"Microsoft appears willing to spend millions and defer any potential profitability of the Zune simply to weaken Apple's bargaining power with recording companies and set a precedent for hardware manufacturers paying music companies."
This will go over like gangbusters with Apple and consumers alike. To think that the record industry will try to leverage a deal with another business with regards to consumer goods (music) is ridiculous. Nevermind the fact that Apple will simply leverage their massive iPod fan base against the labels, customers just won't stand for it. Especially when the market for digital media players is already supported by people who have proven they are willing to pay for music, a label-imposed "tax" on those players to cover "stolen content" won't fly.
I have noticed (to much LOLing this morning) that nearly every article on/. is tagged with "itsatrap"... what gives? Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose of the tagging system in the first place? At the very least, it was highly amusing to see every article tagged with "itsatrap." Maybe we should lobby slashdot to legitimize it with an admiral ackbar icon.
I'm confused by this. It sounds like you're writing code like this:
function thisX(args){ SomeCode; SomeCode; thisX(); }
function thisY(args){ SomeCode; thisY(); }
Where some function of thisY() is dependent on the execution of thisX(), except you're saying that thisX() runs slower than thisY(), so you write some sort of timeout to run thisY() after thisX has finished (by estimation, as you mentioned.)
Why don't you do this instead:
function thisX(args){ SomeCode; SomeCode; return Var; } function thisY(args){ SomeCode; SomeVar = thisX(args); }
Such that the complete execution of function thisY() is dependent on the complete execution of function thisX() without having to set some timeout and basically, make your code wait around with fingers crossed for the first function to execute? I'm surprised you got modded up for this, and no one checked you before. The only time I ever use timeouts is when I actually want the code to run on human time, like "wait 5 seconds before refreshing some section of the page, or before you display an alert" or something to that effect, but never for code dependency. The parent's complaint regarding multithreaded is directed toward this, but the workaround is not to "time" your code.
Then again, I could be way off base here, and I'm sure someone will "fix" me.
Hmmm... you brought up selling compilations to record companies. Interesting.
They'd love to sell you nothing but compilations, because in many MANY cases, the artists' contracts contain clauses that allow the record company to exclude royalty payments on music included in compilations. This includes greatest hits compilations. While I don't know the exact legalese, basically the contract states that once the music is recorded for the purpose of the album, it's only good to collect royalties on sales of that album. After that, the copyright holders (record companies) are free to do whatever they like with the songs, including sell them on compilations. This is why there's a series of TIME/LIFE compilations that sell (on TV, special catalogs, etc.) because, from a business perspective, it's simply a matter of negotiating some sort of lump sum payout to the record company (copyright holders) rather than fix up some kind of agreement with the artists. This is also one of the biggest money-makers for record companies outside of their inflated prices for physical media. For instance, those "Now That's What I Call Music" compilations that sell big overseas are essentially pure profit for the record companies since they rarely pay the artists on the royalties of those sales. In fact, the record company calls them "marketing".
So whether the artists suck or not, they get screwed in the end if more compilations are sold.
I have a plug-in for Firefox that, with a right-click, switches the rendering engine to IE. For web development purposes this is invaluable. So while I'm still very much a Firefox user, I am still subject to IE, and in that respect, I am customer of IE.
I support a boycott of Sony. I own very little of their products to begin with, and I won't be buying any in the near or distant future. Enough is enough.
Include: clauses that say when a child is injured due to some activity followed in the course of a child just being a child, then the parents cannot hold the school responsible, i.e. TAG, SOCCER, TETHERBALL, ETC., ETC. Additionally address the issues related to self-expression (dress-code) and other such things that have been getting school administrations in trouble in the past; i.e. if we suspend your kid for breaking the dress-code, be prepared to have a conference over it. If you call your lawyer first, we reserve the right to counter-sue your ass for breaking this agreement.
This is a terrible development; kids can't be kids anymore because adults (their parents) are litigious, opportunistic assholes trying to score a buck, and schools shouldn't have to fight fire with fire by being equally litigious. When's it all going to stop? I don't necessarily think that parents should have to go so far as to sign an agreement with the school, but at the same time, why shouldn't they? They must for just about everything else (phone service, car rentals, etc.) The idea that they are protecting the children is bullcrap. They are definitely out to protect themselves, with little regard for the real developmental well-being of the children they have a responsibility for educating. No wonder I know so many people who are home-schooling their kids. Ugh...home schooling...another sometimes ugly issue (social development, responsibility to others, etc, etc.)
The AM radio band has a stigma associated with it that doesn't market well to a group of consumers within the 14-30 year-old range, and I am not talking about the NPR geeks (of which I am one) who would appreciate the inclusion of the AM band. AM is their dad's radio station, and that's just not cool (to some).
"These have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It doesn't matter that Microsoft owns more than 90% of the worldwide operating systems market. That hasn't stopped the iPod in the last five years, despite a long series of "PlaysForSure" devices."
I completely agree with this. That would be like saying that no one should be using Adobe's Photoshop because Windows ships with MS Paint.
Microsoft needs to read a little book by Clay Christensen called "The Innovator's Dilemma." In it, the author says people often "hire" things to do specific jobs. I sat in on a live discussion once where he used the example of a chocolate shake, and how the company selling a particular shake tried to improve the product's sales by trying to improve the overall quality and experience. It didn't have any impact on sales until they examined why people bought it in the first place. They discovered that people bought shakes often in the morning to give them something to sip on for the long commute into work. It beat out other products (muffins, coffee, fruit, etc.) because of the very specific job that people wanted it to serve: easy, no-mess, lengthy consuming time, interesting, etc.
When I think of the Zune, I imagine how it seems to try to be so many things at once, when the reality is that people probably want a much simpler product to just provide music as a background to doing other things, like working out, grocery shopping, studying, etc. Obviously, I'm using the college-kid as an example market, but you have to consider that they are by no means a trivial market. I can't see "Zune Parties" going on in the dorms where kids are swapping songs on their Zunes. Anywho, it's for this reason that I believe that there's too much utility built into the zune that doesn't provide any remarkable value to the marketplace, and when you put it up against the iPod, both as a fashion piece and as a utility for listening to music, the Zune still has a lot of ground to cover against the iPod.
If you ask me, they should have started by making it smaller, with less features, and as a fashionable alterative to the iPod.
They don't aid in the functionality, they only appear to make things look faster, and after all is said and done, you look like a big sissy bitch for using them.
To talk a little about the comparison of a Mac laptop to, in this case, a HP laptop: a close friend of mine who is starting nursing school, and has little experience with computers (she's just not a computer person) was given a new HP laptop by her family for school. She asked me to be present for the unboxing and subsequent setup because she figured there was some stuff that might need to be done to it so she could connect to the internet. She was right; I spent the next 4 hours trying to get her laptop to connect to a wireless network, among other things. It went down like this: first of all, the pre-installed software popped up so much crap, and took so long to load the machine up on start-up, I laboriously took the time to remove all of the crappy pre-installed software just so that she wouldn't have to wait about 15 minutes every time she started up. Then I had to install the usual firefox, ccleaner, avg, xp patches, etc. before I would connect to any network. This involved downloading all the appropriate software to my laptop, transferring the files to my thumb-drive, and installing them on her machine. Finally, I tried to connect to her wireless router. No dice. There was still some HP pre-installed wireless connection manager software that wasn't properly connecting to the router, because for whatever reason, the WPA key wouldn't take. So I went the windows route, which I discovered was blocked by the HP software. I then had to kill the software, and then start up a service in XP that would allow me to connect to available networks and enter the WPA key. This is all stuff that she would have NEVER been able to do on her own.
Contrast with:
Unbox Mac, start up, run through setup, start working online via wireless (albeit unencrypted wireless, but easily connected to nonetheless).
If you are someone who values your time, or are someone who doesn't have a friend that knows a thing or two about computers and will help you for free, exactly how much cheaper does the Dell or HP option become when you have to spend time and money later on service calls, and trips to the Best Buy Dork Squad or whatever they're called just to get your computer healthy?
We take for granted that we can manage our own computers well, but there's SO MANY PEOPLE out there who just don't care about the computing world like we do, but still have to rely on it to do their jobs. Sure, I'd love to just say "let them fend for themselves", but many of them are close friends and family who I would never expect to just "figure it out" without some hair-pulling aggravation. I wouldn't let them. To my friend, I suggested an Apple, but ultimately her family made that decision, and she's gotta live with it. And to those that say, "Macs aren't impervious" I say, of course not, but they are orders of magnitude safer and easier to manage than a Windows machine, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
If you read the product sheet via the link on my comment, you'll see that the energy doesn't penetrate beyond 1/64th of an inch of the surface of the skin, so anything implanted would be unaffected.
They would probably pop if left in the the path of the beam long enough, but as I had mentioned in a reply to a commenter above, the system isn't likely to sustain the energy long enough for that to happen.
Read the product sheet on the page linked in my comment. It will explain why damage isn't permanent (non-lethal). Also, while I am not positive about this) the system isn't designed to sustain energy for durations long enough to cause damage (pulsing, maybe).
Actually, I've had such a system (millimeter wave emitter) tested on me. I voluteered myself, as did the people in charge of the project. The thing hurts like you're being cooked alive, and stops immediately once you're out of the way, but leaves no physical trace of injury.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just like an evil Italian scientist to bring a Tesla coil to a firefight.
LOAD "*" ,8,1
"Microsoft appears willing to spend millions and defer any potential profitability of the Zune simply to weaken Apple's bargaining power with recording companies and set a precedent for hardware manufacturers paying music companies."
This will go over like gangbusters with Apple and consumers alike. To think that the record industry will try to leverage a deal with another business with regards to consumer goods (music) is ridiculous. Nevermind the fact that Apple will simply leverage their massive iPod fan base against the labels, customers just won't stand for it. Especially when the market for digital media players is already supported by people who have proven they are willing to pay for music, a label-imposed "tax" on those players to cover "stolen content" won't fly.
I have noticed (to much LOLing this morning) that nearly every article on /. is tagged with "itsatrap"... what gives? Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose of the tagging system in the first place? At the very least, it was highly amusing to see every article tagged with "itsatrap." Maybe we should lobby slashdot to legitimize it with an admiral ackbar icon.
Where some function of thisY() is dependent on the execution of thisX(), except you're saying that thisX() runs slower than thisY(), so you write some sort of timeout to run thisY() after thisX has finished (by estimation, as you mentioned.)
Why don't you do this instead:
Such that the complete execution of function thisY() is dependent on the complete execution of function thisX() without having to set some timeout and basically, make your code wait around with fingers crossed for the first function to execute? I'm surprised you got modded up for this, and no one checked you before. The only time I ever use timeouts is when I actually want the code to run on human time, like "wait 5 seconds before refreshing some section of the page, or before you display an alert" or something to that effect, but never for code dependency. The parent's complaint regarding multithreaded is directed toward this, but the workaround is not to "time" your code.
Then again, I could be way off base here, and I'm sure someone will "fix" me.
Hmmm... you brought up selling compilations to record companies. Interesting.
They'd love to sell you nothing but compilations, because in many MANY cases, the artists' contracts contain clauses that allow the record company to exclude royalty payments on music included in compilations. This includes greatest hits compilations. While I don't know the exact legalese, basically the contract states that once the music is recorded for the purpose of the album, it's only good to collect royalties on sales of that album. After that, the copyright holders (record companies) are free to do whatever they like with the songs, including sell them on compilations. This is why there's a series of TIME/LIFE compilations that sell (on TV, special catalogs, etc.) because, from a business perspective, it's simply a matter of negotiating some sort of lump sum payout to the record company (copyright holders) rather than fix up some kind of agreement with the artists. This is also one of the biggest money-makers for record companies outside of their inflated prices for physical media. For instance, those "Now That's What I Call Music" compilations that sell big overseas are essentially pure profit for the record companies since they rarely pay the artists on the royalties of those sales. In fact, the record company calls them "marketing".
So whether the artists suck or not, they get screwed in the end if more compilations are sold.
"...I think (to him) IE7 is "part" of Windows..."
And therein lies the bulk of the problems with IE.
I have a plug-in for Firefox that, with a right-click, switches the rendering engine to IE. For web development purposes this is invaluable. So while I'm still very much a Firefox user, I am still subject to IE, and in that respect, I am customer of IE.
Does viewing/listening to copyrighted content constitute distribution?
I support a boycott of Sony. I own very little of their products to begin with, and I won't be buying any in the near or distant future. Enough is enough.
Solution: Parental / School agreements
Include: clauses that say when a child is injured due to some activity followed in the course of a child just being a child, then the parents cannot hold the school responsible, i.e. TAG, SOCCER, TETHERBALL, ETC., ETC. Additionally address the issues related to self-expression (dress-code) and other such things that have been getting school administrations in trouble in the past; i.e. if we suspend your kid for breaking the dress-code, be prepared to have a conference over it. If you call your lawyer first, we reserve the right to counter-sue your ass for breaking this agreement.
This is a terrible development; kids can't be kids anymore because adults (their parents) are litigious, opportunistic assholes trying to score a buck, and schools shouldn't have to fight fire with fire by being equally litigious. When's it all going to stop? I don't necessarily think that parents should have to go so far as to sign an agreement with the school, but at the same time, why shouldn't they? They must for just about everything else (phone service, car rentals, etc.) The idea that they are protecting the children is bullcrap. They are definitely out to protect themselves, with little regard for the real developmental well-being of the children they have a responsibility for educating. No wonder I know so many people who are home-schooling their kids. Ugh...home schooling...another sometimes ugly issue (social development, responsibility to others, etc, etc.)
"Just find a form of exercise you enjoy doing."
Sex is often a prescribed catalyst for kickstarting an exercise regiment.
[/cue slashdot jokes about how geeks don't/can't get any.]
If the lies that comcast are saying are written into the script for the sales jerk, then it's both :)
The AM radio band has a stigma associated with it that doesn't market well to a group of consumers within the 14-30 year-old range, and I am not talking about the NPR geeks (of which I am one) who would appreciate the inclusion of the AM band. AM is their dad's radio station, and that's just not cool (to some).
"These have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It doesn't matter that Microsoft owns more than 90% of the worldwide operating systems market. That hasn't stopped the iPod in the last five years, despite a long series of "PlaysForSure" devices."
I completely agree with this. That would be like saying that no one should be using Adobe's Photoshop because Windows ships with MS Paint.
Microsoft needs to read a little book by Clay Christensen called "The Innovator's Dilemma." In it, the author says people often "hire" things to do specific jobs. I sat in on a live discussion once where he used the example of a chocolate shake, and how the company selling a particular shake tried to improve the product's sales by trying to improve the overall quality and experience. It didn't have any impact on sales until they examined why people bought it in the first place. They discovered that people bought shakes often in the morning to give them something to sip on for the long commute into work. It beat out other products (muffins, coffee, fruit, etc.) because of the very specific job that people wanted it to serve: easy, no-mess, lengthy consuming time, interesting, etc.
When I think of the Zune, I imagine how it seems to try to be so many things at once, when the reality is that people probably want a much simpler product to just provide music as a background to doing other things, like working out, grocery shopping, studying, etc. Obviously, I'm using the college-kid as an example market, but you have to consider that they are by no means a trivial market. I can't see "Zune Parties" going on in the dorms where kids are swapping songs on their Zunes. Anywho, it's for this reason that I believe that there's too much utility built into the zune that doesn't provide any remarkable value to the marketplace, and when you put it up against the iPod, both as a fashion piece and as a utility for listening to music, the Zune still has a lot of ground to cover against the iPod.
If you ask me, they should have started by making it smaller, with less features, and as a fashionable alterative to the iPod.
Ribbons : MS Products :: Ribbons : Bicycles
They don't aid in the functionality, they only appear to make things look faster, and after all is said and done, you look like a big sissy bitch for using them.
To talk a little about the comparison of a Mac laptop to, in this case, a HP laptop: a close friend of mine who is starting nursing school, and has little experience with computers (she's just not a computer person) was given a new HP laptop by her family for school. She asked me to be present for the unboxing and subsequent setup because she figured there was some stuff that might need to be done to it so she could connect to the internet. She was right; I spent the next 4 hours trying to get her laptop to connect to a wireless network, among other things. It went down like this: first of all, the pre-installed software popped up so much crap, and took so long to load the machine up on start-up, I laboriously took the time to remove all of the crappy pre-installed software just so that she wouldn't have to wait about 15 minutes every time she started up. Then I had to install the usual firefox, ccleaner, avg, xp patches, etc. before I would connect to any network. This involved downloading all the appropriate software to my laptop, transferring the files to my thumb-drive, and installing them on her machine. Finally, I tried to connect to her wireless router. No dice. There was still some HP pre-installed wireless connection manager software that wasn't properly connecting to the router, because for whatever reason, the WPA key wouldn't take. So I went the windows route, which I discovered was blocked by the HP software. I then had to kill the software, and then start up a service in XP that would allow me to connect to available networks and enter the WPA key. This is all stuff that she would have NEVER been able to do on her own.
Contrast with:
Unbox Mac, start up, run through setup, start working online via wireless (albeit unencrypted wireless, but easily connected to nonetheless).
If you are someone who values your time, or are someone who doesn't have a friend that knows a thing or two about computers and will help you for free, exactly how much cheaper does the Dell or HP option become when you have to spend time and money later on service calls, and trips to the Best Buy Dork Squad or whatever they're called just to get your computer healthy?
We take for granted that we can manage our own computers well, but there's SO MANY PEOPLE out there who just don't care about the computing world like we do, but still have to rely on it to do their jobs. Sure, I'd love to just say "let them fend for themselves", but many of them are close friends and family who I would never expect to just "figure it out" without some hair-pulling aggravation. I wouldn't let them. To my friend, I suggested an Apple, but ultimately her family made that decision, and she's gotta live with it. And to those that say, "Macs aren't impervious" I say, of course not, but they are orders of magnitude safer and easier to manage than a Windows machine, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
If you read the product sheet via the link on my comment, you'll see that the energy doesn't penetrate beyond 1/64th of an inch of the surface of the skin, so anything implanted would be unaffected.
They would probably pop if left in the the path of the beam long enough, but as I had mentioned in a reply to a commenter above, the system isn't likely to sustain the energy long enough for that to happen.
i ndex.html
Sidenote: Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer is credited with the creation of the microwave oven.
http://www.raytheon.com/about/history/leadership/
Read the product sheet on the page linked in my comment. It will explain why damage isn't permanent (non-lethal). Also, while I am not positive about this) the system isn't designed to sustain energy for durations long enough to cause damage (pulsing, maybe).
Actually, I've had such a system (millimeter wave emitter) tested on me. I voluteered myself, as did the people in charge of the project. The thing hurts like you're being cooked alive, and stops immediately once you're out of the way, but leaves no physical trace of injury.
I work for Raytheon.
I prefer the confusion of getting sucked off before I know what's going on.
No wait, that's not right...
It might be... in SOVIET RUSSIA.
It had to be said. I'm sorry, there's nothing that can be done about it.
As I read that, I thought it was going to end with, "...throwing chairs at silhouetted dancers with white headphones."