Apple makes a LOT of profit from selling iPods. So the song is the razor, not the iPod, and that's because the price sensitivity is currently about the content, not the player.
Only one thing wrong with the analogy. You can't really go down much lower on the price of blades. But the iPod is quite simply overpriced. If Apple doesn't watch out, cutthroat competition from Asian companies -- perhaps not singly but as part of a horde -- is going to put it out of the blade business.
To carry the analogy further, I don't see a substantial increase in Apple's razor business so long as there's no explicit law banning the P2P and free(dark)net systems that would allow listeners to download freebie content. I think Apple's only chance of substantially increasing its media business is by resorting to some DRM system. Lock 'em up in an audio format that can only be played in iPod or iTunes. Then make iPod and iTunes play only those formats.
Then again mp3s are perhaps already too ubiquitous to ignore. So I suspect Microsoft has the upper hand here, as their WMA format is at least playing catch up with mp3. If Microsoft released a media player merely as decent as the XBox or Windows XP, I see Apple biting the dust.
Ya. I too bought one of these so called multi-function devices for about the same amount. Mine's an Aiptek. Could we be talking about the same rebranded gizmo? The Aiptek DV-3500 does mp3 playback and voice, still and mp4 recording to MMC or SD media.
The old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none" certainly applies to the thing. It's a nice toy. But it's bound to fail in quite a few situations where a dedicated mp3 player, digital still camera and digital camcorder -- even if they still fall short of their analog cousins -- would do just fine. For one thing, the DV-3500 doesn't have optical zoom. Most of the better mid-range digital still cameras have at least 3X and as we go up the price range we see 10X in cameras like the Kodak DX7590, which also does mpeg4 recording. The camcorder is also practically useless in low-light situations. So forget about using it in undercover work.
The Taiwanese company has other models available in their Pocket DV range.
I think most people won't mind a bigger computer so long as they don't have to be Spiderman to connect all the necessary pieces or peripherals. The sleekness of the iMac was a big factor in its success. All you needed to plug in was the keyboard, the mouse and the power cord. If the Mini can be cabled as easily as a DVD player (probably the most complex appliance in a non-geek's living room) to a TV, then Apple has a winner.
I'm a vegetarian, but I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with such experiments. If I did, I would be joining the lunatic fringe of the animal rights movement that wouldn't stop at burning down MacDonalds restaurants. I think what one needs is moral consistency. If it would be wrong to kill a mouse with a nominally human brain, then why is it okay to kill an adult cow for beef? I would rate the adult cow higher on the sentience scale than a mouse with an uneducated human brain.
I see an apparent confusion in the force. We should differentiate between the player (the Quicktime player from Apple) and the file format known as Quicktime. The Apple Quicktime player is indeed nagware. But as other posters have already noted, there are non-nagging players available, whose legality may or may not be on the gray side. Here it's probably also important to differentiate between the Quicktime file format (the container) and the different Quicktime codecs (the content). For example, a Quicktime file can contain the Sorenson video codec made (in)famous by the trailers you download from Apple.com or the so-called Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) codec supported by many older digital camcorders before the advent of MPEG 4 (yet another QT-embeddable codec). The Sorenson codec has since been reverse-engineered by the terribly underrated FFmpeg project, and non-Windows lusers can now view such Quicktime movie without being nagged (hearing them may still be a problem though).
I can understand the fears of the US government. Like everything else, espionage is probably becoming commoditized. PC technologies -- including the Intel and AMD CPUs inside them -- are relatively low-tech as far as millenium technologies go. But link several and you have a commodity supercomputer. Terrorism has for a long time been a form of commoditized warfare. Small, treacherous attacks combine to give the impression of strength against a state with an overwhelming superiority in conventional or nuclear arms.
I've had the chance to use Google as a grammar or style checker in my day job as a glorified copy editor. I type two nearly identical expressions X and Y in the search box. If expression X gets 10,100 hits and expression Y only 500 hits, I use expression X.
For example, as a non-native speaker, I found myself waffling between the expression (A) "run for mayor of" and the expression (B) "run as mayor of." Letting Google arbitrate, I found 14,900 hits for (A) and only 200 hundred hits for (B). I chose (A).
I discovered there's practically a dead heat between the expressions "a new lease on life" (which, if I'm not mistaken, is the expression favored by American usage) and "a new lease of life," with the latter nosing out the former 144,000 hits to 140,000. In this instance I let my own usage arbitrate. Since I'm more exposed to American than to English, I chose on.
If it's for a good cause, why not? I'll readily sell off that necklace or autographed first edition, i.e., another family member desperately needs money for an operation or the organization is on the verge of liquidation. Besides, I don't think the items that are going to be sold represent anything really personal. These are basically the same sort of things that celebrities give away, in lieu of cash, to charity auctions. This is the one lesson that Gollum, that sneaky hobbit formerly known as Smeagol, failed to appreciate. The value of a thing lies not in itself, but in the good it can do. Love something too much and you're possessed by it. Instead of owning it, you're owned by it.
Even assuming its conclusions are true, the study cited by the article doesn't provide proof that women are necessarily bad in math. It might be a case for why women are bad in branches of math that do require visual manipulation like geometry. I don't see much visual manipulation in arithmetic and algebra or even in much of what goes under the heading "computer science." Hey, even the whole story doesn't provide a "case" for why fewer women are into computers. Programming is more about logic than raw math power.
News by definition isn't intended to be a surgical exposition on a topic. I work at a news organization so I know that quite often one sentence summarizes the whole news article. The rest is either "storified" data -- e.g. Ten people were confirmed dead, while five were reported as missing -- background information, or worse, padding with no relevance to the topic at hand. (Watch out for expressions like "meanwhile"!) News is no longer news if you can't read it while it's hot. What you need to read are magazines like National Geographic or the New Yorker. Because their deadlines are measured in periods longer than a day, they can adopt a more leisurely approach to their subjects. Unfortunately, magazines appear to be less willing than news organizations to share their content online. Quite a few of them require paid registration.
Make that last sentence: "How can GNU/Linux rule when it can't shoot?" (I know I should have previewed, but the office broadband izzz zzzo zzzlow. today)
I don't see any first person shooters
among the games include in the LiveCD. There are a handful of free --
GPL or better -- shooters around like
Marathon Aleph One. Unfortunatley the one shooter entry, Cube, was removed from the current version:
I didn't wrote jet a games list, you can refer to the
old list, because there are few differences. From the old list there are only few removal (Cube is the only important removal) and there are some new entries (like Wesnoth and TORCS!). I will rewrite the list soon, stay tuned!
I had a 60GB 5400rpm drive that already had bad sectors when I bought it. I should have returned it to the store the hour I got my "drive seek" error. But I was too lazy. The drive lasted all of two years before I got fed up with the intermittent crashes and replaced it with a cheaper, speedier and higher-capcity 80GB drive. The damaged drive probably could have lasted a few more months, had I the mind to reformat around the bad sectors (which was what I originally did to make the drive useful during its two-year of life). But that would be prolonging the agony too much!
No, it's actually an inexpensive replica of the Face on Mars that some alien space tourist dropped. It looks just like a meteorite because the photos were taken with wrong illumination and at wrong inclination, just like the images of the Mars Global Surveyor released by NASA supposedly to debunk the existence of the extraterrestrial artifact.
Since the list contains a number of innovations that I don't see lying around or cavorting in my apartment like the space shuttle (No. 25), plasma TV (No. 18) and my personal nanobot floor cleaner (No. 21), the technology experts consulted by CNN should have included even more gee-whiz conceptware such as space elevators (demonstrated to be plausible by the inventor of the communication satellite), air-breathing rockets and Matrix-style (jack me in, Scotty) virtual reality? Hmm, why is virtual reality -- even in its tepid VR glasses form -- not in the list? My choice for No. 1 is a toss-up between the AIBO and the Honda robot.
Slashdot of course has its famous slashdot moderation mechanism. I see truth in Wikipedia being filtered by something else, the passion of a relatively smaller (per subject or wiki entry) group of committed bloggers. Entries on controversial subjects (like the ones on a certain invaded or liberated Middle Eastern country) tend to be reverted and re-reverted more often because more people feel passionate enough about them to actually click on the Edit tab and rewrite the truth from their perspective. On the other hand, wrong information on subjects which are of interest to literally only a handful of people tend to sit for a long time. But that's okay. Only a handful of people will be affected by the mis(dis)information.
Yes and No. Theora is a superset of VP3, so VP3 streams (with minor syntactic modifications) can be made into Theora streams without recompression (but not vice versa).
Theora will be almost entirely based upon the VP3 codec designed by On2. However, Theora video data will be delivered inside of the Ogg container format (with Vorbis for audio), so Ogg Theora files will not be the same as VP3 files. There also may be quite a few performance advantages to using Theora when 1.0 is complete. While our focus is integration, there will certainly be a lot of optimization involved, as well.
So there! Theora is optimized VP3, which means there's a good chance it would turn out to be a faster codec. But as far as visual quality is concerned Theora is likely to be just as good or just as bad as VP3.
On2 itself is well represented in the survey by its VP6 codec, and judging from the pseudo version numbers on the codec names, it should be safe to assume that VP3 is inferior to VP6 (VP6 - VP3 = 3 generations of development).
Also, we have to admit that some of the critical software for Linux isn't as good as the software for Windows. Last night I discovered that KOffice's KSpread program won't let me make a non-contiguous selection. KWord doesn't feature paragraph grouping or widow and orphan control. I *want* to use the free software programs, but I find myself using Crossover Office to run MS Office because MS Office works. It's expensive, but it does the job.
But why aren't you using another office suite such as, which is argually the most advanced Office suite that runs under GNU/Linux, and under *BSD and OSX. It also runs under WinXP. I don't know about your KSpread problem, but OOo Writer does have widow and orphan control.
Magnatune.com and eclassical.com have all the music I care to download. They also offer free titles and the option to preview samples of the work. Magnatune provides flac and ogg files in addition to the usual mp3s.
Newspapers contain a great deal of editorializing, too, and not just in the Opinion section. I should know. I work at one:
Journalists go out and find out what's going on, they (hopefully) check their sources out and get confirmation and input from both sides and then report on it. Commentators -- and these includes bloggers -- are consumers of what journalists generate. They add (or, some might argue, remove) value by way of interpretation.
This unfortunately is a naive description of how newspapers actually work. There are reporters and there are editors. While the reporters (sometimes) do "go out and find out what's going on," their reports often get munged, even mangled, by the editors.
As one of those who do the mangling, I know that what a reporter wrote sometimes bears little resemblance to what gets printed.
And speaking of reporters going out, sometimes the going out part goes no further than the fax machine or mail server. Or haven't you heard of the term press release? I often see reports that are simply lightly rewritten press releases. And guess what the reporter's contribution often is? The editorializing.
A well-hit blogger is probably just as reliable or unreliable, as fair or biased, as a popular newspaper.
Making fluxbox and its kin usable winds up requiring I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.
Slashdot Mirror
To carry the analogy further, I don't see a substantial increase in Apple's razor business so long as there's no explicit law banning the P2P and free(dark)net systems that would allow listeners to download freebie content. I think Apple's only chance of substantially increasing its media business is by resorting to some DRM system. Lock 'em up in an audio format that can only be played in iPod or iTunes. Then make iPod and iTunes play only those formats.
Then again mp3s are perhaps already too ubiquitous to ignore. So I suspect Microsoft has the upper hand here, as their WMA format is at least playing catch up with mp3. If Microsoft released a media player merely as decent as the XBox or Windows XP, I see Apple biting the dust.
The old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none" certainly applies to the thing. It's a nice toy. But it's bound to fail in quite a few situations where a dedicated mp3 player, digital still camera and digital camcorder -- even if they still fall short of their analog cousins -- would do just fine. For one thing, the DV-3500 doesn't have optical zoom. Most of the better mid-range digital still cameras have at least 3X and as we go up the price range we see 10X in cameras like the Kodak DX7590, which also does mpeg4 recording. The camcorder is also practically useless in low-light situations. So forget about using it in undercover work.
The Taiwanese company has other models available in their Pocket DV range.
I think most people won't mind a bigger computer so long as they don't have to be Spiderman to connect all the necessary pieces or peripherals. The sleekness of the iMac was a big factor in its success. All you needed to plug in was the keyboard, the mouse and the power cord. If the Mini can be cabled as easily as a DVD player (probably the most complex appliance in a non-geek's living room) to a TV, then Apple has a winner.
I'm a vegetarian, but I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with such experiments. If I did, I would be joining the lunatic fringe of the animal rights movement that wouldn't stop at burning down MacDonalds restaurants. I think what one needs is moral consistency. If it would be wrong to kill a mouse with a nominally human brain, then why is it okay to kill an adult cow for beef? I would rate the adult cow higher on the sentience scale than a mouse with an uneducated human brain.
I see an apparent confusion in the force. We should differentiate between the player (the Quicktime player from Apple) and the file format known as Quicktime. The Apple Quicktime player is indeed nagware. But as other posters have already noted, there are non-nagging players available, whose legality may or may not be on the gray side. Here it's probably also important to differentiate between the Quicktime file format (the container) and the different Quicktime codecs (the content). For example, a Quicktime file can contain the Sorenson video codec made (in)famous by the trailers you download from Apple.com or the so-called Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) codec supported by many older digital camcorders before the advent of MPEG 4 (yet another QT-embeddable codec). The Sorenson codec has since been reverse-engineered by the terribly underrated FFmpeg project, and non-Windows lusers can now view such Quicktime movie without being nagged (hearing them may still be a problem though).
I can understand the fears of the US government. Like everything else, espionage is probably becoming commoditized. PC technologies -- including the Intel and AMD CPUs inside them -- are relatively low-tech as far as millenium technologies go. But link several and you have a commodity supercomputer. Terrorism has for a long time been a form of commoditized warfare. Small, treacherous attacks combine to give the impression of strength against a state with an overwhelming superiority in conventional or nuclear arms.
If you and I were working on a document in SubEthaEdit you could revert any changes I make as I make them, and I yours.
I've had the chance to use Google as a grammar or style checker in my day job as a glorified copy editor. I type two nearly identical expressions X and Y in the search box. If expression X gets 10,100 hits and expression Y only 500 hits, I use expression X.
For example, as a non-native speaker, I found myself waffling between the expression (A) "run for mayor of" and the expression (B) "run as mayor of." Letting Google arbitrate, I found 14,900 hits for (A) and only 200 hundred hits for (B). I chose (A).
I discovered there's practically a dead heat between the expressions "a new lease on life" (which, if I'm not mistaken, is the expression favored by American usage) and "a new lease of life," with the latter nosing out the former 144,000 hits to 140,000. In this instance I let my own usage arbitrate. Since I'm more exposed to American than to English, I chose on.
If it's for a good cause, why not? I'll readily sell off that necklace or autographed first edition, i.e., another family member desperately needs money for an operation or the organization is on the verge of liquidation. Besides, I don't think the items that are going to be sold represent anything really personal. These are basically the same sort of things that celebrities give away, in lieu of cash, to charity auctions. This is the one lesson that Gollum, that sneaky hobbit formerly known as Smeagol, failed to appreciate. The value of a thing lies not in itself, but in the good it can do. Love something too much and you're possessed by it. Instead of owning it, you're owned by it.
Even assuming its conclusions are true, the study cited by the article doesn't provide proof that women are necessarily bad in math. It might be a case for why women are bad in branches of math that do require visual manipulation like geometry. I don't see much visual manipulation in arithmetic and algebra or even in much of what goes under the heading "computer science." Hey, even the whole story doesn't provide a "case" for why fewer women are into computers. Programming is more about logic than raw math power.
News by definition isn't intended to be a surgical exposition on a topic. I work at a news organization so I know that quite often one sentence summarizes the whole news article. The rest is either "storified" data -- e.g. Ten people were confirmed dead, while five were reported as missing -- background information, or worse, padding with no relevance to the topic at hand. (Watch out for expressions like "meanwhile"!) News is no longer news if you can't read it while it's hot. What you need to read are magazines like National Geographic or the New Yorker. Because their deadlines are measured in periods longer than a day, they can adopt a more leisurely approach to their subjects. Unfortunately, magazines appear to be less willing than news organizations to share their content online. Quite a few of them require paid registration.
But Neil didn't post it on his official web site so it could be /.ed.
Make that last sentence: "How can GNU/Linux rule when it can't shoot?" (I know I should have previewed, but the office broadband izzz zzzo zzzlow. today)
I had a 60GB 5400rpm drive that already had bad sectors when I bought it. I should have returned it to the store the hour I got my "drive seek" error. But I was too lazy. The drive lasted all of two years before I got fed up with the intermittent crashes and replaced it with a cheaper, speedier and higher-capcity 80GB drive. The damaged drive probably could have lasted a few more months, had I the mind to reformat around the bad sectors (which was what I originally did to make the drive useful during its two-year of life). But that would be prolonging the agony too much!
No, it's actually an inexpensive replica of the Face on Mars that some alien space tourist dropped. It looks just like a meteorite because the photos were taken with wrong illumination and at wrong inclination, just like the images of the Mars Global Surveyor released by NASA supposedly to debunk the existence of the extraterrestrial artifact.
[Then try MMC]
Since the list contains a number of innovations that I don't see lying around or cavorting in my apartment like the space shuttle (No. 25), plasma TV (No. 18) and my personal nanobot floor cleaner (No. 21), the technology experts consulted by CNN should have included even more gee-whiz conceptware such as space elevators (demonstrated to be plausible by the inventor of the communication satellite), air-breathing rockets and Matrix-style (jack me in, Scotty) virtual reality? Hmm, why is virtual reality -- even in its tepid VR glasses form -- not in the list? My choice for No. 1 is a toss-up between the AIBO and the Honda robot.
Slashdot of course has its famous slashdot moderation mechanism. I see truth in Wikipedia being filtered by something else, the passion of a relatively smaller (per subject or wiki entry) group of committed bloggers. Entries on controversial subjects (like the ones on a certain invaded or liberated Middle Eastern country) tend to be reverted and re-reverted more often because more people feel passionate enough about them to actually click on the Edit tab and rewrite the truth from their perspective. On the other hand, wrong information on subjects which are of interest to literally only a handful of people tend to sit for a long time. But that's okay. Only a handful of people will be affected by the mis(dis)information.
A quote from the Theora faq:
So there! Theora is optimized VP3, which means there's a good chance it would turn out to be a faster codec. But as far as visual quality is concerned Theora is likely to be just as good or just as bad as VP3.On2 itself is well represented in the survey by its VP6 codec, and judging from the pseudo version numbers on the codec names, it should be safe to assume that VP3 is inferior to VP6 (VP6 - VP3 = 3 generations of development).
Magnatune.com and eclassical.com have all the music I care to download. They also offer free titles and the option to preview samples of the work. Magnatune provides flac and ogg files in addition to the usual mp3s.
As one of those who do the mangling, I know that what a reporter wrote sometimes bears little resemblance to what gets printed.
And speaking of reporters going out, sometimes the going out part goes no further than the fax machine or mail server. Or haven't you heard of the term press release? I often see reports that are simply lightly rewritten press releases. And guess what the reporter's contribution often is? The editorializing.
A well-hit blogger is probably just as reliable or unreliable, as fair or biased, as a popular newspaper.
Incredible! Does this mean a base installation of XFce includes Firefox, Abiword, Emacs, GVim, The Gimp, GPhoto, Inkscape and Scribus? These are the apps I require in order to make Fluxbox usable.