The only way these statements could have less credibility is if they mentioned dilithium crystals. I'm a very passionate music lover. That means I love the *music*, not psycho-babble about physical attachments or "having street cred".
Seriously, if concerns over "Street cred" ever enter your mind for any reason, you are a poser, pure and simple.
Ever heard of "shared culture"?
Maybe for you, the concept of "music" begins and ends with the actual audio itself. But to a lot of other people it also includes the bands and personnel, fan clubs, live gigs, and the satisfaction of finding and knowing other people who share an interest in what you like.
Go turn on your radio, and tune it to a pop station. Hear that awful dreck? That right there should be sufficient to show that the actual audio itself has very little to do with the role of "music" in our society. Music is an much cultural as it is sonic. Always has been. Probably always will be.
Re:But what if Microsoft offered it all together?
on
Windows vs Mac Security
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Apple's taking a different approach: What users need is in the box: Anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, image backup and restore, offsite safe storage through.
Don't you think that if Microsoft offered this that everyone would cry monopoly?
Microsoft has been declared a monopoly in Federal court, and found guilty of anti-trust offenses related to abusing that monopoly in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Apple, on the other hand, is not a monopoly, and hence it would be perfectly legal for them to bundle anything they damn well felt like bundling.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Microsoft, because of their market position, is held to a different legal standard. End of story.
Supporting mixed models is not a new concept even if 64 bit itself hasn't been done. OS/2 did it, Win95 did it. Ultimately there is no reason for the end user to care.
Please note that these new features, including full 64-bit/32-bit mixed-mode compability, were announced at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, not the World Wide Users Conference.
So while you're correct that it may not be a big deal to users, users weren't the audience. To the developers who want or need to code 64-bit applications, it's a big deal indeed.
OK, sure, theoretically you can recharge these things in seconds... but to do so will require moving scary amounts of current around.
Right now, those NiMH "fast recharge" batteries you see at the store take about an amp to recharge 4 2500mAh AAs in about an hour. So, what if you want to charge them in, say a minute? That's about 60 amps of current.
And there's the problem: your average houshold circuit tops out at probably 15 amps; Hell, even your air conditioner or electric stove circuit probably doesn't provide more than 30 amps. So the fastest you could charge those new-fangled "battacitors" is four minutes *if* there's nothing else on the circuit; or more realistically, 10-15 minutes *and* all the lights in your house dim while they're charging.
Circuits were never my thing. Maybe I'm missing something here. I'm sure you EE types will correct me...
Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc, these companies are not selling you on email services. They are selling you on using their site as a portal to your email service. Google liberally peppers their GMail with GAds, same with Yahoo and Hotmail. They want people to show up, not because of the @whatever.com extension, but because they can indoctrinate you with advertising earning their site revenue.
And I suppose it never occurred to you that perhaps Microsoft sees this new "tool" as a way to deprive Gmail, Yahoo, etc. of this revenue stream...
The band shows up for a few hours on Tuesday and Wednesday to actually sing the songs that were written for them, then they go have unprotected sex with random groupies for the next 6 months while everybody else puts in 8 hour days making the entire album come together. So why in the hell should the artists get the lion's share of the profits? What makes them so special? The dozens, or even hundreds of other, "behind-the-scenes" people who worked on the album all worked much harder on the product, why should they get thrown the scraps that are leftover once the band gets the rich reward you seem to think they're entitled to?
Dude, you've been working for the record company too long. Time to move on, you're seriously burned out. And more than a little bitter.
You might have a point, when it comes to the sort of pre-fab, image-managed, marketing-contrived acts like the boy-bands and pop-tarts; but TFA is by a guy in a band that writes its own material, and obviously is very involved with their albums. The vast majority of acts out there, the 90%+ who just make enough to keep a roof over their heads, are in the business to make music. Considering what they get out of their record deals, it sure ain't to get rich.
Don't dump on all the artists out there who actually have talent, just because you got paid industry scale to help Britney buy another vacation home. Deal with your own issues, and move on.
The biggest difference I see is that in the U.S. of A., telecom is a weird mixture of public utility and for-profit business. Incumbent telcos don't face competitive pressures, since they have government-sanctioned monopolies in their regions. They do, however, have pressure to deliver ever-increasing profits to their shareholders.
It's not that Verizon et. al. can't deliver megabit-or-faster speeds to most of their customers, it's just that they have no incentive to do so without also demanding extortionate prices for it.
Example: Here in New Jersey, regular 256kbps down/ 90kbps up DSL would cost me $40 a month; but Verizon would be more than happy to provide me with 1.5Mbps down / 768kbps up, and a static IP, too, over the very same equipment... for around $200/month.
So you can get a speedy connection. But you gotta pay...
Wall Street Journal quotes a doctor: 'My impression is that people believe more of what they read than what I tell them. It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public.
Well, of course patients don't believe their doctors. It's begun to dawn on them that their doctors don't work for them, they work for the HMO.
Now that doctor's offices are just assembly lines to push pills, there's not the same level of trust there once was. For a lot of people, the Web fills the void. It's not too surprising, really.
And if history is any indication, Verizon will *still* limit you to 96kbps upstream.
I'm tellin' ya, these carriers won't be happy until we have gigabit capacity downstream, and just enough upsream to handle mouse clicks, completing the Internet's conversion into interactive television.
Want your state to make laws to prevent this? Show up and vote.
Easy for you to say, you don't live in New Jersey, which is owned and operated by the real estate development industry.
Our corrupt legislature has voted time and time again to benefit the hand that feeds them, at the expense of us mere property owners. Doesn't matter which party, either, they're both beyond hope.
Bet Hovnanian, Toll Brothers, and the commercial developers have their checkbooks out already...
So we'd probably better get ready for the "temporary restriction of liberties during Wartime" to become permanent, because there is no forseeable way to end that war.
Correct. "Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania." Just substitute "terrorism" for "Oceania".
You want people to switch to Firefox or another standards compliant browser? then provide useful features that are only available in those browsers, while still making your page usable with IE.
I wish them luck in their efforts to get this info. As another Slashdotter posted in the other election thread, it's amazing how no one in the media wants to talk about how the exit polls, which are normally quite accurate, showed Kerry strong in places where he eventually lost. I won't rehash all the Diebold issues, but in an election this close, some modest vote fraud, spread thinly enough, would be more than enough to sway the result.
I do wonder, though where they're gonna find the manpower to process all this data, if they do succeed. The recounts in a few Florida counties took days; this is a few orders of magnatude more work!
It'd be nice if there was a little less raw opinion and random editorializing splattered across the actual stories. It's only a few lines; for heaven's sake try to be a little professional.
So I buy a $100 PC, but then need $700 for an OS and desktop suite (WP, spreadsheet, et. al)? Steve, put down the pipe, you've been hanging out with Darl too long.
Or is this a sinister MS plot to get people hooked on cheap PCs, then use a subscription $9.95 a month model to 'rent' the software?
Sure, it might help them sell the "rental" OS model, but you should think bigger.
The Wintel platform has long been a partnership between Intel and Microsoft, but that's no longer the case. MS has been cozying up to AMD, while Intel has been chafing under Redmond's rule, and looking to get it's products into other markets, such as consumer electronics.
These days, I think Microsoft wants to encourage the commoditization of the hardware platform even further than it is already; first, in order to lower the barrier to entry to Windows in the developing world, and secondly, to strengthen it's negotiating position vs. the hardware builders. So much of Microsoft's pie-in-the-sky future is based on a level of integration that pretty much demands that they, and only they, dictate the hardware platform. Taking the wind out of Intel et. al.'s profits by driving prices through the floor would certainly help that.
It's not an accident. Microsoft has been trying for a long time now to convince consumers that software is more valuable than hardware.
Actually, they've been pretty successful at that. One of the problems us Macintosh users run into when dealing with the Great Unwashed Masses is the perception that Macs arent' real computers. Doesn't matter if I can surf the web, do email, even work with MS Office documents; But it's not Windows! To these morons, a PC is, by definition, an Intel box running Windows. Seems odd to those of us on Slashdot, perhaps, but that's the view shared by a good chunk of the computer-using public.
Microsoft shamelessly ripped off the feature and interface for Windows, but of course, they did so ten years laters, and their solution is limited to matching resolution/bit depth.
Whoops... that didn't come out right. I meant to say, Microsoft's version was limited to the same resolution and bit depth when it first came out. More recent versions (Win2k? XP?) are a bit more flexible in terms of resolution and bit depth. Sorry 'bout that.
But seriously, folks... the Macintosh has been able to do this since the Macintosh II came out in 1987. Back then color monitors were relatively pricy and low-resolution; many graphic artists would hook up an older B&W tube for tool pallets and text windows, so they could use all those colors pixels for the main document window.
What's more, Apple's version of this feature supports as many monitors as you can connect, and supports spanning the desktop across monitors of different resolution and/or but depth, too. There's a panel that shows you all your monitors' display spaces, and lets you drag them around to indicate their physical arrangement. Microsoft shamelessly ripped off the feature and interface for Windows, but of course, they did so ten years laters, and their solution is limited to matching resolution/bit depth.
With so much at stake, it's not surprising that this will eventually involve the Supreme Court. However if this is once again ruled against them, they will have serious problem.
Problem is, if the court rules for them, fair use as we know it is dead and buried. The Betamax decision has been the cornerstone of our fair use rights in the electronic age.
Slashdot Mirror
"You keep using sat word. I don sink it means what you sink it means."
-- Inigo Montoya
While I'm at it, another one:
"A word means what I say it means. Nothing more and nothing less."
--Tweedledum
Face it, folks, between politics and marketing, nothing really "means" anything anymore.
Ever heard of "shared culture"?
Maybe for you, the concept of "music" begins and ends with the actual audio itself. But to a lot of other people it also includes the bands and personnel, fan clubs, live gigs, and the satisfaction of finding and knowing other people who share an interest in what you like.
Go turn on your radio, and tune it to a pop station. Hear that awful dreck? That right there should be sufficient to show that the actual audio itself has very little to do with the role of "music" in our society. Music is an much cultural as it is sonic. Always has been. Probably always will be.
*** DISK ERROR ***
[A]bort, [R]etry, [F]lee to high ground? : _
Microsoft has been declared a monopoly in Federal court, and found guilty of anti-trust offenses related to abusing that monopoly in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Apple, on the other hand, is not a monopoly, and hence it would be perfectly legal for them to bundle anything they damn well felt like bundling.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Microsoft, because of their market position, is held to a different legal standard. End of story.
Please note that these new features, including full 64-bit/32-bit mixed-mode compability, were announced at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, not the World Wide Users Conference.
So while you're correct that it may not be a big deal to users, users weren't the audience. To the developers who want or need to code 64-bit applications, it's a big deal indeed.
From this federal government? Sounds like you've been patronizing those drug dealers mentioned.
Welcome to the new reality: the government gets full access to your business, but you get no access into their business.
Between this, easily-hackable voting machines, and yet more police abuses, it's been a really bad week for the Constitution.
OK, sure, theoretically you can recharge these things in seconds... but to do so will require moving scary amounts of current around.
Right now, those NiMH "fast recharge" batteries you see at the store take about an amp to recharge 4 2500mAh AAs in about an hour. So, what if you want to charge them in, say a minute? That's about 60 amps of current.
And there's the problem: your average houshold circuit tops out at probably 15 amps; Hell, even your air conditioner or electric stove circuit probably doesn't provide more than 30 amps. So the fastest you could charge those new-fangled "battacitors" is four minutes *if* there's nothing else on the circuit; or more realistically, 10-15 minutes *and* all the lights in your house dim while they're charging.
Circuits were never my thing. Maybe I'm missing something here. I'm sure you EE types will correct me...
And I suppose it never occurred to you that perhaps Microsoft sees this new "tool" as a way to deprive Gmail, Yahoo, etc. of this revenue stream...
Mac Powerbook - PowerPC = MacBook
Doesnt' exactly roll off the tongue, but it makes perfect sense to me.
At least when Microsoft steals an idea from Apple, they have the decency to change the name.
Sheesh.
Dude, you've been working for the record company too long. Time to move on, you're seriously burned out. And more than a little bitter.
You might have a point, when it comes to the sort of pre-fab, image-managed, marketing-contrived acts like the boy-bands and pop-tarts; but TFA is by a guy in a band that writes its own material, and obviously is very involved with their albums. The vast majority of acts out there, the 90%+ who just make enough to keep a roof over their heads, are in the business to make music. Considering what they get out of their record deals, it sure ain't to get rich.
Don't dump on all the artists out there who actually have talent, just because you got paid industry scale to help Britney buy another vacation home. Deal with your own issues, and move on.
The biggest difference I see is that in the U.S. of A., telecom is a weird mixture of public utility and for-profit business. Incumbent telcos don't face competitive pressures, since they have government-sanctioned monopolies in their regions. They do, however, have pressure to deliver ever-increasing profits to their shareholders.
It's not that Verizon et. al. can't deliver megabit-or-faster speeds to most of their customers, it's just that they have no incentive to do so without also demanding extortionate prices for it.
Example: Here in New Jersey, regular 256kbps down/ 90kbps up DSL would cost me $40 a month; but Verizon would be more than happy to provide me with 1.5Mbps down / 768kbps up, and a static IP, too, over the very same equipment... for around $200/month.
So you can get a speedy connection. But you gotta pay...
Well, of course patients don't believe their doctors. It's begun to dawn on them that their doctors don't work for them, they work for the HMO.
Now that doctor's offices are just assembly lines to push pills, there's not the same level of trust there once was. For a lot of people, the Web fills the void. It's not too surprising, really.
And if history is any indication, Verizon will *still* limit you to 96kbps upstream.
I'm tellin' ya, these carriers won't be happy until we have gigabit capacity downstream, and just enough upsream to handle mouse clicks, completing the Internet's conversion into interactive television.
Easy for you to say, you don't live in New Jersey, which is owned and operated by the real estate development industry.
Our corrupt legislature has voted time and time again to benefit the hand that feeds them, at the expense of us mere property owners. Doesn't matter which party, either, they're both beyond hope.
Bet Hovnanian, Toll Brothers, and the commercial developers have their checkbooks out already...
Correct. "Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania." Just substitute "terrorism" for "Oceania".
Useful features? Like, say standards compliance?
;{)
I wish them luck in their efforts to get this info. As another Slashdotter posted in the other election thread, it's amazing how no one in the media wants to talk about how the exit polls, which are normally quite accurate, showed Kerry strong in places where he eventually lost. I won't rehash all the Diebold issues, but in an election this close, some modest vote fraud, spread thinly enough, would be more than enough to sway the result.
I do wonder, though where they're gonna find the manpower to process all this data, if they do succeed. The recounts in a few Florida counties took days; this is a few orders of magnatude more work!
You must be new here. ;{)
Sure, it might help them sell the "rental" OS model, but you should think bigger.
The Wintel platform has long been a partnership between Intel and Microsoft, but that's no longer the case. MS has been cozying up to AMD, while Intel has been chafing under Redmond's rule, and looking to get it's products into other markets, such as consumer electronics.
These days, I think Microsoft wants to encourage the commoditization of the hardware platform even further than it is already; first, in order to lower the barrier to entry to Windows in the developing world, and secondly, to strengthen it's negotiating position vs. the hardware builders. So much of Microsoft's pie-in-the-sky future is based on a level of integration that pretty much demands that they, and only they, dictate the hardware platform. Taking the wind out of Intel et. al.'s profits by driving prices through the floor would certainly help that.
Actually, they've been pretty successful at that. One of the problems us Macintosh users run into when dealing with the Great Unwashed Masses is the perception that Macs arent' real computers. Doesn't matter if I can surf the web, do email, even work with MS Office documents; But it's not Windows! To these morons, a PC is, by definition, an Intel box running Windows. Seems odd to those of us on Slashdot, perhaps, but that's the view shared by a good chunk of the computer-using public.
Whoops... that didn't come out right. I meant to say, Microsoft's version was limited to the same resolution and bit depth when it first came out. More recent versions (Win2k? XP?) are a bit more flexible in terms of resolution and bit depth. Sorry 'bout that.
...but, then, what isn't? ;{)
But seriously, folks... the Macintosh has been able to do this since the Macintosh II came out in 1987. Back then color monitors were relatively pricy and low-resolution; many graphic artists would hook up an older B&W tube for tool pallets and text windows, so they could use all those colors pixels for the main document window.
What's more, Apple's version of this feature supports as many monitors as you can connect, and supports spanning the desktop across monitors of different resolution and/or but depth, too. There's a panel that shows you all your monitors' display spaces, and lets you drag them around to indicate their physical arrangement. Microsoft shamelessly ripped off the feature and interface for Windows, but of course, they did so ten years laters, and their solution is limited to matching resolution/bit depth.
Problem is, if the court rules for them, fair use as we know it is dead and buried. The Betamax decision has been the cornerstone of our fair use rights in the electronic age.