Just because some people aren't able to deal with distractions and prioritize driving doesn't mean that others can't do it perfectly safely. It's not the act of talking on a cell phone while driving that's dangerous, it's not paying attention to your driving while you do this... If you use the phone responsibly, (foremost by using a hands-free device to free up your hands), putting the phone down and ignoring the conversation when driving demands your attention, then you can't tell if a driver's talking on a phone or not just from their driving. If people let phones or other distractions take their attention away from the driving task for any appreciable amount of time, then they are going to die, or kill someone else. I think it is possible to dedicate some spare cycles to talking on a phone or whatever else while driving, but the driving task must always take precedence over anything else, and cannot be ignored for more than a half-second at a time or so. Once you become skilled at driving, there are certainly some spare fractions of seconds that can be used for other tasks, as long as driving is the highest priority.
I'd say the difference from an operational standpoint is that driving a stick-shift, your right hand is only on the shifter when you want to change gears, which is typically for brief periods in between long periods of hands on the wheel. Also, taking your hand off the wheel to shift gears is part of the driving task, and so it's easier to integrate it with the rest of the actions involved in driving. Talking on a cell phone without a hands-free setup ties up one of your hands for as long as you're on the phone, and it's a completely separate task from driving, and so it has the potential to be more distracting. Personally, I drive a stick and talk on my phone at times without hands-free, and I'm able to prioritize the driving over the phone call, and so I'm not afraid to put my phone down and use my hands to drive when needed, even in the middle of a conversation. All you have to do is realize that the driving task risks your life and the lives of those around you, where the phone task only risks your social life. Clearly, the driving task should take precedence for most people. It does seem that certain individuals are not so skilled at multitasking and establishing priorities, even with their lives at stake. Clearly, this is a form of natural selection, although chances are they will kill innocents as well as themselves... Maybe dealing with distractions should be a part of driver's ed and training, although it seems intuitively obvious that the driving task should always take the highest priority...
It seems strange that people are arguing about getting rid of NAT devices and having unique IPs for every device without bringing up the privacy implications. It seems that having unique addresses for every device is a small step away from being able to track and monitor every device on the net. Without the ability to proxy or perform NAT services, every device would be exposed to the net, and would leave a reliable trail of activity. It seems that this would encourage governments to think that they can control and enforce the web, and deal a pretty strong blow to the level of anonymity granted by the current network topology. I just hope that if this does come to pass, that there will be solutions to mitigate this risk, to help obfuscate individual activity on the net. This hazard to troubleshooting network issues, as described in the summary, might be an important factor in ensuring privacy and a certain degree of anonymity on the web.
You should be happy about this then, since the new DRM-free downloads from the iTunes Store will be compatible with your Sansa player. You now have one more purchasing option to choose from.
That's wrong. Music is not a commodity for several reasons. The first and foremost is that one piece of music is not interchangeable with another. The market for one artist's music is much different than another artist's. The other, and more significant reason is copyright. Copyright grants monopolies on content distribution and ownership, creating scarcity for particular copyrighted works. These factors mean that it's the copyright holder who determines the value of the music, not the size of the audience. If you don't want to negotiate a distribution contract with the copyright holder, you're up shit creek without a paddle.
Too bad there are barely any MP3 players that will play those Walmart Music Store downloads... And they're crappy DRM'd WMA tracks. I think most people would rather save their $0.88 than waste it on that crap... Now if Walmart was selling DRM-free music, Apple might have something to worry about...
The difference is that Apple is working to get all the content in industry standard formats, while Microsoft is trying to drive adoption of their proprietary formats and license them to other market players. One leads to a happy world where any new competitor can join the market and compete on equal footing, while the other leads to one single company's assured dominance over the industry. Apple leverages standard formats with vertical solutions, while Microsoft is in the format licensing business, trying to muscle their proprietary format into a dominant position.
I agree that this service will fail, but only because it's devaluing the music too much for it to be worth it for artists. There is no way you could attract enough advertising revenue to the vast number of independent artists with relatively low audiences. This can only work for top 40 type music, with large target audiences already in place. They will never be able to offer more niche music unless they subsidize it with more popular tracks, which is no way to determine the value of music. We end up with something that's equivalent to FM radio run by Clearchannel, which is completely unappealing when compared with decent streaming MP3 radio stations (which can be captured and stored in MP3 format if desired) and paid downloads in higher quality without ads. The artist and record label should determine the value of the music, not the amount of listeners.
I'm going to have to agree with the anonymous troll on this one. It's not our place to worry about the freedoms of Chinese people (unless you're posting from China). If things get bad enough, they'll have to revolt and toss out their own leaders. We can't intervene each time we disagree with how leaders are running their countries. It's the responsibility of the citizens to keep their leaders in check.
From the summary: "malware... can still hide with user-mode rootkits"
Did that strike anyone else as odd? User mode rootkits... wouldn't that be "userkits", or just trojans/viruses/malware? If it doesn't have root access, I don't think you can call it a rootkit.
The iPhone has WiFi support. It will drive the demand for WiFi installations, to the detriment of the cell carriers' data plans. People will stick to low-bandwidth demands when on the slow EDGE connection, and save their bandwidth-intensive usage for when WiFi is available. This will be the case until faster, cheaper services are available from GSM cell carriers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question It mentions the common usage which the site you linked says is incorrect as a side note, but I'd be willing to bet most people would be quite confused if you used the phrase to describe a logical fallacy...
I agree that content from the iTunes Video Store is crappy quality, but I did find some content in iTunes' podcast directory to show off the picture quality possible. Here's a good example. There's a 720p video podcast, and it looks just as good as the HDTV content I get via Comcast. Wave of the future and stuff...
Fuck the RIAA, except for EMI. We do have to hand it to them for taking the courageous step, breaking rank from the other big labels, and taking a chance on selling standard format music. Now if they can just distance themselves from the suing of little old grandmothers, I might even be motivated to exclude them from my RIAA boycott, provided they have music I'm interested in...
"The RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't..."
You seem to be forgetting SACD and DVD-Audio, both heavily-laden with DRM. The market rejected them in favor of regular Audio CDs, and I would say the presence of DRM was an important factor in this rejection, since geeks knew to stay far away from those formats. DVDs were successful due to the drastic improvement in convenience and picture quality over VHS, despite the DRM. BluRay and HD-DVD won't have it so easy since they're not such a drastic improvement over DVDs as DVDs were to VHS, combined with the rise in popularity of electronic distribution in favor of shipping shiny discs... I guess my point is that DMCA or no, content distributors seem to have forgotten on which side their bread is buttered.
Why would you buy a Sony TV? Other manufacturers make nicer sets for less money. As for the BluRay movies, Sony only sees a small licensing fee for each disc sold, nothing even close to what they make for every PS3 game sold, and certainly nothing that will bring them back in the black. BluRay and HD-DVD discs are still a fairly insignificant market compared to DVDs. If they are counting on TV set and BluRay movie disc sales to float the loss on the PS3 hardware, then they are in for a rough couple of years. They're getting pinched from every direction here. I would not want to holding any of Sony's stock at this time...
The problem is that UMPC is just a poor form factor. It's too large to put in your pocket, but small enough that it gets tossed around in a backpack, and you feel silly carying a purse-sized carrying case for one. It's too small to comfortably write on for most tasks, and obviously too small to incorporate a keyboard. You almost have to use an external keyboard to do any work. The display resolution is too low for serious productivity work, but it's too large to be a portable media player or PDA. I really can't think of any general-use function that these things perform well. The only role I could see for a device with that form factor is a wall-mounted, countertop dock and sometimes portable replacement for a home landline telephone, to use for voice and video conferencing and calling up recipes. It would have to be priced under $300 to be successful in that role. Otherwise, it's so niche that I bet Apple doesn't bother.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term 'exploit'. What happens when your eNanny gets compromised, and starts encouraging your kid to do drugs and whore themselves out? Who's going to monitor the monitoring software?
I meant his decision to lock down the iPhone, not the iPod. For the market the iPod is targetting as a media player, as long as you can load standard media files onto it, not being able to load new 3rd party software is not really an issue. For a smart phone, however, it's just plain wrong.
I used to think that Apple would be doomed without him, but since his decision to lock down the iPod to open development, I have to question that. Obviously, the guy makes incredibly stupid decisions at times. The things he brings are 1) salesmanship, 2) perfectionism in design and usage (empathy for users), and 3) motivator for engineers at Apple. His skills as a salesman are undisputed and rarely matched. As a chief visionary and leader of the design teams, he certainly has beneficial impulses in usability, but seems frightened of participating with other players in the industry, and tends to favor controlling the ENTIRE device, to the detriment of interoperability. He fails to understand the value that openness and loose controls bring to a product.As for his skills as a motivator, there are plenty of horror stories floating around that speak of the (hate to say mercurial, but there it is...) way he can deal with people at times, so I'd say there's certainly possibility for improvement in this regard. This is not to say that his motivation techniques haven't proved effective, but they certainly must have had their toll on the lives of the engineers beneath him...
I think there's definitely room for improvement, though it will be tough to find someone with such a powerful reality distortion field to give keynote presentations...
It's not that the 0.005% that writes their own code is that big of a loss in terms of unit sales, but it's an incredibly critical demographic. They will be the ones who will add great value to the platform, and possibly develop some killer apps. It's also the much larger percentage of people that want to run the tools they need on their phone, without having the OS provider dictating what you can and can't do with your phone. They are really hurting their launch with this move, and you would be foolish not to see why. Successes and failures aren't made in a vacuum...
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Just because some people aren't able to deal with distractions and prioritize driving doesn't mean that others can't do it perfectly safely. It's not the act of talking on a cell phone while driving that's dangerous, it's not paying attention to your driving while you do this... If you use the phone responsibly, (foremost by using a hands-free device to free up your hands), putting the phone down and ignoring the conversation when driving demands your attention, then you can't tell if a driver's talking on a phone or not just from their driving. If people let phones or other distractions take their attention away from the driving task for any appreciable amount of time, then they are going to die, or kill someone else. I think it is possible to dedicate some spare cycles to talking on a phone or whatever else while driving, but the driving task must always take precedence over anything else, and cannot be ignored for more than a half-second at a time or so. Once you become skilled at driving, there are certainly some spare fractions of seconds that can be used for other tasks, as long as driving is the highest priority.
I'd say the difference from an operational standpoint is that driving a stick-shift, your right hand is only on the shifter when you want to change gears, which is typically for brief periods in between long periods of hands on the wheel. Also, taking your hand off the wheel to shift gears is part of the driving task, and so it's easier to integrate it with the rest of the actions involved in driving. Talking on a cell phone without a hands-free setup ties up one of your hands for as long as you're on the phone, and it's a completely separate task from driving, and so it has the potential to be more distracting. Personally, I drive a stick and talk on my phone at times without hands-free, and I'm able to prioritize the driving over the phone call, and so I'm not afraid to put my phone down and use my hands to drive when needed, even in the middle of a conversation. All you have to do is realize that the driving task risks your life and the lives of those around you, where the phone task only risks your social life. Clearly, the driving task should take precedence for most people. It does seem that certain individuals are not so skilled at multitasking and establishing priorities, even with their lives at stake. Clearly, this is a form of natural selection, although chances are they will kill innocents as well as themselves... Maybe dealing with distractions should be a part of driver's ed and training, although it seems intuitively obvious that the driving task should always take the highest priority...
Not anymore, it ain't... Now, Apple will go with NTFS just to spite them...
Damnit, where's the smushed bug key?!?
It seems strange that people are arguing about getting rid of NAT devices and having unique IPs for every device without bringing up the privacy implications. It seems that having unique addresses for every device is a small step away from being able to track and monitor every device on the net. Without the ability to proxy or perform NAT services, every device would be exposed to the net, and would leave a reliable trail of activity. It seems that this would encourage governments to think that they can control and enforce the web, and deal a pretty strong blow to the level of anonymity granted by the current network topology. I just hope that if this does come to pass, that there will be solutions to mitigate this risk, to help obfuscate individual activity on the net. This hazard to troubleshooting network issues, as described in the summary, might be an important factor in ensuring privacy and a certain degree of anonymity on the web.
You should be happy about this then, since the new DRM-free downloads from the iTunes Store will be compatible with your Sansa player. You now have one more purchasing option to choose from.
That's wrong. Music is not a commodity for several reasons. The first and foremost is that one piece of music is not interchangeable with another. The market for one artist's music is much different than another artist's. The other, and more significant reason is copyright. Copyright grants monopolies on content distribution and ownership, creating scarcity for particular copyrighted works. These factors mean that it's the copyright holder who determines the value of the music, not the size of the audience. If you don't want to negotiate a distribution contract with the copyright holder, you're up shit creek without a paddle.
Too bad there are barely any MP3 players that will play those Walmart Music Store downloads... And they're crappy DRM'd WMA tracks. I think most people would rather save their $0.88 than waste it on that crap... Now if Walmart was selling DRM-free music, Apple might have something to worry about...
The difference is that Apple is working to get all the content in industry standard formats, while Microsoft is trying to drive adoption of their proprietary formats and license them to other market players. One leads to a happy world where any new competitor can join the market and compete on equal footing, while the other leads to one single company's assured dominance over the industry. Apple leverages standard formats with vertical solutions, while Microsoft is in the format licensing business, trying to muscle their proprietary format into a dominant position.
I agree that this service will fail, but only because it's devaluing the music too much for it to be worth it for artists. There is no way you could attract enough advertising revenue to the vast number of independent artists with relatively low audiences. This can only work for top 40 type music, with large target audiences already in place. They will never be able to offer more niche music unless they subsidize it with more popular tracks, which is no way to determine the value of music. We end up with something that's equivalent to FM radio run by Clearchannel, which is completely unappealing when compared with decent streaming MP3 radio stations (which can be captured and stored in MP3 format if desired) and paid downloads in higher quality without ads. The artist and record label should determine the value of the music, not the amount of listeners.
I'm going to have to agree with the anonymous troll on this one. It's not our place to worry about the freedoms of Chinese people (unless you're posting from China). If things get bad enough, they'll have to revolt and toss out their own leaders. We can't intervene each time we disagree with how leaders are running their countries. It's the responsibility of the citizens to keep their leaders in check.
From the summary:
"malware... can still hide with user-mode rootkits"
Did that strike anyone else as odd? User mode rootkits... wouldn't that be "userkits", or just trojans/viruses/malware? If it doesn't have root access, I don't think you can call it a rootkit.
The iPhone has WiFi support. It will drive the demand for WiFi installations, to the detriment of the cell carriers' data plans. People will stick to low-bandwidth demands when on the slow EDGE connection, and save their bandwidth-intensive usage for when WiFi is available. This will be the case until faster, cheaper services are available from GSM cell carriers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
It mentions the common usage which the site you linked says is incorrect as a side note, but I'd be willing to bet most people would be quite confused if you used the phrase to describe a logical fallacy...
I agree that content from the iTunes Video Store is crappy quality, but I did find some content in iTunes' podcast directory to show off the picture quality possible. Here's a good example. There's a 720p video podcast, and it looks just as good as the HDTV content I get via Comcast. Wave of the future and stuff...
Many bands sell live recordings of their concerts in FLAC format, which is lossless:
http://galactic.livedownloads.com/
Fuck the RIAA, except for EMI. We do have to hand it to them for taking the courageous step, breaking rank from the other big labels, and taking a chance on selling standard format music. Now if they can just distance themselves from the suing of little old grandmothers, I might even be motivated to exclude them from my RIAA boycott, provided they have music I'm interested in...
"The RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't..."
You seem to be forgetting SACD and DVD-Audio, both heavily-laden with DRM. The market rejected them in favor of regular Audio CDs, and I would say the presence of DRM was an important factor in this rejection, since geeks knew to stay far away from those formats. DVDs were successful due to the drastic improvement in convenience and picture quality over VHS, despite the DRM. BluRay and HD-DVD won't have it so easy since they're not such a drastic improvement over DVDs as DVDs were to VHS, combined with the rise in popularity of electronic distribution in favor of shipping shiny discs... I guess my point is that DMCA or no, content distributors seem to have forgotten on which side their bread is buttered.
Why would you buy a Sony TV? Other manufacturers make nicer sets for less money. As for the BluRay movies, Sony only sees a small licensing fee for each disc sold, nothing even close to what they make for every PS3 game sold, and certainly nothing that will bring them back in the black. BluRay and HD-DVD discs are still a fairly insignificant market compared to DVDs. If they are counting on TV set and BluRay movie disc sales to float the loss on the PS3 hardware, then they are in for a rough couple of years. They're getting pinched from every direction here. I would not want to holding any of Sony's stock at this time...
The problem is that UMPC is just a poor form factor. It's too large to put in your pocket, but small enough that it gets tossed around in a backpack, and you feel silly carying a purse-sized carrying case for one. It's too small to comfortably write on for most tasks, and obviously too small to incorporate a keyboard. You almost have to use an external keyboard to do any work. The display resolution is too low for serious productivity work, but it's too large to be a portable media player or PDA. I really can't think of any general-use function that these things perform well. The only role I could see for a device with that form factor is a wall-mounted, countertop dock and sometimes portable replacement for a home landline telephone, to use for voice and video conferencing and calling up recipes. It would have to be priced under $300 to be successful in that role. Otherwise, it's so niche that I bet Apple doesn't bother.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term 'exploit'. What happens when your eNanny gets compromised, and starts encouraging your kid to do drugs and whore themselves out? Who's going to monitor the monitoring software?
I meant his decision to lock down the iPhone, not the iPod. For the market the iPod is targetting as a media player, as long as you can load standard media files onto it, not being able to load new 3rd party software is not really an issue. For a smart phone, however, it's just plain wrong.
I used to think that Apple would be doomed without him, but since his decision to lock down the iPod to open development, I have to question that. Obviously, the guy makes incredibly stupid decisions at times. The things he brings are 1) salesmanship, 2) perfectionism in design and usage (empathy for users), and 3) motivator for engineers at Apple. His skills as a salesman are undisputed and rarely matched. As a chief visionary and leader of the design teams, he certainly has beneficial impulses in usability, but seems frightened of participating with other players in the industry, and tends to favor controlling the ENTIRE device, to the detriment of interoperability. He fails to understand the value that openness and loose controls bring to a product.As for his skills as a motivator, there are plenty of horror stories floating around that speak of the (hate to say mercurial, but there it is...) way he can deal with people at times, so I'd say there's certainly possibility for improvement in this regard. This is not to say that his motivation techniques haven't proved effective, but they certainly must have had their toll on the lives of the engineers beneath him...
I think there's definitely room for improvement, though it will be tough to find someone with such a powerful reality distortion field to give keynote presentations...
Fuck that! I want my wireless sniffers and emulators...
It's not that the 0.005% that writes their own code is that big of a loss in terms of unit sales, but it's an incredibly critical demographic. They will be the ones who will add great value to the platform, and possibly develop some killer apps. It's also the much larger percentage of people that want to run the tools they need on their phone, without having the OS provider dictating what you can and can't do with your phone. They are really hurting their launch with this move, and you would be foolish not to see why. Successes and failures aren't made in a vacuum...