Downfall to be replaced by what? I agree that I'm less than happy with where Adobe has gone culturally in the last few years, but they've got less competition than Microsoft. There is simply nothing to replace them, period. Macromedia was the last thing standing between them and a total monopoly. Now, here we are.
The best part is, people will continue buying iPods regardless, and Apple's sacred cash cow will remain alive and well, except that users will complain that Amazon needs to integrate with iTunes so as to make their download experience easier.
>How do you define good? Is music created by people who don't respect their audience good?
It can be, yes. If moral values dictated the quality of a person's art, then art as we know it would probably never have evolved. Good artists can also love the music, or the art, or whatever, and merely see the audience as a necessary evil. If the music isn't received well, then the artist is just as likely to blame the audience for being ignorant as they are for blaming themselves for creating bad music.
Even the most well-intended artists who really want to connect with their audience and find people who love their music as much as they do may not be the best contract negotiators. Artists are not well known for managing themselves well, and people good at managing are not always considered the most artistic people in the world. Many artists who have entered into these kinds of contracts may have thought they were necessary evils at the time and that they would win free of them later once they'd made it big. However, real life isn't always that clear cut, an the people who are writing the contracts know how to make them stick. Hence the current culture and the power of the recording labels.
Do you think this is new? Michelangelo is one of the most famous artists of all times, but was notoriously anti-social, was only able to make his art because of the sponsorship of powerful patrons, and still managed to die in poverty after a long and successful career.
Would you prefer to limit it to a few people whose only differentiating trait is that they're incredibly rich or happen to be in power? People with wealth and power are not typically known for their high moral standards.
If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like.
That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.
Here's the important question - I am toying with buying the HD-DVD or BluRay version, but I haven't committed to a player yet. As an American living in Japan, region locking is a big issue for me. From what I can Google, BluRay is still region-locked, but in a way that works for me (Japan and the US are lumped together.) I see conflicting information that HD-DVD was supposed to be region free, but now maybe it's not, and there's no news more recent than 2006 to help me decide. Does anybody know how this finally settled out?
What you're suggesting is that you don't care about the livelihood of the people who supply you with the information you read every day on the web. Sure, they could stop publishing tomorrow, but then we'd all have to go back to hobbies that don't involve reading on the computer.
Sailboats can be used in winds over 10mph. That is, if you've ever sailed on anything over 20 feet in length. Otherwise, areas like the Roaring Forties below South America would be nigh unto impassible.
The article also goes on to say that the professor reading a poem to his students is a public performance. This is just flat wrong. Classroom != public. The performance of the work in this case is permitted.
One of the things I disagreed with from the article is the claim of copyright infringement for passing out copies of a published article within class. As a teacher, I specifically looked up the law on this one when our local board of education raised concerns that showing movies in class might be copyright infringement; as it turns out, allowing students to view a copyrighted work within the classroom is allowed, even if it's a privately owned DVD with only a home viewing license. At the very worst, you could require that the students return the materials to the teacher at the end of class.
The reason that predators have the bodies that they do is that they have to go chase after their prey and burn up a lot of energy patiently stalking their next meal. They also sleep a lot in order to conserve energy, since their meals have the annoying habit of not wanting to be eaten, making them less plentiful than, say, grass, which is pretty much everywhere and is far less likely to struggle.
I was under the impression that even permanent residence had to be renewed every three years, just like any other Japanese visa? It used to be that any Japanese visa beyond tourist would allow you to stand in the citizen's line (up until now.)
Interestingly enough, I was told in America that they definitely wanted my Japanese wife and I to go through the citizen's line in customs, otherwise it mucks up the paperwork. ("It says here you're traveling with family, where are they?")
Also, I was offended to see a sign in Japanese in Kansai Airport this last summer that apologized to other Japanese if they had to wait behind foreigners before getting processed. I guess the number of visa-carrying foreigners is increasing and putting the natives out. It's not the sentiment that bothers me, it's the audacity of posting the sign.
I have lived in Japan for five years now, speak fluent Japanese, and can tell you that, although the average American phone makes me shake my head in pity for the crap that is forced upon my fellow countrymen, the iPhone is definitely on par with what Japan has to offer. Japanese phones usually go for design over functionality, with innovations being focused on screen quality, the built-in camera, and music playback ability.
However, phones here are just as closed as in the States, so as to charge the user as much as possible for access to each carrier's unique flavor of internet access and multimedia content. Want access to the regular internet? Each time you start up a session and connect to a page, they charge you 300 yen for the privilege. My Japanese friends were impressed that I had figured out how to get around Docomo's file-naming obfuscation on my SD card so that I was able to upload photos and video as well as download them without having to use the network.
By the way, a correction to your rule of thumb: the cooler something is, the more Japanes talk about it. They're all about giving kudos, and I got sufficient compliments for my iPod Touch. I just had a high school student write an essay where she claimed that the iPod was the world's greatest invention, and that the iPhone would be even better. If the Japanese aren't saying much about a gadget, it's either because they just really aren't gadget people or you're bragging about it too much. If they're openly belittling something of yours, you're most likely not actually in Japan.
As for the actual article referred to by the submitter, Apple's great triumph was to claim half of the boxed OS sales for October. What kind of a statistic is that? Most new PCs are sold with Windows pre-installed, not boxed; hardly anybody buys it separately. So what Apple is saying is that more Apple users went out and bought the new OS for their old computer than PC users bought a boxed version of Windows. How surprising is that statistic? What percentage of the Windows-using public actually ever consider upgrading the OS separate from buying a new computer?
I'm a Mac user, but Macs are only slightly better represented in Japan than anywhere else. Apple lost a lot of market share in the 90s that it has failed to take back, and Microsoft's site-wide licenses work well with Japanese corporate and government institutional mentality. japanese typically admit to liking Macs, but a lot of the universal stereotypes carry over (too expensive), plus they want something that they know works with everybody else.
You're forgetting that Yahoo's operation in China is staffed by Chinese. If Yahoo didn't comply, there might be a real chance for real people to go to jail who really didn't feel like it. It's all good and fine for th e mothership to give you its blessing up until the point the police are knocking on your door.
Philosophically, it's morally dispicable for Yahoo as a corporate entity. However, you have to wonder what the view was like from China.
Except that, in the case of locations like restaurants, theaters, etc., you don't have to use a cell phone to dial 911. Those businesses have wired land lines to take care of such situations, and they're likely to be less hysterical about it, too. The only time I can see a cell phone jammer as being honestly obnoxious is somebody carrying it around on their person just to be obnoxious.
There was a time before cell phones, and nobody thought twice about how they were going to call 911. They just figured they'd ask the restaurant or theater people to do it for them. Guess what? You can still do that.
I really couldn't care less if she's been a saint since she escaped or if she claims to be innocent So you're admitting that you really don't care if the person is innocent, just as long as the system functions? Easy to say until it's your turn. Obviously the system is fundamentally flawed if we don't care if the person is innocent or not. The whole point of justice is in trying to punish those with actual guilt, not just anybody that the system arbitrarily decides is guilty. Also, the statute of limitations is important; justice is not served when 35 years have passed and the person has committed no further crimes.
Of course it's going to cost money; this is something that's intended to benefit everybody, so everybody gets to pay. Seems fair. Unfortunately, something as intangible as environmental protection simply isn't going to be popular, so people complain. I agree that there are bound to be problems with attempts to regulate pollution, and people will point fingers and say how one cock-up is exactly why this is a bad idea, even if we manage to succeed somewhere else. In the end, it's all a matter of "you gotta start somewhere." Contrary to popular belief, it's not going to get better on its own.
What does coffee have to do with it? Whoa, you freaked me out for a second; I thought they'd finally found the killer drawback to my dark java mistress. Since I drink mine black, I don't have to worry about cancer (or diabetes) inducing sugars being involved. If I die, it'll be by caffeine alone.
I seriously doubt that somebody has invented a device that allows you to restore digitally masked footage. First of all, where does the clean sample come from? Second of all, those digital squares are a bit large; while you could manage to perhaps create a fuzzy, oddly greyish looking bit of genetalia, it would lack any realistic detail. Maybe in a Hollywood sci-fi movie, but not in real life. I've seen Japanese porn, and I've worked in television effects for more than ten years; this is definitely news to me. Degrading, easy; bringing it back? Holy grail territory, there. You could make a fortune with software like that.
But that's not realistic. Pretty code takes time, and companies hire you to meet deadlines with a product that works, not make perfect code. The whole point of this conversation is that one of the lesser-known reasons to keep things hidden is to keep your ugly mistakes from coming to light.
According to the article from golem.de, the engine does indeed support several 3D rendering methods: OpenGL for OSX, DirectX 9 for Vista and XP, the DirectX equivalent on the 360, and a proprietary rendering engine for the PS3. id claims that 90% of the code is used across all platforms, meaning that portability becomes relatively trivial (according to id.) They even had four displays connected to four different game platforms, each running a demo of the game simultaneously so that viewers could see that there were no noticeable differences in the rendering quality or framerate (each one was running smoothly at 60fps.)
Re:If the journalist was stupid enough to sign it.
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They do usually say that, yes. However, if you fail to neglect to say who you signed the NDA with, who's to say you're talking about the same one? "Oh, the one I was talking about was with *another* company. I can't tell you who, though, because I'm bound by an NDA."
You mean attempted increase in crime. Since the criminals wouldn't be able to see anything, they would make themselves stand out since they'd have to resort to using flashlights. The article points this out, btw.
So you're saying that the ninja would use the pretense of helping the guy up as a chance to stab him, and then hope that nobody would notice the dead body and rapidly expanding pool of blood while he made good his escape? Interesting technique. I have to agree, I think somebody was pulling your leg.
The idea of a ninja posing as a good Samaritan with his face exposed in public, not to mention in broad daylight is a good one, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Downfall to be replaced by what? I agree that I'm less than happy with where Adobe has gone culturally in the last few years, but they've got less competition than Microsoft. There is simply nothing to replace them, period. Macromedia was the last thing standing between them and a total monopoly. Now, here we are.
The best part is, people will continue buying iPods regardless, and Apple's sacred cash cow will remain alive and well, except that users will complain that Amazon needs to integrate with iTunes so as to make their download experience easier.
But only when it's running on a 64-bit chip. By that argument, it's no better than Vista (ignoring Microsoft's 32 and 64-bit version split.)
>How do you define good? Is music created by people who don't respect their audience good?
It can be, yes. If moral values dictated the quality of a person's art, then art as we know it would probably never have evolved. Good artists can also love the music, or the art, or whatever, and merely see the audience as a necessary evil. If the music isn't received well, then the artist is just as likely to blame the audience for being ignorant as they are for blaming themselves for creating bad music.
Even the most well-intended artists who really want to connect with their audience and find people who love their music as much as they do may not be the best contract negotiators. Artists are not well known for managing themselves well, and people good at managing are not always considered the most artistic people in the world. Many artists who have entered into these kinds of contracts may have thought they were necessary evils at the time and that they would win free of them later once they'd made it big. However, real life isn't always that clear cut, an the people who are writing the contracts know how to make them stick. Hence the current culture and the power of the recording labels.
Do you think this is new? Michelangelo is one of the most famous artists of all times, but was notoriously anti-social, was only able to make his art because of the sponsorship of powerful patrons, and still managed to die in poverty after a long and successful career.
Would you prefer to limit it to a few people whose only differentiating trait is that they're incredibly rich or happen to be in power? People with wealth and power are not typically known for their high moral standards.
If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like.
That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.
Here's the important question - I am toying with buying the HD-DVD or BluRay version, but I haven't committed to a player yet. As an American living in Japan, region locking is a big issue for me. From what I can Google, BluRay is still region-locked, but in a way that works for me (Japan and the US are lumped together.) I see conflicting information that HD-DVD was supposed to be region free, but now maybe it's not, and there's no news more recent than 2006 to help me decide. Does anybody know how this finally settled out?
What you're suggesting is that you don't care about the livelihood of the people who supply you with the information you read every day on the web. Sure, they could stop publishing tomorrow, but then we'd all have to go back to hobbies that don't involve reading on the computer.
Sailboats can be used in winds over 10mph. That is, if you've ever sailed on anything over 20 feet in length. Otherwise, areas like the Roaring Forties below South America would be nigh unto impassible.
The article also goes on to say that the professor reading a poem to his students is a public performance. This is just flat wrong. Classroom != public. The performance of the work in this case is permitted.
One of the things I disagreed with from the article is the claim of copyright infringement for passing out copies of a published article within class. As a teacher, I specifically looked up the law on this one when our local board of education raised concerns that showing movies in class might be copyright infringement; as it turns out, allowing students to view a copyrighted work within the classroom is allowed, even if it's a privately owned DVD with only a home viewing license. At the very worst, you could require that the students return the materials to the teacher at the end of class.
The reason that predators have the bodies that they do is that they have to go chase after their prey and burn up a lot of energy patiently stalking their next meal. They also sleep a lot in order to conserve energy, since their meals have the annoying habit of not wanting to be eaten, making them less plentiful than, say, grass, which is pretty much everywhere and is far less likely to struggle.
I was under the impression that even permanent residence had to be renewed every three years, just like any other Japanese visa? It used to be that any Japanese visa beyond tourist would allow you to stand in the citizen's line (up until now.)
Interestingly enough, I was told in America that they definitely wanted my Japanese wife and I to go through the citizen's line in customs, otherwise it mucks up the paperwork. ("It says here you're traveling with family, where are they?")
Also, I was offended to see a sign in Japanese in Kansai Airport this last summer that apologized to other Japanese if they had to wait behind foreigners before getting processed. I guess the number of visa-carrying foreigners is increasing and putting the natives out. It's not the sentiment that bothers me, it's the audacity of posting the sign.
I have lived in Japan for five years now, speak fluent Japanese, and can tell you that, although the average American phone makes me shake my head in pity for the crap that is forced upon my fellow countrymen, the iPhone is definitely on par with what Japan has to offer. Japanese phones usually go for design over functionality, with innovations being focused on screen quality, the built-in camera, and music playback ability.
However, phones here are just as closed as in the States, so as to charge the user as much as possible for access to each carrier's unique flavor of internet access and multimedia content. Want access to the regular internet? Each time you start up a session and connect to a page, they charge you 300 yen for the privilege. My Japanese friends were impressed that I had figured out how to get around Docomo's file-naming obfuscation on my SD card so that I was able to upload photos and video as well as download them without having to use the network.
By the way, a correction to your rule of thumb: the cooler something is, the more Japanes talk about it. They're all about giving kudos, and I got sufficient compliments for my iPod Touch. I just had a high school student write an essay where she claimed that the iPod was the world's greatest invention, and that the iPhone would be even better. If the Japanese aren't saying much about a gadget, it's either because they just really aren't gadget people or you're bragging about it too much. If they're openly belittling something of yours, you're most likely not actually in Japan.
As for the actual article referred to by the submitter, Apple's great triumph was to claim half of the boxed OS sales for October. What kind of a statistic is that? Most new PCs are sold with Windows pre-installed, not boxed; hardly anybody buys it separately. So what Apple is saying is that more Apple users went out and bought the new OS for their old computer than PC users bought a boxed version of Windows. How surprising is that statistic? What percentage of the Windows-using public actually ever consider upgrading the OS separate from buying a new computer?
I'm a Mac user, but Macs are only slightly better represented in Japan than anywhere else. Apple lost a lot of market share in the 90s that it has failed to take back, and Microsoft's site-wide licenses work well with Japanese corporate and government institutional mentality. japanese typically admit to liking Macs, but a lot of the universal stereotypes carry over (too expensive), plus they want something that they know works with everybody else.
You're forgetting that Yahoo's operation in China is staffed by Chinese. If Yahoo didn't comply, there might be a real chance for real people to go to jail who really didn't feel like it. It's all good and fine for th e mothership to give you its blessing up until the point the police are knocking on your door.
Philosophically, it's morally dispicable for Yahoo as a corporate entity. However, you have to wonder what the view was like from China.
Except that, in the case of locations like restaurants, theaters, etc., you don't have to use a cell phone to dial 911. Those businesses have wired land lines to take care of such situations, and they're likely to be less hysterical about it, too. The only time I can see a cell phone jammer as being honestly obnoxious is somebody carrying it around on their person just to be obnoxious.
There was a time before cell phones, and nobody thought twice about how they were going to call 911. They just figured they'd ask the restaurant or theater people to do it for them. Guess what? You can still do that.
Of course it's going to cost money; this is something that's intended to benefit everybody, so everybody gets to pay. Seems fair. Unfortunately, something as intangible as environmental protection simply isn't going to be popular, so people complain. I agree that there are bound to be problems with attempts to regulate pollution, and people will point fingers and say how one cock-up is exactly why this is a bad idea, even if we manage to succeed somewhere else. In the end, it's all a matter of "you gotta start somewhere." Contrary to popular belief, it's not going to get better on its own.
What does coffee have to do with it? Whoa, you freaked me out for a second; I thought they'd finally found the killer drawback to my dark java mistress. Since I drink mine black, I don't have to worry about cancer (or diabetes) inducing sugars being involved. If I die, it'll be by caffeine alone.
I seriously doubt that somebody has invented a device that allows you to restore digitally masked footage. First of all, where does the clean sample come from? Second of all, those digital squares are a bit large; while you could manage to perhaps create a fuzzy, oddly greyish looking bit of genetalia, it would lack any realistic detail. Maybe in a Hollywood sci-fi movie, but not in real life. I've seen Japanese porn, and I've worked in television effects for more than ten years; this is definitely news to me. Degrading, easy; bringing it back? Holy grail territory, there. You could make a fortune with software like that.
But that's not realistic. Pretty code takes time, and companies hire you to meet deadlines with a product that works, not make perfect code. The whole point of this conversation is that one of the lesser-known reasons to keep things hidden is to keep your ugly mistakes from coming to light.
According to the article from golem.de, the engine does indeed support several 3D rendering methods: OpenGL for OSX, DirectX 9 for Vista and XP, the DirectX equivalent on the 360, and a proprietary rendering engine for the PS3. id claims that 90% of the code is used across all platforms, meaning that portability becomes relatively trivial (according to id.) They even had four displays connected to four different game platforms, each running a demo of the game simultaneously so that viewers could see that there were no noticeable differences in the rendering quality or framerate (each one was running smoothly at 60fps.)
They do usually say that, yes. However, if you fail to neglect to say who you signed the NDA with, who's to say you're talking about the same one? "Oh, the one I was talking about was with *another* company. I can't tell you who, though, because I'm bound by an NDA."
You mean attempted increase in crime. Since the criminals wouldn't be able to see anything, they would make themselves stand out since they'd have to resort to using flashlights. The article points this out, btw.
So you're saying that the ninja would use the pretense of helping the guy up as a chance to stab him, and then hope that nobody would notice the dead body and rapidly expanding pool of blood while he made good his escape? Interesting technique. I have to agree, I think somebody was pulling your leg.
The idea of a ninja posing as a good Samaritan with his face exposed in public, not to mention in broad daylight is a good one, though.