But there are people on Wikipedia who seem to treat the whole project as if bits were a limited resource desperately in need of preservation. While bits themselves are not limited, storage and bandwidth are. While they get cheaper every day, an organization like Wikipedia does run the risk of hitting their limits. Especially if they're publishing their information to hard media (books and DVD) and distributing it without the internet. I guess what I'm trying to say is that they have a limited budget and very ambitious goals. I would think that if more people donate money to them, they'll have more resources for publishing and distributing information and be less likely to have to consider whether that information is "notable" or not.
Geez, what is this, digg?
Intresting case BUT stop pretending that the RIAA is stupid enough to sue USENET, it is sueing a company that sells access to usenet. People here are quick to blame politicians for not knowing enough, but count the posts that don't even seem to know the difference between these two. This is not digg. This is slashdot. It's not that we don't know the difference between usenet and usenet.com. It's just that we didn't RTFA. Hell, most of us didn't even RTFS.
Other than my subscription to eMusic, I pretty much only buy music direct-from-the-artist. This usually includes getting a record (on vinyl) at shows, which hopefully includes mp3 downloads that labels like Merge and Sub Pop include with their LPs. I also bought the Radiohead record (at $5) online.
I see 2 benefits to this approach:
1. (I like to think) artists get more from the sale than they would if I bought it from a shop. 2. The labels that make up the RIAA get less (if any) money from the sale. (I usually only go to shows of bands on independent labels - "safe" on the RIAA Radar).
I liked Amped 3, but otherwise there weren't very many good launch titles. And playing Halo 2 in emulation mode frustrated me a little. The resolution up conversion was a plus, but wouldn't have sold me on a console. If the 360 didn't have backward compatibility, I wouldn't have even considered buying one.
I'm not suggesting that MS did a better job of their launch. Being first to launch was probably critical for them to gain market share, but they've spent billions fixing a design flaw that could have been caught had they not rushed it. And almost a year after the Wii launch, I can count the games I've purchased on one hand. Mine doesn't get played a whole lot unless we have guests over and want to play party games. I just don't know that Sony has crossed the threshold where the titles for the PS3 are good enough or big enough for the console to stand on its own.
Making the Blu-Ray drive a core part of the system has been a gamble. Sony would like it to push adoption of their format, and that could earn them a lot of money. But the added cost has put the console out of reach of a lot of the people who did buy the PS2. Now the price must come down. The console must be affordable for gamers who aren't home theater enthusiasts. Without gamers, the developers will not want to invest in making good games for the platform. But first and foremost, gamers want games. Which is why Sony should be cutting costs in anything but the console's ability to play games.
No. The price is high. The games are average. But eliminating the ability to play the good games they do have (for the PS2) isn't going to help them. Sony would be better off eliminating features that aren't core to playing video games, which is what most people who buy game consoles want to do with them.
Sony must be having a hard time reducing the cost of the console, which their potential customers have pretty much demanded they do. A lot of the PS3 exclusive games are getting a lukewarm reception, many of the multi-platform titles get released late on the PS3, and Blu-Ray is not popular enough for the average consumer to purchase it as a Blu-Ray player.
They must be in a pretty tough spot if reducing the number of games that can be played on their video game console looks like a good way to sell more consoles.
Repeat after me: Good Games Sell Consoles Good Games Sell Consoles Good Games Sell Consoles
No, but they will ban you from Xbox Live. Don't ask me how. I would guess that their goal with that is to keep people from crashing the game servers. For example, someone invited me to a custom game on a modded map that allowed up to 50 or 100 players in the game instead of the usual 16.
I wouldn't draw a parallel to modding a phone to work on a network other than AT&T's. Apple doesn't support AT&T's network, and if it caused problems for anyone's network, it would likely be the one that the modded phone is being used on.
Do Smart or Dynamic playlists need to be supported by portable players? I use Smart Playlists in iTunes to create rules based on file metadata and data in the iTunes database. Neither of these things are editable either of my iPods.
If you're just talking about synchronization, then that is an issue for iTunes (or whatever program you use to sync your audio player). When you sync your player, the Smart Playlist becomes a Dumb Playlist and it is synchronized just like any other playlist.
As an example, I have a script to synchronize my iTunes playlists with Windows Media Player so that I can play them on my Xbox in my living room. Does Windows Media Player support iTunes Smart Playlists? No. It gets a point-in-time snapshot of the Smart Playlist whenever I synchronize. Your portable player does the same thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Do the contents of your Smart Playlist change on your iPod without synchronizing? If not, then the iPod doesn't "support" Smart Playlists. It's an issue for the sync software.
If you don't mind getting a new phone number, you could use a free service like GrandCentral. It gives you a single phone number that routes calls to your phones based on the caller and your rules, and lets you access all of your voicemail visually from the web. The website uses a flash plugin, but there's a mobile version. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't confirm if it works on mobile Safari.
I'm sure it requires more effort than the built in solution, but it doesn't care who your phone company is.
Not so. The Xbox 360 acts as a standard UPnP streaming media consumer. Any software that can stream music or videos to a UPnP media client can feed the 360. In Windows, that would be WMP11 or Windows Media Connect. I use TVersity to stream music and video to my 360. It is Windows only, but has more features than WMP/WMC (real time transcoding, support for many media codecs, streaming internet video), and plays nice with other things as well (PSP, PS3, Wii).
I don't work for them either. I just like their server.
But only 44% of all statistics are used "during discussions in online forums". 26% are used in advertising. 17% are used in the news / investigative journalism, 2% are used in executive reports and powerpoint presentations, 9% are used by political action committees and the rest are split 50/50 between academics and, well, everyone else.
I was under the impression that the point of modding a post is to show that you appreciated the content of the post and to make it more visible to others who may not read every post in the discussion (or TFA), thus contributing to the community. Does it really matter if you can increase someone's karma?
First of all, I do understand your point. And while I generally avoid the extra time it takes to type words into a cellphone over just *speaking them*, there are situations where talking is more difficult.
Sporting events
clubs / bars
libraries
anywhere where loud crowd noise makes it difficult to hear/speak
Additionally, sending a picture/video can sometimes communicate your message more efficiently than speaking as well. Obviously the phone supports SMS messaging (AT&T is using the number of SMS messages / month to differentiate some of their plans), but it seems to me that "texting" is a more common activity than sending email. I'm a bit surprised to hear that the phone doesn't support common messaging formats.
I'm a little confused by the article. Is the problem that printers report being "low on ink" or "out of ink" too early?
TÜV Rheinland measured cartridge weights before and after use, stopping use when printers reported that they were out of ink.
That's the first problem. Printers routinely report that they are low on ink even when they aren't, and in some cases there are still hundreds of pages worth of ink left. My Canon PIXMA ip5000 reports when ink is low, and when it is empty. (I'm not sure if all modern printers do) I buy a refill when it's low and swap the cartridge when it's empty. The ink cartridges I use are clear, and they're usually empty when I swap them.
Find me real examples of bands that have made it strictly off the web with no label backing. I'm not sure what your criteria for "made it" is, but I believe the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is the best example of an unknown band who has built an audience on the web. Not anything comparable to the Beatles fanbase, but they're only on their second record. They do, OTOH, sell their music on iTunes and in most brick and mortar stores. They've also been reviewed on numerous websites and magazines, including Rolling Stone. It's really pretty impressive.
Be glad that was your only issue. I logged on after rebooting. Then my Vista Ultimate OS started churning away, running the CPU at 100% for the next 20 minutes. The task manager attributed most of it to Idle Processes. The only was to stop it was to hard reboot the machine. Upon reboot, the machine started operating normally again. Needless to say, I disabled automatic updates this morning.
If you're comparing a physical stakeout to a massive historical database of all telephone communications, then in a sense, they do wear blinders. The fact that technology enables them to "monitor activity" on a wider scale doesn't necessarily give them the right to.
If you were comparing the phone database to the police setting up a networked, video surveillance system that covered every part of your city, recognized faces, and wrote the information about who was where when to a database which was analyzed for "suspicious behavior", then you'd be granting them a similar "field of view" to what the call records give them. Would that be OK, as long as they promised to only watch the video of criminals^H^H^H^H^H^H terrorists or their associates?
Given the president's beliefs on "pre-emptive" defense and the limitations on presidential power, I wouldn't recommend you threaten harm or wish harm on the president... At least not on your Verizon cell phone.
Go ahead. Rant some more about the political bias on Slashdot. You may be right. Then again, the Bush administration may just be doing (or have done) worse things than giving an RIAA employee a job at a convention. Looking at the headlines today, that would include seeking expansion of spy powers, and deleting a lot of emails from Karl Rove.
If the iTunes Store is the only way to get content for my AppleTV, then I better stop HandBrake right now since it's busy ripping one of my DVD in H.264/AAC.
If you think iTunes = iTunes Store, you're sadly mistaken. The fact that the content has to be IN iTunes as opposed to COME FROM the iTunes Store is very different. Ok. Now consider the author and context of the article. Peter Svensson wrote the comparison for the Associated Press. The link is to "The Ledger" a newspaper out of Lakeland, Florida. The target audience for this review is not every geek wanting to stream their 3 Tera byte collection of video, ripped from DVDs and HD-DVDs or downloaded using BitTorrent.
This article is written for the average consumer. The one whom Apple is telling If it's on iTunes, it's on your widescreen TV".("on iTunes" != "IN iTunes") What they aren't telling said consumer is that the quality of the video is poor. That matters to people who own widescreen TVs. Whether the poor quality is a result of compression, poor encoding, DRM, or anything else doesn't matter. The Apple TV won't meet their expectations.
Furthermore, with wireless USB, the whole thing is up in the air: wireless data with wired power may well be a better way to go overall, and Powered USB may simply not be aimed at the consumer at all. I have to disagree with you on the wireless USB point.
What does it give you that Bluetooth or Wi-fi doesn't? There have been a number of devices with some form of wireless data transfer (pdas, cell phones, etc) for years now, but they've not really taken off. Bluetooth has been most effective when used in wireless headsets, and maybe wireless keyboards and mice. For anything else (such as wireless synchronization), running the radio just drains the already short battery life of the device, meaning you're probably going to have to carry around a power adapter to keep the battery charged. Many of the power adapters are the brick kind, meaning they take up more space than a USB cable would. And if you have more than one device, you might need a charger for each.
Ultimately, you're trading one problem (having to carry a cable) for many (having to carry one or more power supplies, shorter battery life, encryption, wireless interference). How is that a good idea?
Maybe it's just me. I don't have a TV that supports HDMI. I don't care to replace all my DVDs with BluRay or HD-DVDs, or all my component video / digital audio cables with HDMI ones. So, "Elite"?.... meh.
What I keep asking myself is "Why now?" I mean these features had been announced for the PS3 for over a year now at least. Did it just take MS this long to copy Sony? Or was it a conscious decision to wait until Sony launched the PS3? I mean the PS3 has been sitting on store shelves for months with more integrated features than the "Elite" 360, and it has only recently received positive attention with the announcement of "Home" and their Second Life clone. So after the public has given a lukewarm reaction to HDMI and a larger hard drive on their competitor's console, they decide to jump in with a "Me Too"? At a higher (w/ HD-DVD and wireless) overall price?
On the other hand, usability of a phone and usability of a PDA or music player may not be the same thing. For example, I like being able to feel the keys on my phone's keypad so I can press and hold the 2 button and execute the speed dial to call home without having to navigate menus or look at the screen to be sure I'm hitting the right key. This is the main reason I've never purchased a touchscreen PDA/phone.
Similarly, I need a limited number of functions on my music/media player. Play/Pause, Stop, Next, Previous, Volume Controls, and a way to select the media to play. These functions don't intuitively map to the standard buttons on a phone. And I find it easier to call someone and talk to them than to tap on a miniature keyboard, so a QWERTY thumb keyboard is useless to me.
This is an attempt at convergence where appropriate (caller ID through the earphones), not just another FrankenGadget. For the people who want a phone to make phone calls and a media player to play music, but don't want to carry 2 devices, this could be useful.
My only real complaint is that I don't see it as a very useful music player because it requires Yet Another Music Manager and/or purchases from Yet Another Music Store. I already have to manage 2 music libraries (iTunes to play on my iPod and WMP to play on my Xbox). I'm not interested in managing a 3rd. What I really need is one Music Library with a plugin architecture that allows me to sync my devices, stream to various devices on my local network, auto import from the file system and tag my files.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than my subscription to eMusic, I pretty much only buy music direct-from-the-artist. This usually includes getting a record (on vinyl) at shows, which hopefully includes mp3 downloads that labels like Merge and Sub Pop include with their LPs. I also bought the Radiohead record (at $5) online.
I see 2 benefits to this approach:
1. (I like to think) artists get more from the sale than they would if I bought it from a shop.
2. The labels that make up the RIAA get less (if any) money from the sale. (I usually only go to shows of bands on independent labels - "safe" on the RIAA Radar).
I liked Amped 3, but otherwise there weren't very many good launch titles. And playing Halo 2 in emulation mode frustrated me a little. The resolution up conversion was a plus, but wouldn't have sold me on a console. If the 360 didn't have backward compatibility, I wouldn't have even considered buying one.
I'm not suggesting that MS did a better job of their launch. Being first to launch was probably critical for them to gain market share, but they've spent billions fixing a design flaw that could have been caught had they not rushed it. And almost a year after the Wii launch, I can count the games I've purchased on one hand. Mine doesn't get played a whole lot unless we have guests over and want to play party games. I just don't know that Sony has crossed the threshold where the titles for the PS3 are good enough or big enough for the console to stand on its own.
Making the Blu-Ray drive a core part of the system has been a gamble. Sony would like it to push adoption of their format, and that could earn them a lot of money. But the added cost has put the console out of reach of a lot of the people who did buy the PS2. Now the price must come down. The console must be affordable for gamers who aren't home theater enthusiasts. Without gamers, the developers will not want to invest in making good games for the platform. But first and foremost, gamers want games. Which is why Sony should be cutting costs in anything but the console's ability to play games.
No. The price is high. The games are average. But eliminating the ability to play the good games they do have (for the PS2) isn't going to help them. Sony would be better off eliminating features that aren't core to playing video games, which is what most people who buy game consoles want to do with them.
Sony must be having a hard time reducing the cost of the console, which their potential customers have pretty much demanded they do. A lot of the PS3 exclusive games are getting a lukewarm reception, many of the multi-platform titles get released late on the PS3, and Blu-Ray is not popular enough for the average consumer to purchase it as a Blu-Ray player.
They must be in a pretty tough spot if reducing the number of games that can be played on their video game console looks like a good way to sell more consoles.
Repeat after me:
Good Games Sell Consoles
Good Games Sell Consoles
Good Games Sell Consoles
No, but they will ban you from Xbox Live. Don't ask me how. I would guess that their goal with that is to keep people from crashing the game servers. For example, someone invited me to a custom game on a modded map that allowed up to 50 or 100 players in the game instead of the usual 16.
I wouldn't draw a parallel to modding a phone to work on a network other than AT&T's. Apple doesn't support AT&T's network, and if it caused problems for anyone's network, it would likely be the one that the modded phone is being used on.
Do Smart or Dynamic playlists need to be supported by portable players? I use Smart Playlists in iTunes to create rules based on file metadata and data in the iTunes database. Neither of these things are editable either of my iPods.
If you're just talking about synchronization, then that is an issue for iTunes (or whatever program you use to sync your audio player). When you sync your player, the Smart Playlist becomes a Dumb Playlist and it is synchronized just like any other playlist.
As an example, I have a script to synchronize my iTunes playlists with Windows Media Player so that I can play them on my Xbox in my living room. Does Windows Media Player support iTunes Smart Playlists? No. It gets a point-in-time snapshot of the Smart Playlist whenever I synchronize. Your portable player does the same thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Do the contents of your Smart Playlist change on your iPod without synchronizing? If not, then the iPod doesn't "support" Smart Playlists. It's an issue for the sync software.
If you don't mind getting a new phone number, you could use a free service like GrandCentral. It gives you a single phone number that routes calls to your phones based on the caller and your rules, and lets you access all of your voicemail visually from the web. The website uses a flash plugin, but there's a mobile version. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't confirm if it works on mobile Safari.
I'm sure it requires more effort than the built in solution, but it doesn't care who your phone company is.
I don't work for them either. I just like their server.
But only 44% of all statistics are used "during discussions in online forums". 26% are used in advertising. 17% are used in the news / investigative journalism, 2% are used in executive reports and powerpoint presentations, 9% are used by political action committees and the rest are split 50/50 between academics and, well, everyone else.
I was under the impression that the point of modding a post is to show that you appreciated the content of the post and to make it more visible to others who may not read every post in the discussion (or TFA), thus contributing to the community. Does it really matter if you can increase someone's karma?
Additionally, sending a picture/video can sometimes communicate your message more efficiently than speaking as well. Obviously the phone supports SMS messaging (AT&T is using the number of SMS messages / month to differentiate some of their plans), but it seems to me that "texting" is a more common activity than sending email. I'm a bit surprised to hear that the phone doesn't support common messaging formats.
That's the first problem. Printers routinely report that they are low on ink even when they aren't, and in some cases there are still hundreds of pages worth of ink left. My Canon PIXMA ip5000 reports when ink is low, and when it is empty. (I'm not sure if all modern printers do) I buy a refill when it's low and swap the cartridge when it's empty. The ink cartridges I use are clear, and they're usually empty when I swap them.
Be glad that was your only issue. I logged on after rebooting. Then my Vista Ultimate OS started churning away, running the CPU at 100% for the next 20 minutes. The task manager attributed most of it to Idle Processes. The only was to stop it was to hard reboot the machine. Upon reboot, the machine started operating normally again. Needless to say, I disabled automatic updates this morning.
If you're comparing a physical stakeout to a massive historical database of all telephone communications, then in a sense, they do wear blinders. The fact that technology enables them to "monitor activity" on a wider scale doesn't necessarily give them the right to.
If you were comparing the phone database to the police setting up a networked, video surveillance system that covered every part of your city, recognized faces, and wrote the information about who was where when to a database which was analyzed for "suspicious behavior", then you'd be granting them a similar "field of view" to what the call records give them. Would that be OK, as long as they promised to only watch the video of criminals^H^H^H^H^H^H terrorists or their associates?
Given the president's beliefs on "pre-emptive" defense and the limitations on presidential power, I wouldn't recommend you threaten harm or wish harm on the president... At least not on your Verizon cell phone.
While you may be correct that folks on Slashdot lean left, you might consider that the content of the article also affects the response.
Compare Republican related articles to Democrat related articles.
Go ahead. Rant some more about the political bias on Slashdot. You may be right. Then again, the Bush administration may just be doing (or have done) worse things than giving an RIAA employee a job at a convention. Looking at the headlines today, that would include seeking expansion of spy powers, and deleting a lot of emails from Karl Rove.
This article is written for the average consumer. The one whom Apple is telling If it's on iTunes, it's on your widescreen TV". ("on iTunes" != "IN iTunes") What they aren't telling said consumer is that the quality of the video is poor. That matters to people who own widescreen TVs. Whether the poor quality is a result of compression, poor encoding, DRM, or anything else doesn't matter. The Apple TV won't meet their expectations.
Additionally, the revenue from the out-of-court settlements could offset the cost of the USB Keys.
What does it give you that Bluetooth or Wi-fi doesn't? There have been a number of devices with some form of wireless data transfer (pdas, cell phones, etc) for years now, but they've not really taken off. Bluetooth has been most effective when used in wireless headsets, and maybe wireless keyboards and mice. For anything else (such as wireless synchronization), running the radio just drains the already short battery life of the device, meaning you're probably going to have to carry around a power adapter to keep the battery charged. Many of the power adapters are the brick kind, meaning they take up more space than a USB cable would. And if you have more than one device, you might need a charger for each.
Ultimately, you're trading one problem (having to carry a cable) for many (having to carry one or more power supplies, shorter battery life, encryption, wireless interference). How is that a good idea?
Maybe it's just me. I don't have a TV that supports HDMI. I don't care to replace all my DVDs with BluRay or HD-DVDs, or all my component video / digital audio cables with HDMI ones. So, "Elite"?.... meh.
What I keep asking myself is "Why now?" I mean these features had been announced for the PS3 for over a year now at least. Did it just take MS this long to copy Sony? Or was it a conscious decision to wait until Sony launched the PS3? I mean the PS3 has been sitting on store shelves for months with more integrated features than the "Elite" 360, and it has only recently received positive attention with the announcement of "Home" and their Second Life clone. So after the public has given a lukewarm reaction to HDMI and a larger hard drive on their competitor's console, they decide to jump in with a "Me Too"? At a higher (w/ HD-DVD and wireless) overall price?
I don't get it.
On the other hand, usability of a phone and usability of a PDA or music player may not be the same thing. For example, I like being able to feel the keys on my phone's keypad so I can press and hold the 2 button and execute the speed dial to call home without having to navigate menus or look at the screen to be sure I'm hitting the right key. This is the main reason I've never purchased a touchscreen PDA/phone.
Similarly, I need a limited number of functions on my music/media player. Play/Pause, Stop, Next, Previous, Volume Controls, and a way to select the media to play. These functions don't intuitively map to the standard buttons on a phone. And I find it easier to call someone and talk to them than to tap on a miniature keyboard, so a QWERTY thumb keyboard is useless to me.
This is an attempt at convergence where appropriate (caller ID through the earphones), not just another FrankenGadget. For the people who want a phone to make phone calls and a media player to play music, but don't want to carry 2 devices, this could be useful.
My only real complaint is that I don't see it as a very useful music player because it requires Yet Another Music Manager and/or purchases from Yet Another Music Store. I already have to manage 2 music libraries (iTunes to play on my iPod and WMP to play on my Xbox). I'm not interested in managing a 3rd. What I really need is one Music Library with a plugin architecture that allows me to sync my devices, stream to various devices on my local network, auto import from the file system and tag my files.