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Slashback: Quakery, Lifespans, Barcodes
Just stick around and collect on this bet. mindriot writes "The German climatic researcher Manfred Stock has rejected Stephen Hawking's theory which states that man would not exist on earth for another 1,000 years. To him this seems rather unlikely. Stock expects that, in 50 years, mankind will have switched to alternative power resources. Read the german article here." Oder, wenn Sie nicht Deutsch kann, bitte Babelfish benutzen. It's a much more optimistic view of things, but hardly the words of a Pollyanna.
CD-Rs are cheap, cheap, cheap. David Hume writes: "Fox News is reporting that '[a] three-judge panel decided to allow the popular service to continue allowing users to share music files over the Internet, pending further deliberations.' ... "The judges seemed to need more information from the recording industry and were more antagonistic to the RIAA," said copyright expert Leonard Rubin, who observed the proceedings."'
Overall, it sounds like Napster is taking neither the "shoo-in" or "dropped anchor" tacks that many people predicted. The article points out (and presumably the judge knows) that peer-to-peer file transfers have long since left the gate.
Well, they are the guys who make it, after all! You might remember the stink raised by the release of the Q3 1.25 patch. Now Bob Mintern writes: "iD Software, in hue of their current Point Release for Quake 3 1.25, has released a FAQ highlighting sevral issues of the 1.25 patch and what it breaks. The FAQ can be located here. I wonder when the "offical" patch will work and everything will be normal again..."
After this I'll try to shut up for a while about it, OK? There's been so much about the CueCat that perhaps you (and / or digital convergence) are sick of hearing about it. I pledge not to mention it for at least a week, on penalty of an early bedtime or perhaps more vacation days. But today, you must deal a few I thought were neat ;) First, bk1e asks the musical question: "Why :de:claw your :Cue:Cat when you can get it :spayed in about two minutes with a soldering iron? Simply solder on one jumper and it acts like any other barcode scanner." Heh.
Or, even without doing that, hangel points to this "A CueCat decoder for Zope by stevea," which includes source. Specifically, this one will let you scan in a book's bar code and look it up on Amazon.
Finally, photon317 writes: "There's a make-fun-of-DC site at www.digitaldivergence.org." This I leave to your own judgement, but as R. Crumb might say, not everything is for everybody. Think iBrator.
Okay, I'm probably one of those (lucky/stupid as hell?) few folks who have had a CDR for more than 5 years. I bought my Sony 920S Spressa drive a while ago, and even for its now slow 2x burning speeds, the thing continues to perform. (knock on wood)
Back when I first got the thing, I was lucky enough to even find blank CDR's in stores, much worse... they usually came at a price of about $9.99 to $14.99 each.
Over the past 5 or so years... i've watched the prices of CDR's plummet. Yesterday at Staples, I bought a 50 pack spindle of 80 minute blanks for $14.98. My heart sank into my gut when I saw this. All I had to do was wait about a half decade for everything to literally be a fraction of what it cost me to begin with.
The point I wanted to bring up is that... now that CDR Drives and blanks are essentially dirt cheap, and the software is dumbed-down enough for just about anybody to use it... Why did they get so cheap? The big concern, I thought, was the fact that people could easily make digitally perfect copies for little to no cost.
Compare this to DVD writer blanks and recorders. They've existed for a little while now... In the first two years after I bought my CDR, the prices at least went down by half... To the point to where it was actually cost effective (gasp!) to burn copies.
At this point, the cost of DVD blanks are still high enough to reenforce the argument that DeCSS (while it can be used as a tool for such) wasn't made for piracy... after all, the equipment costs too much and blanks are still higher than the cost of buying the actual DVD release itself.
My question is... with so much concern about MP3's, duplicating CD's, why did the CDR media get so insanely cheap... and why is the DVD media continuing to be so expensive? By now, I expected DVD duplicating media to get cheaper.
At this point, it looks like nobody really cares about what we do with CD's. Even after the advent of MPEG4/DivX;-) compressing DVD films at reasonable quality small enough to fit on a single CDR. What the hell is going on here?
I can't really buy the argument that it costs more to make DVD blanks over CDR blanks. To manufacture DVD's is barely more expensive that CD's... and the scary thing is that I can typically find DVD movies on sale for LESS than music CD's on sale.
Okay, I've rambled on enough. Any other thoughts, folks?
Whee.
Hey, I've been doing my part all evening to spam investment boards about the upcoming Digital Convergence IPO. The more the merrier, though! Bust in! Here's a sample:
Digital Convergence (DGTL) recently filed plans for an IPO. This company gives out free barcode scanners (called "CutCat") and accompanying software. The idea is that you can scan things and their software will pull up an appropriate web page in your browser. On the side, they can collect demographic data. For example, they could determine which gender and age group most often scans a certain type of product.
I think this is a horrible company, a must avoid stock for the following reasons:
These are just my opinions, of course. I did my best to get the facts straight, but I'm not perfect. Additional comments on this corporate disaster slouching toward NASDAQ are available at:
hmm, if one can "decode" a :Cue by sight, thus rendering a brain as a device for circumventing technological ... blah blah, does that make procreating a violation of the DMCA?
If I ever release a new technology (i.e. CueCat), remind me to not choose a name that opens myself up to so many metaphors...
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I know some of you will think this is off-topic, but I think it was the most significant event of the week.
Signal 11 left slashdot.
He provided many insightful comments in addition to his humorous comments, and occasional trolls. We lost a great member of the Slashdot community, and I feel it should be noted.
You can read his farewell speech HERE.