If price really isn't important, hotshot, then why not just buy another MP3 player that works with WMA if Yahoo's service looks attractive? Hell, you'll still come out ahead relative to paying through the nose for Apple's store.
My guess is that unless Apple goes a similar route (and they probably won't, at least not with price) the days of the iPod being dominant will be numbered. Sort of the way things generally go with Apple products. They make something good first, then people copy it and improve upon it while Apple sits their and overcharges for it as they watch their market share go away. Eventually the only people that will pay for it are trendy young people on the coasts who equate what they buy with who they are. (I know that sounds harsh, but just listen to the kind of things people say about their iPod shuffles. It's like the closest people in San Francisco ever get to religion.)
University compuers don't usually get owned because they have an IT staff to manage and protect them.
That's my point.:-) The original internet was a bunch of large peer institutions who had a least a modicum of reason to trust one another and connect their networks. The model was one of fat local networks connected somewhat thinly together. A few servers would do most of the communicating between subnets. (Remember when mail actually took more than one or two hops and USENET servers only connected to nearby servers?) The current "internet" is really more of a free-for-all star topology with everybody only a few hops from the backbone and data centralized to a handful of servers. I'm sure there are tons of people who know this stuff better than me here, and I hope some of them jump in here, but my feeling is that this explains the reason DDOS attacks are so easy and yet effective.
Point taken. In theory, though, they shouldn't have the same problem. A university should be able to have more control over the machines on their subnets than an ISP. An ISP connects disparate "subnets" offsite, whereas a university serves as ISP for a community of users on site, all within the confines of its property. A university has no excuse for not clamping down.
I think this is a good example of how the democratization of the net has really screwed things up in some ways. The net was never intended to be so centralized (undecentralized?), with huge ISPs serving millions of customers. Of course there's going to be zombie networks. The net wasn't designed to have millions of individual users directly connected from essentially unsupervised subnetworks. Notice that you never hear about a company or university having a significant percentage of their machines taken over, especially not for a long time. Originally, the network was just large organizations connecting their managed networks to the backbones, usually from behind firewalls. But an ISP doesn't watch it's clients computers the way a sysadmin would (nor should they) and thus we have the present, sorry, situation of millions of Microsoft moms unwittingly playing host to a global crime wave.
It's a good thing we have such secure consumer operating systems, or this could turn into a real problem!
The kid just might be psychic. Kids often are. Perhaps autistic kids are more in touch with that stuff than normal kids. I predicted some scary shit when was a kid, according to my parents.
You're only an insensitive jerk if the mystery shitter were within earshot. Otherwise, it's just private enjoyment of your thoughts.
Reminds me of the time everybody in my college dorm found a turd in the toilet that looked like it had to kill the guy who birthed it. It was spherical, green and literally the size of a grape fruit. Obviously, it wouldn't flush. So it sort of became like the dorm pet. Everybody thought it was really funny except the gay vegetarian on the hall, who was conspicuous in his lack of humor about it.
Man, that's a heck of a time you've had. I'm sorry. Quite frankly, I think the world would be far better off without the profession of psychology. The human brain is too complex to be treating it's ailments in the same paradigm in which we treat the flu. Moreover, we actually understand the flu. Most DSM disorders are just pseudoscientific collections of symptoms put in by a voting committee of shrinks to make it easier to bill insurance companies.
Actually, it seems the "party of tolerance" has got the upper hand when it comes to assholes on this issue. I've heard little but fair reason on the side of those supporting hunting, but very little other than cheap emotion-based pot shots from the anti-hunters on this one.
Agreed, there was nothing insightful about his comment. There is no "human infestation". Humans in the midwest aren't putting themselves in a position where other humans in the midwest are starving as a result of their overpopulation. In fact, the Midwest is pretty well thriving these days (minus Ohio), and has a much more managable population level than the coasts.
Allow me to go so far as to also say that if they were starving each other out, it still wouldn't be ok to shoot them.:-)
The midwest is more infested with humans than with deer. Where can I apply for a human hunting license?
What simple-minded zealots modded this unbelievably stupid straw-man "argument" as insightful? This is why it's so hard to be liberal these days. I don't want to be on the same side as these assholes.
I think you missed the point of this guy's reply. He was pointing out the way the submitter spoke of "innocent" animals. That's such a ridiculous loaded word that closes off debate before it even starts. It's clear the submitter wasn't interested in a true debate and is fairly happy in his conclusions.
Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals -- they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!
Mod this tripe down. It's not funny as much as inflammatory itself. Nobody said hunters only killed innocent animals or ones that deserved it, etc. You're anthropomorphizing (however that's spelled) quite a bit in your parody of anthropomorphizing, because animals can't be said to be innocent or not innocent either way. That's not even the point of any reasonable debate on hunting. If you want to have an intelligent discussion on whether hunting is valid for humans to do for sport, fine. But there's going to be more than enough knee-jerk smug bullshit coming from this post as it is.
How convenient. You get to define libertarianism and then slam it. Pretty easy. You can set up a straw man argument for any philosophy and take it down in the next sentence if you only care about appearing correct and not making intellectual headway.
You can find simplistic libertarians just as you can find people of all political pursuasions who take things too far. At it's best, libertarianism recognizes that the devil is in the interpretation of "does no one else harm" and that there are very difficult questions to answer. The difference between libertarians and most people these days is simply that the former actual start from a principle at all.
That's very interesting. Thanks for posting that. It really bugs me when companies don't even expect us to be honest. It quickens the ol' moral decline, IMHO.
European governments keep themselves busy by making everything as difficult as humanly possible. It's either that, or cause a world war every few years. I applaud this decision.
I haven't eaten meat (or fish) for 20 years now. I feel great, and look a lot younger than i am. Perhaps the critters found themselves in an abundance of readily available, high-energy greens and decided it was much less work than trying to catch & kill their next meal.
Maybe the lack of meat has screwed up your vision. Most vegetarians I know look like hell. Which is too bad, because their obsessive, healthier-than-thou personality defects don't leave them with much else of interest.
Hmm, that never occurred to me. Are you saying that MS puts out a student version for the express purpose of having an effectively lowered price to get office in more hands? That's pretty scary, if you're right.
If you need more features, just buy Microsoft Outlook for $109. That's still a lot cheaper than buying the entire Standard Edition Office suite for $399. (Of course, the Office edition for students and teachers costs $149, and no one's checking IDs).
Is anybody else disturbed by what it means for our society that a journalist, of all people, feels comfortable openly suggesting people dishonestly obtain the student version? I don't care how much you hate Microsoft, this kind of thing damages far more than Bill Gates.
I bet when they started that project, it seemed fun. But about halfway, through, I bet it didn't sound so cool getting linux to run on a completely obsolete handheld game console that nobody cares about anymore. Sunk costs are a bitch.
I was being sarcastic, pointing out that despite your obviously correct understanding of the "web" vs the "internet", as things are evolving, the internet is mostly used for the web, and we're mostly all just connecting to the same few places. It's not the point of the internet as originally intended or engineered.
The prototype was developed at Utah State University, is this the end of guide dogs?"
No, but it sure sounds like the end of blind people. What is it with AI people? They still can't produce software with the intelligence of a lab mouse, but they've moved on to guiding the blind? Last I checked, people still had trouble getting robots to navigate a building reliably.
Why do we even need an Internet? Why don't we all just have a connection to Google, sort of a star network with Google at the center. Google has a copy of everything anyway, 98% of the Internet is just a waste. The content people should just cut the bullshit and upload their stuff to Google, and then we'll all get it from them. For all the beauty of the original distributed Internet, the whole idea of everybody connected to everybody didn't anticipate our proclivity for monopolies and cheap hardrives. Except for P2P illegal file sharing, all of the connections that don't go between Google and someplace else are really pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
If price really isn't important, hotshot, then why not just buy another MP3 player that works with WMA if Yahoo's service looks attractive? Hell, you'll still come out ahead relative to paying through the nose for Apple's store.
My guess is that unless Apple goes a similar route (and they probably won't, at least not with price) the days of the iPod being dominant will be numbered. Sort of the way things generally go with Apple products. They make something good first, then people copy it and improve upon it while Apple sits their and overcharges for it as they watch their market share go away. Eventually the only people that will pay for it are trendy young people on the coasts who equate what they buy with who they are. (I know that sounds harsh, but just listen to the kind of things people say about their iPod shuffles. It's like the closest people in San Francisco ever get to religion.)
That's my point.
I sensed beforehand somebody was going to freak out about my psychic comments.
Point taken. In theory, though, they shouldn't have the same problem. A university should be able to have more control over the machines on their subnets than an ISP. An ISP connects disparate "subnets" offsite, whereas a university serves as ISP for a community of users on site, all within the confines of its property. A university has no excuse for not clamping down.
I think this is a good example of how the democratization of the net has really screwed things up in some ways. The net was never intended to be so centralized (undecentralized?), with huge ISPs serving millions of customers. Of course there's going to be zombie networks. The net wasn't designed to have millions of individual users directly connected from essentially unsupervised subnetworks. Notice that you never hear about a company or university having a significant percentage of their machines taken over, especially not for a long time. Originally, the network was just large organizations connecting their managed networks to the backbones, usually from behind firewalls. But an ISP doesn't watch it's clients computers the way a sysadmin would (nor should they) and thus we have the present, sorry, situation of millions of Microsoft moms unwittingly playing host to a global crime wave.
It's a good thing we have such secure consumer operating systems, or this could turn into a real problem!
Correct. That should teach me about not previewing posts. That should teach me about not previewing posts.
The kid just might be psychic. Kids often are. Perhaps autistic kids are more in touch with that stuff than normal kids. I predicted some scary shit when was a kid, according to my parents.
You're only an insensitive jerk if the mystery shitter were within earshot. Otherwise, it's just private enjoyment of your thoughts.
Reminds me of the time everybody in my college dorm found a turd in the toilet that looked like it had to kill the guy who birthed it. It was spherical, green and literally the size of a grape fruit. Obviously, it wouldn't flush. So it sort of became like the dorm pet. Everybody thought it was really funny except the gay vegetarian on the hall, who was conspicuous in his lack of humor about it.
Man, that's a heck of a time you've had. I'm sorry. Quite frankly, I think the world would be far better off without the profession of psychology. The human brain is too complex to be treating it's ailments in the same paradigm in which we treat the flu. Moreover, we actually understand the flu. Most DSM disorders are just pseudoscientific collections of symptoms put in by a voting committee of shrinks to make it easier to bill insurance companies.
Actually, it seems the "party of tolerance" has got the upper hand when it comes to assholes on this issue. I've heard little but fair reason on the side of those supporting hunting, but very little other than cheap emotion-based pot shots from the anti-hunters on this one.
Allow me to go so far as to also say that if they were starving each other out, it still wouldn't be ok to shoot them. :-)
What simple-minded zealots modded this unbelievably stupid straw-man "argument" as insightful? This is why it's so hard to be liberal these days. I don't want to be on the same side as these assholes.
I think you missed the point of this guy's reply. He was pointing out the way the submitter spoke of "innocent" animals. That's such a ridiculous loaded word that closes off debate before it even starts. It's clear the submitter wasn't interested in a true debate and is fairly happy in his conclusions.
Mod this tripe down. It's not funny as much as inflammatory itself. Nobody said hunters only killed innocent animals or ones that deserved it, etc. You're anthropomorphizing (however that's spelled) quite a bit in your parody of anthropomorphizing, because animals can't be said to be innocent or not innocent either way. That's not even the point of any reasonable debate on hunting. If you want to have an intelligent discussion on whether hunting is valid for humans to do for sport, fine. But there's going to be more than enough knee-jerk smug bullshit coming from this post as it is.
How convenient. You get to define libertarianism and then slam it. Pretty easy. You can set up a straw man argument for any philosophy and take it down in the next sentence if you only care about appearing correct and not making intellectual headway.
You can find simplistic libertarians just as you can find people of all political pursuasions who take things too far. At it's best, libertarianism recognizes that the devil is in the interpretation of "does no one else harm" and that there are very difficult questions to answer. The difference between libertarians and most people these days is simply that the former actual start from a principle at all.
Please. RTFA. The resolution is 300 m. The only nude sunbather who could be spotted in CA is maybe an excited Tommy Lee.
That's very interesting. Thanks for posting that. It really bugs me when companies don't even expect us to be honest. It quickens the ol' moral decline, IMHO.
European governments keep themselves busy by making everything as difficult as humanly possible. It's either that, or cause a world war every few years. I applaud this decision.
Maybe the lack of meat has screwed up your vision. Most vegetarians I know look like hell. Which is too bad, because their obsessive, healthier-than-thou personality defects don't leave them with much else of interest.
Hmm, that never occurred to me. Are you saying that MS puts out a student version for the express purpose of having an effectively lowered price to get office in more hands? That's pretty scary, if you're right.
Is anybody else disturbed by what it means for our society that a journalist, of all people, feels comfortable openly suggesting people dishonestly obtain the student version? I don't care how much you hate Microsoft, this kind of thing damages far more than Bill Gates.
I bet when they started that project, it seemed fun. But about halfway, through, I bet it didn't sound so cool getting linux to run on a completely obsolete handheld game console that nobody cares about anymore. Sunk costs are a bitch.
I was being sarcastic, pointing out that despite your obviously correct understanding of the "web" vs the "internet", as things are evolving, the internet is mostly used for the web, and we're mostly all just connecting to the same few places. It's not the point of the internet as originally intended or engineered.
No, but it sure sounds like the end of blind people. What is it with AI people? They still can't produce software with the intelligence of a lab mouse, but they've moved on to guiding the blind? Last I checked, people still had trouble getting robots to navigate a building reliably.
Why do we even need an Internet? Why don't we all just have a connection to Google, sort of a star network with Google at the center. Google has a copy of everything anyway, 98% of the Internet is just a waste. The content people should just cut the bullshit and upload their stuff to Google, and then we'll all get it from them. For all the beauty of the original distributed Internet, the whole idea of everybody connected to everybody didn't anticipate our proclivity for monopolies and cheap hardrives. Except for P2P illegal file sharing, all of the connections that don't go between Google and someplace else are really pointless.