there is nothing wrong with this. If Microsoft "donates" or "discounts" its products for whatever "spin reason" they want to put on it, it's totally legal. It's dubious, but legal.
Under US law you are totally wrong. It is illegal for a company that enjoys a monopoly in one area of business to use financial or "tying" arrangements to extend that monopoly into other areas. That was what MS was found guilty of. Sherman Act. Go look it up. It's there for a very good reason: a small dose of regulation to try to promote a healthy dose of fair competition so that the end consumers benefit.
Not As Small As An iPod!
on
TiVo Basic
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· Score: 1
It's 456.4% larger than an iPod, 486.48% heavier, butt ugly, and can't synch with iTunes. It is therefore a POS, cannot possibly be any good to anyone, and is destined to fail.
I always thought Tivo should make a 30 second TV spot with a very annoying background noise and jarring images, then in the last few seconds say: If you had Tivo you could have fast forwarded this.
Outstanding idea. Use Carrot Top and it's a winner.
The 60GB Nomad will hold the same number of songs as the 30GB iPod. If you consider that the Nomad must have 256Kbps MP3 for CD-quality, and the iPod must have 128Kbps AAC for CD-quality.
(I have no opinion about Oggs because I have not listened to them enough)
It seems to me that the only purpose of pushing AAC onto the iPod is to deploy Anti Sharing Technology (DRM) and create a new revenue stream for Apple. I think I'll stick with my open-source Lame VBR MP3s...
"--nspsytune --vbr-mtrh -V1 -mj -h -b96 --lowpass 19.5 --athtype 3 --ns-sfb21 2 -Z --scale 0.98 -X0" is my personal route to listening nirvana. I get an average bitrate of around 170Kbps and an *amazing* sound fidelity.
One big question is "does the Zen support the Mac?" If not, then I'm bummed.
That was why I ended up getting the Archos over the Zen as an xmas pressie for my gf - Mac Support. The Archos is visible on all platforms as a bog-standard USB2/1 external hard drive, so you can drag and drop any file at will. As I recall, the old Zen had no Mac support.
Audio-only players are so 90s. Personally, I'm saving my money for the Archos AV320, or something like it. Big screen, MP3 *&* MPEG video playback and record. The lack of wireless, though, is a sore point.
Actually, a "Now Playing" feature is useful in well-featured jukeboxes, and also exists in iTunes, I believe. 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)
MJ is a high-end jukebox and, as such, does take a while to explore all its features. It has dual skin modes, as well as transparency, and you can set up some sweet displays with this.
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.
What do you read, Star Trek novelisations? Joyce wrote The Dead, what have you done?
It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I guess nobody creating this beast has ever seen Demon Seed. Possibly the scariest movie *ever* about home automation.
Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) is an Artificial Intelligence researcher, contracted by the US Department of Defense. He has arrived at a truly intelligent computer--Proteus. Understandably, everyone is excited about the possibilities of an artificially intelligent superbrain. Everyone, except possibly Harris' wife, who he's on the outs with ostensibly because of his obsession with his work.... Demon Seed seems to take place in an unspecified future. A place where, among the normal accoutrements of the typical family home is an elaborate, computer controlled home "envirosystem" that does everything from letting you in the front door to making your food and regulating heating systems beneath the floors.
the humanoid population of that planet perfected the science of cybernetics. They replaced their bodies with mechanical counterparts, and even altered the thought processes of their brains. Thus, the Cybermen were born. Ruthless and emotionless, the Cybermen began a campaign of conquest to rule the galaxy.
The Cybermen were originally humans, and the scientists of their home planet Mondas perfected cybernetics. They initially replaced only their limbs with metal and plastic, but they gradually progressed to the nervous system and finally the brain. The end product was the Cyberman, who were huge metal giants, devoid of emotion, only acted on logic, immensely strong and intent on conquest.
Personally I'm still looking for a good music db/organizing program for either Linux (preferred) or Windows (thank you samba
After 10 years of making and downloading MP3s I have amassed a few hundred GBs of stuff, all online and pretty messy. The collection had outgrown the abilities of every jukebox software that I'd tried (including, yes, iTunes, which is a pretty though slow mid-range jukebox choice) until I found Media Jukebox. The free version is awesome, but I surprised myself by paying $25, basically for the tagging editor and the streaming capability.
So they eventually got around to porting Doom to the Archos, which is nice, and unexpected. Oh yeah, and Rockbox 2 was released, with lots of new features.
So Brigadier General Vincent Brooks is a "liberal". You managed to squeeze in that word three times in your little vainglorious rant. I think you have a problem with labels and stereotyping.
NUMBER: 55130
QUOTATION: The Pope? How many divisions has he got?
ATTRIBUTION: Josef Stalin (1879-1953), Soviet leader. Quoted in Winston Churchill, "The Gathering Storm," vol. 1, ch. 8, The Second World War (1948).
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
--Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, U.S. Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945
He made a very large donation to a charity that has known connections to terrorist groups.
You know, we could stamp out a lot of terrorism in Britain and Ireland by bombing the shit out of Boston, Chicago, and New York, oh yes. And arresting the hundreds of thousands of Irish-Americans that fund terrorist organizations.
As a native Irish-born person, what really bugs me about this current "War on Terror" is that it's really a "War on Wog Terror". Various Irish-American charitiess have funded a sustained, vicious, crippling terror campaign within Ireland and Britain for decades, yet even in the current paranoid climate the Irish-American lobby is so large that the Bush Gang didn't proscribe these "charities" even as it curtailed the activities of many Muslim charities (some legitimate, some terrorist funding fronts).
If there were as many Arab-Americans and there are "Irish"-Americans, bet your arse this War On Terror would be targeted differently.
This was printed in a UK paper a year or so ago, but seems to be no longer available online.
To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can't think why no one has thought of it before. It's so simple. If only the UK had done something similar in Northern Ireland, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.
The moment the IRA blew up the Horseguards' bandstand, the Government should have declared its own War on Terrorism. It should have immediately demanded that the Irish government hand over Gerry Adams. If they refused to do so -- or quibbled about needing proof of his guilt -- we could have told them that this was no time for prevarication and that they must hand over not only Adams but all IRA terrorists in the Republic. If they tried to stall by claiming that it was hard to tell who were IRA terrorists and who weren't, because they don't go around wearing identity badges, we would have been free to send in the bombers.
It is well known that the best way of picking out terrorists is to fly 30,000ft above the capital city of any state that harbours them and drop bombs -- preferably cluster bombs. It is conceivable that the bombing of Dublin might have provoked some sort of protest, even if just from James Joyce fans, and there is at least some likelihood of increased anti-British sentiment in what remained of the city and thus a rise in the numbers of potential terrorists. But this, in itself, would have justified the tactic of bombing them in the first place. We would have nipped them in the bud, so to speak. I hope you follow the argument.
Having bombed Dublin and, perhaps, a few IRA training bogs in Tipperary, we could not have afforded to be complacent. We would have had to turn our attention to those states which had supported and funded the IRA terrorists through all these years. The main provider of funds was, of course, the USA, and this would have posed us with a bit of a problem. Where to bomb in America? It's a big place and it's by no means certain that a small country like the UK could afford enough bombs to do the whole job. It's going to cost the US billions to bomb Iraq and a lot of that is empty countryside. America, on the other hand, provides a bewildering number of targets.
Should we have bombed Washington, where the policies were formed? Or should we have concentrated on places where Irishmen are known to lurk, like New York, Boston and Philadelphia? We could have bombed any police station and fire station in most major urban centres, secure in the knowledge that we would be taking out significant numbers of IRA sympathisers. On St Patrick's Day, we could have bombed Fifth Avenue and scored a bull's-eye.
In those American cities we couldn't afford to bomb, we could have rounded up American citizens with Irish names, put bags over their heads and flown them in chains to Guernsey
Singularity - Rapture for Nerds
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've been doing a lot of reading on the singularity lately, and I've become more and more convinced that it is certain to happen.
Ken MacLeod, another UK SF writer, believes that the Singularity is nothing more or less than a cult-like "Rapture For Nerds". Which accounts for its unusual popularity, I guess, in the United States - compared to Europe the rate of churchgoing and belief in supernatural powers is *much* higher.
The AI Cult waxes and wanes in step with technological fads. We are just past the peak of the most recent cycle and for many people, the "history" of the Singularity only goes back to the late-80s/early-90s or so. Roszak traces it back to preposterous statements in the 1940s-1950s, the 1960s-1970s, and he saw the beginning of the current cycle in the 1990s.
Really, there's no more ehalthy way to disabuse yourself of a belief in supernatural computers than to read vintage Minsky and other, forgotten prognosticators confidently predicting runaway hyper-intelligent computers by the 1980s, or the 1990s at most!
Some people really will believe everything the neocons spew, won't you? Uncritically believing everything your Leaders tell you makes as delusional as the Saddamists.
Three days after Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld charged night-vision goggles had been supplied by Syria to Iraq, a top US commander said Monday he was unaware of any Iraqi battlefield use of such devices.
"What I know is that we have not to my knowledge seen any at this point," Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told a briefing at the Central Command's forward headquarters in Qatar in reply to a question.
"I'm just not aware of any that have been encountered."
So they already got the Teachers! I hope the DMCA Cops go after the Librarians next. Those copyright-flouting socialistic liberal peaceniks have it coming, indisriminately sharing out media to people and not charging! Haven't they read Ayn Rand? Don't they know that's against The Free Market? Shame on them! Shame on them!
Would putting firewire or USB2 on really have been so hard? As it stands, the player seems to be in the 'so close but' category.
Yeah that's right. My girlfriend's Archos 20GB Recorder cost half the list price for this Neuros and has USB2. *And* it's Mac-compatible, which is why it was chosen over the Nomad or other PC-only devices.
Slashdot Mirror
It's 456.4% larger than an iPod, 486.48% heavier, butt ugly, and can't synch with iTunes. It is therefore a POS, cannot possibly be any good to anyone, and is destined to fail.
http://www.infoanarchy.org/comments/2002/9/8/2347
(I have no opinion about Oggs because I have not listened to them enough)
It seems to me that the only purpose of pushing AAC onto the iPod is to deploy Anti Sharing Technology (DRM) and create a new revenue stream for Apple. I think I'll stick with my open-source Lame VBR MP3s...
"--nspsytune --vbr-mtrh -V1 -mj -h -b96 --lowpass 19.5 --athtype 3 --ns-sfb21 2 -Z --scale 0.98 -X0" is my personal route to listening nirvana. I get an average bitrate of around 170Kbps and an *amazing* sound fidelity.
Audio-only players are so 90s. Personally, I'm saving my money for the Archos AV320, or something like it. Big screen, MP3 *&* MPEG video playback and record. The lack of wireless, though, is a sore point.
l ?pg=12
l easePicts/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/play.htm
http://shanebrinkmandavis.com/homepage/JBMM/Prere
I forgot to mention, I think the trouble is the double-click bit.
Try right-clicking from within the Media Library view - you will see a whole bunch of options.
Actually, a "Now Playing" feature is useful in well-featured jukeboxes, and also exists in iTunes, I believe. 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)
MJ is a high-end jukebox and, as such, does take a while to explore all its features. It has dual skin modes, as well as transparency, and you can set up some sweet displays with this.
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.
I ditched Speakeasy (768/768 $80) for Cyberonic (1500/768 $40) and like it. Static IPs, fast pings, less downtime, shorter hold times.
Why wait? I note that the scrappy Archos has long been the underdog in the MP3 player/recorders, but their MPEG4 player/recorder just won the "CES 2003 Best of Portable Video & Best of the Show", apparently.
So they eventually got around to porting Doom to the Archos, which is nice, and unexpected. Oh yeah, and Rockbox 2 was released, with lots of new features.
So Brigadier General Vincent Brooks is a "liberal". You managed to squeeze in that word three times in your little vainglorious rant. I think you have a problem with labels and stereotyping.
You know, we could stamp out a lot of terrorism in Britain and Ireland by bombing the shit out of Boston, Chicago, and New York, oh yes. And arresting the hundreds of thousands of Irish-Americans that fund terrorist organizations.
As a native Irish-born person, what really bugs me about this current "War on Terror" is that it's really a "War on Wog Terror". Various Irish-American charitiess have funded a sustained, vicious, crippling terror campaign within Ireland and Britain for decades, yet even in the current paranoid climate the Irish-American lobby is so large that the Bush Gang didn't proscribe these "charities" even as it curtailed the activities of many Muslim charities (some legitimate, some terrorist funding fronts).
If there were as many Arab-Americans and there are "Irish"-Americans, bet your arse this War On Terror would be targeted differently.
This was printed in a UK paper a year or so ago, but seems to be no longer available online.
Personally, the best book I've read recently on the subject of AI Shamanism is Theodore Roszak's The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking . This book is especially valuable because the first edition was written in the mid-80s, and traces the origin of the AI Cult back to the 1940s.
The AI Cult waxes and wanes in step with technological fads. We are just past the peak of the most recent cycle and for many people, the "history" of the Singularity only goes back to the late-80s/early-90s or so. Roszak traces it back to preposterous statements in the 1940s-1950s, the 1960s-1970s, and he saw the beginning of the current cycle in the 1990s.
Really, there's no more ehalthy way to disabuse yourself of a belief in supernatural computers than to read vintage Minsky and other, forgotten prognosticators confidently predicting runaway hyper-intelligent computers by the 1980s, or the 1990s at most!
So they already got the Teachers! I hope the DMCA Cops go after the Librarians next. Those copyright-flouting socialistic liberal peaceniks have it coming, indisriminately sharing out media to people and not charging! Haven't they read Ayn Rand? Don't they know that's against The Free Market? Shame on them! Shame on them!
Would putting firewire or USB2 on really have been so hard? As it stands, the player seems to be in the 'so close but' category.
Yeah that's right. My girlfriend's Archos 20GB Recorder cost half the list price for this Neuros and has USB2. *And* it's Mac-compatible, which is why it was chosen over the Nomad or other PC-only devices.