It gives you a way to scan in order for small details.
Say you're looking through a collection of 200+ photos from a day or two at the beach, and you want to find the one the where the guy is holding a red umbrella. Tracking small details from image to image like that is really tough on a grid, since there isn't a clear first-next linear progression. Instead, your brain has to make one up that's slow and boustrophedonic, and you have to track images with your eyes as you scroll down.
With cover flow, at least on a Mac, there's a direct progression from current to next, and you can click exactly far enough ahead to get a new eyeful (which isn't necessarily the same thing as a screenful).
Yeah, the least believable part about it is that he admitted doing it. I have a feeling that if this were an urban legend, there would be no 'I was just taking it home for my kid for the holiday' line to wiggle out of what was intended to be permanent theft.
It's shit like this that makes me glad I don't work in IT.
The Japanese were very creative, from the standpoint of indstrial operations. They brought us things like just-in-time inventory, matrix organization of management, strong branding, team-building exercises, the use of dynamic small teams to work on problems, and a slew of other practices from the 1920s to the 1970s that have proven to be wildly successful in every instance where they were adopted.
The cars looked unimaginative, but the proof was in the pudding: people preferred the cheap, efficient, and reliable cars to the imaginative ones. People loved to talk about how great Chevy convertibles, VW beetles, BMWs, etc etc looked, but in the end they all bought Toyotas and Hondas.
It's hard to give even first-guess estimates, because people who want to have sex with children fall into a variety of categories.
Many child rapists, for example, are not sexually attracted to the children they abuse; rather, they get sexual gratification from being able to abuse and humiliate someone weaker than they are, and children are of easy prey.
On the other hand, you have the people who genuinely fit the category of 'pedophilia'; that is, they are for whatever reason sexual attracted to young children. Like homosexuals at one time, in most cases these people are able to live a normal cover life and have relations with adults, but they are so given to fantasies about being seduced à la Humbert Humbert by young girls or boys; these are most often the targets of Dateline-style stings.
Then there are people who are into it solely because it is illegal and forbidden; they usually end up being the ones interested in mostly-developed adolescents. However, people in the first category typically end up that way because they were themselves abused by a parent or authority figure. No one really knows about people in the third category, but it's possible that like homosexuals their behavior has a genetic component. Lastly, the people in the third category are included only by an artifact of the law; change the law and you change their behavior.
Actually, what's important is that the project embraced potentially competing objectives in order to reach their goal, which was to make a browser that could beat Internet explorer in performance, functionality, and market share. Even though it seemed silly at the time to fork the Mozilla suite into a couple of smaller, dedicated apps, once it became clear that this was the way forward they gave it their blessing instead of allowing acrimony and bad blood force Firefox, Thunderbird, et al. into formal project separation.
It proves once again that open source is all about plurality, and that small teams make thing happen that larger groups cannot (like, enormous speed improvements in Gecko).
The purpose of property rights in modern society is, at heart, to make sure that someone is not deprived of the fruits of his labor. If I take care of a farmhouse, if I work the land and make it productive, it is only just that I be allowed to keep the house and the lion's share of the food I produce; anyone can see the injustice if someone came along and took over my house and stole all the food I grew, because for all my work I am now homeless and starving.
It is fundamental to the nature of property that someone can be deprived of it, and that is the reason we have laws to protect it. It's not about money, it's about natural rights. However, natural rights for ideas go in the opposite direction. If I hear an idea, it is my natural right to think about it and try to apply it to my life in some way. The saying "Information wants to be free" is true insofar as there is no real impediment to an idea propagating itself indefinitely, and that once known it is not easily forgotten. Thus, information is actually the opposite of property.
Nevertheless, in order to make it economically feasible for people to come up with new ideas (books, music, inventions), the government allows an un-natural right to monopoly that is limited in duration so that the writer and the inventor can enjoy the fruits of their productive labor like the farmer does.
Really, it ought to be called 'intellectual un-propery', because that describes precisely what it is.
Technically, in order for a patent to be granted it must be "reduced to practice" (i.e., have a working model). But this, like the conditions of novelty and non-obviousness, seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I think the problem is, if you try to use the flash as a sort of buffer, you end up with the worst of both worlds. You're still subject to the same mechanical failure risks for long-term storage as a simple hard disk, but you're also limited by the number of writes you can do to the buffer.
You can accomplish the same thing, with fewer flaws, by just having two drives.
I've decided that the government faked the Moon and Mars landings to cover up what they're really doing in space. By now there's probably a working military base on the face of the Moon, just waiting for the day that somebody else tries to claim space as their turf.
Of course, they didn't reckon on finding the black monolith....
My guess would be that years ago some CS people got a small grant to buy an Xbox and put Linux on it, as a sort of exercise in hacking. It's all well an exciting the first time you do it, but afterwards all you've got is another Linux server, only in an XBox case. So they put it in a server room, set it up to host the philosophy department's webpage, and forgot about it.
What bugs me the most is that someone who is an IT department manager saw something in the server room that was plugged in, on the network, and turned on, and decided to turn it off and disconnect it without so much as asking someone.
Every time I start thinking that the rivalry between techies and suits in IT is overstated, I hear about something like this.
If the police change their minds, what are the statutory penalties involved?
I don't plan on going to Finland to play Linux DVDs, but I'm curious to know how other states' criminal penalties stack up to the US's (up to five years in jail and a $250000 fine).
Good riddance, I say. If people took all the time they currently spent on presentation and spent it on content instead (thus letting end users decide the way to present it that best suits them), the Web wouldn't suck nearly as much as it does.
If Apple does this successfully, it will not be because they make a better AppleTV, a better AirTunes, or do an Apple version of XBox or any of that crap. It's because Apple will come up with some other way to govern digital content movement within the home that's better than what everyone else has.
I think it would end up being something like a digital cable box, where you can browse all the content available on every computer in your house from any of several 'output' locations. It won't plug directly into your iPod, because Apple wants people to auto-sync their iPods rather than manage them manually. It will probably integrate directly with your cable/fiber-optic TV service so you can use it to watch TV from you laptop while watching movies stored on your laptop on TV.
Or something like that, point is, it won't be like the stuff we've already seen, because we've also seen that the stuff that exists isn't compelling enough.
They did, actually, but between the Vandals, the Lombards, the Huns, the Moors, and the Arabs running around in their neighborhood, the Italians picked up some very bad pronunciations.
Does anyone else remember the launches of windows 95 and 98? They were huge news. Like, computer stores opened at midnight, had parties, and gave away stuff. Front page of the newspaper, above the fold, all the stops pulled out. People came out in droves to buy new copies for their old hardware.
Contrast this with the Vista launch: not even half of new business gear has the system on it, over a year later. People hate it. One guy posted here to talk about the time he bought a box copy of Vista Ultimate; I wouldn't be surprised if he were the only one in the country.
Can you imagine what it would say about Adobe if CS2 continued to outsell CS3? If 55% of Ubuntu downloads were for 7.0? If Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was a more popular product thatn 10.5 "Leopard"? They would be a laughing stock and every investor on the planet would be shorting their stock. Hell, even Sun doesn't try to spin news this bad as being in their favor.
I think you actually take a far too broad view of the problem. Industry lobbyists, to pick on someone everyone hates, aren't actually against free markets *in theory*, it's just that their job is to support legislation that helps out american businesses in their industry, even if it hurts foreign businesses or other sectors. To that end, they don't need to suppress possible flaws, they simple do not present them to legislators, and since there are (by law) no cash-contributing lobbying groups that represent international business interests and the free-market people are all in non-profit think-tanks, the politicians only ever hear one side of the argument.
The worst part is, I can't think of a solution that might not be worse than the problem.
It's also the responsibility of lenders to take your finances and such into account, and to consider the risk. If someone has a high-paying job in a volatile industry, the bank would probably charge a higher APR and give him the option to pay down principle early if he wanted. If someone had a stable job and could afford exactly $350 in payments a month, a dumb move would be to set up a plan where he'd pay that amount. Then, if prices of other needs rise even slightly due to inflation, he can't make his payments anymore.
The original logic behind FDIC was that the government would only insure accounts at banks that exercised good judgement in lending. That standard appears to have fallen, or vanished.
You fail to realize that homeowners can get away with giving up their house to the bank anyway--they only have to declare bankruptcy, and all that does is ruin their credit without helping the bank out in any material way. The current program only works if the homeowner has actually bought a second home or other substantial assets they can be forced to sell to relieve their debt obligation. These people are in the vast minority, anyway, and are not the cause of the credit crisis.
The credit crisis was caused by banks offering variable-rate mortgages on overvalued properties and assuming that virtually zero risk for the transaction considered individually (thanks to the house as collateral, and government insurance) meant zero aggregate risk. However, their behavior created a bubble and the price of houses soared--it's easy to convince someone to pay a lot for a house when you can show them a nice, small monthly rate. This led to speculation, which meant higher prices, and a credit volume of credit being extended. Once there was a slight dip, all those VBRs jumped the bubble burst.
I think it's fair to say that if the bank is going to accept something as collateral on a loan, then that thing is (or ought) to be valued by the bank at whatever the loan amount is. Otherwise, I could offer a six-pack of beer as collateral on a million-dollar loan, yes?
However, as you say, this will lead to much higher mortgage interest rates. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as lately people whom one wouldn't advise to buy a house have been doing so, but it does decrease opportunities for everyone across the board. I think a fair compromise could be to split the difference evenly. For example, if I buy a house for $450k, and the house immediately depreciates to $300k and the bank forecloses, I am only on the hook for $75k of the remaining money, and the rest would be a loss for the bank. The advantage is that this discourages foreclosure except where the borrower cannot make payments under any circumstances.
Another alternative would be to specify that the house would be worth always be worth at least certain percentage of the mortgage amount in terms of debt repayment. This way, if we specified that the house was worth 90% of a $500k mortgage, once I make $60k worth of payments, the bank cannot foreclose the property without paying me back the extra $10k. Again, this discourages foreclosing, and makes it so that the buyer and the bank share the risk, instead of trying to dump it all on the buyer.
What this case says to me is that in fact the RIAA know that they will have trouble winning their civil cases in court. They have, in fact, clearly held off on bringing a suit against him until they had a guilty verdict, so they could use the verdict as a lever in the probable civil trial.
Their first legal harassment technique, suing filesharers randomly, appeared to have run out of steam and then backfired on them so they got the government to invoke a little-known, eleven year old statute to crack him open. The only saving grace is that the Justice department is not about to start bringing cases against every 12-20 year old in the country who owns a computer, when there are so many terrorists and child pornographers out there that they can feel good about busting.
Slashdot Mirror
It gives you a way to scan in order for small details.
Say you're looking through a collection of 200+ photos from a day or two at the beach, and you want to find the one the where the guy is holding a red umbrella. Tracking small details from image to image like that is really tough on a grid, since there isn't a clear first-next linear progression. Instead, your brain has to make one up that's slow and boustrophedonic, and you have to track images with your eyes as you scroll down.
With cover flow, at least on a Mac, there's a direct progression from current to next, and you can click exactly far enough ahead to get a new eyeful (which isn't necessarily the same thing as a screenful).
Yeah, the least believable part about it is that he admitted doing it. I have a feeling that if this were an urban legend, there would be no 'I was just taking it home for my kid for the holiday' line to wiggle out of what was intended to be permanent theft.
It's shit like this that makes me glad I don't work in IT.
Thank you for clarifying that, I only know what I read in the newspapers, which rarely go into depth on these kinds of things.
I probably ought to start reading the WSJ.
The Japanese were very creative, from the standpoint of indstrial operations. They brought us things like just-in-time inventory, matrix organization of management, strong branding, team-building exercises, the use of dynamic small teams to work on problems, and a slew of other practices from the 1920s to the 1970s that have proven to be wildly successful in every instance where they were adopted.
The cars looked unimaginative, but the proof was in the pudding: people preferred the cheap, efficient, and reliable cars to the imaginative ones. People loved to talk about how great Chevy convertibles, VW beetles, BMWs, etc etc looked, but in the end they all bought Toyotas and Hondas.
It's hard to give even first-guess estimates, because people who want to have sex with children fall into a variety of categories.
Many child rapists, for example, are not sexually attracted to the children they abuse; rather, they get sexual gratification from being able to abuse and humiliate someone weaker than they are, and children are of easy prey.
On the other hand, you have the people who genuinely fit the category of 'pedophilia'; that is, they are for whatever reason sexual attracted to young children. Like homosexuals at one time, in most cases these people are able to live a normal cover life and have relations with adults, but they are so given to fantasies about being seduced à la Humbert Humbert by young girls or boys; these are most often the targets of Dateline-style stings.
Then there are people who are into it solely because it is illegal and forbidden; they usually end up being the ones interested in mostly-developed adolescents. However, people in the first category typically end up that way because they were themselves abused by a parent or authority figure. No one really knows about people in the third category, but it's possible that like homosexuals their behavior has a genetic component. Lastly, the people in the third category are included only by an artifact of the law; change the law and you change their behavior.
Actually, what's important is that the project embraced potentially competing objectives in order to reach their goal, which was to make a browser that could beat Internet explorer in performance, functionality, and market share. Even though it seemed silly at the time to fork the Mozilla suite into a couple of smaller, dedicated apps, once it became clear that this was the way forward they gave it their blessing instead of allowing acrimony and bad blood force Firefox, Thunderbird, et al. into formal project separation.
It proves once again that open source is all about plurality, and that small teams make thing happen that larger groups cannot (like, enormous speed improvements in Gecko).
c0:ld:de:ad:be:ef:15:f0:0d
The purpose of property rights in modern society is, at heart, to make sure that someone is not deprived of the fruits of his labor. If I take care of a farmhouse, if I work the land and make it productive, it is only just that I be allowed to keep the house and the lion's share of the food I produce; anyone can see the injustice if someone came along and took over my house and stole all the food I grew, because for all my work I am now homeless and starving.
It is fundamental to the nature of property that someone can be deprived of it, and that is the reason we have laws to protect it. It's not about money, it's about natural rights. However, natural rights for ideas go in the opposite direction. If I hear an idea, it is my natural right to think about it and try to apply it to my life in some way. The saying "Information wants to be free" is true insofar as there is no real impediment to an idea propagating itself indefinitely, and that once known it is not easily forgotten. Thus, information is actually the opposite of property.
Nevertheless, in order to make it economically feasible for people to come up with new ideas (books, music, inventions), the government allows an un-natural right to monopoly that is limited in duration so that the writer and the inventor can enjoy the fruits of their productive labor like the farmer does.
Really, it ought to be called 'intellectual un-propery', because that describes precisely what it is.
Technically, in order for a patent to be granted it must be "reduced to practice" (i.e., have a working model). But this, like the conditions of novelty and non-obviousness, seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I think the problem is, if you try to use the flash as a sort of buffer, you end up with the worst of both worlds. You're still subject to the same mechanical failure risks for long-term storage as a simple hard disk, but you're also limited by the number of writes you can do to the buffer.
You can accomplish the same thing, with fewer flaws, by just having two drives.
I've decided that the government faked the Moon and Mars landings to cover up what they're really doing in space. By now there's probably a working military base on the face of the Moon, just waiting for the day that somebody else tries to claim space as their turf.
Of course, they didn't reckon on finding the black monolith....
My guess would be that years ago some CS people got a small grant to buy an Xbox and put Linux on it, as a sort of exercise in hacking. It's all well an exciting the first time you do it, but afterwards all you've got is another Linux server, only in an XBox case. So they put it in a server room, set it up to host the philosophy department's webpage, and forgot about it.
What bugs me the most is that someone who is an IT department manager saw something in the server room that was plugged in, on the network, and turned on, and decided to turn it off and disconnect it without so much as asking someone.
Every time I start thinking that the rivalry between techies and suits in IT is overstated, I hear about something like this.
If the police change their minds, what are the statutory penalties involved?
I don't plan on going to Finland to play Linux DVDs, but I'm curious to know how other states' criminal penalties stack up to the US's (up to five years in jail and a $250000 fine).
Good riddance, I say. If people took all the time they currently spent on presentation and spent it on content instead (thus letting end users decide the way to present it that best suits them), the Web wouldn't suck nearly as much as it does.
"Blague"-o-sphere, I'm looking at you...
In point of fact, it doesn't stop someone from copying at all, does it? You can make and burn a disc image even if it's protected by CSS, can't you?
Mind you, I don't know for sure since i've never tried it, but that how it appears to work.
Further proof that the RIAA/MPAA/etc are not interested in rights per se, but only in control.
If Apple does this successfully, it will not be because they make a better AppleTV, a better AirTunes, or do an Apple version of XBox or any of that crap. It's because Apple will come up with some other way to govern digital content movement within the home that's better than what everyone else has.
I think it would end up being something like a digital cable box, where you can browse all the content available on every computer in your house from any of several 'output' locations. It won't plug directly into your iPod, because Apple wants people to auto-sync their iPods rather than manage them manually. It will probably integrate directly with your cable/fiber-optic TV service so you can use it to watch TV from you laptop while watching movies stored on your laptop on TV.
Or something like that, point is, it won't be like the stuff we've already seen, because we've also seen that the stuff that exists isn't compelling enough.
Classics time!
Greek originally had a letter for the 'H' sound, it was called heita H. However, they also needed long vowels for the 'eh' sound (they invented the short 'E' out of whole cloth), so they experimented for a while with things like an E with a line underneath it (the origin of the omega (Ω)symbol is an O with a line underneath it). As aspiration was their weakest consonant, they eventually decided to use 'H' for a long 'eh' sound, and and later split 'H' split it into two halves to use as diacritical marks for aspiration (left half of 'H') and non-aspiration (right half). These evolved into the ᾠand ᾽ of classical greek script, which eventually vanished again around 1980 or so.
They did, actually, but between the Vandals, the Lombards, the Huns, the Moors, and the Arabs running around in their neighborhood, the Italians picked up some very bad pronunciations.
Don't feel bad, the French are worse.
Does anyone else remember the launches of windows 95 and 98? They were huge news. Like, computer stores opened at midnight, had parties, and gave away stuff. Front page of the newspaper, above the fold, all the stops pulled out. People came out in droves to buy new copies for their old hardware.
Contrast this with the Vista launch: not even half of new business gear has the system on it, over a year later. People hate it. One guy posted here to talk about the time he bought a box copy of Vista Ultimate; I wouldn't be surprised if he were the only one in the country.
Can you imagine what it would say about Adobe if CS2 continued to outsell CS3? If 55% of Ubuntu downloads were for 7.0? If Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was a more popular product thatn 10.5 "Leopard"? They would be a laughing stock and every investor on the planet would be shorting their stock. Hell, even Sun doesn't try to spin news this bad as being in their favor.
Le MS est mort! Vive le MS!
Bill Joy took the initiative in creating the internet, i.e. he did it. Everyone else is basically just a footnote.
I think you actually take a far too broad view of the problem. Industry lobbyists, to pick on someone everyone hates, aren't actually against free markets *in theory*, it's just that their job is to support legislation that helps out american businesses in their industry, even if it hurts foreign businesses or other sectors. To that end, they don't need to suppress possible flaws, they simple do not present them to legislators, and since there are (by law) no cash-contributing lobbying groups that represent international business interests and the free-market people are all in non-profit think-tanks, the politicians only ever hear one side of the argument.
The worst part is, I can't think of a solution that might not be worse than the problem.
Or, use them for different purposes. Do you backups to a RAID, boot from read-only flash and have your database in SSD.
I mean, even in the old days they could choose between punch cards, tape, and teletype for data storage and retrieval.
It's also the responsibility of lenders to take your finances and such into account, and to consider the risk. If someone has a high-paying job in a volatile industry, the bank would probably charge a higher APR and give him the option to pay down principle early if he wanted. If someone had a stable job and could afford exactly $350 in payments a month, a dumb move would be to set up a plan where he'd pay that amount. Then, if prices of other needs rise even slightly due to inflation, he can't make his payments anymore.
The original logic behind FDIC was that the government would only insure accounts at banks that exercised good judgement in lending. That standard appears to have fallen, or vanished.
You fail to realize that homeowners can get away with giving up their house to the bank anyway--they only have to declare bankruptcy, and all that does is ruin their credit without helping the bank out in any material way. The current program only works if the homeowner has actually bought a second home or other substantial assets they can be forced to sell to relieve their debt obligation. These people are in the vast minority, anyway, and are not the cause of the credit crisis.
The credit crisis was caused by banks offering variable-rate mortgages on overvalued properties and assuming that virtually zero risk for the transaction considered individually (thanks to the house as collateral, and government insurance) meant zero aggregate risk. However, their behavior created a bubble and the price of houses soared--it's easy to convince someone to pay a lot for a house when you can show them a nice, small monthly rate. This led to speculation, which meant higher prices, and a credit volume of credit being extended. Once there was a slight dip, all those VBRs jumped the bubble burst.
I think it's fair to say that if the bank is going to accept something as collateral on a loan, then that thing is (or ought) to be valued by the bank at whatever the loan amount is. Otherwise, I could offer a six-pack of beer as collateral on a million-dollar loan, yes?
However, as you say, this will lead to much higher mortgage interest rates. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as lately people whom one wouldn't advise to buy a house have been doing so, but it does decrease opportunities for everyone across the board. I think a fair compromise could be to split the difference evenly. For example, if I buy a house for $450k, and the house immediately depreciates to $300k and the bank forecloses, I am only on the hook for $75k of the remaining money, and the rest would be a loss for the bank. The advantage is that this discourages foreclosure except where the borrower cannot make payments under any circumstances.
Another alternative would be to specify that the house would be worth always be worth at least certain percentage of the mortgage amount in terms of debt repayment. This way, if we specified that the house was worth 90% of a $500k mortgage, once I make $60k worth of payments, the bank cannot foreclose the property without paying me back the extra $10k. Again, this discourages foreclosing, and makes it so that the buyer and the bank share the risk, instead of trying to dump it all on the buyer.
What this case says to me is that in fact the RIAA know that they will have trouble winning their civil cases in court. They have, in fact, clearly held off on bringing a suit against him until they had a guilty verdict, so they could use the verdict as a lever in the probable civil trial.
Their first legal harassment technique, suing filesharers randomly, appeared to have run out of steam and then backfired on them so they got the government to invoke a little-known, eleven year old statute to crack him open. The only saving grace is that the Justice department is not about to start bringing cases against every 12-20 year old in the country who owns a computer, when there are so many terrorists and child pornographers out there that they can feel good about busting.