I have to say that I disagree with the statement that 'the gain is marginal'. Once you get used to watching HD stuff you don't want to go back.
I have to say I wholeheartedly agree with this. I have *always* been annoyed by compression artifacts on DVDs, especially in dark areas of the picture. It has seemed strange to me that such artifacting has been considered OK by the producers of DVD video--I thought we had moved to a digital format that should be better than previous formats in all ways, rather than having its own detectable foibles due to storage space/compression limitations. So HD-DVD has made me quite happy beacuse I no longer see such artifacting (which had become even more noticeable on a 42" HD set), in addition to the higher resolution and increased color gamut. I've already made the decision that I won't buy any more standard DVDs if I can help it, with an exception made for some animated series where I'm less concerned with gains in resolution (Simpsons, Futurama, etc.).
Seriously, what expensive startup costs? If you want to record yourself there's the initial outlay in a powerful computer set up and perhaps Pro Tools, and some good microphones for drums and vocals. So--maybe $10,000? $20,000? And once you've got that equipment, you can use it as much as you want, with no hourly studio time.
And if you don't have the knowhow or money to do the recording yourself, there are all kinds of small studios with perfectly decent engineers that charge less than $1,000 for a day. It's perfectly feasible to record an album for $5,000-$10,000 this way, or much less if you have connections or friends in the small-time recording industry.
After that, electronic distribution is essentially free, via MySpace, or by setting yourself up on iTunes, eMusic, etc. If you also need CDs, a company like Kunaki can produce them for you on the fly for less than $2 each, *and* handle the ordering back end.
Compared to a lot of other things you could do for a living, music is *not* an expensive industry to be a part of, if you don't buy into the rock 'n' roll life style, often lived by artists who are *fearsomely* in hock to their major label for some ungodly advance money that it will take royalties years to pay off, if ever.
I have a feeling that part of the issue (at least) with ringtone pricing was the record labels wanting a cut--why else would the ringtone feature not be enabled for EVERY track in the iTunes store, rather than just 500K of them?
Besides, if you want free ringtones from any audio source, you can already install them, without jailbreaking your iPhone:
Let the aftermarket take care of you with external battery packs like this (I don't know that it works with the iPhone's connector, but I'm sure it'll be a short wait for a version that does):
I'm only replying because I think your sig needs improvement. "You're so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep" is almost funny, but it leaves me wondering what feet have to do with situation. A funnier version would be "You're so boring that when I see you my *eyes* go to sleep."
This is an aside to your point, and not really directed at you, but I am getting really tired of reading about these sites "removing copyrighted material", as it just goes to show that most of the people commenting on this actually aren't that aware of the nuances of copyright law. Copyrighting your creative work is not something you have to actively do, like registering a trademark. It is something that happens instantly and automatically as soon as you have created the work. In other words, *all* of the videos uploaded to YouTube/Google are copyrighted. The issue is that some material has been uploaded by someone who is not the copyright owner, not merely that the work is copyrighted. And this is something that could be an issue whether the owner is a major media conglomorate or an individual like the Star Wars Kid.
For example, consider the PowerBook 17" waste of keyboard space - why not tack on a numeric keypad and shift the speakers to left and right of the trackpad? Because it disturbs some sense of symmetry? I dunno....
While I wouldn't mind a numeric keypad on my PowerBook either, I think you just demonstrated why you *aren't* a design genius, by putting the speakers directly under the user's wrists where they will be muffled, and where the grill is likely to accumulate dirt. I've used several laptops that placed the speakers under the wrists or on the front (like my Thinkpad), where they are often muffled by body parts, and it is highly irritating. Since the wider PowerBook has real estate on either side of the keyboard, it makes perfect sense to put the speakers there.
Another point against your proposed addition of a numeric keypad--you would have to shift the keyboard and potentially the track pad off center, forcing the user to put their hands in a very unnatural position when typing on the alphanumeric keyboard.
Emperical evidence suggests otherwise. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you probably believe that idiotic "round earth theory" as well.
Actually, no, not if you look at *all* of the empirical evidence, such as the motion of the planets in the sky. As a matter of fact, it is evidence such as this (thank you, Tycho) that led us down the road of understanding that the Earth does, in fact, revolve around the sun. Incorporating *all* available evidence in our explanation of how the universe works is what science is all about.
The scientific method offers a process, a mechanism by which we may peacefully offer competing for confirmation or refutation by others...
Actually a critical point about the scientific method that most people miss is: There is *no* confirmation--there is only refutation and attempts to refute. If a theory has gone long enough without any attempts to refute it being successful, then it is accepted as probably true, but it can never be confirmed. And part of this is another important point--a theory is *only* scientific if you can state a way in which it can be refuted, such as which experimental results or natural evidence would show that it is *not* true. Which is where the ID crowd, for instance, runs into trouble.
Not a very forward thinking professor, then. I am a programmer by trade, and my Oracle cubicle is about to be given away because I'm never there. With my (company) laptop, I can do my job anywhere--at home in my PJs, in the local coffee shop, or while visiting relatives in Alaska. How many jobs give you this level of freedom for a decent wage and benefits?
To be fair, the first time I was a CS major in the early 90s, I didn't really see where the Internet wave was going to take us, myself. Sure, I'd been online since 1983, but somehow it never seemed real to me that I would truly be able to telecommute like this. When I went back to school in the late 90s, I had missed the crest of the wave, when many were able to get rich for doing almost nothing, but I now had the attainable goal in mind of finding a non-geographically-fixed job.
I recently re-watched James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, made in 1985, and found it a little eerie how well he described my current working conditions in the first episode.
That is because women like Lara Croft are fiction, but women like the whores in GTA are fact. You would be suprised at how well children can tell the difference between real and make believe.
Do you not see how you just invalidated your own point? Hint--GTA is make believe.
I believe the hype is *still* that it can replace books. We just haven't seen the advances necessary in the technology yet. Imagine if you had, say, a 200-page book, which looked like any other book except that its pages were blank. Imagine that you had a touch-sensitive interface on the inside front cover that let you scroll through thousands of volumes on the flash memory resident in the book's spine. And imagine that selecting one of those volumes filled the book with text and graphics that looked to the naked eye like a regular printed page. All of the storage capability of modern computers, with the highly refined, time-tested user interface of the book. Now imagine that those pages are pressure sensitive, so that you can also write on them.
Holy crap.
I am amazed that, here at the dawn of entirely new way of tying in computers to our normal lives, all people can do is carp about the first baby steps. It's as if the telegraph was just rolled out to your town and all you could do was point out that you yourself don't actually get to talk on the wire, or that it's slower than talking to someone next to you, or that it's far more expensive per word than a handwritten letter. Have some imagination! There's nothing about what I just described above that would take more than a few relatively minor advances in technology to accomplish (degree rather than kind). All of the pieces are coming into place--just give it 10-20 years.
The first version of Civilization was released 14 years ago. With the original copyright terms, it would now be entering public domain.
What, the original copyright terms from 1790? Copyrights have lasted much, much longer for quite a long time, and the idea in the last couple of centuries has been to reward the author for the work for their entire *lifetime*, and to reward their estate for a certain number years thereafter.
A better question to ask would be not whether Mr. Meier would want to *give up* the copyright and allow the work to enter the public domain, but whether he would want to *maintain* the copyright and simply change the licensing, e.g., to license the original game under the GPL or BSD license.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys must all play exclusively on Easy mode. There are actually five buttons.
I have to say I wholeheartedly agree with this. I have *always* been annoyed by compression artifacts on DVDs, especially in dark areas of the picture. It has seemed strange to me that such artifacting has been considered OK by the producers of DVD video--I thought we had moved to a digital format that should be better than previous formats in all ways, rather than having its own detectable foibles due to storage space/compression limitations. So HD-DVD has made me quite happy beacuse I no longer see such artifacting (which had become even more noticeable on a 42" HD set), in addition to the higher resolution and increased color gamut. I've already made the decision that I won't buy any more standard DVDs if I can help it, with an exception made for some animated series where I'm less concerned with gains in resolution (Simpsons, Futurama, etc.).
And if you don't have the knowhow or money to do the recording yourself, there are all kinds of small studios with perfectly decent engineers that charge less than $1,000 for a day. It's perfectly feasible to record an album for $5,000-$10,000 this way, or much less if you have connections or friends in the small-time recording industry.
After that, electronic distribution is essentially free, via MySpace, or by setting yourself up on iTunes, eMusic, etc. If you also need CDs, a company like Kunaki can produce them for you on the fly for less than $2 each, *and* handle the ordering back end.
Compared to a lot of other things you could do for a living, music is *not* an expensive industry to be a part of, if you don't buy into the rock 'n' roll life style, often lived by artists who are *fearsomely* in hock to their major label for some ungodly advance money that it will take royalties years to pay off, if ever.
http://www.cocoadex.com/Ringtones_1.1.dmg
Besides, if you want free ringtones from any audio source, you can already install them, without jailbreaking your iPhone:
http://www.cocoadex.com/Ringtones_1.1.dmg
Or, if they bought the iPhone within the last 14 days (like me), they can take their receipt back to the store and get a refund for the difference.
Or you could just, you know, plug a microphone into the dock connector...
http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F8E464-Backup-Battery -Pack/dp/B00009KAPW
Sure, it's inelegant, but we are talking about emergency power here, not day-to-day use.
Modern Extinctions
This is certainly not a complete list, but there are plenty of species listed as going extinct after 1956.
I'm only replying because I think your sig needs improvement. "You're so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep" is almost funny, but it leaves me wondering what feet have to do with situation. A funnier version would be "You're so boring that when I see you my *eyes* go to sleep."
Minor quibble, because otherwise I agree--this was an *American* student. He's of Iranian descent, but that doesn't make him foreign.
Anyone who spells "lose" as "loose" should have 50 karma points taken away.
This is an aside to your point, and not really directed at you, but I am getting really tired of reading about these sites "removing copyrighted material", as it just goes to show that most of the people commenting on this actually aren't that aware of the nuances of copyright law. Copyrighting your creative work is not something you have to actively do, like registering a trademark. It is something that happens instantly and automatically as soon as you have created the work. In other words, *all* of the videos uploaded to YouTube/Google are copyrighted. The issue is that some material has been uploaded by someone who is not the copyright owner, not merely that the work is copyrighted. And this is something that could be an issue whether the owner is a major media conglomorate or an individual like the Star Wars Kid.
While I wouldn't mind a numeric keypad on my PowerBook either, I think you just demonstrated why you *aren't* a design genius, by putting the speakers directly under the user's wrists where they will be muffled, and where the grill is likely to accumulate dirt. I've used several laptops that placed the speakers under the wrists or on the front (like my Thinkpad), where they are often muffled by body parts, and it is highly irritating. Since the wider PowerBook has real estate on either side of the keyboard, it makes perfect sense to put the speakers there. Another point against your proposed addition of a numeric keypad--you would have to shift the keyboard and potentially the track pad off center, forcing the user to put their hands in a very unnatural position when typing on the alphanumeric keyboard.
Actually, no, not if you look at *all* of the empirical evidence, such as the motion of the planets in the sky. As a matter of fact, it is evidence such as this (thank you, Tycho) that led us down the road of understanding that the Earth does, in fact, revolve around the sun. Incorporating *all* available evidence in our explanation of how the universe works is what science is all about.
Actually a critical point about the scientific method that most people miss is: There is *no* confirmation--there is only refutation and attempts to refute. If a theory has gone long enough without any attempts to refute it being successful, then it is accepted as probably true, but it can never be confirmed. And part of this is another important point--a theory is *only* scientific if you can state a way in which it can be refuted, such as which experimental results or natural evidence would show that it is *not* true. Which is where the ID crowd, for instance, runs into trouble.
To be fair, the first time I was a CS major in the early 90s, I didn't really see where the Internet wave was going to take us, myself. Sure, I'd been online since 1983, but somehow it never seemed real to me that I would truly be able to telecommute like this. When I went back to school in the late 90s, I had missed the crest of the wave, when many were able to get rich for doing almost nothing, but I now had the attainable goal in mind of finding a non-geographically-fixed job.
I recently re-watched James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, made in 1985, and found it a little eerie how well he described my current working conditions in the first episode.
Do you not see how you just invalidated your own point? Hint--GTA is make believe.
I believe the hype is *still* that it can replace books. We just haven't seen the advances necessary in the technology yet. Imagine if you had, say, a 200-page book, which looked like any other book except that its pages were blank. Imagine that you had a touch-sensitive interface on the inside front cover that let you scroll through thousands of volumes on the flash memory resident in the book's spine. And imagine that selecting one of those volumes filled the book with text and graphics that looked to the naked eye like a regular printed page. All of the storage capability of modern computers, with the highly refined, time-tested user interface of the book. Now imagine that those pages are pressure sensitive, so that you can also write on them.
Holy crap.
I am amazed that, here at the dawn of entirely new way of tying in computers to our normal lives, all people can do is carp about the first baby steps. It's as if the telegraph was just rolled out to your town and all you could do was point out that you yourself don't actually get to talk on the wire, or that it's slower than talking to someone next to you, or that it's far more expensive per word than a handwritten letter. Have some imagination! There's nothing about what I just described above that would take more than a few relatively minor advances in technology to accomplish (degree rather than kind). All of the pieces are coming into place--just give it 10-20 years.
What, the original copyright terms from 1790? Copyrights have lasted much, much longer for quite a long time, and the idea in the last couple of centuries has been to reward the author for the work for their entire *lifetime*, and to reward their estate for a certain number years thereafter.
A better question to ask would be not whether Mr. Meier would want to *give up* the copyright and allow the work to enter the public domain, but whether he would want to *maintain* the copyright and simply change the licensing, e.g., to license the original game under the GPL or BSD license.