No, they aren't. They are finding themselves competing with NetFlix and P2P networks. NetFlix is great, but you only get your movies in monthly alotments. P2P is free, but you are downloading a Pig in a poke, with no idea of the quality of the recording, how long it's going to take to download, or whether that copy of "The Bourne Identity" is really a low quality dub of "Anal Whores with no bladder control volume VII" (Or the other way around.)
Late fees were not really about keeping titles on the shelf, they were a secondary revenue stream. They finally looked at the curves and realized that less revenue would be eroded by eliminating late fees than would be if they let NetFlix and file sharing network eat their lunch.
So, while they don't have the selection of NetFlix and they are more expensive than P2P, they have a competitive advantage in the fact that your "download time" is however long it takes to hike/bike/drive to the store.
Having worked in a library I can tell you that yes, you can buy that title TODAY for $20. Six weeks from know the blue shirts will shrug and tell you it's out of stock, but they have a pile of other new releases.
The added replacement cost libraries and video store places charge is what it costs to get the products directly from a distributor, without a volume discount. You aren't exactly going to find a copy of "2001" a space oddesy lying around at your local Target. At least not for very long.
Truth be told, it's the Coyote who was my favorite. What an embodyment of the engineering can do. No matter how many anvils get dropped on your head, keep plugging away at a solution.
At the same time, what an embodyment of the problems of the engineering mindset! No matter how many times it blows up in your face, keep plugging away at ever more elaborate technical solutions.
I actually built a firewall to do that using Linux. Amazing the power if IPTABLES, MySQL, and a couple of TCL scripts to tie the two together.
The application was a metering system for a Coffee Shop. You would show up, try to access the net, and would be greeted by a message telling you to see the person at the counter to activate your connection.
I can produce the police report if you like. Damn, never thought a first hand experience would by "Urban Legend." I guess me, myself, and I counts as a FOAF.
Since when did you have the rights and freedoms to take something you did not pay for? If nobody pays for music and movies, there won't be many movies and music works worth taking. Want proof? Just look at any third world economy where IP laws are lax. Very little talent comes out of those sort of countries.
Want free music? Then revert your country's laws back to third world standards. Just be prepared for your standard of living to drop accordingly.
Be careful what you wish for, it just might come true.
Mankind got by for countless milennia before this whole concept of "paying for music" started. Need I remind you that all over the world, there are these people called "musicians" who generally like to play on these things called "instruments" and produce noise called "music."
Music isn't the issue. What is at issue is the insane idea that you can own music, and that your grandchildren can live off of performances that were recorded before they were even born, long after you are dead.
Destroy the music industry, and music will survive. Indeed, it would probably do a bit better. Folk Festivals of late have devolved into drunk people covering the Beatles.
Um, having been beaten up on several occasions by "drunken assholery" I can tell you the contusions, bruised kidneys, and being beaten to unconciousness so said drunk can joyride on your motorcycle still requires and emergency room stay, and still results in damaged property.
And the funny part is, in neither case was it the chucklehead's first brush with the law.
You get drunk and assault somebody, it's the same as if you were sober and assaulted somebody. You are still a fucking violent offender.
Reminds me of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Resteraunt."
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's
where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after
committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly
looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father
rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And
they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the
bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest
father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly
'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me
and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay
$50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?"
And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench
there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I
said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand,
and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing,
father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the
bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of
things, until the Sargeant came over...
And no, if the new version is 600 MB, there is no way the file is going to get from your office to said laptop in time for a 9:00am presentation over the internet. (At 8:30am). If the presentation is on Monday, and today is Friday (also happens), you would do better to fed-ex a CD. Not really windows specific, but common enough to merit another snide comment.
Actually never show up at an event with a presentation made under Windows. I'm a network admin at a science museum, and I regularly get called up to more or less make people feel really stupid about embedding videos, decorative fonts, and transition effects into their presentation that the machine playing the presentation doesn't have.
And no, if the new version is 600 MB, about the only way it's going to get from your office to said laptop in time for a 9:00am presentation over the internet. Frankly, if the presentation is on Monday, and today is Friday, you would do better to fed-ex a CD. Not really windows specific, but common enough to merit another snide comment.
Keep in mind though, work processors in those days would only load the page you were currently editing into memory. Oh Bank Street Writer, so many fond memories (sniff.)
The thing you have to remember about the original mac, the video board actually used the memory bus to raster the screen. Sure, PC's had DMA, but on the Mac, the lower chunk of ram WAS the video ram. They had a device known as the "Bob Baily Unit" that divided time between the microprocessor and the video display engine.
The size of the display, and it's black and white nature, was burned into the the design of the memory bus itself. Sure that would be horrible today, but this was 1984. A GUI was an insanely great new thing.
Frankly any information given to the Hubble scientists is published in peer reviewed journals that are available to all of our "opponents" in various arms races.
If a scientist develops a fix for a certain problem in space that's one thing. If our spooks hand a cookbook for best practices in spysat development to said scientist they are basically giving away any advantage our stuff has.
Besides, the hubble would then have been a civilianized model of an American spy satellite. Better for it to have been a scratch built enterprise, because no one knows if the solutions that Nasa developed are the same ones employed by US, or the USSR, PRC, etc.
Actually most CCD's are most sensitive in the near-infra red region. And you don't really need to paint a target, there is that big yellow fireball that pelts the surface with all kinds of wonderful frequencies of EM radiation.
Spy sats probably use the same trick as scanners and modern day digital cameras to double the resolution of a CCD using a sub-pixel extrapolation algorithem. That gets you down to 2.5 cm.
From what I've heard, while a watch is a stretch, they can read a license plate from orbit.
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Slashdot Mirror
They escape.
Late fees were not really about keeping titles on the shelf, they were a secondary revenue stream. They finally looked at the curves and realized that less revenue would be eroded by eliminating late fees than would be if they let NetFlix and file sharing network eat their lunch.
So, while they don't have the selection of NetFlix and they are more expensive than P2P, they have a competitive advantage in the fact that your "download time" is however long it takes to hike/bike/drive to the store.
The added replacement cost libraries and video store places charge is what it costs to get the products directly from a distributor, without a volume discount. You aren't exactly going to find a copy of "2001" a space oddesy lying around at your local Target. At least not for very long.
Truth be told, it's the Coyote who was my favorite. What an embodyment of the engineering can do. No matter how many anvils get dropped on your head, keep plugging away at a solution.
At the same time, what an embodyment of the problems of the engineering mindset! No matter how many times it blows up in your face, keep plugging away at ever more elaborate technical solutions.
The application was a metering system for a Coffee Shop. You would show up, try to access the net, and would be greeted by a message telling you to see the person at the counter to activate your connection.
I can produce the police report if you like. Damn, never thought a first hand experience would by "Urban Legend." I guess me, myself, and I counts as a FOAF.
So what does an SSID of ETOYOC tell you about me?
I'll just wave that one on.
Mankind got by for countless milennia before this whole concept of "paying for music" started. Need I remind you that all over the world, there are these people called "musicians" who generally like to play on these things called "instruments" and produce noise called "music."
Music isn't the issue. What is at issue is the insane idea that you can own music, and that your grandchildren can live off of performances that were recorded before they were even born, long after you are dead.
Destroy the music industry, and music will survive. Indeed, it would probably do a bit better. Folk Festivals of late have devolved into drunk people covering the Beatles.
And the funny part is, in neither case was it the chucklehead's first brush with the law.
You get drunk and assault somebody, it's the same as if you were sober and assaulted somebody. You are still a fucking violent offender.
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargeant came over...
New Version:
And no, if the new version is 600 MB, there is no way the file is going to get from your office to said laptop in time for a 9:00am presentation over the internet. (At 8:30am). If the presentation is on Monday, and today is Friday (also happens), you would do better to fed-ex a CD. Not really windows specific, but common enough to merit another snide comment.
Actually never show up at an event with a presentation made under Windows. I'm a network admin at a science museum, and I regularly get called up to more or less make people feel really stupid about embedding videos, decorative fonts, and transition effects into their presentation that the machine playing the presentation doesn't have.
And no, if the new version is 600 MB, about the only way it's going to get from your office to said laptop in time for a 9:00am presentation over the internet. Frankly, if the presentation is on Monday, and today is Friday, you would do better to fed-ex a CD. Not really windows specific, but common enough to merit another snide comment.
In Soviet Copyleftistan, the Trade Show watches YOU.
Keep in mind though, work processors in those days would only load the page you were currently editing into memory. Oh Bank Street Writer, so many fond memories (sniff.)
(Evil Twin Skippy pats his new Xserve's.)
The size of the display, and it's black and white nature, was burned into the the design of the memory bus itself. Sure that would be horrible today, but this was 1984. A GUI was an insanely great new thing.
Hmmm, I see someone has never worked with ISO9000, or Six Sigma.
Texas Tower, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Hyatt Regency Causeway, Chernobyl, Johnstown Dam, Citibank building...
Large complex failures DO happen in construction. Some are simply expensive to fix. Some result in structural failure. Others cost thousands of lives.
before doing battle, in the temple one calculates and will not win, because few calculations were made;
many calculations, victory, few calculations, no victory, then how much less so when no calculations?
--Sun Tsu, The Art of War
Do or do not. There is no try.
If a scientist develops a fix for a certain problem in space that's one thing. If our spooks hand a cookbook for best practices in spysat development to said scientist they are basically giving away any advantage our stuff has.
Besides, the hubble would then have been a civilianized model of an American spy satellite. Better for it to have been a scratch built enterprise, because no one knows if the solutions that Nasa developed are the same ones employed by US, or the USSR, PRC, etc.
Actually most CCD's are most sensitive in the near-infra red region. And you don't really need to paint a target, there is that big yellow fireball that pelts the surface with all kinds of wonderful frequencies of EM radiation.
From what I've heard, while a watch is a stretch, they can read a license plate from orbit.
Not so.