The iRiver H300 series has been able to do this for how long? I'd have to say between 1.5 and 2 years. Yes, the support is pretty minimal as they have to be re-encoded in a smaller resolution and in some sort of MPEG standard format,
You know, between that quick and easy procedure of getting videos onto the iRiver, the award-winning simplicity of the iRiver Music Store, the new iRiver Video Store, and the fact that the H300 doesn't officially support video files, it's a real wonder why iRiver doesn't dominate the portable video market. Must be entirely due to those catchy iPod commercials.
Even more heinous, but technically feasible, would be per-user and related-hits tracking, so if you buy a $.50 song, all the 'other songs purchased by people who bought this one' go up to $.99 for you personally. In such a system, the only way to get the low prices consistently would be to buy random selections of stuff nobody else wants.
Amazon tried this. People caught on, got pissed, and Amazon stopped doing it. I was going to say that the RIAA would take one look at this history, and decide not to repeat a certain failure, but anymore I honestly don't know about them.
"Hey boss, this iTunes thing is catching on pretty well."
"It is, but I wonder how we could make more money from it."
"Well, we could charge Apple more, since they're making a massive 0.03% profit on the store, that'll make us more money."
"Naw, you gotta think bigger than that, we've gotta think huge."
"We could rob Fort Knox."
"Too huge, but I like your thinking. Wait, wait, wait... what if we force Apple to charge different prices for different songs?"
"Didn't BuyMusic.com try that?"
"And look how successful they are now!"
"Boss... they're out of business."
"Yeah, and you're out of a job now, pissant. Get me the phone, I have a certain Steve Jobs to call!"
Take a whole bunch of these and stack them up in series. As you approach each one, it opens as closes again behind you as you pass. You end up in a moving bubble. That would be cool.
If claustrophobia is cool, then yes, it'd very cool.
...why is it we have such relatively small canines? The males of most primate species have large canines especially for fighting, usually other males in order to win controll of groups of females. Some speculation has it that monogamy in our kind did away with the need for large canines, or maybe, in our kind females did away with the male perrogative of controlling breeding?
I don't think that's true, women still seem to be attracted to guys with big canines. Big canines like golden retrievers and labs are total chick magnets, but a guy walking a miniature poodle is likely to get a lot of strange looks. Having your canines fight over a girl is just sick, though, and illegal everywhere but the south.
Various FOX News "watchdog" groups are a dizzying array of alleged inaccuracies in FOX News opinion and editorial shows, with almost nothing in actual NEWS content (and certainly not more than any other news organization). Further, whenever FOX News does commit an error in NEWS content, it voluminously and repeatedly spends the next hour, or at least that news show/hour, correcting itself for the benefit of people who may have missed the initial correction. And that event itself is a rarity. BS. Here's a good list of Fox "Hard News" inaccuracies, distortions, spin, and outright lies, although there's no mention of when or if retractions were issued.
I figured the "all-you-can-eat" buffet menus just meant we were fatasses. So glad to hear it's actually just our desire for choice!:-P
The subscription model really does have a lot of value to it, especially as iPods become further entrenched in our culture. Right now, Apple is using iTunes to drive demand for iPods, but it soon might be that iPods drive demand for listening to the music you chose, not what the radio stations want you to listen to.
The one thing that's holding Napster back right now (well, besides for not working on iPods) is they think their customers are idiots. They really do. Napster's CEO said his ad campaign was meant to convicne people that buying an iPod was stupid, because of the whole $10,000 thing. He also said in some interview that he's trying to make a future where all the music we've bought before won't matter. We were idiots for buying that stuff, he's saying. Quite frankly, that's not going to win over a hell of a lot of iPod users, and they're going to have to start making Napster fun if they want people to actually use it.
So with a PPU, you have to decide on a common library of collisions. Good news: more objects you can play with and let the PPU decide what's getting hit. Bad news: everybody's game will react basically the same and they'll have to decide if that's a good idea.
It looks like we're heading there already. Havok has already developed a mature software physics engine which is used in many popular games. I think in this case, developers are willing to give up a little control on physics to have better looking effects. This PPU sounds like it's designed to hook right into Havok, and could really prove useful as Havok becomes more popular.
If only it were that easy. IANAL, but I've read that patent suits are settled out of court in the vast majority of cases because they are hideously expensive. Even if these patents look trivially invalid to you or me, it can take a court of law a long time to figure that same thing out, and Apple's lawyers can rack up a lot of billable hours during that time. These kinds of cases can easily cost both companies $3-4 million to see to the end, so it's in Apple's interest to just settle it out of court quickly, with a lump sum payment to these guys of something like half a million dollars. It's precisely how companies like this work; they offer bigger companies the option of paying their lawyers millions of dollars, or paying the company that's suing them a lot less. Which would you chose?
Now, if you were thinking long term and reputation, you'd take the first company that sues you for frivolous patent infringement, and hound them to the bitter end. Hire the best possible legal patent team, counter-sue for slander or fraud or something, fight that case to the bitter end to get the patent declared invalid, and just set a "we don't negotiate with patent terrorists" precedent. I bet you there wouldn't be a second try at a stunt like that, and it'd pay off in the long run. And I have no idea why Apple doesn't do that now.
It's late and I'm a little rusty, but the results on their page are interesting, if not necessarily statistically significant. Out of 192 "let's assume" randomly selected timeframes, they found 16 events that were significant at the.05 level. That is, an event in the REG is signficant if it has a less than 5% probability of occuring by chance. Now, with 192 timeframes, you'd expect a few to look unlikely. In fact, we'd expect on average 192*0.05 = 9.6 events that look significant. So we're only 5.4 events above our average expectations. We can also calculate how much this average varies from case to case (say twenty people did this, and then compared and contrasted), and from that find if this is outcome was likely or not. The standard deviation for this case is:
sqrt(192*0.05*0.95) = 3.02
So we're 5.4 events away from expectations with a standard deviation of 3.02 events. This translates (through the student t-distribution) to a probability of about 0.08. That's intriguing, although not a mind blowingly low probability.
Aside from the statistics, they've got a problem with the scientific method. They don't have any control days, so if their machines just produced unlikely streams of numbers more often than they should, the researchers could accidentally assume they are predicting the future. A better test would be to run the REGs for a year, collect the stream of data, and keep it secret. Then, at the end of the year, the scientists could pick out an equal number of "important" and "unimportant" days. If there's a statistically significant difference in the frequency of unlikely REG data on important and unimportant days, then you've got something. If not, they might just have a problem with their REGs.
(I'd link to a better explanation of how I calculated standard deviation here, but the page I fould was an ugly pdf. You may have better luck simply Googling for it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if they found Iraq's WMD in Jupiter...
A Webby, an INDEX Award, and Time magazine called it the Innovation of the Year.
You know, between that quick and easy procedure of getting videos onto the iRiver, the award-winning simplicity of the iRiver Music Store, the new iRiver Video Store, and the fact that the H300 doesn't officially support video files, it's a real wonder why iRiver doesn't dominate the portable video market. Must be entirely due to those catchy iPod commercials.
Everything is a remake, some are just better disguised remakes. Even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of older works.
Amazon tried this. People caught on, got pissed, and Amazon stopped doing it. I was going to say that the RIAA would take one look at this history, and decide not to repeat a certain failure, but anymore I honestly don't know about them.
"Hey boss, this iTunes thing is catching on pretty well."
"It is, but I wonder how we could make more money from it."
"Well, we could charge Apple more, since they're making a massive 0.03% profit on the store, that'll make us more money."
"Naw, you gotta think bigger than that, we've gotta think huge."
"We could rob Fort Knox."
"Too huge, but I like your thinking. Wait, wait, wait... what if we force Apple to charge different prices for different songs?"
"Didn't BuyMusic.com try that?"
"And look how successful they are now!"
"Boss... they're out of business."
"Yeah, and you're out of a job now, pissant. Get me the phone, I have a certain Steve Jobs to call!"
If claustrophobia is cool, then yes, it'd very cool.
The Vista Beta comes with a WPA bypasser. Like a bypasser for WiFi's WPA? Isn't that kind of dumb, given their new bent on security?
You're very passionate about not caring about this book, aren't you?
I don't think that's true, women still seem to be attracted to guys with big canines. Big canines like golden retrievers and labs are total chick magnets, but a guy walking a miniature poodle is likely to get a lot of strange looks. Having your canines fight over a girl is just sick, though, and illegal everywhere but the south.
Maybe I'm missing something here...
BS. Here's a good list of Fox "Hard News" inaccuracies, distortions, spin, and outright lies, although there's no mention of when or if retractions were issued.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200412230015
And then there's this completely fabricated gem from the election:
Trail Tails: What's that face?
I haven't finished reading the "liberal bias" report yet, that may take some time.
Once they find out it's not about the resurrection of Christ, the fundies are going to be mighty pissed about anything called resurrection ecology.
The subscription model really does have a lot of value to it, especially as iPods become further entrenched in our culture. Right now, Apple is using iTunes to drive demand for iPods, but it soon might be that iPods drive demand for listening to the music you chose, not what the radio stations want you to listen to.
The one thing that's holding Napster back right now (well, besides for not working on iPods) is they think their customers are idiots. They really do. Napster's CEO said his ad campaign was meant to convicne people that buying an iPod was stupid, because of the whole $10,000 thing. He also said in some interview that he's trying to make a future where all the music we've bought before won't matter. We were idiots for buying that stuff, he's saying. Quite frankly, that's not going to win over a hell of a lot of iPod users, and they're going to have to start making Napster fun if they want people to actually use it.
Can somebody explain what that means?
I'm assuming that's not like bulk mail over the internet. I'd hate to accidently download viagra when I just when a torrent file.
It looks like we're heading there already. Havok has already developed a mature software physics engine which is used in many popular games. I think in this case, developers are willing to give up a little control on physics to have better looking effects. This PPU sounds like it's designed to hook right into Havok, and could really prove useful as Havok becomes more popular.
If only it were that easy. IANAL, but I've read that patent suits are settled out of court in the vast majority of cases because they are hideously expensive. Even if these patents look trivially invalid to you or me, it can take a court of law a long time to figure that same thing out, and Apple's lawyers can rack up a lot of billable hours during that time. These kinds of cases can easily cost both companies $3-4 million to see to the end, so it's in Apple's interest to just settle it out of court quickly, with a lump sum payment to these guys of something like half a million dollars. It's precisely how companies like this work; they offer bigger companies the option of paying their lawyers millions of dollars, or paying the company that's suing them a lot less. Which would you chose? Now, if you were thinking long term and reputation, you'd take the first company that sues you for frivolous patent infringement, and hound them to the bitter end. Hire the best possible legal patent team, counter-sue for slander or fraud or something, fight that case to the bitter end to get the patent declared invalid, and just set a "we don't negotiate with patent terrorists" precedent. I bet you there wouldn't be a second try at a stunt like that, and it'd pay off in the long run. And I have no idea why Apple doesn't do that now.
sqrt(192*0.05*0.95) = 3.02
So we're 5.4 events away from expectations with a standard deviation of 3.02 events. This translates (through the student t-distribution) to a probability of about 0.08. That's intriguing, although not a mind blowingly low probability.
Aside from the statistics, they've got a problem with the scientific method. They don't have any control days, so if their machines just produced unlikely streams of numbers more often than they should, the researchers could accidentally assume they are predicting the future. A better test would be to run the REGs for a year, collect the stream of data, and keep it secret. Then, at the end of the year, the scientists could pick out an equal number of "important" and "unimportant" days. If there's a statistically significant difference in the frequency of unlikely REG data on important and unimportant days, then you've got something. If not, they might just have a problem with their REGs.
(I'd link to a better explanation of how I calculated standard deviation here, but the page I fould was an ugly pdf. You may have better luck simply Googling for it.)