Plus, for $30, Hot Keyboard Pro can solve any keyboard issues like this.
It's simple to configure it so that when you press some special media button and your media player is active to then send the right key (or execute a menu item, etc.).
I'm sure there are many other ways to do the same sort of thing, some probably free.
Private trackers (and I don't mean "demonoid" private) are probably the safest way to BT at this time. Those users have to keep a ratio, and the wolves don't usually upload to the swarm, (seeing as that would either #1 be infringement, or #2 produce bad checksums and get you kicked) they just connect and quietly log IPs from the tracker scrapes.
If you can get connected to one of these "private" trackers, you can easily spy on every single torrent without ever worrying about ratio.
First, you can always upload on torrents that aren't really a copyright issue.
Second, you can set your client to not download anything but the tiny.NFO file for every torrent, and then share it back. Doing this, you get to watch the IPs connected to the tracker, but never share anything dangerous.
Last, I often am able to download from a "private" tracker through DHT.
J.J. Abrams. Damon Lindelof. LOST. Need I say more?
Nope. That's enough to say that the movie will be pointless, with many dream sequences, time travel, and anything else to keep filling time without anything actually happening to the characters.
This will also allow the writers to not have to think about continuity at all, so we can have some kick-ass action scenes without consequences that might have to be resolved later.
The trailers I've seen for the new Star Trek movie make me actually want to see it. It looks edgier which is exactly what Star Trek needs to survive.
Since the most "edgy" Star Trek series flamed out after 4 years, I don't know whether it's what ST fans want.
You can argue about other issues with Enterprise, but any series where the captain of "The Big E" is torturing prisoners (and not just in the mirror universe) has to win the "edgy" crown.
The most complaints about Enterprise seem to be about the changing of canon (Romulans were pre-warp until Kirk's time, Borg and Klingon first contact were retconned, and don't get me started on the Suliban and Xindi), and this new movie does exactly the same sort of things.
I have no doubt it will make a crapload of money the first weekend, and it might even make a lot overall, but it's not going to be because it's a good Star Trek movie.
That can't possibly be true. Similar amounts maybe, but exactly? I know that if I took as much as I used to I would be lugging around 100lbs in one bag plus my personal item laptop bag full, much more than I could reasonably carry. I do believe carry-on luggage has increased but since in my case carry-on weight is around 30-40% of what my total weight used to me I can't see it going anywhere but down.
Based on a completely non-scientific survey (flights I've been on recently), I can say that now about 90% of people have the max-size carry-on, and I suspect that most also checked luggage (based on the count of luggage at the baggage claim). This is likely because the second checked bag is quite a bit more than the first.
This seems about the same total quantity as before, but just now less of it is in the hold. I also suspect that some "traveling together" have now have everybody bringing a carry-on, to cut the total checked bags down. For four people, if they used to check 4 bags and drag one true carry-on (purses, etc., don't count) with essentials, I think they check one max sized bag and have four very large carry-on pieces now.
With my 15" Dell (Studio 15), I can run 5+ hours on a 9-cell battery doing similar things to what you do.
But, as soon as I fire up a video (resolution doesn't seem to matter) or play a game, I can count on battery life being cut in half. Playing audio doesn't do nearly the same drain.
I understand that historically bundled services are replaced with fees that it is upsetting, however I really have enjoyed knowing that when you load up to 100lbs (50lbs weight limit per bag) that it is paid for while I carry on my only luggage (which I have done for up to 7 day trips easily).
Since I have yet to see an airline that weighs carry-on luggage, I can see why you would like this policy. The only real criteria for the carry-on is that you must be able to fit it in an overhead bin and be able to lift it there.
Flying now, it is quite obvious there is a lot more carry-on luggage, and much of it is often at the very limit of size to fit in the overhead bins (with no hope of fitting under a seat). Basically, people have just stopped checking luggage because it costs more, but the airplane has exactly the same amount of luggage as it would have before the charges started.
I'd much rather see the airline charge $2-5 per hour of flight time more for the flight and not charge for the first checked bag. Among other things, it would speed loading and unloading of the plane, as I wouldn't have to wait for the people who can just barely navigate their max-size carry-on while inside the plane.
My personal requirements are to not own a laptop that cannot last at least 5 hours on a battery during normal operation.
Unfortunately, with only a single battery, there just aren't any laptops that can last 5 hours with "normal operation", unless "normal operation" is just some light typing.
If you watch videos, play games, or do anything else that keeps the hard drive moving and the video card running higher than idle, you can generally get about 3-4 hours out of most laptops.
A programmer (even if he hasn't programmed anything more complex than mergesort) would think "why in this lovely Blue Marble would a pacemaker or an elevator cease to work because of a wrong date?")
Any programmer worth his salt would easily see that an elevator can have programming such that on certain days of the week (or at certain times of day) it will alter its behavior. Say, being more likely to quickly return to the ground floor from 7am to 10am.
And, this sort of programming could fail if Y2K was not taken into account. The failure may be spectacular (e.g., constantly moving from the top to the bottom floor, stopping nowhere else and eventually burning something out), very bad (e.g., not working at all), or just annoying (e.g., running the "Sunday" schedule on Tuesday).
As for pacemakers and ICBMs, I don't know what sort of day/date things the software might rely on, but I could imagine something like "if you haven't heard from central missile command in the last X days, assume destruction by enemy forces and launch at your target". Sure, that'd be stupid, but nobody has ever lost money betting on the stupidity of a government.
1st-tier vendors specify that the drives they buy are individually tested. From the article, it says that Apple performs a further 30-60 hour burn in test.
Neither of these is particularly important, as all they help prevent is DOA, and they don't help much, since DOA is most likely caused by the act of shipping the drive across the country.
Since drive failure rate tends to have a direct correlation to drive age, not failing in the first week gives you zero confidence the drive will survive any longer than a drive that was not tested.
Additionally, Apple needs to keep a stock of the same drives for warranty replacements (no matter how much testing, there are some bad drives)
This is also a bad thing, as drives tend to fail in bunches from the same lot. Keeping an older drive means that you don't know the full failure history for that lot, so it makes it more likely you are sending out bad drives to replace bad drives.
The best thing to do is engineer your storage array in such a way that a small difference in drive size will not be a problem. Or, to just realize that drive capacity per unit cost will keep increasing and replace 500GB drives with 640GB drives, and let the end user "waste" the extra capacity until all drives in the array are replaced. The benefit of this is that they might just buy a bunch more drives from you once some percentage of their array has already been replaced for warranty.
Cost of performing warranty work
If Apple does this like Sun, then the cost is basically the cost of FedEx overnight per drive. The end-user does the install, and ships the bad drive back, and Sun then ships a bunch to Seagate (or whoever) and gets new drives shipped to them.
Profit
Basically, Apple (or any other OEM company) can acquire drives in such large quantities that they can re-sell them for 20% more than "street" prices and still rake in profits. Any business that can gross 50% on material sales is staying in the black for a long time (at least until their customers wise up).
If you've got managers who want to get that warm fuzzy from spending far too much on hardware just so they can get "support" that can't keep your five-9s system at three-9s, then go ahead. I'll keep recommending that customers buy the exact same hardware without the Sun/Dell/Apple logo, self-insure and save a bundle in both money and downtime.
The fact that climate change now has a great deal of non-scientists talking and writing about it basically means the following have been invoked:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. —Clarke's first law
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion—the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right. —Asimov's corollary to Clarke's first law
Basically, this means that as more of the general public state that global warming is fact, it is more likely that the scientists who state that more study is needed are actually correct.
Quote all you want...your ignoring that what you buy from Tiger Direct/Best Buy/New Egg for $35 for 80GB or $100 for 1TB IS NOT THE SAME ANIMAL as a server drive.
A respectable "non-server" 1TB drive from the same manufacturer costs $130, with the rock-bottom cheapest 1TB drive being $90.
So, over the cheapest drive, you pay about 50% premium to get a good "consumer" hard drive, and about 75% premium to get a server-class drive. So, how does this explain the 300% premium charged by Apple?
A quarter ton of Ammonium Nitrate made into slightly more than that of ANFO. If they mixed it ideally it's 1.6 times the power of an equivalent weight of TNT.
And, yet, it's still less explosive power than a current Mark 83 bomb, of which thousands have been dropped in the past few years.
The Mythbusters do some decent sized explosions, but something as simple as blowing up an old bomber that was fully loaded out with live armaments would be 20-50 times as big as anything they have ever done.
In that case, Lee should ask and pay for 600 items, and accept up to 100 bad ones. They'll get their 500 pairs of jeans, and there won't be any logos to counterfeit.
Or, Lee should say: when you're done, we want 600 logos back, with 500 of them on jeans.
Seems like a pretty simple way to stop the "authentic counterfeit" market, and I know that's the way some companes do it.
But this all really should be obvious to the casual observer, and it was discussed to death around 1999 (when Amazon.com was going to kill B&M completely by three years ago). So next guess: parent post is a subtle troll. Well played.
Nope, not a troll. It's just that the predictions were off by a few years.
Part of the demise of Circut City was certainly fueled by online sellers. Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other B&M book stores are in serious trouble because of Amazon. Blockbuster—which practically had a monopoly on movie rental—is looking at bankruptcy because of Netflix.
Unless the B&M stores start to offer something that makes people want to go in and shop, they are toast. The #1 thing they used to offer was instant gratification, but now shipping times are down for most online stores, and it's not uncommon for a B&M to be out of stock of what you want.
Add in the "bend over" prices on accessories like cables, the hard sell for extended warranties, and the clueless help (good help would be the thing that could bring people in) and you can see why people are dumping B&M for online.
Actually, I wrote a series of screenplays based on something Ellison thought up many years ago...
I was thinking about contacting him and asking if he'd let me produce it (shoestring budget, 'natch) but the thing preventing me from doing that is his reputation for suing everyone.
And, this perfectly sums up Harlan Ellison.
Although he might have a contract with Paramount in this particular case, Ellison believes that anything he ever vaguely mentioned is his property in perpetuity. By suing people left and right and getting at least some of them to settle (since it's a lot cheaper), he is promoting the myth that ideas can be copyrighted.
As an example, it's Harlan Ellison's name in the credits of Babylon 5, because he raised a stink about some minor idea, but nobody is complaining that the Psi Corps was a complete rip-off of an Alfred Bester idea. Personally, I don't have a problem with what many idiots call "stealing" of ideas, because they're just ideas...copyright is designed to protect the implementation.
Because they've slashed their margins on the things you're actually there to buy so low trying to get you in there to buy them.
With the exeception of sales (big ones, not just 10% off), I can almost always purchase anything Best Buy sells cheaper online. Only very large/heavy items that can get big savings by bulk shipping 10 of them are really cheaper at any B&M store.
Unless all the online stores have even lower margins, then I think that Best Buy, etc., haven't done enough to lower their prices.
Except, cleanup (or re-implementation) never happens.
And, then, if it does, nobody bothers to even think of asking for help from the guy who implemented the emergency fix.
In one case, I was the guy that had to code like mad to get a database app finished. It was client-server before the web really existed, so it used a custom app on the client. When it was re-implemented later using ASP.NET, nobody even bothered to ask me anything about it.
As someone who has toured with a band (an unsigned one, but also spent time with some people who have been signed to a label) I can assure you at the bottom end it's hard to even break even.
Yes, it is, but the more exposure you get, the more people will be interested in paying to hear you play. If your band was getting airplay on radio stations, would you demand to be paid for that, or would you call it "promotion"?
There are many older, established musicians who want to get paid for radio airplay. This is because most aren't creating anything new anymore. Of the "ten richest bands" that the AC pointed out, only
U2 really is putting out anything new on a regular basis. Seven of them are merely riding on their 20+ year old reputations. Bands like this can tour without any new exposure, and for them, getting paid for everything is fine, because free doesn't help them much anymore.
For smaller bands, though, it's all about exposure, so being willing to give some things away for free to get that exposure is a far better strategy.
Egbert was pretty messed up long before fantasy roleplaying came along.
Like many gamers, he was a very smart kid (he graduated high school at 14 or 15), and he really just wasn't ready for the real world. He was two years older than me, but 3-4 grades in front of me, so I didn't know him personally, but my parents knew his parents moderately well.
The stories in the papers were pretty sensationalistic, because at the time, D&D was just really catching on, and (like you said) a lot of people wanted some ammo against it. Anybody who did any research would have known that he had been on thin ice for a long time, but nobody dug deeper and the lie the investigator told stood for years. Despite his book, nobody remembers the real story.
Face it, if you're going to go on tour and cover the cost of touring, you'd better be pretty famous already. And the idea that people like to donate for free stuff in any significant amount is contradicted by pretty much everything I've heard whether it's software projects or otherwise.
You must work for a record label, because this is exactly the sort of nonsense they spout in order to try and prop up their failing business model through legislation.
Here is a great example of how giving away things can make you a lot of money in the long run. You don't have to be famous to begin with...you just have to be talented and smart enough to figure out how to make money with that talent.
I suspect this last part is the major reason there are so many musicians whining about file sharing taking food out of their mouth...the reality is that they just aren't talented or smart enough to keep producing music in a way that people are willing to pay for.
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Plus, for $30, Hot Keyboard Pro can solve any keyboard issues like this.
It's simple to configure it so that when you press some special media button and your media player is active to then send the right key (or execute a menu item, etc.).
I'm sure there are many other ways to do the same sort of thing, some probably free.
Private trackers (and I don't mean "demonoid" private) are probably the safest way to BT at this time. Those users have to keep a ratio, and the wolves don't usually upload to the swarm, (seeing as that would either #1 be infringement, or #2 produce bad checksums and get you kicked) they just connect and quietly log IPs from the tracker scrapes.
If you can get connected to one of these "private" trackers, you can easily spy on every single torrent without ever worrying about ratio.
First, you can always upload on torrents that aren't really a copyright issue.
Second, you can set your client to not download anything but the tiny .NFO file for every torrent, and then share it back. Doing this, you get to watch the IPs connected to the tracker, but never share anything dangerous.
Last, I often am able to download from a "private" tracker through DHT.
We're a bunch of IT people, many who write code for a living, and quite a few consultants.
So, "whoring" of any type is in our genes.
J.J. Abrams. Damon Lindelof. LOST. Need I say more?
Nope. That's enough to say that the movie will be pointless, with many dream sequences, time travel, and anything else to keep filling time without anything actually happening to the characters.
This will also allow the writers to not have to think about continuity at all, so we can have some kick-ass action scenes without consequences that might have to be resolved later.
The trailers I've seen for the new Star Trek movie make me actually want to see it. It looks edgier which is exactly what Star Trek needs to survive.
Since the most "edgy" Star Trek series flamed out after 4 years, I don't know whether it's what ST fans want.
You can argue about other issues with Enterprise, but any series where the captain of "The Big E" is torturing prisoners (and not just in the mirror universe) has to win the "edgy" crown.
The most complaints about Enterprise seem to be about the changing of canon (Romulans were pre-warp until Kirk's time, Borg and Klingon first contact were retconned, and don't get me started on the Suliban and Xindi), and this new movie does exactly the same sort of things.
I have no doubt it will make a crapload of money the first weekend, and it might even make a lot overall, but it's not going to be because it's a good Star Trek movie.
That can't possibly be true. Similar amounts maybe, but exactly? I know that if I took as much as I used to I would be lugging around 100lbs in one bag plus my personal item laptop bag full, much more than I could reasonably carry. I do believe carry-on luggage has increased but since in my case carry-on weight is around 30-40% of what my total weight used to me I can't see it going anywhere but down.
Based on a completely non-scientific survey (flights I've been on recently), I can say that now about 90% of people have the max-size carry-on, and I suspect that most also checked luggage (based on the count of luggage at the baggage claim). This is likely because the second checked bag is quite a bit more than the first.
This seems about the same total quantity as before, but just now less of it is in the hold. I also suspect that some "traveling together" have now have everybody bringing a carry-on, to cut the total checked bags down. For four people, if they used to check 4 bags and drag one true carry-on (purses, etc., don't count) with essentials, I think they check one max sized bag and have four very large carry-on pieces now.
With my 15" Dell (Studio 15), I can run 5+ hours on a 9-cell battery doing similar things to what you do.
But, as soon as I fire up a video (resolution doesn't seem to matter) or play a game, I can count on battery life being cut in half. Playing audio doesn't do nearly the same drain.
I understand that historically bundled services are replaced with fees that it is upsetting, however I really have enjoyed knowing that when you load up to 100lbs (50lbs weight limit per bag) that it is paid for while I carry on my only luggage (which I have done for up to 7 day trips easily).
Since I have yet to see an airline that weighs carry-on luggage, I can see why you would like this policy. The only real criteria for the carry-on is that you must be able to fit it in an overhead bin and be able to lift it there.
Flying now, it is quite obvious there is a lot more carry-on luggage, and much of it is often at the very limit of size to fit in the overhead bins (with no hope of fitting under a seat). Basically, people have just stopped checking luggage because it costs more, but the airplane has exactly the same amount of luggage as it would have before the charges started.
I'd much rather see the airline charge $2-5 per hour of flight time more for the flight and not charge for the first checked bag. Among other things, it would speed loading and unloading of the plane, as I wouldn't have to wait for the people who can just barely navigate their max-size carry-on while inside the plane.
My personal requirements are to not own a laptop that cannot last at least 5 hours on a battery during normal operation.
Unfortunately, with only a single battery, there just aren't any laptops that can last 5 hours with "normal operation", unless "normal operation" is just some light typing.
If you watch videos, play games, or do anything else that keeps the hard drive moving and the video card running higher than idle, you can generally get about 3-4 hours out of most laptops.
With Cygwin, / != C:\ ... let me know how it goes.
It works pretty much the same once the rm command works its way down to /cygdrive.
One fridge and make sure it's seals are good.
You still use a fridge instead of one of these?
<faux anger>Don't you care about the environment?</faux anger>
A programmer (even if he hasn't programmed anything more complex than mergesort) would think "why in this lovely Blue Marble would a pacemaker or an elevator cease to work because of a wrong date?")
Any programmer worth his salt would easily see that an elevator can have programming such that on certain days of the week (or at certain times of day) it will alter its behavior. Say, being more likely to quickly return to the ground floor from 7am to 10am.
And, this sort of programming could fail if Y2K was not taken into account. The failure may be spectacular (e.g., constantly moving from the top to the bottom floor, stopping nowhere else and eventually burning something out), very bad (e.g., not working at all), or just annoying (e.g., running the "Sunday" schedule on Tuesday).
As for pacemakers and ICBMs, I don't know what sort of day/date things the software might rely on, but I could imagine something like "if you haven't heard from central missile command in the last X days, assume destruction by enemy forces and launch at your target". Sure, that'd be stupid, but nobody has ever lost money betting on the stupidity of a government.
1st-tier vendors specify that the drives they buy are individually tested. From the article, it says that Apple performs a further 30-60 hour burn in test.
Neither of these is particularly important, as all they help prevent is DOA, and they don't help much, since DOA is most likely caused by the act of shipping the drive across the country.
Since drive failure rate tends to have a direct correlation to drive age, not failing in the first week gives you zero confidence the drive will survive any longer than a drive that was not tested.
Additionally, Apple needs to keep a stock of the same drives for warranty replacements (no matter how much testing, there are some bad drives)
This is also a bad thing, as drives tend to fail in bunches from the same lot. Keeping an older drive means that you don't know the full failure history for that lot, so it makes it more likely you are sending out bad drives to replace bad drives.
The best thing to do is engineer your storage array in such a way that a small difference in drive size will not be a problem. Or, to just realize that drive capacity per unit cost will keep increasing and replace 500GB drives with 640GB drives, and let the end user "waste" the extra capacity until all drives in the array are replaced. The benefit of this is that they might just buy a bunch more drives from you once some percentage of their array has already been replaced for warranty.
Cost of performing warranty work
If Apple does this like Sun, then the cost is basically the cost of FedEx overnight per drive. The end-user does the install, and ships the bad drive back, and Sun then ships a bunch to Seagate (or whoever) and gets new drives shipped to them.
Profit
Basically, Apple (or any other OEM company) can acquire drives in such large quantities that they can re-sell them for 20% more than "street" prices and still rake in profits. Any business that can gross 50% on material sales is staying in the black for a long time (at least until their customers wise up).
If you've got managers who want to get that warm fuzzy from spending far too much on hardware just so they can get "support" that can't keep your five-9s system at three-9s, then go ahead. I'll keep recommending that customers buy the exact same hardware without the Sun/Dell/Apple logo, self-insure and save a bundle in both money and downtime.
The fact that climate change now has a great deal of non-scientists talking and writing about it basically means the following have been invoked:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. —Clarke's first law
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion—the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right. —Asimov's corollary to Clarke's first law
Basically, this means that as more of the general public state that global warming is fact, it is more likely that the scientists who state that more study is needed are actually correct.
Quote all you want...your ignoring that what you buy from Tiger Direct/Best Buy/New Egg for $35 for 80GB or $100 for 1TB IS NOT THE SAME ANIMAL as a server drive.
A 1TB server drive costs $160.
A respectable "non-server" 1TB drive from the same manufacturer costs $130, with the rock-bottom cheapest 1TB drive being $90.
So, over the cheapest drive, you pay about 50% premium to get a good "consumer" hard drive, and about 75% premium to get a server-class drive. So, how does this explain the 300% premium charged by Apple?
I know you had tongue-in-cheek, but one of the big advantages of Nehalem (i.e., Core i7) is that it does not require fully-buffered memory.
This reduces the initial cost and power requirements (and thus the lifetime cost).
A quarter ton of Ammonium Nitrate made into slightly more than that of ANFO. If they mixed it ideally it's 1.6 times the power of an equivalent weight of TNT.
And, yet, it's still less explosive power than a current Mark 83 bomb, of which thousands have been dropped in the past few years.
The Mythbusters do some decent sized explosions, but something as simple as blowing up an old bomber that was fully loaded out with live armaments would be 20-50 times as big as anything they have ever done.
In that case, Lee should ask and pay for 600 items, and accept up to 100 bad ones. They'll get their 500 pairs of jeans, and there won't be any logos to counterfeit.
Or, Lee should say: when you're done, we want 600 logos back, with 500 of them on jeans.
Seems like a pretty simple way to stop the "authentic counterfeit" market, and I know that's the way some companes do it.
But this all really should be obvious to the casual observer, and it was discussed to death around 1999 (when Amazon.com was going to kill B&M completely by three years ago). So next guess: parent post is a subtle troll. Well played.
Nope, not a troll. It's just that the predictions were off by a few years.
Part of the demise of Circut City was certainly fueled by online sellers. Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other B&M book stores are in serious trouble because of Amazon. Blockbuster—which practically had a monopoly on movie rental—is looking at bankruptcy because of Netflix.
Unless the B&M stores start to offer something that makes people want to go in and shop, they are toast. The #1 thing they used to offer was instant gratification, but now shipping times are down for most online stores, and it's not uncommon for a B&M to be out of stock of what you want.
Add in the "bend over" prices on accessories like cables, the hard sell for extended warranties, and the clueless help (good help would be the thing that could bring people in) and you can see why people are dumping B&M for online.
Actually, I wrote a series of screenplays based on something Ellison thought up many years ago... I was thinking about contacting him and asking if he'd let me produce it (shoestring budget, 'natch) but the thing preventing me from doing that is his reputation for suing everyone.
And, this perfectly sums up Harlan Ellison.
Although he might have a contract with Paramount in this particular case, Ellison believes that anything he ever vaguely mentioned is his property in perpetuity. By suing people left and right and getting at least some of them to settle (since it's a lot cheaper), he is promoting the myth that ideas can be copyrighted.
As an example, it's Harlan Ellison's name in the credits of Babylon 5, because he raised a stink about some minor idea, but nobody is complaining that the Psi Corps was a complete rip-off of an Alfred Bester idea. Personally, I don't have a problem with what many idiots call "stealing" of ideas, because they're just ideas...copyright is designed to protect the implementation.
Because they've slashed their margins on the things you're actually there to buy so low trying to get you in there to buy them.
With the exeception of sales (big ones, not just 10% off), I can almost always purchase anything Best Buy sells cheaper online. Only very large/heavy items that can get big savings by bulk shipping 10 of them are really cheaper at any B&M store.
Unless all the online stores have even lower margins, then I think that Best Buy, etc., haven't done enough to lower their prices.
Except, cleanup (or re-implementation) never happens.
And, then, if it does, nobody bothers to even think of asking for help from the guy who implemented the emergency fix.
In one case, I was the guy that had to code like mad to get a database app finished. It was client-server before the web really existed, so it used a custom app on the client. When it was re-implemented later using ASP.NET, nobody even bothered to ask me anything about it.
As someone who has toured with a band (an unsigned one, but also spent time with some people who have been signed to a label) I can assure you at the bottom end it's hard to even break even.
Yes, it is, but the more exposure you get, the more people will be interested in paying to hear you play. If your band was getting airplay on radio stations, would you demand to be paid for that, or would you call it "promotion"?
There are many older, established musicians who want to get paid for radio airplay. This is because most aren't creating anything new anymore. Of the "ten richest bands" that the AC pointed out, only U2 really is putting out anything new on a regular basis. Seven of them are merely riding on their 20+ year old reputations. Bands like this can tour without any new exposure, and for them, getting paid for everything is fine, because free doesn't help them much anymore.
For smaller bands, though, it's all about exposure, so being willing to give some things away for free to get that exposure is a far better strategy.
They latched on to something of an urban myth surrounding James Dallas Egbert III.
Egbert was pretty messed up long before fantasy roleplaying came along.
Like many gamers, he was a very smart kid (he graduated high school at 14 or 15), and he really just wasn't ready for the real world. He was two years older than me, but 3-4 grades in front of me, so I didn't know him personally, but my parents knew his parents moderately well.
The stories in the papers were pretty sensationalistic, because at the time, D&D was just really catching on, and (like you said) a lot of people wanted some ammo against it. Anybody who did any research would have known that he had been on thin ice for a long time, but nobody dug deeper and the lie the investigator told stood for years. Despite his book, nobody remembers the real story.
Face it, if you're going to go on tour and cover the cost of touring, you'd better be pretty famous already. And the idea that people like to donate for free stuff in any significant amount is contradicted by pretty much everything I've heard whether it's software projects or otherwise.
You must work for a record label, because this is exactly the sort of nonsense they spout in order to try and prop up their failing business model through legislation.
Here is a great example of how giving away things can make you a lot of money in the long run. You don't have to be famous to begin with...you just have to be talented and smart enough to figure out how to make money with that talent.
I suspect this last part is the major reason there are so many musicians whining about file sharing taking food out of their mouth...the reality is that they just aren't talented or smart enough to keep producing music in a way that people are willing to pay for.