7 truly is Vista SP3. And I don't say that in a negative fashion; Vista runs very well on my two desktops and laptop.
However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy.
In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER!
In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).
A) Only upgrade installs
B) The 7 installer detects known incompatible software and asks you to uninstall it, making it very clear that it's going to do so.
Whenever Valve or any other company wants to release DLC on the Xbox 360 or PS3, they have to pay either Microsoft or Sony to certify the content. They charge gamers to make up for the cost of this certification.
Of course, the fact that gamers will pay for downloadable content on consoles is certainly a good reason by itself...
Sony? The company that brought us Memory Sticks, UMDs, Betamaxes, Minidiscs, and hundreds of other propietary formats, using an open standard?
*head explodes*
Seriously, I'm glad that Sony is starting to open up a bit. In addition to the usual Memory Stick slot, Sony's new eBook readers come with Secure Digital slots too. Things like this are making me seriously consider buying a Sony for my first eBook reader.
I think it's really quite sad that Rupert Murdoch thinks this will work, given the number of quality, professional news sources online that are free.
I think Rupert's eying the success of the Wall Street Journal as an online subscription site a little too much. What works for the WSJ won't work for other papers, IMO.
If you combine the 360 addon owners with the regular pool, 14% of those surveyed own an HD-DVD player.
So, if you combine the PS3 owners with the regular Blu-Ray owners, 16% of those surveyed owned a Blu-Ray player.
Here is the logical response you probably have now: "But, every HD-DVD owner (including addon) bought it to watch Blu-Rays, while many PS3 owners probably bought it just to play games."
That's taken care of by the survey too. Out of all, PS3 owners 25% buy all their movies in Blu-Ray and another. 32% buy "most" of their movies in Blu-Ray. So 57% are regular Blu-Ray buyers now, and many PS3 owners are waiting for prices to come down.
HD-DVD owners? Stores gave the players away. They were cheaper than other upscaling players at some point. The addon for the 360 was $20 at my local stores with 5 free movies. Many HD-DVD owners probably bought closeout gear at low prices.
So while the percentages may technically be right, with the fire sale that followed HD-DVDs failure, it's not terribly suprising. And the 7% is it at least 12% for Blu-Ray buyers, since over half of all PS3 owners buy movies.
Maybe Google's looking not to shift the cost to end-users, but to media producers.
Similar to their PPC/sponsored links on search, you can pay to have preferred listings in a designated area near the top of the page. SPAM can take out an ad on their own product, a music company could take one out for their artist, etc.
Of course, micropayments in the form of DRM free TV shows would work pretty well too.
The mind boggling thing, to me, is that Hulu doesn't offer a $1 buy option for each episode. Episode older than the past 5 episodes, or you want to watch ad-free? Click a button, poof, ads are gone, and it's downloading in the background in a DRM free format, automatically adding itself to iTunes when done. Hulu doesn't have a lot in their HD gallery now, but it would be an easy way to get the content providers to offer it on Hulu. A dollar or two, and not only can you watch the episode on the device of your choice, but watch it on Hulu in HD whenever you want. Embed the name in the metadata, and 99% of the users wouldn't know how to remove it. The 1% that do could already torrent it anyways.
There is an insane amount of data currently in HTML, a standard that's been going strong and has just been continually added to over 18 years.
A) Why change from HTML?
B) Why wouldn't we be able to convert to ICML?
HTML is primarily a text format anyways, so unless we gave up text based formats all together, HTML would still be readable- some markup might be lost, but the majority of the information is there.
Deprecation doesn't usually lead to removal of the feature as far as web standards go. Tables in HTML were deprecated because there was a better way- CSS and other attributes intended to be used for page/text alignment, tables were supposed to be for tabular data only. All major browsers still render tables- why remove the rendering when so many pages use it, and it isn't a security issue?
The blink tag is a poor example at best, as it was never a standard to begin with. Which is why specified standards are so important to begin with!
1) That's why some sources aren't trustworthy, and also why the Web Archive project is so important.
2) Different sites have different bias. There are sites that are very pro-MS too.
3) Which is why standard transfer protocols and document specifications are so important. HTML has been readable since 1991.
4) The internet routes around censorship. Ever hear of the Streisand effect?
True, but looking back at verifiable events can give us some real insight.
Try looking at the Slashdot archives on September 11th, 2001. I was in middle school when the attacks happened, and I wasn't a Slashdot reader. Even more than the articles, the comments are very interesting. Panic. First hand accounts. Anger (We're going to bomb them into oblivion, we'll have Osama in a week, etc.)
While you can't trust old information on the internet, it does have a wide variety of verifiable information that is more accessible digitally than it ever has been before.
Amazon has affiliates in New York, which NY passed a law saying that gives said businesses a "relationship" that requires them to tax online.
It's very flimsy legally. Newegg.com did it for a couple months, then basically wrote customers an email saying "NY has no legal ground for this; we're not going to tax you anymore".
Technically, in NY, you are supposed to pay sales tax yourself by reporting it yourself on your tax returns. No one does.
States are getting ridiculously greedy. It's interstate commerce; it would be unconstitutional to interfere and would add a lot of complexity for online sellers.
Common misconception. If you read into it, Stage6 was actually close to making a profit, thanks to Yahoo toolbar downloads with the DivX web player. Ultimately, it was killed by board politics. If you want a good read, read here.
Hulu is owned by Fox/NBC, and they are trying to attract other content providers.
Simply put, the ad revenue on Hulu is much, much less than on TV. Sure, it beats piracy (a little money and control over how long your content is on there) but if people were to cancel cable or watch Hulu on their Xboxes more, both cable/satellite providers and the content providers themselves would be unhappy.
Just another game of cat & mouse: Hulu makes changes, and Boxee updates. The hope is that if you make the workarounds unreliable enough to the point where people are too irritated, most will switch back to TV, with a few using Hulu just online on their computers and a few turning back to piracy.
Hulu is starting to get a pretty good mass now. Hulu is my preferred player (ease of use, intrusiveness of ads, etc.). NBCs is better in some ways (higher resolution) but worse in others (less able to handle connection bumps). CBS' player is decent, and ABC's player is probably the least user friendly of the bunch.
Hulu is the future; content providers who don't offer online streaming will be left behind. It's really a win-win. Consumers get an easy and free option to catch up with their shows if they miss them. The content provider gets to manage the time it's up and gets ad revenue, and likely can use web metrics software to get a better idea of viewership/demographics (NetRatings, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc.) since very few households influence the Nielsen Ratings.
Windows CE, XP, whatever, an ATM shouldn't be running a consumer OS for a variety of reasons (security holes, stability, error rate). Why not use either a very trimmed down Linux distro or roll your own OS? I mean, there is a bit of investment having to make the drivers and all- but surely it can't be too expensive to do (not with what is at stake).
Still, it's a trojan (has to be put on individual ATMs) - and criminals would have to gain physical access to the computer inside the ATM, which would mean breaking the ATM itself or somehow getting the keys (pretty difficult). So it's not the most widespread issue.
Therein lies the problem. Even though it's an extreme burden on society, the idea of keeping people like Madoff out of prison angers a lot of people. Prison is a pretty nasty place. It costs a lot on society per year- thousands- but the idea that we are depriving him brings a lot to his family.
However, Madoff stole an immense amount of money- he should be forced to sell his house and property to help compensate those he defrauded.
For the amount of money he defrauded people of, he should have to spend one day per household that he defrauded doing manual labor (8 hour workday, with a short break for a meal- nothing fancy, of course). Then, he should have to look at the people and families he defrauded and apologize to them. Hopefully, he'd actually be sorry.
Too bad we'll just put him in prison. That's not to say he won't be sorry or deprived there, just that he'll be a further drain on taxpayers.
I bought a cheapie Toshiba in May 2007 for $600 + Tax. Came with Vista Home Premium, an 160GB Hard drive, 15.4" display, 1GB of RAM. It didn't run Aero, but it was the cheapest laptop I could get with decent specs at that time, and it has great Ubuntu compatibility, which I wanted to move the recipient to if possible. I was buying it for a nontechnical friend who needed a web processing/email machine.
Thing is still running great after two years of good usage. However, when I tried to buy it, I was hounded by three employees for five minutes. When I gave them "My AmEx gives me an additional year on the warranty free" spiel, they relented and sold me the laptop- after they spent another 5 minutes trying to sell me Microsoft Office, a laptop backpack, Geek Squad, etc.
In their defense, they eventually relented and sold me the laptop. It helps that it was very much visible in a glass case, and was the Sunday special.
Legally murky, as software with little or no purpose other than circumventing copy protection, software which is marketed for circumventing copy protection, or primarily designed to break protection would be a violation of US Code Section 1201, which would leave the service provider open for secondary infringement. So while the DMCA may not be the "right" way to ask, once the copyright holder has knowledge of a tool as described above, they could be legally liable if they don't remove it.
As far as the legal ramifications of (possibly) abusing the "safe harbor provision", I'm not sure.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this does not constitute legal advice, etc.
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, LaFontaine died in September 2008, so this voiceover can never happen...
The fact that many customers bought the album from legally Universal Australia, which was the source of the leak, means that trying to seek out the cause or find who downloaded the album vs. who bought it from Universal Australia means that any data collection from Last.FM would be useless- no way to determine who paid vs. who didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
7 truly is Vista SP3. And I don't say that in a negative fashion; Vista runs very well on my two desktops and laptop.
However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy.
In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER!
In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).
A) Only upgrade installs
B) The 7 installer detects known incompatible software and asks you to uninstall it, making it very clear that it's going to do so.
This is a non-story.
Whenever Valve or any other company wants to release DLC on the Xbox 360 or PS3, they have to pay either Microsoft or Sony to certify the content. They charge gamers to make up for the cost of this certification.
Of course, the fact that gamers will pay for downloadable content on consoles is certainly a good reason by itself...
Sony? The company that brought us Memory Sticks, UMDs, Betamaxes, Minidiscs, and hundreds of other propietary formats, using an open standard?
*head explodes*
Seriously, I'm glad that Sony is starting to open up a bit. In addition to the usual Memory Stick slot, Sony's new eBook readers come with Secure Digital slots too. Things like this are making me seriously consider buying a Sony for my first eBook reader.
I think it's really quite sad that Rupert Murdoch thinks this will work, given the number of quality, professional news sources online that are free.
I think Rupert's eying the success of the Wall Street Journal as an online subscription site a little too much. What works for the WSJ won't work for other papers, IMO.
If you combine the 360 addon owners with the regular pool, 14% of those surveyed own an HD-DVD player.
So, if you combine the PS3 owners with the regular Blu-Ray owners, 16% of those surveyed owned a Blu-Ray player.
Here is the logical response you probably have now: "But, every HD-DVD owner (including addon) bought it to watch Blu-Rays, while many PS3 owners probably bought it just to play games."
That's taken care of by the survey too. Out of all, PS3 owners 25% buy all their movies in Blu-Ray and another. 32% buy "most" of their movies in Blu-Ray. So 57% are regular Blu-Ray buyers now, and many PS3 owners are waiting for prices to come down.
HD-DVD owners? Stores gave the players away. They were cheaper than other upscaling players at some point. The addon for the 360 was $20 at my local stores with 5 free movies. Many HD-DVD owners probably bought closeout gear at low prices.
So while the percentages may technically be right, with the fire sale that followed HD-DVDs failure, it's not terribly suprising. And the 7% is it at least 12% for Blu-Ray buyers, since over half of all PS3 owners buy movies.
Same thing here in the states. I have noticed that this is very popular with the business textbook publishers, especially with Pearson.
Maybe Google's looking not to shift the cost to end-users, but to media producers.
Similar to their PPC/sponsored links on search, you can pay to have preferred listings in a designated area near the top of the page. SPAM can take out an ad on their own product, a music company could take one out for their artist, etc.
Of course, micropayments in the form of DRM free TV shows would work pretty well too.
The mind boggling thing, to me, is that Hulu doesn't offer a $1 buy option for each episode. Episode older than the past 5 episodes, or you want to watch ad-free? Click a button, poof, ads are gone, and it's downloading in the background in a DRM free format, automatically adding itself to iTunes when done. Hulu doesn't have a lot in their HD gallery now, but it would be an easy way to get the content providers to offer it on Hulu. A dollar or two, and not only can you watch the episode on the device of your choice, but watch it on Hulu in HD whenever you want. Embed the name in the metadata, and 99% of the users wouldn't know how to remove it. The 1% that do could already torrent it anyways.
There is an insane amount of data currently in HTML, a standard that's been going strong and has just been continually added to over 18 years.
A) Why change from HTML?
B) Why wouldn't we be able to convert to ICML?
HTML is primarily a text format anyways, so unless we gave up text based formats all together, HTML would still be readable- some markup might be lost, but the majority of the information is there.
Deprecation doesn't usually lead to removal of the feature as far as web standards go. Tables in HTML were deprecated because there was a better way- CSS and other attributes intended to be used for page/text alignment, tables were supposed to be for tabular data only. All major browsers still render tables- why remove the rendering when so many pages use it, and it isn't a security issue?
The blink tag is a poor example at best, as it was never a standard to begin with. Which is why specified standards are so important to begin with!
1) That's why some sources aren't trustworthy, and also why the Web Archive project is so important.
2) Different sites have different bias. There are sites that are very pro-MS too.
3) Which is why standard transfer protocols and document specifications are so important. HTML has been readable since 1991.
4) The internet routes around censorship. Ever hear of the Streisand effect?
True, but looking back at verifiable events can give us some real insight.
Try looking at the Slashdot archives on September 11th, 2001. I was in middle school when the attacks happened, and I wasn't a Slashdot reader. Even more than the articles, the comments are very interesting. Panic. First hand accounts. Anger (We're going to bomb them into oblivion, we'll have Osama in a week, etc.)
While you can't trust old information on the internet, it does have a wide variety of verifiable information that is more accessible digitally than it ever has been before.
It's ridiculous. I've looked into it online and I haven't found a single example of someone being charged or penalized for not paying use tax.
My guess is because it's so legally flimsy no state would dare take it to court.
Amazon has affiliates in New York, which NY passed a law saying that gives said businesses a "relationship" that requires them to tax online.
It's very flimsy legally. Newegg.com did it for a couple months, then basically wrote customers an email saying "NY has no legal ground for this; we're not going to tax you anymore".
Technically, in NY, you are supposed to pay sales tax yourself by reporting it yourself on your tax returns. No one does.
States are getting ridiculously greedy. It's interstate commerce; it would be unconstitutional to interfere and would add a lot of complexity for online sellers.
WoW uses virtually no bandwidth. From what I've read, if you're in a very busy area the entire time, it's about 10MB per hour (excluding patches).
Common misconception. If you read into it, Stage6 was actually close to making a profit, thanks to Yahoo toolbar downloads with the DivX web player. Ultimately, it was killed by board politics. If you want a good read, read here.
Huh, looks like my "greater than" sign was removed from the title. Thanks, Slashdot.
Hulu is owned by Fox/NBC, and they are trying to attract other content providers.
Simply put, the ad revenue on Hulu is much, much less than on TV. Sure, it beats piracy (a little money and control over how long your content is on there) but if people were to cancel cable or watch Hulu on their Xboxes more, both cable/satellite providers and the content providers themselves would be unhappy.
Just another game of cat & mouse: Hulu makes changes, and Boxee updates. The hope is that if you make the workarounds unreliable enough to the point where people are too irritated, most will switch back to TV, with a few using Hulu just online on their computers and a few turning back to piracy.
Hulu is starting to get a pretty good mass now. Hulu is my preferred player (ease of use, intrusiveness of ads, etc.). NBCs is better in some ways (higher resolution) but worse in others (less able to handle connection bumps). CBS' player is decent, and ABC's player is probably the least user friendly of the bunch.
Hulu is the future; content providers who don't offer online streaming will be left behind. It's really a win-win. Consumers get an easy and free option to catch up with their shows if they miss them. The content provider gets to manage the time it's up and gets ad revenue, and likely can use web metrics software to get a better idea of viewership/demographics (NetRatings, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc.) since very few households influence the Nielsen Ratings.
Windows CE, XP, whatever, an ATM shouldn't be running a consumer OS for a variety of reasons (security holes, stability, error rate). Why not use either a very trimmed down Linux distro or roll your own OS? I mean, there is a bit of investment having to make the drivers and all- but surely it can't be too expensive to do (not with what is at stake).
Still, it's a trojan (has to be put on individual ATMs) - and criminals would have to gain physical access to the computer inside the ATM, which would mean breaking the ATM itself or somehow getting the keys (pretty difficult). So it's not the most widespread issue.
Therein lies the problem. Even though it's an extreme burden on society, the idea of keeping people like Madoff out of prison angers a lot of people. Prison is a pretty nasty place. It costs a lot on society per year- thousands- but the idea that we are depriving him brings a lot to his family.
However, Madoff stole an immense amount of money- he should be forced to sell his house and property to help compensate those he defrauded.
For the amount of money he defrauded people of, he should have to spend one day per household that he defrauded doing manual labor (8 hour workday, with a short break for a meal- nothing fancy, of course). Then, he should have to look at the people and families he defrauded and apologize to them. Hopefully, he'd actually be sorry.
Too bad we'll just put him in prison. That's not to say he won't be sorry or deprived there, just that he'll be a further drain on taxpayers.
I bought a cheapie Toshiba in May 2007 for $600 + Tax. Came with Vista Home Premium, an 160GB Hard drive, 15.4" display, 1GB of RAM. It didn't run Aero, but it was the cheapest laptop I could get with decent specs at that time, and it has great Ubuntu compatibility, which I wanted to move the recipient to if possible. I was buying it for a nontechnical friend who needed a web processing/email machine.
Thing is still running great after two years of good usage. However, when I tried to buy it, I was hounded by three employees for five minutes. When I gave them "My AmEx gives me an additional year on the warranty free" spiel, they relented and sold me the laptop- after they spent another 5 minutes trying to sell me Microsoft Office, a laptop backpack, Geek Squad, etc.
In their defense, they eventually relented and sold me the laptop. It helps that it was very much visible in a glass case, and was the Sunday special.
Legally murky, as software with little or no purpose other than circumventing copy protection, software which is marketed for circumventing copy protection, or primarily designed to break protection would be a violation of US Code Section 1201, which would leave the service provider open for secondary infringement. So while the DMCA may not be the "right" way to ask, once the copyright holder has knowledge of a tool as described above, they could be legally liable if they don't remove it.
As far as the legal ramifications of (possibly) abusing the "safe harbor provision", I'm not sure.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this does not constitute legal advice, etc.
Unfortunately, LaFontaine died in September 2008, so this voiceover can never happen...
The fact that many customers bought the album from legally Universal Australia, which was the source of the leak, means that trying to seek out the cause or find who downloaded the album vs. who bought it from Universal Australia means that any data collection from Last.FM would be useless- no way to determine who paid vs. who didn't.