No, people don't prefer MP3s over CDs. They prefer affordable music over expensive overpriced music. CDs sound better than even a well-encoded MP3 because it's not compressed, and because it's uncompressed, it can be encoded to your choice of compressed formats with the least loss of quality. Even if they ignored the Internet and MP3s, I'm sure people would buy more music if they did just two things.
1. Drop the price of CDs to the same as cassettes and LPs, say $10.99-$11.99 regular price and $7.99-$8.99 on sale. And don't even say inflation; until the late 90's cassettes were sold for about 2/3 the price of CDs. That's still more expensive than your $.25/song MP3 vending machine, but for a fan, it may be worth having the CD and album liner art, etc.
2. Bring back CD singles and price them the same as 45 singles, say $3.99.
#3 would be to get rid of Clear Channel, but that's just wishful thinking.
I'd bet a lot of that $500,000 production cost is money the recording company paid back to themselves. If they owned the recording studio, the CD pressing plant, and the print shop for the album liners, that money just goes from one division to another of the same company.
Hunting rifles are rarely used to commit crimes because they're big and can't be concealed like handguns. Still, even handguns have legitimate uses like sport target shooting (pistol shooting is an Olympic event). If you run a legit gun store and run the usual background checks on customers, the contribution to murders and gun violence is minimal.
Look up the difference between net and gross HP. Those 60's muscle cars were measured in gross HP, meaning they don't subtract power consumed by the alternator, fan, water pump, etc. It hard to say for each car how much those advertised horses were inflated, but you should subtract about 25% to compare to today's cars' net HP. If you're comparing to an actual dyno run measuring HP at the drive wheels subtract another 10% from the net HP because that's measured at the crank.
"Finally, televisions are a different beast. You need hardware to handle scan-conversions, TV reception, composite/S-video conversions, etc."
Yes, that's additional hardware, but not hundreds of dollars worth. You can buy a PCI TV tuner card for under $60. For $100 Viewsonic makes a standalone TV tuner with remote that'll turn any VGA monitor, LCD or CRT, into a very usable TV set. It's a good way to get around the high prices of LCD TV's ($800 for a 15 inch at Circuit City).
Even if the spam was sent through a foreign mail relay the spammer probably doesn't like there. Unless it's purely a scam, the spammer still needs to sell something and collect payment. That means there's probably a US address from where they're shipping their product (if it's a physical product) and a US based checking account, credit card merchant account, or a Paypal account. Yes, spammers try very hard to cover their tracks, but if they can be traced to California or some other state with strong spam laws, they'll be fuxxord.
Even if he didn't hype the Osbourne 2 prematurely, Kaypro came out with a better model a little while later. It had a 9 inch screen that you could actually use to read 80 column text. The rest of the specs were all industry standard for that time for a business class system running CP/M.
The other half of of what IBM messed up was that they lost control of the clone market. Compaq even beat them to market with the first 386 PC. They tried to take that control back with the Microchannel bus in the PS/2 systems, but they flopped. Although bad for IBM, all those affordable clones were good for the PC's popularity and good for Microsoft. Text mode DOS in the 80s did suck compared to the Mac, but because of their premium prices and hardware monopoly, Apple doomed themselves to a niche market.
No, not your kids. If you want me to be more specific. ADULTS with no credit history and whose lack of credit history cannot be explained by circumstances such as recent immigration.
I think the theory goes that if someone has NO credit history (as opposed to a good or bad credit history), it's almost the same as having no past, and there's a higher chance that this person is using a false identity or an alias. Not that it would have helped with 9/11 because the hijackers travelled under their own names.
Here's what the report says: For the most part,companies that offered users a choice about receiving commercial emails respected that choice.
When you give your address to a legit website, it takes a little longer for it to leak out. Eighteen months sounds about right. I had one address I only used for ecommerce, ebay and registering with legit websites. It had almost no spam for years, but then it must have finally leaked out and the spam just exploded. The strange part is, I used to get Bargaindog ads when I tried Lifeminders years ago, and they stopped when I stopped Lifeminders and opted out of everything. When the flood of spam started years later, the first spam I got was from Bargaindog who stopped sending to me when I complained, but it quickly turned into pure spam like porn and scams. I'm guessing they didn't spam me from one of their old lists, but probably bought a dirty list from a listbroker spammer who's peddling it around on those Millions CDs.
It's not just the latest and greatest from Dell. I had an old Dell CP PII-266 laptop that melted a rubberband into my coffee table. I was smart enough to keep it off my lap.
Garbage is most definitely abandoned property. If you were picking through someone's garbage cans that they put out on the sidewalk, there's nothing wrong with that. If the garbage cans were still in his yard, you'd be trespassing, but probably not stealing. If you were picking through containers not commonly used for disposing of garbage (e.g. laundry baskets) while on someone's private property, that's probably stealing. IANAL
Even if residential broadband becomes an oligopoly with one cable company and/or DSL from the baby bell, you can always get a T1 for $1000 with no restrictions on reselling bandwidth or running servers. If you get 10 people to go in with you in a co-op arrangement, that's starting to look affordable. But that's a big IF, whether you can find 10 neighbors within wireless range or can affordably wire up an apartment or condo building.
Tell me about it. I had an Atari 400 AND a Sinclair ZX81. Touchscreen and membrane keyboards suck because of no tactile feedback. The dumbest use of one yet had to be the 80's Buicks with the touchscreen monitor interface. Yes, I want to look down from the road to see which button I'm pressing to set the heater.
Now if someone could make a touchscreen with raised buttons like maybe using a pin grid, that would be cool.
The funniest product I heard from Nokia is that they made rubber batons for the Soviet riot police. This was back in the 80's and a Finn told me so it must be true.
I'm still on Trustix 1.2, but 1.5 is the current release. I like it too. You'd think a lean and mean RPM distro is an oxymoron, but that's exactly what Trustix is.
It was called Operation Chrome Dome. I thought it was bigger, but it was just a small number of bombers, the most in the air was 12 during the Cuban missile crisis. It also ended in the late 60's.
DC3 was one of the first all aluminum planes, and it was massively overbuilt. Any aluminum structure optimized for light weight will start cracking from metal fatigue when you put it through enough stress cycles. The trick is to predict metal fatigure and either build it strong enough to not crack during its useful lifetime or publish a maintenance schedule for inspecting and replacing the part.
If only the connector in the console would last that long. Remember the/. story about the guy who hacked a new connector onto his NES? It worked, but it faced the wrong way so he cut a hole in the back of the case for the cartridge.
That's $1.2 billion over five years, and that includes $500 million already pledged by Bush to the Freedom Car Initiative (a continuation of the 80mpg car research project started by the Clinton administration 10 yrs ago). A hundred million or two a year is peanuts in the Federal budget. (story here). Fuel cell research will probably need 10 times as much money before it's ready for production.
$.99 isn't that bad compared to a CD single or 45 single when they were around. Although you did get a B side or extra tracks with them. The a la carte pricing is ok for one or two songs, but they really need to give a discount for the entire album like $6-7. Lots of albums have little 10-20 second intro or intermission tracks. Can't expect people to pay $.99 just for that.
Few years ago I had a fall off the motorcycle with a Dell CPI laptop in the backpack. No real padding, just wrapped in a sweater. It still worked fine, but the rear bezel was smashed in. It was an $8 part so no big deal. Bought a new bezel. Later that year, the hard drive crashed and got it replaced under warranty. Gee Dell, I have *no* idea how that could've happened.:-)
The lesson is, don't leave home without your padded case. Mobilecomputing had a good review of them here, drop tests and all.
Still, those Dell CP cases had some pretty flimsy LCD hinges. Always feel creaky and wobbly, and I always try to treat them delicately.
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No, people don't prefer MP3s over CDs. They prefer affordable music over expensive overpriced music. CDs sound better than even a well-encoded MP3 because it's not compressed, and because it's uncompressed, it can be encoded to your choice of compressed formats with the least loss of quality. Even if they ignored the Internet and MP3s, I'm sure people would buy more music if they did just two things.
1. Drop the price of CDs to the same as cassettes and LPs, say $10.99-$11.99 regular price and $7.99-$8.99 on sale. And don't even say inflation; until the late 90's cassettes were sold for about 2/3 the price of CDs. That's still more expensive than your $.25/song MP3 vending machine, but for a fan, it may be worth having the CD and album liner art, etc.
2. Bring back CD singles and price them the same as 45 singles, say $3.99.
#3 would be to get rid of Clear Channel, but that's just wishful thinking.
I'd bet a lot of that $500,000 production cost is money the recording company paid back to themselves. If they owned the recording studio, the CD pressing plant, and the print shop for the album liners, that money just goes from one division to another of the same company.
Hunting rifles are rarely used to commit crimes because they're big and can't be concealed like handguns. Still, even handguns have legitimate uses like sport target shooting (pistol shooting is an Olympic event). If you run a legit gun store and run the usual background checks on customers, the contribution to murders and gun violence is minimal.
"my '67 chevelle has 650HP"
Look up the difference between net and gross HP. Those 60's muscle cars were measured in gross HP, meaning they don't subtract power consumed by the alternator, fan, water pump, etc. It hard to say for each car how much those advertised horses were inflated, but you should subtract about 25% to compare to today's cars' net HP. If you're comparing to an actual dyno run measuring HP at the drive wheels subtract another 10% from the net HP because that's measured at the crank.
"Finally, televisions are a different beast. You need hardware to handle scan-conversions, TV reception, composite/S-video conversions, etc."
Yes, that's additional hardware, but not hundreds of dollars worth. You can buy a PCI TV tuner card for under $60. For $100 Viewsonic makes a standalone TV tuner with remote that'll turn any VGA monitor, LCD or CRT, into a very usable TV set. It's a good way to get around the high prices of LCD TV's ($800 for a 15 inch at Circuit City).
Even if the spam was sent through a foreign mail relay the spammer probably doesn't like there. Unless it's purely a scam, the spammer still needs to sell something and collect payment. That means there's probably a US address from where they're shipping their product (if it's a physical product) and a US based checking account, credit card merchant account, or a Paypal account. Yes, spammers try very hard to cover their tracks, but if they can be traced to California or some other state with strong spam laws, they'll be fuxxord.
Actually the MPEG2 codec is patented, so free DVD player software would be illegal in the US unless you paid your $2.50 to the MPEGLA.
Even if he didn't hype the Osbourne 2 prematurely, Kaypro came out with a better model a little while later. It had a 9 inch screen that you could actually use to read 80 column text. The rest of the specs were all industry standard for that time for a business class system running CP/M.
The other half of of what IBM messed up was that they lost control of the clone market. Compaq even beat them to market with the first 386 PC. They tried to take that control back with the Microchannel bus in the PS/2 systems, but they flopped. Although bad for IBM, all those affordable clones were good for the PC's popularity and good for Microsoft. Text mode DOS in the 80s did suck compared to the Mac, but because of their premium prices and hardware monopoly, Apple doomed themselves to a niche market.
No, not your kids. If you want me to be more specific. ADULTS with no credit history and whose lack of credit history cannot be explained by circumstances such as recent immigration.
I think the theory goes that if someone has NO credit history (as opposed to a good or bad credit history), it's almost the same as having no past, and there's a higher chance that this person is using a false identity or an alias. Not that it would have helped with 9/11 because the hijackers travelled under their own names.
Here's what the report says:
For the most part,companies that offered users a choice about receiving commercial emails respected that choice.
When you give your address to a legit website, it takes a little longer for it to leak out. Eighteen months sounds about right. I had one address I only used for ecommerce, ebay and registering with legit websites. It had almost no spam for years, but then it must have finally leaked out and the spam just exploded. The strange part is, I used to get Bargaindog ads when I tried Lifeminders years ago, and they stopped when I stopped Lifeminders and opted out of everything. When the flood of spam started years later, the first spam I got was from Bargaindog who stopped sending to me when I complained, but it quickly turned into pure spam like porn and scams. I'm guessing they didn't spam me from one of their old lists, but probably bought a dirty list from a listbroker spammer who's peddling it around on those Millions CDs.
It's not just the latest and greatest from Dell. I had an old Dell CP PII-266 laptop that melted a rubberband into my coffee table. I was smart enough to keep it off my lap.
Garbage is most definitely abandoned property. If you were picking through someone's garbage cans that they put out on the sidewalk, there's nothing wrong with that. If the garbage cans were still in his yard, you'd be trespassing, but probably not stealing. If you were picking through containers not commonly used for disposing of garbage (e.g. laundry baskets) while on someone's private property, that's probably stealing. IANAL
Even if residential broadband becomes an oligopoly with one cable company and/or DSL from the baby bell, you can always get a T1 for $1000 with no restrictions on reselling bandwidth or running servers. If you get 10 people to go in with you in a co-op arrangement, that's starting to look affordable. But that's a big IF, whether you can find 10 neighbors within wireless range or can affordably wire up an apartment or condo building.
Tell me about it. I had an Atari 400 AND a Sinclair ZX81. Touchscreen and membrane keyboards suck because of no tactile feedback. The dumbest use of one yet had to be the 80's Buicks with the touchscreen monitor interface. Yes, I want to look down from the road to see which button I'm pressing to set the heater.
Now if someone could make a touchscreen with raised buttons like maybe using a pin grid, that would be cool.
The funniest product I heard from Nokia is that they made rubber batons for the Soviet riot police. This was back in the 80's and a Finn told me so it must be true.
I'm still on Trustix 1.2, but 1.5 is the current release. I like it too. You'd think a lean and mean RPM distro is an oxymoron, but that's exactly what Trustix is.
It was called Operation Chrome Dome. I thought it was bigger, but it was just a small number of bombers, the most in the air was 12 during the Cuban missile crisis. It also ended in the late 60's.
It is expensive, but during the Cold War we always had some nuclear-armed B-52s flying in the air ready to attack if needed.
DC3 was one of the first all aluminum planes, and it was massively overbuilt. Any aluminum structure optimized for light weight will start cracking from metal fatigue when you put it through enough stress cycles. The trick is to predict metal fatigure and either build it strong enough to not crack during its useful lifetime or publish a maintenance schedule for inspecting and replacing the part.
If only the connector in the console would last that long. Remember the /. story about the guy who hacked a new connector onto his NES? It worked, but it faced the wrong way so he cut a hole in the back of the case for the cartridge.
That's $1.2 billion over five years, and that includes $500 million already pledged by Bush to the Freedom Car Initiative (a continuation of the 80mpg car research project started by the Clinton administration 10 yrs ago). A hundred million or two a year is peanuts in the Federal budget. (story here). Fuel cell research will probably need 10 times as much money before it's ready for production.
$.99 isn't that bad compared to a CD single or 45 single when they were around. Although you did get a B side or extra tracks with them. The a la carte pricing is ok for one or two songs, but they really need to give a discount for the entire album like $6-7. Lots of albums have little 10-20 second intro or intermission tracks. Can't expect people to pay $.99 just for that.
Few years ago I had a fall off the motorcycle with a Dell CPI laptop in the backpack. No real padding, just wrapped in a sweater. It still worked fine, but the rear bezel was smashed in. It was an $8 part so no big deal. Bought a new bezel. Later that year, the hard drive crashed and got it replaced under warranty. Gee Dell, I have *no* idea how that could've happened. :-)
The lesson is, don't leave home without your padded case. Mobilecomputing had a good review of them here, drop tests and all.
Still, those Dell CP cases had some pretty flimsy LCD hinges. Always feel creaky and wobbly, and I always try to treat them delicately.