Yes, that's a good point about the Guardasil vaccine. I made my doctor give it to me even though technically I'm one year older than the recommended age range. I hope we get more advances like this.
I agree with the many insightful posts which have observed that this is just a shift and the industry will be leaner and better than ever. The desire for music will never go away.
But, isn't there also a bit of a downturn in how much people are willing to spend on music, simply because it's not a cornerstone of their hobbies anymore? I know that for myself I never just sit and ONLY listen to music. I'm on the web, watching TV, movie, reading a book, etc. Most of my music time is in my car, when I listen to the radio. The rest of the time, music is either a bother to what I'm doing (reading), or it's just background music in which case the radio is just fine. I no longer pop in an album and just sit and listen to it. So the value of music, to me, has been reduced to some vaguely noticed background noise and entertainment for when I drive. So it's no longer something I'm willing to pay much, if anything for. The radio is free. And the few REALLY good songs I want for my mp3 player or to keep on my computer, I'm not willing to buy the whole album to get it. Nor am I willing to pay $1 per song.
These days we have many more options of what to do in our free time. I'm not going to pay for music until it becomes closer to 25 cents per song. Even then, it better be a really good song, and better be DRM free.
REC is what it's called. Not RCC. Come on, even I'm noticing an unusually high number of editing mistakes in the/. summaries lately. Usually I just don't care- but let's strive for accuracy shall we? If/. isn't anal about this kind of thing... who else would be?
Read the article. Several of your points are addressed. It supports txt, pdf and mobi files without conversion. drag and drop via USB. Again... read the article!
Who actually uses that button? I can say that most of my searches, I don't end up going to the first result. If I were to use that button, odds are that I would get to the page, determine it's not what I want... click back, then click the regular search button. The odds just don't play out.
It's that little snippet of text in the search result that shows you the context of your search term- that's what really helps my searching. Now that I think about, I wish I could set that blurb to be longer...
And please... I'm pretty sure that button isn't fooling anyone into thinking Google is still just a friendly, underdog, basement project.
"Sorry ma'am, we can't investigate the gang violence down your street, those officers were re-allocated to chase down the vicious ring of copyright violators."
I think colleges and universities could benefit most from something like this. Imagine if as part of your tuition you were given one of these slick ereaders. Then you download all your textbooks onto it. You can choose to purchase a cheaper time-sensitive copy which expires after the term is up. No hassle of trying to resell your textbooks after the semester only to find out the professor changed the edition, so the next semester doesn't want your used book.
Heck, I remember my own CS courses, the books averaged $80 to $150 each! Times 5 classes per semester, times 2 semesters per year, times 4 years. Whew - lot of money went to books I'll never touch again.
Also, no heavy textbooks to lug around. And if the device allowed you to highlight passages to be aggregated into your own study notes- even better. The professor could even release his own notes as an ebook, so no more need to copy down his annoying powerpoint lessons.
We've already seen resistance from paper-back fans how an ereader just doesn't make sense compared to a paperback. So if these things can't take off in the university setting, I don't see much hope for their wider adoption.
Of course- I prefer paper books- they look nicer on my shelves and are more likely to still be in my possession 20 years from now than any ebook.
My mom had breast cancer several years ago. The treatments are just horrible, but I'm thankful she's still with us. It seems however that once a year we hear about some potential breakthrough or another. Well, with the truckloads of donations going to 'breast cancer research', I'm getting a little sick of hearing about 'potential' breakthroughs. I want something we can start using right now. It's hard to be patient when people you care about are sick or dying. I hope some of these possibilities pan out soon.
*looks at back of current paperback she's reading*
Yup, I paid $10 for a physical book. Why the hell would I pay $10 for a ebook? That being said I can get a used copy in good condition for usually $2-4.
This assumes I want to keep a copy. If I don't there's always the library down the street.
Figure out what the cost of a physical book is, minus the manufacturing costs, shipping, distribution and retailer costs. That's what the ebook should cost. The commission to the author, publisher and ebook distributor. That's it.
I'm sure this has been said, but if Comcast is going to set themselves up as the police of pirated Anime movies... then they are now responsible for enforcing all other laws such as child porn, internet predators, all pirated materials, etc, etc. They better be careful what they're doing- they may be targeting these anime shows as a not-so-sneaky way of going after bittorrent traffic in general, but they're soon going to be expected to watch for non-bittorrent illegal traffic. You can't pick and choose which laws to enforce.
How can anyone remain a comcast customer knowing that comcase is peering into every bit that you send and receive? It disgusts me. Where's the privacy protection. Comcast provides voice service too right? Are they scanning that too? If not, why not? Sheesh, get out people.
While I agree that being unable to get a refund for a non-working game is a load of BS, I'm not sure why you are surprised. If I buy a physical game from a store and open the box, at that point I am unable to get a refund. I can get an exchange for scratched disks, but if the game doesn't work on my machine then I'm out of luck.
I have a stack of games that were opened but failed to install because my previous computer was a piece of crap.
Purchasing from Steam is the same thing- once you have the game, you can't get a refund, even if it fails to work. This isn't a criticism of Steam, but rather of the whole industry of game, music and movie sales. I've always seen buying PC games as a bit of a gamble. That's why I only buy the rare game that I REALLY want, and it's also why so many people choose to buy games for console that would obviously be better on PC- because console games 'just work'.
Anyway, why pick on Steam for refusing to refund a game? You should be picking on every game retailer online or off.
I had one job where they gave me some contracts to bring home and sign before my first day of work. The one document was a non-compete contract which basically said that I could not get another job in the same industry within a 30 KM radius around the business' location while employed by them, AND for 3 years after leaving their employment.
I was blown away by the thought that they could effectively freeze me from getting another programmer job in my town. What was I supposed to do if I quit? Work at Burger King for 3 years before I could go back into programming? So I did some Googling and also spoke to a personnel agency owner I know and found out that these are just scare tactics, and at least in Canada are not enforceable- you can't tell people where they can and can't work. The main way they ARE enforceable is if, for example you are a salesman and take your list of contacts with you. That's a no-no.
I'm not sure how it applies to knowledge gained or what you 'think up', but I would imagine there is a similar limit to how far the law will go toward allowing a company to slap restrictions on your own knowledge. However, if you work on a project on company time, I'm sure you can't go else where and make a similar version of it for someone else.
The main point - consult an expert- contract lawyer is best.
I'm pretty sure your credit card company only knows the store you shopped at, not the individual items you purchased. So they must be looking for shoppers at ethnic-food stores. Unless they are mining loyalty cards from the bigger chains... which I'm sure all the terrorists are using loyalty cards *rolls eyes*. Ahhhh, America. Always amusing how hypocritical your government is. The FBI is watching you buy your "Freedom Fries". Ha.
The non-Nintendo brand memory cards for gamecube/wii have this problem too. Never by Mad-Catz anything, and stick with the Nindendo brand cards. I speak from painful experience!
Not quite. My free time is worth more than my work-day time because it's precious to me. The rare-er it is the more it's worth. I do freelance work on the side in my spare time and I price it at twice what I make at my day job. So my free time is worth $40/h, and that will go up as my career advances. So, 5 hours into HalfLife2ep2, my saved game is worth $200. I'll say that's worth backing up alright.... Note to self...
However, there are often cheat codes that let you jump ahead to any level you choose so you could use that. Plus, if it's a good game, then replaying it isn't TOO much of a pain in the butt. So, that brings the price down too.
This is a great idea. I have a great stereo I got for my bday 10 years ago. It's a Samsung (if I remember correctly) and it has a 5 CD carousel on the top, a radio and 2 tape decks. It also has a video in connection so I hooked it up to my dvd player and tv for stereo sound.
Anyway, I love it. But for the last 5 years, every time I turn it off, it loses all preset radio stations and goes back to factory default. When I turn it on the CD tray spins and everything programmed in is gone. It's putting extra wear and tear on the CD tray and is just frustrating. I opened it up one time and took a clueless peak in side to see if I could spot anything that looks like a battery for maintaining the memory but couldn't spot anything.
I'd be so grateful if I could get that problem fixed. When I get home and can check the model info I'll be hitting up that fixya site for sure. Great idea for a website.
Yes, I've seen that kind of blanket comments from people who just don't understand. If it can be used for bad reasons and good reasons, it should be outlawed. When my Mom first started seeing all the TV specials about internet predators on the Internet and on IM networks, my Mom was first in favour of outlawing the entire Internet. Then outlawing just chat.
I asked her if we should outlaw cameras just because pedophiles can use them to photograph children. She gave me an almost-comprehending-glimmer of a stare for a while but then just resumed her insistence that all chat is evil, the internet is evil, etc, etc.
People are very, very afraid of what they don't understand. And are willing to give up massive amounts of their freedoms for even an illusion of safety. So sad.
It's my observation that there are two types of users of Facebook. Some of my friends put every tidbit of data about themselves that the site asks for. Their highschool, college, employer, age, religion, sexual preference, relationship, photos, favourite shows, books, who they are related to, etc, etc. It builds a pretty extensive profile of them. These are usually the people who never look at the privacy options to tighten them up and make their profile info available only to their friends. So all their info is basically open to anyone on their network. You could easily find out someone's mother's maiden name, and other 'security' questions used by banks and such. Foolish in my opinion.
Then there's people like me. I have just the absolute basics on there- nothing that isn't already public knowledge. I remove all the 'how do you know so and so' data. I also tighten up all my settings so only my approved friends can view my info. So I have no concern about my potential employers seeing my info... or even the Facebook employees. I also don't approve everyone to view my full profile if I've just me them once. Some people see the number of FB friends you have as some kind of score.
Anyway... it doesn't HAVE to be a privacy nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you! She's so strong, it's an inspiration.
Yes, that's a good point about the Guardasil vaccine. I made my doctor give it to me even though technically I'm one year older than the recommended age range. I hope we get more advances like this.
I agree with the many insightful posts which have observed that this is just a shift and the industry will be leaner and better than ever. The desire for music will never go away.
But, isn't there also a bit of a downturn in how much people are willing to spend on music, simply because it's not a cornerstone of their hobbies anymore? I know that for myself I never just sit and ONLY listen to music. I'm on the web, watching TV, movie, reading a book, etc. Most of my music time is in my car, when I listen to the radio. The rest of the time, music is either a bother to what I'm doing (reading), or it's just background music in which case the radio is just fine. I no longer pop in an album and just sit and listen to it. So the value of music, to me, has been reduced to some vaguely noticed background noise and entertainment for when I drive. So it's no longer something I'm willing to pay much, if anything for. The radio is free. And the few REALLY good songs I want for my mp3 player or to keep on my computer, I'm not willing to buy the whole album to get it. Nor am I willing to pay $1 per song.
These days we have many more options of what to do in our free time. I'm not going to pay for music until it becomes closer to 25 cents per song. Even then, it better be a really good song, and better be DRM free.
Lost my angle bracket. Let's try html.... RE<C
REC is what it's called. Not RCC. Come on, even I'm noticing an unusually high number of editing mistakes in the /. summaries lately. Usually I just don't care- but let's strive for accuracy shall we? If /. isn't anal about this kind of thing... who else would be?
Read the article. Several of your points are addressed. It supports txt, pdf and mobi files without conversion. drag and drop via USB. Again... read the article!
Very interesting comment. Thanks for posting that! Wish I had mod points.
Who actually uses that button? I can say that most of my searches, I don't end up going to the first result. If I were to use that button, odds are that I would get to the page, determine it's not what I want... click back, then click the regular search button. The odds just don't play out.
It's that little snippet of text in the search result that shows you the context of your search term- that's what really helps my searching. Now that I think about, I wish I could set that blurb to be longer...
And please... I'm pretty sure that button isn't fooling anyone into thinking Google is still just a friendly, underdog, basement project.
"Sorry ma'am, we can't investigate the gang violence down your street, those officers were re-allocated to chase down the vicious ring of copyright violators."
I think colleges and universities could benefit most from something like this. Imagine if as part of your tuition you were given one of these slick ereaders. Then you download all your textbooks onto it. You can choose to purchase a cheaper time-sensitive copy which expires after the term is up. No hassle of trying to resell your textbooks after the semester only to find out the professor changed the edition, so the next semester doesn't want your used book.
Heck, I remember my own CS courses, the books averaged $80 to $150 each! Times 5 classes per semester, times 2 semesters per year, times 4 years. Whew - lot of money went to books I'll never touch again.
Also, no heavy textbooks to lug around. And if the device allowed you to highlight passages to be aggregated into your own study notes- even better. The professor could even release his own notes as an ebook, so no more need to copy down his annoying powerpoint lessons.
We've already seen resistance from paper-back fans how an ereader just doesn't make sense compared to a paperback. So if these things can't take off in the university setting, I don't see much hope for their wider adoption.
Of course- I prefer paper books- they look nicer on my shelves and are more likely to still be in my possession 20 years from now than any ebook.
My mom had breast cancer several years ago. The treatments are just horrible, but I'm thankful she's still with us. It seems however that once a year we hear about some potential breakthrough or another. Well, with the truckloads of donations going to 'breast cancer research', I'm getting a little sick of hearing about 'potential' breakthroughs. I want something we can start using right now. It's hard to be patient when people you care about are sick or dying. I hope some of these possibilities pan out soon.
On top of that, for $400 you can buy a Palm TX which does a whole lot more including reading ebooks.
$10 for best sellers???
*looks at back of current paperback she's reading*
Yup, I paid $10 for a physical book. Why the hell would I pay $10 for a ebook? That being said I can get a used copy in good condition for usually $2-4.
This assumes I want to keep a copy. If I don't there's always the library down the street.
Figure out what the cost of a physical book is, minus the manufacturing costs, shipping, distribution and retailer costs. That's what the ebook should cost. The commission to the author, publisher and ebook distributor. That's it.
Silly.
Those are not real photos- they are CGI. Look closer.
However, if it was real, it would be pretty damn cool. Well, cool-ish.
I'm sure this has been said, but if Comcast is going to set themselves up as the police of pirated Anime movies... then they are now responsible for enforcing all other laws such as child porn, internet predators, all pirated materials, etc, etc. They better be careful what they're doing- they may be targeting these anime shows as a not-so-sneaky way of going after bittorrent traffic in general, but they're soon going to be expected to watch for non-bittorrent illegal traffic. You can't pick and choose which laws to enforce.
How can anyone remain a comcast customer knowing that comcase is peering into every bit that you send and receive? It disgusts me. Where's the privacy protection. Comcast provides voice service too right? Are they scanning that too? If not, why not? Sheesh, get out people.
While I agree that being unable to get a refund for a non-working game is a load of BS, I'm not sure why you are surprised. If I buy a physical game from a store and open the box, at that point I am unable to get a refund. I can get an exchange for scratched disks, but if the game doesn't work on my machine then I'm out of luck.
I have a stack of games that were opened but failed to install because my previous computer was a piece of crap.
Purchasing from Steam is the same thing- once you have the game, you can't get a refund, even if it fails to work. This isn't a criticism of Steam, but rather of the whole industry of game, music and movie sales. I've always seen buying PC games as a bit of a gamble. That's why I only buy the rare game that I REALLY want, and it's also why so many people choose to buy games for console that would obviously be better on PC- because console games 'just work'.
Anyway, why pick on Steam for refusing to refund a game? You should be picking on every game retailer online or off.
I love that idea. Love it. Put IE and MSN and all the other bundled crap on an optional disk. Fantastic.
True. I thought that was what the levy on blank media was for...
I had one job where they gave me some contracts to bring home and sign before my first day of work. The one document was a non-compete contract which basically said that I could not get another job in the same industry within a 30 KM radius around the business' location while employed by them, AND for 3 years after leaving their employment.
I was blown away by the thought that they could effectively freeze me from getting another programmer job in my town. What was I supposed to do if I quit? Work at Burger King for 3 years before I could go back into programming? So I did some Googling and also spoke to a personnel agency owner I know and found out that these are just scare tactics, and at least in Canada are not enforceable- you can't tell people where they can and can't work. The main way they ARE enforceable is if, for example you are a salesman and take your list of contacts with you. That's a no-no.
I'm not sure how it applies to knowledge gained or what you 'think up', but I would imagine there is a similar limit to how far the law will go toward allowing a company to slap restrictions on your own knowledge. However, if you work on a project on company time, I'm sure you can't go else where and make a similar version of it for someone else.
The main point - consult an expert- contract lawyer is best.
I'm pretty sure your credit card company only knows the store you shopped at, not the individual items you purchased. So they must be looking for shoppers at ethnic-food stores. Unless they are mining loyalty cards from the bigger chains... which I'm sure all the terrorists are using loyalty cards *rolls eyes*. Ahhhh, America. Always amusing how hypocritical your government is. The FBI is watching you buy your "Freedom Fries". Ha.
The non-Nintendo brand memory cards for gamecube/wii have this problem too. Never by Mad-Catz anything, and stick with the Nindendo brand cards. I speak from painful experience!
Not quite. My free time is worth more than my work-day time because it's precious to me. The rare-er it is the more it's worth. I do freelance work on the side in my spare time and I price it at twice what I make at my day job. So my free time is worth $40/h, and that will go up as my career advances. So, 5 hours into HalfLife2ep2, my saved game is worth $200. I'll say that's worth backing up alright. ... Note to self...
However, there are often cheat codes that let you jump ahead to any level you choose so you could use that. Plus, if it's a good game, then replaying it isn't TOO much of a pain in the butt. So, that brings the price down too.
This is a great idea. I have a great stereo I got for my bday 10 years ago. It's a Samsung (if I remember correctly) and it has a 5 CD carousel on the top, a radio and 2 tape decks. It also has a video in connection so I hooked it up to my dvd player and tv for stereo sound.
Anyway, I love it. But for the last 5 years, every time I turn it off, it loses all preset radio stations and goes back to factory default. When I turn it on the CD tray spins and everything programmed in is gone. It's putting extra wear and tear on the CD tray and is just frustrating. I opened it up one time and took a clueless peak in side to see if I could spot anything that looks like a battery for maintaining the memory but couldn't spot anything.
I'd be so grateful if I could get that problem fixed. When I get home and can check the model info I'll be hitting up that fixya site for sure. Great idea for a website.
Yes, I've seen that kind of blanket comments from people who just don't understand. If it can be used for bad reasons and good reasons, it should be outlawed. When my Mom first started seeing all the TV specials about internet predators on the Internet and on IM networks, my Mom was first in favour of outlawing the entire Internet. Then outlawing just chat.
I asked her if we should outlaw cameras just because pedophiles can use them to photograph children. She gave me an almost-comprehending-glimmer of a stare for a while but then just resumed her insistence that all chat is evil, the internet is evil, etc, etc.
People are very, very afraid of what they don't understand. And are willing to give up massive amounts of their freedoms for even an illusion of safety. So sad.
It's my observation that there are two types of users of Facebook. Some of my friends put every tidbit of data about themselves that the site asks for. Their highschool, college, employer, age, religion, sexual preference, relationship, photos, favourite shows, books, who they are related to, etc, etc. It builds a pretty extensive profile of them. These are usually the people who never look at the privacy options to tighten them up and make their profile info available only to their friends. So all their info is basically open to anyone on their network. You could easily find out someone's mother's maiden name, and other 'security' questions used by banks and such. Foolish in my opinion.
Then there's people like me. I have just the absolute basics on there- nothing that isn't already public knowledge. I remove all the 'how do you know so and so' data. I also tighten up all my settings so only my approved friends can view my info. So I have no concern about my potential employers seeing my info... or even the Facebook employees. I also don't approve everyone to view my full profile if I've just me them once. Some people see the number of FB friends you have as some kind of score.
Anyway... it doesn't HAVE to be a privacy nightmare.