Do you honestly think on 3% of the USA is buying 8.3 million iTunes songs?
Yes. People who are using iTMS are selected for high-income, high-end consumption. They have an OSX Mac, they avoided any cheaper options and shelled out hundreds of dollars for a dinky little device that only plays audio. They have broadband. These are people with money to burn, as compared to a typical sample of MP3 consumers.
The mention of NiMH on a battery pack does not automatically guarantee high energy density. A prismatic NiMH battery for a mobile phone, for example, is made for slim geometry and may only have an energy density of 60Wh/kg. The cycle count for this battery would be limited to around 300. In comparison, a cylindrical NiMH offers energy densities of 80Wh/kg and higher. Still, the cycle count of this battery will be moderate to low. High durability NiMH batteries, which are intended for industrial use and the electric vehicle enduring 1000 discharges to 80 percent depth-of discharge, are packaged in large cylindrical cells. The energy density on these cells is a modest 70Wh/kg.
It is just like those mechanical booths that many of us are used to with little levers that you pull down next to the name of the candidate.
One big difference is that the Indian elections use proportional representation, an early 20th century voting system that counts voter preference rankings to determine results, as opposed to the US's simpler, strictly 19th century plurality voting system where winner takes all, even with a minority of the total votes cast.
The US actually began to use PR during the Progressive Era, but moved the other direction during the 20th Century, abandoning many of the Progressive Era's municipal and local proportional systems (which had produced notable increases in effective votes, minority participation, and concordant representation).
Soundproofing your case produces results, but the biggest bang for the buck is definitely replacing the PSU.
I built a TV PC and I was annoyed by the hovercraft-like PSU, so I invested in a silent PSU. There are lots of custom quiet PSUs recommended here, but you pay for the styling and mods.
After the PSU replacement and replacement of the PC case, the PSU is literally inaudible. The loudest ambient noise in the apartment now comes from the fridge compressor in the kitchen one room over.
It's a minimal system though, an underclocked XP2400, a single hard drive. If and when I put in some more drives, I may line the case with soundproofing...
TANSTAAFL, and someone has to pay for those low prices in Walmart, typically America's new working classes, now exported into Chinese sweatshops, and displaced local retailers, now usually Walmart's captive wage slaves.
A healthy family with a roof over its head could supply virtually all of its other basic monthly needs with one stop at a Wal-Mart Supercenter like the one here in Salina, Kansas. To me, that raised a question: Can a family whose breadwinner works at Wal-Mart afford to supply its minimum needs by shopping there?... The bottom line: They would need an absolute minimum of $1,136 per month to cover housing, food, transportation, health care and miscellaneous expenses. Despite our best efforts, we exceeded our cashier's monthly income by $120.
In a sense, Walmart generates its huge profits by driving its employees' wages unsustainably low. We the taxpayer then pick up the social cost of Walmart's workshop profiteering by providing these bankrupt wage slaves with a federal tax credit of just over $4000 annually (and other benefits, such as food stamps). Instead of doing the honorable thing and raising the minimum wage, we provide massive billions of dollars of corporate welfare to Walmart and enable it to post increased profits.
the government implicitly recognizes the insufficiency of Wal-Mart wages. Our cashier's family would be eligible for an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) of $4,140 in 2002. That would close the gap between the cashier's wage and bare survival, and provide enough additional income to lift the family just above the poverty line.
It was covered in Slashdot before, the original analysis is... An Analysis of Netflix's DVD Allocation System
I've noticed some odd tweaks that Netflix use. Sometimes weeks can go by when I don't get any of the movies on my "Very Long Wait" schedule (which I have all collected right at the start of my 450+ queue. But if I register a broken or scratched disc, then suddenly I get a small flurry of "VLW" movies, that surges, then subsides. SO I figure their CRM system does some sort of temporary promotion to keep you happy.
I've tried the Walmart trial twice. It sometimes takes them over a week to turnaround a disk, compared to Netflix's 2-3 day turnaround. Based on this, I'd say Walmart are not good value for money.
Since the Iraqi's are now liberated and free to form their own democracy which will inevitably lead to a much more open and accountable economy
You are mixing your ideological buzzwords here. Democracies do not necessarily lead to vibrant economies, just as vibrant economies do not necessarily lead to democracies. Otherwise, how to explain the lack of democracy in China, and the lack of economic growth in Argentina?
Additionally, can you explain what an "open and accountable economy" is, exactly. "Economies" apply to the "production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services". "Democracies" are all about the "common people especially when constituting the source of political authority". These concepts do not have any necessary concordance beyond that which ideologues like to ascribe.
And given that Rummy et al have put the smackdown on any attempts by the Iraqis to hold a elections any time soon (because they know that the expressed will of the people would return an overwhelmingly anti-US government), can you explain how "the Iraqis" are now "free to form their own democracy"?
"Childhood's End" - Early Singularity Fable
on
"V" Sequel Coming to NBC
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Childhood's aliens are merely subcontractors for another more powerful race with apocalytic intentions
Actually I think the wonderful and majestic Childhood's End was one of the early modern-form Singularity eschataological-themed science fiction books.
Current technological eschatology extensively uses the fictional device of runaway information technology leading to computerised transcendence. In Childhood's End, the theme was that all advanced dominant planetary species throughout the galaxy (except the "devils") inevitably developed their civilisations to a critical biomass of psychic cognition that would prompt the emergence of a new, absorptive group mind. The "demons" didn't hasten the process, or retard it -- they simple arrived to nursemaid the new organism.
In that era, most psychoactive drugs had yet to be prohibited, the "talking cure" of developmental psychoanalysis was at its zenith, and the potential effects of group psychology deployed within advertising and the new mass broadcast media seemed limitless. It was generally assumed that advancing pharmcological technology and increased self-actualization techniques would lead to stronger, mentally fitter humans. Of course, that didn't happen. These days, a lot of people put their faith in computation cycles, encryption, and wireless packet switching. Good luck with that.
Childhood's End is quite similar to a few other books of that 1950s era, especially Poul Anderson's Brainwave, which was one of the first books to advance the notion of different cognitive "zones" within the Galaxy that creates different levels of intelligence and self-awareness. This idea was most famously borrowed by Vernor Vinge for his 1980s Fire On The Deep space opera. I'm also thinking of Fritz Leiber's "The Girl WIth The Hungry Eyes".
I'm having difficulty seeing how Tony Soprano is much worse than Gandalf. You know, if you look at LotR objectively, what Gandalf is all about is White Power and anti-democracy. He worked tirelessly to maintain the hegemony and genetic purity of a small core of oligarchical monarchists with a fundamentalst religious outlook that believed the Gods had given them eminent domain over Middle Earth. They seem to have been fighting a viscious war of ethnic cleansing and land grabs against all the southern and eastern cultures in Middle Earth. Apparently, Gondor was no place to be if your skin has a dark, brown, or yellow tinge. You had these poor immigrants from the South (including descendents of the losing side in one of Gondor's civil wars) being denied immigration visas, even though Gondor itself was evidently underpopulated and suffering from a low fertility rate.
I'm honestly curious what mp3 manager you use that makes iTunes look moderately featured.
I agree with you. iTunes is a fairly good jukebox with a reasonably powerful UI and acceptable speed. Well done for a company where producing jukebox software is not their primary goal. My girlfriend uses it on her iMac and it works well for her. But iTunes doesn't handle a wide variety of media, it chokes on large collections (I have 60K files requiring management), and the interface is not very configurable.
For my needs I use Media Jukebox (just check my profile for all the times I repeat myself!). Windows only, sadly for MacOS people.
It's got an amazingly well thought out, context switchable "Now Playing" UI feature. I know something like this also exists in iTunes, but MJ's is more expressive. It's basically a pop stack which a variety of selectable behaviours. So say you are playing a Playlist or random set of tunes and you want to add some more items to your "Now Playing". You have a bunch of choices:
Replace
Add (to End)
Add (as Beginning)
Add (as next to play)
Add (play now)
Add (shuffle)
Add (replace)
Within the "Playing Now" display field, you can also add HTML and Flash objects and take input from the ID3 tags, so you can customize your own jukebox front end. The interface toggles between mini and maxi skinnable modes.
The visual effects studio lets you construct your own graphical filters, operators, and expressions to transformthe sound input into graphical output. The SFX Studio and the amazingly well done Tagging Editor are, IMHO, what puts MJ above all other jukebox choices. You can literally customize it to your heart's content.
Of course, there are all the usual plugins, streams, stream serving, burning, stripping, and transcoding... It even has iPod support!
So I'm not saying iTunes is bad, I'm just saying that it is a *moderate* piece of jukebox software that adds value to Apple's primary profit driver: the iPod. Maybe if the new music store continues to be successful, then Apple will put more resources into enhancing the iTunes interface and functionality.
However, currently the difference in product design and execution between a dedicated, media jukebox company and a hardware manufacturer producing some pack-in software to enhance their handheld is quite large.
The MacOS platform is rather lacking for choice and depth of good media jukebox software, so that's why iTunes and streams are such a bigger deal for that platform. But it does lead to a kind of wilful ignorance and disinclination to learn from or appreciate great software found on other platforms, such as WIndows or Linux.
iPod Sacrifices Features, Affordability For Size
on
Neuros Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The iPod is elegant, small, lightweight, and has a simple, good UI(not to mention, read-only address book/calendar stuff).
Yes, iPods are smaller than many other disk-based MP3 players, but they achieve this compactness by sacrificing features and expandability. They cost around 50% more than equivalently featured MP3 hard drive players. They have no digital line-in recording, no mic facility, no FM radio, and no easy way for users to replace or expand the device's batteries or hard drive. Unlike most of the new generation media players they also feature no MPEG 4 video playback or recording. They have a weird, all-or-nothing metadata approach to storing music that forces you to use the moderately featured iTunes freeware to utilise the iPod to its fullest instead of being able to use some other full-featured, non-freeware media jukebox software. Their battery life is shorter than (AFAIK) all other disk-based HD MP3 players. I gather from the iPod usergroups that the new-gen iPods are getting between 5-8 hours of playtime, and this is with new, fully conditioned batteries.
On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily. Well done to Apple for figuring that a large proportion of potential MP3 player buyers are not interested in advanced features, and will pay a significant premium for compactness and a simple, constrained interface.
In the 90s, AOL similarly spotted that they could capture a large proportion of online users by offering a simple, integrated system. I think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturer's media player offerings.
As I write this I am listening to a stream from my home server, running Media Jukebox. Why is streaming such a big deal for Macs? PCs have had this for years. Shoutcast, Icecast, the list goes on...
permanent, perfect audio-visual record. Generations born now, will possibly not KNOW what is to NOT know exactly what the past was like
Don't get too cocky. Looking at pictures of the past does not let you experience the past as it was lived and felt. It's the different between perception and experiential reality. Remember all our visual media are a socio-cultural construct and embedded within them is a whole set of assumptions and forced compromises and accommodations that make perfect sense to *us* but whose meaning will be lost to future generations without deep and careful study.
We can *look* at literally thousands of medieval images, but without that deeply religious, almost shamanistic mindset all we see are ephemera: knights, swords, damsels, and so on. To extract the coded meanings and circumlocutions within the media we emply historians. Future historians will have a lot more recorded media to work with, but they won;t be out of the loop.
Don't waste time debating the wide-eyed, endless, unnervingly uniform, scarily sanguine protestations of these Segway Cultists folks, you'll end up spammed, email hate-bombed, and IP-blocked. Dean Kamen has recruited an army of feverish acolytes that rivals Steve Jobs' disciples in terms of portable reality distortion fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you honestly think on 3% of the USA is buying 8.3 million iTunes songs?
Yes. People who are using iTMS are selected for high-income, high-end consumption. They have an OSX Mac, they avoided any cheaper options and shelled out hundreds of dollars for a dinky little device that only plays audio. They have broadband. These are people with money to burn, as compared to a typical sample of MP3 consumers.
There's also this Battery Shootout ranking system, skewed towards small portable electronic device effectiveness.
The US actually began to use PR during the Progressive Era, but moved the other direction during the 20th Century, abandoning many of the Progressive Era's municipal and local proportional systems (which had produced notable increases in effective votes, minority participation, and concordant representation).
Oh how quickly they forget. MSX? Windows 1.0? MS Xenix? The not-so-compatible 1980s MS-DOS Compatibles? The list goes on and on...
This sounds about as promising and likely as the Return of Amiga. Come to think of it, mayvbe they'll run Orac on a Beowulf cluster of Amigas...
Cringely gets front-page billing so frequently on Slashdot that I think it's time he got his own icon.
Soundproofing your case produces results, but the biggest bang for the buck is definitely replacing the PSU.
I built a TV PC and I was annoyed by the hovercraft-like PSU, so I invested in a silent PSU. There are lots of custom quiet PSUs recommended here, but you pay for the styling and mods.
For me, the most economical approach was to pay $50 for a standard Fortron/Sparkle PSU with inside-case 120mm fan intake. There's a review of it at Tom's.
After the PSU replacement and replacement of the PC case, the PSU is literally inaudible. The loudest ambient noise in the apartment now comes from the fridge compressor in the kitchen one room over.
It's a minimal system though, an underclocked XP2400, a single hard drive. If and when I put in some more drives, I may line the case with soundproofing...
In a sense, Walmart generates its huge profits by driving its employees' wages unsustainably low. We the taxpayer then pick up the social cost of Walmart's workshop profiteering by providing these bankrupt wage slaves with a federal tax credit of just over $4000 annually (and other benefits, such as food stamps). Instead of doing the honorable thing and raising the minimum wage, we provide massive billions of dollars of corporate welfare to Walmart and enable it to post increased profits.
I've tried the Walmart trial twice. It sometimes takes them over a week to turnaround a disk, compared to Netflix's 2-3 day turnaround. Based on this, I'd say Walmart are not good value for money.
Additionally, can you explain what an "open and accountable economy" is, exactly. "Economies" apply to the "production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services". "Democracies" are all about the "common people especially when constituting the source of political authority". These concepts do not have any necessary concordance beyond that which ideologues like to ascribe.
And given that Rummy et al have put the smackdown on any attempts by the Iraqis to hold a elections any time soon (because they know that the expressed will of the people would return an overwhelmingly anti-US government), can you explain how "the Iraqis" are now "free to form their own democracy"?
Current technological eschatology extensively uses the fictional device of runaway information technology leading to computerised transcendence. In Childhood's End, the theme was that all advanced dominant planetary species throughout the galaxy (except the "devils") inevitably developed their civilisations to a critical biomass of psychic cognition that would prompt the emergence of a new, absorptive group mind. The "demons" didn't hasten the process, or retard it -- they simple arrived to nursemaid the new organism.
In that era, most psychoactive drugs had yet to be prohibited, the "talking cure" of developmental psychoanalysis was at its zenith, and the potential effects of group psychology deployed within advertising and the new mass broadcast media seemed limitless. It was generally assumed that advancing pharmcological technology and increased self-actualization techniques would lead to stronger, mentally fitter humans. Of course, that didn't happen. These days, a lot of people put their faith in computation cycles, encryption, and wireless packet switching. Good luck with that.
Childhood's End is quite similar to a few other books of that 1950s era, especially Poul Anderson's Brainwave, which was one of the first books to advance the notion of different cognitive "zones" within the Galaxy that creates different levels of intelligence and self-awareness. This idea was most famously borrowed by Vernor Vinge for his 1980s Fire On The Deep space opera. I'm also thinking of Fritz Leiber's "The Girl WIth The Hungry Eyes".
I'm having difficulty seeing how Tony Soprano is much worse than Gandalf. You know, if you look at LotR objectively, what Gandalf is all about is White Power and anti-democracy. He worked tirelessly to maintain the hegemony and genetic purity of a small core of oligarchical monarchists with a fundamentalst religious outlook that believed the Gods had given them eminent domain over Middle Earth. They seem to have been fighting a viscious war of ethnic cleansing and land grabs against all the southern and eastern cultures in Middle Earth. Apparently, Gondor was no place to be if your skin has a dark, brown, or yellow tinge. You had these poor immigrants from the South (including descendents of the losing side in one of Gondor's civil wars) being denied immigration visas, even though Gondor itself was evidently underpopulated and suffering from a low fertility rate.
For my needs I use Media Jukebox (just check my profile for all the times I repeat myself!). Windows only, sadly for MacOS people.
It's got an amazingly well thought out, context switchable "Now Playing" UI feature. I know something like this also exists in iTunes, but MJ's is more expressive. It's basically a pop stack which a variety of selectable behaviours. So say you are playing a Playlist or random set of tunes and you want to add some more items to your "Now Playing". You have a bunch of choices: Within the "Playing Now" display field, you can also add HTML and Flash objects and take input from the ID3 tags, so you can customize your own jukebox front end. The interface toggles between mini and maxi skinnable modes.
The visual effects studio lets you construct your own graphical filters, operators, and expressions to transformthe sound input into graphical output. The SFX Studio and the amazingly well done Tagging Editor are, IMHO, what puts MJ above all other jukebox choices. You can literally customize it to your heart's content.
Of course, there are all the usual plugins, streams, stream serving, burning, stripping, and transcoding... It even has iPod support!
So I'm not saying iTunes is bad, I'm just saying that it is a *moderate* piece of jukebox software that adds value to Apple's primary profit driver: the iPod. Maybe if the new music store continues to be successful, then Apple will put more resources into enhancing the iTunes interface and functionality.
However, currently the difference in product design and execution between a dedicated, media jukebox company and a hardware manufacturer producing some pack-in software to enhance their handheld is quite large.
The MacOS platform is rather lacking for choice and depth of good media jukebox software, so that's why iTunes and streams are such a bigger deal for that platform. But it does lead to a kind of wilful ignorance and disinclination to learn from or appreciate great software found on other platforms, such as WIndows or Linux.
On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily. Well done to Apple for figuring that a large proportion of potential MP3 player buyers are not interested in advanced features, and will pay a significant premium for compactness and a simple, constrained interface.
In the 90s, AOL similarly spotted that they could capture a large proportion of online users by offering a simple, integrated system. I think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturer's media player offerings.
As I write this I am listening to a stream from my home server, running Media Jukebox. Why is streaming such a big deal for Macs? PCs have had this for years. Shoutcast, Icecast, the list goes on...
We can *look* at literally thousands of medieval images, but without that deeply religious, almost shamanistic mindset all we see are ephemera: knights, swords, damsels, and so on. To extract the coded meanings and circumlocutions within the media we emply historians. Future historians will have a lot more recorded media to work with, but they won;t be out of the loop.
Don't waste time debating the wide-eyed, endless, unnervingly uniform, scarily sanguine protestations of these Segway Cultists folks, you'll end up spammed, email hate-bombed, and IP-blocked. Dean Kamen has recruited an army of feverish acolytes that rivals Steve Jobs' disciples in terms of portable reality distortion fields.
RUN!!! Don't walk, to the nearest exit.