Staring this year, Danes have to pay an additional $0.5 (DKK 4) for each blank CD-R purchased. Protests were launched and people/stores stockpiled pre-tax media, but it looks like the tax is here to stay.
Personally, I'm ditching CD-R and moving to larger harddrives..
Eh, you think that'll help..? They're after hard drives, too, and scanners, and everything else that can be used to reproduce copyrighted material.
This thing is out of hand. We have an independent organization (Copy-DAN) that can invent new taxes on media at will. Which the do in perfect excess.
We have Exchange on our corporate LAN (230 users), and within the latest year we had two major crashes (downtime 1-2 weeks each), and are looking for alternatives to Exchange. Depending so heavily on one monolithic server for email, contact lists, calendar and stuff left us in a mess - even high management suddenly didn't know their appointments!
It turned out that subtle bugs in the database had corrupted things slowly, and our backups where worthless. When it eventually fell over, we lost most of our archives.
The official Corporate Solution is obvious - our policy is now that we're not supposed to rely on our mail archive...
Hopefully a worse ride than most - things get dead ugly when this thing is gone for a week!
That's our experience as well - everytime we use one of those darned things, we have to discard one or two. Perhaps they don't age well, or the ones we got are poor quality - but it seems to apply to Sony, BASF, 3M and other quality brands as well.
They're under-capacity anyway, so we usually use something else.
I second the idea of the Zip drives. We've used them extensively at work - initially because floppies wouldn't hold the large images and Quark jobs we use for publishing - but after a couple of years of heavy use, reliability counts in positively as well. They just don't fail on us (unlike our hard drives - urgh...).
Easy to understand (it's just a big floppy), high capacity, fast. Internal (IDE) or USB connections are what we use, SCSI and Parallel also exist.
Highly recommended.
BSA is right - let's all help fight piracy
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 1
Piracy and all their silly restrictions are a pain in the ass that mainly benefits laywers, not programmers or users.
The only real solution is promoting free software. Be it Linux, FreeBSD, KOffice, StarOffice, GIMP or whatever. Talk of Linux, copy CD's for free, help people out when they're stuck. Then we'll all be too busy fixing the problem to bother ranting:)
Some companies here in Denmark have decided to make the switch away from Microsoft. The clearest example is a major oil company (Q8) who are replacing their 130 desktops to run Linux and StarOffice, expecting significant support and upgrade savings.
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This thing is out of hand. We have an independent organization (Copy-DAN) that can invent new taxes on media at will. Which the do in perfect excess.
We have Exchange on our corporate LAN (230 users), and within the latest year we had two major crashes (downtime 1-2 weeks each), and are looking for alternatives to Exchange. Depending so heavily on one monolithic server for email, contact lists, calendar and stuff left us in a mess - even high management suddenly didn't know their appointments!
It turned out that subtle bugs in the database had corrupted things slowly, and our backups where worthless. When it eventually fell over, we lost most of our archives.
The official Corporate Solution is obvious - our policy is now that we're not supposed to rely on our mail archive...
Hopefully a worse ride than most - things get dead ugly when this thing is gone for a week!
Whish you a less monolitic solution.
-Henrik
They're under-capacity anyway, so we usually use something else.
I second the idea of the Zip drives. We've used them extensively at work - initially because floppies wouldn't hold the large images and Quark jobs we use for publishing - but after a couple of years of heavy use, reliability counts in positively as well. They just don't fail on us (unlike our hard drives - urgh...).
Easy to understand (it's just a big floppy), high capacity, fast. Internal (IDE) or USB connections are what we use, SCSI and Parallel also exist.
Highly recommended.
The only real solution is promoting free software. Be it Linux, FreeBSD, KOffice, StarOffice, GIMP or whatever. Talk of Linux, copy CD's for free, help people out when they're stuck. Then we'll all be too busy fixing the problem to bother ranting :)
Microsoft is right - stop piracy - promote Linux.
-Henrik
Some companies here in Denmark have decided to make the switch away from Microsoft. The clearest example is a major oil company (Q8) who are replacing their 130 desktops to run Linux and StarOffice, expecting significant support and upgrade savings.