Apple's "walled garden" - despite the price of admission - is well on its way to becoming a larger presence on the web than the Linux PC or mobile device.
I could see this possibly becoming reality in some industries, especially those that are heavily oriental to working with documents/text (low bandwidth). But I think I can safely say that at least where I work in film editorial, this won't happen for a very long time. Online apps are just too slow for this kind of bandwidth intense medium. Even if a service was established, like I understand is already happening for games, where you would essentially connect to a VNC server where the 'real' computer was to do your work, there is just no possible way you could do 1080p and especially not RED 4K without massive bottlenecks and latency. Yes you could down convert, and/or compress, but then it would be much inferior to just using a 'real' computer in the first place wouldn't it? When I sit down and start cutting on the Avid, or with FCP, and I scrub the playhead through my timeline, I need to see (and hear) everything as it happens. I can only imagine how horrible and frusterating it would be to try to cut a show through VNC, there's no room for latency.
I could perhaps seeing this happen in 50 years where everybody's connection is 1000MB+/sec, but even then we'll be cutting uncompressed UHDV (4320p) video which roughly 20GB a SECOND. I don't think the "your computer is a browser" idea is going to happen here, maybe it will work for some people, but certainly not everyone.
Exactly, I think you've definitely struck the heart of the issue, normal benchmarks don't take these into consideration which is the problem. I've always felt that Windows Vista was considerably slower than XP, in my experience 7 is somewhat faster than Vista. But the thing all these benchmarks really show is that there really isn't much difference between XP/Vista/7. Sure when you copy a multi-gigabyte file (or what-have-you) it's a second or two different between each version. But I think this is all in the margin of error, I'd say it's safe to say they are all equivalent in these respects. At least in my opinion, the REAL performance is, for example, how long it takes for Explorer to open when I click My Computer. When I click the start menu, how long does it take to display and fully render? When I drag my mouse across a row of icons in Office 2007 do they all immediately highlight as I pass over them, or is there a delay as it tries to play catch-up with my cursor?
To me, "performance" isn't whether my computer takes 451 seconds or 449 seconds to copy a file, it's whether that copy dialog showed up instantly, and if I click "cancel" it IMMEDIATELY stops and closes the dialog. In this respect XP is vastly superior to both Vista and 7. And if you really want to see this GUI difference played out try going back and trying 2000, or better yet, NT 4.0, and then tell me that Vista or 7 is "just as fast".
Well let's say you have a 50GB MP3 collection, would you spend $12,000-$13,000 on it? Ten years ago, would you have even IMAGINED that you'd have a 50GB MP3 collection?! I mean, I remember when 4GB-8GB drives were "freakin' massive!" and that was well into the "Napster era".
Granted, people buy larger storage devices because they don't have much of a choice (I can't count the number of times I only *needed* a small drive but ended up getting something way overkill because it was the smallest drive I could find), but people still find ways to use them. Also, storage capacity and price-per-gigabyte has improved far faster than bandwidth and other technology. So we are hitting that point where people have more hard drive space then they intend to use. That doesn't mean people will never find a way to use it. Remember 640k is enough for anyone and all that jazz...
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media PER UNIT is ever going to *increase*? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses. Bigger hard drives, faster burning devices, more bandwidth, streaming flash videos etc. have all given people access to more material. And whether or not they were ever going to pay for that media and whether or not media companies are losing money because of it is irrelevant. The point is that the value to the consumer keep decreasing and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Internet is a content delivery platform and with that comes media delivery. The more media someone is exposed to the less value each individual "unit of media" has.
This is a bad move in my opinion and will only encourage piracy. If you do the math, you'll realize that for someone to legally acquire say, 20GB worth of music (3MB avg.) at $1.00 per song, it would cost nearly $7,000. The thing is that as time goes on, hard drives are only going to be getting bigger and cheaper. Additionally as fast broadband becomes even more widespread it will mean that illegal downloading will become easier and the price factor with eventually decrease to nothing.
How much do you think some TV show is worth to a typical viewer? How about a song? Even though it might be $1.00-$1.29 today, as people get more media with the same investment in space and time the value is only going to decline. Your iPod can hold more, so you want more media to fill it up. NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection. Well I suppose SOME people might, but certainly nobody that I know would ever even think about paying that much for something they can get for free (and at the same, or near-same quality). Only a dollar per song sounds pretty reasonable, but if you have a 160GB iPod, filling it up will cost $48,000! $48,000?! Just think of what that kind of money can mean to somebody. Pay off the credit card debt. Get a new car. Remodeling. Any number of major things.
I'd say we are QUITE past the point of something "worth paying for". As soon as a person downloads a song "illegally" they cross an invisible line and are now "pirates". And of course once you do it once, it's so easy to do again. That makes it sound like a drug but it's true. If you can get something easily for free, what's the point in paying for it? The best reason I can think of is if you get a significant amount of value added by actually paying for it. When this happens people become significantly more selective about what they DO actually pay for verses what they download for free. And of course, the media itself is practically free.
Basically I think that if companies what to directly sell their media to consumers, it will have to cost fractions of a cent, and they're going to have to come up with some clever ideas on how to provide it to make it easier than simply downloading it for free. It'll probably have to offer other value as well.
For example with TV shows companies should experiment with broadcasts which actually "upgraded" for the web. The idea is that you put your show online with ads for people to see for free. In terms of music, I think bands should get "distributors" which distribute all their music in very large inexpensive packages. Then the band can offer their music for free download on their website for their casual fans, but while simultaneously selling media and merchandise to their more loyal fans (who don't mind spending a little bit to support the band) with added value. I think there are still many ways to make good money off of media, but the truth is that the pay per unit or copy model is dying and won't be around much longer.
Just give it some time, sooner or later it will be broken. There's no working cryptographic algorithm in which the codebreaker and the intended recipient are the same person.
This is a very common problem that happens when a disc isn't finalized on both audio CDs and video DVDs that are recorded on direct to disc consumer recording systems. After a the actual data is written what is a essentially a "table of contents" has to be written at the beginning of the disc, otherwise you get the "blank disc" effect as describe here. That two separate data specialists couldn't figure this out is rather concerning...
This reminds me of a gaming console that Atari worked on in the mid-1980s called the Atari Mindlink, very similar concept except it used infrared sensors to measure the movement of the muscles in your head.
I disagree, I think Wikipedia articles should use the most concise terminology for the relevant subject areas. If you don't know a word, just look it up! I used to read Wikipedia articles all the time with words I didn't know, since I've started looking them up when I see words I don't know, my vocabulary has expanded dramatically and consequently not only do I have to look up fewer words, but I find that those words end up being useful in real life more then I had realized. By only subjecting yourself to explanations in simple terms you deny yourself a superior comprehension of the subject matter.
You can mostly protect yourself from this if you use Google and a few simple tips:
1. If you have a Google account, make sure to disable search history and clear your previous searches. Also only login when necessary, not for general surfing.
2. If you get use Firefox get the CustomizeGoogle extension, it allows you to disable Google click tracking and also the Google Cookie (along with a bunch of other nice options like ad removal).
This still won't protect you from your local browser history on your computer, or from your own IP address, you can use a proxy to help conceal your IP from Google, and clearing your local history is easy enough. It really depends on how paranoid you are as to how extensively you wish to cover your tracks.
Finally, another choice is to use the Scroogle Scraper for your general searches, which is basically a totally anonymous Google-front end without Google ads.
http://www.8notes.com/ looks promising they're free at least. If you want more recent songs, you'll usually have to pay to download them from commercial sites, but you can save and print them right away after paying. http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/ is a good example.
Well I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't appreciate a film crew in the restroom taping ME while I was taking a dump. Not that I suppose anybody would want to watch it anyway... but STILL!
Did they test zonealarm? Because even with my best efforts to circumvent it (for testing), it's still able to block everything. Even as an Admin user, it's not possible to stop the service unless you
"officially" exit the program. I've been using it for years, and I haven't once ever had a program that it didn't block (if I chose to block it). Even test software which was spesifically meant to try to find holes in personal firewalls. The new version does other handy things too, like keeping an eye on software which tries to monitor your keyboard/mouse (such as keyloggers) and giving you the option to block them from doing that. Very handy.
It's only guaranteed until the end of 2006. So most likely it's one those things to get people hooked on using the service and more willing to pay the charges after this year. But hey, the business model works for drug dealers. Once you get addicted to the sample drug, you'll be a long-term customer.
Conspiracy theory: The reason is free is because it's funded by the NSA, that way they won't need to ask anyone for phone records. Shhhhhhhhhhh
Their games can be quite addicting for some people. My brother used to have a hard time going more then a day without opening up Bejeweled or Zuma. It's practically a drug by itself, since it can cause lost relationships, health problems etc. if abused.
Before it took time, patence and know-how to get a release up and going. Now it's suddenly going to become so easy to distribute stuff with BitTorrent that people will start putting up fake virus/spyware/corrupt files because it won't take any time or knowledge to do so. Releases distributed with BitTorrent has always excelled in their quality when comparred to their P2P (think Kazaa) counterparts. Now BitTorrent will suddenly become as bad as Kazaa, bogus files, destorted music... it was good while it lasted, BitTorrent.
I organize all of my files by putting them into directories organized by type:
music/
mp3/
mid/
wav/
ogg/
etc...
Files themselves are titled as "[Artist Name] - [Song Name]" I've found that titling them this works well since all of a particular artists songs are all grouped together. Or, if you have a huge collection (>500) you could put them in subdirectories titled after the author: "[Artist Name]/[Song Name]". If you use a cd ripping program such as CDex goto Options -> Settings click the Filenames tab and type "%1 - %4" to have it automatically extract to this format for you. Alternatively you can use "%1\%4" to seperate them into seperate directories by artist name.
Without software like Firefox, their would be no reason for Microsoft to ever make a better product, just look at how long IE's been in version 6! Now that Microsoft's starting to feel their browser dominance threatened they're playing for attention to their own product.
Clearly competition benefits the end-user.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's "walled garden" - despite the price of admission - is well on its way to becoming a larger presence on the web than the Linux PC or mobile device.
Pretty sure he was referring to Microsoft's new advertising slogan actually.
I could see this possibly becoming reality in some industries, especially those that are heavily oriental to working with documents/text (low bandwidth). But I think I can safely say that at least where I work in film editorial, this won't happen for a very long time. Online apps are just too slow for this kind of bandwidth intense medium. Even if a service was established, like I understand is already happening for games, where you would essentially connect to a VNC server where the 'real' computer was to do your work, there is just no possible way you could do 1080p and especially not RED 4K without massive bottlenecks and latency. Yes you could down convert, and/or compress, but then it would be much inferior to just using a 'real' computer in the first place wouldn't it? When I sit down and start cutting on the Avid, or with FCP, and I scrub the playhead through my timeline, I need to see (and hear) everything as it happens. I can only imagine how horrible and frusterating it would be to try to cut a show through VNC, there's no room for latency.
I could perhaps seeing this happen in 50 years where everybody's connection is 1000MB+/sec, but even then we'll be cutting uncompressed UHDV (4320p) video which roughly 20GB a SECOND. I don't think the "your computer is a browser" idea is going to happen here, maybe it will work for some people, but certainly not everyone.
Exactly, I think you've definitely struck the heart of the issue, normal benchmarks don't take these into consideration which is the problem. I've always felt that Windows Vista was considerably slower than XP, in my experience 7 is somewhat faster than Vista. But the thing all these benchmarks really show is that there really isn't much difference between XP/Vista/7. Sure when you copy a multi-gigabyte file (or what-have-you) it's a second or two different between each version. But I think this is all in the margin of error, I'd say it's safe to say they are all equivalent in these respects. At least in my opinion, the REAL performance is, for example, how long it takes for Explorer to open when I click My Computer. When I click the start menu, how long does it take to display and fully render? When I drag my mouse across a row of icons in Office 2007 do they all immediately highlight as I pass over them, or is there a delay as it tries to play catch-up with my cursor?
To me, "performance" isn't whether my computer takes 451 seconds or 449 seconds to copy a file, it's whether that copy dialog showed up instantly, and if I click "cancel" it IMMEDIATELY stops and closes the dialog. In this respect XP is vastly superior to both Vista and 7. And if you really want to see this GUI difference played out try going back and trying 2000, or better yet, NT 4.0, and then tell me that Vista or 7 is "just as fast".
Well let's say you have a 50GB MP3 collection, would you spend $12,000-$13,000 on it? Ten years ago, would you have even IMAGINED that you'd have a 50GB MP3 collection?! I mean, I remember when 4GB-8GB drives were "freakin' massive!" and that was well into the "Napster era".
Granted, people buy larger storage devices because they don't have much of a choice (I can't count the number of times I only *needed* a small drive but ended up getting something way overkill because it was the smallest drive I could find), but people still find ways to use them. Also, storage capacity and price-per-gigabyte has improved far faster than bandwidth and other technology. So we are hitting that point where people have more hard drive space then they intend to use. That doesn't mean people will never find a way to use it. Remember 640k is enough for anyone and all that jazz...
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media PER UNIT is ever going to *increase*? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses. Bigger hard drives, faster burning devices, more bandwidth, streaming flash videos etc. have all given people access to more material. And whether or not they were ever going to pay for that media and whether or not media companies are losing money because of it is irrelevant. The point is that the value to the consumer keep decreasing and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Internet is a content delivery platform and with that comes media delivery. The more media someone is exposed to the less value each individual "unit of media" has.
This is a bad move in my opinion and will only encourage piracy. If you do the math, you'll realize that for someone to legally acquire say, 20GB worth of music (3MB avg.) at $1.00 per song, it would cost nearly $7,000. The thing is that as time goes on, hard drives are only going to be getting bigger and cheaper. Additionally as fast broadband becomes even more widespread it will mean that illegal downloading will become easier and the price factor with eventually decrease to nothing.
How much do you think some TV show is worth to a typical viewer? How about a song? Even though it might be $1.00-$1.29 today, as people get more media with the same investment in space and time the value is only going to decline. Your iPod can hold more, so you want more media to fill it up. NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection. Well I suppose SOME people might, but certainly nobody that I know would ever even think about paying that much for something they can get for free (and at the same, or near-same quality). Only a dollar per song sounds pretty reasonable, but if you have a 160GB iPod, filling it up will cost $48,000! $48,000?! Just think of what that kind of money can mean to somebody. Pay off the credit card debt. Get a new car. Remodeling. Any number of major things.
I'd say we are QUITE past the point of something "worth paying for". As soon as a person downloads a song "illegally" they cross an invisible line and are now "pirates". And of course once you do it once, it's so easy to do again. That makes it sound like a drug but it's true. If you can get something easily for free, what's the point in paying for it? The best reason I can think of is if you get a significant amount of value added by actually paying for it. When this happens people become significantly more selective about what they DO actually pay for verses what they download for free. And of course, the media itself is practically free.
Basically I think that if companies what to directly sell their media to consumers, it will have to cost fractions of a cent, and they're going to have to come up with some clever ideas on how to provide it to make it easier than simply downloading it for free. It'll probably have to offer other value as well.
For example with TV shows companies should experiment with broadcasts which actually "upgraded" for the web. The idea is that you put your show online with ads for people to see for free. In terms of music, I think bands should get "distributors" which distribute all their music in very large inexpensive packages. Then the band can offer their music for free download on their website for their casual fans, but while simultaneously selling media and merchandise to their more loyal fans (who don't mind spending a little bit to support the band) with added value. I think there are still many ways to make good money off of media, but the truth is that the pay per unit or copy model is dying and won't be around much longer.
Just give it some time, sooner or later it will be broken. There's no working cryptographic algorithm in which the codebreaker and the intended recipient are the same person.
This is a very common problem that happens when a disc isn't finalized on both audio CDs and video DVDs that are recorded on direct to disc consumer recording systems. After a the actual data is written what is a essentially a "table of contents" has to be written at the beginning of the disc, otherwise you get the "blank disc" effect as describe here. That two separate data specialists couldn't figure this out is rather concerning...
This reminds me of a gaming console that Atari worked on in the mid-1980s called the Atari Mindlink, very similar concept except it used infrared sensors to measure the movement of the muscles in your head.
0 0/mindlink.html
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/26
I disagree, I think Wikipedia articles should use the most concise terminology for the relevant subject areas. If you don't know a word, just look it up! I used to read Wikipedia articles all the time with words I didn't know, since I've started looking them up when I see words I don't know, my vocabulary has expanded dramatically and consequently not only do I have to look up fewer words, but I find that those words end up being useful in real life more then I had realized. By only subjecting yourself to explanations in simple terms you deny yourself a superior comprehension of the subject matter.
If you want things explained in more general terms then you should visit the Simplified Wikipedia: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
You can mostly protect yourself from this if you use Google and a few simple tips:
1. If you have a Google account, make sure to disable search history and clear your previous searches. Also only login when necessary, not for general surfing.
2. If you get use Firefox get the CustomizeGoogle extension, it allows you to disable Google click tracking and also the Google Cookie (along with a bunch of other nice options like ad removal).
This still won't protect you from your local browser history on your computer, or from your own IP address, you can use a proxy to help conceal your IP from Google, and clearing your local history is easy enough. It really depends on how paranoid you are as to how extensively you wish to cover your tracks.
Finally, another choice is to use the Scroogle Scraper for your general searches, which is basically a totally anonymous Google-front end without Google ads.
http://www.8notes.com/ looks promising they're free at least. If you want more recent songs, you'll usually have to pay to download them from commercial sites, but you can save and print them right away after paying. http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/ is a good example.
Another thing you can do is find a midi of what you want to play (use a midi search engine: http://www.musicrobot.com/ or http://www.vanbasco.com/midisearch.html ) and open in a sequencer and print the track(s) you want. Anvil Studio is a free program which can do this. http://www.anvilstudio.com/
Yesterday's "pre-release" (CRC32): 4F3CF1D7
Today's "official" release (CRC32): 4F3CF1D7
I guess not much has changed since RC3...
Well I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't appreciate a film crew in the restroom taping ME while I was taking a dump. Not that I suppose anybody would want to watch it anyway... but STILL!
Did they test zonealarm? Because even with my best efforts to circumvent it (for testing), it's still able to block everything. Even as an Admin user, it's not possible to stop the service unless you "officially" exit the program. I've been using it for years, and I haven't once ever had a program that it didn't block (if I chose to block it). Even test software which was spesifically meant to try to find holes in personal firewalls. The new version does other handy things too, like keeping an eye on software which tries to monitor your keyboard/mouse (such as keyloggers) and giving you the option to block them from doing that. Very handy.
It's only guaranteed until the end of 2006. So most likely it's one those things to get people hooked on using the service and more willing to pay the charges after this year. But hey, the business model works for drug dealers. Once you get addicted to the sample drug, you'll be a long-term customer.
Conspiracy theory: The reason is free is because it's funded by the NSA, that way they won't need to ask anyone for phone records. Shhhhhhhhhhh
...to play doom on a 2 by 3 cm keypad with only 12 buttons! Why can't we have thumbsticks?!
I for one am against bloatware. If they can make a better game in a smaller package, what's wrong with that?
Their games can be quite addicting for some people. My brother used to have a hard time going more then a day without opening up Bejeweled or Zuma. It's practically a drug by itself, since it can cause lost relationships, health problems etc. if abused.
...and suddenly a multitude of slashdotters visit wikipedia: Goatse... :-D
(also a convenient mirror of the original site for those who dare...)
The "strong magnet" meme is an urban m"yth. You need far stronger static magnetic fields to damage a drive without opening it than you can buy.
s _id=71
Don't be so sure... http://www.gaussboys.com/product_info.php?product
... you just need a better case!
Before it took time, patence and know-how to get a release up and going. Now it's suddenly going to become so easy to distribute stuff with BitTorrent that people will start putting up fake virus/spyware/corrupt files because it won't take any time or knowledge to do so. Releases distributed with BitTorrent has always excelled in their quality when comparred to their P2P (think Kazaa) counterparts. Now BitTorrent will suddenly become as bad as Kazaa, bogus files, destorted music... it was good while it lasted, BitTorrent.
...now when Google goes down I can't even use the web. What am I waiting for.
I organize all of my files by putting them into directories organized by type: music/ mp3/ mid/ wav/ ogg/ etc... Files themselves are titled as "[Artist Name] - [Song Name]" I've found that titling them this works well since all of a particular artists songs are all grouped together. Or, if you have a huge collection (>500) you could put them in subdirectories titled after the author: "[Artist Name]/[Song Name]". If you use a cd ripping program such as CDex goto Options -> Settings click the Filenames tab and type "%1 - %4" to have it automatically extract to this format for you. Alternatively you can use "%1\%4" to seperate them into seperate directories by artist name.
Without software like Firefox, their would be no reason for Microsoft to ever make a better product, just look at how long IE's been in version 6! Now that Microsoft's starting to feel their browser dominance threatened they're playing for attention to their own product. Clearly competition benefits the end-user.