Here's the thing that I don't get about iTunes and iPods. Why don't they have an interface for other people to write compatible plugins? This is a feature of nearly every other pc music player (although not many hardware players.) People talk about how the open source community isn't enough of a market to warrant extra effort, but the fact is that the open source community will support itself if they have the tools to do it. Given a well documented interface, and a simple tool for flashing the ipod, I'd be willing to bet that we'd see ogg vorbis support in 2 weeks. I'm sure someone out there is willing to do the assembly hacking it would take to decode it with the same hardware.
I won't buy an iPod, but not because it doesn't support ogg vorbis. I won't buy it until it supports arbitrary formats, i.e. if you need the support you have the option of reasonably writing it in, or finding someone else who already has.
Kefka was the most evil character I've ever seen in a video game.
I think SHODAN could give him a run for his money.
Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.
As for helping poor countries establish stable democracies, the Cato Institute had a study several years ago positing that property rights, more than any other single variable, were the key to long term stability and prosperity. Interesting reading, if you can find it.
I'm not saying they are wrong, but if the Cato institute had concluded anything else, I'd just about shit a brick.
As for vesting, I think that it should be more like patents. Upon creating a work, you can get a copyright, but that window of opportunity swiftly expires. Thus, authors that don't care (such as most of us here vis-a-vis our posts) can take no action and no copyright will ensue, but authors that do care can engage in a token action so that they are identifying themselves and the relevant works, and can get rights in them. For patents, it's a year from the time when the invention becomes publicly known (paraphrased). I figure that's a good span of time.
I take it that you don't personally know anyone who creates works for which copyright is important.
My mother is a self-employed medical illustrator. Over the course of her career she has created and sold thousands of images. Her work has also been published in violation of her copyright with disappointing frequency, and this is common in the field. Unfortunately, it simply isn't economically feasible to go to court. An individual artist does not have the capital to pursue litigation against a large publishing company. Periodically a publishing house will trample on enough people that they can coordinate and pool resources, but the gains are minimal and it is a stressful time consuming process for everyone involved.
Now can you imagine what it would be like if every single work had to be registered with a government office to get any legal protection whatsoever? There are many more fields that are affected by copyright than are contained in the common vision of decadent pop music stars.
At any rate, I don't think any government agency would have the capacity to handle the volume of registrations with anything approaching efficiency.
Personally, I think google talk is the nicest IM client I've ever used. Every little thing about it is done right.
Like to know when someone IMed you but don't want timestamps cluttering up your conversations? It will insert subtle timestamps in any long pause in the conversation.
Don't like multiple chat windows cluttering up your screen, but don't want to embarass yourself? Google talk's stackable shadable windows are just the thing.
You get the idea. Every single part of the interface seems like an ingenious compromise between the pros and cons of features that other IM clients have tried.
Broken Maximize and other issues.
on
Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When I maximize the player it covers the taskbar, even though I have the taskbar immobile and set to stay on top of other windows. It also takes an incredibly long time to read all of the metadata of my music. Granted, I have a ton of music, but it's still annoying that I've had it installed for 10 minutes and I still can't find half of my music in it. I also can't figure out how to edit track metadata. The edit button doesn't seem to do anything, and it has all of my various artist albums split up by the individual track artists.
Overall, so far I can't say that its going to get me to switch from foobar2000 anytime soon, particularly since I haven't been able yet to verify whether it supports musepack files.
Rather that just saying that some results were omitted, they should list the exact number of sites that were omitted that have a higher rank than those shown on the current page. Then a Chinese citizen looking at the page of Tiananmen results might not be able to learn exactly what happened, but they would learn that something happened, and it's something that the rest of the world has a lot to say about.
Nonsense. Even if Google censors the results, Chinese citizens are getting access to a hell of a lot more information with Google than without Google. The internet is simply too big to be effectively censored.
Personally, I think the most ethical thing to do would be to respond the way they did with the Kazaa-lite lawsuit. Post a notice with relevant searches stating that sites have been removed from the search results due to Chinese government censorship.
And the thing that blew me away wasn't during the install. It was immediately after.
I thought I was being prudent about security when the first thing I did after installing windows was plugging in my ethernet cord and running windows update. Little did I know . . .
In the time it took me to run windows update I had already been infected with 6 pieces of malicious software. Thankfully the google pack install comes with norton antivirus, or I probably never would have noticed.
I now understand why so many windows users get their boxes owned. If you don't pay attention to updates, you are fucked.
The damage done to an object, in crude terms, is a function of the force applied to the object. The force is directly proportional to the impulse divided by the time (impulse being change in momentum). So for your example of the gun, if the momentum of the bullet being fired changes over a longer period of time, (the time it takes to accelerate out of the barrel until it releaves the pressure in the chamber by exiting the barrel) it will not do nearly as much damage as it does to the person it hits, since there it is losing momentum over a much smaller time frame. The time it takes to deform your skin the inch or so it will give is much smaller than the time it takes to get out of the barrel, and as a result it will rupture your skin, but not the hands or shoulder of the person firing the bullet.
With your whiplash example, the momentum of the people is changing much more slowly. The car's crumple zones cause the actual force that is applied to be much smaller.
If you aren't convinced, go punch a pillow as hard as you can, then go do the same to a concrete block. See which one hurts your hand more.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing that I don't get about iTunes and iPods. Why don't they have an interface for other people to write compatible plugins? This is a feature of nearly every other pc music player (although not many hardware players.) People talk about how the open source community isn't enough of a market to warrant extra effort, but the fact is that the open source community will support itself if they have the tools to do it. Given a well documented interface, and a simple tool for flashing the ipod, I'd be willing to bet that we'd see ogg vorbis support in 2 weeks. I'm sure someone out there is willing to do the assembly hacking it would take to decode it with the same hardware.
I won't buy an iPod, but not because it doesn't support ogg vorbis. I won't buy it until it supports arbitrary formats, i.e. if you need the support you have the option of reasonably writing it in, or finding someone else who already has.
I'm a little curious then as to how he would threaten to either kill his past self or hire him as the G-man does at the end of the first game.
be installing their own software. It makes no difference who made it.
Kefka was the most evil character I've ever seen in a video game.
I think SHODAN could give him a run for his money.
Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.
Am I searching on a different google? I certainly don't see them.
As for helping poor countries establish stable democracies, the Cato Institute had a study several years ago positing that property rights, more than any other single variable, were the key to long term stability and prosperity. Interesting reading, if you can find it.
I'm not saying they are wrong, but if the Cato institute had concluded anything else, I'd just about shit a brick.
Kinda vital to the discussion . . .
As for vesting, I think that it should be more like patents. Upon creating a work, you can get a copyright, but that window of opportunity swiftly expires. Thus, authors that don't care (such as most of us here vis-a-vis our posts) can take no action and no copyright will ensue, but authors that do care can engage in a token action so that they are identifying themselves and the relevant works, and can get rights in them. For patents, it's a year from the time when the invention becomes publicly known (paraphrased). I figure that's a good span of time.
I take it that you don't personally know anyone who creates works for which copyright is important.
My mother is a self-employed medical illustrator. Over the course of her career she has created and sold thousands of images. Her work has also been published in violation of her copyright with disappointing frequency, and this is common in the field. Unfortunately, it simply isn't economically feasible to go to court. An individual artist does not have the capital to pursue litigation against a large publishing company. Periodically a publishing house will trample on enough people that they can coordinate and pool resources, but the gains are minimal and it is a stressful time consuming process for everyone involved.
Now can you imagine what it would be like if every single work had to be registered with a government office to get any legal protection whatsoever? There are many more fields that are affected by copyright than are contained in the common vision of decadent pop music stars.
At any rate, I don't think any government agency would have the capacity to handle the volume of registrations with anything approaching efficiency.
. . .so I can filter out his crap.
Seriously though, I've never seen a Dvorak column posted to Slashdot that could have any use to anyone. That man is a waste of everyone's time.
. . . so I can filter it out?
I'm never buying a piece of music from the RIAA again. I'm not going to give money to companies that use it to assault my rights in court.
Vote with your dollars people.
Maybe stop giving them our dollars?
Personally, I think google talk is the nicest IM client I've ever used. Every little thing about it is done right.
Like to know when someone IMed you but don't want timestamps cluttering up your conversations? It will insert subtle timestamps in any long pause in the conversation.
Don't like multiple chat windows cluttering up your screen, but don't want to embarass yourself? Google talk's stackable shadable windows are just the thing.
You get the idea. Every single part of the interface seems like an ingenious compromise between the pros and cons of features that other IM clients have tried.
On non-physical media, what's the difference?
iTunes doesn't have a stop button either. Suppose I want to screw with the file in another application without closing Songbird?
I can pause tracks, but how do I stop them?
When I maximize the player it covers the taskbar, even though I have the taskbar immobile and set to stay on top of other windows. It also takes an incredibly long time to read all of the metadata of my music. Granted, I have a ton of music, but it's still annoying that I've had it installed for 10 minutes and I still can't find half of my music in it. I also can't figure out how to edit track metadata. The edit button doesn't seem to do anything, and it has all of my various artist albums split up by the individual track artists.
Overall, so far I can't say that its going to get me to switch from foobar2000 anytime soon, particularly since I haven't been able yet to verify whether it supports musepack files.
Rather that just saying that some results were omitted, they should list the exact number of sites that were omitted that have a higher rank than those shown on the current page. Then a Chinese citizen looking at the page of Tiananmen results might not be able to learn exactly what happened, but they would learn that something happened, and it's something that the rest of the world has a lot to say about.
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=democracy&b tnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=
Seeing as the first hit is the wikipedia democracy article, I think you are right on the mark.
Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Nonsense. Even if Google censors the results, Chinese citizens are getting access to a hell of a lot more information with Google than without Google. The internet is simply too big to be effectively censored.
Personally, I think the most ethical thing to do would be to respond the way they did with the Kazaa-lite lawsuit. Post a notice with relevant searches stating that sites have been removed from the search results due to Chinese government censorship.
And the thing that blew me away wasn't during the install. It was immediately after.
I thought I was being prudent about security when the first thing I did after installing windows was plugging in my ethernet cord and running windows update. Little did I know . . . In the time it took me to run windows update I had already been infected with 6 pieces of malicious software. Thankfully the google pack install comes with norton antivirus, or I probably never would have noticed.
I now understand why so many windows users get their boxes owned. If you don't pay attention to updates, you are fucked.
The damage done to an object, in crude terms, is a function of the force applied to the object. The force is directly proportional to the impulse divided by the time (impulse being change in momentum). So for your example of the gun, if the momentum of the bullet being fired changes over a longer period of time, (the time it takes to accelerate out of the barrel until it releaves the pressure in the chamber by exiting the barrel) it will not do nearly as much damage as it does to the person it hits, since there it is losing momentum over a much smaller time frame. The time it takes to deform your skin the inch or so it will give is much smaller than the time it takes to get out of the barrel, and as a result it will rupture your skin, but not the hands or shoulder of the person firing the bullet.
With your whiplash example, the momentum of the people is changing much more slowly. The car's crumple zones cause the actual force that is applied to be much smaller.
If you aren't convinced, go punch a pillow as hard as you can, then go do the same to a concrete block. See which one hurts your hand more.
He must be a slashdot reader. That's just too much of a coincidence to be believed!
ion
HAWT