I've got Charter's Ultra100 service (was Ultra60 originally) and I've had a couple of service issues - one was a hardware issue at some box a mile or two from here and one was supposedly some card at the "head-end". Both times I've had to escalate the issue to get it addressed; but beyond that I've pretty much gotten the advertised speed the entire time I've had them.
That being said, I was not amused with the "caps" as while I've never hit them - we specifically asked about that when we signed up and were of course promised that the Ultra60 tier wouldn't have any.
Agreed. I've got a XBOX360 HD drive and a couple of stand-alone HD-DVD players that gather dust while we watch movies on the PS3's and/or PC's with Blu-Ray drives...
Blu-Ray burners and discs still (at least in my opinion) aren't to a price point where they are common; but yet lets throw another format into the mix. How many of these do they really think the market will bear? These guys never learn....
Yeah, and they also can't install games to the hard drive, nor move accounts back and forth from a banned system to a non-banned system from what I understand. So yes there is a loss of functionality as well.
I have no problems with what they did; but I question their logic. Those consoles that are banned from Live for being "modded" can still obviously play pirated games. What they *can't* do is go on live and among other things purchase things. So while they will undoubtedly sell some more consoles (Craigslist and eBay are full of banned consoles) and probably some more games - I don't really see this as doing much to stop piracy - I only see it stopping any legit spending from those consoles.
Seems to me that there must've been a better way to handle this; but that's just me.
I have a similar router (Linksys WRT350N) also flashed with DD-WRT. It's been running on 20/3 FTTP for a year or two and a few weeks ago we moved to 60/5 cable and it hasn't given me any issues.
I've got absolutely no problem with people who rent less movies than me getting a higher priority when it comes to getting a particular movie... That's fine... But *IF* they are shipping me movies a day (or more) later than somebody else; then yeah I have a problem with that... There are weeks when I turn around movies pretty quickly and expect to get something back in a timely manner - in general it seems to balance out as there are weeks when the same three movies sit here for the entire week...
It does seem that if I'm turning around movies pretty quickly that it often takes an extra 1-2 days for Netflix to "receive my movies back" and they don't seem to ship out the same day they've received them back; whereas when I'm sitting on them for several days at a time they seem to be received the day after I mail them back and a new movie goes out same day....
Before @home went under they were offering phone service here. I ordered it and it was a joke. They power backup they installed was plugged into an outlet off of a light in the basement so when the light was turned off (which it normally was) the battery ran down and phone service eventually went out. Even once they addressed that at least every couple of weeks I'd pick up the phone and not have a dial tone. A call (via a cell phone) to tech support usually got it resolved in a matter of minutes; but it was a pain and I finally went back to SBC....
For a lot of books that's probably being generous. I had several classes where the textbook that was "required" was written by somebody from the University's faculty and was never referenced/needed/etc during the entire semester.
I've still probably got 2 dozen of those old wheels laying in a box somewhere. I didn't mind those as much as the dark purple code sheets that came with some games (Jack Nicklaus Golf may have been one of those). Nearly went blind trying to read those...........
No there are actually WMP plugins for those apps. It's been a while; but I think the Roxio one is part of the installation for the media player. The Nero one I guess was installed by Nero itself when I installed the full application.
I have to agree with the Super Monkey Ball games. As far as Nintendo games, I liked the Mario Party games for playing with my daughter. I'm still a sucker for the older Nintendo games like Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing (again, a good one to play with my daughter), etc.
a few years ago. We went through the process of using their "self-audit tool" (Gasp I think?). As the "new" IT person I got the (nasty) responsibility for assessing the situation and bringing us into compliance. The problem we found wasn't with "commercial" software such as Microsoft, etc.; what we did find was shareware being used/abused. We ended up purchasing licenses for several products (Winzip, CuteFTP, etc) that people "needed" but never bothered to put a requisition in for. Additionally we ended up rolling out Win2k and instituted some control over who could/couldn't install software etc. It was a time consuming process analyzing the data and such as the program listed *EVERYTHING* including all of the standard windows utilities such as the calculator and such. Bottom line was that the odds were probably better that I'd get by lightning than for them to have came in; but it needed to be done and the letter made it a priority with our owners so I can't fault the process.
I'm not an avid chess person and perhaps my memory isn't what it once was; but I seem to recall reading somewhere that they *do* have computer chess championships of some kind. However, that being said I do tend to agree with a comment further down in that it's really which computer has the better set of programmers more than anything....
The more we learn
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
the less it seems that we know. I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination; but considering how much of our science is based on this kind of thing I do find it amazing that that at this point in time we're now questioning the e=mc^2....
I do think it's got it's potential uses; but I'm guessing it's too expensive to really get any kind of market and if that turns out to be the case how long will the service be around?
I've worked for a point of sale company for almost 4 years and it's been my experience with scanners in that time that pretty much all of them in that time (and some time prior) can handle a large variety of barcodes. Software on the other hand has been another issue. I've seen some products that only had room to allow for 12 characters in the barcode field which is obviously a problem for them. In a perfect world that software would be upgraded or replaced; but often the developer is long since gone; or the cost of upgrading (both in terms of s/w and h/w to run the newer software) is cost prohibitive for smaller retailers.
As far the stuff like magazines that have the additional digits; the problems I've seen with those is that many hand held scanners you have to set to auto-discriminate to handle those since the majority of UPC-A's don't have them. Once you do that the error rate increases quite a bit especially on poorer quality barcodes.
Additionally I concur with the people who are asking why only 13 digits. I haven't seen that article in question; but I assume that it discusses the EAN-13 format. There are many other formats out there that can hold more data that these scanners can read. Why settle on something that is only going to offer incremental growth?
Using your math then explain to me how a casette is still quite often priced cheaper than a CD? Doesn't a casette cost more than a CD to produce? Doesn't a CD sell more copies than a casette?
And as far as the 80% who are "money losing" then it seems to me it should be survival of the fittest. It seems to me that the onus should be on the recording companies to be a better judge of who is going to sell and make less mistakes. Inflating the prices of CD's to make up for that is obviously good business sense on their part; but it doesn't make it a good idea from the customers perspective. And going back to my original point, a lot of business have made a lot of money with lower margins and higher sales. It's my *opinion* that if they reduced their margins on CD's they'd sell more -- obviously not in every case -- but in general and would end up making more money in the first place.
If these companies are only batting.200 (1 in 5 as you say) then perhaps they should start looking at themselves and try and improve that average.......
but if seems to me that if the labels would invest the time/energy/money/etc into making the music available online at a reasonable price (with reasonable usage) as well as making CD's themselves more reasonably priced they'd be a lot better off.
The technology is out there to "pirate" DVD's; but I've purchased almost 500 of them because they (for the most part) are reasonably priced (often less than a CD) or they are special editions that have enough content that justifies the higher cost (to me).
Everybody wants large margins; but a lot of companies have made a lot of money over the years on smaller margins with larger quantities sold.........
There are still quite a few WWIV boards available either via dialup or telnet. Try filenet.wwiv.net (or maybe it's bbs.filenet.wwiv.net) from there you should be able to find quite a few more.
I work for a POS company and with the exception of the really large retailers I've seen just the opposite trend the last few years. More and more accounts are moving off of proprietary h/w and s/w to general purpose PC's and they want Office, Internet Access, etc., on them. While we prefer to sell/install machines dedicated to POS that's becoming more and more of a rarity -- again with the exception of the really large retailers.
It shouldn't matter if they are "truly" reformed of if they are just trying to drum up interest. The bottom line is that they are doing something that I consider a good step.
Yeah we don't know that they won't see something they don't like and attempt to shut it down and if they do then yeah I'd think they deserved all the scorn in the world; but for know I think they at least deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Part of the problem with them ever selling it online is the lack of quality out there. How many CD's can you think of that have more than a song or two you'd like enough to buy? I've got a handful here that have at least 3 songs that *I* like; but most of them were purchased for a single song or two. I really don't think online purchasing will fly unless it was by the song and if so I can't see there being enough money there....
but I'd rather see something new than yet another Doom game. Yeah the graphics will probably be impressive and all; but I just can't see the attraction to rehashing the same concepts over and over. I suppose I'm no better as I have Civilization 1, 2, & now 3; but even though I've enjoyed each game in the series none was as good as the first there is just too much repetition in the series (and in any series really).
Seems like the resources that'll get dumped into Doom 3 could be put towards something new and exciting; although I guess in the economic climate the easy decision is to revisit what's been successful...
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I've got Charter's Ultra100 service (was Ultra60 originally) and I've had a couple of service issues - one was a hardware issue at some box a mile or two from here and one was supposedly some card at the "head-end". Both times I've had to escalate the issue to get it addressed; but beyond that I've pretty much gotten the advertised speed the entire time I've had them.
That being said, I was not amused with the "caps" as while I've never hit them - we specifically asked about that when we signed up and were of course promised that the Ultra60 tier wouldn't have any.
And given the size of hard drives how beneficial is this? Why not make try and make the existing drives and media more cost effective instead?
Agreed. I've got a XBOX360 HD drive and a couple of stand-alone HD-DVD players that gather dust while we watch movies on the PS3's and/or PC's with Blu-Ray drives...
Blu-Ray burners and discs still (at least in my opinion) aren't to a price point where they are common; but yet lets throw another format into the mix. How many of these do they really think the market will bear? These guys never learn....
Yeah, and they also can't install games to the hard drive, nor move accounts back and forth from a banned system to a non-banned system from what I understand. So yes there is a loss of functionality as well.
I have no problems with what they did; but I question their logic. Those consoles that are banned from Live for being "modded" can still obviously play pirated games. What they *can't* do is go on live and among other things purchase things. So while they will undoubtedly sell some more consoles (Craigslist and eBay are full of banned consoles) and probably some more games - I don't really see this as doing much to stop piracy - I only see it stopping any legit spending from those consoles.
Seems to me that there must've been a better way to handle this; but that's just me.
I have a similar router (Linksys WRT350N) also flashed with DD-WRT. It's been running on 20/3 FTTP for a year or two and a few weeks ago we moved to 60/5 cable and it hasn't given me any issues.
I've got absolutely no problem with people who rent less movies than me getting a higher priority when it comes to getting a particular movie... That's fine... But *IF* they are shipping me movies a day (or more) later than somebody else; then yeah I have a problem with that... There are weeks when I turn around movies pretty quickly and expect to get something back in a timely manner - in general it seems to balance out as there are weeks when the same three movies sit here for the entire week...
It does seem that if I'm turning around movies pretty quickly that it often takes an extra 1-2 days for Netflix to "receive my movies back" and they don't seem to ship out the same day they've received them back; whereas when I'm sitting on them for several days at a time they seem to be received the day after I mail them back and a new movie goes out same day....
Before @home went under they were offering phone service here. I ordered it and it was a joke. They power backup they installed was plugged into an outlet off of a light in the basement so when the light was turned off (which it normally was) the battery ran down and phone service eventually went out. Even once they addressed that at least every couple of weeks I'd pick up the phone and not have a dial tone. A call (via a cell phone) to tech support usually got it resolved in a matter of minutes; but it was a pain and I finally went back to SBC....
For a lot of books that's probably being generous. I had several classes where the textbook that was "required" was written by somebody from the University's faculty and was never referenced/needed/etc during the entire semester.
Probably neither, it would hover in the air spinning round and round. Actually I think if you got enough of them you could power a small city.
I've still probably got 2 dozen of those old wheels laying in a box somewhere. I didn't mind those as much as the dark purple code sheets that came with some games (Jack Nicklaus Golf may have been one of those). Nearly went blind trying to read those...........
No there are actually WMP plugins for those apps. It's been a while; but I think the Roxio one is part of the installation for the media player. The Nero one I guess was installed by Nero itself when I installed the full application.
I have to agree with the Super Monkey Ball games. As far as Nintendo games, I liked the Mario Party games for playing with my daughter. I'm still a sucker for the older Nintendo games like Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing (again, a good one to play with my daughter), etc.
a few years ago. We went through the process of using their "self-audit tool" (Gasp I think?). As the "new" IT person I got the (nasty) responsibility for assessing the situation and bringing us into compliance. The problem we found wasn't with "commercial" software such as Microsoft, etc.; what we did find was shareware being used/abused. We ended up purchasing licenses for several products (Winzip, CuteFTP, etc) that people "needed" but never bothered to put a requisition in for. Additionally we ended up rolling out Win2k and instituted some control over who could/couldn't install software etc. It was a time consuming process analyzing the data and such as the program listed *EVERYTHING* including all of the standard windows utilities such as the calculator and such. Bottom line was that the odds were probably better that I'd get by lightning than for them to have came in; but it needed to be done and the letter made it a priority with our owners so I can't fault the process.
I'm not an avid chess person and perhaps my memory isn't what it once was; but I seem to recall reading somewhere that they *do* have computer chess championships of some kind. However, that being said I do tend to agree with a comment further down in that it's really which computer has the better set of programmers more than anything....
the less it seems that we know. I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination; but considering how much of our science is based on this kind of thing I do find it amazing that that at this point in time we're now questioning the e=mc^2....
posted several months back.
I do think it's got it's potential uses; but I'm guessing it's too expensive to really get any kind of market and if that turns out to be the case how long will the service be around?
I've worked for a point of sale company for almost 4 years and it's been my experience with scanners in that time that pretty much all of them in that time (and some time prior) can handle a large variety of barcodes. Software on the other hand has been another issue. I've seen some products that only had room to allow for 12 characters in the barcode field which is obviously a problem for them. In a perfect world that software would be upgraded or replaced; but often the developer is long since gone; or the cost of upgrading (both in terms of s/w and h/w to run the newer software) is cost prohibitive for smaller retailers.
As far the stuff like magazines that have the additional digits; the problems I've seen with those is that many hand held scanners you have to set to auto-discriminate to handle those since the majority of UPC-A's don't have them. Once you do that the error rate increases quite a bit especially on poorer quality barcodes.
Additionally I concur with the people who are asking why only 13 digits. I haven't seen that article in question; but I assume that it discusses the EAN-13 format. There are many other formats out there that can hold more data that these scanners can read. Why settle on something that is only going to offer incremental growth?
Using your math then explain to me how a casette is still quite often priced cheaper than a CD? Doesn't a casette cost more than a CD to produce? Doesn't a CD sell more copies than a casette?
.200 (1 in 5 as you say) then perhaps they should start looking at themselves and try and improve that average.......
And as far as the 80% who are "money losing" then it seems to me it should be survival of the fittest. It seems to me that the onus should be on the recording companies to be a better judge of who is going to sell and make less mistakes. Inflating the prices of CD's to make up for that is obviously good business sense on their part; but it doesn't make it a good idea from the customers perspective. And going back to my original point, a lot of business have made a lot of money with lower margins and higher sales. It's my *opinion* that if they reduced their margins on CD's they'd sell more -- obviously not in every case -- but in general and would end up making more money in the first place.
If these companies are only batting
but if seems to me that if the labels would invest the time/energy/money/etc into making the music available online at a reasonable price (with reasonable usage) as well as making CD's themselves more reasonably priced they'd be a lot better off.
The technology is out there to "pirate" DVD's; but I've purchased almost 500 of them because they (for the most part) are reasonably priced (often less than a CD) or they are special editions that have enough content that justifies the higher cost (to me).
Everybody wants large margins; but a lot of companies have made a lot of money over the years on smaller margins with larger quantities sold.........
There are still quite a few WWIV boards available either via dialup or telnet. Try filenet.wwiv.net (or maybe it's bbs.filenet.wwiv.net) from there you should be able to find quite a few more.
I work for a POS company and with the exception of the really large retailers I've seen just the opposite trend the last few years. More and more accounts are moving off of proprietary h/w and s/w to general purpose PC's and they want Office, Internet Access, etc., on them. While we prefer to sell/install machines dedicated to POS that's becoming more and more of a rarity -- again with the exception of the really large retailers.
It shouldn't matter if they are "truly" reformed of if they are just trying to drum up interest. The bottom line is that they are doing something that I consider a good step.
Yeah we don't know that they won't see something they don't like and attempt to shut it down and if they do then yeah I'd think they deserved all the scorn in the world; but for know I think they at least deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Part of the problem with them ever selling it online is the lack of quality out there. How many CD's can you think of that have more than a song or two you'd like enough to buy? I've got a handful here that have at least 3 songs that *I* like; but most of them were purchased for a single song or two. I really don't think online purchasing will fly unless it was by the song and if so I can't see there being enough money there....
but I'd rather see something new than yet another Doom game. Yeah the graphics will probably be impressive and all; but I just can't see the attraction to rehashing the same concepts over and over. I suppose I'm no better as I have Civilization 1, 2, & now 3; but even though I've enjoyed each game in the series none was as good as the first there is just too much repetition in the series (and in any series really).
Seems like the resources that'll get dumped into Doom 3 could be put towards something new and exciting; although I guess in the economic climate the easy decision is to revisit what's been successful...