An EVDO connection instead of WiFi: Well, okay, 802.11x sucks for a variety of reasons, but there is one good thing about it: many people have home networks that use it. EVDO? That's a fancy way of saying "we control the device's access to the internet, and you will pay for it."
According to the article, "classics" will be available for $2/pop, and you can subscribe to blogs for $1/month. You know, classics, like the ones that are out of copyright, and blogs, like the ones you can get for free.
How many times do companies come out with a "cool product", and then think it will succeed purely as a vector for other purchases? It might work for video games (where the base product's performance and design is unique) and inkjets (where the supplies drive the retail price), but here you're competing with services that are free. You want to point to the iPod and ITMS? What percentage of tracks on all iPods out there were purchased at ITMS?
Okay, one more thing, this time from Microsoft's Hill:
There's 550 years of technological development in the book, and it's all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of the eye to the part of the brain that does the processing [of the symbols on the page],
There's more than that. Codices have been around since late antiquity (I dunno, 4th century maybe?). Before that, we had papyrus rolls. Books are also more versatile than that, with some being designed to be read from across the room.
Finally, how fast does kindle let you flip through the pages?
Like many other people here, I've been waiting for an affordable and usable eInk reader, but this ain't it either.
Okay, they're things with notional existence. You can't point to them and say "This thing here". That sequences of bytes are intellectual property is a secondary issue. The point is: many people don't intuitively think of them the same way.
For that matter, the notion that the value of something comes from the work put into it, and not from what it is, is a relatively late development (see, for example, all the medieval condemnations against lending at interest, since gold doesn't grow). In fact, this is the inherent contradiction in what I wrote earlier: while people seem to think value is something inherent in objects, it is actually a societally imposed (and negotiated) concept.
There are criminal laws against copying trade secrets, and they are referred to as theft. The dictionary example is of plagiarism, where someone claims to be the author of the work of another. Positing that a copyright is property (and I'm sure you'll accept that), the equivalent case of "stealing" would be, "He is claiming copyright on my work." Many of us know people who have been victims of this sort of theft, but it's not the same thing as infringing a copyright.
I'm not saying it's better or worse; just that the term "theft" does not apply, and if you insist on applying it, you are perverting the notion.
"Stealing" is not obtaining something without proper authorization. We have rights, and we enjoy those rights, as long as they don't infringe on others. I don't want to live in a society that assumes no rights and requires "proper authorization" for mundane tasks. Infringement of rights is a serious crime, perhaps more serious than theft, but there's no need to get so riled up about it that you end up criminalizing everything in a sort of 1984-meets-Windows Vista dystopia.
I'll concede your points, but state that the underlying notion is that "Gold is something that has value, and that can be owned." You're right, he should have used paper currency; we can use gold for all kinds of things, and that people like it being purty. But it is possible to imagine a society that, in spite of its inherent interest to us, placed no value on gold; or one that maintained that gold belonged to everyone; or one that decided that the whale, being a Royal Fish, when it washed ashore belonged to the king.
Excellent point on the distinction between a business model and an economic model, but I disagree on the shiny: what has made copyright work in the past has been A) the scale needed to infringe on copyrights and B) the fact that the average person buys a tangible physical object.
A) means the number of players is limited, and B) means that the people see themselves as buying something. Copyright is what "limits the supply" on your reading, but it's only really limited according to the owners' wishes and capabilities, and, generally speaking, scarcity doesn't have much to do with mass media's price. B) has a not-unimportant psychological effect. We can argue about whether ideas exist, but we can point to a CD and say "That exists".
Long before any of this nonsense, people were making tapes of records, covering songs at performances, copying texts, and all without worrying about copyright issues. While it is copyright infringement, it's been a zone where societal norms and the law have been at odds. The economic situation has changed where what was once a tolerated popular activity on the fringes of the IP economy has rendered obsolete their current system. And no amount of social engineering, legislation and lawsuits is going to change that.
Well, Gene Simmons is right, sorta, when he points out the core issue:
The only reason why gold is expensive is because we all agree that it is. There's no real use for it, except we all agree and abide by the idea that gold costs a certain amount per ounce. As soon as you give people the choice to deviate from it, you have chaos and anarchy.
Property is, at heart, an agreement between people about things. My computer has nothing intrinsic in it that makes it mine and not yours: we just agree that that is the case.
There's something very basic in humans that less us understand the concept of "mine" and "yours", and apply it to physical objects. But what about ideas? Intellectual property is much more difficult for most people to wrap their minds around. For example, you don't understand it either. "Downloading stuff that you didn't pay for" is not stealing. Stealing is a criminal act where you deprive someone of the use or enjoyment of property. Making a copy of a work is not criminal, nor does it deprive the copyright owner of anything. It can be against the wishes of the copyright owner, and the copyright owner can assert that you inflicted damages, but it is not stealing, just as hijacking an aircraft is not committing insurance fraud.
So, we've got property rights that are agreed upon by a society, or so we think, and some of those, few people really seem to understand, and yet affect everybody. Worse, these are relative young "rights". Copyrights came in with mass printing and were built to combat mass printing. With the cost of duplication practically nil, and the means of communication readily available, Copyright law, as it is now, is just impractical: it's designed for mass infringement cases, not as a means of generating revenue.
On the one hand, human behavior in these matters has not changed since the beginning of written communication: people copy what interests them, and don't immediately grasp the notion of paying for an instantion of an idea (they do, however, immediately grasp the importance of paying someone to produce ideas). On the other hand, we have a handful of companies with a business model based on the high cost of mass production and distribution confronted with a change to an environment of cheap distribution and individualized production. And there's no worse citizen than a fading elite. The music industry in particular made this worse by focusing on saturating the market with a few insipid "hits", and overexposing the listeners: to the average person, that song that they're hearing several times a day isn't worth anything in itself.
So to answer your question: nobody's saying downloading music without paying for it is ok. I say that, yes, downloading music without paying for is ok, when the copyright holders make it available for free.
If you have a TV tuner, you can set it to auto-record shows, and the Zune software will transcode it (and presumably bust it down to 320x240) for the Zune, and wirelessly sync it up. If you have a HD tuner (or even just a digital one, on some reports), it won't work.
The "coolness factor" isn't in the HD, but that you can record your daily television shows (say last night's talk shows), and they'll be automatically put on your device for the morning commute. The "shotgun-to-foot factor" is that it doesn't work unless you have an analog tuner card, even though analog broadcasts are going to disappear.
Yes, I had a siemens candy-bar phone with a one-press unlock. In the eight months it lasted before its power circuit broke, I recall numerous instances of arriving at work (after walking for 30 minutes) to find the boss expecting me, as he'd already been talking to my pants.
Steve Jobs didn't do diddly here. The basic design principle is: If you have a mechanical sliding lock, cool. Otherwise, you have to use buttons, and if you use buttons, use more than one. Because a "phone lock" that regularly unlocks in a situation where uncommanded forces are applied to the keyboard is no lock, but a nuisance.
I confess that I do from time to time look to see who has their bluetooth in discoverable mode. Some cellphones do it, and these have generic names (such as the Verizon WonderPrice Z302). My GPS transceiver doesn't have a non-discoverable mode (If you see a device called "In my pants, not my car", come over and say hi, sugar). But Macintoshes seem to be discoverable by default, and even better, advertise that they are Macintoshes and give the name of the user.
I won't comment on Apple's policy in doing so, and I'll leave you to figure out what kinds of social engineering and hacking exploits this opens the door to. I'm just sayin', that's all.
Hey, I hear some congressmen are taking bribes. The next time that happens, let's seize the assets of every congressman and garner their wages for ten years to come.
Ooh, and all this can go away if the Universities pay Audible Magic. Now, they wouldn't have anything to do with the current RIAA shakedowns, would they?
I think you're being unfair here. They could very well have a supersweet natural language parser going on.
It doesn't matter.
The job of the avant garde is to scout the terrain ahead to avoid leading the army into a dead end or a massacre.
Facade is definitely avant-garde; I'm just up in the air about whether it's a dead end or a massacre.
Yes, the artwork is, well, ugly. The characters are not pleasant to look at, and the walk around like John Wayne in bad need of a box of ExLax. The narrative should suck you into the story, instead it just sucks. To play Trip's role, you need to care about and like the unhappy couple. Instead, you're confronted with two bitter, ugly creatures in an ugly apartment.
But all that is beside the point. The core problem is the concept. This is supposed to explore computer games as interactive psychological drama, as a way to communicate rich emotional tones with subtle details. You are supposed to interact with the two AI characters about their relationship. But no parser can be fine enough to the task. So the user becomes immediately aware of the irreality of the situation: yes, they are fighting; no I don't think I'm ever going to be fed. I am supposed to do something, but whatever I type in doesn't get understood; or if it does, it's not understood correctly. I mean, it might work in a sort of "Premenstrual Eliza" kinda way, but it's not a game anyone really wants to play.
Er, you ever look at the credits for movies from 40 years ago? They're darn short, and a whole lot more people than that were involved in them. They were never heavily credited up front. At most, the only thing that's changed is that they've dropped the names of the musical directors. But the standard format has always been "moneymakers" first: stars, then the exec producers/producers/writer and finally the director. "Bought and paid for" was the modus operandi back in the fifties. And you know what? Unless you can commoditize credits, many video game companies will skip them.
"Display of a credit"? Come on, it's never been that way. I went through a couple years in the game industry, working (paid) on dozens of titles, and the only game in which my name appears is Macintosh Armor Alley (=for those of you data mining my ass, you now know exactly who I am; and for those of you not, could someone go over to the MobyGames entry and confirm that Testing 1, 2, 3... most assuredly existed, but was almost never credited).
Record companies often SCREW the bands on contract.
Dude, producers, sound engineers, and all those folks don't all work for the record companies.
Front money? How many record company contracts have you seen? And how much does a record company actually advance on royalties for anyone but a superstar?
Marketing: yes, that's true. Of course, it's less true now than it was fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, there were record stores, and people actually listened to the radio. Well, they killed record stores, and nobody listens to music on the radio anymore anyway.
Record companies are only now getting into the tour bus business, because that's the only part of the industry making money. That is not traditionally what record companies do. That's what band managers do, and for most recording artists, that's still what managers do.
Top-of-the-line instruments? Dude, you mean like Nikes and stuff?
So, no, I say your understanding of the music industry clashes with mine. But you do point the way forward: out of the hands of old "CD and lawsuit" companies and into the control of groups and individuals (within the current record companies, or outside them) with influence on the market as it currently is. And, with the internet, it currently is more segmented and more regional than it's been in a long time. Radio DJs are all but irrelevant; MTV? When was the last time they showed music? And yet the record companies still insist on making $2M videos? The current arbiters of music fashion and taste are those people who've been supporting recorded music since its advent, but have never been under the control of the music industry: your buddy who makes the mix tape, the club DJ, your little hoodrat friend who's been "saving it for the scene".
The "industry leading" recording studios aren't worth it for most musicians: they can get a "good enough" job done in someone's house in the Meadowlands. The "music people" and their cocaine only harmed Rock-n-Roll to begin with.
So no, the Reagan 80s were not a glory period for music. As the saying goes, I survived the 80s one time already...
Very cute. But there's a huge problem here. Let's assume everything that NetApp claims is true: That WAFL contains a bunch of unique ideas that are patent-worthy and protected by patent, and that ZFS infringes on them in a non-trivial manner.
Okay, so what are you going to do? Sue Sun?
If so, you'd better hope that there's nothing in Sun's patent portfolio that you're infringing upon. The way software patents have gotten these days, it's a pretty fair bet that NetApp runs afoul of at least a few of Sun's 14,000 patents.
To reassure folks internally, Dave appeals to ignorance:
"Can you ever remember a Fortune 1000 company being shut down by patents?
There's always a first time. And maybe that's what it will take to reform the system. While Sun can wave the F/OSS flag as they battle NetApp, they will end up proving a few scary points about the current state of the patent system:
1) If a company tries to use software patents the way they were intended, it will only be successful against companies smaller than themselves. The big boys will insist on a portfolio exchange; if that fails, one party will end up looking like SCO. 2) The only way to get money out of the "big infringers" is to have a company with zero liability of patent infringement, such as one with a litigation-based business model. 3) Software patents are a barrier to entry for small companies, and a perpetual liability.
I've never owned a cell in the US. Yes, I've spent most of my life there, and in the past decade, I've bounced between Europe and the US, yet spending most of my time stateside. Funny thing, though: while in Europe, cellular communications have gotten easier, to the point where I've now had three separate cell phones, and five separate phone numbers in four countries (including Switzerland, which is right up there with the US in terms of pharmaceutical and cell phone costs), in the US, I have never seen the point in having a cell phone. It just isn't worth it. Phone calls cost. Text messages cost. To get access, you effectively need a paid subscription. Then you need to use their hardware on the network, from which they have removed the balls. Yeah, I know, there are ways around many obstacles, but I'd have to be motivated and seriously mobile to care. I'm not.
It just comes to this: when our country, which should be representing us, sells our resources to private corporations, it has an obligation to ensure that it represents our interests in doing so.
I don't consider it in the public interest when all we get from such a transaction is a couple billion bucks the oligopoly will have a hard time recovering and a parking lot hand job for select bureaucrats. Oh boy. We can finally afford to pay the cell phone companies for that no-warrant surveillance system we always wanted. woop de doo.
Well, if you take physics, AI and visualization out of the game, you pretty much have the CPU code for todays video games. Yes, supercomputers can do wonderful things with those three factors, but no, you don't find anything anywhere close to the same order of magnitude for games. It just doesn't make economic sense. It's like driving to the next town over in a 747. It takes way too much training to do, costs far too much in resources, and the result is much less effective than the competing products.
It might surprise you, but US laws derive from the British Legal Tradition. And, the story as put forth here involves the violation of several laws:
1. In a business transaction between a retailer and a consumer, the consumer gets the benefit of the doubt. In a business-to-business transaction, the "brick-laying" party could argue that the other business should have conducted the due diligence of checking the goods before leaving the store. In a business-to-consumer transaction, the due diligence lies on the part of the retailer, making sure they're selling what they claim they're selling. 2. According to the claim (which we are under no obligation to believe), there are two separate transactions here. The guy bought a load of bricks, returned it, and got credited. No problem here. Then he bought a hard drive, and the manager showed up and seized it. As you insular folks know, you can't do that without a lawfully issued writ of distraint.
Veropedia: Pedia is the Greek leftover from Encyclopedia, and Vero is supposed to be from the Latin verum for "true". Of course, vero is also an adverb in Latin, meaning "but". as in, "This is from Wikipedia, but/em it's not Wikipedia". So, it's supposed to be true, but their title is a god-awful mix of Latin and Greek (cf. the word "Scientology"), and it doesn't mean what they think it means.
Asus, for example, makes an UMPC with the same processor, 7" 800x480 screen, and a 60GB drive, plus all kinds of bonuses for twice the price of an Eee.
I debated waiting for the Eee, but watching the prices climb and the features drop, I ended up getting a Nokia 800 (4.1" 800x480 screen), which you can equip with memory and a keyboard for the price of an Eee. Even smaller size and weight, slower processor, but an "always on/rarely plugged in" philosophy that is better for certain tasks.
So it's not that "you pay through the nose", but that, in the race for power and portability, the measuring stick has been Windows. Once you junk it in all its forms (Vista, Tablet Edition, CE), you can put together a slim OS that does exactly what you need the hardware to do, and does it with a lot less overhead.
So normally you'd pay through the nose for a super PC shoehorned into a tiny box. Here, we have an underpowered PC in a tiny box. And it is enough to start the revolution.
The trance vibrator runs in personal space, not just user space, although I suspect some enterprising hackers have succeeded in jamming that thing clear up to their kernel. The product might warrant consideration, since at the moment insmodding the trance vibrator often necessitates an ER visit.
Linux - annoying until you learn it. Vista - annoying until you learn it AND disable the security features.
Add to that:
Linux - constant annoyances when you learn it, and need to get anything to work. Vista - annoying when you learn it, have disabled the security features, and need to get anything to work.
Linux - You own this turd, and it's worth every penny. Vista - You paid for this turd, it ain't worth the price, you don't own it, and Microsoft can take it away at any moment.
OS updates have been following the development in technology for the last quarter decade. Has development slowed enough in the last five years that Vista offers users nothing new of substance, and Linux flavors have gotten "good enough" to offer what most users need?
Not quite. NASA has been doing some good stuff in research and application. For example, they've done great studies on how cultural dynamics affect approaches to CRM (in this case, "crew resource management", or how to make sure the folks at the pointy end are all effective at their jobs. In the past, they've even published articles that have become classic points of reference for the disconnect of perspective between ATC and pilots, and suggested solutions. So, sure, there may be an overlap between aeronautics research and administering aviation, but that's the nature of academic work. Even if it weren't, the FAA's job is to run the aviation system. While self-evaluation is part of the job description, no agency, department or bureau in government should be allowed to have exclusive control over its own oversight.
But there's hope. If indeed, it turns out that NASA did suppress their results on the basis of the allegedly stated reasons, namely damaging consumer confidence and adversely affecting airline revenue, then we do have friends in NASA. How do I get there? Well, those are absolutely the most offensive reasons for suppressing any government information about public safety. Heck, you never say "We have some conclusions about public safety in this industry, but publishing them they might convince people to FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES when they consider consuming their product, and thus MAKE THEM CONSIDER ALTERNATIVES." That's the worst thing you can say, and something you'd only say if you were following orders you found morally repugnant.
By such an admission, the higher-ups who were compelled to suppress the information effectively allow us to jump to conclusions such as that "Land-and-Hold Short" ops are inherently dangerous and will cause an accident. Hey, feel free to post anonymously your true feelings.
yeah, Nokia has a "test service" that ran in the Spring. And I hear that Gtalk n800 to n800 only, sorta works. I stand by what I said. And I look forward to the day I can make video calls on my n800.
Yeah, well, to be fair, nobody mentions it, because it doesn't really work yet. Current word is that GTalk on the n800 supports some sort of video phone calls. The N810 will have the Gizmo project support it as well. At that point (aka, a couple weeks), it might be worth mentioning, especially since the small screen size and side camera placement make the parallax less distracting. Right now, it's the ongoing joke. It would be cool, but until it gets working on a wide scale, not even the fanbois are gonna plug it. So, I see the press releases, I hear the news, and I hope OS2008 will be "all that": enabling it to be a true portable video/VoIP device, but while I have no shame mentioning all the bits and pieces that half work, I won't bring that up. Yet.
Maemomapper lets you preload entire geographic sections from your favorite online map repositories; someone even slapped together a windows tool to grab tiles and dump them onto an SD card. So you don't need to be connected to the net while hiking, and you can download max resolution for an entire country if need be.
Slashdot Mirror
An EVDO connection instead of WiFi: Well, okay, 802.11x sucks for a variety of reasons, but there is one good thing about it: many people have home networks that use it. EVDO? That's a fancy way of saying "we control the device's access to the internet, and you will pay for it."
According to the article, "classics" will be available for $2/pop, and you can subscribe to blogs for $1/month. You know, classics, like the ones that are out of copyright, and blogs, like the ones you can get for free.
How many times do companies come out with a "cool product", and then think it will succeed purely as a vector for other purchases? It might work for video games (where the base product's performance and design is unique) and inkjets (where the supplies drive the retail price), but here you're competing with services that are free. You want to point to the iPod and ITMS? What percentage of tracks on all iPods out there were purchased at ITMS?
Okay, one more thing, this time from Microsoft's Hill:
There's more than that. Codices have been around since late antiquity (I dunno, 4th century maybe?). Before that, we had papyrus rolls. Books are also more versatile than that, with some being designed to be read from across the room.
Finally, how fast does kindle let you flip through the pages?
Like many other people here, I've been waiting for an affordable and usable eInk reader, but this ain't it either.
Okay, they're things with notional existence. You can't point to them and say "This thing here". That sequences of bytes are intellectual property is a secondary issue. The point is: many people don't intuitively think of them the same way.
For that matter, the notion that the value of something comes from the work put into it, and not from what it is, is a relatively late development (see, for example, all the medieval condemnations against lending at interest, since gold doesn't grow). In fact, this is the inherent contradiction in what I wrote earlier: while people seem to think value is something inherent in objects, it is actually a societally imposed (and negotiated) concept.
There are criminal laws against copying trade secrets, and they are referred to as theft. The dictionary example is of plagiarism, where someone claims to be the author of the work of another. Positing that a copyright is property (and I'm sure you'll accept that), the equivalent case of "stealing" would be, "He is claiming copyright on my work." Many of us know people who have been victims of this sort of theft, but it's not the same thing as infringing a copyright.
I'm not saying it's better or worse; just that the term "theft" does not apply, and if you insist on applying it, you are perverting the notion.
"Stealing" is not obtaining something without proper authorization. We have rights, and we enjoy those rights, as long as they don't infringe on others. I don't want to live in a society that assumes no rights and requires "proper authorization" for mundane tasks. Infringement of rights is a serious crime, perhaps more serious than theft, but there's no need to get so riled up about it that you end up criminalizing everything in a sort of 1984-meets-Windows Vista dystopia.
oh snap.
I'll concede your points, but state that the underlying notion is that "Gold is something that has value, and that can be owned." You're right, he should have used paper currency; we can use gold for all kinds of things, and that people like it being purty. But it is possible to imagine a society that, in spite of its inherent interest to us, placed no value on gold; or one that maintained that gold belonged to everyone; or one that decided that the whale, being a Royal Fish, when it washed ashore belonged to the king.
Excellent point on the distinction between a business model and an economic model, but I disagree on the shiny: what has made copyright work in the past has been A) the scale needed to infringe on copyrights and B) the fact that the average person buys a tangible physical object.
A) means the number of players is limited, and B) means that the people see themselves as buying something. Copyright is what "limits the supply" on your reading, but it's only really limited according to the owners' wishes and capabilities, and, generally speaking, scarcity doesn't have much to do with mass media's price. B) has a not-unimportant psychological effect. We can argue about whether ideas exist, but we can point to a CD and say "That exists".
Long before any of this nonsense, people were making tapes of records, covering songs at performances, copying texts, and all without worrying about copyright issues. While it is copyright infringement, it's been a zone where societal norms and the law have been at odds. The economic situation has changed where what was once a tolerated popular activity on the fringes of the IP economy has rendered obsolete their current system. And no amount of social engineering, legislation and lawsuits is going to change that.
There's something very basic in humans that less us understand the concept of "mine" and "yours", and apply it to physical objects. But what about ideas? Intellectual property is much more difficult for most people to wrap their minds around. For example, you don't understand it either. "Downloading stuff that you didn't pay for" is not stealing. Stealing is a criminal act where you deprive someone of the use or enjoyment of property. Making a copy of a work is not criminal, nor does it deprive the copyright owner of anything. It can be against the wishes of the copyright owner, and the copyright owner can assert that you inflicted damages, but it is not stealing, just as hijacking an aircraft is not committing insurance fraud.
So, we've got property rights that are agreed upon by a society, or so we think, and some of those, few people really seem to understand, and yet affect everybody. Worse, these are relative young "rights". Copyrights came in with mass printing and were built to combat mass printing. With the cost of duplication practically nil, and the means of communication readily available, Copyright law, as it is now, is just impractical: it's designed for mass infringement cases, not as a means of generating revenue.
On the one hand, human behavior in these matters has not changed since the beginning of written communication: people copy what interests them, and don't immediately grasp the notion of paying for an instantion of an idea (they do, however, immediately grasp the importance of paying someone to produce ideas). On the other hand, we have a handful of companies with a business model based on the high cost of mass production and distribution confronted with a change to an environment of cheap distribution and individualized production. And there's no worse citizen than a fading elite. The music industry in particular made this worse by focusing on saturating the market with a few insipid "hits", and overexposing the listeners: to the average person, that song that they're hearing several times a day isn't worth anything in itself.
So to answer your question: nobody's saying downloading music without paying for it is ok. I say that, yes, downloading music without paying for is ok, when the copyright holders make it available for free.
Uh, the point was:
If you have a TV tuner, you can set it to auto-record shows, and the Zune software will transcode it (and presumably bust it down to 320x240) for the Zune, and wirelessly sync it up. If you have a HD tuner (or even just a digital one, on some reports), it won't work.
The "coolness factor" isn't in the HD, but that you can record your daily television shows (say last night's talk shows), and they'll be automatically put on your device for the morning commute. The "shotgun-to-foot factor" is that it doesn't work unless you have an analog tuner card, even though analog broadcasts are going to disappear.
Yes, I had a siemens candy-bar phone with a one-press unlock. In the eight months it lasted before its power circuit broke, I recall numerous instances of arriving at work (after walking for 30 minutes) to find the boss expecting me, as he'd already been talking to my pants.
Steve Jobs didn't do diddly here. The basic design principle is: If you have a mechanical sliding lock, cool. Otherwise, you have to use buttons, and if you use buttons, use more than one. Because a "phone lock" that regularly unlocks in a situation where uncommanded forces are applied to the keyboard is no lock, but a nuisance.
I confess that I do from time to time look to see who has their bluetooth in discoverable mode. Some cellphones do it, and these have generic names (such as the Verizon WonderPrice Z302). My GPS transceiver doesn't have a non-discoverable mode (If you see a device called "In my pants, not my car", come over and say hi, sugar). But Macintoshes seem to be discoverable by default, and even better, advertise that they are Macintoshes and give the name of the user.
I won't comment on Apple's policy in doing so, and I'll leave you to figure out what kinds of social engineering and hacking exploits this opens the door to. I'm just sayin', that's all.
Isn't that how it works?
Hey, I hear some congressmen are taking bribes. The next time that happens, let's seize the assets of every congressman and garner their wages for ten years to come.
Ooh, and all this can go away if the Universities pay Audible Magic. Now, they wouldn't have anything to do with the current RIAA shakedowns, would they?
I think you're being unfair here. They could very well have a supersweet natural language parser going on.
It doesn't matter.
The job of the avant garde is to scout the terrain ahead to avoid leading the army into a dead end or a massacre.
Facade is definitely avant-garde; I'm just up in the air about whether it's a dead end or a massacre.
Yes, the artwork is, well, ugly. The characters are not pleasant to look at, and the walk around like John Wayne in bad need of a box of ExLax. The narrative should suck you into the story, instead it just sucks. To play Trip's role, you need to care about and like the unhappy couple. Instead, you're confronted with two bitter, ugly creatures in an ugly apartment.
But all that is beside the point. The core problem is the concept. This is supposed to explore computer games as interactive psychological drama, as a way to communicate rich emotional tones with subtle details. You are supposed to interact with the two AI characters about their relationship. But no parser can be fine enough to the task. So the user becomes immediately aware of the irreality of the situation: yes, they are fighting; no I don't think I'm ever going to be fed. I am supposed to do something, but whatever I type in doesn't get understood; or if it does, it's not understood correctly. I mean, it might work in a sort of "Premenstrual Eliza" kinda way, but it's not a game anyone really wants to play.
Yeah, but a phone with GPS and access to a database of restaurants, bus stops, gas stations, and grocery stores, among others, is particularly useful.
Er, you ever look at the credits for movies from 40 years ago? They're darn short, and a whole lot more people than that were involved in them. They were never heavily credited up front. At most, the only thing that's changed is that they've dropped the names of the musical directors. But the standard format has always been "moneymakers" first: stars, then the exec producers/producers/writer and finally the director.
"Bought and paid for" was the modus operandi back in the fifties. And you know what? Unless you can commoditize credits, many video game companies will skip them.
"Display of a credit"? Come on, it's never been that way. I went through a couple years in the game industry, working (paid) on dozens of titles, and the only game in which my name appears is Macintosh Armor Alley (=for those of you data mining my ass, you now know exactly who I am; and for those of you not, could someone go over to the MobyGames entry and confirm that Testing 1, 2, 3... most assuredly existed, but was almost never credited).
Record companies often SCREW the bands on contract.
Dude, producers, sound engineers, and all those folks don't all work for the record companies.
Front money? How many record company contracts have you seen? And how much does a record company actually advance on royalties for anyone but a superstar?
Marketing: yes, that's true. Of course, it's less true now than it was fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, there were record stores, and people actually listened to the radio. Well, they killed record stores, and nobody listens to music on the radio anymore anyway.
Record companies are only now getting into the tour bus business, because that's the only part of the industry making money. That is not traditionally what record companies do. That's what band managers do, and for most recording artists, that's still what managers do.
Top-of-the-line instruments? Dude, you mean like Nikes and stuff?
So, no, I say your understanding of the music industry clashes with mine. But you do point the way forward: out of the hands of old "CD and lawsuit" companies and into the control of groups and individuals (within the current record companies, or outside them) with influence on the market as it currently is. And, with the internet, it currently is more segmented and more regional than it's been in a long time. Radio DJs are all but irrelevant; MTV? When was the last time they showed music? And yet the record companies still insist on making $2M videos? The current arbiters of music fashion and taste are those people who've been supporting recorded music since its advent, but have never been under the control of the music industry: your buddy who makes the mix tape, the club DJ, your little hoodrat friend who's been "saving it for the scene". The "industry leading" recording studios aren't worth it for most musicians: they can get a "good enough" job done in someone's house in the Meadowlands. The "music people" and their cocaine only harmed Rock-n-Roll to begin with.
So no, the Reagan 80s were not a glory period for music. As the saying goes, I survived the 80s one time already...
Okay, so what are you going to do? Sue Sun?
If so, you'd better hope that there's nothing in Sun's patent portfolio that you're infringing upon. The way software patents have gotten these days, it's a pretty fair bet that NetApp runs afoul of at least a few of Sun's 14,000 patents.
To reassure folks internally, Dave appeals to ignorance:
There's always a first time. And maybe that's what it will take to reform the system. While Sun can wave the F/OSS flag as they battle NetApp, they will end up proving a few scary points about the current state of the patent system:
1) If a company tries to use software patents the way they were intended, it will only be successful against companies smaller than themselves. The big boys will insist on a portfolio exchange; if that fails, one party will end up looking like SCO.
2) The only way to get money out of the "big infringers" is to have a company with zero liability of patent infringement, such as one with a litigation-based business model.
3) Software patents are a barrier to entry for small companies, and a perpetual liability.
I've never owned a cell in the US. Yes, I've spent most of my life there, and in the past decade, I've bounced between Europe and the US, yet spending most of my time stateside. Funny thing, though: while in Europe, cellular communications have gotten easier, to the point where I've now had three separate cell phones, and five separate phone numbers in four countries (including Switzerland, which is right up there with the US in terms of pharmaceutical and cell phone costs), in the US, I have never seen the point in having a cell phone. It just isn't worth it. Phone calls cost. Text messages cost. To get access, you effectively need a paid subscription. Then you need to use their hardware on the network, from which they have removed the balls. Yeah, I know, there are ways around many obstacles, but I'd have to be motivated and seriously mobile to care. I'm not.
It just comes to this: when our country, which should be representing us, sells our resources to private corporations, it has an obligation to ensure that it represents our interests in doing so.
I don't consider it in the public interest when all we get from such a transaction is a couple billion bucks the oligopoly will have a hard time recovering and a parking lot hand job for select bureaucrats. Oh boy. We can finally afford to pay the cell phone companies for that no-warrant surveillance system we always wanted. woop de doo.
Well, if you take physics, AI and visualization out of the game, you pretty much have the CPU code for todays video games. Yes, supercomputers can do wonderful things with those three factors, but no, you don't find anything anywhere close to the same order of magnitude for games. It just doesn't make economic sense. It's like driving to the next town over in a 747. It takes way too much training to do, costs far too much in resources, and the result is much less effective than the competing products.
It might surprise you, but US laws derive from the British Legal Tradition. And, the story as put forth here involves the violation of several laws:
1. In a business transaction between a retailer and a consumer, the consumer gets the benefit of the doubt. In a business-to-business transaction, the "brick-laying" party could argue that the other business should have conducted the due diligence of checking the goods before leaving the store. In a business-to-consumer transaction, the due diligence lies on the part of the retailer, making sure they're selling what they claim they're selling.
2. According to the claim (which we are under no obligation to believe), there are two separate transactions here. The guy bought a load of bricks, returned it, and got credited. No problem here. Then he bought a hard drive, and the manager showed up and seized it.
As you insular folks know, you can't do that without a lawfully issued writ of distraint.
Veropedia: Pedia is the Greek leftover from Encyclopedia, and Vero is supposed to be from the Latin verum for "true". Of course, vero is also an adverb in Latin, meaning "but". as in, "This is from Wikipedia, but/em it's not Wikipedia". So, it's supposed to be true, but their title is a god-awful mix of Latin and Greek (cf. the word "Scientology"), and it doesn't mean what they think it means.
Asus, for example, makes an UMPC with the same processor, 7" 800x480 screen, and a 60GB drive, plus all kinds of bonuses for twice the price of an Eee.
I debated waiting for the Eee, but watching the prices climb and the features drop, I ended up getting a Nokia 800 (4.1" 800x480 screen), which you can equip with memory and a keyboard for the price of an Eee. Even smaller size and weight, slower processor, but an "always on/rarely plugged in" philosophy that is better for certain tasks.
So it's not that "you pay through the nose", but that, in the race for power and portability, the measuring stick has been Windows. Once you junk it in all its forms (Vista, Tablet Edition, CE), you can put together a slim OS that does exactly what you need the hardware to do, and does it with a lot less overhead.
So normally you'd pay through the nose for a super PC shoehorned into a tiny box. Here, we have an underpowered PC in a tiny box. And it is enough to start the revolution.
The trance vibrator runs in personal space, not just user space, although I suspect some enterprising hackers have succeeded in jamming that thing clear up to their kernel. The product might warrant consideration, since at the moment insmodding the trance vibrator often necessitates an ER visit.
Add to that:
Linux - constant annoyances when you learn it, and need to get anything to work.
Vista - annoying when you learn it, have disabled the security features, and need to get anything to work.
Linux - You own this turd, and it's worth every penny.
Vista - You paid for this turd, it ain't worth the price, you don't own it, and Microsoft can take it away at any moment.
OS updates have been following the development in technology for the last quarter decade. Has development slowed enough in the last five years that Vista offers users nothing new of substance, and Linux flavors have gotten "good enough" to offer what most users need?
Crap was gonna mod you insightful, but modded you redundant. Posting to clear you out. Sorry mate. (Those with points, feel free to modspank me).
Just further proof that we don't need much exposition. It's a game: show us. I'm savoring the Portal experience.
Not quite. NASA has been doing some good stuff in research and application. For example, they've done great studies on how cultural dynamics affect approaches to CRM (in this case, "crew resource management", or how to make sure the folks at the pointy end are all effective at their jobs. In the past, they've even published articles that have become classic points of reference for the disconnect of perspective between ATC and pilots, and suggested solutions. So, sure, there may be an overlap between aeronautics research and administering aviation, but that's the nature of academic work. Even if it weren't, the FAA's job is to run the aviation system. While self-evaluation is part of the job description, no agency, department or bureau in government should be allowed to have exclusive control over its own oversight.
But there's hope. If indeed, it turns out that NASA did suppress their results on the basis of the allegedly stated reasons, namely damaging consumer confidence and adversely affecting airline revenue, then we do have friends in NASA. How do I get there? Well, those are absolutely the most offensive reasons for suppressing any government information about public safety. Heck, you never say "We have some conclusions about public safety in this industry, but publishing them they might convince people to FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES when they consider consuming their product, and thus MAKE THEM CONSIDER ALTERNATIVES." That's the worst thing you can say, and something you'd only say if you were following orders you found morally repugnant.
By such an admission, the higher-ups who were compelled to suppress the information effectively allow us to jump to conclusions such as that "Land-and-Hold Short" ops are inherently dangerous and will cause an accident. Hey, feel free to post anonymously your true feelings.
yeah, Nokia has a "test service" that ran in the Spring. And I hear that Gtalk n800 to n800 only, sorta works. I stand by what I said. And I look forward to the day I can make video calls on my n800.
Yeah, well, to be fair, nobody mentions it, because it doesn't really work yet. Current word is that GTalk on the n800 supports some sort of video phone calls. The N810 will have the Gizmo project support it as well. At that point (aka, a couple weeks), it might be worth mentioning, especially since the small screen size and side camera placement make the parallax less distracting. Right now, it's the ongoing joke. It would be cool, but until it gets working on a wide scale, not even the fanbois are gonna plug it. So, I see the press releases, I hear the news, and I hope OS2008 will be "all that": enabling it to be a true portable video/VoIP device, but while I have no shame mentioning all the bits and pieces that half work, I won't bring that up. Yet.
Maemomapper lets you preload entire geographic sections from your favorite online map repositories; someone even slapped together a windows tool to grab tiles and dump them onto an SD card. So you don't need to be connected to the net while hiking, and you can download max resolution for an entire country if need be.