The PDF export is disgusting, it's a hack that takes the PostScript image of your print and sticks it in a PDF. It looks like ass and you cannot copy and paste from the PDF.
I think I get your point as well but what Wal-Mart is playing on in this field is putting studios against one another and playing their rivalities.
Studios aren't likely to all move to Itunes in one swift movement, they will do so gradually like the Networks did for TV shows. Where Wal-Mart has leverage is that they can scare the Studios and slow down the adoption, or even kill itunes movies in its infancy.
WalMart would never cut itself from $6.8bn of DVD sales just because they are angry. However, just like you mentioned substitution of point of sales was an option for customers (i.e. go to Best Buy instead), Wal-Mart can decide to drop one Studio at a time in retaliation; there is a high substitution factor in movies (not 100%, I agree); which means people go out to buy a movie and will sometimes go home with another. The real loser in case of a drop would be the studio, not Wal-Mart as sales would just spill-over to some other studio.
Now if studios had the balls to team-up and not give in to Wal-Mart they would definitely have some more leverage and distribute to whoever they want
Buddy, hate to break your momentum but according to business week (see link below), Wal-Mart makes up for 40% of the $17bn annual DVD sales. In my book that accounts to weekly sales of roughly $131mm
$131mm=40%*$17bn/52
I think Wal-Mart wouldn't give a fart even if iTunes sold $10MM worth of movies in the first week.
Money is Hollywood's lifeline, and cutting a weekly flow of $130MM sound's pretty life threatning to me.Yeah I know $130mm is sales, not cost of goods sold, but then again Wal-Mart sells DVD as loss leaders to get people in their stores. You get the point anyway.
A good way to mitigate this surge in power demand at home, it would be smarter to have an equivalent capcitor sit at home and charge over the course of an hour or two and then unload it's charge to the vehicule's capacitor. With this method you could even schedule your capacitor to cahrge during the night where electricity is cheaper (at least here in europe). What are the advantages vs a battery? Well your local Shell station could be running massive capacitors for you and you could just plug-in real quick without the need to wait hours at a time to fuel up.
I purchased one of the TV shows in the iTunes Store. Files are noticeably bigger at 500Mb for 40 mins. The video is way better quality than the QVGA we used to have. What's even better is that these 640*480 1.5Mbs h264 videos playback just fine on the iPod. What's the trick? was there an artificial limitation on playback capabilities? or is there an embedded file in the video itself?
Sure it doesn't have a gigantic screen, not does it have high res but it can playback videos at 30fps at 320*240 in Mpeg4 which is more than you can say for the 770. It also comes with 1 gig of flash ram, plus expansion port. Nevermind that you don't look as dorky making a SIP call with this thing as you do with your 770 against your ear. If they deliver gmail compatibility, IM, video playback, SIP etc... this thing might well challenge the 770 and other gadgets a little more than you think.
Wi-FI sip phones are already +$150, this thing would probably retail for under $300, which in my book is quite nice. Nevermind that this thing is almost pocketable where the 770 clearly isn't.
If it's gonna keep some cables than I would much rather have these cables suspended from the ceiling (although admittedly not straight perpendicular, with some angle as it is for this one). I can see many advantages to this vs the magnetic bed a) no giant magnet to pay for b) no giant electricity bill c) no 1.2 mn Euros bill (for 5K max you'd get my version) d) no bed bugs making their way from the floor.
No if they knew how to stabilise the bed without cables than I would be really impressed wnd would STFU. Until then, this will be for people with too much money and not enough sense.
If I really didn't mind redevelopping all my codebase I would just go with OpenOffice and it's Java implementation. The thing is that I have thousands of hours invested into VBA already, nevermind my experience so moving to Applescript is an alternative, but not a replacement for VBA in my eyes.
Well I work in banking and there is not a day that goes by where people use VBA. Not everybody knows how to code, but everybody indirectly relies on VBA.
Mom and pop shops might not require scripting, but you can't beat the cost and speed of development of VBA applications within Excel. It's not just about cost but about interoperability with our proprietary library plug-ins. If you wanted to code in Java or C, you would need to interface with some pretty hard-core librairies.
Macs were already a difficult for me to use at home as the VB editor doesn't support predictive input (very useful). No more VBA support means that I won't be able to work on some files at home.
Sure you can read and write compatible files with Ms Office. You can even run the "old" office under Rosetta with Support for VBA. But going forward, Office 2004 for Mac will no longer be availble and no IT manager in his right mind will go with an office suite that doesn't support scripting.
VBA is slow enough as it is, nevermind under Rosetta emulation. Now if there is no more support for VBA, companies will shy away from Mac even more. Apple better get their "Tables" (aka their Excel equivalent to Pages) working asap. And it better be fully compatible with VBA too.
A friend of mine works in a very large dealership of Germand made cars. New cars all come with a little plastic keyring with a tab attached to it. You scratch the surface of this tab to reveal a "Master Key". This key is akin to the RFID code needed to start the car, the dealer is supposed to give it up to the customer so that he can order a new set of keys, reprogram the other ones etc.. This dealer has some people scratch all of these tags before they are given to the client, because as we well know, joe client will lose this in a blink. Without this key you need to contact the factory, wait two weeks, pay a fee and than program some new keys. On this particular brand, you can program/pair up to 5 keys per car if I remember correctly; only 5 keys can have the same code, I you lose one, you can only have four more etc.. After you've lost these you will need to reprogram all keys once again.
My point is that at any level in this process you could have an insider job from the dealer, the manufacturer, or even some thief which goes through the dealer's bin picking these tabs if they aren't securely destroyed.
Forensic evidence for this kind of theft is nearly impossible to tell, the cars ECU don't usually keep a whole lot of historical data.
Nevermind that, if you get ahold of a dealer's servicing computer and a new ECU worth only a few thousand dollars you can actually reprogram the keys without need for the master key (plus you get to keep the ecu and put the old one back in when you abandon the car). The difficulty with this method however is not damaging the stering column or the physical lock.
I am French and am well aware of FREE's (ISP) ambition for WI-MAX. Just wanted to clarify why DSL is not economically feasible for ~10% of the population. DSL needs to be within 5-6 Km of a DSLAM, which as we well know don't come cheap and need hundreds of users to amortise cost.
Fiber doesn't suffer as much from signal attenuation (I've heard things like 15KM aren't impossible). So in fact, for these people FTTH is more of a possibility than DSL.
Get over it man. That whole "surrendering" thing is getting old. I'm not even sure that you know what started it all, nevermind who helped the pilgrims settle in the US and fight for their independence against England.
So do us a favour, pick up a history book and learn something for a change.
What's expensive with FTTH is the termination of the fiber to the homes, not so much the backbone. French experts agree that getting all the homes connected in France would cost approximately 30bn (with an average cost of 1500 per house). That may sound like a lot but in fact it's only the price of 500KM of new highway.
I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.
Thanks for addressing some of my concerns. I know what it's like to introduce a new concept/product and get a lot of questions/concerns from people outside. I admire both your courage and dedication to improve other people's life. Really.
I hope that you didn't take my critiques too heartly, I am merely trying to be constructive.
I think with a few safeguards, a little more incentive for the experts, and whynot reputation systems like others have suggested in their posts, you will be able to achieve something of great value where all parties benefit from the service.
And definitely do bring this to other fields of expertise, as good as I may be with computers, I'm helpless when it comes to cooking and would sure "trade" a few words of advice in IT for some healthy recipees.
Liability/support (for the one seeking help) and compensation for the one helping?
If somebody gets some good advice, and later needs to build something on what was already done, won't he need to explain to however is now the selected expert at Qunu what his problem is/was, what the Qunu expert helped him achieve etc.. Basically this guy will have no client file/historical so that whoever comes in later can pick it up from there. What happens if the next expert dissagrees with what the previous expert said to be done? The one seeking assistance will be confused as hell! Also what happens when the advice received causes a problem downstream, who's gonna get the end-user out of his misery?
On the other side, experts don't mind helping out on forum boards, and I think that the thing that makes this cooperation possible is that there is no one-to-one relationship, experts won't be necessarily reading the board all the time nor will they need to answer something they don't like/want to answer. Also they choose when they wnat ot respond.
With IM you are dictacted what problem (within a given field I concede), who you answer to and you are compelled to answer (we all know it is impossible to resist talking to somebody on IM, whereas emaied responses can more easily be delayed). The other problem is that you won't be using this while at work (not if you are honest with your employer), nor will you want to sit at home waiting for somebody to ring you; imagine this is like doing helpdesk support on the WE in your spare time, for zit, nada! ouch. For all this added stress/difficulty, what does the expert get? Nothing besides gratitude as far as I can tell.
All in all I think that this is a bad idea for anything else than a casual "how do you remove red-eyes in Picasa", "or what do I need to open *.rar files".
Guys please tell me how this would appeal to anybody else than the ones seeking help.
Btw; Qunu sound exactly like "cul nu" in French which means bare-ass. Funny translation I know but makes me think that's what ones seeking help are in for if things go sour.
I was brought to the same conclusions when I bought a Mac and realized that I needn't upgrade for web browsing and photos. The Mac unlike Windows PCs needn't re-installs, anti-virus and al.
Last time Allofmp3.com went offline for a few days, the traffic surged afterwards as more people were made aware of its existence and joined in on the fun.
If they weren't able to take down PirateBay **in the EU**, what chance have they got to take down Allofmp3 in Russia?
Sometimes consensus is not the best way to go.
Most *working* modern structures require some sort of "benevolent dictator". Well there should be limits but I know for a fact that giving everybody an equal voice distracts from focus.
As they say: "Camels are horses designed by consensus"
Publishing a price means that I can bid the asking price and get the product. If it is not available, then the price is "announced to be" and is currently non-existant.
Slashdot editors could learn a thing or two by spending a week in writing/journalist summer-camp. Day in and day out they write non-sensical blurbs, never mind they don't check-out the underlying articles, at least post a cohesive summary.
Slashdot Mirror
The PDF export is disgusting, it's a hack that takes the PostScript image of your print and sticks it in a PDF.
It looks like ass and you cannot copy and paste from the PDF.
I think I get your point as well but what Wal-Mart is playing on in this field is putting studios against one another and playing their rivalities.
Studios aren't likely to all move to Itunes in one swift movement, they will do so gradually like the Networks did for TV shows.
Where Wal-Mart has leverage is that they can scare the Studios and slow down the adoption, or even kill itunes movies in its infancy.
WalMart would never cut itself from $6.8bn of DVD sales just because they are angry. However, just like you mentioned substitution of point of sales was an option for customers (i.e. go to Best Buy instead), Wal-Mart can decide to drop one Studio at a time in retaliation; there is a high substitution factor in movies (not 100%, I agree); which means people go out to buy a movie and will sometimes go home with another.
The real loser in case of a drop would be the studio, not Wal-Mart as sales would just spill-over to some other studio.
Now if studios had the balls to team-up and not give in to Wal-Mart they would definitely have some more leverage and distribute to whoever they want
Buddy, hate to break your momentum but according to business week (see link below), Wal-Mart makes up for 40% of the $17bn annual DVD sales.
.Yeah I know $130mm is sales, not cost of goods sold, but then again Wal-Mart sells DVD as loss leaders to get people in their stores. You get the point anyway.
n t/aug2006/db20060831_806225.htm
In my book that accounts to weekly sales of roughly $131mm
$131mm=40%*$17bn/52
I think Wal-Mart wouldn't give a fart even if iTunes sold $10MM worth of movies in the first week.
Money is Hollywood's lifeline, and cutting a weekly flow of $130MM sound's pretty life threatning to me
Source --> http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/conte
A good way to mitigate this surge in power demand at home, it would be smarter to have an equivalent capcitor sit at home and charge over the course of an hour or two and then unload it's charge to the vehicule's capacitor.
With this method you could even schedule your capacitor to cahrge during the night where electricity is cheaper (at least here in europe).
What are the advantages vs a battery? Well your local Shell station could be running massive capacitors for you and you could just plug-in real quick without the need to wait hours at a time to fuel up.
I purchased one of the TV shows in the iTunes Store. Files are noticeably bigger at 500Mb for 40 mins.
The video is way better quality than the QVGA we used to have.
What's even better is that these 640*480 1.5Mbs h264 videos playback just fine on the iPod. What's the trick? was there an artificial limitation on playback capabilities? or is there an embedded file in the video itself?
Sure it doesn't have a gigantic screen, not does it have high res but it can playback videos at 30fps at 320*240 in Mpeg4 which is more than you can say for the 770.
It also comes with 1 gig of flash ram, plus expansion port.
Nevermind that you don't look as dorky making a SIP call with this thing as you do with your 770 against your ear.
If they deliver gmail compatibility, IM, video playback, SIP etc... this thing might well challenge the 770 and other gadgets a little more than you think.
Wi-FI sip phones are already +$150, this thing would probably retail for under $300, which in my book is quite nice. Nevermind that this thing is almost pocketable where the 770 clearly isn't.
That's actually a quite smart simple idea.
Are you sure however that there is no way in hell I could move it while jumping on the bed or else?
I mean having a 2 ton piece of stone falling with/over you is gonna leave a mark..
If it's gonna keep some cables than I would much rather have these cables suspended from the ceiling (although admittedly not straight perpendicular, with some angle as it is for this one).
I can see many advantages to this vs the magnetic bed
a) no giant magnet to pay for
b) no giant electricity bill
c) no 1.2 mn Euros bill (for 5K max you'd get my version)
d) no bed bugs making their way from the floor.
No if they knew how to stabilise the bed without cables than I would be really impressed wnd would STFU.
Until then, this will be for people with too much money and not enough sense.
Where people *don't* use that is...
If I really didn't mind redevelopping all my codebase I would just go with OpenOffice and it's Java implementation.
The thing is that I have thousands of hours invested into VBA already, nevermind my experience so moving to Applescript is an alternative, but not a replacement for VBA in my eyes.
Well I work in banking and there is not a day that goes by where people use VBA. Not everybody knows how to code, but everybody indirectly relies on VBA.
Mom and pop shops might not require scripting, but you can't beat the cost and speed of development of VBA applications within Excel.
It's not just about cost but about interoperability with our proprietary library plug-ins.
If you wanted to code in Java or C, you would need to interface with some pretty hard-core librairies.
Macs were already a difficult for me to use at home as the VB editor doesn't support predictive input (very useful). No more VBA support means that I won't be able to work on some files at home.
Sure you can read and write compatible files with Ms Office. You can even run the "old" office under Rosetta with Support for VBA.
But going forward, Office 2004 for Mac will no longer be availble and no IT manager in his right mind will go with an office suite that doesn't support scripting.
VBA is slow enough as it is, nevermind under Rosetta emulation. Now if there is no more support for VBA, companies will shy away from Mac even more.
Apple better get their "Tables" (aka their Excel equivalent to Pages) working asap. And it better be fully compatible with VBA too.
Because as far as I know, 5.1 Dolby Digital is 492Kbit/s for 6 channels. Not exactly lossless.
Do DVDs support any raw format? Anything lossless?
I sure hope this guy isn't thinking about DVD-Audio format because as we all know these flopped went the way of the dodos.
A friend of mine works in a very large dealership of Germand made cars.
New cars all come with a little plastic keyring with a tab attached to it. You scratch the surface of this tab to reveal a "Master Key".
This key is akin to the RFID code needed to start the car, the dealer is supposed to give it up to the customer so that he can order a new set of keys, reprogram the other ones etc..
This dealer has some people scratch all of these tags before they are given to the client, because as we well know, joe client will lose this in a blink.
Without this key you need to contact the factory, wait two weeks, pay a fee and than program some new keys.
On this particular brand, you can program/pair up to 5 keys per car if I remember correctly; only 5 keys can have the same code, I you lose one, you can only have four more etc.. After you've lost these you will need to reprogram all keys once again.
My point is that at any level in this process you could have an insider job from the dealer, the manufacturer, or even some thief which goes through the dealer's bin picking these tabs if they aren't securely destroyed.
Forensic evidence for this kind of theft is nearly impossible to tell, the cars ECU don't usually keep a whole lot of historical data.
Nevermind that, if you get ahold of a dealer's servicing computer and a new ECU worth only a few thousand dollars you can actually reprogram the keys without need for the master key (plus you get to keep the ecu and put the old one back in when you abandon the car).
The difficulty with this method however is not damaging the stering column or the physical lock.
On Wikipedia.org (arguably a better source) you will see that "it is also unusual to remember the aid given to the Americans by European powers such as France and the Dutch Republic"
So there you are. Nuff said, have a cookie.
I am French and am well aware of FREE's (ISP) ambition for WI-MAX.
Just wanted to clarify why DSL is not economically feasible for ~10% of the population.
DSL needs to be within 5-6 Km of a DSLAM, which as we well know don't come cheap and need hundreds of users to amortise cost.
Fiber doesn't suffer as much from signal attenuation (I've heard things like 15KM aren't impossible). So in fact, for these people FTTH is more of a possibility than DSL.
Get over it man. That whole "surrendering" thing is getting old.
I'm not even sure that you know what started it all, nevermind who helped the pilgrims settle in the US and fight for their independence against England.
So do us a favour, pick up a history book and learn something for a change.
What's expensive with FTTH is the termination of the fiber to the homes, not so much the backbone.
French experts agree that getting all the homes connected in France would cost approximately 30bn (with an average cost of 1500 per house).
That may sound like a lot but in fact it's only the price of 500KM of new highway.
I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.
Thanks for addressing some of my concerns.
I know what it's like to introduce a new concept/product and get a lot of questions/concerns from people outside. I admire both your courage and dedication to improve other people's life. Really.
I hope that you didn't take my critiques too heartly, I am merely trying to be constructive.
I think with a few safeguards, a little more incentive for the experts, and whynot reputation systems like others have suggested in their posts, you will be able to achieve something of great value where all parties benefit from the service.
And definitely do bring this to other fields of expertise, as good as I may be with computers, I'm helpless when it comes to cooking and would sure "trade" a few words of advice in IT for some healthy recipees.
Keep up the good work!
Liability/support (for the one seeking help) and compensation for the one helping?
If somebody gets some good advice, and later needs to build something on what was already done, won't he need to explain to however is now the selected expert at Qunu what his problem is/was, what the Qunu expert helped him achieve etc.. Basically this guy will have no client file/historical so that whoever comes in later can pick it up from there.
What happens if the next expert dissagrees with what the previous expert said to be done? The one seeking assistance will be confused as hell!
Also what happens when the advice received causes a problem downstream, who's gonna get the end-user out of his misery?
On the other side, experts don't mind helping out on forum boards, and I think that the thing that makes this cooperation possible is that there is no one-to-one relationship, experts won't be necessarily reading the board all the time nor will they need to answer something they don't like/want to answer. Also they choose when they wnat ot respond.
With IM you are dictacted what problem (within a given field I concede), who you answer to and you are compelled to answer (we all know it is impossible to resist talking to somebody on IM, whereas emaied responses can more easily be delayed).
The other problem is that you won't be using this while at work (not if you are honest with your employer), nor will you want to sit at home waiting for somebody to ring you; imagine this is like doing helpdesk support on the WE in your spare time, for zit, nada! ouch.
For all this added stress/difficulty, what does the expert get? Nothing besides gratitude as far as I can tell.
All in all I think that this is a bad idea for anything else than a casual "how do you remove red-eyes in Picasa", "or what do I need to open *.rar files".
Guys please tell me how this would appeal to anybody else than the ones seeking help.
Btw; Qunu sound exactly like "cul nu" in French which means bare-ass. Funny translation I know but makes me think that's what ones seeking help are in for if things go sour.
Amen,
I was brought to the same conclusions when I bought a Mac and realized that I needn't upgrade for web browsing and photos. The Mac unlike Windows PCs needn't re-installs, anti-virus and al.
...security
To be able to reverse-engineer the Skype protocol, these guys had at one point or another to decrypt the data, and encrypt it as well.
What this means is that they could configure their application as a SuperNode and intercept conversations, files, text in between.
Guess the AES 256bit encryption wasn't implemented properly.
Thanks Skype.
Last time Allofmp3.com went offline for a few days, the traffic surged afterwards as more people were made aware of its existence and joined in on the fun.
If they weren't able to take down PirateBay **in the EU**, what chance have they got to take down Allofmp3 in Russia?
Sometimes consensus is not the best way to go. Most *working* modern structures require some sort of "benevolent dictator". Well there should be limits but I know for a fact that giving everybody an equal voice distracts from focus. As they say: "Camels are horses designed by consensus"
Publishing a price means that I can bid the asking price and get the product. If it is not available, then the price is "announced to be" and is currently non-existant.
Slashdot editors could learn a thing or two by spending a week in writing/journalist summer-camp. Day in and day out they write non-sensical blurbs, never mind they don't check-out the underlying articles, at least post a cohesive summary.