What I really want is a way to identified albums like Dark Side of the Moon in iTunes and iPod so that the software knows "only play this album in order." This way I can shuffle my entire collection without hearing "Empty Spaces" was nothing connected to it. You might then specify rules like "Treat 'Antoher Brick Pt. 1/Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick Pt. 2' as a single song in shuffle. (You might also want to link "We Will Rock You" with "We Are The Champions" for example.) And some songs you just never want to come up on random like 20 second intros.
Shuffle isn't a bad idea but a pure shuffle is more random than what is actually desired. mp3s/aac files need more meta-data so that we can ascribe attributes like "fast song" or "melodic song" to tracks and assign weightings. I don't want to create playlists, I just want a smarter shuffle.
Sure, I could do all that... but the thing about saving that you have to ask yourself is: what are you saving up for? Isn't the whole point of saving time so that you can sleep late on Saturday, play your onling RPG or whatever else you consider to be good? And why the hell would I want to conserve daylight hours? I'd rather have the night hours. Sleeping in the morning gives you more hours to be awake at night. For that matter, why go to work early when you can go to work late? There's less traffic at 7pm too, ya know and those Simpsons reruns... Tivo catches those for you.
I'm all for sticking to black and grey as a means of getting matching clothes but taking a woman shopping is the opposite of saving time. When I go shopping with a woman, I feel like getting out of the car and painting a red X in the road to remind others where I encountered missing time. Women are, in fact, the primary drive for such portable devices that do things like time-shift talk radio. This allows you to actually do something useful or enjoyable while waiting for women to get ready or shop for something.
Bittorrent kindof sucks for me because I have DSL which has a limited upload capacity and a large download capacity. I'd like it a lot more if I had a different kind of broadband connection.
The "how could he have not forseen" argument is ridiculous. Anything powerful can be used for legal or illegal means. Do you not think http and ftp have been used to infringe copyright? If you're going to criticize for that, let's go ahead and talk about what evil inventions the ink pen and printing press were.
The interesting thing to me about the illegal uses of Bittorrent are how those prosecutions will be handled. Imagine a world in which every time you bought drugs, you had to sell some of them to someone else. Then the issue becomes: were you buying with intent? When you "download" (for that's what it will be to the layman regardless of technicality) with Bittorrent, are you intentionally redistributing or is the redistribution an unintended consequence of the lesser crime of simply partaking of the copyright protected work? Authority figures and courtrooms both tend to focus their efforts on the "sellers" rather than the "users." What do you do when every user is also a seller?
I get the point that this isn't really anonymous, but neither was Kazaa. It's more a matter of civil disobedience. Speeding is illegal but I've been on many a highway in which you couldn't spot a soul driving under the limit. Most of them... most of the time don't get tickets. "Everybody's doing it," may not be a legal or moral defense, but it's much easier to hide in a crowd.
You make excellent points, James--but the fact remains that this trend means that certain types of jobs will have less demand in the US. Readers of Slashdot are more technical than the average American and many of our livlihoods are impacted by the shrinking demand of the technical labor force in America. So while the net sum may be the same for other Americans, it still sucks if you're an American programmer. (Cheaper programmers is probably a good thing for say... a salesman.)
America still makes cars--she still services cars, makes accessories for cars, installs radios in cars, buys and sells cars, etc. The manufacturing was moved to where manufacturing was cheaper. If code is cheaper to write somewhere else, it will be written somewhere else--if not now, eventually--if not India, then elsewhere. There will still be other work to do in the US but the American programmer is in the same predicament that the American automotive factory worker was in twenty years ago. That seems bad enough without exaggerating.
Anyway, I thought this was a good article the first time it was posted.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's really too bad that a general purpose PC can only be used as a DVR. Imagine if you could use it to play all different kinds of video files (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) that some people get from teh Interwebs (http://thepirate-useyourimagination-.org/brwsearc h.php?b=1&d=200). When I think of all that CPU sitting there unused, I just wish there was a way I could use it to deinterlace and scale the video better than the projector (http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/about.htm). It's a real shame that there's no way to filter and soften artifacts, make gamma correction or do other post-processing (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow). I mean wow, what if you had something that could do that to even make DVDs look cleaner and more accurate (http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?s =6486412abf926166ef4d7dc0be10c450&t=4392). If you could do that, you may even put some of them on your hard drive if that wasn't impossible (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/ dvd_rippers/dvd_decrypter.cfm). Even if there were a way to keep movies on a hard drive, you still wouldn't have a way to remove the ads, trailers, french soundtracks and other crap (http://www.dvdshrink.org/why.html). Gosh, I keep thinking too that with a projector in the home theater room and everything, it's too bad there's no way to play video games on it (http://www.mame.net/).
What I really want is a way to identified albums like Dark Side of the Moon in iTunes and iPod so that the software knows "only play this album in order." This way I can shuffle my entire collection without hearing "Empty Spaces" was nothing connected to it. You might then specify rules like "Treat 'Antoher Brick Pt. 1/Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick Pt. 2' as a single song in shuffle. (You might also want to link "We Will Rock You" with "We Are The Champions" for example.) And some songs you just never want to come up on random like 20 second intros. Shuffle isn't a bad idea but a pure shuffle is more random than what is actually desired. mp3s/aac files need more meta-data so that we can ascribe attributes like "fast song" or "melodic song" to tracks and assign weightings. I don't want to create playlists, I just want a smarter shuffle.
Get mentioned on cnn.com. Get sold to (or destroyed by) major motor companies. Aren't sold as "convenience store fans" as their first application.
Sure, I could do all that... but the thing about saving that you have to ask yourself is: what are you saving up for? Isn't the whole point of saving time so that you can sleep late on Saturday, play your onling RPG or whatever else you consider to be good? And why the hell would I want to conserve daylight hours? I'd rather have the night hours. Sleeping in the morning gives you more hours to be awake at night. For that matter, why go to work early when you can go to work late? There's less traffic at 7pm too, ya know and those Simpsons reruns... Tivo catches those for you. I'm all for sticking to black and grey as a means of getting matching clothes but taking a woman shopping is the opposite of saving time. When I go shopping with a woman, I feel like getting out of the car and painting a red X in the road to remind others where I encountered missing time. Women are, in fact, the primary drive for such portable devices that do things like time-shift talk radio. This allows you to actually do something useful or enjoyable while waiting for women to get ready or shop for something.
Why doesn't it work with ADSL? (Maybe I have other causes to blame for my speed ceilings.)
Bittorrent kindof sucks for me because I have DSL which has a limited upload capacity and a large download capacity. I'd like it a lot more if I had a different kind of broadband connection. The "how could he have not forseen" argument is ridiculous. Anything powerful can be used for legal or illegal means. Do you not think http and ftp have been used to infringe copyright? If you're going to criticize for that, let's go ahead and talk about what evil inventions the ink pen and printing press were. The interesting thing to me about the illegal uses of Bittorrent are how those prosecutions will be handled. Imagine a world in which every time you bought drugs, you had to sell some of them to someone else. Then the issue becomes: were you buying with intent? When you "download" (for that's what it will be to the layman regardless of technicality) with Bittorrent, are you intentionally redistributing or is the redistribution an unintended consequence of the lesser crime of simply partaking of the copyright protected work? Authority figures and courtrooms both tend to focus their efforts on the "sellers" rather than the "users." What do you do when every user is also a seller? I get the point that this isn't really anonymous, but neither was Kazaa. It's more a matter of civil disobedience. Speeding is illegal but I've been on many a highway in which you couldn't spot a soul driving under the limit. Most of them... most of the time don't get tickets. "Everybody's doing it," may not be a legal or moral defense, but it's much easier to hide in a crowd.
You make excellent points, James--but the fact remains that this trend means that certain types of jobs will have less demand in the US. Readers of Slashdot are more technical than the average American and many of our livlihoods are impacted by the shrinking demand of the technical labor force in America. So while the net sum may be the same for other Americans, it still sucks if you're an American programmer. (Cheaper programmers is probably a good thing for say... a salesman.)
America still makes cars--she still services cars, makes accessories for cars, installs radios in cars, buys and sells cars, etc. The manufacturing was moved to where manufacturing was cheaper. If code is cheaper to write somewhere else, it will be written somewhere else--if not now, eventually--if not India, then elsewhere. There will still be other work to do in the US but the American programmer is in the same predicament that the American automotive factory worker was in twenty years ago. That seems bad enough without exaggerating.
Anyway, I thought this was a good article the first time it was posted.