You know, the default should be "what works for most users and doesn't terribly inconvenience all others". This feature works great and you can easily disable it or use non-phrase search for any specific query by clicking on the provided link. No reason to disable it.
I don't understand why people think that OR searches are somehow inherently better than AND searches. Come on, there is no reason to prefer one over the other, except for the tradition. If AllTheWeb decides to use AND (in a smart way, only for certain phrases) and it makes the search experience better, why not???
Being artsy alone doesn't make watching the film worthwhile, it needs to also be a good artsy film. And, as Nodatadj said, good artistic films tend to get 7+ ratings on IMDB. Just open their awards pages and check the winners. I think most of them are 6+ and many are 7+ or even 8+.
Of course, there are some films that are rated 1 or 10 by half of the viewers, like this one. Well, because of cultural differences IMDB users (American to a very large extent) can't always understand foreign films and this leads to unfair ratings from time to time. But guess what? I can deal with that.:) I rather ignore one good, but controversial movie rated 5/10 than waste my time watching ten crappy films. I need a filter and IMDB mostly works. I often check the reviews after I saw the film and formed an opinion and I can tell you that usually (although not always) I agree with the majority.
If you can point out some good but very underrated movies, that would be interesting. But please, relatively popular films:) , so that I can have a non-zero chance finding it on video in Russia or on P2P.
A movie will go from being 1.5 GB to >3GB if the spots are left in the movie.
Nope. If it's a cam version, I seriously doubt that these spots would be recorded at all. If it was a DVD, it would make some sense, or may be Telecine. But on cam version you would need VERY noticable dots.
I don't think it would be very difficult. There have been a story on/. a long time ago about a guy converting films to "difference" versions. The frames were replaced with differences between consequitive frames. I think that artefacts such as these dots would be clearly visible. And if not, then they are unlikely to be preserved after compression.
That's extremely strange attitude. I almost never watch movies that are rated less than 6 on IMDB and prefer 7+ ones. I still haven't seen all movies in their top 250. Why on Earth would I waste my time watching some crap?
When I check the TV schedule for the next week, I spend a few minutes to look up the films on imdb.com and I do not usually even think about watching any of the sub-6 crapola they like to show so much. Next week on TV: "Streetcar 'Desire'", "Westside story", "Rabbit-proof fence", "Das Experiment" and "Things to Come". Why then would I want to watch "Stranger in the House", "Blackout", "Armed and Dangerous", "Wishful Thinking", "Arresting Gena" or "Scary Movie"?
Well, I don't want to help MPAA, but I believe in the open exchange of information, so here is an idea.
It might cost a bit more than placing big blobs of shit-coloured paint on the film, but it would look much better. It will be especially useful when digital distribution becomes reality. Simply change the text on certain objects in the movie, such as house numbers, street names, license plates, etc., when it's not essential to the plot. You can make every print uniquely identifiable, while still making the movie watching experience as pleasant as possible.
This can be countered, of course, by simply acquiring two copies from different sources and comparing them (binary subtraction and then brightness x20). Everything that would survive compression should become visible.
As yerricde said, this is an optional feature that can be turned off in the preferences. I would also like to add that users are informed that it was activated and are presented with a link to search for the same words without quotes. And of course, it is only activated when the phrase is really common. And even better, AllTheWeb can group just a few words inside your search, not necessarily the whole phrase.
A few days ago I searched for "kazaa lite" on Google and found that no results are censored! The main KaZaA Lite page was the 1st result. That was only temporarily, of course, because right now the search is still censored.
I am sure that a few years after RFIDs become ubiquitous some company will come up with an innovative way to build an ultra sensitive reader that would scan RFIDs from 10 metres or so. And then you would only need to install enough readers in the cities and you would have a decent chance of catching most RFIDs there.
RFIDs are good because of their potential and because they are a step to smart matter and other stuff like that. But they are extremely scary, because the society must be ready for them. Unleash them in the US and who knows how the government and corporation may misuse them.
I was under impression that any breathing and walking human today already had a nearly limitless supply of free pens, kindly provided by various companies and organisation. The best thing is the variety, allowing you to sample all kinds of pens and select the one that best fits your hand and writing style.
If you want to shell out some money, though, there was some supposedly cool and innovative pen with a hole inside that you put your finger in to write.:)
I also suggest you to try a Google/Altavista/Alltheweb image search for "pen".:) When you find the one you like, just click on the link.
That's funny. Now is your turn to not take offence, but your counter-argument is nonsense.:)
Your example: 2 products, for one AB pays royalty, for other it doesn't. AB spends 1% of extra profits from product I and patent owner spends 1% from product II sales.
Now look at another example. The same two products, the same prices, but this time no royalty is paid by AB. Now it simply gets 1% extra for product I and 1% extra for product II. The only difference is that instead of sharing the money with patent owner, AB gets it all. The amount of additional investment doesn't change. The economy in general is not a zero-sum game, but indeed a lot of its parts are. Patents/copyrights are one example.
And you must also realise that while they might stimulate innovation, wider distribution of knowledge in case of no patents also has great benefits. But most arguments for patents and for copyrights are done by those industries that would simply lose their part of the pie, which would be passed to others, just like telemarketers don't want to lose their part.
It's really surprising how poorly people (people in general, nothing personal, Laughing_God) in capitalist countries understand that economy is in fact zero-sum in many cases, such as the one described above. That's also why the "jobs will be lost" argument seems so popular...
Yeah, sure. Next you'll be arguing for forbidding any parties on campus, because in the university people should be studying, not having fun.:) Guess what, it's the campus network. If people download music in computer labs, hunt them down and kill them.;) But if they do it from their dorms, that's perfectly reasonable activity. I understand perfectly well that campus network may be a part of the larger university network, but there is an important distinction. Even though the university is reponsible for providing connectivity in both university buildings and the dorms, the purposes are different. Internet in dorms is for fun as much as TV in dorms is for fun and as common rooms are for fun. People pay for a place to live there 24h. Obviously, they do not intend to study there 100% of the time and university should understand that. If the university is providing Internet access to the dorms, it better do well, otherwise students have a valid reason to be angry.
You also use several times the term "maxing out the big pipe". Well, let me tell you. If you are a network admin, it's your responsibility to manage the network, so that it's technically impossible for one user to take over the whole pipe, denying access to everyone else, not by blocking legitimate traffic (P2P in dorms is legitimate traffic), but by limiting individual connections so that a user gets 10Mbps downstream when there is no other traffic, but is limited to 256Kbps when the network is more heavily used.
Honestly, I don't see how this is a problem for Valve. Assuming they don't do something really nasty in the code, the exposure is harmless. It's unlikely another developer will use the code - too much risk. Cheaters might be a minor problem, but HL2 is primarily a single-player game, so Valve probably has at least a year to update the network code for multiplayer mods. Yes, the secrecy makes some sense in early development stages, but even then not much. The only problem might be early exposure to the game, like in the case of Doom3 alpha, but that won't usually affect the sales anyway. Look at Enter the Matrix - how much were sales hurt by negative reviews? Not at all. How much will Doom3 sales suffer from the leak. Not at all. How much will HL2 sales suffer. Again, not a single bit.
Market works wonders in the long term (at least it probably would for cartriges, although it didn't for razor blades). But the change is slow and in the short term (5 years or so) it sometimes needs a helping hand, otherwise we become aggravated by the slow changes. We, humans, tend to not notice gradual changes and are simply too hasty. In 2010 our present problems with RIAA, Lexmark and DMCA will be forgotten, because the solution would be found (unless, of course, it wouldn't be found and the US would turn into a fascist police state) and everyone will be happy. Meanwhile we are angry because the market is too slow - we can either patiently wait or try various things to do market's work ourselves.
There is no net positive impact for the economy from licensing fees. What one company gets, another pays. More earnings for workers in one firm means pink slips for another firm.
The only possible positive impact from patents is when more inventions are created because of the additional incentives. This is true to some extent in many industries. But it should be patently obvious that it's not the case for Lexmark. While you might be mislead by extremely low prices of new printers, benefits to consumers are not very clear, because of just as extremely high prices for cartriges. The price of one colour print is simply too great. This is an indicator that certain printer manufacturers do not turn the limited monopoly granted to them into public good. That can only mean one thing - the monopoly should be revoked, not strengthened by rulings such as this one.
No, Windows has been selling for $149+ since its inception.
You understand what the profit margin is, don't you? If the price is the same and costs are the same, profit margin will increase with sales volume. In MS case development costs increased, but their sales increased even faster. The relative prices of software are completely irrelevant in the case of software, because variable costs are approximately zero. If your program costs 100000$ to develop and the average market price for such software is 100$, your margin will be 0% at 1000 copies sold and 10% at 110000 copies sold. Yes, the margins can fluctuate wildly in the market, but my guess would be the averages are consistent with other industries. But Microsoft's margines are far from average, because they are a monopoly.
I have nothing against private sector.:) Of course, while the FOSS communication policy should have been be designed in the UN, actual communicating should have been done by private marketing and PR firms. No doubt about this. As for funding, markets are very far from perfect in this regard, because of how fundrasing works. People are irrational, that's why they will give their money to the charity with the best promotional campaign, not to the charity with the rightest cause. Ergo free market is not very efficient here and should be augmented (if not replaced) by public efforts.
I don't want to sound like twisting your statements, but I couldn't resist.
More often than not, people just don't care and continue to buy MS softwaredespite the fact that it's riddent with bugs and vulnerability, otherwise how would MS get money? The only other possibility would be because they didn't know. If they were educated, they'd install open-source software and use sound security practices. Educating them should be top priorty.
Really, I don't see much difference between these two issues. I am not equating capitalism to the AIDS epidemic, but I think AIDS epidemic and Blaster/SoBig epidemic both have lack of information as their root cause. The markets have shown that they cannot solve the problem by themselves, that why some government assistance is in order.
Markets are not the solution for everything. Governments should intervene when they spot a deficiency. To me raising awareness of FOSS clearly is a such case, especially because a significant part of the closed-source industry is dominated by the monopolistic moster, whose name should not be said.:) If we had a very free and open market, it might work without government or UN involvement. But there are no chances that open source (Linux in particular) can spend as much as MS on advertising. MS is a monopoly, that why governments should either hinder MS or help its competitors, especially OSS. To encourage competition, not simply to protect selected companies, like in case of agriculture subsidies.
Bullshit. When MS started making Windows and Office, it didn't sell these products with 80% margin. Neither did its competitors. The market was simply too small to support high margins. Software costs money to develop and it costs almost nothing to produce and distribute. Once the market reached its current size, people naturally expect MS to lower prices, as microeconomics dictate. The problem is, MS highjacked microeconomics by becoming a monopoly. That's why people are pissed off.
You see, most hardware drops in price as the market grows. But for some reason, this doesn't happen with MS software.
The government really needs to stay out of promoting things one way or the other. Let things handle themselves. The U.N. shouldn't be forcing people to be aware of AIDS nor should they be trying to write mechanisms fighting it, they should be trying to solve real problems at hand (any ideas what these might be?).
Like it or not, anti-AIDS drugs aren't always the best choice. Why not try doing something else, like asking people to abstain from sex while we put our heads in the sand? Chastity isn't evil.
Business has consistently stated that it is essential for governments to ensure technologically neutral policy towards different software models.
Do you honestly think that Redhat said that? Or may be Microsoft and alike said that the governments should be technologicallt neutral (i.e. preserve the status quo)? Open source doesn't involve spending a lot of marketing and PR, that's why the competition with closed-source is not fair. And that is why governments should do something to raise the awareness of the open-source.
If the telemarketer calls a thousand people and 1% of them submits the complain, that will probably be enough for the FTC to act. Even if you are among those lazy 99%, the system will still work. And if less than 1% complains, then that particular telemarketing call probably wasn't annoying enough.
As for you answering machine practice, it's simply impolite and not very smart either. Many people do not like to talk to the answering machine and will simply hang up. And you never know if you want to talk with them, until they say something. So you might miss a relatively important call from one of your friends or colleagues.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, the default should be "what works for most users and doesn't terribly inconvenience all others". This feature works great and you can easily disable it or use non-phrase search for any specific query by clicking on the provided link. No reason to disable it.
I don't understand why people think that OR searches are somehow inherently better than AND searches. Come on, there is no reason to prefer one over the other, except for the tradition. If AllTheWeb decides to use AND (in a smart way, only for certain phrases) and it makes the search experience better, why not???
Being artsy alone doesn't make watching the film worthwhile, it needs to also be a good artsy film. And, as Nodatadj said, good artistic films tend to get 7+ ratings on IMDB. Just open their awards pages and check the winners. I think most of them are 6+ and many are 7+ or even 8+.
:) I rather ignore one good, but controversial movie rated 5/10 than waste my time watching ten crappy films. I need a filter and IMDB mostly works. I often check the reviews after I saw the film and formed an opinion and I can tell you that usually (although not always) I agree with the majority.
:) , so that I can have a non-zero chance finding it on video in Russia or on P2P.
Of course, there are some films that are rated 1 or 10 by half of the viewers, like this one. Well, because of cultural differences IMDB users (American to a very large extent) can't always understand foreign films and this leads to unfair ratings from time to time. But guess what? I can deal with that.
If you can point out some good but very underrated movies, that would be interesting. But please, relatively popular films
A movie will go from being 1.5 GB to >3GB if the spots are left in the movie.
Nope. If it's a cam version, I seriously doubt that these spots would be recorded at all. If it was a DVD, it would make some sense, or may be Telecine. But on cam version you would need VERY noticable dots.
I don't think it would be very difficult. There have been a story on /. a long time ago about a guy converting films to "difference" versions. The frames were replaced with differences between consequitive frames. I think that artefacts such as these dots would be clearly visible. And if not, then they are unlikely to be preserved after compression.
That's extremely strange attitude. I almost never watch movies that are rated less than 6 on IMDB and prefer 7+ ones. I still haven't seen all movies in their top 250. Why on Earth would I waste my time watching some crap?
When I check the TV schedule for the next week, I spend a few minutes to look up the films on imdb.com and I do not usually even think about watching any of the sub-6 crapola they like to show so much. Next week on TV: "Streetcar 'Desire'", "Westside story", "Rabbit-proof fence", "Das Experiment" and "Things to Come". Why then would I want to watch "Stranger in the House", "Blackout", "Armed and Dangerous", "Wishful Thinking", "Arresting Gena" or "Scary Movie"?
Well, I don't want to help MPAA, but I believe in the open exchange of information, so here is an idea.
It might cost a bit more than placing big blobs of shit-coloured paint on the film, but it would look much better. It will be especially useful when digital distribution becomes reality. Simply change the text on certain objects in the movie, such as house numbers, street names, license plates, etc., when it's not essential to the plot. You can make every print uniquely identifiable, while still making the movie watching experience as pleasant as possible.
This can be countered, of course, by simply acquiring two copies from different sources and comparing them (binary subtraction and then brightness x20). Everything that would survive compression should become visible.
As yerricde said, this is an optional feature that can be turned off in the preferences. I would also like to add that users are informed that it was activated and are presented with a link to search for the same words without quotes. And of course, it is only activated when the phrase is really common. And even better, AllTheWeb can group just a few words inside your search, not necessarily the whole phrase.
At the risk of making Google look bad, decent search engines automatically add quotes to common phrases.
A few days ago I searched for "kazaa lite" on Google and found that no results are censored! The main KaZaA Lite page was the 1st result. That was only temporarily, of course, because right now the search is still censored.
If RFIDs are widely deployed then the receivers will have to be cheap.
Yep. And even if they aren't cheap, think about the number of surveillance cameras (which aren't particularly cheap) installed everywhere already.
I am sure that a few years after RFIDs become ubiquitous some company will come up with an innovative way to build an ultra sensitive reader that would scan RFIDs from 10 metres or so. And then you would only need to install enough readers in the cities and you would have a decent chance of catching most RFIDs there.
RFIDs are good because of their potential and because they are a step to smart matter and other stuff like that. But they are extremely scary, because the society must be ready for them. Unleash them in the US and who knows how the government and corporation may misuse them.
I was under impression that any breathing and walking human today already had a nearly limitless supply of free pens, kindly provided by various companies and organisation. The best thing is the variety, allowing you to sample all kinds of pens and select the one that best fits your hand and writing style.
:)
:) When you find the one you like, just click on the link.
If you want to shell out some money, though, there was some supposedly cool and innovative pen with a hole inside that you put your finger in to write.
I also suggest you to try a Google/Altavista/Alltheweb image search for "pen".
That's funny. Now is your turn to not take offence, but your counter-argument is nonsense. :)
Your example: 2 products, for one AB pays royalty, for other it doesn't. AB spends 1% of extra profits from product I and patent owner spends 1% from product II sales.
Now look at another example. The same two products, the same prices, but this time no royalty is paid by AB. Now it simply gets 1% extra for product I and 1% extra for product II. The only difference is that instead of sharing the money with patent owner, AB gets it all. The amount of additional investment doesn't change. The economy in general is not a zero-sum game, but indeed a lot of its parts are. Patents/copyrights are one example.
And you must also realise that while they might stimulate innovation, wider distribution of knowledge in case of no patents also has great benefits. But most arguments for patents and for copyrights are done by those industries that would simply lose their part of the pie, which would be passed to others, just like telemarketers don't want to lose their part.
It's really surprising how poorly people (people in general, nothing personal, Laughing_God) in capitalist countries understand that economy is in fact zero-sum in many cases, such as the one described above. That's also why the "jobs will be lost" argument seems so popular...
Yeah, sure. Next you'll be arguing for forbidding any parties on campus, because in the university people should be studying, not having fun. :) Guess what, it's the campus network. If people download music in computer labs, hunt them down and kill them. ;) But if they do it from their dorms, that's perfectly reasonable activity. I understand perfectly well that campus network may be a part of the larger university network, but there is an important distinction. Even though the university is reponsible for providing connectivity in both university buildings and the dorms, the purposes are different. Internet in dorms is for fun as much as TV in dorms is for fun and as common rooms are for fun. People pay for a place to live there 24h. Obviously, they do not intend to study there 100% of the time and university should understand that. If the university is providing Internet access to the dorms, it better do well, otherwise students have a valid reason to be angry.
You also use several times the term "maxing out the big pipe". Well, let me tell you. If you are a network admin, it's your responsibility to manage the network, so that it's technically impossible for one user to take over the whole pipe, denying access to everyone else, not by blocking legitimate traffic (P2P in dorms is legitimate traffic), but by limiting individual connections so that a user gets 10Mbps downstream when there is no other traffic, but is limited to 256Kbps when the network is more heavily used.
Honestly, I don't see how this is a problem for Valve. Assuming they don't do something really nasty in the code, the exposure is harmless. It's unlikely another developer will use the code - too much risk. Cheaters might be a minor problem, but HL2 is primarily a single-player game, so Valve probably has at least a year to update the network code for multiplayer mods. Yes, the secrecy makes some sense in early development stages, but even then not much. The only problem might be early exposure to the game, like in the case of Doom3 alpha, but that won't usually affect the sales anyway. Look at Enter the Matrix - how much were sales hurt by negative reviews? Not at all. How much will Doom3 sales suffer from the leak. Not at all. How much will HL2 sales suffer. Again, not a single bit.
Market works wonders in the long term (at least it probably would for cartriges, although it didn't for razor blades). But the change is slow and in the short term (5 years or so) it sometimes needs a helping hand, otherwise we become aggravated by the slow changes. We, humans, tend to not notice gradual changes and are simply too hasty. In 2010 our present problems with RIAA, Lexmark and DMCA will be forgotten, because the solution would be found (unless, of course, it wouldn't be found and the US would turn into a fascist police state) and everyone will be happy. Meanwhile we are angry because the market is too slow - we can either patiently wait or try various things to do market's work ourselves.
There is no net positive impact for the economy from licensing fees. What one company gets, another pays. More earnings for workers in one firm means pink slips for another firm.
The only possible positive impact from patents is when more inventions are created because of the additional incentives. This is true to some extent in many industries. But it should be patently obvious that it's not the case for Lexmark. While you might be mislead by extremely low prices of new printers, benefits to consumers are not very clear, because of just as extremely high prices for cartriges. The price of one colour print is simply too great. This is an indicator that certain printer manufacturers do not turn the limited monopoly granted to them into public good. That can only mean one thing - the monopoly should be revoked, not strengthened by rulings such as this one.
No, Windows has been selling for $149+ since its inception.
You understand what the profit margin is, don't you? If the price is the same and costs are the same, profit margin will increase with sales volume. In MS case development costs increased, but their sales increased even faster. The relative prices of software are completely irrelevant in the case of software, because variable costs are approximately zero. If your program costs 100000$ to develop and the average market price for such software is 100$, your margin will be 0% at 1000 copies sold and 10% at 110000 copies sold. Yes, the margins can fluctuate wildly in the market, but my guess would be the averages are consistent with other industries. But Microsoft's margines are far from average, because they are a monopoly.
I have nothing against private sector. :) Of course, while the FOSS communication policy should have been be designed in the UN, actual communicating should have been done by private marketing and PR firms. No doubt about this. As for funding, markets are very far from perfect in this regard, because of how fundrasing works. People are irrational, that's why they will give their money to the charity with the best promotional campaign, not to the charity with the rightest cause. Ergo free market is not very efficient here and should be augmented (if not replaced) by public efforts.
I don't want to sound like twisting your statements, but I couldn't resist.
More often than not, people just don't care and continue to buy MS softwaredespite the fact that it's riddent with bugs and vulnerability, otherwise how would MS get money? The only other possibility would be because they didn't know. If they were educated, they'd install open-source software and use sound security practices. Educating them should be top priorty.
Really, I don't see much difference between these two issues. I am not equating capitalism to the AIDS epidemic, but I think AIDS epidemic and Blaster/SoBig epidemic both have lack of information as their root cause. The markets have shown that they cannot solve the problem by themselves, that why some government assistance is in order.
Markets are not the solution for everything. Governments should intervene when they spot a deficiency. To me raising awareness of FOSS clearly is a such case, especially because a significant part of the closed-source industry is dominated by the monopolistic moster, whose name should not be said. :) If we had a very free and open market, it might work without government or UN involvement. But there are no chances that open source (Linux in particular) can spend as much as MS on advertising. MS is a monopoly, that why governments should either hinder MS or help its competitors, especially OSS. To encourage competition, not simply to protect selected companies, like in case of agriculture subsidies.
Bullshit. When MS started making Windows and Office, it didn't sell these products with 80% margin. Neither did its competitors. The market was simply too small to support high margins. Software costs money to develop and it costs almost nothing to produce and distribute. Once the market reached its current size, people naturally expect MS to lower prices, as microeconomics dictate. The problem is, MS highjacked microeconomics by becoming a monopoly. That's why people are pissed off.
You see, most hardware drops in price as the market grows. But for some reason, this doesn't happen with MS software.
1. Mass-market by definition cannot be cool. Cool requires a degree of exclusivity.
:)
Please tell me, what cell phone model you consider "cool". Isn't it a Nokia phone by chance?
After you are done with that, tell me what game console you consider "cool"? You might be a GC devotee, but my bet is most people will say PS2.
And finally, what is the coolest PDA? I guess Tungsten, CLIE or iPaq. Not Zaurus or some other obscure niche Linux-based device, tha's for sure.
The government really needs to stay out of promoting things one way or the other. Let things handle themselves. The U.N. shouldn't be forcing people to be aware of AIDS nor should they be trying to write mechanisms fighting it, they should be trying to solve real problems at hand (any ideas what these might be?).
Like it or not, anti-AIDS drugs aren't always the best choice. Why not try doing something else, like asking people to abstain from sex while we put our heads in the sand? Chastity isn't evil.
Business has consistently stated that it is essential for governments to ensure technologically neutral policy towards different software models.
Do you honestly think that Redhat said that? Or may be Microsoft and alike said that the governments should be technologicallt neutral (i.e. preserve the status quo)? Open source doesn't involve spending a lot of marketing and PR, that's why the competition with closed-source is not fair. And that is why governments should do something to raise the awareness of the open-source.
You aren't very smart then, are you? :)
If the telemarketer calls a thousand people and 1% of them submits the complain, that will probably be enough for the FTC to act. Even if you are among those lazy 99%, the system will still work. And if less than 1% complains, then that particular telemarketing call probably wasn't annoying enough.
As for you answering machine practice, it's simply impolite and not very smart either. Many people do not like to talk to the answering machine and will simply hang up. And you never know if you want to talk with them, until they say something. So you might miss a relatively important call from one of your friends or colleagues.