"... the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD's."
I think Hilary Rosen might have encountered the concept of telling the truth at a party once, but didn't get beyond the cursory introduction.
I went ahead and RTFA to make sure the above statement wasn't being taken out of context by the post. It wasn't, and it might actually kind of be true if one is absolutely insistent on playing only AAC files on the iPod. The actual truth, which Hilary Rosen would likely not be willing to acknowledge without the threat of slow torture death behind it, is that the iPod works with sample MP3s that you might legally download from a band's website or any one of a gazillion legal indie music MP3 sites, and also works with audiobooks downloaded from Audible.com. But Rosen probably considers any music by an unsigned band to be beneath putting on an iPod anyway, and probably isn't too interested in audiobooks, either.
Other ridiculous ideas in the blog entry include: "He [Steve Jobs] is as laconically casually cool as Bono" and the idea that the iPod constitutes a monopoly. First off, Steve Jobs might be a little bit hip, but he's not cool except to the Mac faithful, the only ones who really care who he is (that's my opinion, though. I might be wrong). Second, a monopoly means that no-one can buy or use a product or service type by anyone other than a specific company. Ma Bell had a monopoly on phone service. There wasn't an alternative. There are zillions of alternatives to the iPod. The iPod is just really, really popular. That doesn't make it a monopoly.
The oddest thing to me is that no-one who would actually seek out and read Hilary Rosen's blog would be the least bit fooled by the misstatements in it.
This has gone beyond a mere culture war. This is a war being waged by the insane in their effort to subvert and ultimately subdue sanity itself. To replace science with Pentacostalism, replace teaching with preaching, and replace truth with myth. These maniacal, land-locked Southerners are determined to hammer out their new techno-theocracy at any cost, and they are winning, people. They are winning. They have seized control of the terms of all debate, seized the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and are within a hairsbreadth of controlling the entire Judiciary. We are heading inexorably toward the nightmare world envisioned by authors like Alice Walker in books like A Handmaid's Tale. All it's going to take is one more 9/11-style attack and you'll be having to recite Bible verses in order to leave your house in the morning.
I did a brilliant one. I got myself elected President by having a Republican-packed US Supreme Court back up a crooked election in Florida, squandered a national budget surplus on massive tax breaks for my billionaire friends, and parlayed a huge terrorist attack on American soil into an excuse to start an incredibly costly and intractable war that's succeeding only in destabilizing the entire Middle East and creating more terrorists. April Fool!
I do agree. I'm not going to condone Apple's heavy-handed approach to this situation, but I think that what happened with Enron, WorldCom, and the tobacco industry is nowhere near the same ballpark. Those companies were all concerned with the public's reaction, or the government's reaction, whereas Apple was concerned with the reaction of their competitors. Apple doesn't see this as someone blowing the whistle about corporate misdeeds, or some internal memo surfacing about studies that prove the harmful effects of their products. Apple sees this as industrial espionage. Certainly no-one is more interested in what Apple is cooking up than those who are in direct competition with Apple. I'm sure Apple understands that the techno-cognoscenti will probably look upon the leaked information favorably, even approvingly. But that doesn't help when Sony or Dell is given three months of lead time to answer Apple's new products with similar products of their own.
Sarah Vowell's book The Partly Cloudy Patriot has a chapter in it about how a remark that Al Gore made while speaking at a public school got misquoted by a single word and then blown up by the supposedly "liberal" media into a frenzy that took on a life of its own, and effectively, however unfairly and undeservedly, tarred Gore as a self-aggrandizing liar. I won't recount the story here... go borrow the book-on-cd from your local library. It's read by the author, so it'll be like having a defense of Al Gore read to you by Violet of The Incredibles.
From the book: "[Gore] was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you're not smart. You're a smarty-pants. It's annoying. People get annoyed with your knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework... 'There's something I should know, I don't know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don't. So I'm going to have to make fun of him now.'"
If Mars had plaid-skirted schoolgirls living on it they'd have been there twenty years ago. Am I right? Am I right? Is this thing on? Thank you, I'll be here all week.
People will be snapping up the *sucks.com domain names now, but be warned, companies will still threaten suits for trade defamation if they find disparaging remarks about them or their products on the web.
Check out the offerings distributed by Public Radio International. The archives of many of their shows are available to listen to for free. Specifically, check out This American Life, To the Best of Our Knowledge, and Sound & Spirit. If you're able to record these shows from the archives (using some sort of scheduled stream-ripper like iRecordMusic or WireTap Pro), or purchase them (through Audible or ITMS), they can make an hour-long commute feel like mere minutes.
And for your Monday morning commute, make sure you've got the latest installment of Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me!, the NPR news quiz.
Or is she a little to old for the role? Is Wonder Woman supposed to be in her early 20s?
SuperDickery.com has a surprising pic of a Wonder Woman panel, followed by a pretty funny caption.
The spammer is suing this fellow for defamation for putting insulting remarks about them on his website. Clearly they're trying to both shut him up about their spamming operation and keep him from pursuing them in court for violating CAN-SPAM. This company will probably end up paying every cent of their victim's legal bills, and are only drawing attention to themselves. Pretty foolish, if you ask me.
I'm surprised to hear that Microsoft's refusal to adopt international standards in their browser actually thwarts a potential phishing attack rather than aiding it. If the problem can't be fixed in the browsers, maybe email clients and websites can find some way of decoding, detecting, and disabling such links. Are phishers going to bother trying to use this exploit if it works on less than 10% of their potential victims?
And when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was interviewing the members of Bon Jovi, he commented on the fact that they were using his image on some of the passes. "I'll sue your asses!" he shouts at them, "I'm not kidding! Ask the sock puppet!" and then the scene cuts to him having his way with the sock puppet while huffing, "Say my name! What's my name?! Say it! Say my name!" Ah, late night TV.
No, what's up with that? I would just get to the bottom of the thing and before I could read the last paragraph, the page would refresh to a new slide. The little "Stop" link at the top doesn't seem to do anything, either. I was also disappointed that they don't seem to showing the commercials in their entirety.
I disagree on that point. The director is composing the scenes to fit within that wide-screen format, and then MGM was recomposing the scenes and then re-cropping them.
I use iPhoto to manage my digital photo collection, and I often crop my images creatively before either printing them or sending them to people. But if someone takes a portion of one of my images, that's not the image as I see it, but a reinterpretation of it.
If I take a photo of Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra standing next to each other, and crop out Frank Sinatra, that's quite a different photo, one that won't make the same impression as the original. I had a point with this but now I've forgotten it.
Oh, no, please, don't get me started on this whole thing!
The store that I worked at decided to hop on the panoramic bandwagon by offering to print the "panoramic" pictures in-house. The way they did that was to use the color enlarging printer to make an 8x12 of each photo and then use a paper-trimmer to chop off the blackness on the top and bottom!
And here's the kicker... they would charge a lot less for a one of these "panoramic" prints than they would charge for a regular 8x12, even though it was actually much more work to print the "panoramic" shots. Not only was it a hassle to trim the print, but the large blank areas on the top and bottom of the shot would throw off the automatic negative density sensor to a degree that meant making adjustments to the machine when printing... a hassle.
Essentially, people who were paying full price for enlargements were subsidizing the people who had fallen for the "panoramic" crap.
It was just a huge, stupid hornswaggle on the photographically illiterate American public. The camera industry and its photofinishing allies were telling people "Look, bigger pictures!" when, in fact, the reality was, "Look, cropped enlargements!"
MGM is guilty, then, of much the same thing. They're saying, "Look, letterboxing!" when, in fact, the reality is, "Look, masked pan-and-scan!"
Back in the 1990s, when I worked at a camera store, my coworkers and I were excited when the "panoramic" cameras were introduced. We thought that they'd use a wider strip of 35mm film and actually take a physically wider picture. However, the only thing that differentiates a "panoramic" camera from a regular camera is that the "panoramic" camera masks off the top and bottom of the picture, leaving a blank space that tells the photofinisher to basically enlarge the picture onto a larger sheet of photographic paper. The actual image isn't any larger.
But the sad thing is that I used to try to explain to people that it wasn't really a panoramic picture at all. It wasn't using a larger piece of film to shoot onto, it was using a smaller piece of film to shoot onto and then blowing it up bigger when printing. And people would stare at me blankly and say, "So what? It's still a larger picture."
I'm just glad that this DVD version of the swindle resulted in a lawsuit and a settlement. To think they would do that to a filmmaker's creative work and assume that no-one would notice. How stupid do they think people are? And to think that these companies have the nerve to complain about piracy of their movies, when they're willing to turn a masterfully crafted piece of cinematography into a pile of crap and sell it to us under false pretenses. Uh-oh, I'm foaming at the mouth again. Someone pass me a kleenex.
I use the.mac service, but it really pays off for me to have it, since I use a Mac at work and one at home. It's nice to have a common gigabyte of space that synchronizes between the two computers. And there's the nice email with aliases that I get to set up, and some free software, and online photo albums that I can automatically publish to with iPhoto, iCal sync-ing, Safari Bookmarks sync-ing, and and stuff like that. I don't know if the $60-a-year Outlook will include any of those kinds of features.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Hilary Rosen might have encountered the concept of telling the truth at a party once, but didn't get beyond the cursory introduction.
I went ahead and RTFA to make sure the above statement wasn't being taken out of context by the post. It wasn't, and it might actually kind of be true if one is absolutely insistent on playing only AAC files on the iPod. The actual truth, which Hilary Rosen would likely not be willing to acknowledge without the threat of slow torture death behind it, is that the iPod works with sample MP3s that you might legally download from a band's website or any one of a gazillion legal indie music MP3 sites, and also works with audiobooks downloaded from Audible.com. But Rosen probably considers any music by an unsigned band to be beneath putting on an iPod anyway, and probably isn't too interested in audiobooks, either.
Other ridiculous ideas in the blog entry include: "He [Steve Jobs] is as laconically casually cool as Bono" and the idea that the iPod constitutes a monopoly. First off, Steve Jobs might be a little bit hip, but he's not cool except to the Mac faithful, the only ones who really care who he is (that's my opinion, though. I might be wrong). Second, a monopoly means that no-one can buy or use a product or service type by anyone other than a specific company. Ma Bell had a monopoly on phone service. There wasn't an alternative. There are zillions of alternatives to the iPod. The iPod is just really, really popular. That doesn't make it a monopoly.
The oddest thing to me is that no-one who would actually seek out and read Hilary Rosen's blog would be the least bit fooled by the misstatements in it.
This has gone beyond a mere culture war. This is a war being waged by the insane in their effort to subvert and ultimately subdue sanity itself. To replace science with Pentacostalism, replace teaching with preaching, and replace truth with myth. These maniacal, land-locked Southerners are determined to hammer out their new techno-theocracy at any cost, and they are winning, people. They are winning. They have seized control of the terms of all debate, seized the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and are within a hairsbreadth of controlling the entire Judiciary. We are heading inexorably toward the nightmare world envisioned by authors like Alice Walker in books like A Handmaid's Tale. All it's going to take is one more 9/11-style attack and you'll be having to recite Bible verses in order to leave your house in the morning.
I did a brilliant one. I got myself elected President by having a Republican-packed US Supreme Court back up a crooked election in Florida, squandered a national budget surplus on massive tax breaks for my billionaire friends, and parlayed a huge terrorist attack on American soil into an excuse to start an incredibly costly and intractable war that's succeeding only in destabilizing the entire Middle East and creating more terrorists. April Fool!
I do agree. I'm not going to condone Apple's heavy-handed approach to this situation, but I think that what happened with Enron, WorldCom, and the tobacco industry is nowhere near the same ballpark. Those companies were all concerned with the public's reaction, or the government's reaction, whereas Apple was concerned with the reaction of their competitors. Apple doesn't see this as someone blowing the whistle about corporate misdeeds, or some internal memo surfacing about studies that prove the harmful effects of their products. Apple sees this as industrial espionage. Certainly no-one is more interested in what Apple is cooking up than those who are in direct competition with Apple. I'm sure Apple understands that the techno-cognoscenti will probably look upon the leaked information favorably, even approvingly. But that doesn't help when Sony or Dell is given three months of lead time to answer Apple's new products with similar products of their own.
Sarah Vowell's book The Partly Cloudy Patriot has a chapter in it about how a remark that Al Gore made while speaking at a public school got misquoted by a single word and then blown up by the supposedly "liberal" media into a frenzy that took on a life of its own, and effectively, however unfairly and undeservedly, tarred Gore as a self-aggrandizing liar. I won't recount the story here... go borrow the book-on-cd from your local library. It's read by the author, so it'll be like having a defense of Al Gore read to you by Violet of The Incredibles.
... 'There's something I should know, I don't know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don't. So I'm going to have to make fun of him now.'"
From the book:
"[Gore] was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you're not smart. You're a smarty-pants. It's annoying. People get annoyed with your knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework
If Mars had plaid-skirted schoolgirls living on it they'd have been there twenty years ago. Am I right? Am I right? Is this thing on? Thank you, I'll be here all week.
I can only imagine what Triumph the Insult Comic Dog would to have to say about this group.
People will be snapping up the *sucks.com domain names now, but be warned, companies will still threaten suits for trade defamation if they find disparaging remarks about them or their products on the web.
Check out the offerings distributed by Public Radio International. The archives of many of their shows are available to listen to for free. Specifically, check out This American Life , To the Best of Our Knowledge , and Sound & Spirit . If you're able to record these shows from the archives (using some sort of scheduled stream-ripper like iRecordMusic or WireTap Pro), or purchase them (through Audible or ITMS), they can make an hour-long commute feel like mere minutes.
And for your Monday morning commute, make sure you've got the latest installment of Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me! , the NPR news quiz.
Or is she a little to old for the role? Is Wonder Woman supposed to be in her early 20s?
SuperDickery.com has a surprising pic of a Wonder Woman panel, followed by a pretty funny caption.
The spammer is suing this fellow for defamation for putting insulting remarks about them on his website. Clearly they're trying to both shut him up about their spamming operation and keep him from pursuing them in court for violating CAN-SPAM. This company will probably end up paying every cent of their victim's legal bills, and are only drawing attention to themselves. Pretty foolish, if you ask me.
Finally, I can move out of my parents' basement!
I wonder if they'll try to block pages that oppose polygamy.
Everyone's reaction sounds like Louis in Casablanca... "I'm shocked... shocked to find no evidence to support SCO's case!"
How about the little red devil jabbing his pitchfork into a patent lawyer's behind?
I'm surprised to hear that Microsoft's refusal to adopt international standards in their browser actually thwarts a potential phishing attack rather than aiding it. If the problem can't be fixed in the browsers, maybe email clients and websites can find some way of decoding, detecting, and disabling such links. Are phishers going to bother trying to use this exploit if it works on less than 10% of their potential victims?
I love how the spyware the Windows OS attracts interoperates with other spyware on the system.
And when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was interviewing the members of Bon Jovi, he commented on the fact that they were using his image on some of the passes. "I'll sue your asses!" he shouts at them, "I'm not kidding! Ask the sock puppet!" and then the scene cuts to him having his way with the sock puppet while huffing, "Say my name! What's my name?! Say it! Say my name!" Ah, late night TV.
No, what's up with that? I would just get to the bottom of the thing and before I could read the last paragraph, the page would refresh to a new slide. The little "Stop" link at the top doesn't seem to do anything, either. I was also disappointed that they don't seem to showing the commercials in their entirety.
I disagree on that point. The director is composing the scenes to fit within that wide-screen format, and then MGM was recomposing the scenes and then re-cropping them.
I use iPhoto to manage my digital photo collection, and I often crop my images creatively before either printing them or sending them to people. But if someone takes a portion of one of my images, that's not the image as I see it, but a reinterpretation of it.
If I take a photo of Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra standing next to each other, and crop out Frank Sinatra, that's quite a different photo, one that won't make the same impression as the original. I had a point with this but now I've forgotten it.
Oh, no, please, don't get me started on this whole thing!
The store that I worked at decided to hop on the panoramic bandwagon by offering to print the "panoramic" pictures in-house. The way they did that was to use the color enlarging printer to make an 8x12 of each photo and then use a paper-trimmer to chop off the blackness on the top and bottom!
And here's the kicker... they would charge a lot less for a one of these "panoramic" prints than they would charge for a regular 8x12, even though it was actually much more work to print the "panoramic" shots. Not only was it a hassle to trim the print, but the large blank areas on the top and bottom of the shot would throw off the automatic negative density sensor to a degree that meant making adjustments to the machine when printing... a hassle.
Essentially, people who were paying full price for enlargements were subsidizing the people who had fallen for the "panoramic" crap.
It was just a huge, stupid hornswaggle on the photographically illiterate American public. The camera industry and its photofinishing allies were telling people "Look, bigger pictures!" when, in fact, the reality was, "Look, cropped enlargements!"
MGM is guilty, then, of much the same thing. They're saying, "Look, letterboxing!" when, in fact, the reality is, "Look, masked pan-and-scan!"
Back in the 1990s, when I worked at a camera store, my coworkers and I were excited when the "panoramic" cameras were introduced. We thought that they'd use a wider strip of 35mm film and actually take a physically wider picture. However, the only thing that differentiates a "panoramic" camera from a regular camera is that the "panoramic" camera masks off the top and bottom of the picture, leaving a blank space that tells the photofinisher to basically enlarge the picture onto a larger sheet of photographic paper. The actual image isn't any larger.
But the sad thing is that I used to try to explain to people that it wasn't really a panoramic picture at all. It wasn't using a larger piece of film to shoot onto, it was using a smaller piece of film to shoot onto and then blowing it up bigger when printing. And people would stare at me blankly and say, "So what? It's still a larger picture."
I'm just glad that this DVD version of the swindle resulted in a lawsuit and a settlement. To think they would do that to a filmmaker's creative work and assume that no-one would notice. How stupid do they think people are? And to think that these companies have the nerve to complain about piracy of their movies, when they're willing to turn a masterfully crafted piece of cinematography into a pile of crap and sell it to us under false pretenses. Uh-oh, I'm foaming at the mouth again. Someone pass me a kleenex.
I'm inviting everyone to join my social network... except for YOU GUYS! Nah nah nah nah nah nah!
Ah, the spirit of Jacques Vaucanson lives on, more than two centuries later.
I use the .mac service, but it really pays off for me to have it, since I use a Mac at work and one at home. It's nice to have a common gigabyte of space that synchronizes between the two computers. And there's the nice email with aliases that I get to set up, and some free software, and online photo albums that I can automatically publish to with iPhoto, iCal sync-ing, Safari Bookmarks sync-ing, and and stuff like that. I don't know if the $60-a-year Outlook will include any of those kinds of features.