unfortunatly it gets to cold here for HD based car mp3 players...
Interesting... I've used a hard drive based player (a Creative Jukebox 3) in an outer pocket of my jacket (ie. on the cold side of the layer of insulation.. it basically is the same temp as the air around it) in -18 C with no problems at all... so just how cold does it get where you are?
(I imagine the temperature requirements for car mp3 players are much the same as any other hard drive based players...)
Does anyone also think they were manipulating numbers there?
Absolutely. Reread the wording carefully:
noting that only four of 10 movies earn
enough at the box office to recoup the average of
$89 million spent on producing and marketing a
film.
So what they're effectively saying is that the average cost for a movie is $89m, and only 4 out of 10 movies make more than $89m. But that doesn't mean 4 out of 10 movies are profitable - the other 6 probably had much lower budgets and consequently broke even with a much lower revenue.
For example: let's say 4 movies cost $120m each to produce (the likes of Titanic, T2, etc.). Then to make the average 89m per film the other 6 cost about 68m each. Now let's say the 4 big budget films (due to superior film quality, more aggressive marketing, etc) make huge profits, while the other 6 only make 75m each. They still made a profit but they didn't make the requisite 89m. Now this scenario has been turned into "only 4 out of 10 movies are profitable" (that's not what they said, but that's what everyone heard), even though all the movies made a profit.
As for your job, I reccommend you look at finding a job that doesn't place such unreasonable demands on the amount of time you have to work.
Please explain:
Why he should have to follow such a strict, ridiculous recommendation from you or anyone else?
How you plan to provide any service that is guaranteed to work 24/7 without having technicians that you can reach at any time to fix unexpected errors? There are some systems where a fault just can't wait till morning, for example dam floodgate controls, passport control systems.. the list goes on.
I wonder why I'm even wasting time explaining something so obvious...
So then by the reasoning of these laws all bars should be equipped with cameras inside and outside.
I dunno how it is over in the US, but pretty much all bars and clubs here have video surveillance. They aren't required to, they just do. So what's the difference between that and if it was required? The result is the same.
On a side note, the video surveillance came in pretty handy for catching some people who produced handguns and shot some patrons of a nightclub in Sydney a couple of years ago. Every time I go to a club, I'm glad they're there.
Nobody is forcing you into a public pay phone either (I hope). But that does not mean they should be able to listen to your calls.
True, but that's an ridiculous analogy. Noone is talking about wiretapping the stuff you send out of the cybercafe. They are talking about recording your face when you walk in. This (video surveillance) has many legitimate uses, and is very commonplace anywhere where there are large amounts of cash.
Since they aren't hiding the fact that you're being recorded it's not really against even the most extreme privacy principles. You get your face recorded every time you buy petrol. So what?
Just think, if security cameras in cyber-cafes were not required by law, how many cyber-cafes would use that and not have them? They have large volumes of cash on the premises. And once you have security cameras in your establishment of your own volition it's trivial for the government to get access to anything they record. Whether they are required or not is really moot point.
It's been my experience that most people crying for anonymity on the internet are not big believers in freedom of expression. They are believers in freedom to not get punched in the mouth.
Sure. Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech.. just not freedom after speech.
And exactly what sort of holes does one stuff whole women into?
Well, you'd be suprised... I remember a guy in high school once said to me (out of the blue) "My sister fits in the microwave".
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 1
That's simply not true. The monopolies of the early 1900s were government subsidized. They were not free-market based. The gov't, through land grants, created a false economy for Rail Road companies (as just one industry example). I've yet to see a truly free economy, mainly because liberals seem preprogrammed at birth to screw it up, and put their hand into the system.
That's funny, what I remember from history classes is that after WWI and into the early twenties, the US government pursued what was called a "laissez-faire" strategy - based on Smith's theory that the markets would become efficient by themselves. However every major industry collapsed to monopolies on its own (this will always happen when marginal costs of production are low and initial setup costs are high, since newcomers must face a high setup cost to even get in the game while the established players can continue to churn out their products or provide services.. a good example of this is the airline industry, maybe not in the US but in many countries like Australia and Switzerland), and caused market saturation. You can't tell me there were no monopolies when the American word for "vaccuum cleaner" became "Hoover" and the word for "tissue" became "Kleenex". During that time Ford was about the only brand of car you could buy.
The reason that every industry folded into a monopoly was because of the advent of mass production that ended up lowering the marginal production cost of _anything_ to ridiculously low (compared to what they had been before) levels, and they did everything they could to lower it even further (remember Henry Ford saying "You can have any colour, as long as it's black"). How were the automotive and household goods industries government subsidised?
You don't see many monopolies now (excluding airlines) because after the first crash laws were put in place to prevent the monopolies from forming. Coincidentally, it was the lack of innovation caused by these monopolies (who had no incentive to innovate but only churned out more and more of the same) that cause the markets to saturate.
Microsoft's very success in it's operating system line has laid the groundwork for it's position to eventually be overtaken. Their is such a value in having the 'Next Windows OS' replacement that venture funding will always roll the dice. The potential profit drives companies to constantly assail what some think as 'monopolistic' positions held by MS.
Examples? What companies have tried to overtake MS by producing the "Next Windows Replacement"? AFAIK, Linux has been around longer than windows and was never touted as a replacement for it anyway - it aims at a completely different target market (only very recently has it started to shift its focus). Apple has also been around longer than Windows.. if anything Windows was originally a MacOS replacement. And they haven't won back a significant market share yet. What else, OS/2? Ok, we can have a laugh about OS/2 and move on.
If anything, Linux and the spread of it should show once and for all that Microsoft is _not_ a monopoly, and they do not exclusively control the operating system market.
They do not, but they tried. They failed, simply by virtue of the fact that their product failed to meet the demands of certain niche markets. They tried to control the browser market too, and succeeded. You might argue that IE has always been superior, but that's complete crap - with a lack of proxy support it barely qualifies as a browser at all. From IE2 onwards, they had managed to stifle Netscape's revenue stream by giving out their browser to everyone for free, thus precluding Netscape improving their browser in a meaningful way. They won, due to the fact that they had the deep pockets to continue to improve and support a product that wasn't making any money (since it was free), while Netscape or any other would-be competition did not. This is precisely why new software fails to beat out MS software - when an MS product starts losing ma
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You think Netscape died because of MS properietary hooks and IE/win9x/win2k pre-installed? Hell no, their code sucked. Their app sucked. IE came along early on and was orders of magnitude faster.
You clearly never used IE 1.0. I did... or tried to (at that point Netscape was up to about 1.4). Anyway, at the time my ISP required mandatory proxies to be used, and IE had no proxy support. But it did load faster. Notepad loads faster than Netscape too. Always has, always will. Unofortunately it doesn't let you browse the web, and neither did the first few versions of IE.
The only argument I heard for IE at the time everyone was switching was "it loads instantly"... but that was due to preloading during boot (by making it the system shell) rather than by any sort of superior code. They didn't care. For a long time it was a vastly inferior browser.. but it was there, and it did the job well enough (barely) that most people just stuck with it.
As for your rant about the free market, the real market is far from free, and deliberately kept that way. Your (US) government used to think the same way you do back in the 20s, and that's what led to the first Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. If left unchecked the free market tends to converge to just a bunch of monopolies in many industries.. it's been proven many times over that monopolies are bad, and this is what we're seeing here. It's not the "free" market in action, it's MS further tending towards its monopolistic state by grinding out competition. I for one would rather they didn't get there, but that's just me.
A lot of others support CF... My Olympus Camedia C5050Z lets you have both SM and CF in there at the same time. And I know at least some of the Nikon Coolpix series still support it. That's like, the other two major digicam manufacturers... so I wouldn't say "one of the only".
Also you left out the major reason to want CF, especially CF Type II - the CF Microdrives. You can keep an entire holiday's worth of photos (for most people) on one of the new 4gb microdrives. It's slow, sure, but with a dual card cam you can take your pictures on fast SM, and then copy them onto the Microdrive (just using the camera, no laptop required) when you have time.
My stance just comes from the "two wrongs don't make a right" proverb. To effectively bring about any change, I don't believe it is right to stoop to the level of the people who were wrong to begin with. I just think its better policy to uphold the standards you seek to promote.
Two wrongs don't make a right... but on the other hand, there is also a proverb "To fight with wolves, you must become a wolf."
Did you read my post? I was talking about naming recordings on the iPod.
Anyway, the iPod doesn't come with recording ability as a standard feature.
Well, that's answered my question. So you're saying that not supporting recording at all is better than one that lets you record stuff but not name it (like you couldn't work it out later from listening to them on your PC)?
Seems a bit silly to list that as a drawback in the Dell vs. the iPod, when the iPod doesn't support any recording (although I thought the new ones did? or do you need some ludicrously expensive iMic or something which is just a stereo microphone with a special connector for 8x the price?). What it should then say is that the Dell supports at least some ability to record, while the iPod has none, and it's an advantage for the Dell. Even if the iPod takes it to pieces in every other respect (which I'm not contesting here).
So you tell me if it seems similar or not to what the Jukebox has.
It's similar, but not the same. The jukebox wheel is about 1.5cm in diameter, and it's the same shape as most volume controllers in CD drives. It does have acceleration tho, flicking it quickly with your thumb gets you almost all of the way from a to z.
Simple. The iPod doesn't require any text input on the unit. It's all done through software.
So how do you name stuff you recorded? That's what you were talking about on the Dell isn't it? The Jukebox lets you control it all through the software too, AND on the player itself in case you need to. So you aren't losing anything, but you gain an extra ability you don't have to use if you don't want to. But it is useful for searching for songs by title/artist/etc... even then you need only the first few letters.
... in removable media mode.
Ah ok, so how about this deal, I give you some of my drugs, and you just forget everything I said about that;p It just didn't click...
Because I don't want to waste the time going through ~2500 badly organised songs and deciding which ones I no longer want, and it's not like I need the space. When I do need it, I'll delete them. Also the exact songs I like to listen to depend on the mood I'm in, which is why I don't delete them... if I go through them in a cheerful happy mood I'll end up deleting a completely different set of songs than if I do it in a gloomy mood.
I think the major strength of firewire is the fact you can draw a few amps from its power leads, compared to the 500mA of USB... which is an issue when you're fast charging a Li battery like the iPod does, especially if any daisy chaining is factored into the equation. That's also just pure speculation tho.
When am I ever going to listen to 15GB worth of music on my player? That's like my _whole_ friggun music library!
I loaded my whole music library (about 12gb) onto my 20gb Jukebox, and even though I never listened to a lot of it anymore on my PC, I still found it worthwhile.
How, you ask? Well, I made a shortlist (of about 1000 songs) on the Jukebox to exclude the stuff I really don't want to listen to, and now just have it play through that list on shuffle. When it picks out an old song, odds are that because you haven't heard it for so long, you won't be sick of it anymore, and will enjoy most of the songs it plays for you. And if you don't like a song, just hit the >>| button... It works well, try it.
I think he tried to say that it only charges when daisy chained... which would be annoying if you didn't have somehing to chain it off... but then again I can't read minds so who knows what he meant;p
Too bad if you have more than two of these devices.
Two? Most new motherboards have at least 4, or 6, USB ports. "New", as in mine is almost a year old and in this category. Now, even if I plugged in everything straight to the ports on the box, that would be enough (god damn, how many of those devices do you want??)... but I don't do this, because the box is under the desk and it's not convenient. Instead I plug my USB mouse, scanner, bluetooth controller dongle (kudos to MS for making a "bluetooth mouse" that doesn't work on any BT controller except their own.. and I occasionally use it on my desktop machine as a wireless remote when I'm watching anime from my armchair) and the occasional digital camera into the USB hub built into my monitor.. but it could be just any USB hub.
In the other room on another computer I have a generic un-built-into-anything AUD30 USB hub, sporting a USB printer, mouse, and WiFi card.
Everything works, and always worked without any USB-related hiccups. Also I've never heard of things that work in USB ports on the box but not hubs. So what is it exactly that doesn't work for you?
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's confidence ;p
(Score:5, Funny)And that's irony ;p
Interesting ... I've used a hard drive based player (a Creative Jukebox 3) in an outer pocket of my jacket (ie. on the cold side of the layer of insulation .. it basically is the same temp as the air around it) in -18 C with no problems at all ... so just how cold does it get where you are?
(I imagine the temperature requirements for car mp3 players are much the same as any other hard drive based players...)
Anyone who wants to now CAN-SPAM you as much as they like, legally.
Whoever was silly enough to think the Act was meant to do something else?
So much for the War on Terror then. And the War on Drugs. I guess America's poor still have some hope ;p
Absolutely. Reread the wording carefully:
So what they're effectively saying is that the average cost for a movie is $89m, and only 4 out of 10 movies make more than $89m. But that doesn't mean 4 out of 10 movies are profitable - the other 6 probably had much lower budgets and consequently broke even with a much lower revenue.
For example: let's say 4 movies cost $120m each to produce (the likes of Titanic, T2, etc.). Then to make the average 89m per film the other 6 cost about 68m each. Now let's say the 4 big budget films (due to superior film quality, more aggressive marketing, etc) make huge profits, while the other 6 only make 75m each. They still made a profit but they didn't make the requisite 89m. Now this scenario has been turned into "only 4 out of 10 movies are profitable" (that's not what they said, but that's what everyone heard), even though all the movies made a profit.
Please explain:
I wonder why I'm even wasting time explaining something so obvious...
Probably ... with attitudes like that I can't imagine him having too many people to talk to ;p
You mean, they won't be able to see my password of "********"? Thank god for that ;p
I dunno how it is over in the US, but pretty much all bars and clubs here have video surveillance. They aren't required to, they just do. So what's the difference between that and if it was required? The result is the same.
On a side note, the video surveillance came in pretty handy for catching some people who produced handguns and shot some patrons of a nightclub in Sydney a couple of years ago. Every time I go to a club, I'm glad they're there.
True, but that's an ridiculous analogy. Noone is talking about wiretapping the stuff you send out of the cybercafe. They are talking about recording your face when you walk in. This (video surveillance) has many legitimate uses, and is very commonplace anywhere where there are large amounts of cash.
Since they aren't hiding the fact that you're being recorded it's not really against even the most extreme privacy principles. You get your face recorded every time you buy petrol. So what?
And today's freedom fighters are often tomorrow's terrorist scum.
Just think, if security cameras in cyber-cafes were not required by law, how many cyber-cafes would use that and not have them? They have large volumes of cash on the premises. And once you have security cameras in your establishment of your own volition it's trivial for the government to get access to anything they record. Whether they are required or not is really moot point.
Sure. Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech .. just not freedom after speech.
Well, you'd be suprised ... I remember a guy in high school once said to me (out of the blue) "My sister fits in the microwave".
That's funny, what I remember from history classes is that after WWI and into the early twenties, the US government pursued what was called a "laissez-faire" strategy - based on Smith's theory that the markets would become efficient by themselves. However every major industry collapsed to monopolies on its own (this will always happen when marginal costs of production are low and initial setup costs are high, since newcomers must face a high setup cost to even get in the game while the established players can continue to churn out their products or provide services.. a good example of this is the airline industry, maybe not in the US but in many countries like Australia and Switzerland), and caused market saturation. You can't tell me there were no monopolies when the American word for "vaccuum cleaner" became "Hoover" and the word for "tissue" became "Kleenex". During that time Ford was about the only brand of car you could buy.
The reason that every industry folded into a monopoly was because of the advent of mass production that ended up lowering the marginal production cost of _anything_ to ridiculously low (compared to what they had been before) levels, and they did everything they could to lower it even further (remember Henry Ford saying "You can have any colour, as long as it's black"). How were the automotive and household goods industries government subsidised?
You don't see many monopolies now (excluding airlines) because after the first crash laws were put in place to prevent the monopolies from forming. Coincidentally, it was the lack of innovation caused by these monopolies (who had no incentive to innovate but only churned out more and more of the same) that cause the markets to saturate.
Microsoft's very success in it's operating system line has laid the groundwork for it's position to eventually be overtaken. Their is such a value in having the 'Next Windows OS' replacement that venture funding will always roll the dice. The potential profit drives companies to constantly assail what some think as 'monopolistic' positions held by MS.
Examples? What companies have tried to overtake MS by producing the "Next Windows Replacement"? AFAIK, Linux has been around longer than windows and was never touted as a replacement for it anyway - it aims at a completely different target market (only very recently has it started to shift its focus). Apple has also been around longer than Windows .. if anything Windows was originally a MacOS replacement. And they haven't won back a significant market share yet. What else, OS/2? Ok, we can have a laugh about OS/2 and move on.
If anything, Linux and the spread of it should show once and for all that Microsoft is _not_ a monopoly, and they do not exclusively control the operating system market.
They do not, but they tried. They failed, simply by virtue of the fact that their product failed to meet the demands of certain niche markets. They tried to control the browser market too, and succeeded. You might argue that IE has always been superior, but that's complete crap - with a lack of proxy support it barely qualifies as a browser at all. From IE2 onwards, they had managed to stifle Netscape's revenue stream by giving out their browser to everyone for free, thus precluding Netscape improving their browser in a meaningful way. They won, due to the fact that they had the deep pockets to continue to improve and support a product that wasn't making any money (since it was free), while Netscape or any other would-be competition did not. This is precisely why new software fails to beat out MS software - when an MS product starts losing ma
You clearly never used IE 1.0. I did ... or tried to (at that point Netscape was up to about 1.4). Anyway, at the time my ISP required mandatory proxies to be used, and IE had no proxy support. But it did load faster. Notepad loads faster than Netscape too. Always has, always will. Unofortunately it doesn't let you browse the web, and neither did the first few versions of IE.
The only argument I heard for IE at the time everyone was switching was "it loads instantly" ... but that was due to preloading during boot (by making it the system shell) rather than by any sort of superior code. They didn't care. For a long time it was a vastly inferior browser .. but it was there, and it did the job well enough (barely) that most people just stuck with it.
As for your rant about the free market, the real market is far from free, and deliberately kept that way. Your (US) government used to think the same way you do back in the 20s, and that's what led to the first Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. If left unchecked the free market tends to converge to just a bunch of monopolies in many industries .. it's been proven many times over that monopolies are bad, and this is what we're seeing here. It's not the "free" market in action, it's MS further tending towards its monopolistic state by grinding out competition. I for one would rather they didn't get there, but that's just me.
Genetically modified foods. Like the article says.
A lot of others support CF... My Olympus Camedia C5050Z lets you have both SM and CF in there at the same time. And I know at least some of the Nikon Coolpix series still support it. That's like, the other two major digicam manufacturers ... so I wouldn't say "one of the only".
Also you left out the major reason to want CF, especially CF Type II - the CF Microdrives. You can keep an entire holiday's worth of photos (for most people) on one of the new 4gb microdrives. It's slow, sure, but with a dual card cam you can take your pictures on fast SM, and then copy them onto the Microdrive (just using the camera, no laptop required) when you have time.
Two wrongs don't make a right ... but on the other hand, there is also a proverb "To fight with wolves, you must become a wolf."
Did you read my post? I was talking about naming recordings on the iPod.
Anyway, the iPod doesn't come with recording ability as a standard feature.Well, that's answered my question. So you're saying that not supporting recording at all is better than one that lets you record stuff but not name it (like you couldn't work it out later from listening to them on your PC)?
Seems a bit silly to list that as a drawback in the Dell vs. the iPod, when the iPod doesn't support any recording (although I thought the new ones did? or do you need some ludicrously expensive iMic or something which is just a stereo microphone with a special connector for 8x the price?). What it should then say is that the Dell supports at least some ability to record, while the iPod has none, and it's an advantage for the Dell. Even if the iPod takes it to pieces in every other respect (which I'm not contesting here).
It's similar, but not the same. The jukebox wheel is about 1.5cm in diameter, and it's the same shape as most volume controllers in CD drives. It does have acceleration tho, flicking it quickly with your thumb gets you almost all of the way from a to z.
Simple. The iPod doesn't require any text input on the unit. It's all done through software.So how do you name stuff you recorded? That's what you were talking about on the Dell isn't it? The Jukebox lets you control it all through the software too, AND on the player itself in case you need to. So you aren't losing anything, but you gain an extra ability you don't have to use if you don't want to. But it is useful for searching for songs by title/artist/etc ... even then you need only the first few letters.
Ah ok, so how about this deal, I give you some of my drugs, and you just forget everything I said about that ;p It just didn't click ...
Because I don't want to waste the time going through ~2500 badly organised songs and deciding which ones I no longer want, and it's not like I need the space. When I do need it, I'll delete them. Also the exact songs I like to listen to depend on the mood I'm in, which is why I don't delete them ... if I go through them in a cheerful happy mood I'll end up deleting a completely different set of songs than if I do it in a gloomy mood.
But mostly it's the time factor.
I think the major strength of firewire is the fact you can draw a few amps from its power leads, compared to the 500mA of USB ... which is an issue when you're fast charging a Li battery like the iPod does, especially if any daisy chaining is factored into the equation. That's also just pure speculation tho.
I loaded my whole music library (about 12gb) onto my 20gb Jukebox, and even though I never listened to a lot of it anymore on my PC, I still found it worthwhile.
How, you ask? Well, I made a shortlist (of about 1000 songs) on the Jukebox to exclude the stuff I really don't want to listen to, and now just have it play through that list on shuffle. When it picks out an old song, odds are that because you haven't heard it for so long, you won't be sick of it anymore, and will enjoy most of the songs it plays for you. And if you don't like a song, just hit the >>| button... It works well, try it.
I think he tried to say that it only charges when daisy chained ... which would be annoying if you didn't have somehing to chain it off ... but then again I can't read minds so who knows what he meant ;p
Two? Most new motherboards have at least 4, or 6, USB ports. "New", as in mine is almost a year old and in this category. Now, even if I plugged in everything straight to the ports on the box, that would be enough (god damn, how many of those devices do you want??)... but I don't do this, because the box is under the desk and it's not convenient. Instead I plug my USB mouse, scanner, bluetooth controller dongle (kudos to MS for making a "bluetooth mouse" that doesn't work on any BT controller except their own .. and I occasionally use it on my desktop machine as a wireless remote when I'm watching anime from my armchair) and the occasional digital camera into the USB hub built into my monitor .. but it could be just any USB hub.
In the other room on another computer I have a generic un-built-into-anything AUD30 USB hub, sporting a USB printer, mouse, and WiFi card.
Everything works, and always worked without any USB-related hiccups. Also I've never heard of things that work in USB ports on the box but not hubs. So what is it exactly that doesn't work for you?