I know you already quoted part of this but I think this part of the FAQ is hilarious (as well as not being true).
3. How can I get tracks I rip from my CD into iTunes and/or onto my iPod?
Apple's proprietary technology doesn't support secure music formats other than their own and therefore the music on this disc can't be directly imported into iTunes or iPods.
Sony BMG wants music to be easily transferable to any device that supports secure music. Currently, music from our protected CDs may be transferred to hundreds of such devices, as both Microsoft and Sony have assisted to make the user experience on our discs as seamless as possible with their secure formats.
Unfortunately, in order to directly and smoothly rip content into iTunes it requires the assistance of Apple. To date, Apple has not been willing to cooperate with our protection vendors to make ripping to iTunes and to the iPod a simple experience.
Isn't it great folks?! I don't even need to add any commentary. I highly reccommend that whole FAQ the parent linked to as some *good* comic literature. The people who wrote this FAQ should get the Ignobel prize next year for literature, kind of like the Nigerian scammers got the award this year http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig200 5
Exactly. The submitter said something about low-priced cards and then I saw $300 or so. Yep sounds pretty low to me. I think of low-priced and think less than $100. Hey, less than $50 is low-priced.
I know this is nitpicky, but you can burn the individual songs as many times as you want. It's playlists of DRM'ed songs that can only be burned a few times.
I don't know what all of you are running on your computers but when I run any of the OpenOfiice 2.0 programs they each take up around 30 Mb of memory. Most of the Microsoft Office programs take up that much memory on my computer. Also, the OO programs will load within 3 or 4 seconds, about what Microsoft Office programs do. I'm not sure why people say it is slow and takes up a lot of memory since it seems just as fast as Office. Of course I am running a dual 6.8 GHz Pentium 5 system with 16 Gb of RAM, maybe that has something to do with it.
I'm really on a 2 GHz P4 with 768 Mb RAM with XP Home (agggrrrhh, that's blasphemous here!).
An 80 Mb dl is pretty small. It's great that Google's getting into this though. Paying people to work on open source software usually has excellent results.
Of course, those numbers only really look at Disney and Apple - not Disney + Touchstone + Buena Vista + ABC + the myriad other companies Disney owns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_ by_Disney. So yes, Disney is a giant compared to Apple.
Your post shows that you have as much faith in science as the the parent poster does in her/his religion. Is the scientific method the only source of truth in life? If you believe that, then what you know as truth changes every day. Science changes continuously.
I'm not against the scientific method, I think it is a fabulous way to discern knowledge and I use it in my research (of course). It has some major shortcomings though. I won't get in to all the problems with it but if you trace the history of the scientific method, you can see the underlying philosophies. All science was/is rooted deeply in philosophy. Why do we still get PhDs at our universities? We can get a bachelor's of science but we become doctors of philosophy with additional education. The root of science is as much a philosophy as is modern theology.
Some of the founding philosophies for our scientific method are materialism (only what you can see exists and matter is really all that matters), rationalism (all truth can be derived through reason), and quantification (numbers are the best approach to describing truth because they are universal and certain; which is why statistic and statistical significance are so significant in science).
There are modern and competing scientific methods to the one we currently use; there is a hermeneutical method that does not really deny anything in our scientific method but rather expands on it, making a more all-encompassing approach to knowledge. It is a similar but extended approach to truth.
One of the problems in our world today is that some non-religious people feel threatened by religion and some religious people are threatened by science. America was founded with a separation of church and state which means the government cannot pander to any one set of religious beliefs or people above that of other beliefs; however, it also means that the government cannot deny the free exercise of that religion or those beliefs. Separation of church and state was never meant to keep religion out of our schools, it was meant to allow for religious freedom in the country. If you look at the educational systems from the founding of the country (and especially later when free public education was mandated) up until the last few decades or so, religion was heavily involved in our schools (and government). Many people think that we are more enlightened now as we remove religion more and more from our educational system. That's an awfully egocentric belief. All of the founding fathers believed in God (yes, some were deists and many did not go to church actively, but all believed in God). Are we more enlightened than they were just because we believe Darwin and they never had the opportunity to? Do we laugh at the poor religious masses who are lost in delusions while we believe that we are one of only a few enlightened people who rise above the pettiness of religion and embrace science as our savior? Ok, I may be exaggerating a bit, but my point is that those who are threatened by religion need to stop being so fastidious (as do those who are so threatened by science).
I go to church every week. I am also studying neuroscience. There are no conflicts between the two (and that is not because I compartmentalize them from each other - I don't). Do I think religions have all the answers? No. Does science have all the answers? No and science usually produces more questions than answers (I'm not saying that's bad). Why should you care if Intelligen Design is taught in schools? Vote against it or move somewhere where it isn't taught. If it's not practical to move, then when your kids learn it at school talk with them about it and let them know you disagree but also let them decide for themselves whether they agree or not. Is exposure to the theory of Intelligent Design so bad that you can't even listen to it? I think it's a bit funny that the fundamentalist Christians asking for Intelligent Design to be taught alongside evolution are the ones who are being open-minded here. They are not asking
I'm sorry, I should have made it clearer that my post was completely tongue-in-cheek. I was being sarcastic. Thanks for your insightful post thoughl; I completely agree with you.
But we're talking lost productivity here. Hey, if I can find something in.002 seconds rather than.2 seconds, that's 1000x faster. If I do lots of searches over the day, that's an extra second or two I've gained of productivity. That means I have more time to read Slashd...I mean get more work done.
This is what NASA tells the Mars astronauts when they're on their way to Mars: "Sorry guys. We really wanted to save some money and so we engineered your spacecraft to make it to Mars but probably not back home. We also took out all redundancy in your flight and navigation systems. It was just too expensive to include them. We did pack you some UNO cards though and extra toilet paper (it's pretty cheap after all).Your spacesuits should work for at least a couple days too. That should be plenty of time for you to take pictures and send them back to us, if you survive the impact. We didn't want to spend too much money so we'll just surround your capsule with lots of foam and hope for the best. We do have some good news for you though; we just saved a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to GEICO."
The first thing I thought of is: laser guns from Star Wars. Nothing beats a good blaster at your side kid.
This will even inprove on Star Wars - we could have some wicked fast automatic laser rifles. I think I'll take a laser gun over your lightsaber and just pick you off from a distance. The only reason lightsabers were effective in the Star Wars movies is because the Storm Troopers were about as accurate as a Dvorak opinion. Their accuracy was much worse than chance.
I agree for the most part. However, used computers generally are not as cheap as they should be, especially with the deals you can get from Dell and HP on computers. Most of the time people try to sell their used computers for way too much. As an example, my university has regular used computer sales. For the prices they are offering their compters I could buy a brand new computer with an LCD monitor. So it really depends on where or from who you are buying your used computers. If you have friends that will sell it to you for cheap then that's great but if you're just looking in the paper or on eBay then the deals may not be as good. I'd rather pay an extra $100 for a new computer anyway; it has a warranty, it is brand new, and most of the time will have a longer lifespan.
That way, Microsoft-approved devices like the Xbox will work with it, but non-approved devices like the iPod won't.
Of course, not letting the iPod work with a Vista-based computer would spell the death of Vista. Seriously. People like their iPods. Most people do not particularly like Windows. Microsoft hopefully would not (or would, depending on how you look at it) be that stupid. People would revolt and buy Macs if Windows locked out iPods.
Yep, it's the same system. I teach a behavioral neurobiology class at a university and we just got done talking about addictions and addiction research. It's all the same basal ganglia system (particularly the neucleus accumbens, as someone previously pointed out). The dopamine-producing neurons there (and other parts of the dopaminergic system) respond to anything pleasurable (food, sex, etc.). When drugs make people feel good, they are activating this system. Good habits would be formed through this same system (although it might take more work with exercise for example, because many people actually do not like to exercise - they may like the effects of it but how many people actually love how running a marathon make them feel (I'm not talking about some sense of accomplishment)? How do you feel after doing strenuous exercise? Usually not that great initially). So I should qualify my remarke and say that if the good habit truly produces physical pleasure, then those habits would also be formed and intensified in this circuit.
Aperture works with Tiff files too. Apple just hypes the RAW format because there are not as many programs that manipulate RAW files as there are that manipulate TIFF. TIFF has been around for a long time. I used to use Photoshop back in the early 90s and work with TIFFs. RAW is just a newer format that is only becoming big with the boom of prosumer digital cameras (although RAW is finding its way into purely consumer cameras). I just brought it up mainly because Apple makes a big deal of it.
Some more random info:
You can also add up to 16 Gb of RAM! In addition, you could add 4 graphics cards (1 16x, 1 8x, 2 4x) and connect 8 digital montiors to your Mac. You can add a Quadro FX 4500 card and have dual 30" displays hooked up to your G5. They also come with dual independent gigabit ethernet.
These look like pretty cool computers. I'll still wait for the Intel-based macs, but Apple keeps innovating.
Aperture is geared toward professional photographers. It allows you to work directly with RAW files (as well as many other file types). It is similar to Googles Picassa but on steroids. It doesnt look like it will compete with Photoshop though at this stage. It is more of a basic organization and editing program. It looks pretty slick but has some fairly hefty system requirements.
Sure, it *may* be faster than other software rendering solutions, but it still only approaches (that's such a broad term) the performance of low-end cards: "can rival the performance of low end hardware 3D graphics solutions in some cases." Sounds pretty iffy to me. It'll be good in some cases; however, as it is, I doubt it will replace dedicated hardware cards for many people (it's not like low-end cards are very expensive. You can find decent (albeit older) graphics cards for under $20.
I'm not saying this technology isn't useful, it just has limited application in its current state.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you already quoted part of this but I think this part of the FAQ is hilarious (as well as not being true). 3. How can I get tracks I rip from my CD into iTunes and/or onto my iPod? Apple's proprietary technology doesn't support secure music formats other than their own and therefore the music on this disc can't be directly imported into iTunes or iPods. Sony BMG wants music to be easily transferable to any device that supports secure music. Currently, music from our protected CDs may be transferred to hundreds of such devices, as both Microsoft and Sony have assisted to make the user experience on our discs as seamless as possible with their secure formats. Unfortunately, in order to directly and smoothly rip content into iTunes it requires the assistance of Apple. To date, Apple has not been willing to cooperate with our protection vendors to make ripping to iTunes and to the iPod a simple experience. Isn't it great folks?! I don't even need to add any commentary. I highly reccommend that whole FAQ the parent linked to as some *good* comic literature. The people who wrote this FAQ should get the Ignobel prize next year for literature, kind of like the Nigerian scammers got the award this year http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig200 5
I just wanted to say that that was one of the funniest things I'd read in quite a while. Thanks for the laugh.
Exactly. The submitter said something about low-priced cards and then I saw $300 or so. Yep sounds pretty low to me. I think of low-priced and think less than $100. Hey, less than $50 is low-priced.
I know this is nitpicky, but you can burn the individual songs as many times as you want. It's playlists of DRM'ed songs that can only be burned a few times.
None that anyone has noticed yet. I did it and everything seems to work just fine.
I don't know what all of you are running on your computers but when I run any of the OpenOfiice 2.0 programs they each take up around 30 Mb of memory. Most of the Microsoft Office programs take up that much memory on my computer. Also, the OO programs will load within 3 or 4 seconds, about what Microsoft Office programs do. I'm not sure why people say it is slow and takes up a lot of memory since it seems just as fast as Office. Of course I am running a dual 6.8 GHz Pentium 5 system with 16 Gb of RAM, maybe that has something to do with it.
I'm really on a 2 GHz P4 with 768 Mb RAM with XP Home (agggrrrhh, that's blasphemous here!).
An 80 Mb dl is pretty small. It's great that Google's getting into this though. Paying people to work on open source software usually has excellent results.
Of course, those numbers only really look at Disney and Apple - not Disney + Touchstone + Buena Vista + ABC + the myriad other companies Disney owns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_ by_Disney. So yes, Disney is a giant compared to Apple.
Your post shows that you have as much faith in science as the the parent poster does in her/his religion. Is the scientific method the only source of truth in life? If you believe that, then what you know as truth changes every day. Science changes continuously.
I'm not against the scientific method, I think it is a fabulous way to discern knowledge and I use it in my research (of course). It has some major shortcomings though. I won't get in to all the problems with it but if you trace the history of the scientific method, you can see the underlying philosophies. All science was/is rooted deeply in philosophy. Why do we still get PhDs at our universities? We can get a bachelor's of science but we become doctors of philosophy with additional education. The root of science is as much a philosophy as is modern theology.
Some of the founding philosophies for our scientific method are materialism (only what you can see exists and matter is really all that matters), rationalism (all truth can be derived through reason), and quantification (numbers are the best approach to describing truth because they are universal and certain; which is why statistic and statistical significance are so significant in science).
There are modern and competing scientific methods to the one we currently use; there is a hermeneutical method that does not really deny anything in our scientific method but rather expands on it, making a more all-encompassing approach to knowledge. It is a similar but extended approach to truth.
One of the problems in our world today is that some non-religious people feel threatened by religion and some religious people are threatened by science. America was founded with a separation of church and state which means the government cannot pander to any one set of religious beliefs or people above that of other beliefs; however, it also means that the government cannot deny the free exercise of that religion or those beliefs. Separation of church and state was never meant to keep religion out of our schools, it was meant to allow for religious freedom in the country. If you look at the educational systems from the founding of the country (and especially later when free public education was mandated) up until the last few decades or so, religion was heavily involved in our schools (and government). Many people think that we are more enlightened now as we remove religion more and more from our educational system. That's an awfully egocentric belief. All of the founding fathers believed in God (yes, some were deists and many did not go to church actively, but all believed in God). Are we more enlightened than they were just because we believe Darwin and they never had the opportunity to? Do we laugh at the poor religious masses who are lost in delusions while we believe that we are one of only a few enlightened people who rise above the pettiness of religion and embrace science as our savior? Ok, I may be exaggerating a bit, but my point is that those who are threatened by religion need to stop being so fastidious (as do those who are so threatened by science).
I go to church every week. I am also studying neuroscience. There are no conflicts between the two (and that is not because I compartmentalize them from each other - I don't). Do I think religions have all the answers? No. Does science have all the answers? No and science usually produces more questions than answers (I'm not saying that's bad). Why should you care if Intelligen Design is taught in schools? Vote against it or move somewhere where it isn't taught. If it's not practical to move, then when your kids learn it at school talk with them about it and let them know you disagree but also let them decide for themselves whether they agree or not. Is exposure to the theory of Intelligent Design so bad that you can't even listen to it? I think it's a bit funny that the fundamentalist Christians asking for Intelligent Design to be taught alongside evolution are the ones who are being open-minded here. They are not asking
I'm sorry, I should have made it clearer that my post was completely tongue-in-cheek. I was being sarcastic. Thanks for your insightful post thoughl; I completely agree with you.
Sorry, that's 100x faster not 1000x; my mind stopped working for a sec.
But we're talking lost productivity here. Hey, if I can find something in .002 seconds rather than .2 seconds, that's 1000x faster. If I do lots of searches over the day, that's an extra second or two I've gained of productivity. That means I have more time to read Slashd...I mean get more work done.
Yeah, it's kind-of funny that the company who made Pirates! is so worried about piracy. Go figure.
This is what NASA tells the Mars astronauts when they're on their way to Mars: "Sorry guys. We really wanted to save some money and so we engineered your spacecraft to make it to Mars but probably not back home. We also took out all redundancy in your flight and navigation systems. It was just too expensive to include them. We did pack you some UNO cards though and extra toilet paper (it's pretty cheap after all).Your spacesuits should work for at least a couple days too. That should be plenty of time for you to take pictures and send them back to us, if you survive the impact. We didn't want to spend too much money so we'll just surround your capsule with lots of foam and hope for the best. We do have some good news for you though; we just saved a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to GEICO."
You can't forget NARC. There was something refreshing about blowing up drug dealers and their dogs (the dogs were the best).
The first thing I thought of is: laser guns from Star Wars. Nothing beats a good blaster at your side kid.
This will even inprove on Star Wars - we could have some wicked fast automatic laser rifles. I think I'll take a laser gun over your lightsaber and just pick you off from a distance. The only reason lightsabers were effective in the Star Wars movies is because the Storm Troopers were about as accurate as a Dvorak opinion. Their accuracy was much worse than chance.
Yep, now we can play the crappy eye-candy games at twice the speed and end the pain twice as soon for only 4 times the cost.
New record! Doom 3 in 5 minutes.
I agree for the most part. However, used computers generally are not as cheap as they should be, especially with the deals you can get from Dell and HP on computers. Most of the time people try to sell their used computers for way too much. As an example, my university has regular used computer sales. For the prices they are offering their compters I could buy a brand new computer with an LCD monitor. So it really depends on where or from who you are buying your used computers. If you have friends that will sell it to you for cheap then that's great but if you're just looking in the paper or on eBay then the deals may not be as good. I'd rather pay an extra $100 for a new computer anyway; it has a warranty, it is brand new, and most of the time will have a longer lifespan.
That way, Microsoft-approved devices like the Xbox will work with it, but non-approved devices like the iPod won't.
Of course, not letting the iPod work with a Vista-based computer would spell the death of Vista. Seriously. People like their iPods. Most people do not particularly like Windows. Microsoft hopefully would not (or would, depending on how you look at it) be that stupid. People would revolt and buy Macs if Windows locked out iPods.
Yep, it's the same system. I teach a behavioral neurobiology class at a university and we just got done talking about addictions and addiction research. It's all the same basal ganglia system (particularly the neucleus accumbens, as someone previously pointed out). The dopamine-producing neurons there (and other parts of the dopaminergic system) respond to anything pleasurable (food, sex, etc.). When drugs make people feel good, they are activating this system. Good habits would be formed through this same system (although it might take more work with exercise for example, because many people actually do not like to exercise - they may like the effects of it but how many people actually love how running a marathon make them feel (I'm not talking about some sense of accomplishment)? How do you feel after doing strenuous exercise? Usually not that great initially). So I should qualify my remarke and say that if the good habit truly produces physical pleasure, then those habits would also be formed and intensified in this circuit.
That is a good point. I realized that same thing just after I had posted my comment.
Aperture works with Tiff files too. Apple just hypes the RAW format because there are not as many programs that manipulate RAW files as there are that manipulate TIFF. TIFF has been around for a long time. I used to use Photoshop back in the early 90s and work with TIFFs. RAW is just a newer format that is only becoming big with the boom of prosumer digital cameras (although RAW is finding its way into purely consumer cameras). I just brought it up mainly because Apple makes a big deal of it.
I think they can only do 2 30" displays max. Still cool nonetheless.
Some more random info:
You can also add up to 16 Gb of RAM!
In addition, you could add 4 graphics cards (1 16x, 1 8x, 2 4x) and connect 8 digital montiors to your Mac.
You can add a Quadro FX 4500 card and have dual 30" displays hooked up to your G5.
They also come with dual independent gigabit ethernet.
These look like pretty cool computers. I'll still wait for the Intel-based macs, but Apple keeps innovating.
Aperture is geared toward professional photographers. It allows you to work directly with RAW files (as well as many other file types). It is similar to Googles Picassa but on steroids. It doesnt look like it will compete with Photoshop though at this stage. It is more of a basic organization and editing program. It looks pretty slick but has some fairly hefty system requirements.
Sure, it *may* be faster than other software rendering solutions, but it still only approaches (that's such a broad term) the performance of low-end cards: "can rival the performance of low end hardware 3D graphics solutions in some cases." Sounds pretty iffy to me. It'll be good in some cases; however, as it is, I doubt it will replace dedicated hardware cards for many people (it's not like low-end cards are very expensive. You can find decent (albeit older) graphics cards for under $20.
I'm not saying this technology isn't useful, it just has limited application in its current state.