That's the way things are in the current world, and it's the way they've been for over a half of a century. For better or worse, technology evolves and when there is an opening to make everyday life easier for a reasonable price, it *will* be filled. If the PVR concept truly takes off and becomes ubiquitous, the broadcast networks will no longer be viable. Even if only half the population uses them, they lose half the budget that normally would go into show production. The quality and quantity of shows goes downhill, and networks like HBO which have subscription-based revenue streams will make their original offerings even more attractive. Once this happens, more and more people will be attracted to the pay model, and the cycle feeds itself.
A lot of people complain about cable, saying "I'm paying for 150 channels when I only actually use 5 of them". With the onset of digital cable and satellite, along with pay-per-view, I think a more sustainable model for the future is "micropayment pay-per-view". Want a season pass to Boston Public? Sure, it's $1 per episode with unskippable ads, or $2 per episode without ads. We'll give you a 10% discount if you order the whole season at once.
Why would this work? For most people, it'd be cheaper or at most the same as what they're already paying. If they go on vacation for a couple weeks, either it doesn't cost them anything, or they'll be able to catch up on the shows when they get back. For the networks, they get fine-grained details of what people are watching, and will be able to easily manage their schedules. They could have special promotions for free showings of good but unpopular shows. And they'd be freed from the competition amongst the other networks for prime slots.
I've got about 30+ O'Reilly books, Design Patterns, Stroustrap C++, etc. They're out there if you look long enough. LimeWire has also been a big help in it as well.
You can find a wealth of PDF/PS/HTML/etc copies of computer texts online. Kazaa is a good place to start. Obviously, only download the books you have physical copies of.:-)
I've been dedicating my cycles voluntarily to UD for many months now. It's a great cause and they seem like a good and upstanding group. If they end up partnering with these bozos and allowing their research to be turned into an involuntary virus, I'll certainly pull my machines from the pool. It's important work that they do, but there are others to choose from.
Sure, it's hard to put down a copy of "The Shocking History of Phosphorus". But when it comes to relating to the kids of today and teaching them science, nobody kicks it like MC Hawking. As an example of his clear and concise educational style, explaining the difficult concept of entropy:
Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw. The second law is quite precise about where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun! That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about, you're now down with a discount.
This has been bugging me forever. Nobody is saying that they need to remove the browser from the OS, they just need to disable it. How hard is it to remove the icons for it, and disable the "internet http browser" aspect until the user voluntarily downloads a tiny piece of plug-in code which enables the browser to work with internet protocols? If the world's largest and most powerful software company can't figure out how to do this, then how in the world are they getting big business to pay them millions of dollars to manage their mission critical software?
Spam filtering is one possible application of this type of tool, but the more useful involves taking the mail you *do* want, and sorting it into logical buckets. For instance, let's say work on several open source projects, belong to a couple organizations, and have a real-life job. You could toss a filter in your email that scans each incoming message and throws it in the proper bucket. This allows you to logically separate your mail to reduce confusion of each non-overlapping category.
Procmail only goes so far, it's really only useful for simple header scanning.. I could really see a good scanner utility being a valuable tool. Maybe Google should share some of their technology..:-)
Welcome to Trading Cubes, the show where two techies trade jobs for one year to see who can make a bigger mess out of their respective employers! Today we have Rashib Akalam of InterCorp and John Williams of the Department of Defense. Rashib has been struggling lately with his new widget inventory project, and is hoping that John can come in and make sense of the tangled lines of Ada code. John has been having a lot of troubles lately with his missile guidance system, and is hoping that Rashib can prevent another "oopsy".
Will John get his widgets straight? Will Rashib blow up China? Let's trade cubes!
..should be an ad with picture of a tiny house, with no doors and a single closed window with heavy bars on it. A bright smiling sun shines above the house, with children outside dancing freely in the summer sun.
The HTML is pretty bad and won't render under Netscape. Anyone care to fix it up for the lazy ones of us who are too lazy to search through the source for the images?
Yahoo! PayDirect is FDIC insured (up to $100,000), is a real bank (HSBC), and is not being investigated or sued by anybody.:-) As an added bonus, I'm fairly sure it's cheaper than PayPal.
He's said that he would learn from the mistakes of others, and not create additional features for subscribers that cost more to maintain than they generate in revenue. I'd imagine this feature would fall under that category. And like the other posts have said, K5 does that already.
I live in Silicon Valley and I'd buy it. There are still a number of spots in the valley that can't get DSL/Cable Modem/etc, for instance here in Campbell. A friend in Santa Clara was able to get broadband only about a year ago.
If this is actually the way Sun is reacting, then they're even more foolish than I'd imagined (which would be a feat in and of itself). Sun is going to piss off its last remaining friends simply to make a tiny dent in Microsoft's bottom line? That's not how business works -- every action done should result in a net positive cashflow as a reaction. Companies, especially public companies that are in touble as it is, don't have the time or money to play these kinds of games. Microsoft is over 10x the size of Sun. Sun isn't going to win a David and Goliath battle by aiming for Microsoft's big toe.
At any rate, I sincerely doubt that Microsoft would need to lower prices even if Sun did have some success with Star Office. MS Office is king by a tremendous margin. Did Microsoft lower the prices of Windows when Linux became a "viable competitor" with a fairly large percentage of desktops? Nope.
Newsflash: It's just been discovered that Microsoft has been working with the CIA to track your every move on the web! Last week, l33t hackers in Germany discovered that Internet Explorer has a covert feature, which they have codenamed "Browser History". They found that by clicking on a little button on the browser, Internet Explorer *KNEW* where you'd been browsing! Surely it must have been storing some kind of list of the sites you've been visiting, and therefore it's clear that it's a consipracy against *YOU*. The FBI and CIA both know everything -- your only option is to throw your computer into the sea and leave the country.
Hmm.. that's great to hear, but I wonder when those of us living in the ever-primative Silicon Valley will be able to get broadband. I live in Campbell (which basically borders Santa Clara to the south and San Jose to the west), and I still can't get DSL or cable modem service here. In fact, a friend of mine who lives in central Santa Clara was able to get DSL only a year ago or so. When I first arrived a couple years ago, Pac Bell babbled something about "Project Pronto" which was supposed to be finished by Summer 2000 (of course, it wasn't). Has anyone heard any information about this?
I'm having a race with my parents in rural Ohio to see who will get broadband first..
The very fact that this got as far as it did shows a ton about our legal system. A company with relatively deep pockets is able to force a guy to go to court and pay two lawyers to fight a frivilous lawsuit.
If I were him, I would file a countersuit. He registered the domain in 1990, and since the company didn't file for the trademark until 1997, he might have a lawsuit for *them* for trying to name their company to take advantage of his domain's popularity.;-)
See this page for part of a description of why it's a pain. It simply won't work under redhat due to library incompatibilities. Even doing this didn't *quite* fix it.
Let's combine this scheme along with the one from a couple weeks ago where they compressed random data by 100x! You could fit 1000x the data over existing cable lines.;-)
I'm sure this is just wishful thinking, but having just gone through the absolutely painful process of getting Oracle to run on RedHat linux, perhaps this move will eliminate the need to use a certain version of a certain distrobution to make it run. *shrugs*
Despite the gross limitation of the 128kbps sound quality (ugh), this device has one incredibly compelling feature for the concert taper. It is able to handle both microphone and line in (from the soundboard) *simultaneously*, called a matrix. Before this, it took a *lot* of equipment in order to do this (on the low end, a small mixer and a DAT deck or on the high end, a small recording studio).
Why does that matter? Recordings made with *only* microphones sound very distant, they contain a lot of croud noise, and are unusable for professional recordings. Recordings made from *only* the soundboard sound really flat and thin, you hardly pick up any audience at all, and often times in smaller venues, some instruments aren't even run through the soundboard (such as drums). By combining the two feeds, what results is the best of both worlds, and is how every professional live recording is made.
This device takes a huge step forward in technology for tapers, but not quite a big enough one. For one, the bit rate is far too low. Most tapers are audiophiles, and would never consider using less than 160 or 192, or most would even want it lossless. It's be also nice to offer higher bit rates as well as compressed full-quality (the SHN format comes to mind).
Also, while you get the chance to record mic and line in, it takes these four discrete channels and mixes them in realtime down into the standard 2 stereo channels. In the ideal world, it'd maintain the 4 channels, pass it to the computer that way, and allow you to muck with the levels that way. That way you could shift the soundboard portion ahead a few ms (due to the speed of sound slowing the microphone feed).
Enhance this device with those features, maybe add a bit more space, and you will sell one of these to every taper in the universe. What a godsend that would be!
Slashdot Mirror
That's the way things are in the current world, and it's the way they've been for over a half of a century. For better or worse, technology evolves and when there is an opening to make everyday life easier for a reasonable price, it *will* be filled. If the PVR concept truly takes off and becomes ubiquitous, the broadcast networks will no longer be viable. Even if only half the population uses them, they lose half the budget that normally would go into show production. The quality and quantity of shows goes downhill, and networks like HBO which have subscription-based revenue streams will make their original offerings even more attractive. Once this happens, more and more people will be attracted to the pay model, and the cycle feeds itself.
A lot of people complain about cable, saying "I'm paying for 150 channels when I only actually use 5 of them". With the onset of digital cable and satellite, along with pay-per-view, I think a more sustainable model for the future is "micropayment pay-per-view". Want a season pass to Boston Public? Sure, it's $1 per episode with unskippable ads, or $2 per episode without ads. We'll give you a 10% discount if you order the whole season at once.
Why would this work? For most people, it'd be cheaper or at most the same as what they're already paying. If they go on vacation for a couple weeks, either it doesn't cost them anything, or they'll be able to catch up on the shows when they get back. For the networks, they get fine-grained details of what people are watching, and will be able to easily manage their schedules. They could have special promotions for free showings of good but unpopular shows. And they'd be freed from the competition amongst the other networks for prime slots.
I've got about 30+ O'Reilly books, Design Patterns, Stroustrap C++, etc. They're out there if you look long enough. LimeWire has also been a big help in it as well.
You can find a wealth of PDF/PS/HTML/etc copies of computer texts online. Kazaa is a good place to start. Obviously, only download the books you have physical copies of. :-)
I've been dedicating my cycles voluntarily to UD for many months now. It's a great cause and they seem like a good and upstanding group. If they end up partnering with these bozos and allowing their research to be turned into an involuntary virus, I'll certainly pull my machines from the pool. It's important work that they do, but there are others to choose from.
This has been bugging me forever. Nobody is saying that they need to remove the browser from the OS, they just need to disable it. How hard is it to remove the icons for it, and disable the "internet http browser" aspect until the user voluntarily downloads a tiny piece of plug-in code which enables the browser to work with internet protocols? If the world's largest and most powerful software company can't figure out how to do this, then how in the world are they getting big business to pay them millions of dollars to manage their mission critical software?
Spam filtering is one possible application of this type of tool, but the more useful involves taking the mail you *do* want, and sorting it into logical buckets. For instance, let's say work on several open source projects, belong to a couple organizations, and have a real-life job. You could toss a filter in your email that scans each incoming message and throws it in the proper bucket. This allows you to logically separate your mail to reduce confusion of each non-overlapping category.
:-)
Procmail only goes so far, it's really only useful for simple header scanning.. I could really see a good scanner utility being a valuable tool. Maybe Google should share some of their technology..
You'll need to update Microsoft and have them reset your passport everytime you get a haircut..
Welcome to Trading Cubes, the show where two techies trade jobs for one year to see who can make a bigger mess out of their respective employers! Today we have Rashib Akalam of InterCorp and John Williams of the Department of Defense. Rashib has been struggling lately with his new widget inventory project, and is hoping that John can come in and make sense of the tangled lines of Ada code. John has been having a lot of troubles lately with his missile guidance system, and is hoping that Rashib can prevent another "oopsy".
Will John get his widgets straight? Will Rashib blow up China? Let's trade cubes!
This reminds me a ton of when Homer was hired by his brother to design the ultimate car, the "car of the common man". Ugh. :-)
..should be an ad with picture of a tiny house, with no doors and a single closed window with heavy bars on it. A bright smiling sun shines above the house, with children outside dancing freely in the summer sun.
The HTML is pretty bad and won't render under Netscape. Anyone care to fix it up for the lazy ones of us who are too lazy to search through the source for the images?
Yahoo! PayDirect is FDIC insured (up to $100,000), is a real bank (HSBC), and is not being investigated or sued by anybody. :-) As an added bonus, I'm fairly sure it's cheaper than PayPal.
http://paydirect.yahoo.com/
He's said that he would learn from the mistakes of others, and not create additional features for subscribers that cost more to maintain than they generate in revenue. I'd imagine this feature would fall under that category. And like the other posts have said, K5 does that already.
..because they sure are going to great lengths to make it look like their prior art goes back a ways:
Last updated on Wed 31 Dec 1969 04:00:00 PM PST
;-)
I live in Silicon Valley and I'd buy it. There are still a number of spots in the valley that can't get DSL/Cable Modem/etc, for instance here in Campbell. A friend in Santa Clara was able to get broadband only about a year ago.
If this is actually the way Sun is reacting, then they're even more foolish than I'd imagined (which would be a feat in and of itself). Sun is going to piss off its last remaining friends simply to make a tiny dent in Microsoft's bottom line? That's not how business works -- every action done should result in a net positive cashflow as a reaction. Companies, especially public companies that are in touble as it is, don't have the time or money to play these kinds of games. Microsoft is over 10x the size of Sun. Sun isn't going to win a David and Goliath battle by aiming for Microsoft's big toe.
At any rate, I sincerely doubt that Microsoft would need to lower prices even if Sun did have some success with Star Office. MS Office is king by a tremendous margin. Did Microsoft lower the prices of Windows when Linux became a "viable competitor" with a fairly large percentage of desktops? Nope.
Newsflash: It's just been discovered that Microsoft has been working with the CIA to track your every move on the web! Last week, l33t hackers in Germany discovered that Internet Explorer has a covert feature, which they have codenamed "Browser History". They found that by clicking on a little button on the browser, Internet Explorer *KNEW* where you'd been browsing! Surely it must have been storing some kind of list of the sites you've been visiting, and therefore it's clear that it's a consipracy against *YOU*. The FBI and CIA both know everything -- your only option is to throw your computer into the sea and leave the country.
Hmm.. that's great to hear, but I wonder when those of us living in the ever-primative Silicon Valley will be able to get broadband. I live in Campbell (which basically borders Santa Clara to the south and San Jose to the west), and I still can't get DSL or cable modem service here. In fact, a friend of mine who lives in central Santa Clara was able to get DSL only a year ago or so. When I first arrived a couple years ago, Pac Bell babbled something about "Project Pronto" which was supposed to be finished by Summer 2000 (of course, it wasn't). Has anyone heard any information about this?
I'm having a race with my parents in rural Ohio to see who will get broadband first..
The very fact that this got as far as it did shows a ton about our legal system. A company with relatively deep pockets is able to force a guy to go to court and pay two lawyers to fight a frivilous lawsuit.
;-)
If I were him, I would file a countersuit. He registered the domain in 1990, and since the company didn't file for the trademark until 1997, he might have a lawsuit for *them* for trying to name their company to take advantage of his domain's popularity.
See this page for part of a description of why it's a pain. It simply won't work under redhat due to library incompatibilities. Even doing this didn't *quite* fix it.
Let's combine this scheme along with the one from a couple weeks ago where they compressed random data by 100x! You could fit 1000x the data over existing cable lines. ;-)
I'm sure this is just wishful thinking, but having just gone through the absolutely painful process of getting Oracle to run on RedHat linux, perhaps this move will eliminate the need to use a certain version of a certain distrobution to make it run. *shrugs*
Despite the gross limitation of the 128kbps sound quality (ugh), this device has one incredibly compelling feature for the concert taper. It is able to handle both microphone and line in (from the soundboard) *simultaneously*, called a matrix. Before this, it took a *lot* of equipment in order to do this (on the low end, a small mixer and a DAT deck or on the high end, a small recording studio).
Why does that matter? Recordings made with *only* microphones sound very distant, they contain a lot of croud noise, and are unusable for professional recordings. Recordings made from *only* the soundboard sound really flat and thin, you hardly pick up any audience at all, and often times in smaller venues, some instruments aren't even run through the soundboard (such as drums). By combining the two feeds, what results is the best of both worlds, and is how every professional live recording is made.
This device takes a huge step forward in technology for tapers, but not quite a big enough one. For one, the bit rate is far too low. Most tapers are audiophiles, and would never consider using less than 160 or 192, or most would even want it lossless. It's be also nice to offer higher bit rates as well as compressed full-quality (the SHN format comes to mind).
Also, while you get the chance to record mic and line in, it takes these four discrete channels and mixes them in realtime down into the standard 2 stereo channels. In the ideal world, it'd maintain the 4 channels, pass it to the computer that way, and allow you to muck with the levels that way. That way you could shift the soundboard portion ahead a few ms (due to the speed of sound slowing the microphone feed).
Enhance this device with those features, maybe add a bit more space, and you will sell one of these to every taper in the universe. What a godsend that would be!