Did I say what formats they should have been compatible with, like MP3? Did I not say proprietary? Did I say anything about the timelines? And you call me "dummy"? Nice uncalled-for ad hominem.
Besides, you're the one who's claiming Sony didn't want to limit their product. Sony has had a resolute and unyielding drive to limit their products ever since they bought Columbia Records in '87 and Columbia Pictures in '89. They are the industry leaders in DRM technologies, from SecuROM, MagicGate and SDMI, CSS, AACS, NTSC/C, and HDCP, just to name a few of their initiatives. They've been a force for evil and incompatibility for 24 years. So don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining.
A musician friend of mine just picked up a TASCAM DP-008. He was debating on whether he should buy a USB-2 or a Firewire based A to D system, and decided something he could take along to live shows without bringing the whole laptop and cable thing was even better. I think he paid about $299 for it.
Takes SDHC cards, so an 8GB card will hold a lot of sound. But while it's an "8" track device, it can only record two tracks at a time (you can record two while playing back up to six others, supposedly it's good for live performances playing backing tracks.) And he's said the built-in microphones were "adequate".
Exactly! Who knew? When they were released, they came out with their proprietary and incompatible ATRAC compression scheme, and some kind of copy-bit DRM, so I knew there was never any chance of me accidentally buying one. I figured they just faded into the mists of history as another example of Sony sh!tting on their customers. Apparently it was a much longer walk into the mists than I thought.
If you're south of the Minnesota river, as I am, Dakota Electric is my electric co-op, and they're the ones offering whole-house surge suppressors. The link is currently broken on their site, but as I recall it was about $175 installed. Definitely recommended.
Gold recovery is a part of the recycling business. If you're not recycling old electronics, you should be. Just to keep lead out of the landfills, I personally take all my dead electronics to a nearby recycling center where they dispose of them for $0.15/pound (or free, depending on the whim of the day's politicians.) I don't care if they make money off my dead junk, as long as they're being responsibly handled.
There are do-it-yourselfers who are mixing up the acids and recovering the gold from old circuit boards. I saw a series of how-to videos by a guy who cut up 10 old PC ISA cards to recover 600 gold-plated card-edge-connector contacts, and ended up with about a 1.5 grams of gold (perhaps $60 worth.) I think the site was goldrecovery.us, but warning: it's as ugly as anything from Geocities ever was.:-)
Of course, he used several containers of various acids and chemicals (all available over the counter), and there is no way of knowing from the videos how he disposes of his toxic wastes. But it's all certainly doable in the average garage.
No, he was angry at exactly the right guy. They may have been misinformed by their managers (who were previously misinformed by the Monster cable salesmen) but they were told "hey, sell these things, we make a tremendous profit on cables." An honest education won't help: whether or not the sales pitch is true they'll continue to push this crap on everyone, because it makes them money. So the best plan is to call them on it, then walk away and let the reduced sales teach them the lessons they need to learn about lying to customers.
The thing is, most customers want to be told what to do without ever having the understanding. Therefore, lying is a way to make them happy about spending $100/cable that they would have paid anyway.
For that price, I'd want individual Maxwell's demons, each having a certified pedigree tracing them back to James Maxwell, living in the wires and watching each conductor; each opening their gate only long enough to let the good signals come through.
Surge suppression is important for certain electronic devices, and in certain areas. A relative had a workshop out in a Minnesota prairie where summer lightning storms are common, and they blew phone line suppressors at least monthly. (They were the internal fuse type devices that had to be physically replaced, so he had the phone guy leave him a dozen so he could get through the year without a service call.) They used surge suppressors on all their computer equipment.
My electric company sells and installs "whole house surge suppressors". Mine is mounted as an extra layer beneath the meter (they unplugged the meter, plugged in the suppressor, then plugged the meter into the suppressor.) Saved me from having to remember to buy surge suppressors for every individual electronic component I might otherwise worry about. I've never had a problem in the 9 years I've had it installed.
The "power strips" do have one value add: multiple outlets. But you can get a six outlet power strip for $4, and don't have to pay a Monster price for protection.
And if you're the kind of person who actually does worry about "dirty power" (like the GP was mocking) a UPS is the wrong way to go. Most produce modified square waves, rich in harmonics, and might make a bad amplifier sing a 60Hz song.
And that's why I'd mock anyone who buys ANYTHING by Denon. If they're going to lie this bad about their cables, who knows what other lies they told about their amplifiers, tuners, or other gear?
It's a Boolean state: as long as they maintain this lie, they're nothing but liars.
the damage done to the usa by communist infiltrators was less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
This statement is not true. Joseph McCarthy was actually correct. The Venona decrypts, declassified in 1999-2002, identified a lot of the Communist Party CPUSA members and revealed them to be Soviet agents. And the Mitrokhin Archive, an internal KGB record of their own history, smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by their former senior archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, shows quite clearly the depths of penetration of the Soviet agents, as well as their strategies of spreading disinformation. These documents are readily available, go check them out at your local bookstore or library.
Now McCarthy was indeed a zealot, and used improper means of "persuasion" instead of following legal channels, but his claims were fairly accurate. Much of Hollywood was infiltrated, as well as the U.S. State Department, and even Congress. But McCarthy was unable to publicly back his claims with the data because the Venona project itself and all its data was classified top secret, and was not to be revealed in case they gave away the secret that we were reading Soviet "one-time pads". (Hint: they used their pads two times, which broke their security.) This was an operational mistake that happened from 1946-1948, and so they could have safely used the data then as the Soviets had corrected the mistake before he went public, but the FBI had no way of knowing that. Among other interesting tidbits, the Venona decrypts proved conclusively that the Rosenbergs were indeed the traitors that gave the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The campaign to cloud their guilt with doubt was just one of the many Soviet disinformation campaigns. (These campaigns included such crap as "AIDS was created by the U.S. Army as a bioweapon", which even the Russians now regret having spread.)
the damage done to the usa by terorrism today is less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
I agree with you and believe this statement is true. Many of our rights have been stripped by the misnamed USA PATRIOT act, and our government has gone apeshit crazy, all even better than the results UBL hoped for when he attacked. I'd much rather have the occasional terrorist attempt than the current form of the DHS. At least an idiot on a plane today is going to be jumped by a hundred very pissed off travelers. Nobody's ever going to fly another plane into a building on our soil again, not while there are solid cockpit doors and a few real Americans on board.
However, there is quite a bit of difference between the two. McCarthy acted alone, from secret knowledge. The DHS is acting as the face of the U.S. government. The politicians are bringing war to all kinds of new places in the name of terrorism. They've completely soiled this country and her reputation, and they should be stopped.
If IT locks out the app store, it won't be successful.
Like the iPad, it's too big to carry thoughtlessly like a phone. You have to have a reason to carry it. If Sally in accounting can't put Angry Birds on it, or the Kindle app, she won't want to carry it around. Those are the real reasons she carries her iPad everywhere, despite her claims of using it for calendar or email.
Good luck Cisco, but making it IT friendly is the opposite of making it user friendly.
I've heard that 'spam' subsidizes the entire USPS. Without the revenue generated by 3rd class bulk rate, first class postage would probably be about $2 USD per letter (allegedly.) Thus spam keeps your letter carriers coming around every day, except Sundays.
Of course, that was several years ago. I've also heard that email has decimated the first class postage business, so the proportional subsidy is now probably much higher than that.
"Pi ckOutYo urPr ef er enceTa bl etsEs sen ti alsWe bsto re" (Pick Out Your Preference Tablets Essentials Webstore)
Here's the thing, I don't even initially understand what they're trying to sell with that message. It takes a few seconds of thought to parse the words, but before that time my internal mental gibberish recognition filter has kicked in, and my brain is already saying "gibberish == spam, hit delete".
I suppose if someone is desperate to figure out every word that's emailed to them, they'd spend the time, but what kind of person responds?
Bruce's point is that if the OS allows the user to be stupid, then the OS is at fault because user stupidity is a quantity empirically proven to be greater than zero.
The way I look at black hats is: if they're able to silently penetrate a system, and are able and willing to tell you about it, you sure better believe the exact same knowledge and capability is available to someone else on the planet. What makes you think they're the only ones to actually penetrate the system? How could you possibly be better off with your head in the sand?
Those vulnerabilities already exist. Existing thieves already exploit them. It's better to learn from them and close the holes than it is to hit them with sticks; otherwise they just go somewhere else and steal from them.
According to what we've been told the dose we receive from the backscatter scanners is, it's supposed to be far less than the additional radiation we receive flying for five hours at 38,000 feet. In other words, your groin has always borne the increased risk when you choose to fly. Nowadays you simply get some extra bonus radiation exposure without the inconvenience of flight.
Until just a few years ago, I was an assistant scoutmaster, and took kids camping regularly. Our rule was electronics stayed in the car. They could play and text or whatever on the way to and from the camp, but once we got there, we were camping, and it was time to unplug,
A part of that experience is helping the kids to overcome homesickness. If they can talk to mommy any time they want, they don't learn how to be on their own.
Only a few short years ago, parents got along just fine when the kids went off to summer camp, and didn't worry that the kids wouldn't trouble them with phone calls home and constant SMSs and emails. Matter of fact, Mom and Dad would usually call this time period "vacation".
There are two reasons kids go to summer camp. Only one is for the kids.
I agree with the GP. Unplug. It'll be best for all of you.
For offshoring, the inefficiencies can be made up for over time as the offshore teams come up to speed. It takes years to learn how to work with them, and how to use them effectively, but overall it can be made to work, and sometimes it can work quite well. Things like early morning and late night conference calls happen often, but to make up for it there's the occasional trip to an exotic locale. If you ever get the chance to make that trip to an offshore office on the corporate dime, I highly recommend it.
However, as you suggest, a capital-A Agile team has to be commonly located. If you can't ask the stakeholder or the guy next to you "hey, about this X that I don't understand" and get a response in seconds, you're wasting everyone's time. That's definitely true in the small, but doesn't have to stop you from asking an offshore team to take on a difficult task.
Outsourcing is a different matter. There, the motives are entirely on profit, not on quality and not on your best interests. And that doesn't matter if it's outsourced to a company co-located in your own building. They make money on a per-project basis, so if you want to install a Firefox plug-in on a PC in the north wing, "we'll put together a project proposal for you." The more projects they run for you, the more beholden to them they think you become. Worse, you can't even deny their screw-ups. Look at the companies that outsourced their customer mailing lists when they got breached a few months ago. Nobody remembers the name of the outsourcing company (because they're probably in hiding) but everyone remembers that it was Best Buy who sent them the apology letter.
Outsourcing is poisonous. Offshoring can be rewarding to the patient.
It [Watson] will also make humans more dumb and less thoughtful over time
I would argue the quite the opposite. Statistical probability is what Watson does, and knowing comparatively, the likelihood of having one illness over another is a very valuable learning tool; its not at all limited to a diagnostic tool. Using a system like that would be akin to knowing how to Google well. I know for certain that I've been able to educate myself, faster, by having access to relevant search results. Having a resource like Watson and looking at his suggestions, objectively, would unilaterally produce more proficient doctors.
I think his argument is that it may make Watson more proficient over time, but not necessarily the doctors. They might just get better at describing symptoms in ways that Watson will understand.
Not sure how practical the crank would be on a 500 lumen chip. That thing draws 5W at full power. You might be turning a fairly heavy crank to keep it glowing.
Of course, being reprogrammable, you could have the cranking circuit put it in "dim and easy to crank" mode.
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Did I say what formats they should have been compatible with, like MP3? Did I not say proprietary? Did I say anything about the timelines? And you call me "dummy"? Nice uncalled-for ad hominem.
Besides, you're the one who's claiming Sony didn't want to limit their product. Sony has had a resolute and unyielding drive to limit their products ever since they bought Columbia Records in '87 and Columbia Pictures in '89. They are the industry leaders in DRM technologies, from SecuROM, MagicGate and SDMI, CSS, AACS, NTSC/C, and HDCP, just to name a few of their initiatives. They've been a force for evil and incompatibility for 24 years. So don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining.
A musician friend of mine just picked up a TASCAM DP-008. He was debating on whether he should buy a USB-2 or a Firewire based A to D system, and decided something he could take along to live shows without bringing the whole laptop and cable thing was even better. I think he paid about $299 for it.
Takes SDHC cards, so an 8GB card will hold a lot of sound. But while it's an "8" track device, it can only record two tracks at a time (you can record two while playing back up to six others, supposedly it's good for live performances playing backing tracks.) And he's said the built-in microphones were "adequate".
Still exist?
Exactly! Who knew? When they were released, they came out with their proprietary and incompatible ATRAC compression scheme, and some kind of copy-bit DRM, so I knew there was never any chance of me accidentally buying one. I figured they just faded into the mists of history as another example of Sony sh!tting on their customers. Apparently it was a much longer walk into the mists than I thought.
If you're south of the Minnesota river, as I am, Dakota Electric is my electric co-op, and they're the ones offering whole-house surge suppressors. The link is currently broken on their site, but as I recall it was about $175 installed. Definitely recommended.
Gold recovery is a part of the recycling business. If you're not recycling old electronics, you should be. Just to keep lead out of the landfills, I personally take all my dead electronics to a nearby recycling center where they dispose of them for $0.15/pound (or free, depending on the whim of the day's politicians.) I don't care if they make money off my dead junk, as long as they're being responsibly handled.
There are do-it-yourselfers who are mixing up the acids and recovering the gold from old circuit boards. I saw a series of how-to videos by a guy who cut up 10 old PC ISA cards to recover 600 gold-plated card-edge-connector contacts, and ended up with about a 1.5 grams of gold (perhaps $60 worth.) I think the site was goldrecovery.us, but warning: it's as ugly as anything from Geocities ever was. :-)
Of course, he used several containers of various acids and chemicals (all available over the counter), and there is no way of knowing from the videos how he disposes of his toxic wastes. But it's all certainly doable in the average garage.
No, he was angry at exactly the right guy. They may have been misinformed by their managers (who were previously misinformed by the Monster cable salesmen) but they were told "hey, sell these things, we make a tremendous profit on cables." An honest education won't help: whether or not the sales pitch is true they'll continue to push this crap on everyone, because it makes them money. So the best plan is to call them on it, then walk away and let the reduced sales teach them the lessons they need to learn about lying to customers.
The thing is, most customers want to be told what to do without ever having the understanding. Therefore, lying is a way to make them happy about spending $100/cable that they would have paid anyway.
For that price, I'd want individual Maxwell's demons, each having a certified pedigree tracing them back to James Maxwell, living in the wires and watching each conductor; each opening their gate only long enough to let the good signals come through.
Surge suppression is important for certain electronic devices, and in certain areas. A relative had a workshop out in a Minnesota prairie where summer lightning storms are common, and they blew phone line suppressors at least monthly. (They were the internal fuse type devices that had to be physically replaced, so he had the phone guy leave him a dozen so he could get through the year without a service call.) They used surge suppressors on all their computer equipment.
My electric company sells and installs "whole house surge suppressors". Mine is mounted as an extra layer beneath the meter (they unplugged the meter, plugged in the suppressor, then plugged the meter into the suppressor.) Saved me from having to remember to buy surge suppressors for every individual electronic component I might otherwise worry about. I've never had a problem in the 9 years I've had it installed.
The "power strips" do have one value add: multiple outlets. But you can get a six outlet power strip for $4, and don't have to pay a Monster price for protection.
And if you're the kind of person who actually does worry about "dirty power" (like the GP was mocking) a UPS is the wrong way to go. Most produce modified square waves, rich in harmonics, and might make a bad amplifier sing a 60Hz song.
The monster has no clothes!
FTFY.
And "truer reds". The salesman wouldn't shut up about how much better Monster cables were at improving reds.
I bought my cables at Radio Shack, but I regret not having walked away from that idiot salescreature on the spot.
And that's why I'd mock anyone who buys ANYTHING by Denon. If they're going to lie this bad about their cables, who knows what other lies they told about their amplifiers, tuners, or other gear?
It's a Boolean state: as long as they maintain this lie, they're nothing but liars.
the damage done to the usa by communist infiltrators was less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
This statement is not true. Joseph McCarthy was actually correct. The Venona decrypts, declassified in 1999-2002, identified a lot of the Communist Party CPUSA members and revealed them to be Soviet agents. And the Mitrokhin Archive, an internal KGB record of their own history, smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by their former senior archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, shows quite clearly the depths of penetration of the Soviet agents, as well as their strategies of spreading disinformation. These documents are readily available, go check them out at your local bookstore or library.
Now McCarthy was indeed a zealot, and used improper means of "persuasion" instead of following legal channels, but his claims were fairly accurate. Much of Hollywood was infiltrated, as well as the U.S. State Department, and even Congress. But McCarthy was unable to publicly back his claims with the data because the Venona project itself and all its data was classified top secret, and was not to be revealed in case they gave away the secret that we were reading Soviet "one-time pads". (Hint: they used their pads two times, which broke their security.) This was an operational mistake that happened from 1946-1948, and so they could have safely used the data then as the Soviets had corrected the mistake before he went public, but the FBI had no way of knowing that. Among other interesting tidbits, the Venona decrypts proved conclusively that the Rosenbergs were indeed the traitors that gave the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The campaign to cloud their guilt with doubt was just one of the many Soviet disinformation campaigns. (These campaigns included such crap as "AIDS was created by the U.S. Army as a bioweapon", which even the Russians now regret having spread.)
the damage done to the usa by terorrism today is less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
I agree with you and believe this statement is true. Many of our rights have been stripped by the misnamed USA PATRIOT act, and our government has gone apeshit crazy, all even better than the results UBL hoped for when he attacked. I'd much rather have the occasional terrorist attempt than the current form of the DHS. At least an idiot on a plane today is going to be jumped by a hundred very pissed off travelers. Nobody's ever going to fly another plane into a building on our soil again, not while there are solid cockpit doors and a few real Americans on board.
However, there is quite a bit of difference between the two. McCarthy acted alone, from secret knowledge. The DHS is acting as the face of the U.S. government. The politicians are bringing war to all kinds of new places in the name of terrorism. They've completely soiled this country and her reputation, and they should be stopped.
Imagine the post-treatment MRI scan. Ouch!
If IT locks out the app store, it won't be successful.
Like the iPad, it's too big to carry thoughtlessly like a phone. You have to have a reason to carry it. If Sally in accounting can't put Angry Birds on it, or the Kindle app, she won't want to carry it around. Those are the real reasons she carries her iPad everywhere, despite her claims of using it for calendar or email.
Good luck Cisco, but making it IT friendly is the opposite of making it user friendly.
I've heard that 'spam' subsidizes the entire USPS. Without the revenue generated by 3rd class bulk rate, first class postage would probably be about $2 USD per letter (allegedly.) Thus spam keeps your letter carriers coming around every day, except Sundays.
Of course, that was several years ago. I've also heard that email has decimated the first class postage business, so the proportional subsidy is now probably much higher than that.
"Pi ckOutYo urPr ef er enceTa bl etsEs sen ti alsWe bsto re" (Pick Out Your Preference Tablets Essentials Webstore)
Here's the thing, I don't even initially understand what they're trying to sell with that message. It takes a few seconds of thought to parse the words, but before that time my internal mental gibberish recognition filter has kicked in, and my brain is already saying "gibberish == spam, hit delete".
I suppose if someone is desperate to figure out every word that's emailed to them, they'd spend the time, but what kind of person responds?
Q: How do you save a lawyer from drowning?
A: Take your foot off his head.
Q: What do you have if there's a lawyer buried up to his neck in sand?
A: Not nearly enough sand.
Bruce's point is that if the OS allows the user to be stupid, then the OS is at fault because user stupidity is a quantity empirically proven to be greater than zero.
The way I look at black hats is: if they're able to silently penetrate a system, and are able and willing to tell you about it, you sure better believe the exact same knowledge and capability is available to someone else on the planet. What makes you think they're the only ones to actually penetrate the system? How could you possibly be better off with your head in the sand?
Those vulnerabilities already exist. Existing thieves already exploit them. It's better to learn from them and close the holes than it is to hit them with sticks; otherwise they just go somewhere else and steal from them.
According to what we've been told the dose we receive from the backscatter scanners is, it's supposed to be far less than the additional radiation we receive flying for five hours at 38,000 feet. In other words, your groin has always borne the increased risk when you choose to fly. Nowadays you simply get some extra bonus radiation exposure without the inconvenience of flight.
If you are truly that concerned about radiation, you should stay safely below ground in your basement abode.
Until just a few years ago, I was an assistant scoutmaster, and took kids camping regularly. Our rule was electronics stayed in the car. They could play and text or whatever on the way to and from the camp, but once we got there, we were camping, and it was time to unplug,
A part of that experience is helping the kids to overcome homesickness. If they can talk to mommy any time they want, they don't learn how to be on their own.
Only a few short years ago, parents got along just fine when the kids went off to summer camp, and didn't worry that the kids wouldn't trouble them with phone calls home and constant SMSs and emails. Matter of fact, Mom and Dad would usually call this time period "vacation".
There are two reasons kids go to summer camp. Only one is for the kids.
I agree with the GP. Unplug. It'll be best for all of you.
For offshoring, the inefficiencies can be made up for over time as the offshore teams come up to speed. It takes years to learn how to work with them, and how to use them effectively, but overall it can be made to work, and sometimes it can work quite well. Things like early morning and late night conference calls happen often, but to make up for it there's the occasional trip to an exotic locale. If you ever get the chance to make that trip to an offshore office on the corporate dime, I highly recommend it.
However, as you suggest, a capital-A Agile team has to be commonly located. If you can't ask the stakeholder or the guy next to you "hey, about this X that I don't understand" and get a response in seconds, you're wasting everyone's time. That's definitely true in the small, but doesn't have to stop you from asking an offshore team to take on a difficult task.
Outsourcing is a different matter. There, the motives are entirely on profit, not on quality and not on your best interests. And that doesn't matter if it's outsourced to a company co-located in your own building. They make money on a per-project basis, so if you want to install a Firefox plug-in on a PC in the north wing, "we'll put together a project proposal for you." The more projects they run for you, the more beholden to them they think you become. Worse, you can't even deny their screw-ups. Look at the companies that outsourced their customer mailing lists when they got breached a few months ago. Nobody remembers the name of the outsourcing company (because they're probably in hiding) but everyone remembers that it was Best Buy who sent them the apology letter.
Outsourcing is poisonous. Offshoring can be rewarding to the patient.
It [Watson] will also make humans more dumb and less thoughtful over time
I would argue the quite the opposite. Statistical probability is what Watson does, and knowing comparatively, the likelihood of having one illness over another is a very valuable learning tool; its not at all limited to a diagnostic tool. Using a system like that would be akin to knowing how to Google well. I know for certain that I've been able to educate myself, faster, by having access to relevant search results. Having a resource like Watson and looking at his suggestions, objectively, would unilaterally produce more proficient doctors.
I think his argument is that it may make Watson more proficient over time, but not necessarily the doctors. They might just get better at describing symptoms in ways that Watson will understand.
Not sure how practical the crank would be on a 500 lumen chip. That thing draws 5W at full power. You might be turning a fairly heavy crank to keep it glowing.
Of course, being reprogrammable, you could have the cranking circuit put it in "dim and easy to crank" mode.