arstechnica.com
They have been watching the goings-on at E3 this week, especially the long-awaited (and much-doubted) appearance of the Phantom Console. Calvin (among others) had serious misgivings as to whether Infinium could deliver the goods. Sure, I was skeptical about the company delivering a product. Now that they (seem) to have done that, I'm skeptical about them coming up with US$30 worth of content for me every month. On the flip side, the plan seems to be financially sound, as long as people subscribe. Too often a company comes out promising the world for the low, low price of $X dollars a month, only to go out of business because they really needed $5X a month to stay afloat. Once it is released this fall, we'll find out if it's a yawner or not. In addition to the coverage of the not-quite-a-PC, not-quite-a-console, Calvin and WyldKard ponder the Star Wars gaming universe, bleeding-edge gaming card angst, and a good old Internet time-waster.
The gist of it is pretty simple: the RIAA has their own tracking system based on units shipped, while Nielsen Ratings bases their Soundscan tracking system on actual barcode-scanned purchases. The problem is that Soundscan shows a 10% increase in music sales when comparing the first quarter of 2004 to 1Q 2003. Avalon suggests that sales aren't down, only shipments are. Simple: in the past, the RIAA always shipped considerably more units than were sold. Retails stores simply want less inventory, so they order less, even though they are selling more. Roger Goff, an Entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles confirms that, indeed, retail has reacted this way in the Post-Napster era.
" In other words, retail has adapted to more of an "on demand" model (similar to the Internet) as opposed to the, accepting-tons-of-product-shoved-down-the-pipeline model record companies imposed on them in the past. In other words, the supposedly woeful state of CD sales isn't all that woeful after all. Retail outlets have been working hard to keep up with online competition, and part of that has meant following the rule of Dell: don't have inventory if you can avoid it. The problem is, if this report is correct, then something seriously wrong is afoot. If more units are being sold and fewer units are being shipped, then that means the total cost-per-CD is actually in the RIAA's favor. That is, with all things being equal, more sales and fewer shipments ads up to more profit than before, because there's less overrun and less returns from retailers who can't move product.
The Library is believed to be the greatest library of the ancient world, rivaled only by the Library at Pergamon, which was built many years later by Attalid kings hoping to recreate the glory of Greece. As fate would have it, Marc Antony would make a gift of several thousand scrolls from the Pergamene library to the library at Alexandria (for his dear Cleopatra, no less), only for history to see most (if not all) of those holdings destroyed in a tragic fire. No one knows for sure, but the library housed in the area of 500,000 scrolls (some would say 700,000, some would say less). It was a travesty for civilization in the West, and as a result we often have to rely on poor medieval witnesses to ancient literature, although we are also blessed with many Arabic copies of the works of Aristotle, Plato, and the like. Much, much more was lost, however, and we must always remember that the voices that speak to us from the age of Pericles are only a tiny few of those that were once read aloud in the Library's halls. The Library did not house "works by Socrates," despite what the BBC said. Socrates did not produce literary works, and even the ancients knew of Plato's hand in the dialogues. The library was designed as a mausoleum for Alexander the Great, but his body never made it there. Built by Ptolemy II Soter, the library was part of an overall house built for the honor of the Muses. Many libraries in the west are also designed in a similar fashion, with a central "tomb" area in the middle. Widener Library at Harvard University is designed as such, and the central tomb area lays vacant, as the library was built with funds donated by a relative of a man who died on the Titanic.
The announcement breaks quite a bit of silence as to when Longhorn Server is expected to ship and what features it may contain. Targeted for 2007, roughly a year after the Longhorn desktop release, the server release will support Indigo, Microsoft's new Web services architecture, and sundry other things such as dynamic partition management. In a rather curious development, the company is also saying that it has planned the future service pack release dates for Longhorn server. As it turns out, the company is transitioning to a system whereby major server releases are scheduled for every four years, with "updates" to major releases every two years. So, the Longhorn roadmap currently looks like this: 2006 Longhorn desktop release 2007 Longhorn Server 2008 Longhorn Server Service Pack 2009 Update to Longhorn Server 2010 Service Pack for Update to Longhorn Server 2011 The Next Major Server Release The company hopes that a stringent release pattern will help corporate IT types plan their future rollouts with more foresight. Now most IT shops know what they will be running in 2015 if they're running Windows. Beta testing for Longhorn Server is scheduled to begin in the middle of next year. Turning to the more tangible present, the company said that a server update for Windows Server 2003 is planned for later this year. The update will come under the rubric of a service pack, but new features, including support for 64-bit applications, will be bundled in. A fuller update, code-named R2 (probably Release 2), is scheduled for next year and will include support for the company's document rights management service as well as Trustbridge, a company-wide identity management system.
" One form, the so-called "up-skirt shot," involves using small photographic devices to sneak a peak up the dresses of women in public. Such practices are hardly new, but the advent of camera phones and other digital imaging devices is making the issue more pressing, argue lawmakers. The bill, which passed the Senate last September, would prohibit taking covert pictures in locker rooms, bedrooms and other places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Violators would face fines and up to a year in prison under the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, which passed the committee by voice vote.
Whoever, in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, having the intent to capture an improper image of an individual, knowingly does so and that individual's naked or undergarment clad genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or female breast is depicted in the improper image under circumstances in which that individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding such body part or parts, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
Although the image sizes are of course different, you can see the same concept at work. Those of us working with advertisers have seen this coming. Targeting is key, the medium and format is largely assumed to be irrelevant. What will be fun to watch, however, is how targeted image ads fare against the text ads. Assuming that the same algorithm is used, it will be a test of presentation format coupled with the tradeoff of one advertising message (the image) versus multiple messages (the text ads) in the same space.
Dell's Inspiron XPS is aimed squarely at the Alienware crowd). Now Alienware is looking to up the ante with some of their own technology designs, and wouldn't you know their opening salvo has gaming performance written all over it. Video Array is an accelerated graphics processing subsystem that will allow users to add multiple, off-the-shelf video cards to their Alienware computer systems and have both cards process graphic commands in parallel. Understanding the wide-ranging wants and needs of its customers, Alienware designed its solution so that it is not tied to any one specific video card. This design will allow users to take full...
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