Lots of power companies have sprung up, many cheaper than the standard ones, many completely based on environmentally friendly power. Still, lots of people stick with the old big one because they don't trust these littler companies in case something goes wrong.
That price, many times, is lower because the market is still regulated. The government sets prices so that people will move to the new service provider to create a division in the market. The larger companies are forbiden to lower their prices, and might actually have to raise them.
You should know that most "environmentally friendly" electricity is some of the most expensive juice around. Take wind power. Those fancy fans cost a fortune to make, service and distribute. Oh yeah, the wind moslty blows at low demand periods of the day and year, "Ah, what a wonderful breeze is blowing today. I won't have to run my air conditioner!". These costs have an environmental impact, assides from generating wind currents that eagles can't escape, because they require more activity to support. Think of all the energy that goes into composites manufacure and all of the waste that comes out of it. Think of all the nasty stuff that goes into silicon solar cells.
Electricity deregulation is madness. But hey, I work for an generating company now, so don't listen to me. My company is going to get fat when it's free to charge what it likes. Sing along, "I'm in the money, your stinking money, the good old times are just starting to roll!"
You may consider the charges peanuts, but I find the principle repulsive. You were right to be pissed because you had been decieved. Why are we letting people get away with this?
What's to keep a system like this from rotating numbers from charge to non charge? At 12 it's cheap or part of your service at 1PM it's expensive. Suppose your ISP's number becomes a charge call? Suppose you want to dial a coumputer across town? How do you know that your hour long data exchange is not going to cost you? Such stuff agrivated me when I lived in south Florida where it was difficult to tell.
And the issue the "consumer advocates" have is that you you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at a number whether you were about to make a local or long distance call if you didn't already know. Which you can't necessarily do now ANYWAY, so I don't really understand what their problem with this change is....
Bad argument! Things are bad, so let's make them worse? Bzzzzt!
It is unnaceptable that calls can be charged without your knowledge. Would you eat in a place that did not tell you how much your meal cost until you finished eating? "Oh, but you have to make that call anyway" you might say. No, I do not and I'll make up my mind.
Manufacturing mostly. The percentage of GDP all kinds of manufacturing represents has been falling for 25 years or so. Specifically we can see great downturns in automobile, ship and steel manufacturing.
Not long ago, Silicon Valley marketing guru and venture capitalist Regis McKenna -- for whom I was editing a book -- told me that high-tech leaders who had once made pilgrimages to Japan to understand quality circles and other tools of quality control had lost interest in those buzzwords of the 1980s. They had come to see their product reliability problems as an inevitable side effect of what they excelled at -- innovation at top speed.
"'Act fast and fix the problems later' is how we operate here," Regis said. He showed me a Stanford Computer Industry Project study whose conclusion was that Japan would always lag behind America in software innovation and sales because of a business culture in which perfectionism is rampant. Unlike Japanese computer companies hobbled by elaborate quality control and testing procedures, the Stanford researchers found, American companies accept "good enough" quality for the sake of speed.
So, is this why my Honda drives better than and will outlast your Saturn? Sorry, I don't buy it and neither did the author or should you.
Greed and class strife are killing US industries, not "innovation". Japanese labor now makes more money than US counterparts. That's what happens when you focus on product rather than marketing, and co-operate. My wife and I have seen little innovation in most software since the days of what she calls "Windows 93".
I have not noticed much of the hardware reliability problems lately. In fact, most of my hardware is running better than ever. The software, mostly Free, has revealed the flaws in previous software from Redmond.
My computer performs 100's of tasks? I don't think so. My computer performs the few tasks it was designed for flawlessly. It moves data around its various parts, and manipulates that data when it should. There are hundreds of potential uses for these operations, but you should not confuse machine reliability with software quality. In general, the output of all of my computer operations are confined to screen display, printing, network communications and a few odd noises. All of these things work well.
I used to think I had flaky computers, then I got Linux. Suddenly, my slow cheap junk started doing things for me again and routine tasks became enjoyable. A nicer 650 Athalon runs like a dream, compared to my fromerly lowered expectations. Only one of my computers running any version of Linux has ever crashed hard, and that was because the room was too hot.
I can compare this record to NT where I work. There we have finely made machines with expensive parts that run like crap. "Software updates" are an almost weekly occurance, and uptime of more than a few days is rare.
It's exam week, and I'm going to let off a little steam here. Indulge me as I waste half an hour to jump up and down on the whole concept of WEB ADVERTS while I should be at the books. Yes, I might be a little touchier than usual.
This browser model represents a defeat of all the potential of the web and programable machines in general. By using it, you accept that you have no ability to control your machine and what you chose to view on the web. Free alternatives are available and better.
People seem to talk about bandwith as if they owned it. Let me assure you that they do not! The only bandwith you truly own is your own private network.
The web is a public resource and those advert packets, which may or may not make a living for someone else, get in the way of my packets. I have a cable modem, but I browse with the images and java script off and I refuse cookies that are not returned to the original site. If I want to see a picture, I can request it. One day, I might look into junkbusters.org. It's not a speed issue to me, it's a resource issue for everyone else. Why should I request that stupid flycast crap if I don't have to? I am no more interested in a banner add than I am in a phone call at 6PM from the carpet cleaning company. You should not have to suffer for me to be annoyed by things I don't want. Responsibly use public resources and please yourself at the same time.
Essentially, the web is a pull medium and push stuff has no place on it. If you want to see a Ford add, goto ford.com. Pelease do not accept or support the notion that you must look at an advert to support content on the web. It's just not so. People will make that information available to you for their own good, and if you don't need it that's their problem. You own a programable machine, make it serve you.
Stand up for your rights now. Do not use browsers that do not allow you to chose what content you wish to recieve. Realize that you have as much right to broadcast as does ford, just as you have the right to say what you want and publish as many books as you care to pay for. Never let the day come when someone could plausibly argue that bandwith is limited and comercial concerns have a greater right to it than you do because of a greater demand for comercial content. No one really wants to look at a banner add, and no one really has to!
Like you, I never used myMP3, and I more enjoyed the great variety of artists on the site. This was only because of my limited access to the net.
Unlike you, I can see why people would want to use such a service, and why people own CD's. It would be nice to have my entire collection of CD's available at work because most of it is not Free. It would also be nice to be able to organize them into groups of like music and have the server randomly sellect tracks from the groups, the way I listen to music on my cheap 7 disk changer at home. I can also see how this could be more efficeint if only one copy of a track could be used to serve many legal owners, and how this service might engender the public good will that would allow you to outsell your greedier rivals.
Also, I'm worried about who now owns all of that great independent music? Who gets paid when I acutally buy a CD? Yes, I buy their CD's as often as I buy music elsewhere. I don't have net access everywhere, and I like the artifact almost as much as the music. It also feels good to give money to people who were providing a real service. $8/cd, $4 to artist, $4 to MP3, I thought. Not a bad split and much much better than $20/cd, $0.05 to musician, less to cover artists etc and other creators of content, the rest to promoters, payolla, radio stations, advertisers, packagers, truckers, and the whole rest of the commercial food chain right down to some infinetesimal amount that goes to the now obsolete sales clerk in a record museum, all designed to restrict my choices and ram crap down my throat. I'm sure you will be bothered if it turns out that Gretchen et al will cease to be rewarded for their work the way MP3 sought to reward them and they thought they would be rewarded.
Here is one very important lesson YOU missed in economics classes. Do something for people and you will be rewarded. Fuck people at every oportunity, and you will be ignored.
Every owner of every store wants people to visit. The more people who visit the more the owner will sell. It's just that easy. Provide a service and customers will come, and they will come back as long as some senseless bean counter like you does not annoy them away.
The new service is a non service, as everyone here has pointed out, because it requires you to haul around your CDs anyway. myMP3.com has been fuckedcompany.com for a while, soon is will be nocompany.com. Remember the story about the goose that laid the golden egg? She was killed by some fool like you.
Personally, I pay a lot more than $3/month for my bandwith. I'll be happier when ATT@home decides to let people set up servers so that I can share my own music with myself. I'm not going to count on greed heads like you to do it for me, nor would I pay you a dime to let you try.
You just don't get it. Music trading has gone on for as long as people have been making recordings. If it were not for such individual promotion, music sales would plummet. How many CD's can people really share? Let me rephrase that so a greed head like you can understand. How many CD's are you going to spend time putting on the net or coppying for your friends? That's what I thought.
Here's your gold star for Corporate Stooge class. It should make you feel better for all the bad grades you must have gotten in school.
I only wish this were fud, as RH was my favorite distro. Go see the RH bug page for yourself. The fix has been out since October 10th, and I would have thought that it made it into the CD that I bought from Linux Central in mid November.
I suffered the first two errors mentioned, after the upgrade failed. The upgrade had some kind of network problem. Suffice it to say that I was dissapointed and very supprised after the third attempt had failed. When I had trouble retreiving the corrected installer, well that was four strikes. The upgrade was a tease, because everything that did work, worked much better!
Debian, though more difficult to deal with and not nearly as beautiful or wizzbang, worked in fewer tries. Their ftp and http instal was also very impresive and open next to the problems I may have had with Red Hat's ftp bug fix (it might have just been bussy).
I will not give or even recomend 7.0 to anyone, but would recomend they wait for a while until they fix some of these problems and release 7.1 Don't get me wrong, Red Hat does lots of things right, but so does Debian and right now I'm going to play with it. What's the use of choice if you don't use it?
By the way, this little bummer could have embarased me. I'm happy that my boss did not see 7.0 blow up when I tried to put it on a machine at work (one strike and you're out that time!). I work in an MS shop, and companies like RH and Correl are my only hope to escape the talking paperclip. If the first thing the PHB sees is a failed install, my hopes would get dimmer fast.
That little box (a P90!) now runs RH6.2, and it's running aps and collecting uptime that NT never knows, a much better demonstration. I want to get much more familiar with Debian before I pull a stunt like that in front of people.
It should be just the thing to distribute MS Office 2000^H^H^H^H 10^H^H 1492 or whatever. It's cheaper and will last just long enough for the new release of SpyGlass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H MSIE to break it. You could even get a special eddition of the paper clip on his own CD.
They might also try to distribute Windows 2000, ME, Whistler, NT, 0.net, PE, and BS as these change faster than their office product these days.
Then again, who would pay $200 for less than an ounce of plastic?
A pint's a pound the world around, and that is 16 ounces well purchased.
Yeah right, the usual response is to blame the user. Pthththth-t! You can only take that so far, and you should not ignore the problem underneath. It is possible to make secure software, like OpenBSD.
All the same things can be said about the people who WRITE that software in the first place. Perma-temps, H1B slaves, and other people forced to work 80 hour weeks are not going to produce the best code in the world. Inexperience can be found where you look for it, but it's more important in Redmond.
Sure, it's possible to bone up OpenBSD, but they don't make the same kind of prommises that MS does, and that's where these holes are. MS prommises that their software is secure AND that MSCEs can run it in a secure fashion. They need to live up to both.
RH7 got me too! Both it's upgrade and install failed on me. Just when I was getting used to some of the changes between RH 6 and RH6.2! After blowing up a perfectly useful ftp server and desktop, I took a look at the RH site for what was wrong. What really got me was that their fix, billed as a driver disk, was hard to get at. After some anoying text about their priority servers for paying customers, their ftp server kicked me off to a mirror saying that I'd used up some quota. Then the mirrors gave me trouble, and that was it.
How sad, their text installs were nice easy and set up beautiful, if not secure, systems. I loved their eye candy. So sad, too bad.
The more I use Debian, the more I like it. RH looked to be hiding more and becoming more restrictive, while Debian just feels so much more informative. There seems to be little difference between the way things were done in 2.1 and 2.2, but instalation was much easier.
Konquerer, seems to work just fine, but I'm not sure how to make it stop displaying those nice little java banner adds that so many people demand. My version of KDE is older, so things might be better.
There are at least two text based browsers, but they are kind of a pain with so many websites using pictures as part of their navigation, blah. You can use Lynx, and I'm told Emacs.
It has been said that no editor is complete until it can browse the web. I say now browser is complete until it can be used as a text editor! Try Abi Word, who's native format is SGML. Ahhh!
I agree. Linux runs on about 5% of desktops, and Apple uses up another 5%. The last time I looked at an imac, it used Netscape. This may have changed since MS all but bought Apple, but I doubt they made that big a dent in the installed Apple base. If we make the assumption that all Windoze uses MSIE, and all others use Netscape, you can't have less than 10% of browsing with Netscape.
Still, never unerestimate the power of PHB. Last week the IT boys sent me a nice little "system upgrade" for MSIE 5.01. The stupid thing was manditory and took 20 minutes to run. I started to worry when I saw a message, "migrating bookmarks." I don't think it was nice enought to move my address book which was useless because nothing but the browser can use the proxy (no command line stuff works, nor netscpes little mail client). In anycase, Netscape vanished. Yes, you too can be standardized. Nope, I'm not going to bother reloading Netscape. Deleting it was a big enough hint.
I hate IE! It will not remember the things I tell it to do, like not display pictures or execute scripts. I suppose it will do any old active X thingy, super secure! Everytime I use it, I'm forced to endure whatever big ugly blinking banner add marketoids decide it would be good to waste bandwith on. You can't imagine how ugly our own internal page is. It feels so nice to come home and browse without it.
I've also learned to hate Outlook. It took some time, because I really wanted to see something cool in it. The anoyances, typical of MS interface design, far outweigh any benifits that mess has to offer. Security and privacy? Ha!
Thank God Windows is dying the miserable death it deserves.
So then the users don't purchase their computer systems through corporate IT,
but instead go to Best Buy to buy their computers.
Nah! You don't have to buy a computer. Most companies have loads of older PC's sitting around that you can put whatever you like on. That's how I got Linux on my desk. That older P90 works just great if you remove that awful, bloated, broken MS crap.
Thanks for the info on ESR, that has nothing to do with the subject. On robes, note that they are worn by judges, clerics and academitians. Whatever!
What have you done with your life, Simon Cookie? Your homepage, dripping with sappy poetry and a copyright notice(!), does not show much.
The only thing we can say for sure about the writer of this silly trojan is that he still keeps up with Windoze programing. Kinda makes you wonder, as the poster you malign did. Look up agent provocature.
Now bug me about spelling and call a penis in Yidish.
OK, I'm shoting off my mouth because I don't know ICAL.
My favorite calender program, and one that made other engineers drool where I work, is Spinacker Software's Calender Creator Plus. I've got an old windows 3.1 version that came bundled with a computer.
It had excellent print formating that would make week planers, day planners or regular month long calenders. My favorite is the week planner with a little square for each hour of the day that I carry around in an engineering pad holder. Yes, sometimes paper rules. Do list one side, schedule the other, life planned from 6AM to 10PM.
The interface was very efficent and easy to use. Repeats were almost infinitely variable and flexible, by day of the week, week of the month, day of the year etc. Information was devided into lists that could be added or deleted from a space, and you could have as many spaces as you felt like. Marks on the page were clear and formatable. Goofey images could be stuck in there if you felt like it.
If these things could be combined with a group collaboration and resource scheduling background, you'de have a real winner. Good luck!
I have one windows box left for scanning, printing and making CD's. I'm very careful not to add any goofy software to it. No instant messenger, net downloaded screen saver, games etc. K6-2 400MHz, it runs solid.
Today, I had a term paper to print, and the fucking thing did not work. It happened about a month ago, and I thought I'd fixed it by flipping switches on those stupid tabbed drivers. Yeah, Right! Apparently the stupid thing forgot what I'd done. Do you think I had time to fool with that junk today? It took hours to figure it out through that "intuitive" control pannel. So what happened, registry explosion? I don't know and I don't care.
One more thing, there should never have been a problem! My printer and my scanner are both from Cannon. You would think they would not bomb themselves. You would also think that a machine with no software added to it would continue to work as it always had. Nope, not windows.
Something else that I'd almost forgotten about was Windows installation. It all came flooding back like a bad dream last week when I bought a nice little thinkpad. It already had a "clean" copy of windows 95 on it. It works, but I found myself missing all of the tools that come gratis with any decent linux distro. God, all of the EULA's and what not! The painful incompatibilites, the stupid file naming scheemes, the painful "disket factory" that only alows you to make one flawed copy of the distribution disks, it was awful. It's so much easier to install Linux.
Sure, there are some hardware humps to get over, but once you've got something that works you can do it a million times without pain. 3C509B is a great NIC. Most NE2000 are OK, but you have to watch out for their dos based configuration routines. They don't all work together. Also, I've had trouble with the install of RH 6.1 and 6.2, they skipped network stuff. RH 6.0 worked perfect. Debian 2.2 works good but takes a little getting used to.
With a little work, you can transfer to CD's yourself and record companies have no obligation to distribute new media.
Good record players can be found for cheap these days. I've got myself a Sony linear tracker for free from a friend. It had corrosion contact resistance problems at the cartridge and old belts. This was easily fixed. Record players are mechanical and can be fixed most of the time.
A CD writer was more expensive and the software is elusive for a casual user. I bought a fancy new brand name writer for speed and new software, but I imagine you can find a cheaper one on pricewatch or at your your local computer recycler. The software to run it is a typical Windows nightmare and I've been too lazy to look for Free goodies. Though you'd imagine that converting formats is trivial once you have device drivers, the greedheads want your money for any real functionality. The software I got with my CD recorder does not automaticaly devide albums into their songs, nor does it directly read and convert autio CD's to wav files. Instead it goes through a clumsy D/A then A/D conversion for CD's and records. Let me tell you what a pain it is to have to jump up and down to start and stop recording that record. WavGold takes care of some these problems, but it's beg ware and becomes so anoying that I quit using it. So there you have it, bare bones software where a full featured package should exist because some greedhead wants to make some extra bucks off a few extra chucks of code. One day, I'll have the time to record again, get or make some decent Freeware, and my last excuse to have Windows on any machine will go away. Oh, back to topic.
I have to agree with you that the record companies are under no obligation to provide new media. Software companies do this to engender goodwill. Of course, evil companies like MS break their formats on purpose and the "upgrade" gets you little more than the ability to continue using the software that you already own. After all there has been no real functionality added to any MS work since windows 3.11, and anyone can that their "upgrade price" is just a software tax that engeners no goodwill at all. But that's different from audio recordings. No one expected records to last forever so the deal was fair. Publishers are not obligated to publish things forever. They would be foolish to sit on top of things people will pay for, but oh well, such are the failings of the racket RIAA and the five big music publishers. It was nice enough of them to line their pockets promoting ordinary work to begin with. We would not be able to get together and sign if it were not for the Beatles, right? One day, the market for such things will shrink and the record companies will be forced into a low production, high cost mode. The Beatles will have to be labled as a golden classic and become very expensive. How else will they be able to make money forever off their good sense of promotion? It would be foolish to expect such stuff to pass into the public domain in any reasonable amount of time (75 years in the US), just as it would be foolish to expect the artists to actually profit from their work. Still, no one else is obligated to continue to publish things in perpetuity.
Go on and transfer to CD's yourself, before your record player really gives out. Electrolitic capacitors do die, and the result will be degraded sound quality. My CD's sound just as good as my records ever sounded. With a little work, I can take the pop and hiss out of my CD recordings later and make better coppies.
Really, AC? You might as well call Ukraine and Eastern Europe provinces of Russia. Do you also think the Communists deserve to enslave the rest of Asia as well as the hundreds of cultures they now oppress? Your post is both ignorant and inflamitory.
The fat cats of Beiging will glow in the dark first. I'll be happy if the civilized world sells Taiwan all the nuclear devices they need to defend themselves until the Commies fall under their own corruption and stupidity.
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That price, many times, is lower because the market is still regulated. The government sets prices so that people will move to the new service provider to create a division in the market. The larger companies are forbiden to lower their prices, and might actually have to raise them.
You should know that most "environmentally friendly" electricity is some of the most expensive juice around. Take wind power. Those fancy fans cost a fortune to make, service and distribute. Oh yeah, the wind moslty blows at low demand periods of the day and year, "Ah, what a wonderful breeze is blowing today. I won't have to run my air conditioner!". These costs have an environmental impact, assides from generating wind currents that eagles can't escape, because they require more activity to support. Think of all the energy that goes into composites manufacure and all of the waste that comes out of it. Think of all the nasty stuff that goes into silicon solar cells.
Electricity deregulation is madness. But hey, I work for an generating company now, so don't listen to me. My company is going to get fat when it's free to charge what it likes. Sing along, "I'm in the money, your stinking money, the good old times are just starting to roll!"
What's to keep a system like this from rotating numbers from charge to non charge? At 12 it's cheap or part of your service at 1PM it's expensive. Suppose your ISP's number becomes a charge call? Suppose you want to dial a coumputer across town? How do you know that your hour long data exchange is not going to cost you? Such stuff agrivated me when I lived in south Florida where it was difficult to tell.
Bad argument! Things are bad, so let's make them worse? Bzzzzt!
It is unnaceptable that calls can be charged without your knowledge. Would you eat in a place that did not tell you how much your meal cost until you finished eating? "Oh, but you have to make that call anyway" you might say. No, I do not and I'll make up my mind.
Manufacturing mostly. The percentage of GDP all kinds of manufacturing represents has been falling for 25 years or so. Specifically we can see great downturns in automobile, ship and steel manufacturing.
"'Act fast and fix the problems later' is how we operate here," Regis said. He showed me a Stanford Computer Industry Project study whose conclusion was that Japan would always lag behind America in software innovation and sales because of a business culture in which perfectionism is rampant. Unlike Japanese computer companies hobbled by elaborate quality control and testing procedures, the Stanford researchers found, American companies accept "good enough" quality for the sake of speed.
So, is this why my Honda drives better than and will outlast your Saturn? Sorry, I don't buy it and neither did the author or should you.
Greed and class strife are killing US industries, not "innovation". Japanese labor now makes more money than US counterparts. That's what happens when you focus on product rather than marketing, and co-operate. My wife and I have seen little innovation in most software since the days of what she calls "Windows 93".
I have not noticed much of the hardware reliability problems lately. In fact, most of my hardware is running better than ever. The software, mostly Free, has revealed the flaws in previous software from Redmond.
I used to think I had flaky computers, then I got Linux. Suddenly, my slow cheap junk started doing things for me again and routine tasks became enjoyable. A nicer 650 Athalon runs like a dream, compared to my fromerly lowered expectations. Only one of my computers running any version of Linux has ever crashed hard, and that was because the room was too hot.
I can compare this record to NT where I work. There we have finely made machines with expensive parts that run like crap. "Software updates" are an almost weekly occurance, and uptime of more than a few days is rare.
This browser model represents a defeat of all the potential of the web and programable machines in general. By using it, you accept that you have no ability to control your machine and what you chose to view on the web. Free alternatives are available and better.
People seem to talk about bandwith as if they owned it. Let me assure you that they do not! The only bandwith you truly own is your own private network.
The web is a public resource and those advert packets, which may or may not make a living for someone else, get in the way of my packets. I have a cable modem, but I browse with the images and java script off and I refuse cookies that are not returned to the original site. If I want to see a picture, I can request it. One day, I might look into junkbusters.org. It's not a speed issue to me, it's a resource issue for everyone else. Why should I request that stupid flycast crap if I don't have to? I am no more interested in a banner add than I am in a phone call at 6PM from the carpet cleaning company. You should not have to suffer for me to be annoyed by things I don't want. Responsibly use public resources and please yourself at the same time.
Essentially, the web is a pull medium and push stuff has no place on it. If you want to see a Ford add, goto ford.com. Pelease do not accept or support the notion that you must look at an advert to support content on the web. It's just not so. People will make that information available to you for their own good, and if you don't need it that's their problem. You own a programable machine, make it serve you.
Stand up for your rights now. Do not use browsers that do not allow you to chose what content you wish to recieve. Realize that you have as much right to broadcast as does ford, just as you have the right to say what you want and publish as many books as you care to pay for. Never let the day come when someone could plausibly argue that bandwith is limited and comercial concerns have a greater right to it than you do because of a greater demand for comercial content. No one really wants to look at a banner add, and no one really has to!
OK, I'm loosing coherency. Back to fluids I go.
-paid for by Citezens for Al Gore.
Thank you. I've heard about LAME before, but now it's bookmarked for when I get time to do something about it!
Unlike you, I can see why people would want to use such a service, and why people own CD's. It would be nice to have my entire collection of CD's available at work because most of it is not Free. It would also be nice to be able to organize them into groups of like music and have the server randomly sellect tracks from the groups, the way I listen to music on my cheap 7 disk changer at home. I can also see how this could be more efficeint if only one copy of a track could be used to serve many legal owners, and how this service might engender the public good will that would allow you to outsell your greedier rivals.
Also, I'm worried about who now owns all of that great independent music? Who gets paid when I acutally buy a CD? Yes, I buy their CD's as often as I buy music elsewhere. I don't have net access everywhere, and I like the artifact almost as much as the music. It also feels good to give money to people who were providing a real service. $8/cd, $4 to artist, $4 to MP3, I thought. Not a bad split and much much better than $20/cd, $0.05 to musician, less to cover artists etc and other creators of content, the rest to promoters, payolla, radio stations, advertisers, packagers, truckers, and the whole rest of the commercial food chain right down to some infinetesimal amount that goes to the now obsolete sales clerk in a record museum, all designed to restrict my choices and ram crap down my throat. I'm sure you will be bothered if it turns out that Gretchen et al will cease to be rewarded for their work the way MP3 sought to reward them and they thought they would be rewarded.
Every owner of every store wants people to visit. The more people who visit the more the owner will sell. It's just that easy. Provide a service and customers will come, and they will come back as long as some senseless bean counter like you does not annoy them away.
The new service is a non service, as everyone here has pointed out, because it requires you to haul around your CDs anyway. myMP3.com has been fuckedcompany.com for a while, soon is will be nocompany.com. Remember the story about the goose that laid the golden egg? She was killed by some fool like you.
Personally, I pay a lot more than $3/month for my bandwith. I'll be happier when ATT@home decides to let people set up servers so that I can share my own music with myself. I'm not going to count on greed heads like you to do it for me, nor would I pay you a dime to let you try.
You just don't get it. Music trading has gone on for as long as people have been making recordings. If it were not for such individual promotion, music sales would plummet. How many CD's can people really share? Let me rephrase that so a greed head like you can understand. How many CD's are you going to spend time putting on the net or coppying for your friends? That's what I thought.
Here's your gold star for Corporate Stooge class. It should make you feel better for all the bad grades you must have gotten in school.
I suffered the first two errors mentioned, after the upgrade failed. The upgrade had some kind of network problem. Suffice it to say that I was dissapointed and very supprised after the third attempt had failed. When I had trouble retreiving the corrected installer, well that was four strikes. The upgrade was a tease, because everything that did work, worked much better!
Debian, though more difficult to deal with and not nearly as beautiful or wizzbang, worked in fewer tries. Their ftp and http instal was also very impresive and open next to the problems I may have had with Red Hat's ftp bug fix (it might have just been bussy).
I will not give or even recomend 7.0 to anyone, but would recomend they wait for a while until they fix some of these problems and release 7.1 Don't get me wrong, Red Hat does lots of things right, but so does Debian and right now I'm going to play with it. What's the use of choice if you don't use it?
By the way, this little bummer could have embarased me. I'm happy that my boss did not see 7.0 blow up when I tried to put it on a machine at work (one strike and you're out that time!). I work in an MS shop, and companies like RH and Correl are my only hope to escape the talking paperclip. If the first thing the PHB sees is a failed install, my hopes would get dimmer fast. That little box (a P90!) now runs RH6.2, and it's running aps and collecting uptime that NT never knows, a much better demonstration. I want to get much more familiar with Debian before I pull a stunt like that in front of people.
They might also try to distribute Windows 2000, ME, Whistler, NT, 0.net, PE, and BS as these change faster than their office product these days.
Then again, who would pay $200 for less than an ounce of plastic?
A pint's a pound the world around, and that is 16 ounces well purchased.
All the same things can be said about the people who WRITE that software in the first place. Perma-temps, H1B slaves, and other people forced to work 80 hour weeks are not going to produce the best code in the world. Inexperience can be found where you look for it, but it's more important in Redmond.
Sure, it's possible to bone up OpenBSD, but they don't make the same kind of prommises that MS does, and that's where these holes are. MS prommises that their software is secure AND that MSCEs can run it in a secure fashion. They need to live up to both.
How sad, their text installs were nice easy and set up beautiful, if not secure, systems. I loved their eye candy. So sad, too bad.
The more I use Debian, the more I like it. RH looked to be hiding more and becoming more restrictive, while Debian just feels so much more informative. There seems to be little difference between the way things were done in 2.1 and 2.2, but instalation was much easier.
Konquerer, seems to work just fine, but I'm not sure how to make it stop displaying those nice little java banner adds that so many people demand. My version of KDE is older, so things might be better.
There are at least two text based browsers, but they are kind of a pain with so many websites using pictures as part of their navigation, blah. You can use Lynx, and I'm told Emacs.
It has been said that no editor is complete until it can browse the web. I say now browser is complete until it can be used as a text editor! Try Abi Word, who's native format is SGML. Ahhh!
Still, never unerestimate the power of PHB. Last week the IT boys sent me a nice little "system upgrade" for MSIE 5.01. The stupid thing was manditory and took 20 minutes to run. I started to worry when I saw a message, "migrating bookmarks." I don't think it was nice enought to move my address book which was useless because nothing but the browser can use the proxy (no command line stuff works, nor netscpes little mail client). In anycase, Netscape vanished. Yes, you too can be standardized. Nope, I'm not going to bother reloading Netscape. Deleting it was a big enough hint.
I hate IE! It will not remember the things I tell it to do, like not display pictures or execute scripts. I suppose it will do any old active X thingy, super secure! Everytime I use it, I'm forced to endure whatever big ugly blinking banner add marketoids decide it would be good to waste bandwith on. You can't imagine how ugly our own internal page is. It feels so nice to come home and browse without it.
I've also learned to hate Outlook. It took some time, because I really wanted to see something cool in it. The anoyances, typical of MS interface design, far outweigh any benifits that mess has to offer. Security and privacy? Ha!
Thank God Windows is dying the miserable death it deserves.
Soyo Atholon mobo sees lilo as a boot sector virus. Turned that switch off.
Nah! You don't have to buy a computer. Most companies have loads of older PC's sitting around that you can put whatever you like on. That's how I got Linux on my desk. That older P90 works just great if you remove that awful, bloated, broken MS crap.
What have you done with your life, Simon Cookie? Your homepage, dripping with sappy poetry and a copyright notice(!), does not show much.
The only thing we can say for sure about the writer of this silly trojan is that he still keeps up with Windoze programing. Kinda makes you wonder, as the poster you malign did. Look up agent provocature.
Now bug me about spelling and call a penis in Yidish.
Dork is a Yiddish word for penis.
My favorite calender program, and one that made other engineers drool where I work, is Spinacker Software's Calender Creator Plus. I've got an old windows 3.1 version that came bundled with a computer.
It had excellent print formating that would make week planers, day planners or regular month long calenders. My favorite is the week planner with a little square for each hour of the day that I carry around in an engineering pad holder. Yes, sometimes paper rules. Do list one side, schedule the other, life planned from 6AM to 10PM.
The interface was very efficent and easy to use. Repeats were almost infinitely variable and flexible, by day of the week, week of the month, day of the year etc. Information was devided into lists that could be added or deleted from a space, and you could have as many spaces as you felt like. Marks on the page were clear and formatable. Goofey images could be stuck in there if you felt like it.
If these things could be combined with a group collaboration and resource scheduling background, you'de have a real winner. Good luck!
Today, I had a term paper to print, and the fucking thing did not work. It happened about a month ago, and I thought I'd fixed it by flipping switches on those stupid tabbed drivers. Yeah, Right! Apparently the stupid thing forgot what I'd done. Do you think I had time to fool with that junk today? It took hours to figure it out through that "intuitive" control pannel. So what happened, registry explosion? I don't know and I don't care.
One more thing, there should never have been a problem! My printer and my scanner are both from Cannon. You would think they would not bomb themselves. You would also think that a machine with no software added to it would continue to work as it always had. Nope, not windows.
Something else that I'd almost forgotten about was Windows installation. It all came flooding back like a bad dream last week when I bought a nice little thinkpad. It already had a "clean" copy of windows 95 on it. It works, but I found myself missing all of the tools that come gratis with any decent linux distro. God, all of the EULA's and what not! The painful incompatibilites, the stupid file naming scheemes, the painful "disket factory" that only alows you to make one flawed copy of the distribution disks, it was awful. It's so much easier to install Linux.
Sure, there are some hardware humps to get over, but once you've got something that works you can do it a million times without pain. 3C509B is a great NIC. Most NE2000 are OK, but you have to watch out for their dos based configuration routines. They don't all work together. Also, I've had trouble with the install of RH 6.1 and 6.2, they skipped network stuff. RH 6.0 worked perfect. Debian 2.2 works good but takes a little getting used to.
Good record players can be found for cheap these days. I've got myself a Sony linear tracker for free from a friend. It had corrosion contact resistance problems at the cartridge and old belts. This was easily fixed. Record players are mechanical and can be fixed most of the time.
A CD writer was more expensive and the software is elusive for a casual user. I bought a fancy new brand name writer for speed and new software, but I imagine you can find a cheaper one on pricewatch or at your your local computer recycler. The software to run it is a typical Windows nightmare and I've been too lazy to look for Free goodies. Though you'd imagine that converting formats is trivial once you have device drivers, the greedheads want your money for any real functionality. The software I got with my CD recorder does not automaticaly devide albums into their songs, nor does it directly read and convert autio CD's to wav files. Instead it goes through a clumsy D/A then A/D conversion for CD's and records. Let me tell you what a pain it is to have to jump up and down to start and stop recording that record. WavGold takes care of some these problems, but it's beg ware and becomes so anoying that I quit using it. So there you have it, bare bones software where a full featured package should exist because some greedhead wants to make some extra bucks off a few extra chucks of code. One day, I'll have the time to record again, get or make some decent Freeware, and my last excuse to have Windows on any machine will go away. Oh, back to topic.
I have to agree with you that the record companies are under no obligation to provide new media. Software companies do this to engender goodwill. Of course, evil companies like MS break their formats on purpose and the "upgrade" gets you little more than the ability to continue using the software that you already own. After all there has been no real functionality added to any MS work since windows 3.11, and anyone can that their "upgrade price" is just a software tax that engeners no goodwill at all. But that's different from audio recordings. No one expected records to last forever so the deal was fair. Publishers are not obligated to publish things forever. They would be foolish to sit on top of things people will pay for, but oh well, such are the failings of the racket RIAA and the five big music publishers. It was nice enough of them to line their pockets promoting ordinary work to begin with. We would not be able to get together and sign if it were not for the Beatles, right? One day, the market for such things will shrink and the record companies will be forced into a low production, high cost mode. The Beatles will have to be labled as a golden classic and become very expensive. How else will they be able to make money forever off their good sense of promotion? It would be foolish to expect such stuff to pass into the public domain in any reasonable amount of time (75 years in the US), just as it would be foolish to expect the artists to actually profit from their work. Still, no one else is obligated to continue to publish things in perpetuity.
Go on and transfer to CD's yourself, before your record player really gives out. Electrolitic capacitors do die, and the result will be degraded sound quality. My CD's sound just as good as my records ever sounded. With a little work, I can take the pop and hiss out of my CD recordings later and make better coppies.
The fat cats of Beiging will glow in the dark first. I'll be happy if the civilized world sells Taiwan all the nuclear devices they need to defend themselves until the Commies fall under their own corruption and stupidity.