The way you describe using a tablet is the best you can do with a tablet, but it is far worse than using a chalkboard.
First, in providing the lecture notes you discourage students from taking their own notes, since they know that most of what they might have written will be provided. When a student is actively taking their own notes, they often add detail that help them understand their own notes later. Don't worry about whether or not student's "like the convenience of being able to look at their lectures outside of the classroom". Learning math isn't convenient. It's hard work. They need to be in class, taking good notes, following the lecture, and applying it to the homework problems. If they have to miss a lecture, they need be responsible for the material, and if they can't figure it out from the textbook they need to see you during your office hours, or a tutor. It's a system that's worked for a very long time, and the tablet changes it without providing any real gain, and in fact some loss. In the best of cases it promotes student laziness, and in the worst of cases it lends to students being even more lost than they might have been in a traditional class.
Second, because you are writing on something that is more like pen-and-paper, you will write faster. This makes it so that it is difficult for those of us who weren't discouraged from taking notes (in the first point) to keep up in recording our notes and at the same time follow what you are actually doing. It's always difficult, when you fully understand a mathematical concept, to force yourself to explain it slowly enough that someone who doesn't understand it yet can follow. The chalkboard imposes a bit of a speed restriction since it forces you to write everything in a larger space which takes longer.
Third, a typical classroom chalkboard provides more real estate, so if the student is taking notes and falls a bit behind (because they recorded more detail on a point, or decided to do a side calculation to ensure that they are following what you've done), it provides more of a buffer for them to use to catch up.
Finally, and maybe this one is just me, but there is a huge difference between using a cursor to point to something you've already written, and actually pointing at it on the chalkboard.
One other comment, not related to the tablet: The best math instructor I have ever had did the least lecture preparation: He looked at the book to see what subjects were covered in the sections he planned to go over before class, and then did not look at the book again. He then spent the class period explaining and proving the material as much to himself as to the rest of the class. The notes I took from his lectures were always more thorough and better explained than any text book I have ever read.
I am currently a college student, and am at least minoring in math (Considering a double major). When I started I was 10 years out of high school and had forgotten so much that I had to start way back at Math 055 (Basic Algebra). Since then I have taken, in succession, Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, Trig, Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Proofs, ODE, and am now in Discrete Math. What I have discovered for myself, and from discussions from other students is that we learn the most and the best from instructors that use a good old fashioned chalkboard. It slows you down enough that we can take good notes and still follow what you are doing, it gives you something big enough to clearly point at when you are talking about a piece of what you are doing, and it largely prevents you from just displaying preprepared notes that you post online afterward and hope we manage to follow. If you feel we should have material supplemental to our notes and the textbook, make a handout or post such material online. Math has been successfully taught for ages using a chalkboard. Perhaps there are improvements that can be made to how we teach math, but believe me, switching to a tablet PC is not one of them.
The core concept of copyright law is that "We the People" defend certain rights to your intellectual property in exchange for "Fair Use" and ultimate release of your IP into Public Domain.
"Fair Use" is non-commercial personal or educational use, which describes the majority of the "Piracy" that occurs.
Nothing has been legally mandated into the public domain since the 40's. "Fair Use" has all but been eliminated. So, why are we spending taxpayers $$$ to defend these "Rights" without the reciprocal benefits to society?
If I download a copy of a $700 program like Adobe Photoshop, with the mere goal of learning how to use it, or learning what it's capabilities are, I am downloading it under the very definition of "Fair Use". When I use this program to produce graphics that people pay me money for, that's when I am in excess of "Fair Use".
I used "Pirated" copies of Photoshop to learn how to use it. When I had a client come to me and offer me $7500 to make a few graphics for them, I promptly went out and laid down $700 for Photoshop.
This is the spirit of Copyright law.
Ignoring all of this the lesson that IP owners can learn from this study is that you can charge money for IP, even if it could be copied under "Fair Use", as long as what you charge is reasonable.
I am very careful about what I buy on the iTunes music store, as I may not have heard it in it's entirety, and if I download 20 songs just to hear them once I spend $20. If they put them at, say, a 10 price point, it wouldn't hurt me badly enough financially after downloading 100 songs that I would feel any regret. As it sits I spend maybe $10 at the iTunes music store a month. If songs were 10 a piece, I would likely spend $100 a month at the iTunes music store.
If people are willing to pay for copyrighted works, even if they are using it in a "Fair Use" manner, doesn't it stand to reason that they would pay a similar amount to acquire this IP "legally?"
"I think Mac support for BeOS was killed when Apple refused to release info on the G3 Macs to Be, Inc."
I think that was Be's official line, but I always found it a bit hard to swallow with so many linux distros (including Apple's own mklinux) being able to boot on these Macs.
It always struck me as being more likely that the reason Be stopped supporting BeOS on PPC hardware was mostly a matter of Jean Louise Gassee's pride, after Apple turned down what many considered to be an outrageous asking price for BeOS when Apple was looking for a foundation for it's future "Modern" Operating System.
Instead of hearing that Apple lost that case and jumping to an incorrect conclusion about what it says, maybe you should actually read the ruling?
Was there a ruling? My recollection of Apple history has MS and Apple settling this case out of court, with MS paying Apple an undisclosed amount of money.
If my recollection is correct this was announced at the same time that it was announced that Bill Gates was buying $1 million in Apple stock, and MS bringing Office back to the Mac. I think this was shortly after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. I seem to remember a keynote with Bill Gates coming on the screen and people booing.
"Cell is primarily designed for digital-home applications, but the chip can be used with a wide variety of programming models and could conceivably wind up in any number of systems, Kahle said. The companies are working with open-source compiler developers to create software development tools for programmers, he said."
While this isn't the same as Apple releasing GCC contributions, what open-source compiler could they realistically be talking about besides GCC? At the very least this seems to support the idea that Cell could be an incredible Linux platform, but ultimately if Cell lives up to 1/10th of the hype that was released today, and is indeed fully compatible with the POWER instruction set (implied but not verified), It sounds like Apple would be insane not to use it.
I don't know where this analyst gets his information, but:
"Cell will probably consume around 30 watts of power, similar to the Emotion Engine processor in the PlayStation 2 console, said Peter Glaskowsky, a technical analyst with The Envisioneering Group in Seaford, New York. This is also similar to the power consumption of Intel Corp.'s Pentium M processor."
The question is: How many people out there are unwilling to buy overpriced hardware regardless of their admiration for Mac OS X? How many of those people would have their wallets out gleefully paying $129 because they just found out they can run OS X natively on their current hardware?
I admit I don't have the market research data to give an accurate answer to this question, but I do work in retail computer sales, and my impression is that this describes a tremendous number of people. Remember that Apple's hardware margins hang between 20-25%, whereas, once development costs have been recouped, software is almost 100% profit. So if Apple makes $600-$750 on every $3000 G5 (and less on all of their other consumer hardware), is it really that hard to believe that the number of people who would buy Mac OS X but would not buy Mac hardware wouldn't rapidly make up for the reduction in Mac hardware sales? On top of this there is the viability of OEM deals and people purchasing upgrades to future versions of Mac OS X.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Apple never let go of the hardware, and that's why clones were a very bad thing. The motherboards for the clones still had to be bought from Apple, with Apple's proprietary ROMs. This stifled innovation and real competition as a clone could only be just that: a clone. If Apple had created an open PPC platform things might have turned out different, but Apple still wanted to control the Mac OS by requiring that it run on their own proprietary hardware, even if it had another company's label slapped on the box.
MacOSXIntel would not need to be inhibited in this way, and would not require an existing x86 user to make the investment of new hardware or software. I work in a retail computer establishment and every day I hear people say "I'd switch to the Mac, as I think it is the better platform, but it would require such a significant investment in new hardware and rebuilding my software library from scratch." These people would shell out $129 to run Mac OS X either side by side with Windows, or with a Windows compatibility layer in a heartbeat.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
...and only Steve can decide if it's worth the trade off. Personally I think Apple stands to profit more from software sales than they stand to lose from hardware sales. Apple's hardware (especially their laptops) is innovative, and that will continue to a large portion of their sales.
Even if MacOSXIntel is in the works I think Apple needs to do some things before they can consider going toe-to-toe with MS. If MS sees Apple as a threat they would logically pull support of all their products from Mac OS X. This means that Apple at the very least needs a viable alternative to MS's biggest non-OS products: IE and Office. Apple already tackled IE, and Safari is great. They don't have anything that can compete with Office, though Keynote could be taken as an indication that this is the direction they are heading.
There is a slightly dated, but never-the-less relevant opinion column by a friend of mine, Joshua Thorpe, on my website at http://www.macopz.com/columns/jt/thinkswitch.html
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
You are missing a leading decimal. This was installed with version.1, as in 1 tenth of 1.0.
This is still pretty early in the development cycle and if they only consider this to be 1 tenth of the way to a release version there is reason for immense optimism.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
I don't think the software is far enough along for you to be able to get a "normal experience" out of it. It's slow even on the fastest hardware. That's not to say that this will always be the case, and this is a huge step forward to that end. First you emulate accurately, then you emulate efficiently.
This screenshot on the pearpc site might give you a bit of an idea of the performance you can expect:
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/kde.pn g
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
"A company that is convicted of being a monopoly can't be sued into behaving."
I don't disagree with your point, but I do have semantic correction to make: A company cannot be convicted of being a monopoly, as being a monopoly is not an illegal offense. A company can be convicted of abusing the powers that they possess as a monopoly and THAT is what MS got in trouble for.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Neither AAC nor WMA will ever be considered a "standard".
Wait, so you're saying MPEG 4 isn't a standard? AAC is just MPEG 4 audio.
What makes MPEG 1 Layer III audio (mp3) a standard, but MPEG 4 Audio (m4a, also known as AAC) not one?
WMA's DRM will be broken in time just as FairPlay apparently has been, in any case.
Hmmm... I could be wrong, but I thought wma was cracked a long time ago. I never tried it, but doesn't this program (http://home.wanadoo.nl/lc.staak/freeme.htm) do the same thing this playfair does for except for wma instead of aac?
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Hard one to answer, as there are a number of things that contributed to Farscape becoming my favorite show.
What tops the list for me is the show's intensity. My favorite episodes of ST:TNG were always the season finale/cliffhanger/two parters. That moment, for example, when we find out that Picard is now Locutus, that he has been assimilated, and it seems like there is no way the day can be saved. This happens in nearly every episode of Farscape, and to a much greater extent with any multipart episodes. The title of the 3 episodes leading up to the series finale "We are So Screwed" really describes the feeling you get watching the entire series. You are on the edge of your seat as every situation gets worse and worse, and just when it seems there is no way out they pull a last ditch effort, which always, at least to the necessary extent, works. The overlying problem for each season though is never solved and we are forced to tune in next week as the story gets more and more involved.
Next up: The characters are deep, as you get to know them you really almost feel like you know them. I don't ever want to meet the actors, because I'm sure that it will spoil my illusion of these people actually existing. The actors do a phenomenal job. They have immense chemistry, especially from the end of the first season when Scorpius (and later Harvey) is introduced. Wayne Pygram and Ben Browder play off each other brilliantly.
Third: The show has a very clever, somewhat dry, but extremely funny wit. Crichton makes constant references to Earth pop culture, and when used as clever similes to describe something in this extremely alien universe it is often very funny. Aeryn and Dargo always try to use Crichtons Earth and English references and always screw them up. Seeing a big alien with tendrils trying to measure time by saying "1 mippippi, 2 mippippi", or Aeryn saying "She gives me a woody. Woody...? A human saying I've heard you say often, when you don't trust someone or they may you nervous they give you..." "Willies! She gives you the willies!"
Fourth: The show is SO cinematic. Every episode is like a 1 hour movie, and again this is even more true for the episodes with 2 or more parts. The cinematography is brilliant, and it never gets old as every episode is shot very differently (there's even an episode that is mostly a Warner Brothers style cartoon). The special effects range from perfectly adequate to stunning. The puppeteer work is phenomenal, after very little time you forget that Rygel and Pilot are puppets and accept them as just a couple more characters on the show.
These are the reasons that pop to mind as the most significant portions of Farscape's appeal. Of course words can hardly do it justice, and certainly mine are not the most eloquent, so my recommendation is that you get ahold of the DVD's (or acquire the episodes in whatever manner you see fit:), start from the beginning and I'm sure that after you've got a few episodes under your belt (I was borderline fanatical by 1x05, Back and Back to the Future) you will be hooked and won't be able to resist watching the whole series.
A couple of notes about other comments in this topic: I think the miniseries will do very well, possibly better than the series did ratings wise, as I know that myself and all the other people I know that watched Farscape bought the DVD's and got as many people hooked as they could. I have personally sat 10 people through the entire series (and they became as obsessed as I), and I'm sure this isn't a localized phenomenon.
In regards to Firefly: I think it was a phenomenal show, and am so terribly sad that it got taken off the air, especially after having such a short run. I am delighted they are making a movie. Having said that, I don't think it is as deep, intellectual or imaginative as Farscape, so if I had to choose between them, there'd be a Farscape miniseries instead of a Firefly movie. Fortunately I don't have to make that choice as we are getting both.
There, my first ever slashdot post... Don't be too hard on me.:)
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Slashdot Mirror
I can save you even more time dealing with exceptions. I have started writing all of my methods in a pattern as follows:
public void DoSomething (object doItToMe) // Do something here! // No-op
{
try
{
}
catch {
}
}
Now I never have to deal with exceptions of any kind!
The way you describe using a tablet is the best you can do with a tablet, but it is far worse than using a chalkboard.
First, in providing the lecture notes you discourage students from taking their own notes, since they know that most of what they might have written will be provided. When a student is actively taking their own notes, they often add detail that help them understand their own notes later. Don't worry about whether or not student's "like the convenience of being able to look at their lectures outside of the classroom". Learning math isn't convenient. It's hard work. They need to be in class, taking good notes, following the lecture, and applying it to the homework problems. If they have to miss a lecture, they need be responsible for the material, and if they can't figure it out from the textbook they need to see you during your office hours, or a tutor. It's a system that's worked for a very long time, and the tablet changes it without providing any real gain, and in fact some loss. In the best of cases it promotes student laziness, and in the worst of cases it lends to students being even more lost than they might have been in a traditional class.
Second, because you are writing on something that is more like pen-and-paper, you will write faster. This makes it so that it is difficult for those of us who weren't discouraged from taking notes (in the first point) to keep up in recording our notes and at the same time follow what you are actually doing. It's always difficult, when you fully understand a mathematical concept, to force yourself to explain it slowly enough that someone who doesn't understand it yet can follow. The chalkboard imposes a bit of a speed restriction since it forces you to write everything in a larger space which takes longer.
Third, a typical classroom chalkboard provides more real estate, so if the student is taking notes and falls a bit behind (because they recorded more detail on a point, or decided to do a side calculation to ensure that they are following what you've done), it provides more of a buffer for them to use to catch up.
Finally, and maybe this one is just me, but there is a huge difference between using a cursor to point to something you've already written, and actually pointing at it on the chalkboard.
One other comment, not related to the tablet: The best math instructor I have ever had did the least lecture preparation: He looked at the book to see what subjects were covered in the sections he planned to go over before class, and then did not look at the book again. He then spent the class period explaining and proving the material as much to himself as to the rest of the class. The notes I took from his lectures were always more thorough and better explained than any text book I have ever read.
I am currently a college student, and am at least minoring in math (Considering a double major). When I started I was 10 years out of high school and had forgotten so much that I had to start way back at Math 055 (Basic Algebra). Since then I have taken, in succession, Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, Trig, Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Proofs, ODE, and am now in Discrete Math. What I have discovered for myself, and from discussions from other students is that we learn the most and the best from instructors that use a good old fashioned chalkboard. It slows you down enough that we can take good notes and still follow what you are doing, it gives you something big enough to clearly point at when you are talking about a piece of what you are doing, and it largely prevents you from just displaying preprepared notes that you post online afterward and hope we manage to follow. If you feel we should have material supplemental to our notes and the textbook, make a handout or post such material online. Math has been successfully taught for ages using a chalkboard. Perhaps there are improvements that can be made to how we teach math, but believe me, switching to a tablet PC is not one of them.
Apparently the "cents" symbol doesn't work on /.
Every time I say "10", it should read $0.10.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
The core concept of copyright law is that "We the People" defend certain rights to your intellectual property in exchange for "Fair Use" and ultimate release of your IP into Public Domain.
"Fair Use" is non-commercial personal or educational use, which describes the majority of the "Piracy" that occurs.
Nothing has been legally mandated into the public domain since the 40's. "Fair Use" has all but been eliminated. So, why are we spending taxpayers $$$ to defend these "Rights" without the reciprocal benefits to society?
If I download a copy of a $700 program like Adobe Photoshop, with the mere goal of learning how to use it, or learning what it's capabilities are, I am downloading it under the very definition of "Fair Use". When I use this program to produce graphics that people pay me money for, that's when I am in excess of "Fair Use".
I used "Pirated" copies of Photoshop to learn how to use it. When I had a client come to me and offer me $7500 to make a few graphics for them, I promptly went out and laid down $700 for Photoshop.
This is the spirit of Copyright law.
Ignoring all of this the lesson that IP owners can learn from this study is that you can charge money for IP, even if it could be copied under "Fair Use", as long as what you charge is reasonable.
I am very careful about what I buy on the iTunes music store, as I may not have heard it in it's entirety, and if I download 20 songs just to hear them once I spend $20. If they put them at, say, a 10 price point, it wouldn't hurt me badly enough financially after downloading 100 songs that I would feel any regret. As it sits I spend maybe $10 at the iTunes music store a month. If songs were 10 a piece, I would likely spend $100 a month at the iTunes music store.
If people are willing to pay for copyrighted works, even if they are using it in a "Fair Use" manner, doesn't it stand to reason that they would pay a similar amount to acquire this IP "legally?"
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
"I think Mac support for BeOS was killed when Apple refused to release info on the G3 Macs to Be, Inc."
I think that was Be's official line, but I always found it a bit hard to swallow with so many linux distros (including Apple's own mklinux) being able to boot on these Macs.
It always struck me as being more likely that the reason Be stopped supporting BeOS on PPC hardware was mostly a matter of Jean Louise Gassee's pride, after Apple turned down what many considered to be an outrageous asking price for BeOS when Apple was looking for a foundation for it's future "Modern" Operating System.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Instead of hearing that Apple lost that case and jumping to an incorrect conclusion about what it says, maybe you should actually read the ruling?
Was there a ruling? My recollection of Apple history has MS and Apple settling this case out of court, with MS paying Apple an undisclosed amount of money.
If my recollection is correct this was announced at the same time that it was announced that Bill Gates was buying $1 million in Apple stock, and MS bringing Office back to the Mac. I think this was shortly after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. I seem to remember a keynote with Bill Gates coming on the screen and people booing.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
An excerpt from MacCentral's article on Cell:
"Cell is primarily designed for digital-home applications, but the chip can be used with a wide variety of programming models and could conceivably wind up in any number of systems, Kahle said. The companies are working with open-source compiler developers to create software development tools for programmers, he said."
While this isn't the same as Apple releasing GCC contributions, what open-source compiler could they realistically be talking about besides GCC? At the very least this seems to support the idea that Cell could be an incredible Linux platform, but ultimately if Cell lives up to 1/10th of the hype that was released today, and is indeed fully compatible with the POWER instruction set (implied but not verified), It sounds like Apple would be insane not to use it.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
I don't know where this analyst gets his information, but:
"Cell will probably consume around 30 watts of power, similar to the Emotion Engine processor in the PlayStation 2 console, said Peter Glaskowsky, a technical analyst with The Envisioneering Group in Seaford, New York. This is also similar to the power consumption of Intel Corp.'s Pentium M processor."
This from the MacCentral article on Cell.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Seems like the next trend in suicide notes to me.
"By the time you read this I will be gone. Having jumped- having plummeted off the River Winter Bridge."
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
I think perhaps you are thinking of statutory (also called compulsory) licensing
-=(Lord Crosis)=-The question is: How many people out there are unwilling to buy overpriced hardware regardless of their admiration for Mac OS X? How many of those people would have their wallets out gleefully paying $129 because they just found out they can run OS X natively on their current hardware?
I admit I don't have the market research data to give an accurate answer to this question, but I do work in retail computer sales, and my impression is that this describes a tremendous number of people. Remember that Apple's hardware margins hang between 20-25%, whereas, once development costs have been recouped, software is almost 100% profit. So if Apple makes $600-$750 on every $3000 G5 (and less on all of their other consumer hardware), is it really that hard to believe that the number of people who would buy Mac OS X but would not buy Mac hardware wouldn't rapidly make up for the reduction in Mac hardware sales? On top of this there is the viability of OEM deals and people purchasing upgrades to future versions of Mac OS X.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Apple never let go of the hardware, and that's why clones were a very bad thing. The motherboards for the clones still had to be bought from Apple, with Apple's proprietary ROMs. This stifled innovation and real competition as a clone could only be just that: a clone. If Apple had created an open PPC platform things might have turned out different, but Apple still wanted to control the Mac OS by requiring that it run on their own proprietary hardware, even if it had another company's label slapped on the box.
MacOSXIntel would not need to be inhibited in this way, and would not require an existing x86 user to make the investment of new hardware or software. I work in a retail computer establishment and every day I hear people say "I'd switch to the Mac, as I think it is the better platform, but it would require such a significant investment in new hardware and rebuilding my software library from scratch." These people would shell out $129 to run Mac OS X either side by side with Windows, or with a Windows compatibility layer in a heartbeat.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
...and only Steve can decide if it's worth the trade off. Personally I think Apple stands to profit more from software sales than they stand to lose from hardware sales. Apple's hardware (especially their laptops) is innovative, and that will continue to a large portion of their sales.
Even if MacOSXIntel is in the works I think Apple needs to do some things before they can consider going toe-to-toe with MS. If MS sees Apple as a threat they would logically pull support of all their products from Mac OS X. This means that Apple at the very least needs a viable alternative to MS's biggest non-OS products: IE and Office. Apple already tackled IE, and Safari is great. They don't have anything that can compete with Office, though Keynote could be taken as an indication that this is the direction they are heading.
There is a slightly dated, but never-the-less relevant opinion column by a friend of mine, Joshua Thorpe, on my website at http://www.macopz.com/columns/jt/thinkswitch.html
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
You are missing a leading decimal. This was installed with version .1, as in 1 tenth of 1.0.
This is still pretty early in the development cycle and if they only consider this to be 1 tenth of the way to a release version there is reason for immense optimism.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
I don't think the software is far enough along for you to be able to get a "normal experience" out of it. It's slow even on the fastest hardware. That's not to say that this will always be the case, and this is a huge step forward to that end. First you emulate accurately, then you emulate efficiently.
This screenshot on the pearpc site might give you a bit of an idea of the performance you can expect:
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/kde.pn g
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
"A company that is convicted of being a monopoly can't be sued into behaving."
I don't disagree with your point, but I do have semantic correction to make: A company cannot be convicted of being a monopoly, as being a monopoly is not an illegal offense. A company can be convicted of abusing the powers that they possess as a monopoly and THAT is what MS got in trouble for.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Wait, so you're saying MPEG 4 isn't a standard? AAC is just MPEG 4 audio.
What makes MPEG 1 Layer III audio (mp3) a standard, but MPEG 4 Audio (m4a, also known as AAC) not one?
WMA's DRM will be broken in time just as FairPlay apparently has been, in any case.
Hmmm... I could be wrong, but I thought wma was cracked a long time ago. I never tried it, but doesn't this program (http://home.wanadoo.nl/lc.staak/freeme.htm) do the same thing this playfair does for except for wma instead of aac?
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Hard one to answer, as there are a number of things that contributed to Farscape becoming my favorite show.
What tops the list for me is the show's intensity. My favorite episodes of ST:TNG were always the season finale/cliffhanger/two parters. That moment, for example, when we find out that Picard is now Locutus, that he has been assimilated, and it seems like there is no way the day can be saved. This happens in nearly every episode of Farscape, and to a much greater extent with any multipart episodes. The title of the 3 episodes leading up to the series finale "We are So Screwed" really describes the feeling you get watching the entire series. You are on the edge of your seat as every situation gets worse and worse, and just when it seems there is no way out they pull a last ditch effort, which always, at least to the necessary extent, works. The overlying problem for each season though is never solved and we are forced to tune in next week as the story gets more and more involved.
Next up: The characters are deep, as you get to know them you really almost feel like you know them. I don't ever want to meet the actors, because I'm sure that it will spoil my illusion of these people actually existing. The actors do a phenomenal job. They have immense chemistry, especially from the end of the first season when Scorpius (and later Harvey) is introduced. Wayne Pygram and Ben Browder play off each other brilliantly.
Third: The show has a very clever, somewhat dry, but extremely funny wit. Crichton makes constant references to Earth pop culture, and when used as clever similes to describe something in this extremely alien universe it is often very funny. Aeryn and Dargo always try to use Crichtons Earth and English references and always screw them up. Seeing a big alien with tendrils trying to measure time by saying "1 mippippi, 2 mippippi", or Aeryn saying "She gives me a woody. Woody...? A human saying I've heard you say often, when you don't trust someone or they may you nervous they give you..." "Willies! She gives you the willies!"
Fourth: The show is SO cinematic. Every episode is like a 1 hour movie, and again this is even more true for the episodes with 2 or more parts. The cinematography is brilliant, and it never gets old as every episode is shot very differently (there's even an episode that is mostly a Warner Brothers style cartoon). The special effects range from perfectly adequate to stunning. The puppeteer work is phenomenal, after very little time you forget that Rygel and Pilot are puppets and accept them as just a couple more characters on the show.
These are the reasons that pop to mind as the most significant portions of Farscape's appeal. Of course words can hardly do it justice, and certainly mine are not the most eloquent, so my recommendation is that you get ahold of the DVD's (or acquire the episodes in whatever manner you see fit :), start from the beginning and I'm sure that after you've got a few episodes under your belt (I was borderline fanatical by 1x05, Back and Back to the Future) you will be hooked and won't be able to resist watching the whole series.
A couple of notes about other comments in this topic: I think the miniseries will do very well, possibly better than the series did ratings wise, as I know that myself and all the other people I know that watched Farscape bought the DVD's and got as many people hooked as they could. I have personally sat 10 people through the entire series (and they became as obsessed as I), and I'm sure this isn't a localized phenomenon.
In regards to Firefly: I think it was a phenomenal show, and am so terribly sad that it got taken off the air, especially after having such a short run. I am delighted they are making a movie. Having said that, I don't think it is as deep, intellectual or imaginative as Farscape, so if I had to choose between them, there'd be a Farscape miniseries instead of a Firefly movie. Fortunately I don't have to make that choice as we are getting both.
There, my first ever slashdot post... Don't be too hard on me. :)
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"