Living in Japan, I'd say that the arcade still has a lot of appeal for the younger crowd because of the social aspect (spending time with your friends and not having to be around your family), but the games are definitely feeling their age; Namco isn't making much effort in the innovation or updating graphics department, so it's their own fault.
Unless these are game centers out in the middle of nowhere, blaming the gas prices is total crap, since the trains are unaffected and most kids are going to their local game center by bicycle. Certain shopping malls are indeed out in the suburbs, but again, unless we're talking about the rural countryside here, all of them are within a short walk or bus ride from the station. I'd definitely go with the idea that Namco has been sitting on their coattails and not bothering to bring anything good to the table.
It seems like the RIAA would like us to save it the trouble by just standing up and admitting to any crimes we think we might have committed. I'm sure that'll go far.
Unfortunately, in the real world, the actual result is that you have to code pages for a specific, lowest common denominator, which means that you have to play nice with IE. Developers' goals are dictated by what they can expect from their audience, not their own personal whims. For every additional plug-in you require your users to download, you are losing potential audience that simply gives up. Making people who aren't looking for something better than IE download an entirely new browser is going to really hurt traffic, and traffic means money.
Having said that, as a developer, I really hate Microsoft's continuing efforts to make my web design efforts a nightmare. I get a page looking slick and clean in Firefox using good coding standards, only to have IE puke it back at me looking like a total mess.
One of the upshots of having paid for music is that you may feel less inclined to give it away. Nothing like realizing that other people are taking for free what you actually spent money on to make you want to stop sharing your files.
Anyway, as has been said often enough, DRM does nothing but create bad customer relations. And while I agree that people have always been able to copy music, they have not always had such mind-boggling ease of access and storage capability. Society as a whole needs to remember that regardless of how they feel about the unfairness of the music industry's charging practices, if you don't pay your musicians, they aren't going to be able to make a living. If it was only so easy to replace DRM with the honor system, we wouldn't be having these discussions.
Yeah, I have an email-heavy, voice-light plan, so in essence I never notice my email traffic. The cost for the different kinds of plans is about the same, it's just weighted so that you agree to a higher limit for email and a lower email for voice calls. Your local Docomo shop, for example, can take a look at your calling habits and recommend the best plan to you.
Anybody who lives above the first floor (AKA "in the air"), not to mention people who live in an apartment building, can suffer from a no grounding situation that they can't do anything about. Basically the entire country of Japan (where I live) is not grounded, even though power strips are ironically three-pronged (Japan has the same plug as North America). However, there is a recourse for people with metal piping: you can ground your outlets by running ground wires to the cold water pipe under your kitchen sink, which in turn leads down to the ground and makes an excellent grounding system. Not necessarily completely tidy or elegant, but functional.
Despite this particular bone-headedness, the EPA still does perform important tasks. My sister is an EPA trouble-shooter, whose job it is to be on call 24/7 just in case there is a hazardous material problem, from a diesel truck spill to asbestos removal. She goes to the problem site, assesses the situation, and then coordinates the necessary people to take care of it. Her work prevents such nastiness from getting into the water table and poisoning it in a hundred mile radius for the next twenty years, so I'd rather she and people like her were allowed to keep doing their job.
My original TiBook did that; it was really uncomfortable and annoying. I live in Japan, where none of the plugs are grounded (baffling, I know.) The new MacBook is blessedly tingle-free and by far my favorite laptop ever.
So the fact that they get a fair volume discount and you still end up saving $600 makes it somehow more expensive? Also, calling it an *upgrade* doesn't devalue it, either; sorry.
I agree that their approach to the problem is based on a flawed understanding of how processor development works, not to mention the tech industry's marketing strategy ("People like to buy shiny new objects on a regular basis.(tm)") We are still a ways away from reaching a design plateau where we have achieved some ultimate chip design that can no longer be improved on.
When you buy a computer, you buy it for the worst-case scenario. Your processing needs are probably not going to mysteriously increase over time; it's not like game developers are going to say, "Let's code for *ten* processors this year" while processor manufacturers cheer them on while sitting on their laurels. Even if you could enable four new cores to keep up with more power-hungry applications, this does you no good whatsoever if the latest dual-core chip is ten times faster.
Finally, the idea of being comfortable with paying a certain price now only to see those costs continue, and worse, increase over time is just bad math. Once you buy a piece of hardware, you want it to remain yours. The only way this scenario seems remotely viable is in a shared computing environment such as a college campus, not in the home of a private citizen. It's just silly, I tell you, silly.
He did that because he could and because he wanted to, not because he had to. Probably a bit of publicity and national pride, too. Not to mention that you just guaranteed 30,000 people are going to pay to go see the movie just for bragging rights.
By the Constitution, you mean the state's constitution, right? The US Constitution has no control over the states per se; that is one of the peculiarities of the US system. It confers rights to the individual, but state and federal government are separate entities.
He can sue for infringement of his Constitutional rights, sure, but a state school would be no more affected than a private school in this case. Of course, their funding is paid for by the tax payers and they function by a charter granted to them by the state, so there is a clear bit of accountability there.
I, for one, pray that they come up with something better than the low-bitrate MP3s but more feasible than a vinyl record. There is no reason they couldn't just forgo the Redbook format and record high-quality, lossless digital files to the CD and have everyone use CD players capable of reading them. If people insist on high-quality, analog sound, you might as well give up and admit that nothing beats the original experience of hearing the musicians play.
To the snobbish audiophiles out there: good grief. The best quality is the reproduction of the song in your mind. There will never be a sound system perfect enough to convey exactly what you want.
It's not an invasion of privacy if you post the pictures in a public place. Contrary to popular belief, although the internet may be available from the privacy of your own home, it is by no means private. Guess these kids will learn something, and the administration will feel like they accomplished something (but not really).
Nowhere in the article does it say that the company is going to give you royalties on your design; as a matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the contract didn't specifically say that you sign over all rights to the company before you can accept the prize money.
Mesh network could be provided by the OS, but it isn't. E-book is a significant feature when you're in a classroom situation where you can't afford a pile of physical textbooks. Just because they *could* be provided, or a classroom feature doesn't seem significant to you personally, doesn't make Intel's product the better choice.
By your examples, it might be better to say that those free markets that don't impact people on a significant level are more easily regulated (food poisoning kills, and sending children to sweatshops for 14 hours a day can't be good for them, either). The criminality runs rampant in those, too; sweatshops still exist, they're just offshored to become someone else's problem. Food safety standards are also coming into question, as illustrated by the manipulation of expiration dates of foods sold in Japan. You could even cite the recent scandal of toys covered in lead-based paint as an example where regulation has failed miserably.
I agree that regulation is necessary, or things would be far worse than they already are. It's just a fact that unscrupulous people will work dilligently to find a way around such regulations for the sake of their bottom line.
The specific complaint seems rather specious. Yes, Apple dominates the market, but their avenue of attack is specifically in reference to not being able to play WMA files even though the iPod contains a chip that has that functionality. As others have pointed out, this licensing is not free. Apple may not support other DRM formats, but they also don't require you to use FairPlay-protected AAC exclusively, either. So they fail to enable a feature because they don't legally have the right to do so. That's not crippleware, that's just Apple following the law. If they were genuinely hoping to accomplish something, the plaintiff should have sued for Apple to open the Fairplay format, not try to force Apple to support WMA.
Besides, how does this actually help? Fairplay will continue to exist, If the plaintiff were to win, Apple could feasible expand its market share even more by eliminating the WMA hurdle, and Microsoft's own proprietary file format monopoly would be bolstered as well; how ironic. Who exactly does this case stand to help?
I don't see how having apt or fink would be helpful to programming. If you're actually participating, then I imagine you'd want to actually sign up for the software's development repository, which is going to work on either platform. If you're talking about an IDE, there are several good ones available for the Mac, open source, from Apple, or otherwise. Finally, you could have simply installed Linux on your Mac and have had your Ubuntu experience without having to go and buy a "Linux" laptop (I assume you call it that because the hardware has open source driver support?)
It seems you abbreviated your long story too much and failed to list any concrete examples as to why Macs are good only for grandmas and graphic designers.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
You just tell LaTeX that you want an image / figure at a given location and the software decides the best location.
You mean to say that you tell it the location to put the image, and then it decides where the best location is? That sounds just like what Word attempts to do.
Althought I think Word is a designer's nightmare, there are ways of making an image stay put in a fairly predictable manner, as long as you're willing to drill down and adjust its alignment, text flow, and anchoring properties. I can't see how this is any more difficult than learning LaTeX syntax, but I agree that the lack of separation between form and content makes it a chore in the long run.
As you said, LaTeX has an intelligence, flexibility and clear separation of style from content that makes it excellent for long-form writing and page layout. Much like CSS, you can let a designer worry about the design and let the writer get on with writing. If Microsoft really wanted to offer a compelling reason for people to upgrade to the newest version of Word, they could just make it actually work the way people would like it to work and wouldn't have to worry about reinventing the interface every other version as if that actually solved anything.
DRM has never been that big of an issue for me, since there has always been a way to circumvent it, but as an American living in Japan, region locking has been a real pain in the butt. Even though Blu-ray supports region locking, the PS3 (AKA my cheap Blu-ray player) doesn't require it, and everything I've bought so far, whether game or movie, has been blessedly region-free. Also, under the Blu-ray regions, America and Japan are supposed to fall into the same area, so I can deal with that.
As far as an ad hoc method of DRM circumvention, my Sony LCD TV actually has component out, which is high enough quality for purposes of capturing at DVD quality. At the current size of Blu-ray content versus disk media, I'm not really concerned with storing anything at HD quality yet.
So the labels move away from Apple's iTunes Store, created to drive iPod sales, and move to other platforms that help them to reach iPod users. How exactly does Apple lose here?
The original copyright term was 14 years, with 14 years added later as an optional extension. For an individual, such as a professional author who lives from his sales royalties, this long a period is still a bit short, but doable. Shortening it to five years would make it impossible to make a full-time living as an author. This mentality of "punishing the many to get the few" is a bad way of making the law. We need a law that works for the majority, not punishes or benefits the few.
Not that this is the first time; Congress has passed laws punishing American citizens for living abroad, and it gets really ugly if you decide to rescind your citizenship (you get taxed for ten subsequent years after that.) All this in order to punish a handful of billionaires who decided they want to avoid paying US taxes, but it ends up punishing all 3 million Americans who live abroad, 99.9% of which are *not* billionaires. Bad law-making.
Of course, I'd also like to see perpetual copyrights for free-as-in-speech works, but that's probably too much to ask.
Because if I give something away, that gives me the right to control the copyright forever? How would that be a beneficial law? It simply means you control into perpetuity who gets to use your work, and upon your death, that copyright devolves to your heirs, who may either completely disagree with what you believed, or who decide that they want to sell the copyright to someone else who then controls the work and can do with it what they will, including rescinding the free-as-in-speech part and charging everybody for the continued use of the work. Copyright is not the same as releasing something under an open source license, so there's nothing stopping somebody from deciding later that they want to make money off of it after all. Perpetual copyright means that the work in question will eventually fall into obscurity because it never becomes part of the public domain. This is a bad thing.
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Living in Japan, I'd say that the arcade still has a lot of appeal for the younger crowd because of the social aspect (spending time with your friends and not having to be around your family), but the games are definitely feeling their age; Namco isn't making much effort in the innovation or updating graphics department, so it's their own fault.
Unless these are game centers out in the middle of nowhere, blaming the gas prices is total crap, since the trains are unaffected and most kids are going to their local game center by bicycle. Certain shopping malls are indeed out in the suburbs, but again, unless we're talking about the rural countryside here, all of them are within a short walk or bus ride from the station. I'd definitely go with the idea that Namco has been sitting on their coattails and not bothering to bring anything good to the table.
It seems like the RIAA would like us to save it the trouble by just standing up and admitting to any crimes we think we might have committed. I'm sure that'll go far.
You mean like how the DVD monopoly has resulted in $600+ players?
Unfortunately, in the real world, the actual result is that you have to code pages for a specific, lowest common denominator, which means that you have to play nice with IE. Developers' goals are dictated by what they can expect from their audience, not their own personal whims. For every additional plug-in you require your users to download, you are losing potential audience that simply gives up. Making people who aren't looking for something better than IE download an entirely new browser is going to really hurt traffic, and traffic means money.
Having said that, as a developer, I really hate Microsoft's continuing efforts to make my web design efforts a nightmare. I get a page looking slick and clean in Firefox using good coding standards, only to have IE puke it back at me looking like a total mess.
One of the upshots of having paid for music is that you may feel less inclined to give it away. Nothing like realizing that other people are taking for free what you actually spent money on to make you want to stop sharing your files.
Anyway, as has been said often enough, DRM does nothing but create bad customer relations. And while I agree that people have always been able to copy music, they have not always had such mind-boggling ease of access and storage capability. Society as a whole needs to remember that regardless of how they feel about the unfairness of the music industry's charging practices, if you don't pay your musicians, they aren't going to be able to make a living. If it was only so easy to replace DRM with the honor system, we wouldn't be having these discussions.
Yeah, I have an email-heavy, voice-light plan, so in essence I never notice my email traffic. The cost for the different kinds of plans is about the same, it's just weighted so that you agree to a higher limit for email and a lower email for voice calls. Your local Docomo shop, for example, can take a look at your calling habits and recommend the best plan to you.
Anybody who lives above the first floor (AKA "in the air"), not to mention people who live in an apartment building, can suffer from a no grounding situation that they can't do anything about. Basically the entire country of Japan (where I live) is not grounded, even though power strips are ironically three-pronged (Japan has the same plug as North America). However, there is a recourse for people with metal piping: you can ground your outlets by running ground wires to the cold water pipe under your kitchen sink, which in turn leads down to the ground and makes an excellent grounding system. Not necessarily completely tidy or elegant, but functional.
Despite this particular bone-headedness, the EPA still does perform important tasks. My sister is an EPA trouble-shooter, whose job it is to be on call 24/7 just in case there is a hazardous material problem, from a diesel truck spill to asbestos removal. She goes to the problem site, assesses the situation, and then coordinates the necessary people to take care of it. Her work prevents such nastiness from getting into the water table and poisoning it in a hundred mile radius for the next twenty years, so I'd rather she and people like her were allowed to keep doing their job.
My original TiBook did that; it was really uncomfortable and annoying. I live in Japan, where none of the plugs are grounded (baffling, I know.) The new MacBook is blessedly tingle-free and by far my favorite laptop ever.
So the fact that they get a fair volume discount and you still end up saving $600 makes it somehow more expensive? Also, calling it an *upgrade* doesn't devalue it, either; sorry.
I agree that their approach to the problem is based on a flawed understanding of how processor development works, not to mention the tech industry's marketing strategy ("People like to buy shiny new objects on a regular basis.(tm)") We are still a ways away from reaching a design plateau where we have achieved some ultimate chip design that can no longer be improved on.
When you buy a computer, you buy it for the worst-case scenario. Your processing needs are probably not going to mysteriously increase over time; it's not like game developers are going to say, "Let's code for *ten* processors this year" while processor manufacturers cheer them on while sitting on their laurels. Even if you could enable four new cores to keep up with more power-hungry applications, this does you no good whatsoever if the latest dual-core chip is ten times faster.
Finally, the idea of being comfortable with paying a certain price now only to see those costs continue, and worse, increase over time is just bad math. Once you buy a piece of hardware, you want it to remain yours. The only way this scenario seems remotely viable is in a shared computing environment such as a college campus, not in the home of a private citizen. It's just silly, I tell you, silly.
Not to mention that they have no moving parts. How exciting is that! A microchip with no moving parts!
If you want to read something really baffling, check out their solar chip page here.
He did that because he could and because he wanted to, not because he had to. Probably a bit of publicity and national pride, too. Not to mention that you just guaranteed 30,000 people are going to pay to go see the movie just for bragging rights.
By the Constitution, you mean the state's constitution, right? The US Constitution has no control over the states per se; that is one of the peculiarities of the US system. It confers rights to the individual, but state and federal government are separate entities.
He can sue for infringement of his Constitutional rights, sure, but a state school would be no more affected than a private school in this case. Of course, their funding is paid for by the tax payers and they function by a charter granted to them by the state, so there is a clear bit of accountability there.
I, for one, pray that they come up with something better than the low-bitrate MP3s but more feasible than a vinyl record. There is no reason they couldn't just forgo the Redbook format and record high-quality, lossless digital files to the CD and have everyone use CD players capable of reading them. If people insist on high-quality, analog sound, you might as well give up and admit that nothing beats the original experience of hearing the musicians play.
To the snobbish audiophiles out there: good grief. The best quality is the reproduction of the song in your mind. There will never be a sound system perfect enough to convey exactly what you want.
It's not an invasion of privacy if you post the pictures in a public place. Contrary to popular belief, although the internet may be available from the privacy of your own home, it is by no means private. Guess these kids will learn something, and the administration will feel like they accomplished something (but not really).
Nowhere in the article does it say that the company is going to give you royalties on your design; as a matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the contract didn't specifically say that you sign over all rights to the company before you can accept the prize money.
Mesh network could be provided by the OS, but it isn't. E-book is a significant feature when you're in a classroom situation where you can't afford a pile of physical textbooks. Just because they *could* be provided, or a classroom feature doesn't seem significant to you personally, doesn't make Intel's product the better choice.
By your examples, it might be better to say that those free markets that don't impact people on a significant level are more easily regulated (food poisoning kills, and sending children to sweatshops for 14 hours a day can't be good for them, either). The criminality runs rampant in those, too; sweatshops still exist, they're just offshored to become someone else's problem. Food safety standards are also coming into question, as illustrated by the manipulation of expiration dates of foods sold in Japan. You could even cite the recent scandal of toys covered in lead-based paint as an example where regulation has failed miserably.
I agree that regulation is necessary, or things would be far worse than they already are. It's just a fact that unscrupulous people will work dilligently to find a way around such regulations for the sake of their bottom line.
The specific complaint seems rather specious. Yes, Apple dominates the market, but their avenue of attack is specifically in reference to not being able to play WMA files even though the iPod contains a chip that has that functionality. As others have pointed out, this licensing is not free. Apple may not support other DRM formats, but they also don't require you to use FairPlay-protected AAC exclusively, either. So they fail to enable a feature because they don't legally have the right to do so. That's not crippleware, that's just Apple following the law. If they were genuinely hoping to accomplish something, the plaintiff should have sued for Apple to open the Fairplay format, not try to force Apple to support WMA.
Besides, how does this actually help? Fairplay will continue to exist, If the plaintiff were to win, Apple could feasible expand its market share even more by eliminating the WMA hurdle, and Microsoft's own proprietary file format monopoly would be bolstered as well; how ironic. Who exactly does this case stand to help?
I don't see how having apt or fink would be helpful to programming. If you're actually participating, then I imagine you'd want to actually sign up for the software's development repository, which is going to work on either platform. If you're talking about an IDE, there are several good ones available for the Mac, open source, from Apple, or otherwise. Finally, you could have simply installed Linux on your Mac and have had your Ubuntu experience without having to go and buy a "Linux" laptop (I assume you call it that because the hardware has open source driver support?)
It seems you abbreviated your long story too much and failed to list any concrete examples as to why Macs are good only for grandmas and graphic designers.
You just tell LaTeX that you want an image / figure at a given location and the software decides the best location.
You mean to say that you tell it the location to put the image, and then it decides where the best location is? That sounds just like what Word attempts to do.
Althought I think Word is a designer's nightmare, there are ways of making an image stay put in a fairly predictable manner, as long as you're willing to drill down and adjust its alignment, text flow, and anchoring properties. I can't see how this is any more difficult than learning LaTeX syntax, but I agree that the lack of separation between form and content makes it a chore in the long run.
As you said, LaTeX has an intelligence, flexibility and clear separation of style from content that makes it excellent for long-form writing and page layout. Much like CSS, you can let a designer worry about the design and let the writer get on with writing. If Microsoft really wanted to offer a compelling reason for people to upgrade to the newest version of Word, they could just make it actually work the way people would like it to work and wouldn't have to worry about reinventing the interface every other version as if that actually solved anything.
DRM has never been that big of an issue for me, since there has always been a way to circumvent it, but as an American living in Japan, region locking has been a real pain in the butt. Even though Blu-ray supports region locking, the PS3 (AKA my cheap Blu-ray player) doesn't require it, and everything I've bought so far, whether game or movie, has been blessedly region-free. Also, under the Blu-ray regions, America and Japan are supposed to fall into the same area, so I can deal with that.
As far as an ad hoc method of DRM circumvention, my Sony LCD TV actually has component out, which is high enough quality for purposes of capturing at DVD quality. At the current size of Blu-ray content versus disk media, I'm not really concerned with storing anything at HD quality yet.
So the labels move away from Apple's iTunes Store, created to drive iPod sales, and move to other platforms that help them to reach iPod users. How exactly does Apple lose here?
The original copyright term was 14 years, with 14 years added later as an optional extension. For an individual, such as a professional author who lives from his sales royalties, this long a period is still a bit short, but doable. Shortening it to five years would make it impossible to make a full-time living as an author. This mentality of "punishing the many to get the few" is a bad way of making the law. We need a law that works for the majority, not punishes or benefits the few.
Not that this is the first time; Congress has passed laws punishing American citizens for living abroad, and it gets really ugly if you decide to rescind your citizenship (you get taxed for ten subsequent years after that.) All this in order to punish a handful of billionaires who decided they want to avoid paying US taxes, but it ends up punishing all 3 million Americans who live abroad, 99.9% of which are *not* billionaires. Bad law-making.
Of course, I'd also like to see perpetual copyrights for free-as-in-speech works, but that's probably too much to ask.
Because if I give something away, that gives me the right to control the copyright forever? How would that be a beneficial law? It simply means you control into perpetuity who gets to use your work, and upon your death, that copyright devolves to your heirs, who may either completely disagree with what you believed, or who decide that they want to sell the copyright to someone else who then controls the work and can do with it what they will, including rescinding the free-as-in-speech part and charging everybody for the continued use of the work. Copyright is not the same as releasing something under an open source license, so there's nothing stopping somebody from deciding later that they want to make money off of it after all. Perpetual copyright means that the work in question will eventually fall into obscurity because it never becomes part of the public domain. This is a bad thing.