Ah, this will be another example of America, land of freedom etc. The only difference between this and say China is that it's the corporates that force you to keep your mouth shut, not the government.
much of the US (and elsewhere) hasn't even got broadband yet That's a fair point and I'm looking at it from the European standpoint. Apart from my 70 something year old mum, I don't know *anyone* that isn't on broadband including people's parents and grandparents. I'm also scratching my head to think of anyone that still buys CDs too. I buy the odd one still but then I also buy new vinyl because I'm a collector. Everyone else I know either buys or aquires MP3s as their only source of music now.
Someone else noted how powerful and rich the record companies are. In the UK, the likes of EMI are in financial trouble, high street shop chains that sell CDs are all closing and those who are clinging on (HMV) are showing big losses. And that's in a country that allegedly still buys more CDs than most other countries per capita.
I think in terms of the changes we'll see, ten years is a long time but it will be a house of cards - things will continue as they are for a few years then it will all change very rapidly. All IMHO of course.
Another thought is the demographics - the singles market has all but collapsed - you can get a number one single on sales that wouldn't have touched the top 40 in the 80's. The traditional market i.e. teens has all but given up buying them outside of the few that don't use computers and those probably just swap MP3s on their phones - they certainly insist on playing RnB/(c)rap 'slamming choonz' on the bus for everyone to 'enjoy'. The bulk of purchasing though is albums and that is doing OKish but most people (mid 20's to mid 50s) I know have stopped buying them unless they're a collector.
Back in the late 80's, a UK bank did some R&D on this area and came up with a novel idea. It was signature recognition BUT rather than analysing the actual signature, it 'listened' to the pen on the paper as it moved. They found that anyone (well.. some people anyway) could do a fair replication of someone else's signature if they went slowly but it was almost impossible to recreate someone's signature at the same speed and with the same pressure/flourishes.
In case anyone reads this and copyrights the damn thing, there is prior art and it worked. They just didn't think the market was ready for it.
I can't believe they would write regulations about something they don't even understand! In the UK that's all the Labour government do - a new law every ten minutes on average too. If this is your first exposure to fools making foolish laws, be happy!
>It's the end of radio, can you hear me now?
Reminds me of "WXJL Tonight" by The Human League from 1980 about the last DJ on the air lamenting his fate as all the other stations have gone over to 24/7 automatic stations without any chat inbetween the songs. And now I'm left alone
I haven't got a word to say
And youre the one who makes the choice
To turn me on or turn me off
But now it really matters
That phrase that they "didn't realise" these stations have thousands of channels just points to how ill researched these organisations are. They're putting in knee-jerk regulatory and charging regimes that just don't fit the real world. It's probably not even crossed their mind that half of them are trying to charge for listeners in countries that don't even fall under their jurisdiction.
We're going through a painful growing stage that's going to be full of 'WTF?' moments but I'd be surprised if in ten years time, the music industry landscape will be drastically different with self-publishing bands, CDs a rarity (or their replacement format) and the licencing juggernaut that we have right now being relegated to history.
The only reason I can see for the industry as it stands to exist is R&D but they do so little of that now as to be moot. If a band doesn't hit the big time on their first single/album, they're dropped, no more the nurturing of a band over several albums while they find their stride.
The HiFi brigade will naturally be less than enthused about MP3 as a primary format but that will no doubt be replaced with some sort of lossless DRM free format by then.
Damn, sorry. If I'd known I could have come up with some semi-plausible sounding reply such as 'It's a function of the specmark's, RAM bus speeds and Intel's stock price versus AMD's.;-)
Re:Asynchronous Transfer Mode?
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 1
The bit that said if an older brother dies, the 'new' oldest brother will have a higher IQ. Apart from feeling somewhat threatened if I were an older brother with an overly keen to succeed sibling, what's the mechanism at play here and can it be harnessed without being oldest brother?
Johnny, aged 17 noted 'everytime I go to collage I get a funny tingling in my brain like I'm being slowly microwaved to death.' Students have also been complaining about a blue glowing around anything electrical and a curious crackling noise in the background.
Back in 1964 the UK was busy developing the TSR-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 which was pretty tasty even back then so it wuldn't take a huge jump to think that over 40 years later, the current state of the art is stuff we can only dream of and won't know about for some years to come.
Back around 1995 I used to work with a guy who was ex-Boeing and worked on one of their Stealth prototypes. He was most definitely not one for joking, tall tales or exageration so I was surprised when he noted that back then there was some 9 aircraft in active service that no-one knew about, 3 Airforce, 2 army and 4 naval. He also reckoned that one was equipped purely with energy weapons. If anyone had come out with this I'd have said, yeah, right but this guy really wasn't the sort to make stuff up for a joke. He also confirmed Aurora existed but added 'but that's not the good one'.
>money-raising fairs
Missed that - our schools don't tend to have anything like that. The closest we get is 'bring a pound' day for various charities but that usually gets covered by the coin pot.
>Have children.
Already have. The money gets transferred in to their bank account and they can do what they want with it after that - no cash changes hands with me.
>always slowing everything down while the cashier checks back to base for your card
You must have some antique infrastructure. Cashier taps up your purchases, you insert the debit card in the reader on the counter, it prompts for a PIN number after maybe 2 seconds and says 'remove card' after another second or two. Total payment time 4 seconds. People (especially women, sorry but please, get your cash ready in advance ladies) spend more time rummaging in their wallet or pocket for change.
>Where do you live?
UK
>Don't some shops refuse or surcharge credit cards for small amounts?
Credit cards normally have a minumum like GBP5 or GBP10 but *debit* cards that take the money out your current (checking) account are usually fine although I'd probably balk at making a purchase for less that GBP2 or so. I don't tend to buy stuff like cans of coke when I'm out, newspapers in London are free (well, 3 are anyway) so apart from carparks, I really don't use cash much that I can recall.
Over in the UK most personal banking is free unless you go overdrawn and even then the banks have been hauled over the coals for charging too much for that so a small industry has sprung up with firms offering to help you reclaim excessive overdraft fees back.
Personal accounts provide the volumes of people to keep the branch networks and thus the 'front door' open, small-medium companies pay for the clearing system and much of the income. Really big firms pretty muh get everything at cost or less as their volumes allow for reduced per unit cost. You also get odd situations like bank's paying customers like supermarkets to take the coin off them. The bank's can't count coin as an assett when calculating liquidity so they want to turn it in to notes and the supermarkets want coin.
Slashdot Mirror
>The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm
Now that's what you call size reduction.
Ah, this will be another example of America, land of freedom etc. The only difference between this and say China is that it's the corporates that force you to keep your mouth shut, not the government.
Which God? I suspect they're one or two people on the planet that might have a different deity-or-prophet-of-choice.
>"Two guys walk into a bar..."
And one says 'Ouch, that never used to be there!'
Someone else noted how powerful and rich the record companies are. In the UK, the likes of EMI are in financial trouble, high street shop chains that sell CDs are all closing and those who are clinging on (HMV) are showing big losses. And that's in a country that allegedly still buys more CDs than most other countries per capita.
I think in terms of the changes we'll see, ten years is a long time but it will be a house of cards - things will continue as they are for a few years then it will all change very rapidly. All IMHO of course.
Another thought is the demographics - the singles market has all but collapsed - you can get a number one single on sales that wouldn't have touched the top 40 in the 80's. The traditional market i.e. teens has all but given up buying them outside of the few that don't use computers and those probably just swap MP3s on their phones - they certainly insist on playing RnB/(c)rap 'slamming choonz' on the bus for everyone to 'enjoy'. The bulk of purchasing though is albums and that is doing OKish but most people (mid 20's to mid 50s) I know have stopped buying them unless they're a collector.
I remember you!
Back in the late 80's, a UK bank did some R&D on this area and came up with a novel idea. It was signature recognition BUT rather than analysing the actual signature, it 'listened' to the pen on the paper as it moved. They found that anyone (well.. some people anyway) could do a fair replication of someone else's signature if they went slowly but it was almost impossible to recreate someone's signature at the same speed and with the same pressure/flourishes.
In case anyone reads this and copyrights the damn thing, there is prior art and it worked. They just didn't think the market was ready for it.
>It's the end of radio, can you hear me now?
Reminds me of "WXJL Tonight" by The Human League from 1980 about the last DJ on the air lamenting his fate as all the other stations have gone over to 24/7 automatic stations without any chat inbetween the songs.
And now I'm left alone
I haven't got a word to say
And youre the one who makes the choice
To turn me on or turn me off
But now it really matters
That phrase that they "didn't realise" these stations have thousands of channels just points to how ill researched these organisations are. They're putting in knee-jerk regulatory and charging regimes that just don't fit the real world. It's probably not even crossed their mind that half of them are trying to charge for listeners in countries that don't even fall under their jurisdiction.
We're going through a painful growing stage that's going to be full of 'WTF?' moments but I'd be surprised if in ten years time, the music industry landscape will be drastically different with self-publishing bands, CDs a rarity (or their replacement format) and the licencing juggernaut that we have right now being relegated to history.
The only reason I can see for the industry as it stands to exist is R&D but they do so little of that now as to be moot. If a band doesn't hit the big time on their first single/album, they're dropped, no more the nurturing of a band over several albums while they find their stride.
The HiFi brigade will naturally be less than enthused about MP3 as a primary format but that will no doubt be replaced with some sort of lossless DRM free format by then.
Damn, sorry. If I'd known I could have come up with some semi-plausible sounding reply such as 'It's a function of the specmark's, RAM bus speeds and Intel's stock price versus AMD's. ;-)
I thought it was Adobe Type Manager.
How do you define "whoosh"?
>56 - Dunno.
That's the percentage of performance compared to the Intel equivelent i.e the Turion is 56% the speed of an Intel equivelent.
>maybe the French are just pissed that the Internet didn't grow from Minitel
Ooh, good homework, respect.
Your point re FUD is certainly a good one though although I'm not aware of any French 'answer to Blackberry' systems about to hit the market.
The bit that said if an older brother dies, the 'new' oldest brother will have a higher IQ. Apart from feeling somewhat threatened if I were an older brother with an overly keen to succeed sibling, what's the mechanism at play here and can it be harnessed without being oldest brother?
Johnny, aged 17 noted 'everytime I go to collage I get a funny tingling in my brain like I'm being slowly microwaved to death.' Students have also been complaining about a blue glowing around anything electrical and a curious crackling noise in the background.
Back in 1964 the UK was busy developing the TSR-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 which was pretty tasty even back then so it wuldn't take a huge jump to think that over 40 years later, the current state of the art is stuff we can only dream of and won't know about for some years to come.
Back around 1995 I used to work with a guy who was ex-Boeing and worked on one of their Stealth prototypes. He was most definitely not one for joking, tall tales or exageration so I was surprised when he noted that back then there was some 9 aircraft in active service that no-one knew about, 3 Airforce, 2 army and 4 naval. He also reckoned that one was equipped purely with energy weapons. If anyone had come out with this I'd have said, yeah, right but this guy really wasn't the sort to make stuff up for a joke. He also confirmed Aurora existed but added 'but that's not the good one'.
>money-raising fairs
Missed that - our schools don't tend to have anything like that. The closest we get is 'bring a pound' day for various charities but that usually gets covered by the coin pot.
>Have children.
Already have. The money gets transferred in to their bank account and they can do what they want with it after that - no cash changes hands with me.
Paint them white, let them loose and wait for the enemy to say 'Ooh, iPhone!' then when they pick it up, kaboom!
>always slowing everything down while the cashier checks back to base for your card
You must have some antique infrastructure. Cashier taps up your purchases, you insert the debit card in the reader on the counter, it prompts for a PIN number after maybe 2 seconds and says 'remove card' after another second or two. Total payment time 4 seconds. People (especially women, sorry but please, get your cash ready in advance ladies) spend more time rummaging in their wallet or pocket for change.
>Where do you live?
UK >Don't some shops refuse or surcharge credit cards for small amounts?
Credit cards normally have a minumum like GBP5 or GBP10 but *debit* cards that take the money out your current (checking) account are usually fine although I'd probably balk at making a purchase for less that GBP2 or so. I don't tend to buy stuff like cans of coke when I'm out, newspapers in London are free (well, 3 are anyway) so apart from carparks, I really don't use cash much that I can recall.
Over in the UK most personal banking is free unless you go overdrawn and even then the banks have been hauled over the coals for charging too much for that so a small industry has sprung up with firms offering to help you reclaim excessive overdraft fees back.
Personal accounts provide the volumes of people to keep the branch networks and thus the 'front door' open, small-medium companies pay for the clearing system and much of the income. Really big firms pretty muh get everything at cost or less as their volumes allow for reduced per unit cost. You also get odd situations like bank's paying customers like supermarkets to take the coin off them. The bank's can't count coin as an assett when calculating liquidity so they want to turn it in to notes and the supermarkets want coin.