>> A bit of a downer that they barely mentioned Linux and gave no mention to other significant OSes such as OpenBSD, > It says "market share", not "free for all".
It also is about personal computer market share. Last I looked neither Linux or OpenBSD were personal computers. Sure, they're software that runs on them but hey, the article has nothing to do with software.
May as well complain Linux or BSD weren't shown on a chart showing the popularity of disco music from the 1970s through to 2005. (no, the openBSD songs don't count:)
Oh wow, I thought it was just a low-bitrate audio file, but apparently it will magically appear on my iPod without my knowledge! Oh, what's that? You still have to figure out how to find it the first time, (evidently some people have never heard of bookmarks) download it, you still have to check back periodically, barring an RSS feed (which AFAIK still wouldn't get the file for you, just give you notification and/or a link), and copy it to my iPod...
No. You don't get it. You don't have to go find it and download it, You don't have to check back periodically, you don't have to copy it to your iPod, you don't have to bookmark anything, yes it does magically appear on your iPod. You do have to figure out how to find it the first time, but hey. if you can't find something by typing in a search term on the iTunes Music Store and clicking "subscribe" you've probably already been institutionalized.
As you hinted at by saying "barring an RSS feed" that's just what the xml side of a podcast is. an RSS feed that podcasting software (like iTunes) takes, and then does everything you need automagically.
Plugging the iPod in to charge it kickstarts all the syncing behind your back. Yes, magic, once you've done that first step of finding a podcast you like and going "ooh. I like that" and clicking subscribe. Done. Nothing else to be bothered about except listening to it.
Right. can someone explain to me the difference between new trendy "podcast" and the old "ftp" or "scp" or "http" that we use for everything else? It's the same old technology just dressed up
Convenience. Back in the early 90s, I remember many remarks like yours about the new WWW. "Can someone explain to me the difference between this new trendy "world wide web" and just downloading files by ftp? It's only text and gifs anyway". Yes podcasts are all just mp3s and xml. They're also one hell of a lot more convenient, in the same way that anyone sane would rather go to www.site.com/index.html instead of manually downloading some text with references to half a dozen images and then go hunting down the images it referred to.
Podcast = find a show you like, subscribe. listen. Audio Download = find a show you like, find how to download it from that particular site, find how often it's updated to know when to check again, download it, move it to your player/audio device, listen.
Admittedly neither is much different to the other for one single download of one episode. or two. perhaps three, but when you find ten separate podcasts you quite like listening to each episode of, you're bound to just throw it in the too-annoying-to-continue-with basket. This kind of automation benefits the listeners who keep getting their shows easily, and the casters themselves who don't have to continually get their audience to go through a rigmarole of steps just to hear the show. Radio doesn't make you do that.
Isn't Jennifer Anniston suing / considering suing some photographer for getting a topless photo of her from like a mile away?
Technically (and probably relevant to this discussion) I think Jennifer Aniston wouldn't be suing a photographer for taking the photos, but for publishing them. I don't keep up to date with the intricacies of copyright law, model releases etc, but from the basics I do remember there is a very big difference between taking photos and having them in your possession, and taking them then publishing them. Lots of freedoms for the first, lots of restrictions for the latter.
A friend of mine has one of the big zoom cameras, an 18x canon, and has often found the info revealed in one of them is insanely high. zooming in to take a photo of an aged guy on a park bench reading a newspaper brought out a picture that revealed every word on the front page of it. I found myself zoomed in and reading that article before realising how simple it was, and that we were more than a hundred feet from him.
Anyone here run a business with a display visible from a window, even one half a city block from the next window?
> However, the article goes on to talk about how there is no provision in place to > prevent the uncontrolled surveillance of motorists without a court order.
Cue the "well if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" government apologists.
This was on Australia's Radio National at the start of this year. People's perceptions of how much another person spoke seemed more closely related to the content of what they spoke. If two people spoke equal amounts counted by time and number of words, but one person spoke about a wider range of topics, than the person who spoke about the wider range of topics was perceived to have spoken for a longer period. That much wasn't gender based, except that women did tend to talk about a wider range of topics.
However when it came to men & women speaking one on one, if a woman disagreed with a man in a conversation, the man's perception of the woman's speaking was that she completely monopolised the conversation by time, despite using the same number of words and speaking for a similar amount of time to the man. From the woman's perception, it was still roughly 50/50.
I see the same problems with every LCD I've had a chance to look at. I imagine it depends on what the issue is that causes the colour varying by angle - whether it's inherent to the liquid crystal technology or caused partly by the backlight. I don't know enough about the technology behind LCDs to know just why they all colour shift, I just look at them and see that they do.
Anyone with an LCD, polarising glasses and a digital camera handy? I'd love to see a picture of an LCD taken through those glasses. Thanks.
Another promising technology for displays is SED. Essentially using the same phosphors as a CRT, but each element which is laid out the same as an LCD has its own electron emitter behind it. No vacuum 'tube' like current CRTs, thin, and without the colour issues around LCDs.
Whether or not it becomes economically feasible is something else entirely, of course. More information on wikipedia
I figure it'll leave it just the same as before, and for reference material you'll use the original movies etc you always did.
Stories have been changing since the start of time. Oral history changes just a little on every retelling. Parts are shuffled about in order, different pieces added, some parts uncomfortable to the current teller are missed. it's been that way with storytelling around primitive cave fires, to the history of politics in ancient places, (hell, modern places even), to fairytales when viewed across different cultures, to the translations of the bible, to versions of the same textbook.
Nothing is static. As soon as it is it's stagnated and moved on. Those original star wars movies belong to a generation that has moved on and let the new guard in, ones who have the culture of the new ones - along with almost everything else ever written.
> Don't you believe for one MINUTE that we won't prosecute either. > Hell, we could just bypass the criminal justice system and sue > your precious little girl.
In the early 1990s, my university did something similar. Everyone had a three-initial login consisting of their first/last names and a middle initial, and a letter following. It was policy to give all students who enrolled a login. ghk2, mby5, adh7 etc.
Predictable (and simply so) login names are one thing, but following from that, the default passwords were identical to the login name. That sounds pretty bad. One more thing made it worse...
Not all students needed or ever came to use their logins. Indeed, the theatre, arts and media students never needed or were even told about theirs. It was the easiest thing to score a couple of logins by pure guesswork within minutes even among those people who didn't know to login, cd.. and ls -la to see the inactive user dirs. We'd keep multiple ones active if ever we went over quota, and give accounts to friends outside the university so they could login via the modem pool, and the uni did nothing about it for the five years I was involved with them, from 1991 to 1995.
I'm not surprised the same braindead thinking still exists somewhere in the world.
> Mr. Siklos seems to miss the point, and the details.
And the ingenuity of third parties. iPods are big. HUGE. iTunes may be able to get a certain number of videos for the iPod out, but you can bet your boots others will too.
but more importantly it does mean that it's not a big deal if your child (God forbid) plays outside, scrapes their knee or rolls in the mud
I'm reminded of an aunt & uncle of mine who were beyond neat freaks, but were absolute germaholics going back to when they had their son in the late 1960s. Neither of their kids was allowed outside otherwise they'd get dirty, and everything in the house was regularly bleached, dry cleaned, vacuumed or just renewed if it had even the hint of dirt. It was a pain going to their house, both of them as OCD as you could get. Last time I was there the toilet was bleached by my aunt after I used it. If there was even a hint of illness at school, both cousins just simply weren't allowed to go until it was all-clear.
In the end one cousin did get gravel rash on the elbow running out the school gate when he was 10, and had to be hospitalised for weeks, because he near died from the resulting infection. The first flu that his sister got when she was 13 also almost killed her. Both now (in their 30s) have the most intense asthma, find difficulty putting on normal weight and have regularly come down with weeks-long illnesses needing hospital stays from things that would give a normal person the sniffles & sneezes for a couple of days.
> 2 MP? is it just me or are they getting better and better?
Maybe.
2MP is just how well the camera captures the image through the lens. if the lens is shit (and it's a very small nonfocusing lens, so for many people it's shit) all you're getting is a higher resolution version of the same washed out, blurred, chromatically-distorted fisheye photos that every other camera gives.
You can get very small lenses that aren't shit, but they cost more than this entire phone would.
> Perhaps it isn't only the editors that should check the credibility of a story?
Everyone should check the credibility of what they read, for sure. A good friend of mine wrote a comical story on her blog at the beginning of this year about macintoshes getting intel upgrades. Remember this was before steve jobs let out the big news. Then in June when steve admitted it was true, someone submitted the story to slashdot. Then the world picked it up, and it was featured on engadget, the inquirer, hundreds of blogs, and within two weeks had made it to two US radio station broadcasts and was printed as a center piece in one Australian nationwide newspaper. The journalist at The Australian lost his job over it and a california radio news guy only just escaped with his.
The kicker was nobody wrote to her to check the origins of the story, not one solitary person until Media Watch, an Australian media watchdog television show contacted her to find out the reality behind the story in The Australian.
Tens of news sites blindly followed one another and printed what everyone else was printing. All the while many regular joes picked out it was meant for a laugh immediately.
Something companies have to put up with. A meme gets out that iPod nanos are getting scratched more than white iPods and everyone wants in on a class action suit by rubbing theirs down with sandpaper.
More scratches on an iPod nano sitting in a pocket than on a nano being thrown from a car window at 50mph? I don't think so.
I have never figured out why owners of Apple products refuse to hold Apple to a high standard across the board.
I think it's the other way around. Apple owners complain about the smallest things. I have an 3D iPod, and it has the odd scratch on it, but nothing really noticeable. I put it down to being a white product, so it doesn't show scratches up as badly.
My 2GB black nano however, shows scratches more visibly. But it doesn't worry me because I also have a black shiny clock, a black shiny desk calculator, a black shiny PDA and another brand black shiny mp3 player (name withheld to keep the flaming down).
THEY ALL SCRATCH WORSE THAN WHITE PRODUCTS DO. The nano scratches just as badly as any of them, or no worse than any of them depending how you want to look at it. Black shows scratches far worse. Period. Apple-only users have never had to deal with a glossy all black product, so they're all in a mouth frothing tizz over it acting like all the other shiny black products on the market. It would be nice if it weren't this way, hell it would be nice if Apple were able to do what other manufacturers couldn't do, but they didn't. It's not perfect, but it's not a glaringly deficient design fault like many are making it out to be.
I like Apple's products, but their fanbase can be utter retards sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
>> A bit of a downer that they barely mentioned Linux and gave no mention to other significant OSes such as OpenBSD,
:)
> It says "market share", not "free for all".
It also is about personal computer market share. Last I looked neither Linux or OpenBSD were personal computers. Sure, they're software that runs on them but hey, the article has nothing to do with software.
May as well complain Linux or BSD weren't shown on a chart showing the popularity of disco music from the 1970s through to 2005. (no, the openBSD songs don't count
Oh wow, I thought it was just a low-bitrate audio file, but apparently it will magically appear on my iPod without my knowledge! Oh, what's that? You still have to figure out how to find it the first time, (evidently some people have never heard of bookmarks) download it, you still have to check back periodically, barring an RSS feed (which AFAIK still wouldn't get the file for you, just give you notification and/or a link), and copy it to my iPod...
No. You don't get it. You don't have to go find it and download it, You don't have to check back periodically, you don't have to copy it to your iPod, you don't have to bookmark anything, yes it does magically appear on your iPod. You do have to figure out how to find it the first time, but hey. if you can't find something by typing in a search term on the iTunes Music Store and clicking "subscribe" you've probably already been institutionalized.
As you hinted at by saying "barring an RSS feed" that's just what the xml side of a podcast is. an RSS feed that podcasting software (like iTunes) takes, and then does everything you need automagically.
Plugging the iPod in to charge it kickstarts all the syncing behind your back. Yes, magic, once you've done that first step of finding a podcast you like and going "ooh. I like that" and clicking subscribe. Done. Nothing else to be bothered about except listening to it.
Right. can someone explain to me the difference between new trendy "podcast" and the old "ftp" or "scp" or "http" that we use for everything else? It's the same old technology just dressed up
Convenience. Back in the early 90s, I remember many remarks like yours about the new WWW. "Can someone explain to me the difference between this new trendy "world wide web" and just downloading files by ftp? It's only text and gifs anyway". Yes podcasts are all just mp3s and xml. They're also one hell of a lot more convenient, in the same way that anyone sane would rather go to www.site.com/index.html instead of manually downloading some text with references to half a dozen images and then go hunting down the images it referred to.
Podcast = find a show you like, subscribe. listen.
Audio Download = find a show you like, find how to download it from that particular site, find how often it's updated to know when to check again, download it, move it to your player/audio device, listen.
Admittedly neither is much different to the other for one single download of one episode. or two. perhaps three, but when you find ten separate podcasts you quite like listening to each episode of, you're bound to just throw it in the too-annoying-to-continue-with basket. This kind of automation benefits the listeners who keep getting their shows easily, and the casters themselves who don't have to continually get their audience to go through a rigmarole of steps just to hear the show. Radio doesn't make you do that.
Isn't Jennifer Anniston suing / considering suing some photographer for getting a topless photo of her from like a mile away?
Technically (and probably relevant to this discussion) I think Jennifer Aniston wouldn't be suing a photographer for taking the photos, but for publishing them. I don't keep up to date with the intricacies of copyright law, model releases etc, but from the basics I do remember there is a very big difference between taking photos and having them in your possession, and taking them then publishing them. Lots of freedoms for the first, lots of restrictions for the latter.
A friend of mine has one of the big zoom cameras, an 18x canon, and has often found the info revealed in one of them is insanely high. zooming in to take a photo of an aged guy on a park bench reading a newspaper brought out a picture that revealed every word on the front page of it. I found myself zoomed in and reading that article before realising how simple it was, and that we were more than a hundred feet from him.
Anyone here run a business with a display visible from a window, even one half a city block from the next window?
> However, the article goes on to talk about how there is no provision in place to
> prevent the uncontrolled surveillance of motorists without a court order.
Cue the "well if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" government apologists.
> Seems like rational ideas are just an illision now a days
Seems like good math skills are too. 800,000 computers out of 200 million is WAY more than 0.004% as the summary stated
Someone is off by a couple orders of magnitude. Much closer to half a percent.
Sessions is exactly what I use too, and have done exactly that onto CD for using with machines that need certain drivers.
On top of that, blank CDs are WAY cheaper than blank floppies here, and have been for the last few years.
This was on Australia's Radio National at the start of this year. People's perceptions of how much another person spoke seemed more closely related to the content of what they spoke. If two people spoke equal amounts counted by time and number of words, but one person spoke about a wider range of topics, than the person who spoke about the wider range of topics was perceived to have spoken for a longer period. That much wasn't gender based, except that women did tend to talk about a wider range of topics.
However when it came to men & women speaking one on one, if a woman disagreed with a man in a conversation, the man's perception of the woman's speaking was that she completely monopolised the conversation by time, despite using the same number of words and speaking for a similar amount of time to the man. From the woman's perception, it was still roughly 50/50.
I see the same problems with every LCD I've had a chance to look at. I imagine it depends on what the issue is that causes the colour varying by angle - whether it's inherent to the liquid crystal technology or caused partly by the backlight. I don't know enough about the technology behind LCDs to know just why they all colour shift, I just look at them and see that they do.
Anyone with an LCD, polarising glasses and a digital camera handy? I'd love to see a picture of an LCD taken through those glasses. Thanks.
Another promising technology for displays is SED. Essentially using the same phosphors as a CRT, but each element which is laid out the same as an LCD has its own electron emitter behind it. No vacuum 'tube' like current CRTs, thin, and without the colour issues around LCDs.
Whether or not it becomes economically feasible is something else entirely, of course. More information on wikipedia
I figure it'll leave it just the same as before, and for reference material you'll use the original movies etc you always did.
Stories have been changing since the start of time. Oral history changes just a little on every retelling. Parts are shuffled about in order, different pieces added, some parts uncomfortable to the current teller are missed. it's been that way with storytelling around primitive cave fires, to the history of politics in ancient places, (hell, modern places even), to fairytales when viewed across different cultures, to the translations of the bible, to versions of the same textbook.
Nothing is static. As soon as it is it's stagnated and moved on. Those original star wars movies belong to a generation that has moved on and let the new guard in, ones who have the culture of the new ones - along with almost everything else ever written.
> Don't you believe for one MINUTE that we won't prosecute either.
> Hell, we could just bypass the criminal justice system and sue
> your precious little girl.
could never happen!
In the early 1990s, my university did something similar. Everyone had a three-initial login consisting of their first/last names and a middle initial, and a letter following. It was policy to give all students who enrolled a login. ghk2, mby5, adh7 etc.
.. and ls -la to see the inactive user dirs. We'd keep multiple ones active if ever we went over quota, and give accounts to friends outside the university so they could login via the modem pool, and the uni did nothing about it for the five years I was involved with them, from 1991 to 1995.
Predictable (and simply so) login names are one thing, but following from that, the default passwords were identical to the login name. That sounds pretty bad. One more thing made it worse...
Not all students needed or ever came to use their logins. Indeed, the theatre, arts and media students never needed or were even told about theirs. It was the easiest thing to score a couple of logins by pure guesswork within minutes even among those people who didn't know to login, cd
I'm not surprised the same braindead thinking still exists somewhere in the world.
> Mr. Siklos seems to miss the point, and the details.
And the ingenuity of third parties. iPods are big. HUGE. iTunes may be able to get a certain number of videos for the iPod out, but you can bet your boots others will too.
Is this link so unrealistic soon? not safe for work
> The solution presupposes, of course, that the light bulbs are within reach...
And that the lightbulbs weren't already on and warm.
but more importantly it does mean that it's not a big deal if your child (God forbid) plays outside, scrapes their knee or rolls in the mud
I'm reminded of an aunt & uncle of mine who were beyond neat freaks, but were absolute germaholics going back to when they had their son in the late 1960s. Neither of their kids was allowed outside otherwise they'd get dirty, and everything in the house was regularly bleached, dry cleaned, vacuumed or just renewed if it had even the hint of dirt. It was a pain going to their house, both of them as OCD as you could get. Last time I was there the toilet was bleached by my aunt after I used it. If there was even a hint of illness at school, both cousins just simply weren't allowed to go until it was all-clear.
In the end one cousin did get gravel rash on the elbow running out the school gate when he was 10, and had to be hospitalised for weeks, because he near died from the resulting infection. The first flu that his sister got when she was 13 also almost killed her. Both now (in their 30s) have the most intense asthma, find difficulty putting on normal weight and have regularly come down with weeks-long illnesses needing hospital stays from things that would give a normal person the sniffles & sneezes for a couple of days.
> 2 MP? is it just me or are they getting better and better?
Maybe.
2MP is just how well the camera captures the image through the lens. if the lens is shit (and it's a very small nonfocusing lens, so for many people it's shit) all you're getting is a higher resolution version of the same washed out, blurred, chromatically-distorted fisheye photos that every other camera gives.
You can get very small lenses that aren't shit, but they cost more than this entire phone would.
Correct. this picture shows the flash chips in a 2GB nano. Linked directly from arstechnica's nano autopsy
> Perhaps it isn't only the editors that should check the credibility of a story?
Everyone should check the credibility of what they read, for sure. A good friend of mine wrote a comical story on her blog at the beginning of this year about macintoshes getting intel upgrades. Remember this was before steve jobs let out the big news. Then in June when steve admitted it was true, someone submitted the story to slashdot. Then the world picked it up, and it was featured on engadget, the inquirer, hundreds of blogs, and within two weeks had made it to two US radio station broadcasts and was printed as a center piece in one Australian nationwide newspaper. The journalist at The Australian lost his job over it and a california radio news guy only just escaped with his.
The kicker was nobody wrote to her to check the origins of the story, not one solitary person until Media Watch, an Australian media watchdog television show contacted her to find out the reality behind the story in The Australian.
Tens of news sites blindly followed one another and printed what everyone else was printing. All the while many regular joes picked out it was meant for a laugh immediately.
> during the qualification they got off track and rolled over.
Upside down country did it, the solar car was merely trying to right itself.
Another oddity, that khaki colour car there looks like a 4 door GTO 'coupe'
Strange
I'm calling bullshit on that one too. arstechnica threw theirs out a car window at 50mph and it's less scratched than the grandparent poster's image.
Something companies have to put up with. A meme gets out that iPod nanos are getting scratched more than white iPods and everyone wants in on a class action suit by rubbing theirs down with sandpaper.
More scratches on an iPod nano sitting in a pocket than on a nano being thrown from a car window at 50mph? I don't think so.
I have never figured out why owners of Apple products refuse to hold Apple to a high standard across the board.
I think it's the other way around. Apple owners complain about the smallest things. I have an 3D iPod, and it has the odd scratch on it, but nothing really noticeable. I put it down to being a white product, so it doesn't show scratches up as badly.
My 2GB black nano however, shows scratches more visibly. But it doesn't worry me because I also have a black shiny clock, a black shiny desk calculator, a black shiny PDA and another brand black shiny mp3 player (name withheld to keep the flaming down).
THEY ALL SCRATCH WORSE THAN WHITE PRODUCTS DO. The nano scratches just as badly as any of them, or no worse than any of them depending how you want to look at it. Black shows scratches far worse. Period. Apple-only users have never had to deal with a glossy all black product, so they're all in a mouth frothing tizz over it acting like all the other shiny black products on the market. It would be nice if it weren't this way, hell it would be nice if Apple were able to do what other manufacturers couldn't do, but they didn't. It's not perfect, but it's not a glaringly deficient design fault like many are making it out to be.
I like Apple's products, but their fanbase can be utter retards sometimes.
> And let's not forget Apple is making these for a $100 profit, can they really not afford that extra 50c?
$100 profit? who told you that bullshit, and why did you believe them?
> they just run kde under x11. big deal.
Wrong. Go back and read the article. If you still have the same impression, go back to school and re-learn basic comprehension.