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Hacking the Starbuck's Muzak Machine?
llamaluvr asks: "My friend is employed at a Starbucks coffeehouse, and he told me about a system they use for controlling what kind of music is played in the store. The machine can only play a particular type of CD, which contains 90-100 songs that "expire" after awhile, and is appearantly compiled/ produced by Hear Music, a subsidary of Starbucks. PlayNetwork is in charge of the the hardware. Anyway, he and his fellow employees are sick of Starbucks lame playlists, and they can't use normal CDs, as the machine tells them that the CDs are "expired". Does anybody know anything about how this system works? Is it at all possible to make a CD on your own that can be played on these machines?"
Netcraft has confirmed: Taco-snotting is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
Fact: Taco-snotting is dead.
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
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Starbucks's Muzak is slightly annoying, by not so much that it distracts me from my reading; nor is it loud enough to overpower my head phones.
I suppose it's somewhat "hip" music, picked by a demographer at Starbucks to appeal to their yuppie customers and above all not to offend customers or in any way frustrate those customers in their quest to give Starbucks $5.00 for a cup of coffee.
And that's a good thing. I'm no fan of corporate blandness or lowest common denominator marketing, but...
A Starbucks employee is often a pierced-nosed, tattooed counter-culture wanna-be, and there is no way I'm going to enjoy my Venti Mocha Frap listening to what that employee wants to hear.
I know this makes me sound old and curmudgeonly, but I've always been this way.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
they can't use normal CDs, as the machine tells them that the CDs are "expired".
Easy. Use Consumer Activism. Report a fault to the equipment supplier each time it refuses to play a CD. This drives up their costs, therefore their prices and reduces their competitiveness. Eventually Starbucks will get the message and start using not fault equipment.
Why on earth would you think he'd "come bitching about it"? Unlike many posters here, the Starbucks employee in question displays the creativity, intelligence, and spark to want to understand how something works and how it can be changed, and therefore can be assumed to be intelligent enough to have a basic grasp on the potential consequences.
It's really sad to see all these "It's Starbucks' machine, you have no right to think about it or tinker with it" messages. More shocking still are those that claim it's "immoral" to tinker with it.
It's immoral to do something that will hurt someone.
The tinkerer receives no material advantage for tinkering, and the consequences for messing with it are pretty clear. Starbucks has a clear path of redress and we can be sure they'll take advantage of it if it suits them.
This is on par with photocopying your butt on the office copier. Is it smart? Maybe not. Is it funny or interesting? Maybe, depending on the context. Is it immoral? No.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS