When I was a kid we had one of those bigass housetop antennas and if you moved it around you could get channels (I assume) was from other broadcast areas. Were we "stealing"?
My uncle loves those super sensitive ultra band radios where you can pick up FM stations from like Mexico and Canada and from other really far away places, is he stealing?
I put up a dish with hardware on it that allows me to recieve Directv am I stealing? I suppose the difference is you have to actively "decode" the signal so I suppose that makes it a little more sticky but these signals are landing on my property what I do with them is my business, it's not like I'm splicing into the neighbor's cable, this is like charging me for using the sun's rays or something.
I was a National Merit Finalist, scholarships everywhere, jumped right into college taking honors courses and pulled a 2.6 my first semester, 2.9 the second, I was woefully unprepared for the college curriculum and lost my scholarship after the first year. Had to move back home, loans out the ass, dropped out my junior year. I'm doing ok now but I can only wonder where I'd be had I finished school instead.
The next time I have a few hours to play around I might just see if I can get the printer to work in Linux, the printer and the new digital cam are the two main reasons to keep her on Windows, the rest is just stupid crap, browser games and the like (probably one of the leading causes of all the damned spyware anyway).
Yeah wait for a subpeona from some out of the way podunk place so I have to hire a high price $300 an hour lawyer to go in and say "my client is merely the web host?" no thanks man, sorry but that ain't happening.
It already happened once with "everyone's favorite litigious bastard web host" and I managed to talk them into not making me send a lawyer to Texas by basically, jumping and asking mommy dearest how high. (the owner's mom is his lawyer so she can file motions and shit for free whereas poor bastards like me who have no close relatives who are lawyers get to pay someone $300-$500 per hour, out of state, to answer these filings).
I don't like it anymore than you do, but you throw your wallet at some lawyer, I'll do my best to keep my money in my pocket where it belongs. Fucking lawyers I hate 'em with a passion.
Here's what I sent in reply to the author
on
Testing ISP Censorship
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Don't blame the isp, as a web host I have to worry about DMCA crap, RIAA, MPAA, piracy, lawyers, lawsuits, and litigation. After a while I simply adopt the attitude of "you guys figure this out, send me a copy of the court ruling, if it's OK to have it we'll put the site back, if it's not OK to have it then the site stays down".
No one wants to get caught in the middle of this crap, it's ALL too easy to make these bogus claims and it's ALL too easy to make GOOD on even bogus claims when things such as the DMCA and Patriot Act are out there to give censorship such a big stick.
I don't like censorship, but I don't like flinging my wallet at some sheister lawyer either. In the end I have to weigh the lesser of two evils and while I hate censorship I hate being bankrupt thanks to lawyers or imprisoned thanks to REALLY BAD LAWS even more.
Probably the main thing is basic security. I've spent hours cleaning spyware and viruses and other bullshit off my wife's Win XP machine, and she's well trained not to open attachments in email and other idiocies but STILL that crap gets on there! It's goddamned annoying. I _would_ move her to linux too but the usb multifunction printer, her digital camera, not to mention all those silly browser games/etc she likes to play either won't work in linux or are a pain in the butt to get working.
Another big reason is I hate fucking with Windows licensing, every time I upgrade my wife's machine I have to call that god forsaken toll free number and read in the longass "code" and then they read me back another longass code to "re enable" my OWN LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED copy of Windows CP, the CD is on her tower case, and the product code sticker is stuck to her monitor, I HATE being treated like some kinda pirate just because I upgrade motherboards or swapped sound cards/etc on a computer I OWN running software I PURCHASED.
Mozilla tabbed browsing - ok I know I can run this in Windows too but I still like Mozilla's tabbed browsing:)
One of my other "biggies" is a rather simple one, tabbed SSH shells on Konsole in KDE, I keep upwards of 30 shells open to various servers open at ALL times, having these in one window with tabs at the bottom is absolutely priceless, I've yet to see any other apps do this outside of Konsole and unless my memory fails, the default term program for Gnome also does this.
Email - I like Evolution it serves my purposes without being bloated or trying to "do everything" for me. Check my email, send my email, I'm pretty happy. I will let procmail do my filtering and sorting thanks anyway (yes I know Evolution does a lot more than this but it doesn't put it "in my way"). Also, last I checked there isn't one single email virus that will fuck over Evolution (or any other Linux email client that I'm aware of). But this point is really made in point #1 about security.
Stability - uptime on my box is 28 days, nothing awesome (I'm not shy about rebooting but just don't have too much). Windows while it HAS improved, still isn't that stable, my gaming computer, which has a barebones install of XP with just what is necessary to play the games I like to play, still manages to need a reboot about once per week or so. Nothing more aggravating than having to reboot when you really don't WANT to.
You should have limits you set and abide by, with your job, if you're CONSTANTLY pulling overtime then you should put your foot down about the understaffing. There's no real excuse for being railroaded into working overtime week after week after week by your employer, if they're that damned busy they oughta hire some more help!
And this coming from a business owner, not an employee, I've been in jobs where I was constantly asked to work overtime/etc managing servers, I just put my foot down and said "ok fine get me business class DSL in my house, and I'm gonna work from home a couple days a week", so I'd go in Mon, Thurs and Friday, and work from home the rest of the time over VPN, they were happy, I was able to work "overtime" (salaried of course) and I was happy, I spent much more time at home so I could at least see the wife and rugrat.
Now I work my business from home full time, heck I don't even have offices, why bother... everyone who works for me works from home on a performance based pay system.
Had a user come into our help channel last night, unable to send email through his account with us since that morning (yesterday Sun 05/23) and I confirmed the server was working fine so I had him telnet to port 25 - no luck, had him telnet to port 25 on the server I use for email - no dice, had him use port 2525 - SMTP connection opened up fine.
He was using comcast for his cable modem. Said it just started that day.
We accept incoming smtp on port 2525 also since my OWN isp at home blocks port 25 (knology) so I have ot use 2525 to send email through my company email server myself.
You got ripped, hard, all he had to do was write you a check and issue you a 1099 at the end of the year for your taxes, he was just being CHEAP.
I'da promptly uninstalled the software and walked out. My dad woulda been pissed at me if I hadn't of in such a situation, he doesn't like to work for free either.
My uncle used to bug the shit out of me all the time to work on his computers, so the next time he called I told him I was thinking about building a deck and could he come over and build it for me he said he'd get a material list and estimate for me I told him I'd already got the material I just needed him to build it, he said to tell him how big it was etc so he could figure up labor, I said "what labor I thought you could just come over and build it?" "I don't work for free son" "neither do I it's $45 per hour for me to come to your house to work on your pc's $25 per hour if you unhook everything and bring it here to my house" he hung up on me, my dad said I was a dumbass for doing it for free to begin with.
I've traded computer help and web hosting and computer equipment for loads of stuff and services. A few examples:
a boat and trailer snakes (pet snakes) several dinners both home cooked and for restaurants a condo for a week on the gulf brownies and fresh baked goodies from Publix remodeling on my house stove fridge tires for my car VCD's of old DragonBallZ bootlegs
I think it implies that the people getting paid millions maybe weren't trying very hard, either due to some big conspiracy OR out of shear greed "hey we could cure this now but then who's gonna pay us millions to cure it?".
Yes IRC is a hotbed of illegal activities, it's where I have always gone to get my goods, from the days of helping to start #cablemp3z on dal.net (I hear dal.net doesn't allow any file channels anymore, last time I was on there was pre-2K) with some friends way back when to full dvd rips now. The thing that seperates irc from p2p is (in my case) I usually know the people I am dealing with, often to the point of having phone numbers for them or even having crashed on their couch at some point. So I know when they say "hey I got " it really is and not some fake file. No RIAA spies writing down ip addresses, because anyone who enters our little world that we don't know gets booted before they can say !list. We chat and hang out and if someone gets something cool they share it with the rest.
It isn't the wild west, it's utopia.
That said, irc is like any other tool, I can choose to hit you in the head with my hammer, or I can build you a house, the fact that the hammer can be used to smash your brains in doesn't make it evil.
I also have a private irc server I use for customer support and my techs all stay in a private channel so when we're dealing with tech issues we have a whole group ready to help us solve problems, makes my helpdesk a lot more efficient when any of my techs can ask me a question and get an answer the next time I bring irc to the foreground rather than wait on an email, plus it's a social thing as well as a release mechanism, customer acting a fool? Just bitch in the channel, let it all out and then answer them.
I was in Exodus - Toyama facility in Sunnyvale, CA back in 2001 and was talking to some of the data center techs, they were bitching because Google DOES stack 44 -half depth- servers in a rack, on EACH SIDE (aka 88 servers per rack indeed) and how the heat that produces is absolutely fucking insane and how he can't believe they don't meltdown. He was comlaining how frugal google was not giving the systems more room to breath.
I don't use allofmp3 but I have use another russian site to get some mp3's of bootlegs and other stuff I've yet to find for sale anywhere, and I can tell you I got fantastic speeds from them, 200+ K per second up to 400K which is more a limitation of my cable modem as I rarely see over 300K/s from anywhere, Russian or otherwise.
I doubt at this price the artist gets much, ok I would bet cash they get jack and shit, of course we all know that at even $18 a CD the artist doesn't see much, yes I wish I could buy my music direct from the artist so I know they're getting a cut.
Er one 2 hour movie a night = 730 hours a YEAR so using "real math" that's 2-3 years per bulb.
The other math - Infocus X1 $999 at Best Buy, $250 for a bulb - to equal the cost of my 57" HDTV means even at even 1 bulb per year I'll get 5 years out of the Infocus to equal the $2400 for my TV. I figure before 5 years is up something on that big screen is likely to need service anyway. Besides by the time my bulb wears out I'll likely be able to upgrade my projector at least 2 steps for another $1000 and put the current one up on Ebay or let someone inherit it.
And even if you watched movies 10 hours per day that's 200 days per bulb or $400 per year for bulbs roughly.
Also my 57" Hitachi 16:9 aspect TV cannot even begin to compare to the 72inch WIDE (not diagonal) picture I get downstairs in my theater on my X1 there's no competition between the two at all, my TV is nice, no doubt, but that 72" display I get on the projector just kicks the ass of my TV up and down the block.
If you're pinching pennies hit Wal-Mart and snag a 27" stereo TV, they're getting real cheap, if you're about getting some real enjoyment out of your DVD's (or your DVD's ripped to a terabyte harddrive array and played on a PC hooked to the projector) then once you see that projection image you'll know why you got it.
link for some pics of my theater project, my digital camera ruins the pics of the screens I took but you can get an idea).
Please, let them BOTH ignore Real and let the bastards die the slow agonizing death they so RICHLY deserve.
Has anyone really used their junk since like version 3 or 4 when it became so laden with addons and hidden hitchhikers that no one in their right mind would install their crap?
So hopefully both M$ and Apple will ignore Real networks and then Real will hopefully die soon.
Yeah I know, dream on, but hey, I'm a romantic at heart.
No mod points not that you need 'em, so I'll reply:
#1 True but I don't want to be my parents where I don't have a finger on the pulse of the new stuff. Remember the stuff you call classics (and I call classics) our parents called trash. So don't sell the new stuff short.
#2 Absolutely, I'm a huge music buff, but I simply do not put $15-$20 of value on a CD. Simple as that, my value point is around $8 for a cd, or $4 for a cd in digital downloadable format. Which coincidentally is about what a used CD costs at one of several places used CD's are easy to get (I like amazon's marketplace myself).
#3 Hence another reason to buy used cd's and maybe spend an extra few minutes finding indy artists to at least give ear to and maybe spend money on.
#4 Internet radio is nice, I found many artists this way.
#5 Don't get me started about our local library, that's a rant in and of itself, but here's a snippet - they close at 5pm on Fridays and Saturdays so they DO NOT ENCOURAGE KIDS TO LOITER IN THE LIBRARY - what the living fuck are they smoking?!? Isn't the whole PURPOSE of a library to encourage kids TO loiter?!#?!?! Goddamn it gets my blood boiling.
I buy music online at mp3search.ru, if I catch something cool on Uranium on Fuse or on the radio or wherever, off to mp3search.ru I go, 80 cents or so later I usually have the cd to listen to.
I'm sorry but even at the current buck or so per song it's TOO expensive. I'm not paying $17.99 for a CD and I'm not paying a dollar for a shitty song.
When I can grab a CD for about $8-9 or a song for about 40 cents THEN I'm in, until then it's Amazon.com's used CD marketplace and certain russian websites for me (mp3search.ru if you care).
I don't want to deprive the "artists" of their due but goddamn man $18 for a fucking CD is just too damned much, and $1 a song is borderline too much and $2.50 a song? Get fucking real, that's insane.
They need to look at the succes of iTunes and think to themselves "whoa look at that, wonder how many people would buy songs if they were a little bit CHEAPER", if Itunes could hit about 40-60 cents per track, I'd probably spend a wad there that's just my personal "price point" where I feel online music downloads is priced reasonable, and CD's need to get below about $12 each and I'll be buying a helluva lot more new CD's as well.
Doesn't really affect me much the music I like is lotsa times available cheap or free straight from the artist website (underground metal and hardcore music). But I don't mind the occasional Godsmack or Disturbed or other 'mainstream' metal either.
Next year I think I'll just turn my pc off all day April 1st and spare myself the lame (and occasionally witty but only very very occasionally) april fools jokes that run rampant online each year.
Disclosure - I spent 4 days in Houston in the Sheraton on Robert's dime, got to go to the Houston bowl and party in his box, tour EV1 and some other goodies. I've met and talked to Robert and personally I like the man so call me biased if you want.
Robert honestly thought he was doing a good thing, he hasn't went into details but basically SCO came knocking and when the dust settled it was cheaper to just pay them and let it be, than to fight them.
Robert's not afraid to fight if he has to, he recently won a judgement against everyone's (in the hosting industry anyway) least favorite litigious bastards (er bitch?). But I think he simply felt like buying the stupid licenses was cheapest and easiest.
Then I think he made his big mistake (not that buying them wasn't) and SCO basically either said "hey free advertising we'll just mention this in a press release, and people will see your url EVERYWHERE" OR they simply said "part of the agreement is we name names like it or not" I'm not sure which way it went, but allowing SCO to publicly state they bought a license was the big mistake.
No one knows for sure who might have quietly bought licenses so far, but letting SCO publicly display the fact you buy a license is definitely a big bad idea.
Ok at first I was like "cool, sounds neat" then I saw the pricing and then I did my worst Shaggy impression "ZOIKS Scooby that fucker is expensive" (ok I did say worst).
While I applaud most any corporate/public/front page getting use of open source stuff, I just can't see anyone buying this - I mean yowza, talk about expensive.
Or does the Aussie dollar trade like 3 to 1 for US dollars (ok I'm a typical American and don't know what other money is "worth" but I thought Aussie dollars were in the ballpark of the same value as US).
Still kinda neat though, however it does just look like one of those little Shuttle "cubes" with some open source hacked up software on it.
Yeah we've thought about doing this, one of our customers wrote a form to mail script in php that is so far un-exploited by spammers and when we find a misconfigured formmail we point them at his script and say "use that".
Oddly it hasn't happened in several weeks now, for a while it was a weekly occurance, almost spooky when it stops for a while. But not having to deal with Spamcop and AOL blocking is a nice break...
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a kid we had one of those bigass housetop antennas and if you moved it around you could get channels (I assume) was from other broadcast areas. Were we "stealing"?
My uncle loves those super sensitive ultra band radios where you can pick up FM stations from like Mexico and Canada and from other really far away places, is he stealing?
I put up a dish with hardware on it that allows me to recieve Directv am I stealing? I suppose the difference is you have to actively "decode" the signal so I suppose that makes it a little more sticky but these signals are landing on my property what I do with them is my business, it's not like I'm splicing into the neighbor's cable, this is like charging me for using the sun's rays or something.
Jesus christ was this posted by me in my sleep?
I was a National Merit Finalist, scholarships everywhere, jumped right into college taking honors courses and pulled a 2.6 my first semester, 2.9 the second, I was woefully unprepared for the college curriculum and lost my scholarship after the first year. Had to move back home, loans out the ass, dropped out my junior year. I'm doing ok now but I can only wonder where I'd be had I finished school instead.
The next time I have a few hours to play around I might just see if I can get the printer to work in Linux, the printer and the new digital cam are the two main reasons to keep her on Windows, the rest is just stupid crap, browser games and the like (probably one of the leading causes of all the damned spyware anyway).
Yeah wait for a subpeona from some out of the way podunk place so I have to hire a high price $300 an hour lawyer to go in and say "my client is merely the web host?" no thanks man, sorry but that ain't happening.
It already happened once with "everyone's favorite litigious bastard web host" and I managed to talk them into not making me send a lawyer to Texas by basically, jumping and asking mommy dearest how high. (the owner's mom is his lawyer so she can file motions and shit for free whereas poor bastards like me who have no close relatives who are lawyers get to pay someone $300-$500 per hour, out of state, to answer these filings).
I don't like it anymore than you do, but you throw your wallet at some lawyer, I'll do my best to keep my money in my pocket where it belongs. Fucking lawyers I hate 'em with a passion.
Don't blame the isp, as a web host I have to worry about DMCA crap, RIAA, MPAA, piracy, lawyers, lawsuits, and litigation. After a while I simply adopt the attitude of "you guys figure this out, send me a copy of the court ruling, if it's OK to have it we'll put the site back, if it's not OK to have it then the site stays down".
No one wants to get caught in the middle of this crap, it's ALL too easy to make these bogus claims and it's ALL too easy to make GOOD on even bogus claims when things such as the DMCA and Patriot Act are out there to give censorship such a big stick.
I don't like censorship, but I don't like flinging my wallet at some sheister lawyer either. In the end I have to weigh the lesser of two evils and while I hate censorship I hate being bankrupt thanks to lawyers or imprisoned thanks to REALLY BAD LAWS even more.
Probably the main thing is basic security. I've spent hours cleaning spyware and viruses and other bullshit off my wife's Win XP machine, and she's well trained not to open attachments in email and other idiocies but STILL that crap gets on there! It's goddamned annoying. I _would_ move her to linux too but the usb multifunction printer, her digital camera, not to mention all those silly browser games/etc she likes to play either won't work in linux or are a pain in the butt to get working.
:)
Another big reason is I hate fucking with Windows licensing, every time I upgrade my wife's machine I have to call that god forsaken toll free number and read in the longass "code" and then they read me back another longass code to "re enable" my OWN LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED copy of Windows CP, the CD is on her tower case, and the product code sticker is stuck to her monitor, I HATE being treated like some kinda pirate just because I upgrade motherboards or swapped sound cards/etc on a computer I OWN running software I PURCHASED.
Mozilla tabbed browsing - ok I know I can run this in Windows too but I still like Mozilla's tabbed browsing
One of my other "biggies" is a rather simple one, tabbed SSH shells on Konsole in KDE, I keep upwards of 30 shells open to various servers open at ALL times, having these in one window with tabs at the bottom is absolutely priceless, I've yet to see any other apps do this outside of Konsole and unless my memory fails, the default term program for Gnome also does this.
Email - I like Evolution it serves my purposes without being bloated or trying to "do everything" for me. Check my email, send my email, I'm pretty happy. I will let procmail do my filtering and sorting thanks anyway (yes I know Evolution does a lot more than this but it doesn't put it "in my way"). Also, last I checked there isn't one single email virus that will fuck over Evolution (or any other Linux email client that I'm aware of). But this point is really made in point #1 about security.
Stability - uptime on my box is 28 days, nothing awesome (I'm not shy about rebooting but just don't have too much). Windows while it HAS improved, still isn't that stable, my gaming computer, which has a barebones install of XP with just what is necessary to play the games I like to play, still manages to need a reboot about once per week or so. Nothing more aggravating than having to reboot when you really don't WANT to.
You should have limits you set and abide by, with your job, if you're CONSTANTLY pulling overtime then you should put your foot down about the understaffing. There's no real excuse for being railroaded into working overtime week after week after week by your employer, if they're that damned busy they oughta hire some more help!
And this coming from a business owner, not an employee, I've been in jobs where I was constantly asked to work overtime/etc managing servers, I just put my foot down and said "ok fine get me business class DSL in my house, and I'm gonna work from home a couple days a week", so I'd go in Mon, Thurs and Friday, and work from home the rest of the time over VPN, they were happy, I was able to work "overtime" (salaried of course) and I was happy, I spent much more time at home so I could at least see the wife and rugrat.
Now I work my business from home full time, heck I don't even have offices, why bother... everyone who works for me works from home on a performance based pay system.
Had a user come into our help channel last night, unable to send email through his account with us since that morning (yesterday Sun 05/23) and I confirmed the server was working fine so I had him telnet to port 25 - no luck, had him telnet to port 25 on the server I use for email - no dice, had him use port 2525 - SMTP connection opened up fine.
He was using comcast for his cable modem. Said it just started that day.
We accept incoming smtp on port 2525 also since my OWN isp at home blocks port 25 (knology) so I have ot use 2525 to send email through my company email server myself.
You got ripped, hard, all he had to do was write you a check and issue you a 1099 at the end of the year for your taxes, he was just being CHEAP.
I'da promptly uninstalled the software and walked out. My dad woulda been pissed at me if I hadn't of in such a situation, he doesn't like to work for free either.
My uncle used to bug the shit out of me all the time to work on his computers, so the next time he called I told him I was thinking about building a deck and could he come over and build it for me he said he'd get a material list and estimate for me I told him I'd already got the material I just needed him to build it, he said to tell him how big it was etc so he could figure up labor, I said "what labor I thought you could just come over and build it?" "I don't work for free son" "neither do I it's $45 per hour for me to come to your house to work on your pc's $25 per hour if you unhook everything and bring it here to my house" he hung up on me, my dad said I was a dumbass for doing it for free to begin with.
I've traded computer help and web hosting and computer equipment for loads of stuff and services. A few examples:
a boat and trailer
snakes (pet snakes)
several dinners both home cooked and for restaurants
a condo for a week on the gulf
brownies and fresh baked goodies from Publix
remodeling on my house
stove
fridge
tires for my car
VCD's of old DragonBallZ bootlegs
I think it implies that the people getting paid millions maybe weren't trying very hard, either due to some big conspiracy OR out of shear greed "hey we could cure this now but then who's gonna pay us millions to cure it?".
Either scenario - scary.
Yes IRC is a hotbed of illegal activities, it's where I have always gone to get my goods, from the days of helping to start #cablemp3z on dal.net (I hear dal.net doesn't allow any file channels anymore, last time I was on there was pre-2K) with some friends way back when to full dvd rips now. The thing that seperates irc from p2p is (in my case) I usually know the people I am dealing with, often to the point of having phone numbers for them or even having crashed on their couch at some point. So I know when they say "hey I got " it really is and not some fake file. No RIAA spies writing down ip addresses, because anyone who enters our little world that we don't know gets booted before they can say !list. We chat and hang out and if someone gets something cool they share it with the rest.
It isn't the wild west, it's utopia.
That said, irc is like any other tool, I can choose to hit you in the head with my hammer, or I can build you a house, the fact that the hammer can be used to smash your brains in doesn't make it evil.
I also have a private irc server I use for customer support and my techs all stay in a private channel so when we're dealing with tech issues we have a whole group ready to help us solve problems, makes my helpdesk a lot more efficient when any of my techs can ask me a question and get an answer the next time I bring irc to the foreground rather than wait on an email, plus it's a social thing as well as a release mechanism, customer acting a fool? Just bitch in the channel, let it all out and then answer them.
Ok, don't. Not like I give 2 shits who or what you believe.
I was in Exodus - Toyama facility in Sunnyvale, CA back in 2001 and was talking to some of the data center techs, they were bitching because Google DOES stack 44 -half depth- servers in a rack, on EACH SIDE (aka 88 servers per rack indeed) and how the heat that produces is absolutely fucking insane and how he can't believe they don't meltdown. He was comlaining how frugal google was not giving the systems more room to breath.
I don't use allofmp3 but I have use another russian site to get some mp3's of bootlegs and other stuff I've yet to find for sale anywhere, and I can tell you I got fantastic speeds from them, 200+ K per second up to 400K which is more a limitation of my cable modem as I rarely see over 300K/s from anywhere, Russian or otherwise.
I doubt at this price the artist gets much, ok I would bet cash they get jack and shit, of course we all know that at even $18 a CD the artist doesn't see much, yes I wish I could buy my music direct from the artist so I know they're getting a cut.
Er one 2 hour movie a night = 730 hours a YEAR so using "real math" that's 2-3 years per bulb.
The other math - Infocus X1 $999 at Best Buy, $250 for a bulb - to equal the cost of my 57" HDTV means even at even 1 bulb per year I'll get 5 years out of the Infocus to equal the $2400 for my TV. I figure before 5 years is up something on that big screen is likely to need service anyway. Besides by the time my bulb wears out I'll likely be able to upgrade my projector at least 2 steps for another $1000 and put the current one up on Ebay or let someone inherit it.
And even if you watched movies 10 hours per day that's 200 days per bulb or $400 per year for bulbs roughly.
Also my 57" Hitachi 16:9 aspect TV cannot even begin to compare to the 72inch WIDE (not diagonal) picture I get downstairs in my theater on my X1 there's no competition between the two at all, my TV is nice, no doubt, but that 72" display I get on the projector just kicks the ass of my TV up and down the block.
If you're pinching pennies hit Wal-Mart and snag a 27" stereo TV, they're getting real cheap, if you're about getting some real enjoyment out of your DVD's (or your DVD's ripped to a terabyte harddrive array and played on a PC hooked to the projector) then once you see that projection image you'll know why you got it.
link for some pics of my theater project, my digital camera ruins the pics of the screens I took but you can get an idea).
Please, let them BOTH ignore Real and let the bastards die the slow agonizing death they so RICHLY deserve.
Has anyone really used their junk since like version 3 or 4 when it became so laden with addons and hidden hitchhikers that no one in their right mind would install their crap?
So hopefully both M$ and Apple will ignore Real networks and then Real will hopefully die soon.
Yeah I know, dream on, but hey, I'm a romantic at heart.
No mod points not that you need 'em, so I'll reply:
#1 True but I don't want to be my parents where I don't have a finger on the pulse of the new stuff. Remember the stuff you call classics (and I call classics) our parents called trash. So don't sell the new stuff short.
#2 Absolutely, I'm a huge music buff, but I simply do not put $15-$20 of value on a CD. Simple as that, my value point is around $8 for a cd, or $4 for a cd in digital downloadable format. Which coincidentally is about what a used CD costs at one of several places used CD's are easy to get (I like amazon's marketplace myself).
#3 Hence another reason to buy used cd's and maybe spend an extra few minutes finding indy artists to at least give ear to and maybe spend money on.
#4 Internet radio is nice, I found many artists this way.
#5 Don't get me started about our local library, that's a rant in and of itself, but here's a snippet - they close at 5pm on Fridays and Saturdays so they DO NOT ENCOURAGE KIDS TO LOITER IN THE LIBRARY - what the living fuck are they smoking?!? Isn't the whole PURPOSE of a library to encourage kids TO loiter?!#?!?! Goddamn it gets my blood boiling.
I buy music online at mp3search.ru, if I catch something cool on Uranium on Fuse or on the radio or wherever, off to mp3search.ru I go, 80 cents or so later I usually have the cd to listen to.
I'm sorry but even at the current buck or so per song it's TOO expensive. I'm not paying $17.99 for a CD and I'm not paying a dollar for a shitty song.
When I can grab a CD for about $8-9 or a song for about 40 cents THEN I'm in, until then it's Amazon.com's used CD marketplace and certain russian websites for me (mp3search.ru if you care).
I don't want to deprive the "artists" of their due but goddamn man $18 for a fucking CD is just too damned much, and $1 a song is borderline too much and $2.50 a song? Get fucking real, that's insane.
They need to look at the succes of iTunes and think to themselves "whoa look at that, wonder how many people would buy songs if they were a little bit CHEAPER", if Itunes could hit about 40-60 cents per track, I'd probably spend a wad there that's just my personal "price point" where I feel online music downloads is priced reasonable, and CD's need to get below about $12 each and I'll be buying a helluva lot more new CD's as well.
Doesn't really affect me much the music I like is lotsa times available cheap or free straight from the artist website (underground metal and hardcore music). But I don't mind the occasional Godsmack or Disturbed or other 'mainstream' metal either.
Next year I think I'll just turn my pc off all day April 1st and spare myself the lame (and occasionally witty but only very very occasionally) april fools jokes that run rampant online each year.
Look at the date folks...
Just a useless post to say "cool they quoted me!"
Whoops my 15 minutes are up.
Disclosure - I spent 4 days in Houston in the Sheraton on Robert's dime, got to go to the Houston bowl and party in his box, tour EV1 and some other goodies. I've met and talked to Robert and personally I like the man so call me biased if you want.
Robert honestly thought he was doing a good thing, he hasn't went into details but basically SCO came knocking and when the dust settled it was cheaper to just pay them and let it be, than to fight them.
Robert's not afraid to fight if he has to, he recently won a judgement against everyone's (in the hosting industry anyway) least favorite litigious bastards (er bitch?). But I think he simply felt like buying the stupid licenses was cheapest and easiest.
Then I think he made his big mistake (not that buying them wasn't) and SCO basically either said "hey free advertising we'll just mention this in a press release, and people will see your url EVERYWHERE" OR they simply said "part of the agreement is we name names like it or not" I'm not sure which way it went, but allowing SCO to publicly state they bought a license was the big mistake.
No one knows for sure who might have quietly bought licenses so far, but letting SCO publicly display the fact you buy a license is definitely a big bad idea.
Ok at first I was like "cool, sounds neat" then I saw the pricing and then I did my worst Shaggy impression "ZOIKS Scooby that fucker is expensive" (ok I did say worst).
While I applaud most any corporate/public/front page getting use of open source stuff, I just can't see anyone buying this - I mean yowza, talk about expensive.
Or does the Aussie dollar trade like 3 to 1 for US dollars (ok I'm a typical American and don't know what other money is "worth" but I thought Aussie dollars were in the ballpark of the same value as US).
Still kinda neat though, however it does just look like one of those little Shuttle "cubes" with some open source hacked up software on it.
Yeah we've thought about doing this, one of our customers wrote a form to mail script in php that is so far un-exploited by spammers and when we find a misconfigured formmail we point them at his script and say "use that".
Oddly it hasn't happened in several weeks now, for a while it was a weekly occurance, almost spooky when it stops for a while. But not having to deal with Spamcop and AOL blocking is a nice break...