"Most, if not all, of the online music stores sell music in some sort of proprietary, DRM-able format. MP3 is neither. So people who are buying MP3 players are probably not buying them to play music they've bought off an online music store. Correct me if I'm wrong.... "
Okay, let's call it a counterexample rather than a correction;-)
I've just bought an MP3 player. It cost 300 english pounds, and will store 56GB of music on it's "60GB" disk. And I'll be using it to store music I bought from an online music store.
Specifically, the CD shop at MP3.com, where I seemed to spend a lot of time before they closed it down. When you buy a CD there, it comes with MP3 copies of all the music in the data part of the CD, as well as the normal audio. And posting a CD counts as a high-bandwidth download, you might say.
Of course, the MP3 player can store music from CDs and tapes as well, although they need a bit more work to convert them. But if you only buy music which you're guaranteed to be able to access in the future when you buy from a music store, you won't get caught out when somebody decides to drop whatever proprietry format they encrypted it in, and you'll be able to use whatever player you're using in a few years' time.
It also helps when you want to play music on the computer; XMMS doesn't play WMA files, so they'd be pretty damned usless if I did buy them. Ditto for whatever Apple uses, I believe.
To quote the proposed "consumers' bill of rights", you should expect to be able to play the music you purchase on the player of your choice, using your own means to make conversions if necessary. Anything less is just getting ripped off.
If you don't like transmitting on commercial radio frequencies, you can get a device which plugs into car cassette players, and lets you attach a CD player, MP3 player, etc. They cost about $10, and look like a black cassette with a wire and 3.5mm plug attached
"What happens if a U.S. company hires this guy, and builds a cruise missile for the army, thousands of times cheaper than the ones from the big defense firms? Management would p00p their pants."
as would anyone within a mile of wherever they're being fired from...
An SLR costs about $200 for a decent body, and an okay lens.
A digital camera which can take equivalent quality pictures costs about $3000. Probably a lot more if you actually use the full resolution of film.
For anyone looking at digital SLRs, Dan's Data has a fairly good column, which is as much an insight into digital SLR technology as it is a review of his new camera.
"So no, the attitude isn't "if you don't have a car you're a loser", the attitude is "give me suitable alternatives"."
You say that just as my local bus service from home to work gets cut back to one per hour and unreliable. Insightful? Back to cycling it is then. 5 miles in winter.
"If Java is bluescreening Windows 2000, you have bad hardware."
If I have bad hardware, then an standard Dell computer, new, bought by the company, must be bad hardware. Dual-processor, on-board graphics, fairly standard soundcard.
As to the specialised software needed to crash it: a WAV file editor. The irate music player (sourceforge). Plenty of website applets crashed it. It's bluescreened about 5-6 times, each time was just after a java program started running, and when there was little else going on.
50% more storage than the 20GB iPod, at 2/3 of the price. There's a 60GB version, at less than the cost of a 30Gb iPod.
It's got replaceable batteries, and unlike the iPod, you don't have to remortgage your house to buy a replacement battery. 14 hour claimed battery life. (that's between charges, not 14 hours until you need a new one;-)
It's got a big-screen, it's small, light, has a charger. No GNU support. No OGG. No remote control.
"About time noise pollution was taken seriously. But I'd question the solution...Instead of just diverting traffic, hopefully they look at reducing noisy types of transport and encouraging more quiet forms ---- e.g. light rail, bikes."
In case anyone didn't hear about it, they introduced a "congestion charge" for driving into and around London, which has slashed the amount of traffic in the capital, and made it a much nicer, quieter place.
So yes, they have done something towards solving the source problem. Now if only the British people could get over their attitude of "anyone who doesn't own a car is a loser", they we might just get somewhere with the rest of the country.
As to spending money on measuring the noise throughout the land, think back to optimising code? Of course you spend the most money on benchmarking. Otherwise you waste a lot more money solving an irrelevant problem. So yeah, make the noise map first.
To be honest, I can't imagine what kind of support you need for an office suite once it is installled
"I am trying to develop an easy way for my son to create printed flash cards. I'm starting with an open office spreadsheet which is filled out in two columns. On the second sheet, the cells from the first sheet are placed in the order they should be to print out as labels, which I want to print out to a page of pre-perforated business cards. So, I am loading these as a set of lables in a regular document.
The problem is that the labels in the Open Office document can only contain a certin number of lines. Unlike other programs (i.e. Word Perfect for Windows), the extra lines are pushed into never-never land and not into the next cell. I was hoping to be able to simply add the necessary number of newlines manually to push the text into the appropriate cell. However, this is not working."
"You're missing the point of Coventry's reply. He's saying biometric merely helps pick up "POSSIBLE" suspects, he never say anything about using biometric to accuse people."
Okay, taking that point on its own, a biometrics system which (for whatever reason) is imperfect, will identify people you want to catch as "NOT POSSIBLE" suspects. And the percentage of such false-negatives can be modified in your favour.
"Well the US army has been testing a airbourne laser for a while now which shoots down (well supposedly) missiles in flight."
It's supposed to shoot down artillery shells (i.e. big lumps of metal with no guidance, fuel, or other fragile bits), although nobody's sure entirely how.
And it's not really developed for the US. It's developed for Israel.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most, if not all, of the online music stores sell music in some sort of proprietary, DRM-able format. MP3 is neither. So people who are buying MP3 players are probably not buying them to play music they've bought off an online music store. Correct me if I'm wrong.... "
;-)
Okay, let's call it a counterexample rather than a correction
I've just bought an MP3 player. It cost 300 english pounds, and will store 56GB of music on it's "60GB" disk. And I'll be using it to store music I bought from an online music store.
Specifically, the CD shop at MP3.com, where I seemed to spend a lot of time before they closed it down. When you buy a CD there, it comes with MP3 copies of all the music in the data part of the CD, as well as the normal audio. And posting a CD counts as a high-bandwidth download, you might say.
Of course, the MP3 player can store music from CDs and tapes as well, although they need a bit more work to convert them. But if you only buy music which you're guaranteed to be able to access in the future when you buy from a music store, you won't get caught out when somebody decides to drop whatever proprietry format they encrypted it in, and you'll be able to use whatever player you're using in a few years' time.
It also helps when you want to play music on the computer; XMMS doesn't play WMA files, so they'd be pretty damned usless if I did buy them. Ditto for whatever Apple uses, I believe.
To quote the proposed "consumers' bill of rights", you should expect to be able to play the music you purchase on the player of your choice, using your own means to make conversions if necessary. Anything less is just getting ripped off.
If you don't like transmitting on commercial radio frequencies, you can get a device which plugs into car cassette players, and lets you attach a CD player, MP3 player, etc. They cost about $10, and look like a black cassette with a wire and 3.5mm plug attached
"Or alternatively that nuclear material could be the neccesary kick that life there needs."
Yay! Arms shipments to Jupiter. I knew the administration would come up with a good reason for going there...
Jupiter is named after the god of war, Europa is named after the continent of war, and the americans are going there. Should be lovely and peaceful.
"It is very expensive for companies to implement Mozzila compatible versions"
No, it's very expensive for companies to implement Internet-Explorer only versions, and then realise that they're broken in every other browser
Especially when the site is your front-page, and the person browsing was a potential customer.
"Once you've gotten used to 20+ tabs and flipping between them instaneously, watch out. Mozilla is like the crack of the Internet. Highly addictive."
All we need now are mouses with separate middle-button and scrollwheel, so you don't accidentally scroll in the middle of opening a link...
I have sent back 3 TiVo's...
Try this -- you need a standard computer, and a couple of TV cards.
"What happens if a U.S. company hires this guy, and builds a cruise missile for the army, thousands of times cheaper than the ones from the big defense firms? Management would p00p their pants."
as would anyone within a mile of wherever they're being fired from...
"Why not just get a digital SLR?"
An SLR costs about $200 for a decent body, and an okay lens.
A digital camera which can take equivalent quality pictures costs about $3000. Probably a lot more if you actually use the full resolution of film.
For anyone looking at digital SLRs, Dan's Data has a fairly good column, which is as much an insight into digital SLR technology as it is a review of his new camera.
The definitive answers to any such question are to be found on photo.net
"Anyone else got opinions on Smoothwall vs. IPCop?"
They should write that on the bottom of fireworks, in place of the traditional "light blue touchpaper and retire"...
"And how many versions of windows are there?"
One, according to anybody who sells it. And it's the only operating system in existance.
"Tell Dubya that Martians are stockpiling weapons of mass destruction!"
Does anyone else find it interesting that nuclear weapons are the only sort which actually destroy mass?
Or was that always the point?
"Who said it has to be less [than the speed of light]?"
Einstein did.
"edit your hosts file
127.0.0.1 ads.osdn.com"
Then the next time you test a webserver on your machine, stare in wonder at the thousands of requests for banner ads in the logfiles...
Right-click, "block images from this server"
"So no, the attitude isn't "if you don't have a car you're a loser", the attitude is "give me suitable alternatives"."
You say that just as my local bus service from home to work gets cut back to one per hour and unreliable. Insightful? Back to cycling it is then. 5 miles in winter.
"If Java is bluescreening Windows 2000, you have bad hardware."
If I have bad hardware, then an standard Dell computer, new, bought by the company, must be bad hardware. Dual-processor, on-board graphics, fairly standard soundcard.
As to the specialised software needed to crash it: a WAV file editor. The irate music player (sourceforge). Plenty of website applets crashed it. It's bluescreened about 5-6 times, each time was just after a java program started running, and when there was little else going on.
Best discount I found:
;-)
Nomad Zen NX [not a commission link]
50% more storage than the 20GB iPod, at 2/3 of the price. There's a 60GB version, at less than the cost of a 30Gb iPod.
It's got replaceable batteries, and unlike the iPod, you don't have to remortgage your house to buy a replacement battery. 14 hour claimed battery life. (that's between charges, not 14 hours until you need a new one
It's got a big-screen, it's small, light, has a charger. No GNU support. No OGG. No remote control.
"What will be the next step after we detect a signal?"
Then the arms race begins!
"The only way I've ever even crashed a Java VM is by running out out memory"
Java programs consistantly bluescreen my Windows 2000 computer at work. I didn't think it was possible to do that to Windows2K.
"About time noise pollution was taken seriously. But I'd question the solution...Instead of just diverting traffic, hopefully they look at reducing noisy types of transport and encouraging more quiet forms ---- e.g. light rail, bikes."
In case anyone didn't hear about it, they introduced a "congestion charge" for driving into and around London, which has slashed the amount of traffic in the capital, and made it a much nicer, quieter place.
So yes, they have done something towards solving the source problem. Now if only the British people could get over their attitude of "anyone who doesn't own a car is a loser", they we might just get somewhere with the rest of the country.
As to spending money on measuring the noise throughout the land, think back to optimising code? Of course you spend the most money on benchmarking. Otherwise you waste a lot more money solving an irrelevant problem. So yeah, make the noise map first.
Oh, there's plenty of support you could want
"What happens to the doctors who want to keep using Windows?"
They could be modified using handles and window-locks, but most people prefer doors when they're in a hurry.
now to show this to my PHB...
If you ever wanted to demonstrate the level of support available, even prior to today, point people to users@openoffice.org
The support is orders of magnitude better than anything I've seen for a proprietry product
"You're missing the point of Coventry's reply. He's saying biometric merely helps pick up "POSSIBLE" suspects, he never say anything about using biometric to accuse people."
Okay, taking that point on its own, a biometrics system which (for whatever reason) is imperfect, will identify people you want to catch as "NOT POSSIBLE" suspects. And the percentage of such false-negatives can be modified in your favour.
"Well the US army has been testing a airbourne laser for a while now which shoots down (well supposedly) missiles in flight."
It's supposed to shoot down artillery shells (i.e. big lumps of metal with no guidance, fuel, or other fragile bits), although nobody's sure entirely how.
And it's not really developed for the US. It's developed for Israel.