Hmmmmm...I wonder what will happen to all those iTunes songs once Apple moves to a new DRM or non-DRM format in the future and stops supporting their old format???
Nothing will happen to them. iTunes doesn't phone home when you want to play your music. It DRM's the song specifically for your iTunes account, then sends you the song. You can listen to it whenever you want, with or without Internet access. You can even select those songs and convert them to DRM-less MP3s, or burn them to CD and reimport them in DRM-less format, and then you don't have to worry about DRM at all.
Heck, even if your hard drive crashes and you lose all your music, you can boot up iTunes and re-authorize it to the same account. Then contact Apple, and they'll let you re-download all the music you bought on the account, at no extra charge. Officially they only let you do this once per account, but there are many reports of people doing it two or three times -- for example, their hard drive crashed but then they bought a new computer and wanted to transfer iTunes to it.
Nothing like OpenCanvas?! You mean, Corel doesn't make Painter for the Mac anymore? Has Autodesk stopped selling Sketchbook Pro for OS X? If not, then you are speaking out of a dark orifice.
Unfortunatly, ASUS will now suffer the Wrath of Jobs. [sic]
In other words, ASUS just lost their contract. Maybe not immediately, but certainly in the near future.
Alternatively, this was planned by Apple. Everyone knows THEY won't leak anything, but maybe, just maybe, they need to leak this kind of announcement to shake up the industry a little. There is no timetable announced, so the rumors will be flying. By Christmas? Next summer? End of 2008? Or timed with the iPhone SDK, perhaps -- "Oh, and one more thing... the new MacFingerTouch SDK also makes apps for this new iTablet."
First, FTA: "The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability." Funny or sad? You decide.
Second, some links about the system: buy it from WalMart, here's a big screenshot of it from the manufacturer's site, and although Everex doesn't list it among products, the model number and specification list makes me suspect it's kin to their GC2500 series, which doesn't appear to have any expansion slots (other than another RAM slot).
FTA: "...most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores."
That's exactly the problem with galaxies these days. They sit around all day, killing their brain cells on violent video games, unhealthy food, and astronomical porn (and listen, Vega doesn't look as good in a bikini as she used to). And what happens? Black holes at their cores. Big frickin' black holes at their cores. No morals, no ethics, not a clue about how to be nice to your galactic neighbors. When I was a young galaxy (and a rather handsome one too), that didn't happen. We helped old stars carry their groceries across the street, picked up the trash left by those damn comets, and had big parties when new stars were born. About the most reckless thing we did was a joyride through a nebula or two.
There is a web site that provides links to CRIMINALS, and the police pull down the web site? Why not leave the site up and use it to help track down the people actually creating and hosting the pirated content? Heck, I'm surprised the police were not operating the site themselves as a sting operation.
Whether piracy is Right or Wrong, it is presently against The Law, so this site could have been a useful tool for investigations.
For Radiohead, the profit in this is not just money. There is the massive amount of PR, as well (all the geek rags are talking about Radiohead!). And, there's the marketing list: everyone who downloads it from Radiohead's site (which is over a million people so far) have to sign up and provide postal and e-mail addresses. In other words, Radiohead now has DIRECT CONTACT INFORMATION to millions of fans. They get to manage this communication directly now. From a marketing perspective, that is priceless.
All my pages are static HTML. Not a web application in site, not even PHP. Yes, it's a drag when I need to do some kind of sitewide update, like adding a navigation item.
Umm... there are plenty of content management systems (say, Cascade) that manage content and publish it out to HTML. Even Dreamweaver's templating system will do this. Just because you use pure HTML, doesn't mean you have to lose out on sitewide management control.
So I must wonder whether you are either operating in an extremely bandwidth-constrained environment, or perhaps something else has gone very wrong during your trials.
The former, I hope. Try speeds of a 56kb modem or less. In rural areas of developing countries, or even in the U.S. if all you can get is a faint EVDO signal, then this is what you get (and you're happy about it, believe me). Once the data hits an Internet mainline, the distance and speed are basically irrelevant, but the final leg of the journey to the client is the bottleneck.
OK, I'll readily admit I don't understand the protocols underneath VOIP, and that I have unfairly maligned SIP when other issues are at stake.
So, let me clarify: on the same Internet connections, under the same bandwidth circumstances, using the same computers and same mic/headset equipment, Skype sounds noticeably better than Asterisk. That's my experience. I don't think Skype sounds GOOD, mind you -- it's like a poor cell phone connection -- but it sounds better than the alternatives we have explored.
I use SIP extensively, it's an open protocol, used by Asterisk and is implemented by a heap of companies, providing a range of services in a range of countries. Skype uses their own protocol, and has low call quality. This isn't what I want to be paying for when buying services such as Skype In or Skype out.
We use Skype a lot where I work. We've also experimented with Asterisk. The call quality with SIP is significantly lower than Skype, at least over low-bandwidth Internet connections (which we deal with frequently). Sounds like you've had a different experience, but for now, we're sticking with Skype, and watching this situation very closely....
I may have been driving too fast through Slashdot, so an additional thought. If iPod is losing to DRM, it would be able to play WMA or PlaysForSure in short order. I am sure Microsoft would be happy to license their DRM tech to the biggest portable music player in the U.S....
It's very humorous that people complain about Apple's "lock-in" with iPhone development, or with the proprietary FairPlay DRM. They are making money with their current scheme, so there is no incentive to change. But think about it... if the market changes, and truly looks much more profitable to them if they opened up these technologies, they would do it in a heartbeat. Is the iPod suddenly losing market share because of DRM issues? If so, FairPlay will be available for licensing tomorrow, and at rock-bottom prices. Is the iPhone selling poorly because of software lock-in? The SDK will magically appear, with great pomp and circumstance, again for little money. I doubt Apple can do anything about the AT&T/Cingular lock-in, but in four years it will be a moot point. And just imagine where the iPhone will be then.....
Common exercise: take the article, drop its text into Babelfish, translate it from English to and back again. When doing so from English to Japanese and back, the results are:
The translator of the specialist may face when being the technology which in the job placement place which crosses the world Fuji Xerox developed because of the most recent prototype photocopy machine it makes well, directly. The Japanese show [ the device of subscription link ] only presently, while maintaining the layout of the origin, scans the seat to which the Japanese from the newspaper or the magazine text is printed, Chinese, can stir English or Korean from that translation. Repel the switch of opposite direction and the work of language analysis. As for the secret of Fuji Xerox the text for designing the maintenance, in algorithm and the enthusiastic translation server and connects this being able to distinguish during sketch and the line there is a nameless copier in the networking. Concept 1 while touching, as for the translation machine in order for Babelfish and Google to translate, systematic with the many language which is crime (...) In case of the sentence which becomes ruinous because of the thing splendid thought and place were seen with someone who works machine-translation which is (MT) transferring/changing of technology from present formation of the software probably will be desired, is
Something has been lost, I think. Let's try a quick trip through Europe, though. English to Spanish, Spanish to French, French to German, and German back to English:
The translators of the specialist could steer early in relation to centers work in the world, if Fuji Xerox returns well in the technology, which he developed for his machine plus the latter only the photostat of the prototype. The device momentarily in the demonstration connection of the subscription ] only in Japan knows a printed sheet of the Japanese text of a magazine or a department and a butter outside of a translation of in English or Korean Chinese, investigates, during canned goods t - the original regulation. Shift from a traction a switch and the linguistic work of the analysis in the also opposite management. The secret of Fuji Xerox lies in creation of a net of the copiers innomada at a dedicated employee, and of the translation this with the algorithms to combine, those between the text, which designs and the lines for the cross-checks can differentiate between, it maintain. While the concept of one - the hood is the machine of the translation a admirable idea for everyone, which works regularly the repeated languages (guilty...), to wait the technology left us shifts ignition since the present generation of the software of the machine translation (TA), which can be the opinion that the speeches mangling in places, as the fish and Google of Babel translate.
Honestly, I'm impressed, "as the fish and Google of Babel translate."
Doctors complaining about how little they make as residents are whiny little babies that I want to backhand. First, all the poor little doctors say that they didn't enter the field to make money--then immediately start complaining about how little money they make. Then they complain about how they make only $55,000 a year right out of medical school and how that's nothing compared to the 80 hour work-weeks they have to maintain. But they ignore the fact that after they complete their residencies, they're basically guaranteed over $200,000 for the rest of their lives. Unlike law or banking, doctors have job security and high-paying jobs. Furthermore, the government pays the hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars for each resident they take to offset training costs. That's right, we pay for their education.
Over $200,000/yr? Think again. Family practice, pediatrics, internal medicine, all sub-$200K. Some average as low as $120K; psychiatry is sub-$100K. Still a cut above minimum wage, but then you have to support your family while paying off $300K+ in student loans (plus hefty interest). Then there is the little thing called malpractice insurance or, God forbid, an actual malpractice suit to clean you out and ruin your business. One little mistake made under extreme duress and you're screwed. Oh, and hours? Let's see, 70+ hours, being on call (in most specialties) nights and weekends... my goodness, it starts to sound just like being an IT support person, except that doctors invested 7+ years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in heavy financial debt, to become a tech support person for your body.
If becoming an IT tech took such a significant personal investment (time, money, and family disruption) up front, then maybe I would sympathize with you. But, it doesn't. You want to talk about quality of life? Erase every millisecond of your personal time and energy from the last seven years of your life -- then hand me a third of a million dollars -- and see if that still feels the same as your crummy IT job.
I say this as someone who has had those lousy overtime IT jobs and as the spouse of a medical resident. You don't have a clue. Not one.
Credit card transactions are in the range of 2-5%, depending on the credit issuer (e.g. American Express rates are higher than Visa/MC, typically). So there's 2-5 cents, potentially. Depending on Apple's merchant account and processor contracts, there is probably also a per-transaction fee for fraud prevention and the like, which is typically upwards of 25 cents per transaction. Given that Apple tries to batch-process charges on the back end (rather than actually processing individual micropayments, which would royally screw them in the current credit industry), the per-transaction fees might average out to a penny or two per song.
In other words, 7 cents is not unlikely. It's probably the high end of this cost, but the low end is only around 4 or 5 cents, at best. The GPP's point is that it comes out of APPLE'S pocket, not Vivendi's. But let Vivendi start their own store and figure all this out for themselves...
There's a difference between stated requirements and what you can actually get to work. Users of the open-source XPostFacto have known this for years. Can't run OS 10.3 on that old beige G3 tower? Sure you can! Maybe even 10.4.
Nonetheless, even 10.4.x is supported on the 400mhz PowerBook G3 (the version with a bronze keyboard and FireWire). It is not the speediest thing ever, but for email, Word/PowerPoint, and most web browsing, it's just fine. My main reason to consider replacing it: after seven years of use, the backlighting is starting to fade. But those dual battery bays are hard to give up.
This is about the stupidest thing that Video Professor could do. They just got some PR that they didn't need.
I don't know... sometimes any publicity is good publicity. Really. In America today, there are so many lawsuits that most people won't remember who or why Video Professor sued, but they'll remember that Video Professor does computer training videos!
OTOH, if the ad changes the conversation to discuss the advertised product/service/topic, then that's a huge success in marketing -- the online ad has suddenly converted into WORD OF MOUTH to the person on the other end of the line.
"Clinton Boisvert, an art student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, placed ominous black boxes labeled "Fear" in the Union Square subway station for a school project. His teacher, Barbara Schwartz, praised the project and gave the student an "A" in her class. She said the 25-year-old student intended to observe the public's reaction to his project....
Well he certainly got a reaction. In the bustling transit hub that I use continually people were frightened. An evacuation was forced for five hours after the 37 'Fear' boxes were taped to the walls, pillars and benches in this subway station."
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmmm...I wonder what will happen to all those iTunes songs once Apple moves to a new DRM or non-DRM format in the future and stops supporting their old format???
Nothing will happen to them. iTunes doesn't phone home when you want to play your music. It DRM's the song specifically for your iTunes account, then sends you the song. You can listen to it whenever you want, with or without Internet access. You can even select those songs and convert them to DRM-less MP3s, or burn them to CD and reimport them in DRM-less format, and then you don't have to worry about DRM at all.
Heck, even if your hard drive crashes and you lose all your music, you can boot up iTunes and re-authorize it to the same account. Then contact Apple, and they'll let you re-download all the music you bought on the account, at no extra charge. Officially they only let you do this once per account, but there are many reports of people doing it two or three times -- for example, their hard drive crashed but then they bought a new computer and wanted to transfer iTunes to it.
Nothing like OpenCanvas?! You mean, Corel doesn't make Painter for the Mac anymore? Has Autodesk stopped selling Sketchbook Pro for OS X? If not, then you are speaking out of a dark orifice.
Unfortunatly, ASUS will now suffer the Wrath of Jobs. [sic]
In other words, ASUS just lost their contract. Maybe not immediately, but certainly in the near future.
Alternatively, this was planned by Apple. Everyone knows THEY won't leak anything, but maybe, just maybe, they need to leak this kind of announcement to shake up the industry a little. There is no timetable announced, so the rumors will be flying. By Christmas? Next summer? End of 2008? Or timed with the iPhone SDK, perhaps -- "Oh, and one more thing... the new MacFingerTouch SDK also makes apps for this new iTablet."
I'm in a quandry. I see policemen beating lawyers on the streets in Pakistan. How should I be feeling?
That's a tough call. You should already be depressed, worried, upset, mad, and overall just frickin' pissed off at the terrible rape in the Congo (or even the U.S.), the starvation in Somalia (or North Korea, mothers dying around the world from a condition that can be treated simply and cheaply, incredible pollution in China and everywhere else, intense economic inequality in Latin America and how it's driving the obesity epidemic elsewhere in the world, the war in Iraq that will never end, and the spread of MRSA thanks to decades of using antibiotics too liberally.
This stuff in Pakistan is just more of the same. Please feel sad, perplexed, and angry.
The real question (which you missed) is this: what can you DO about it? Other than make snarky comments on Slashdot, of course.
First, FTA: "The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability." Funny or sad? You decide.
Second, some links about the system: buy it from WalMart, here's a big screenshot of it from the manufacturer's site, and although Everex doesn't list it among products, the model number and specification list makes me suspect it's kin to their GC2500 series, which doesn't appear to have any expansion slots (other than another RAM slot).
FTA: "...most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores."
That's exactly the problem with galaxies these days. They sit around all day, killing their brain cells on violent video games, unhealthy food, and astronomical porn (and listen, Vega doesn't look as good in a bikini as she used to). And what happens? Black holes at their cores. Big frickin' black holes at their cores. No morals, no ethics, not a clue about how to be nice to your galactic neighbors. When I was a young galaxy (and a rather handsome one too), that didn't happen. We helped old stars carry their groceries across the street, picked up the trash left by those damn comets, and had big parties when new stars were born. About the most reckless thing we did was a joyride through a nebula or two.
Dang kids. Get off my lawn!
Sure. Then the folks running the botnet identify you based on your DOS'd IP number, find out what your real IP numbers are, and crush you there.
At least, that's what would happen if I were running it.
...because they resisted the NSA.
There is a web site that provides links to CRIMINALS, and the police pull down the web site? Why not leave the site up and use it to help track down the people actually creating and hosting the pirated content? Heck, I'm surprised the police were not operating the site themselves as a sting operation.
Whether piracy is Right or Wrong, it is presently against The Law, so this site could have been a useful tool for investigations.
You don't need to track your wife... she's at my place.
I know. Gives me more time to spend with my girlfriends.
Or, I'll be able to type in "Where are Sonamchauhan's car keys?" and it pops up a map of YOUR house illustrating the last known position.
Now, if we could have Google track cell phones, OnStars, and EZPass tollway tags, we might even be able to track our teenagers and spouses...
For Radiohead, the profit in this is not just money. There is the massive amount of PR, as well (all the geek rags are talking about Radiohead!). And, there's the marketing list: everyone who downloads it from Radiohead's site (which is over a million people so far) have to sign up and provide postal and e-mail addresses. In other words, Radiohead now has DIRECT CONTACT INFORMATION to millions of fans. They get to manage this communication directly now. From a marketing perspective, that is priceless.
Umm... there are plenty of content management systems (say, Cascade) that manage content and publish it out to HTML. Even Dreamweaver's templating system will do this. Just because you use pure HTML, doesn't mean you have to lose out on sitewide management control.
The former, I hope. Try speeds of a 56kb modem or less. In rural areas of developing countries, or even in the U.S. if all you can get is a faint EVDO signal, then this is what you get (and you're happy about it, believe me). Once the data hits an Internet mainline, the distance and speed are basically irrelevant, but the final leg of the journey to the client is the bottleneck.
OK, I'll readily admit I don't understand the protocols underneath VOIP, and that I have unfairly maligned SIP when other issues are at stake.
So, let me clarify: on the same Internet connections, under the same bandwidth circumstances, using the same computers and same mic/headset equipment, Skype sounds noticeably better than Asterisk. That's my experience. I don't think Skype sounds GOOD, mind you -- it's like a poor cell phone connection -- but it sounds better than the alternatives we have explored.
We use Skype a lot where I work. We've also experimented with Asterisk. The call quality with SIP is significantly lower than Skype, at least over low-bandwidth Internet connections (which we deal with frequently). Sounds like you've had a different experience, but for now, we're sticking with Skype, and watching this situation very closely....
I may have been driving too fast through Slashdot, so an additional thought. If iPod is losing to DRM, it would be able to play WMA or PlaysForSure in short order. I am sure Microsoft would be happy to license their DRM tech to the biggest portable music player in the U.S....
It's very humorous that people complain about Apple's "lock-in" with iPhone development, or with the proprietary FairPlay DRM. They are making money with their current scheme, so there is no incentive to change. But think about it... if the market changes, and truly looks much more profitable to them if they opened up these technologies, they would do it in a heartbeat. Is the iPod suddenly losing market share because of DRM issues? If so, FairPlay will be available for licensing tomorrow, and at rock-bottom prices. Is the iPhone selling poorly because of software lock-in? The SDK will magically appear, with great pomp and circumstance, again for little money. I doubt Apple can do anything about the AT&T/Cingular lock-in, but in four years it will be a moot point. And just imagine where the iPhone will be then.....
Common exercise: take the article, drop its text into Babelfish, translate it from English to and back again. When doing so from English to Japanese and back, the results are:
Something has been lost, I think. Let's try a quick trip through Europe, though. English to Spanish, Spanish to French, French to German, and German back to English:
Honestly, I'm impressed, "as the fish and Google of Babel translate."
Over $200,000/yr? Think again. Family practice, pediatrics, internal medicine, all sub-$200K. Some average as low as $120K; psychiatry is sub-$100K. Still a cut above minimum wage, but then you have to support your family while paying off $300K+ in student loans (plus hefty interest). Then there is the little thing called malpractice insurance or, God forbid, an actual malpractice suit to clean you out and ruin your business. One little mistake made under extreme duress and you're screwed. Oh, and hours? Let's see, 70+ hours, being on call (in most specialties) nights and weekends... my goodness, it starts to sound just like being an IT support person, except that doctors invested 7+ years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in heavy financial debt, to become a tech support person for your body.
If becoming an IT tech took such a significant personal investment (time, money, and family disruption) up front, then maybe I would sympathize with you. But, it doesn't. You want to talk about quality of life? Erase every millisecond of your personal time and energy from the last seven years of your life -- then hand me a third of a million dollars -- and see if that still feels the same as your crummy IT job.
I say this as someone who has had those lousy overtime IT jobs and as the spouse of a medical resident. You don't have a clue. Not one.
Credit card transactions are in the range of 2-5%, depending on the credit issuer (e.g. American Express rates are higher than Visa/MC, typically). So there's 2-5 cents, potentially. Depending on Apple's merchant account and processor contracts, there is probably also a per-transaction fee for fraud prevention and the like, which is typically upwards of 25 cents per transaction. Given that Apple tries to batch-process charges on the back end (rather than actually processing individual micropayments, which would royally screw them in the current credit industry), the per-transaction fees might average out to a penny or two per song.
In other words, 7 cents is not unlikely. It's probably the high end of this cost, but the low end is only around 4 or 5 cents, at best. The GPP's point is that it comes out of APPLE'S pocket, not Vivendi's. But let Vivendi start their own store and figure all this out for themselves...
There's a difference between stated requirements and what you can actually get to work. Users of the open-source XPostFacto have known this for years. Can't run OS 10.3 on that old beige G3 tower? Sure you can! Maybe even 10.4.
Nonetheless, even 10.4.x is supported on the 400mhz PowerBook G3 (the version with a bronze keyboard and FireWire). It is not the speediest thing ever, but for email, Word/PowerPoint, and most web browsing, it's just fine. My main reason to consider replacing it: after seven years of use, the backlighting is starting to fade. But those dual battery bays are hard to give up.
This is about the stupidest thing that Video Professor could do. They just got some PR that they didn't need.
I don't know... sometimes any publicity is good publicity. Really. In America today, there are so many lawsuits that most people won't remember who or why Video Professor sued, but they'll remember that Video Professor does computer training videos!
OTOH, if the ad changes the conversation to discuss the advertised product/service/topic, then that's a huge success in marketing -- the online ad has suddenly converted into WORD OF MOUTH to the person on the other end of the line.
See here:
"Clinton Boisvert, an art student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, placed ominous black boxes labeled "Fear" in the Union Square subway station for a school project. His teacher, Barbara Schwartz, praised the project and gave the student an "A" in her class. She said the 25-year-old student intended to observe the public's reaction to his project.... Well he certainly got a reaction. In the bustling transit hub that I use continually people were frightened. An evacuation was forced for five hours after the 37 'Fear' boxes were taped to the walls, pillars and benches in this subway station."