Did any of you try it? Downloading the plugin took longer than downloading many real programs, and then in the middle of the install it downloaded more programs. Kind of annoying. So then I go to try their demonstration. It takes the Curl plug-in about a minute to load - completely unacceptable. Then I try scrolling around on the terra server map. At first all looks good, very fast and fluid. Then I get away from the center of the map and it's all fuzzy/pixelated. After waiting a while, it gets clearer, the map is apparently not all there until you scroll over some of it. Well - is that not utterly pointless if the reason you have this plugin is to scroll around faster? The entire map never stayed resident in memory, it was continually fuzzing out areas i wasn't looking at. Sorry, but a plain ordinary jpg that would admittedly take a few seconds to download would let me scroll over the whole thing and see it clearly, or print it out. The solution is a faster net connection, not this mess.
The dealer can't take the Toyota signs off the car. They're adding the 'Bobs Toyota' label is optional on their part, but they're stuck with the Toyota label.
Not a perfect analogy though, b/c the Toyota label is just an add for the maker of the car. The MSN logo is NOT an add for Microsoft, the maker of the OS, its an add for a different group, MSN the internet service provider. I know they're still the same company, but they're different groups the way Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown books are different from AOL's NOC. An icon saying 'Long Live Windows!', or a default Windows wallpaper would fit the analogy better. To match the MSN icon analogy, your Toyota car would have to have a label on it advertising Toyota brand Wheat Flakes or some such. And you'd understand then why Bobs Toyota would be upset about putting it on the cars they sell.
I'll bet in addition to the car label, there's one saying 'Ted Britt Ford', 'Koons Cars', or something like that. To get a car without those costs extra - but I certainly think the os consumer should have the same choice to pay extra to not have advertising bundled, though as with the car dealer labels very few will avail themselves of the opportunity.
Things that make you look or feel stupid:
Incomprehensible error messages
Programs that don't remember what you did 2 seconds ago (if I saved a file 30 times in the same directory I'm probably going to want to save it there the next time I save it, not in the program's 'default' directory)
Programs that let you destroy 2 weeks of work with one keystroke
Programs that ask you to confirm that yes you are really super-duper extra sure you want to do what you said you want to do
Programs that require you to remember factoids like where you saved a file (before you get outraged, libraries let you find a book by title, author, several options - why can't computers?)
Programs that require you to do many manual options to do a single task
There are many many examples of this, all unintentional of course. Because really rather little software is 'designed' most of it emerges rather messily, and when it is designed it is usually designed by software engineers whose concerns are not those of the user. Automotive engineers never INTENDED to make boring boxy cars, their specialty just wasn't sleek design.
If the topic is user interface design, nothing important will be said until everyone involved has read 'About Face: the Essentials of User Interface Design' by Alan Cooper (here on amazon). I've been re-reading it again, and am amazed at the insight and the prescience.
Fundamental is the difference between good software engineering, and good user interface design. The automobile industry recognizes this gap - most users don't see what engineering is embedded in the engine, drivetrain, etc, but everyone sees the smooth lines of the body. And the second you sit behind the wheel you can tell if the designers intelligently arranged the controls to be easily accessible and clearly read. NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with the engineering of the car - it could have a revolutionary new suspension system, but that's not what you see. The same gap exists between user interface design and software engineering. An elegant use of pointers is invisible to your user. The relative elegance of software engineering techniques means nothing for user interface design.
Programmers tend to be BAD at interface design - BECAUSE we understand more about how the machines and software work than the average user does. We know the box, so we don't think outside the box.
The book opens with a great discussion of a user's goals, which are usually NOT to recompile a kernel. Cooper says users want: to not look stupid, to get an adequate amount of work done, not be too bored. These goals are clearly not addressed by error boxes that pop up saying 'library x caused a page fault at.... Ok?'.
It is licensed by the author. At least in the book world. The author grants the publishing corp. a limited license for one printing of his work.
In the music world, the artists sign a contract effectively transferring all rights, indefinitely, to the record company. So that all licenses are then granted by the record company - a situation so absurd that the artist no longer has a legal right to copy their own music, only the corporation has that right. (Note: only talking about legal rights.)
MP3.com, Napster, the Web in general have changed the definition of publishing, and made it much easier for amateurs to distribute their content.
Quality isn't a matter of 'digital' or not. MP3's have poor sound quality. They're digital, but they have poor sound quality. The sound quality is the important issue. The point the previous poster was making was that you can use the error correction in your cd audio player to generate a good quality wav file, which you can then use to create good sounding mp3s. If your concern is perfect sound quality, don't use mp3s at all. If you just want listenable music, use the above technique to copy these 'broken' cds. The cd ripping hardware you envision would only be an 'all-in-one-box' version of what was already proposed - a player with error correction, a wav file recorder, and an mp3 encoder. Feel free to design or buy such hardware if you want to, but your computer is already capable of functioning as the second 2 and your cd player can function as the first, and you own these products already.
The problem is that it's not the authors or artists who are enforcing ip for their own benefit. It's media corps. that enforce ip for the benefit of the media corp. Copyright SHOULD reserve certain rights to the author - most of these rights should NOT be transferrable to other parties, and should always revert back to the author after one 'printing' as in the book world, not remain in the hands of a corporation that's never written lyric one, as in the music industry.
so join netflix.com instead. $20 a month, have up to 3 dvds out at a time, for as long as you want, they send the next one in your queue to you as soon as they get one back from you in the postage paid mailers they come in.
"I've always been suspicious of these so called Big Science projects"
Oh yeah - stupid stuff like the Manhattan Project would never be necessary to create fission bombs or fission power plants, eh? And that manned space flight - just tell me how you're supposed to fly around the world when the world's flat?
Big Science very often isn't justified, but is most justified in those areas that require a massive upfront investment that would never be made by industry (fission and fusion are both good examples).
Hmm, please compare relative funding between current fusion research and the amount of funding poured into the Manhattan Project, as a fraction of GNP. I don't think that either fission bombs or fission power plants would have been created with funding like that which goes today for fusion research. MASSIVE government programs allowed that research to be carried out and carried to fruition. The flip side of that is that a huge investment in fusion research- like, say, the amount that the federal government is prepared to dump into increasing available fossil fuels- could very well bring commercial fusion reactors into the realm of viability. So - does politics have anything to do with why we don't have fusion yet? Since it lacks a wealthy industry group to bribe politicians to fund it, while the oil companies have exactly that wealthy industry group, I think it does.
The big lie is that since vinyl is an 'analog' medium, the sound waves direct from the recording are going to be pressed on the record. NOT! It would sound like drek if it was, as the old records did. In almost all cases VINYL IS DIGITALLY MASTERED BEFORE PRESSING! This lets sound engineers do all the tweaking we've come to expect, it is not a simple loss of quality. So any 'analog' benefit is lost before the pressing. You do though get the wonderful analog degradation as micro-scratches and dust accumulate on your record. Being analog, the grooves on your records are the actual shape of the sound waves, but since your records were digitally mastered before pressing, they're not smooth analog curves, they're slightly boxy representing the sampling.
If you like vinyl, using a record preservative like LAST record preservative (review here) can extend the life of your records dramatically. But it can certainly never make them sound better than they did when they were digitally mastered. If you REALLY don't want to damage your record, there are even laser turntables (here) that just scan the grooves. Now I just need one of those in my car:)
Can you tell me the difference between these two statements?
1) I've noticed that some players provide clearer sound than others when playing the same file.
2) If you find a decoder (player) which gives crappy output on a good mp3/ogg file, well then that player is crappy. Yes, I know that such players exist.
Answer? None. 2 is in no way a correction to 1. It is in fact just a restatement of it, with some bad attitude added. Think on them for a moment, and you may see that the original poster might be talking about some of the very relevant details left out of the article. What player was used? What encoder was used (could have been many different ones for the mp3)? What bitrate? An mp3 of a rock song might sound worse on player 1 than on player 2. But an mp3 of a classical song might sound worse on player 2 than on player 1. It is not an issue of "oh, that one's crappy".
It was a flawed experiment, as was pointed out earlier the listeners shouldn't have known what they were listening to. A valid experiment would have been to play the same piece encoded in several different formats, at several different bitrates, on several different players. And that would only show that listener's opinion of the encoder/player combinations for that one piece. This would have to be repeated for each different piece, and different genres have different ranges and characteristics. Electronic dance music is affected differently by compression than classical is, as far as the changes in apparent sound. What you'd be left with is a list of which player is best at playing songs encoded at a particular bitrate by a particular encoder in a particular musical genre. A very interesting experiment. Evidently not one that these reporters wanted to get involved it.
no....publishers have the most to gain
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
Publishers are seeing books being returned at a ridiculous level right now. They upped production when the rapidly expanding mega chains (Borders, BN) were building new stores and ordering more books to fill their shelves (and when Amazon was building and stocking new warehouses) - they thought the increased orders meant more people were buying books, paying no attention to the fact that all that was really growing was the amount of shelf space. Once the new shelf space was filled, as it is now, the orders dropped again. Traditional return levels are around 20% - they've been seeing returns up to near 45% for some books and some stores. These books cost money to print and transport - the cost of return shipping for these books is also borne by the publishers. These costs are passed along to us as consumers.
I think this highlights one of the best, and corporate friendly, uses of digital technology to transmit media. I don't want a copy of a book printed out by me and bound together with some binder clips - I want a real book with a real binding. I don't want a blank cd-r with no printed track listing - I want a cd with cover art, jewel case, and inserts with information. In both the book and music publishing industry, equipping stores with high-quality manufacturing units that could produce professional cds or books from a digital catalog would be a great way to increase the stores available titles, lower cost of production (through eliminating waste), and demonstrate that they are selling a value-added product, it's not just the text or the sounds they're selling, they're selling books or cds. I still really enjoy browsing, and find many of my favorite purchases that way, so I don't want stores to go away or be replaced by these manufacturing kiosks, I just think they would be a great addition, and would be a great way of keeping marginal, small-audience titles in the catalogue.
If I was to try this, it would eat up a good day of work.
"Then I just have to remember one scheme and a bunch of key phrases for all of them"
Yeah - those key phrases? That's what us normal people use AS passwords.
As much as I hate the idea of biometrics, I'm really getting fed up with the need to memorize giant lists of passwords, pins, etc. just to identify that I am in fact me. Nothing is more random or harder to produce than your thumb print or iris pattern - perfect, non-stealable, unique identifiers.
Kids love jar jar.
1) That's not true
2) If the point of the movie was to make kids happy - why was the plot about a vote of no-confidence in a senate in the middle of a trade war? You can't really explain the plot of the movie to a child - and you can't make an adult tolerate Jar Jar. Lucas had 2 potential audiences (believe me i wanted to love it, my first memory is seeing Star Wars at a drive in as a little kid) - he could have done middle of the road stuff that would partially include both or focused solely on one. Instead he put in Jar-Jar that could only appeal to one kids while repulsing adults, and put in a plot that could only be understood by adults.
Obviously NOT. This isn't for updating your BIOS automatically, which would be good. It's to install Adobe Acrobat and like 3 other programs and set your home page and search page. It has not point, there is no demand for it.
It clearly says a meta tag will allow sites to specify that they don't want this 'feature' to be active when viewing the site. People - stop being in a rush to post the first comment and first READ the ENTIRE (very short here by the way) article.
According to the info in the story and followup, there was ONE complaint. About a newsletter that macromedia says is an opt-in. Obnoxious? Or just one annoyed customer trying to get revenge? I have no way of knowing since rbl has removed their documentation. It is unacceptable that they can block access to a site without me being able to find out why. It is unacceptable that the technological elite would then be able to figure out a way to the site but the majority of users wouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Did any of you try it? Downloading the plugin took longer than downloading many real programs, and then in the middle of the install it downloaded more programs. Kind of annoying. So then I go to try their demonstration. It takes the Curl plug-in about a minute to load - completely unacceptable. Then I try scrolling around on the terra server map. At first all looks good, very fast and fluid. Then I get away from the center of the map and it's all fuzzy/pixelated. After waiting a while, it gets clearer, the map is apparently not all there until you scroll over some of it. Well - is that not utterly pointless if the reason you have this plugin is to scroll around faster? The entire map never stayed resident in memory, it was continually fuzzing out areas i wasn't looking at. Sorry, but a plain ordinary jpg that would admittedly take a few seconds to download would let me scroll over the whole thing and see it clearly, or print it out. The solution is a faster net connection, not this mess.
The dealer can't take the Toyota signs off the car. They're adding the 'Bobs Toyota' label is optional on their part, but they're stuck with the Toyota label.
Not a perfect analogy though, b/c the Toyota label is just an add for the maker of the car. The MSN logo is NOT an add for Microsoft, the maker of the OS, its an add for a different group, MSN the internet service provider. I know they're still the same company, but they're different groups the way Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown books are different from AOL's NOC. An icon saying 'Long Live Windows!', or a default Windows wallpaper would fit the analogy better. To match the MSN icon analogy, your Toyota car would have to have a label on it advertising Toyota brand Wheat Flakes or some such. And you'd understand then why Bobs Toyota would be upset about putting it on the cars they sell.
If you buy a car on lot they charge you for taking off the advertising they put on it.
So I wonder if they're upset about the efforts to eradicate coca production?
Is this the original formula maybe?
I think they stopped using cocaine a looonnngggg time ago.
Coke's formula is a trade secret. Not patented or copyrighted or anything. And violating copyright is not a jailable offense.
And the situation was NOT illegal - this man was NOT subject to the american laws he's accused of breaking, our laws end at our borders.
I'll bet in addition to the car label, there's one saying 'Ted Britt Ford', 'Koons Cars', or something like that. To get a car without those costs extra - but I certainly think the os consumer should have the same choice to pay extra to not have advertising bundled, though as with the car dealer labels very few will avail themselves of the opportunity.
Things that make you look or feel stupid:
Incomprehensible error messages
Programs that don't remember what you did 2 seconds ago (if I saved a file 30 times in the same directory I'm probably going to want to save it there the next time I save it, not in the program's 'default' directory)
Programs that let you destroy 2 weeks of work with one keystroke
Programs that ask you to confirm that yes you are really super-duper extra sure you want to do what you said you want to do
Programs that require you to remember factoids like where you saved a file (before you get outraged, libraries let you find a book by title, author, several options - why can't computers?)
Programs that require you to do many manual options to do a single task
There are many many examples of this, all unintentional of course. Because really rather little software is 'designed' most of it emerges rather messily, and when it is designed it is usually designed by software engineers whose concerns are not those of the user. Automotive engineers never INTENDED to make boring boxy cars, their specialty just wasn't sleek design.
If the topic is user interface design, nothing important will be said until everyone involved has read 'About Face: the Essentials of User Interface Design' by Alan Cooper (here on amazon). I've been re-reading it again, and am amazed at the insight and the prescience.
.... Ok?'.
Fundamental is the difference between good software engineering, and good user interface design. The automobile industry recognizes this gap - most users don't see what engineering is embedded in the engine, drivetrain, etc, but everyone sees the smooth lines of the body. And the second you sit behind the wheel you can tell if the designers intelligently arranged the controls to be easily accessible and clearly read. NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with the engineering of the car - it could have a revolutionary new suspension system, but that's not what you see. The same gap exists between user interface design and software engineering. An elegant use of pointers is invisible to your user. The relative elegance of software engineering techniques means nothing for user interface design.
Programmers tend to be BAD at interface design - BECAUSE we understand more about how the machines and software work than the average user does. We know the box, so we don't think outside the box.
The book opens with a great discussion of a user's goals, which are usually NOT to recompile a kernel. Cooper says users want: to not look stupid, to get an adequate amount of work done, not be too bored. These goals are clearly not addressed by error boxes that pop up saying 'library x caused a page fault at
It is licensed by the author. At least in the book world. The author grants the publishing corp. a limited license for one printing of his work.
In the music world, the artists sign a contract effectively transferring all rights, indefinitely, to the record company. So that all licenses are then granted by the record company - a situation so absurd that the artist no longer has a legal right to copy their own music, only the corporation has that right. (Note: only talking about legal rights.)
MP3.com, Napster, the Web in general have changed the definition of publishing, and made it much easier for amateurs to distribute their content.
Quality isn't a matter of 'digital' or not. MP3's have poor sound quality. They're digital, but they have poor sound quality. The sound quality is the important issue. The point the previous poster was making was that you can use the error correction in your cd audio player to generate a good quality wav file, which you can then use to create good sounding mp3s. If your concern is perfect sound quality, don't use mp3s at all. If you just want listenable music, use the above technique to copy these 'broken' cds. The cd ripping hardware you envision would only be an 'all-in-one-box' version of what was already proposed - a player with error correction, a wav file recorder, and an mp3 encoder. Feel free to design or buy such hardware if you want to, but your computer is already capable of functioning as the second 2 and your cd player can function as the first, and you own these products already.
The problem is that it's not the authors or artists who are enforcing ip for their own benefit. It's media corps. that enforce ip for the benefit of the media corp. Copyright SHOULD reserve certain rights to the author - most of these rights should NOT be transferrable to other parties, and should always revert back to the author after one 'printing' as in the book world, not remain in the hands of a corporation that's never written lyric one, as in the music industry.
so join netflix.com instead. $20 a month, have up to 3 dvds out at a time, for as long as you want, they send the next one in your queue to you as soon as they get one back from you in the postage paid mailers they come in.
don't deny child. if you're a geek, you're a geek. but i don't see why you needed to download pr0n in a TGIFridays.
"I've always been suspicious of these so called Big Science projects"
Oh yeah - stupid stuff like the Manhattan Project would never be necessary to create fission bombs or fission power plants, eh? And that manned space flight - just tell me how you're supposed to fly around the world when the world's flat?
Big Science very often isn't justified, but is most justified in those areas that require a massive upfront investment that would never be made by industry (fission and fusion are both good examples).
Hmm, please compare relative funding between current fusion research and the amount of funding poured into the Manhattan Project, as a fraction of GNP. I don't think that either fission bombs or fission power plants would have been created with funding like that which goes today for fusion research. MASSIVE government programs allowed that research to be carried out and carried to fruition. The flip side of that is that a huge investment in fusion research- like, say, the amount that the federal government is prepared to dump into increasing available fossil fuels- could very well bring commercial fusion reactors into the realm of viability. So - does politics have anything to do with why we don't have fusion yet? Since it lacks a wealthy industry group to bribe politicians to fund it, while the oil companies have exactly that wealthy industry group, I think it does.
The big lie is that since vinyl is an 'analog' medium, the sound waves direct from the recording are going to be pressed on the record. NOT! It would sound like drek if it was, as the old records did. In almost all cases VINYL IS DIGITALLY MASTERED BEFORE PRESSING! This lets sound engineers do all the tweaking we've come to expect, it is not a simple loss of quality. So any 'analog' benefit is lost before the pressing. You do though get the wonderful analog degradation as micro-scratches and dust accumulate on your record. Being analog, the grooves on your records are the actual shape of the sound waves, but since your records were digitally mastered before pressing, they're not smooth analog curves, they're slightly boxy representing the sampling.
:)
If you like vinyl, using a record preservative like LAST record preservative (review here) can extend the life of your records dramatically. But it can certainly never make them sound better than they did when they were digitally mastered. If you REALLY don't want to damage your record, there are even laser turntables (here) that just scan the grooves. Now I just need one of those in my car
What is shorten (.shn)? Never heard of it before.
Can you tell me the difference between these two statements?
1) I've noticed that some players provide clearer sound than others when playing the same file.
2) If you find a decoder (player) which gives crappy output on a good mp3/ogg file, well then that player is crappy. Yes, I know that such players exist.
Answer? None. 2 is in no way a correction to 1. It is in fact just a restatement of it, with some bad attitude added. Think on them for a moment, and you may see that the original poster might be talking about some of the very relevant details left out of the article. What player was used? What encoder was used (could have been many different ones for the mp3)? What bitrate? An mp3 of a rock song might sound worse on player 1 than on player 2. But an mp3 of a classical song might sound worse on player 2 than on player 1. It is not an issue of "oh, that one's crappy".
It was a flawed experiment, as was pointed out earlier the listeners shouldn't have known what they were listening to. A valid experiment would have been to play the same piece encoded in several different formats, at several different bitrates, on several different players. And that would only show that listener's opinion of the encoder/player combinations for that one piece. This would have to be repeated for each different piece, and different genres have different ranges and characteristics. Electronic dance music is affected differently by compression than classical is, as far as the changes in apparent sound. What you'd be left with is a list of which player is best at playing songs encoded at a particular bitrate by a particular encoder in a particular musical genre. A very interesting experiment. Evidently not one that these reporters wanted to get involved it.
Publishers are seeing books being returned at a ridiculous level right now. They upped production when the rapidly expanding mega chains (Borders, BN) were building new stores and ordering more books to fill their shelves (and when Amazon was building and stocking new warehouses) - they thought the increased orders meant more people were buying books, paying no attention to the fact that all that was really growing was the amount of shelf space. Once the new shelf space was filled, as it is now, the orders dropped again. Traditional return levels are around 20% - they've been seeing returns up to near 45% for some books and some stores. These books cost money to print and transport - the cost of return shipping for these books is also borne by the publishers. These costs are passed along to us as consumers.
I think this highlights one of the best, and corporate friendly, uses of digital technology to transmit media. I don't want a copy of a book printed out by me and bound together with some binder clips - I want a real book with a real binding. I don't want a blank cd-r with no printed track listing - I want a cd with cover art, jewel case, and inserts with information. In both the book and music publishing industry, equipping stores with high-quality manufacturing units that could produce professional cds or books from a digital catalog would be a great way to increase the stores available titles, lower cost of production (through eliminating waste), and demonstrate that they are selling a value-added product, it's not just the text or the sounds they're selling, they're selling books or cds. I still really enjoy browsing, and find many of my favorite purchases that way, so I don't want stores to go away or be replaced by these manufacturing kiosks, I just think they would be a great addition, and would be a great way of keeping marginal, small-audience titles in the catalogue.
Every 90 days? ALL your passwords?
If I was to try this, it would eat up a good day of work.
"Then I just have to remember one scheme and a bunch of key phrases for all of them"
Yeah - those key phrases? That's what us normal people use AS passwords.
As much as I hate the idea of biometrics, I'm really getting fed up with the need to memorize giant lists of passwords, pins, etc. just to identify that I am in fact me. Nothing is more random or harder to produce than your thumb print or iris pattern - perfect, non-stealable, unique identifiers.
Kids love jar jar.
1) That's not true
2) If the point of the movie was to make kids happy - why was the plot about a vote of no-confidence in a senate in the middle of a trade war? You can't really explain the plot of the movie to a child - and you can't make an adult tolerate Jar Jar. Lucas had 2 potential audiences (believe me i wanted to love it, my first memory is seeing Star Wars at a drive in as a little kid) - he could have done middle of the road stuff that would partially include both or focused solely on one. Instead he put in Jar-Jar that could only appeal to one kids while repulsing adults, and put in a plot that could only be understood by adults.
Obviously NOT. This isn't for updating your BIOS automatically, which would be good. It's to install Adobe Acrobat and like 3 other programs and set your home page and search page. It has not point, there is no demand for it.
It clearly says a meta tag will allow sites to specify that they don't want this 'feature' to be active when viewing the site. People - stop being in a rush to post the first comment and first READ the ENTIRE (very short here by the way) article.
According to the info in the story and followup, there was ONE complaint. About a newsletter that macromedia says is an opt-in. Obnoxious? Or just one annoyed customer trying to get revenge? I have no way of knowing since rbl has removed their documentation. It is unacceptable that they can block access to a site without me being able to find out why. It is unacceptable that the technological elite would then be able to figure out a way to the site but the majority of users wouldn't.