More than five years ago I set up a page about how to disassemble a Greyscale quickcam and how to remove the infrared filter from it. The web page of this/. story even links to the old URL. I left the company four years ago and the page was removed from their web server shortly afterwards.
Astrophotographers loved it, though, and a French astro club even recreated the page from a browser cache (!) and put up a backup: How to disassemble a quickcam, even Connectix tech support mentioned it to their users from time to time.
I am still receiving questions about the procedure described on that page, more than five years later...
Three years ago, I wanted to do something special for my birthday party, so I tried to find a genuine anaglyphic 3D movie to show during the party.
To my surprise, it's easy to find one, at least here in Germany (so I guess it will be just as easy in the US). Most movie distributors offer a 16 mm rental service mostly used by University film clubs and by tiny home-run community cinemas. They also have the classics and you can rent these movies very cheap for non-commercial showings.
In the end, renting a copy of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" over the weekend, a couple of red/green glasses, a 16 mm projector and a small silverscreen was cheaper than renting a video projector and a DVD player. (Ok, that was three years ago and video projectors are much cheaper now. But still.)
They also had "It came from Outer Space" on rental. And the folks at the movie distributor were extremely helpful and really nice folks to deal with.
If you want a special movie evening, I can only recommend you to ask the 16 mm rental service of the large movie distributors to help you out with a classic, be it 3D or not.
Babylon 5 is "cheesy television" because it doesn't compare well to Lord of the Rings?!?
No, it's cheesy television by its own right. And it copies badly from LotR. These were two different things about B5 I didn't like, with the second not being the reason for the first. (I don't mind copying. I dislike bad copying. B5 copied in a bad way.)
This reminds me when I met JMS when he spoke at MIT. He truly is a pompous ass, and after listening to him, I really found it hard to enjoy the show.
I only had this experience from reading his own write-ups about the ongoing production process, as used for quotes in the lurker's guide to B5.
After a few experiences like that, I've just gotten to where I don't want to go listen to authors I like.
I don't know, quite the contrary for me.
Most of the authors I like are actually very nice to listen to. E.g., Douglas Adams' interviews and public readings were a hoot. I also enjoyed audio books with original recordings of Thomas Mann and other authors. Few authors are disappointing when they recite their own works in public.
ICE train tracks (Inter-City Europe express tracks)
A nitpick: ICE stands for Inter City Express. I'm actually quite sad that each European has its own, more-or-less incompatible high speed train system, with the ICE being the German train.
...has been highly controversial over here. The state-funded Transrapid consortium has developed a high-trech train and then, when asking the German government for a track to deploy it live, suddenly found that actually noone in Germany cared for it.
Germany, being a rather small country, yet with a very high density of population, has a very good and highly accepted high-speed railtrack system. (Japan and France are still far better, but still.) The Transrapid offers very little time benefit per direction, yet requires massive construction work for its tracks. Most people here say - why bother? Why do we have to pay billions of tax Euros for a 30 minute benefit?
The Transrapid consortium has struggled during the last years to find an excuse on where to build its track in Germany and why, and so far, plans are still going back and forth.
Several elements in Babylon 5 were influenced by themes that also appear in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. For instance, in The Fellowship of the Ring, the Dark Riders first appear singly, then in progressively larger groups; Babylon 5 repeated this tension-building pattern early in the third seasion, when enemy forces known as the Shadow Vessels appeared first singly, and then in larger numbers. The wizard Gandalf is warned in a prophecy that he will die if he goes to an underground city called "Khazad-dûm"; in B5, commander John Sheridan is warned that he will die if he goes to a planet called "Z'Ha'Dum." Both men sacrifice themselves, fall into an abyss, and return in an altered form to unite the forces of good against the forces of evil.
Straczynski seems to acknowledge inspiration from Tolkien in one episode of B5 where a travelling "techno mage" presents a saying that is almost a direct quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, where the character Gildor Inglorion says, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
However, after being asked the same question hundreds of times, Straczynski has been known to get upset when asked if Babylon 5 "is based on the the Lord of the Rings." His response is that, as an author, he is very well capable of writing his own story, and that it is insulting to suggest that B5 is a LotR rip-off. JMS states that people misunderstand the similarities between the two different stories. In Babylon 5, JMS openly paid homage to LotR by naming several characters after LotR characters -- but this doesn't mean that they are ultimately the same story. JMS also confirms that within these different stories there are indeed some shared events, such as the hero's descent into a pit and resurrection. The small number of shared events exist because both JMS and J. R. R. Tolkien consciously drew on classical mythological sources and storytelling methods. Few people accuse J. R. R. Tolkien's LotR of being a "rip-off" of classical mythology, yet it also has many scenes that draw on classical mythological stories. JMS hopes to communicate to viewers that the archetypes explored in both works are far older and far more universal than most people realize, and that it is common for authors to explore some of these themes in new contexts, in new stories, with new consequences.
I find the last paragraph a rather poor excuse for the way-too similar elements of Babylon 5 and LotR. I don't mind that JMS is making a show partially based on LotR-concepts, adding ideas from other sources. I do mind that he thinks he can use similar names, quotes and plots while saying that he used the same sources as Tolkien for inspiration...
Let me reiterate that Babylon 5's story is truly a work of art. Far and above any mere television series or movie, it approaches, in my view, the greatest stories every told in all literature
You must be joking. You can't be serious, really. You must have a very limited knowledge on literature of you think that B5 is a masterpiece. B5 is a rather obvious rip-off of several "epics", many of its main motives were from Lord of the Rings.
I watched B5 from episode 1. I was hooked at the start, but then was in horror watching the story fall apart and was very very disappointed with the end of the story.
My main gripe with B5 is that it was so pompous and too full of itself that it failed to remain being actually entertaining.
Yes, I read JMS public memos that he wrote during the production of the show. He kept writing lots of praise about himself, "how wonderful" the "supersecret script" of the full story arc was, how "breathtaking" the cheesy effects of the current episode he wrote about were and how people watching the test reel of a episode were so moved, they had tears in their eyes. Oh, how great JMS was when he wrote about himself.
And it was all just cheesy television with a very bad ending. Boy, what a waste of time.
That must be the lowest amount of comments to a frontpage story for a long time.
Well, for a change, this is a frontpage story that you can hardly comment on without actually reading the linked article first. Also something that hasn't happened in a long time...
Er.. you're a five-person shop, and you couldn't get Windows networking to work smoothly?
We're doing network setups for other companies, running larger network configuration than we do, and we're doing software development on server applications.
Try to get Windows server networking running smoothly on a larger setup like that, then we'll talk.:-)
I wonder what kind of IT manager you are, expecting us to give you a detailed answer to _such_ a generic question.
What does your company do? What kind of software do you run, on servers, on desktops? What hardware setups do you have? What software are your employees used to? How IT-competent are your employees - will they freak out when the "start" button looks different on their desktop, will they call support when Clippy is missing? Is retraining an issue or do you use custom-made software that can be ported to the new environment? Can you estimate the cost of porting your custom-made software?
Etc. etc. etc.
Despite what the marketing people tell us, TCO is always a subjective calculcation, there is _no_ objective way of measuring it. Ask two people in the same company for a TCO calculation and you'll get massively different numbers.
Speaking from my own experience, I can say that using Linux instead of Windows has massively reduced my frustration with server setups and networked clients. A non-frustrated, happy IT manager is good for the company, so that alone should be something to consider.:-) Next to that, yes, we are saving a lot on our IT budget by using Linux instead of Windows. But we're just a five-person shop and we all studied informatics, so we don't shy away from tweaking our systems and we don't really care about the system our software runs on.
You're only entitled to making royalties off your music if someone else makes money from it.
Wrong. Even if you give away a copy of your own CD for free, you still have to pay royalties for the recorded songs that are on it. You also still have to pay royalties if the live convert that your ban plays at is free.
Might be different in your country, then. Here in Germany, cover bands pay royalties for the songs they perform live. (Actually not the cover band, but the guy who organized the concert and hired the band.)
Without losing their shorts? Of course, the royalties you pay are within a reasonable price range, and leaves more than enough money for the live performers to still make money from their concerts. The more people listen to the band, the more money you make as a band but also the higher the royalty cut you have to pay.
It's perfectly fair when it comes to live music, yet incredibly buerocratic.
Although, I don't like the royalties you have to pay (in Germany, might be different in your country) for playing recorded music to the public, even when it's a free venue.
I mean seriously, if they got to the point that it was possible to totally secure music so that it couldn't be copied (even with a mic to a speaker), what's to prevent an ameteur band from re-singing the song and recording their version of it?
Royalties. (I hope this is the correct word in English. Forgive me, I'm German.)
If you perform someone else's work in public, if you record it on a media and give away copies, if you broadcast that recording to the public, you have to pay royalties to the author(s) of a song. You also have to pay royalties as well when you play music to the public, e.g. a large public party or the music you play as a cafe owner to keep your customers happy. (That's why royalty-free music is a niche market, btw.)
There are royalty collection organizations in most states, the GEMA is the one here in Germany. I once had the dumb luck of writing a small tune that was then performed by my band on German national TV. As a result, we instantly got a little royalty check through GEMA, since these TV stations paid royalties to GEMA for broadcasting music.
(This, btw., is another reason why some celebrity musicians perform for free on globally broadcast charity events. It's a royalty bonanza.)
In Texas it was illegal to own more than 6 dildos.
1.) I'd love to see a citable official source for this law.
2.) How do they enforce this? Will police search your home for dildos when they receive a tip from an anonymous informer? Some policement must really hate their job there...
Back in my days, we used to run our e-commerce server from an Atari 600 XL and 5.25" floppy drive, while these kangaroo-sized hamsters kept stealing chocolate from our storage room. Which wasn't exactly a storage room, but an old greasy rocket silo in Mexico, built illegally by the Russians during the Cuban crisis.
Oh, you kids don't know how easy life has been for you.
Similar Questions: ARM-powered Desktop?
on
Build Your Own PowerPC?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...are there mainboards and CPUs available to end-users that are not in the sky-high price-range that manufacturers take for developer hardware?
I'd be interested in building an ARM-based desktop computer, but it seems there is no normal mainboard sold to end-users. Or is it? ("Normal" = standard form factor, standard RAMs, IDE, USB and VGA included, possibly PS/2 and serial too.)
Same question for the Crusoe, btw. Seems that the only desktop mainboard available is developers only...
Oh, please don't exaggerate. Of course, I never take 5 hour taxi trips. I'm sure that there is a train, bus or even plane ride to a location close to your destination. And if there isn't, you can always take a rental car.
But again, I'm talking from my position, in Germany, where I can reach every place I want to go to using these means of transportation. If I lived in a remote provincial town without train or bus connection to start with, I'd be the first to buy a car, sure.
Trouble is, trains and buses are empty in the US because they aren't attractive to use. The Amtrak railways are in a poor condition, the trains aren't well maintained and often late, all this scares aways those who know the luxury of having a car.
And the question about tax-subsidized public transportation is of course wether the lack of US taxes on cars and fuel is fair, anyway. US fuel prices are ridiculously low, compared to the rest of the world. A few years back there was an estimate that fuel in Germany would have to cost about 2.60 Euros per Liter to acommodate the secondary costs of its use - pollution, roads, etc.
That's true. Not using a car in the US makes people think of you as an odd person... As I originally said, Greyhound is seen as a poor man's ride, not as an alternative to using a car.
I have to say that German trains are usually a pain in the ass because they are too full
True, but then again I usually travel alone and there's always _one_ seat free for me.
Same, btw., with Greyhound buses in the US. During my US trip, I often got an earlier ride because the bus was waiting for just _one_ more seat to be filled, but everybody who wanted to take the ride was there with a group or family.
Those of us that forget to make seat reservations often end up on the floor
There is now a new price system for German trains that rewards people with rebates if they buy a ticket and reserve a seat early. I guess they are trying to make things better in that regard. I don't like the new price system, though, because I usually decide spontaniously when I take a train, not 7 days in advance.
I pay only about $1600 for a yearly pass for all public transport (boats, trams, trains, busses) throughout the country.
Oh, I envy you! If they offered a all-inclusive ticket as cheap as that here in Germany, it'd be heaven for someone like me.
Slashdot Mirror
If I understand the concept correctly, these watches are only receiving data, not sending. So basically, it's a mini-pager. Is this revolutionary?
Yes.
And: Every CCD cam has an infrared filter.
More than five years ago I set up a page about how to disassemble a Greyscale quickcam and how to remove the infrared filter from it. The web page of this /. story even links to the old URL. I left the company four years ago and the page was removed from their web server shortly afterwards.
Astrophotographers loved it, though, and a French astro club even recreated the page from a browser cache (!) and put up a backup: How to disassemble a quickcam, even Connectix tech support mentioned it to their users from time to time.
I am still receiving questions about the procedure described on that page, more than five years later...
Bummer that Metropolis was a major disappointment of a movie...
call me naive, but LotR is one of those movies that people don't _want_ to pirate.
I know several people who had a SVCD-rip of the full movie and yet they still got the full DVD set half a year later...
Three years ago, I wanted to do something special for my birthday party, so I tried to find a genuine anaglyphic 3D movie to show during the party.
To my surprise, it's easy to find one, at least here in Germany (so I guess it will be just as easy in the US). Most movie distributors offer a 16 mm rental service mostly used by University film clubs and by tiny home-run community cinemas. They also have the classics and you can rent these movies very cheap for non-commercial showings.
In the end, renting a copy of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" over the weekend, a couple of red/green glasses, a 16 mm projector and a small silverscreen was cheaper than renting a video projector and a DVD player. (Ok, that was three years ago and video projectors are much cheaper now. But still.)
They also had "It came from Outer Space" on rental. And the folks at the movie distributor were extremely helpful and really nice folks to deal with.
If you want a special movie evening, I can only recommend you to ask the 16 mm rental service of the large movie distributors to help you out with a classic, be it 3D or not.
Babylon 5 is "cheesy television" because it doesn't compare well to Lord of the Rings?!?
No, it's cheesy television by its own right. And it copies badly from LotR. These were two different things about B5 I didn't like, with the second not being the reason for the first. (I don't mind copying. I dislike bad copying. B5 copied in a bad way.)
I think you might be serious!
I am.
This reminds me when I met JMS when he spoke at MIT. He truly is a pompous ass, and after listening to him, I really found it hard to enjoy the show.
I only had this experience from reading his own write-ups about the ongoing production process, as used for quotes in the lurker's guide to B5.
After a few experiences like that, I've just gotten to where I don't want to go listen to authors I like.
I don't know, quite the contrary for me.
Most of the authors I like are actually very nice to listen to. E.g., Douglas Adams' interviews and public readings were a hoot. I also enjoyed audio books with original recordings of Thomas Mann and other authors. Few authors are disappointing when they recite their own works in public.
ICE train tracks (Inter-City Europe express tracks)
A nitpick: ICE stands for Inter City Express. I'm actually quite sad that each European has its own, more-or-less incompatible high speed train system, with the ICE being the German train.
...has been highly controversial over here. The state-funded Transrapid consortium has developed a high-trech train and then, when asking the German government for a track to deploy it live, suddenly found that actually noone in Germany cared for it.
Germany, being a rather small country, yet with a very high density of population, has a very good and highly accepted high-speed railtrack system. (Japan and France are still far better, but still.) The Transrapid offers very little time benefit per direction, yet requires massive construction work for its tracks. Most people here say - why bother? Why do we have to pay billions of tax Euros for a 30 minute benefit?
The Transrapid consortium has struggled during the last years to find an excuse on where to build its track in Germany and why, and so far, plans are still going back and forth.
I'm curious how you see Babylon 5 as being a rip-off from Lord of the Rings, though.
I wrote that it's a rip-off from several epic works, with LotR being the most influential.
See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5
B5 and The Lord of the Rings
Several elements in Babylon 5 were influenced by themes that also appear in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. For instance, in The Fellowship of the Ring, the Dark Riders first appear singly, then in progressively larger groups; Babylon 5 repeated this tension-building pattern early in the third seasion, when enemy forces known as the Shadow Vessels appeared first singly, and then in larger numbers. The wizard Gandalf is warned in a prophecy that he will die if he goes to an underground city called "Khazad-dûm"; in B5, commander John Sheridan is warned that he will die if he goes to a planet called "Z'Ha'Dum." Both men sacrifice themselves, fall into an abyss, and return in an altered form to unite the forces of good against the forces of evil.
Straczynski seems to acknowledge inspiration from Tolkien in one episode of B5 where a travelling "techno mage" presents a saying that is almost a direct quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, where the character Gildor Inglorion says, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
However, after being asked the same question hundreds of times, Straczynski has been known to get upset when asked if Babylon 5 "is based on the the Lord of the Rings." His response is that, as an author, he is very well capable of writing his own story, and that it is insulting to suggest that B5 is a LotR rip-off. JMS states that people misunderstand the similarities between the two different stories. In Babylon 5, JMS openly paid homage to LotR by naming several characters after LotR characters -- but this doesn't mean that they are ultimately the same story. JMS also confirms that within these different stories there are indeed some shared events, such as the hero's descent into a pit and resurrection. The small number of shared events exist because both JMS and J. R. R. Tolkien consciously drew on classical mythological sources and storytelling methods. Few people accuse J. R. R. Tolkien's LotR of being a "rip-off" of classical mythology, yet it also has many scenes that draw on classical mythological stories. JMS hopes to communicate to viewers that the archetypes explored in both works are far older and far more universal than most people realize, and that it is common for authors to explore some of these themes in new contexts, in new stories, with new consequences.
I find the last paragraph a rather poor excuse for the way-too similar elements of Babylon 5 and LotR. I don't mind that JMS is making a show partially based on LotR-concepts, adding ideas from other sources. I do mind that he thinks he can use similar names, quotes and plots while saying that he used the same sources as Tolkien for inspiration...
Let me reiterate that Babylon 5's story is truly a work of art. Far and above any mere television series or movie, it approaches, in my view, the greatest stories every told in all literature
You must be joking. You can't be serious, really. You must have a very limited knowledge on literature of you think that B5 is a masterpiece. B5 is a rather obvious rip-off of several "epics", many of its main motives were from Lord of the Rings.
I watched B5 from episode 1. I was hooked at the start, but then was in horror watching the story fall apart and was very very disappointed with the end of the story.
My main gripe with B5 is that it was so pompous and too full of itself that it failed to remain being actually entertaining.
Yes, I read JMS public memos that he wrote during the production of the show. He kept writing lots of praise about himself, "how wonderful" the "supersecret script" of the full story arc was, how "breathtaking" the cheesy effects of the current episode he wrote about were and how people watching the test reel of a episode were so moved, they had tears in their eyes. Oh, how great JMS was when he wrote about himself.
And it was all just cheesy television with a very bad ending. Boy, what a waste of time.
That must be the lowest amount of comments to a frontpage story for a long time.
Well, for a change, this is a frontpage story that you can hardly comment on without actually reading the linked article first. Also something that hasn't happened in a long time...
Er .. you're a five-person shop, and you couldn't get Windows networking to work smoothly?
:-)
We're doing network setups for other companies, running larger network configuration than we do, and we're doing software development on server applications.
Try to get Windows server networking running smoothly on a larger setup like that, then we'll talk.
Flamebait? Come on, moderators, the parent poster is exactly right.
I wonder what kind of IT manager you are, expecting us to give you a detailed answer to _such_ a generic question.
:-) Next to that, yes, we are saving a lot on our IT budget by using Linux instead of Windows. But we're just a five-person shop and we all studied informatics, so we don't shy away from tweaking our systems and we don't really care about the system our software runs on.
What does your company do? What kind of software do you run, on servers, on desktops? What hardware setups do you have? What software are your employees used to? How IT-competent are your employees - will they freak out when the "start" button looks different on their desktop, will they call support when Clippy is missing? Is retraining an issue or do you use custom-made software that can be ported to the new environment? Can you estimate the cost of porting your custom-made software?
Etc. etc. etc.
Despite what the marketing people tell us, TCO is always a subjective calculcation, there is _no_ objective way of measuring it. Ask two people in the same company for a TCO calculation and you'll get massively different numbers.
Speaking from my own experience, I can say that using Linux instead of Windows has massively reduced my frustration with server setups and networked clients. A non-frustrated, happy IT manager is good for the company, so that alone should be something to consider.
You're only entitled to making royalties off your music if someone else makes money from it.
Wrong. Even if you give away a copy of your own CD for free, you still have to pay royalties for the recorded songs that are on it. You also still have to pay royalties if the live convert that your ban plays at is free.
Might be different in your country, then. Here in Germany, cover bands pay royalties for the songs they perform live. (Actually not the cover band, but the guy who organized the concert and hired the band.)
Without losing their shorts? Of course, the royalties you pay are within a reasonable price range, and leaves more than enough money for the live performers to still make money from their concerts. The more people listen to the band, the more money you make as a band but also the higher the royalty cut you have to pay.
It's perfectly fair when it comes to live music, yet incredibly buerocratic.
Although, I don't like the royalties you have to pay (in Germany, might be different in your country) for playing recorded music to the public, even when it's a free venue.
I mean seriously, if they got to the point that it was possible to totally secure music so that it couldn't be copied (even with a mic to a speaker), what's to prevent an ameteur band from re-singing the song and recording their version of it?
Royalties. (I hope this is the correct word in English. Forgive me, I'm German.)
If you perform someone else's work in public, if you record it on a media and give away copies, if you broadcast that recording to the public, you have to pay royalties to the author(s) of a song. You also have to pay royalties as well when you play music to the public, e.g. a large public party or the music you play as a cafe owner to keep your customers happy. (That's why royalty-free music is a niche market, btw.)
There are royalty collection organizations in most states, the GEMA is the one here in Germany. I once had the dumb luck of writing a small tune that was then performed by my band on German national TV. As a result, we instantly got a little royalty check through GEMA, since these TV stations paid royalties to GEMA for broadcasting music.
(This, btw., is another reason why some celebrity musicians perform for free on globally broadcast charity events. It's a royalty bonanza.)
Don't write an email. Don't fax.
Send a letter, on paper.
In Texas it was illegal to own more than 6 dildos.
1.) I'd love to see a citable official source for this law.
2.) How do they enforce this? Will police search your home for dildos when they receive a tip from an anonymous informer? Some policement must really hate their job there...
You think that's bad?
Back in my days, we used to run our e-commerce server from an Atari 600 XL and 5.25" floppy drive, while these kangaroo-sized hamsters kept stealing chocolate from our storage room. Which wasn't exactly a storage room, but an old greasy rocket silo in Mexico, built illegally by the Russians during the Cuban crisis.
Oh, you kids don't know how easy life has been for you.
When I told her to put another box in the living room, she wanted a Mac. Now come on, is that reason to break up or what?
http://www.gpf-comics.com/d/20010402.html
http://www.gpf-comics.com/d/20010403.html
http://www.gpf-comics.com/d/20010404.html
http://www.gpf-comics.com/d/20010405.html
And then continue reading at
http://www.gpf-comics.com/d/20010611.html
...are there mainboards and CPUs available to end-users that are not in the sky-high price-range that manufacturers take for developer hardware?
I'd be interested in building an ARM-based desktop computer, but it seems there is no normal mainboard sold to end-users. Or is it? ("Normal" = standard form factor, standard RAMs, IDE, USB and VGA included, possibly PS/2 and serial too.)
Same question for the Crusoe, btw. Seems that the only desktop mainboard available is developers only...
Oh, please don't exaggerate. Of course, I never take 5 hour taxi trips. I'm sure that there is a train, bus or even plane ride to a location close to your destination. And if there isn't, you can always take a rental car.
But again, I'm talking from my position, in Germany, where I can reach every place I want to go to using these means of transportation. If I lived in a remote provincial town without train or bus connection to start with, I'd be the first to buy a car, sure.
Trouble is, trains and buses are empty in the US because they aren't attractive to use. The Amtrak railways are in a poor condition, the trains aren't well maintained and often late, all this scares aways those who know the luxury of having a car.
And the question about tax-subsidized public transportation is of course wether the lack of US taxes on cars and fuel is fair, anyway. US fuel prices are ridiculously low, compared to the rest of the world. A few years back there was an estimate that fuel in Germany would have to cost about 2.60 Euros per Liter to acommodate the secondary costs of its use - pollution, roads, etc.
It is often a question of mentality.
That's true. Not using a car in the US makes people think of you as an odd person... As I originally said, Greyhound is seen as a poor man's ride, not as an alternative to using a car.
I have to say that German trains are usually a pain in the ass because they are too full
True, but then again I usually travel alone and there's always _one_ seat free for me.
Same, btw., with Greyhound buses in the US. During my US trip, I often got an earlier ride because the bus was waiting for just _one_ more seat to be filled, but everybody who wanted to take the ride was there with a group or family.
Those of us that forget to make seat reservations often end up on the floor
There is now a new price system for German trains that rewards people with rebates if they buy a ticket and reserve a seat early. I guess they are trying to make things better in that regard. I don't like the new price system, though, because I usually decide spontaniously when I take a train, not 7 days in advance.
I pay only about $1600 for a yearly pass for all public transport (boats, trams, trains, busses) throughout the country.
Oh, I envy you! If they offered a all-inclusive ticket as cheap as that here in Germany, it'd be heaven for someone like me.