That gives me an idea. If kids aren't learning how to write in cursive because of computers, we should make them start using tablet PC's calibrated to only accept cursive. That way we can trick the little buggers into learning.
No way man. The Wizzard ruled flat out. I mean really, how many people would have ever found that warp pipe in Super Mario Bros. 3 if it wasn't for that movie showing us where it was. Come to think of it, how did that kid know where it was? Hmmmm.
I assume that, once you've brought your item home, you're free to remove the offending tag
That's assuming they clearly show you where all the tags are. KSW has already developed a washable RFID that is being designed to be sewn in your clothes. Matrics is designing smaller and smalled RFIDs. Their smallest is the size of a speck of glitter. Think about how easy it would be in integate that into a cardboard box, or the inking on a package, or the binding glue.
There are SERIOUS privacy issues. I'm being optimistic when I hope that when the industry decides on standards it will include auto-deactivation at cehckout. Otherwise it's going to be an RF war in the streets with people cobbling together RF pingers and scramblers left and right. I think that prospect (and the ease of it happening) will be enough to set industry standards taht protect privacy. But the issue needs to be raised sooner rather than later to assume it happens.
Of course we're talking about shopping. Not much is going to stop the police (ehrem... Patriot Act) from tagging your car with one of these suckers if they need to tail you. You really gonna notice a spec of dirt on your car pinging your location as you go through intersections?
Yeah, I see the concern over what's AFTER RFID because this is a big leap that nobody would ahve seen coming 30 years ago when abrcoding began. Imagine what wacky shit we'll come up with in 2035. Luckily I think people will collectively draw a line in the sand when this kind of technology gets too overboard.
In the mean time just go with the flow and invest your money in the companies developing the RFID technology. With big hitters like Walmart and Target wanting this to go forward, you know it's gonna happen. Might as well get in the ground floor now and make a nice wad of cash in 3 or 4 years.
I actually talked with my doctor about this a few months ago. See I suffer from the traditional "geek statue." I'm tall, lanky, and otherwise just a skinny person. I bike to work everyday, go to the gym, eat a good diet, etc. But genetics keeps me skinny. So in discussing this with my doctor, we discussed food habbits and the subject of caffiene and food addiction.
Basically, as was established in a post above, your body can be addicted to anything it intakes. Be it water, air, nicotine, caffiene, cocaine, cheese pizza, ranch dressing, etc. Anything your body has to chemically break down. Basically, if you drink a lot of caffiene steadily for months and years on end, your body starts to produce the extra chemicals and enzymes neccessary to use the copious amount you put in your body. This is why people complain that after drinking a lot of a certain prodcut, it no longer has the same effect. Your body expects that level and is ready for it, so the buzz is gone.
Of course, when you stop drinking it, your body is still anticipating the need to break down the caffiene and is producing the chemicals and enzymes at the same rate. So it tries to break down the nearest stuff it can find, or just reabsorb into your system. This is where you get the stomach and head aches from. This is where many people will claim you're an addict. It's not an addiction as far as cocaine or heroin would be considered addictions, because your body generally won't induce a craving for it. But it is enough to be painful if you drink a lot of the stuff.
The advice my doctor gave me to kick my caffiene habbit (much more accurate term than addiction) was to start weening myself off it. Instead of buying a 24 pack every week, buy a 12 pack, then a 6 pack. Instead of 2 cups of coffee in the morning, a cup of coffee and a cup of OJ. It basically reprogram's your body's expectation for what it needs to digest so you won't get any really bad reactions. If you're one of those people that still needs to rely on late night caffiene jolts, stagger what you intake and try energy bars and ice water instead. You'll usually get the same net effect.
I don't really see the privacy concern being fixed in reality. RFIDs don't have commercial grade broadcasting capability. Most are designed for their RF signal to be picked up in about a 5-10 foot radius. If the broadcast range was too long, they would burn out too quickly to be efficient for stocking shelves. Additionally, long range RFIDs would be so cost-ineffectual that nobody would integrate them into their products. So if you got your stuff home and the RFIDs weren't deactivated, Walmart would have to come in your house and start scanning your shelves to find out what you have.
The REAL consumer issue I see here is the additional cost of RFID tagging. Barcodes cost little (when you consider the registration costs of a barcode/SKU) and the ink it costs to print spread across millions of units produced. In effect its less than a penny of your purchase. But these, even at positive estimates, will be about 5 cents a piece once they are implemented in mass quantities. This price will inevitably be passed to consumers, but probably phased in over time and hid as an inflation cost. The problem is most time cost increased are passed on in this mannor, the price is jacked up a little bit more because the stores can get away with it. A 5 cent increase of time eventually becomes a 6 cent increase. That may sound little, but think about every unique itme you buy. If you buy 100 items a month (typical grocery buying habbits), you contributed 1 more dollar. Multiply that by customers coming through a store and you see tens of thousands of dollars of additional revenue artifically created because of RFID implementation. This profit increases the larger the store is and the more individual products sold. This is why you see stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc. buying into this plan.
This is why I miss PC Accelerator. Not only were the reviewers complete assholes who weren't afraid to call a crap game crap, but they used realistic benchmarks on video cards. They'd pick 3 recent games, use the same system and just replace the card. That way you could see that one card might be better are certain games but not others.
Oh well, I hope this will at least create some sort of call for alternative testing measures in the future.
Re:Small labels will benefit from the ignorant gia
on
iTunes Indie Meeting Notes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's truely amazing how Apple has managed to hit the nail on the head while the RIAA keeps swinging away futily.
The RIAA keeps trying the closed fist approach to stoping mp3 piracy. Shut down as many services as possible. Sue everyone. Badmouth music fans. Unfortunately, any scholar of the internet can tell you that the more somebody tries to force out a popular service, the more the community will fight back with new sites, programs, hacks, etc.
So Apple has come along with the open hand approach. They aren't insulting the music fans. They aren't insulting the technologically advanced community. They're co-existing. Download what you want. Hell, burn it if you want. Get the entire CD cheaper than it will cost you at any store. You can still love your music, download what you want, keep it, and support the musicians. And hell, now they're even saying they aren't playing favorites. IF you're telling me that the RIAA aligned groups get the same cashflow program as small indie labels, then I'm buying.
We've been waiting awhile for a new "music delivery model" that pundits have been pushing for. I'm not saying Apple has the whole thing nailed down. But they're soooo close. They figured out the key of existing without being a slap in the face to the people they want to use their service. And now the RIAA has their tail tucked between their legs, trying to figure out why a bunch of hippies at Apple figured out something their teams of lawyers and PR consultants couldn't: Don't insult your customer.
Our University is being hit hard, especially because almost all classes and departments have these massive listservs and the listserv software is so archaic that it doesn't have viral replication blocking.
Oh well, at least I get the personal enjoyment of reading other people's e-mails that get cloned. So far I've got 2 that involve people talking about me behind my back. There's always a golden lining people.
While I don't share your penchant for replacing an S with a $, I do agree that the Windows Update Feature is horrid and I'm glad (in some sick way that will soon turn to disappointment) that MS is finally trying to fix it. The thing never works and so called "critical updates" seem to do little other than break my system or prevent me from upgrading software I actually DO consider critical. Right now, I can't upgrade to IR 6 SP1 because it claims I'm already in the process of upgrading yet detects in the first place that I haven't upgraded.
I dream of the day I might be able to click the "update" button and have my computer work without 4 hours+ of backwards engineering to fix all the things it breaks. Sadly, I'm affraid MS will be charging me a few hundred for a version of Windows that actually works like that.
The ad designers responsible for the "I Switched To Mac" commercials was beaten to a bloody pulp for making America listen to idiots who can't plug in a damn printer correctly. Ellen Feiss could not be reached for comment.
You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider."
Thanks for that, now everytime the AC comes out at work I'm going to expect an army of spider-babies to pop out and steal my printer.
Well if you're going to watch blurry DivX rips, you might as well watch them at a size where everything is blurry. It's a better use of a 20 gig HD than 20 gigs of mp3s
If you have access to some 10 year old Macs (like a lot of underfunded schools do), you might be able to find some copies of Hypercard lying around. I had to do "interactive presentations" in Hypercard way back in the day. My friends (read: the computer literate people in the class) quickly learned how to manipulate it's icon and art systems into a fighting game. Worked pretty well. It required a little bit of everything from basic if/then/else structures, to simple art, to sound effects.
Most manfacturers sell pretty good "office" computers at great prices. You don't get a dozen expansion bays or a Geforce 4, but you get a solid computer that is designed to last for a good number of years. Most of them already have 10/00 cards (although these are becoming more standard) in them.
Plus, most of these computers have room for enough expansion that you can meld them to fit your interests. If you're into games, you probably already have a computer with the parts you need or have them in your parents machine. They aren't going to need your GeForce 4 or CD-RW, so just take them out and swap them with parts from the office machine. Your parents most likely will never notice the difference. So once you're done salvaging parts, you have a fast computer that suits your needs, and the computer you're leaving at home is fine for most anything your parents need to do. You save about 500 bucks in the process which is much better used to go partying when you get to college.
P.S. Don't be that guy who sits in class with his Palm keyboard clicking away. Nobody likes that guy. That guy doesn't get any girls.
Slashdot Mirror
That gives me an idea. If kids aren't learning how to write in cursive because of computers, we should make them start using tablet PC's calibrated to only accept cursive. That way we can trick the little buggers into learning.
... but then he might sue me.
No way man. The Wizzard ruled flat out. I mean really, how many people would have ever found that warp pipe in Super Mario Bros. 3 if it wasn't for that movie showing us where it was. Come to think of it, how did that kid know where it was? Hmmmm.
I assume that, once you've brought your item home, you're free to remove the offending tag
That's assuming they clearly show you where all the tags are. KSW has already developed a washable RFID that is being designed to be sewn in your clothes. Matrics is designing smaller and smalled RFIDs. Their smallest is the size of a speck of glitter. Think about how easy it would be in integate that into a cardboard box, or the inking on a package, or the binding glue.
There are SERIOUS privacy issues. I'm being optimistic when I hope that when the industry decides on standards it will include auto-deactivation at cehckout. Otherwise it's going to be an RF war in the streets with people cobbling together RF pingers and scramblers left and right. I think that prospect (and the ease of it happening) will be enough to set industry standards taht protect privacy. But the issue needs to be raised sooner rather than later to assume it happens.
Of course we're talking about shopping. Not much is going to stop the police (ehrem... Patriot Act) from tagging your car with one of these suckers if they need to tail you. You really gonna notice a spec of dirt on your car pinging your location as you go through intersections?
Yeah, I see the concern over what's AFTER RFID because this is a big leap that nobody would ahve seen coming 30 years ago when abrcoding began. Imagine what wacky shit we'll come up with in 2035. Luckily I think people will collectively draw a line in the sand when this kind of technology gets too overboard.
In the mean time just go with the flow and invest your money in the companies developing the RFID technology. With big hitters like Walmart and Target wanting this to go forward, you know it's gonna happen. Might as well get in the ground floor now and make a nice wad of cash in 3 or 4 years.
I actually talked with my doctor about this a few months ago. See I suffer from the traditional "geek statue." I'm tall, lanky, and otherwise just a skinny person. I bike to work everyday, go to the gym, eat a good diet, etc. But genetics keeps me skinny. So in discussing this with my doctor, we discussed food habbits and the subject of caffiene and food addiction.
Basically, as was established in a post above, your body can be addicted to anything it intakes. Be it water, air, nicotine, caffiene, cocaine, cheese pizza, ranch dressing, etc. Anything your body has to chemically break down. Basically, if you drink a lot of caffiene steadily for months and years on end, your body starts to produce the extra chemicals and enzymes neccessary to use the copious amount you put in your body. This is why people complain that after drinking a lot of a certain prodcut, it no longer has the same effect. Your body expects that level and is ready for it, so the buzz is gone.
Of course, when you stop drinking it, your body is still anticipating the need to break down the caffiene and is producing the chemicals and enzymes at the same rate. So it tries to break down the nearest stuff it can find, or just reabsorb into your system. This is where you get the stomach and head aches from. This is where many people will claim you're an addict. It's not an addiction as far as cocaine or heroin would be considered addictions, because your body generally won't induce a craving for it. But it is enough to be painful if you drink a lot of the stuff.
The advice my doctor gave me to kick my caffiene habbit (much more accurate term than addiction) was to start weening myself off it. Instead of buying a 24 pack every week, buy a 12 pack, then a 6 pack. Instead of 2 cups of coffee in the morning, a cup of coffee and a cup of OJ. It basically reprogram's your body's expectation for what it needs to digest so you won't get any really bad reactions. If you're one of those people that still needs to rely on late night caffiene jolts, stagger what you intake and try energy bars and ice water instead. You'll usually get the same net effect.
I don't really see the privacy concern being fixed in reality. RFIDs don't have commercial grade broadcasting capability. Most are designed for their RF signal to be picked up in about a 5-10 foot radius. If the broadcast range was too long, they would burn out too quickly to be efficient for stocking shelves. Additionally, long range RFIDs would be so cost-ineffectual that nobody would integrate them into their products. So if you got your stuff home and the RFIDs weren't deactivated, Walmart would have to come in your house and start scanning your shelves to find out what you have.
The REAL consumer issue I see here is the additional cost of RFID tagging. Barcodes cost little (when you consider the registration costs of a barcode/SKU) and the ink it costs to print spread across millions of units produced. In effect its less than a penny of your purchase. But these, even at positive estimates, will be about 5 cents a piece once they are implemented in mass quantities. This price will inevitably be passed to consumers, but probably phased in over time and hid as an inflation cost. The problem is most time cost increased are passed on in this mannor, the price is jacked up a little bit more because the stores can get away with it. A 5 cent increase of time eventually becomes a 6 cent increase. That may sound little, but think about every unique itme you buy. If you buy 100 items a month (typical grocery buying habbits), you contributed 1 more dollar. Multiply that by customers coming through a store and you see tens of thousands of dollars of additional revenue artifically created because of RFID implementation. This profit increases the larger the store is and the more individual products sold. This is why you see stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc. buying into this plan.
This is why I miss PC Accelerator. Not only were the reviewers complete assholes who weren't afraid to call a crap game crap, but they used realistic benchmarks on video cards. They'd pick 3 recent games, use the same system and just replace the card. That way you could see that one card might be better are certain games but not others.
Oh well, I hope this will at least create some sort of call for alternative testing measures in the future.
It's truely amazing how Apple has managed to hit the nail on the head while the RIAA keeps swinging away futily. The RIAA keeps trying the closed fist approach to stoping mp3 piracy. Shut down as many services as possible. Sue everyone. Badmouth music fans. Unfortunately, any scholar of the internet can tell you that the more somebody tries to force out a popular service, the more the community will fight back with new sites, programs, hacks, etc.
So Apple has come along with the open hand approach. They aren't insulting the music fans. They aren't insulting the technologically advanced community. They're co-existing. Download what you want. Hell, burn it if you want. Get the entire CD cheaper than it will cost you at any store. You can still love your music, download what you want, keep it, and support the musicians. And hell, now they're even saying they aren't playing favorites. IF you're telling me that the RIAA aligned groups get the same cashflow program as small indie labels, then I'm buying.
We've been waiting awhile for a new "music delivery model" that pundits have been pushing for. I'm not saying Apple has the whole thing nailed down. But they're soooo close. They figured out the key of existing without being a slap in the face to the people they want to use their service. And now the RIAA has their tail tucked between their legs, trying to figure out why a bunch of hippies at Apple figured out something their teams of lawyers and PR consultants couldn't: Don't insult your customer.
"Sendo also sued Microsoft for allegedly stealing their technology"
Microsoft stealing other people's tech?! Say it ain't so Bill!
Our University is being hit hard, especially because almost all classes and departments have these massive listservs and the listserv software is so archaic that it doesn't have viral replication blocking. Oh well, at least I get the personal enjoyment of reading other people's e-mails that get cloned. So far I've got 2 that involve people talking about me behind my back. There's always a golden lining people.
While I don't share your penchant for replacing an S with a $, I do agree that the Windows Update Feature is horrid and I'm glad (in some sick way that will soon turn to disappointment) that MS is finally trying to fix it. The thing never works and so called "critical updates" seem to do little other than break my system or prevent me from upgrading software I actually DO consider critical. Right now, I can't upgrade to IR 6 SP1 because it claims I'm already in the process of upgrading yet detects in the first place that I haven't upgraded. I dream of the day I might be able to click the "update" button and have my computer work without 4 hours+ of backwards engineering to fix all the things it breaks. Sadly, I'm affraid MS will be charging me a few hundred for a version of Windows that actually works like that.
The ad designers responsible for the "I Switched To Mac" commercials was beaten to a bloody pulp for making America listen to idiots who can't plug in a damn printer correctly. Ellen Feiss could not be reached for comment.
You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider." Thanks for that, now everytime the AC comes out at work I'm going to expect an army of spider-babies to pop out and steal my printer.
Well if you're going to watch blurry DivX rips, you might as well watch them at a size where everything is blurry. It's a better use of a 20 gig HD than 20 gigs of mp3s
If you have access to some 10 year old Macs (like a lot of underfunded schools do), you might be able to find some copies of Hypercard lying around. I had to do "interactive presentations" in Hypercard way back in the day. My friends (read: the computer literate people in the class) quickly learned how to manipulate it's icon and art systems into a fighting game. Worked pretty well. It required a little bit of everything from basic if/then/else structures, to simple art, to sound effects.
Most manfacturers sell pretty good "office" computers at great prices. You don't get a dozen expansion bays or a Geforce 4, but you get a solid computer that is designed to last for a good number of years. Most of them already have 10/00 cards (although these are becoming more standard) in them. Plus, most of these computers have room for enough expansion that you can meld them to fit your interests. If you're into games, you probably already have a computer with the parts you need or have them in your parents machine. They aren't going to need your GeForce 4 or CD-RW, so just take them out and swap them with parts from the office machine. Your parents most likely will never notice the difference. So once you're done salvaging parts, you have a fast computer that suits your needs, and the computer you're leaving at home is fine for most anything your parents need to do. You save about 500 bucks in the process which is much better used to go partying when you get to college. P.S. Don't be that guy who sits in class with his Palm keyboard clicking away. Nobody likes that guy. That guy doesn't get any girls.