is the cleanest OS I've ever run -- the only to never have crashed on me.
I still have my A1200-030 ready for action if anyone would develop software for it. I'd even be willing to switch it to a dual '060-PPC for backwards compatibility.
And I still don't understand the computer world's obsession of running in PAL screen sizes (4:3) instead of NTSC (8:5). All that unnecessary conversion...
A couple things:
One of the premises of this post is wrong: LEDs do not currently come in all colors. It's easy to think they do, though, as those keychain lights come in various colors to serve the candy raver community. Those are still, however, mostly red and yellow LEDs with colored filters on them.
In order to have an accurate display, you're going to need white LEDs, which have only just been produced in university labs and won't be ready for mass marketing for quite some time.
And in order to have accurate color representation on any given monitor, the display must emit light and there are just no two ways about it. Reflective surfaces are just too susceptible to color and light distortion from ambient light, so the only way to get that easy-on-the-eye newspaper or magazine is by trying to standardize values between the display and the printer through Pantone codes.
I don't really feel it benefits anyone for me to reiterate this for each and every post about digital rights, but this seems like a decent one to use my umbrella statement.
To all media distribution companies, big and small: You decided to go digital. Deal with it.
It is not your right to bend legislation at any level to secure your profit margin because that's not free trade. Go ahead and use any copy protection schemes you wish. But don't you even dare try to legally sanction somebody because they've figured out how to get around it: they've just acted more intelligently and more efficiently.
If you truly believed in free trade and the spirit of competition, you'd try to maximize quality while minimizing overhead. What causes so much overhead? Executive salaries and expense accounts, as well as advertising and payola. You've over-saturated your markets with expensive and inferior product, and people have gotten wise to you. The only companies who have any right to complain are the small independents, because the playing field isn't level to begin with.
This was the case with video games piracy and the resultant bankruptcies of production houses during the 1980s and 1990s. If only their distribution companies would have given more back to the people who originated these products instead of fattening their wallets, we might still have diversity in our software.
Creative people have a right to their intellectual property. Why not show them some respect by divvying up the rewards for their efforts more fairly?
http://www.computerelated.com/forum/viewthread.php ?tid=23
I was also the dummy that said, "see this link" and forgot to paste it in.
Normally I don't have much of a problem with spyware. I scan at least once a day and it keeps the problems down to a minimum. But SearchSquire broke my registry and installed itself without my knowledge or consent. Of course, I was the dummy who broke my backup registry. Check out this link for official lies posted by an alleged employee of SearchSquire who says it's an ActiveX script -- which should have prompted whether or not I wanted something installed.
Since then, the line between musicianship and show business grew a little clearer through the use of recording and visual technology, enabling both poor performers/good singers and poor singers/good performers to have their 15 minutes of fame. We ended up seeing a lot of people noting the differences between live performances and studio albums, often opting to not see their favorite acts live because their performances were mediocre.
Perhaps we experience some conflict over the difference between live performance and studio recording because we expect imperfections in live shows but want flawless recordings. Maybe we don't want "perfect" (sometimes read: inorganic) sounding music in such a spontaneous atmosphere but still want the show to sound like the studio record. The line between musicianship and show business is certainly blurring again, but is it cheating if our expectations have gotten too high?
Phone/PDA combinations aren't likely to overcome desktops because Average Joe (read "people who aren't tech geeks like us") can't afford them, with the exception of the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick, and even with that useless quarter-VGA screen, they do not want something that cumbersome. Then again, they also don't want something very small, as many people have had a hard time holding recent cell phones. Form factor is a critical issue here, and until we have PDAs that can switch to a horizontal display, people will still need something to type their papers and book reports on.
I mean, let's face it: Average Joe might use a pirated copy of Word but certainly not Latek. For this, he needs a desktop.
And who can use such a tiny screen to view cheesy free porn?
I, too, wonder why he didn't opt to use a P.O. Box. This is a business he's running (read "public"). While he couldn't have expected an influx of threats, threats in and of themselves are felonies in many states -- especially when IP addresses and phone calls can be traced. And those IP addresses are becoming less and less dynamic with everyone switching to broadband... My big questions are: how does this guy access the internet? Why has his ISP not cut him off? How does he pay for all the bandwidth he must be using, if he really is that hardcore a spammer?
I've known many people who have worked for the computing services on the UCSB campus.
A few quick sound-bytes:
Most dorm computer users did not purchase NT-based systems of their own volition: they got them as part of a bundle or because mom and dad gave it to them. Therefore, they have had no real incentive to learn how to properly configurate their OS.
Thus, when someone leaves the admin password blank, they may not be more of a "security issue," as some have said, but they certainly become more of a pain in the ass: a logistical nightmare for the computing services people.
Hell, I've even had to teach people how to click "enable" on their network connections. And you expect them to set up an admin password?