Perhaps in Europe everything is opposite (well, having been there, it'd come as no surprise to me if this was true:-) ), but I do know one thing: There's a great deal of broadcasters in North America who lack any form of commercials.
Some of them are paid directly by people who subscribe to the programming, for example, HBO, and FSTV. Some of them broadcast for free and have absolutely no charge attached to them, for example, PBS, and, to some degree (if you live outside of Ontario) TV Ontario. FSTV also has a station without commercials.
Commercial free stations such as TV Ontario, PBS, FSTV, and the variousreligiousstations regularly broadcast content which a great many would find objectionable if they didn't keep their TV sets glued to stations they actually enjoy. In fact, in spite of the fact the BBC forces a license upon people in the UK for their content, PBS manages to give away many of the exact same programs developed by the BBC themselves, and has continued to do so for years. Also, I am certain that the content broadcast on FSTV is FAR more objectionable to many than just about ANY other station I know of, especially the BBC.
Why it is that there are more commercial free programs being broadcast that I can pick up in North America for free than there are in the UK under forced licencing will always remain an unsolveable enigmah to me.
>This is only right if you are using USB 2 or a cheaper firewire card. Apple computers (and I think the more expensive PC cards) transfer power through the firewire lead, which powers the ipod when connected, and recharges the battery too.
Ahh, cool! I didn't know that the iPod supported being charged that way. Good move on Apple's part, although it would suck (tm) for anyone using a laptop.:-)
Okay, here's the list of benefits for an iPod (correct me on what I miss):
- Lots of music in one place, at your fingertips
- "Mix" on the fly
- Use it as a portable hard disk
- Some PDA functionality
- Good battery life
- Not much skipping
- Fast file transfer on a new PC
- Files can be transferred on anything with USB or Firewire
- iTunes compatible
And the list of non-plusses:
- If charged daily, $99 yearly battery replacement fee
- Battery replacement takes longer than one day.
- Storace space cannot be increased through standard methods.
- When the battery goes flat, you have to charge it.
- Also, when the battery is flat, the units data contents are not-transferrable
- Cannot use iPod's music (or data) with anything that doesn't have a USB or Firewire port.
- High initial MSRP cost.
- Cannot play music bought at record store without intermediate steps
- Cannot play your friend's CDs without intermediate steps
- Data format not car stereo compatible
Benefits of a CD/MP3 player:
- Low initial MSRP cost.
- Infinite storage space
- Can mix data and music
- Can reload with fresh batteries if ones in unit die
- Fresh batteries are available anywhere, anytime and take under 10 seconds to replace
- Choice of rechargeable or non-rechargeable batteries
- Files can be transferred to anything with a CD player
- Fast file transfer with any age of computer
- Does not require batteries to transfer data
- Can play back music on many DVD players
- iTunes compatible (if using recoded CD)
- Can play music bought at record store instantly
- Can play your Friend's CDs instantly
- Data format car stereo compatible
Lowlights of a CD/MP3 player:
- Cannot remix between discs
- Requires charging more often when using rechargeable batteries
- Bulky
- Not compatible with anything lacking a DVD or CD-ROM.
- Lacks PDA capabilities
- Older units had skipping problems
- Slow seek times
As you can see, there's strong points on both sides of the debate. As you can imagine, being a car stereo owner, I have a CD/MP3 player.
>I never know what I'll want to listen to and CDs are major, hassling, inconvenient, bulky, old hat now after seeing the light. I can listen to anything in my collection, any time I want, wherever I want, whenever I want.
That's why I sort my CDs by type, rather than alphabetically. Seems you do the same on your iPod.:-)
>why? because of monopolism or market dominance? not likely. as of november 2003 the ipod was the leader in portable digital music player with... 31%.
In exactly the same manner windows is not the leading operating system producer.
As of November, the iPod had a 31 percent market share among all MP3 players sold and an even larger share of the hard drive-based music player market. The company sold a record 730,000 iPods last quarter.
ie: If you compare windows against all operating systems out there (your microwave is using one, your TV, your VCR, stereo, for certain your satellite receiver, etc, etc) there's no way they could even have much more than 5 - 10% of the market.
Squeeze the market down to just what you want to define it as, and bingo! You have a monopoly case, as I suspect it would be for "MP3 players that support iTunes", and definately for "MP3 players that only work on a Mac" (New ones do, yes. If you bought it when it first came out, no.)
Canada doesn't have a DMCA, or anything much like it, ergo one doesn't de facto break the law in Canada when decrypting a DVD. These guys put it better than I ever could. Unless you are using "exploits" fradulently, you are not breaking the law.
In Canada go ahead, you can make a DVD backup. You can even let your friend take one of those crappy copy protected CDs and help him make a copy of it, for him to keep! Yup! A limited form of "Piracy" is a *right* protected by law here. Heck, until a couple of years ago, Canadians were REQUIRED to pirate all encrypted non-Canadian satellite TV signals (paying for them is outlawed). That didn't change until Bell ExpressVu (Canadian satellite company) started bleeding like a stuck pig.
It's the same non-existance of the law that lets me sell modchips (There is *ONE* case of someone getting busted, but not for the modchips. He was selling pirated games and modchips as a super-saver package. What a fool.)
That all being said, I thought I saw "Mountain View, California" on that page?
>But can someone please explain how guns can ever be used in good ways.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean the smartcard is responsible to carry the correct balance, rather than the bank, being that the private key is used to decrypt the information?
The only other way I can see that working is for the card to report back the balance to the machine, but that would be either cleartext or encrypted to the ATMs public key, something that wouldn't stay private for long.
>b) The store has to pay a debit fee with each transaction. Whoopie, you've bought an 80cent pack of gum (on which only 20 cents profit at most), and are asking the guy to incur 50cents to 75cents worth of debit fees on his end. This is why some stores have a minimum purchase requirement to use debit.
I dunno about where you are, but my store pays 15 cents CDN per debit transaction. The 50 cents thing is just a way to rip you off in stores that are cutting a thin dime on profits to purposely undercut the competition (such as us). Of course, you only get the customer once when you do nasty tricks like that...
Also, the 3 - 4% some shops charge on non-cash purchases is a load of bunk too. We're a new shop, the worst percentage you should be getting charged is 2.8% (that's what we're charged). However, as we're with the BBB (YAY! More protection fees!), next year it will be the 1.8% that most established shops should be paying.
As far as cashback, if people asked for it, I'd deal with it. Since nobody has asked, I haven't bothered. Even if someone did, they wouldn't get much more than $40, as that's all I try to keep in the till at max.
Change hasn't been a problem. My estimate is about 4 cash transactions out of about 40 - 50 a week (it's the low season right now). We saw a bit more cash at Christmas, but that's how people budget (if they're smart).
If your store is hurting so bad that you have to sqeeze $0.35 or 1.2% extra from a customer, put yourself out of your misery. Seriously. You're screwed.
>Even if you pay quickly and on time, a credit card advance will have a nasty surprise attached.
>What I want to know is, if the British are supposed to use their fancy metric system, why do they use standard units for their money?
They do. It used to be measured in shillings, pennies, guineas, crowns, farthings, groats, florins, nobles, marks, merks, etc, etc. It's now just Pounds (full units) & Pence/Pennies (1/100 of a pound).
Bah! I was PERFECTLY happy with my Cyrix processor. It wasn't fast, but boy oh boy was it cheap. Way cheaper than I SHOULD have been able to get a CPU for, at the time. Integer performance was exemplary, although the FPU was abysmal. The whole overheating CPU thing was a bit fat load of crap, IMHO, ran mine with an eensy-weensy heatsink, no problems. Most problems actually came from overheating power regulators on cheap-ass motherboards (which, understandably, were what most Cyrixes were coupled with).
The only people complaining were idiots thinking they'd get something for nothing.;-) TANSTAAFL.
>then there was no alternative to Intel until the original Athlon which meant that the Pentium and Pentium II were unchallenged.
I found the AMD K6 (and K6 3DNow! & K6-II K6-III) a great competitor, again, but with the usual caveats. My 333 Mhz AMD computer was nice and speedy, probably similar to a PII-266...
>Appletalk ships in every Linux distro. Yup. And so does XT HDD support. You point, if you have one?
>You're a fucking idiot. Ad hominem attacks are something I've come to expect from Apple Zealots.
>Gigabit ethernet does speed up TCPIP connections on your LAN. No shit. And a 747 would get me to work faster. Does that make it useful to me, or the vast majority of users? HELL NO.
>Apple users are apparently better informed about technology than you. And they apparently have more attitude problems to boot.
>SCSI is still shipped in high volume today. High volume being 1/10th of a percent of all drives sold?
>As is postscript. 1/100th of a percent of all printers shipped, if you're LUCKY. And I mean LUCKY.
>For every one of those stupid things I can name ten or a hundred failed attempts by microsoft or intel to introduce standards. Good. Show me 150 failures by each. Have fun.
>EG: by your argument the X86 market is a failure because microbus was not successfu. Of course, unlike older Macs, there were many choices for buses back then, ISA being on every PC sold, apart from a select few. Can you show me that it was the case, for older Macs, that NuBus was just a sideshow, that the real action was something more popular with the computer industry? I so highly doubt it.
>Never mine that NuBus was a standard bus used by many besides apple (like SCSI), while the "IDE" and "ISA" busses-- which are really the same signalling thing-- are non-standards, and default standards. Yes, and, like a lot of unpopular standards that were used by the underdog, it died. It died really well.
>RISC processing Bzzt! HP, 1986, *WAY* before Apple even thought about that.
>The GUI Debateable, but legend puts it this way, despite Xerox PARC.
>The freakin; CD-ROM! You have apple to thank for that. How the fuck is that possible when the CD-ROM was invented in 1983? You're claiming things for Apple that happened prior to the Mac being released? Are you nuts?
>USB I think we've beat that one to death, TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS Intel beat Apple to the punch on that one. Fuck, can you read what I wrote? Are you that stupid?
>FireWire You mean IEEE-1394, right? Apple wanted to keep the iron fist on firewire, make sure it was dead out of the gate. That's why nobody wanted it. Nobody knew that the hell it was: i.Link? S400? IEEE-1394? All because Apple is a greedy bastard company. They got what they deserved here.
>Flat Panel Displays What the FUCK are you smoking man? LCDs were invented WAAAAAY before Apple existed. Heck, I had a digital watch before the Mac existed. You can't claim shit that's older than the whole company. Get real.
>Tower cases! Whaaaaat the hell are you talking about? You have NEVER been to a computer junk sale, have you?
>the 3.5 inch floppy drive Yawn... same as before. Claiming shit that happened before the Mac was invented.
>The Laser Printer Again... And there's a tasty tidbit that I must remember the next time someone claims the GUI was first sold in the Mac:
1981 May Xerox unveils the Star 8010, at the National Computer Conference. Many features that were developed on the Alto are incorported. It includes a bitmapped screen, WYSIWYG word processor, mouse, laser printer, Smalltalk language, Ethernet, and software for combining text and graphics in the same document. At a starting price of US$16-17,000, the computer is not a commercial success. During its lifetime, 100,000 units are produced.
And idiots like Jobs? He shut it down, remember. Of course you don't, because Apple zealots don't like to remember the stupid mistakes. Just the good stuff.
>The newton, and virtually every other of those items you list-- was and is an unqualified success.
Ahhh, that explains why I've never seen one. Because it was so successful... yeah... right... uhhhhh... sure. Good logic there!
>But then, you're an idiot who will look at a few things that don't work
Yeah, 15 things, that's a "few". Yup. A "few". You know, like if you take 15 keys off your keyboard, that's a "few". Get a hold of the english language man! 15 is not a "few". And I came up with that list in under 30 minutes. Give me a week (and pay me for the work), I bet I could sqeeze in another hundred, easy.
>and look at a company that has never introduced anything original (say Microsoft) and call them a success on innovation.
I said nothing of the sort. However, you're certainly free to be as deluded as you would like to be.
>You're a fucking idiot. Go kill yourself.
Wow! Such intelligent discourse rarely becomes an Apple zealot.
Get a clue. And welcome to another foes list. Moron.
From your rants about the Mac on your userpage:
The Fountainhead My little iMac can encode MPEG4 video in realtime. Show me an x86 that can do that. Or, shut up about x86 performance.
Sure. My 333 Mhz AMD was doing that. I'd give it to you, but you're an asshole, and shipping is expensive.
Whoops! Or did you forget about that little bit of zealotry? Damn! You'd better get editing that user page fast, my foe!
If you were to shave (with anything) for 24 hours straight, you'd probably manage to give yourself a skin graft.
However, the average man likely shaves for 24 hours total each year (or so, depends on how long you take), yet doesn't experience side effects requiring a trip to the hospital.
>Whether or not they failed at other things is irrelevant to whether or not they drove the adoption of USB.
When citing difficult-to-impossible to prove stats, it's often handy to be able to back them up with good, solid indicators that you're right.
For that matter, it's my personal opine that the lack of a floppy drive on the iMac is what drove iMac USB usage. Since you couldn't hook it up any other way without breaking the seal (which, as can be evidenced by internet guides, was actually preferred to being wallet-raped on an overpriced floppy drive), you didn't have much choice but to use USB.
Of course, we'll ignore the fact that intel integrated USB into its chipsets long before the iMac was a gleam in Apple's eye, and we'll ignore the fact that the USB installed userbase was primarialy PC users, even after the infusion of bondi blue iMacs had ceased. Heck, we'll even ignore the fact that intel was shipping USB to the masses in its Triton VX chipset OVER TWO AND A HALF YEARS before the iMac existed.
Sure, we'll just ignore all those facts and pretend the iMac was what made USB USB. We'll just pretend that PCs didn't really have USB until the iMac existed. For the hell of it, we'll even pretend that Apple created USB.
Why?
Because it makes people feel better that Apple made USB popular. Nobody likes to think that in January, 1996 headers were on PC motherboards just waiting to be connected to all the fresh, new, (expensive), USB devices out there.
Now, all that being told, if iMacs drove USB acceptance, likely through mass purchases of USB products driving down prices, WHY THE HELL ARE ALL THE USB FLOPPY DRIVES ALWAYS SO EXPENSIVE?
Okay, well, I argued about GbEthernet simply because I hear enough Mac users who have no need for it ("It'll speed up my internet connection" type users) pretend it's some sort of feature from the gods. Hint: It isn't. And it's totally pointless (IMHO) for your desktop PC to have a network connection faster than your hard drive. Perhaps its useful to abuse a fast server as a memory cache for these computers?:-)
AppleTalk was out and about after Arcnet, which actually *was* better, in a lot of ways. I love Arcnet, and have never seen anything that nears it's robustness (and now cheapness) in a long time. 20,000 ft and still strong. After working with it I wondered why the hell Ethernet took off (Hubs? Switches? Network Jams? 3-4-5 rules? BARF!). Oh well, beggars can't be choosers.
I'm not bashing postscript, but it's useless for the consumer as long as it's confined to $500+ laser printers. Unbelieveable that in this day and age you have to go out and buy a used printer to get one with postscript that doesn't break the bank.
DVI -- You're right, sorry, I meant whatever that wacky Apple VGA connector was. My bad. I always get confused as to what's on the other end of that dongle with the VGA port and dip switches. Still not sure what it's called, but I do know it caused me all sorts of hell (probably from unlabelled dipswitches on cheap Chinese imports).
I'll throw you a curve ball on the mouse argument. The PC didn't put two buttons on it. In fact, I'm somewhat thinking commodore did in January, 1985. Although I hear the PC Jr. may have beaten them to the punch. But, back then, my interest in mice was zilch.:-) Either way, one button is absolutely backwards thinking today, and it still totally sucks. And won't catch on. Ever. Thank God. Although I hear that it has created a booming industry for third party replacement Mac mice.
As far as Portrait Displays go, I do recall the Mac commercials portraying it as the new way for an average consumer to enjoy using a computer. Something about using a monitor like you read a page or something. I never saw the commercial more than once or twice in my life, the only thing sticking with me being "Who the hell thought that up?" Having used a portrait display on an NCD Xterm, though, it isn't a half bad idea, but it is still a little half baked, IMHO.
You'd be surprised about the keyboards/soft power thing. I do recall being on a field trip, getting my first experience with a mac. The entire class, having been "raised" on Tandy 1000s spent the better part of 10 minutes wondering how the hell to get the things to turn on. One more hint for apple: |> does not mean "ON" in North America. (|), strangely enough, does.
Hey, I went lightly on ya, though... how about pioneering Black and White computing!:-)
If Apple tech drives sales, explain the following being failures for the general consumer market (no, not specialized 5% of the world uses it market, the "it's on every computer" market):
- RS-422
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Appletalk
- Postscript
- SCSI
- DVI
- Firewire
- NuBUS
- Passive Cooling
- Built-in Monitors on desktops
- Single button mice
- Foot pedal mice (Separate because it has to be the dumbest idea I've ever had the displeasure of having to use. How absolutely un-ergonomic can you get?)
- Portrait oriented displays
- Keyboards with power buttons
Also explain why the newton died and Palm beat the hell out of its remains.
The way I see it, we're talking, assuming we believe you (we don't), an Apple track record of 2 to 15. That totally blows huge chunks.
>Part of the prima facie case at every DJ's office in PA where a DUI case is brought is to bring in the calibration papers for the Intoxilyzer-5000. They do calibrate them regularly and they have the documentation to prove it. Cops may be jackbooted fascist thugs, but when it comes to DUI, they generally aren't stupid.
Good to hear -- no, I don't agree, though, most cops aren't fascist. A few corrupt ones, maybe, but the rest just do the job they're forced too (example: They're forced to hand out tickets when they go to accident scenes if they can, even if they don't want to. I'm pretty sure that's why most all of them are screwed up -- the cops do it on purpose, IMHO, because many times they just don't think a ticket is the right medicine.)
>Listen, people: There is no "magic bullet" DUI defense.
Very true. And for those not believing it, watch MythBusters! They did a part episode on this, and nothing works, except one thing (which actually works against you): Mouthwash. The high alcohol concentration will cause the meter to give a totally insane reading (in their case the person blowing should have been dead). That just means they'll test you at the station, and it just gives them more proof you're a crappy liar.:-)
>Say as little as possible (name, rank, and social security number, essentially). Don't tell them where you've been or where you're going.
Good advice. And on the lawyer thing, good luck. The cost of getting it contested (pointlessly) is probably not worth it. If you really haven't been drinking, you might win, but if you have, the best a lawyer will do for you is get the sentence busted down a bit. Maybe.
And yeah, I hate drunk drivers just as much as anyone.
>Better yet, make breathalizers even more accessable than that. Every bar should have one, or even personal ones
They tried that with payphones at bars (ever wondered why bars in the middle of nowhere, and I mean NOWHERE, have payphones?). It doesn't work. People just ignore the phones, not calling a cab, neighbour, friend, family member, whatever.
Why do you think they'll use a breathalizer? Besides, I've seen a few bars have them there voluntarialy ($0.25 a blow) and nobody uses the damn thing.
The better answer, in Ontario, is to better enforce Drunk Driving laws. Why the hell a judge lets a wino drive to work after being convicted, I don't know. But it happens ALL THE TIME.
You get caught drunk driving, you should get the license taken away for a year. Then you should be forced to start at a G1 license. Hopefully, having to drive with friends for a year should sober you up.
Better yet, fix the insurance laws too. I do two rear end crashes totalling $348 in damages, and my insurance is now *HIGHER* than a chronic drunk driver! Who the hell thought that one up?
Breathalizers and snow clean up laws aren't the solution. Good, solid, consistent enforcement of punishments is. Show the drunk driver they simply aren't acceptable to society. Right now, to judges and insurance companies, they're just funny jokes. Not a "danger". Stupid.
>When you receive a PA drivers license, you agree in advance to consent to a breath test if stopped and that you understand that failure to comply will result in 12 month suspension of the license regardless of its outcome.
Does PA law allow you to select where to have the test?
ie: Do you have to take the test on the road, or at the station?
IMHO, the equipment at the station is probably far more accurate than the handheld meters.
(And, as for calibration, like that's ever done! They never even keep the speed guns calibrated! [Makes a great defence in court, I'm told, if you can actually prove the gun wasn't calibrated in a reasonable period])
>You are still allowed to modify and redistribute the code to your heart's content, as long as you acknowledge the original authors. Wouldn't you want your work acknowledged?
You already broke your idea!
Where's the:
(TM) - This post includes "IP" from Hayes, Inc.?
That's why advertising clauses suck. *EVERYTHING* we know of is a dervative of something. Sometimes it'd be nice, though, because it would force companies like Disney to face the music. But most of the time it sucks because you waste more ink thanking dead people and companies than getting work done.
>If you can't use your phone because of no signal who cares if you can switch providers?
Sometimes the Devil you know really *IS* worse than the one you don't know...
(Cell providers in Canada are *easily* worse than the ones in the US for service, IMHO. Sometimes I wonder why anyone bothers to get a phone here at all...)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps in Europe everything is opposite (well, having been there, it'd come as no surprise to me if this was true :-) ), but I do know one thing: There's a great deal of broadcasters in North America who lack any form of commercials.
Some of them are paid directly by people who subscribe to the programming, for example, HBO, and FSTV. Some of them broadcast for free and have absolutely no charge attached to them, for example, PBS, and, to some degree (if you live outside of Ontario) TV Ontario. FSTV also has a station without commercials.
Commercial free stations such as TV Ontario, PBS, FSTV, and the various religious stations regularly broadcast content which a great many would find objectionable if they didn't keep their TV sets glued to stations they actually enjoy. In fact, in spite of the fact the BBC forces a license upon people in the UK for their content, PBS manages to give away many of the exact same programs developed by the BBC themselves, and has continued to do so for years. Also, I am certain that the content broadcast on FSTV is FAR more objectionable to many than just about ANY other station I know of, especially the BBC.
Why it is that there are more commercial free programs being broadcast that I can pick up in North America for free than there are in the UK under forced licencing will always remain an unsolveable enigmah to me.
>This is only right if you are using USB 2 or a cheaper firewire card. Apple computers (and I think the more expensive PC cards) transfer power through the firewire lead, which powers the ipod when connected, and recharges the battery too.
:-)
Ahh, cool! I didn't know that the iPod supported being charged that way. Good move on Apple's part, although it would suck (tm) for anyone using a laptop.
Okay, here's the list of benefits for an iPod (correct me on what I miss):
- Lots of music in one place, at your fingertips
- "Mix" on the fly
- Use it as a portable hard disk
- Some PDA functionality
- Good battery life
- Not much skipping
- Fast file transfer on a new PC
- Files can be transferred on anything with USB or Firewire
- iTunes compatible
And the list of non-plusses:
- If charged daily, $99 yearly battery replacement fee
- Battery replacement takes longer than one day.
- Storace space cannot be increased through standard methods.
- When the battery goes flat, you have to charge it.
- Also, when the battery is flat, the units data contents are not-transferrable
- Cannot use iPod's music (or data) with anything that doesn't have a USB or Firewire port.
- High initial MSRP cost.
- Cannot play music bought at record store without intermediate steps
- Cannot play your friend's CDs without intermediate steps
- Data format not car stereo compatible
Benefits of a CD/MP3 player:
- Low initial MSRP cost.
- Infinite storage space
- Can mix data and music
- Can reload with fresh batteries if ones in unit die
- Fresh batteries are available anywhere, anytime and take under 10 seconds to replace
- Choice of rechargeable or non-rechargeable batteries
- Files can be transferred to anything with a CD player
- Fast file transfer with any age of computer
- Does not require batteries to transfer data
- Can play back music on many DVD players
- iTunes compatible (if using recoded CD)
- Can play music bought at record store instantly
- Can play your Friend's CDs instantly
- Data format car stereo compatible
Lowlights of a CD/MP3 player:
- Cannot remix between discs
- Requires charging more often when using rechargeable batteries
- Bulky
- Not compatible with anything lacking a DVD or CD-ROM.
- Lacks PDA capabilities
- Older units had skipping problems
- Slow seek times
As you can see, there's strong points on both sides of the debate. As you can imagine, being a car stereo owner, I have a CD/MP3 player.
>I never know what I'll want to listen to and CDs are major, hassling, inconvenient, bulky, old hat now after seeing the light. I can listen to anything in my collection, any time I want, wherever I want, whenever I want.
:-)
That's why I sort my CDs by type, rather than alphabetically. Seems you do the same on your iPod.
>I am one of the aeron masses, but I went to an editor's studio the other day, and he had Swoppers.
I could have *sworn* I've seen kids playing on those, coloured pink, and shaped like horses...
Take a page from Nintendo's book...
:-)
Call it a PlayBoy.
>This statement will soon become true for anti-virus.
:-)
You mean MSAV, the CPAV rebundle for MS-DOS, right? Truth really is stranger than fiction.
>why? because of monopolism or market dominance? not likely. as of november 2003 the ipod was the leader in portable digital music player with... 31%.
In exactly the same manner windows is not the leading operating system producer.
As of November, the iPod had a 31 percent market share among all MP3 players sold and an even larger share of the hard drive-based music player market. The company sold a record 730,000 iPods last quarter.
ie: If you compare windows against all operating systems out there (your microwave is using one, your TV, your VCR, stereo, for certain your satellite receiver, etc, etc) there's no way they could even have much more than 5 - 10% of the market.
Squeeze the market down to just what you want to define it as, and bingo! You have a monopoly case, as I suspect it would be for "MP3 players that support iTunes", and definately for "MP3 players that only work on a Mac" (New ones do, yes. If you bought it when it first came out, no.)
Canada doesn't have a DMCA, or anything much like it, ergo one doesn't de facto break the law in Canada when decrypting a DVD. These guys put it better than I ever could. Unless you are using "exploits" fradulently, you are not breaking the law.
In Canada go ahead, you can make a DVD backup. You can even let your friend take one of those crappy copy protected CDs and help him make a copy of it, for him to keep! Yup! A limited form of "Piracy" is a *right* protected by law here. Heck, until a couple of years ago, Canadians were REQUIRED to pirate all encrypted non-Canadian satellite TV signals (paying for them is outlawed). That didn't change until Bell ExpressVu (Canadian satellite company) started bleeding like a stuck pig.
It's the same non-existance of the law that lets me sell modchips (There is *ONE* case of someone getting busted, but not for the modchips. He was selling pirated games and modchips as a super-saver package. What a fool.)
That all being said, I thought I saw "Mountain View, California" on that page?
>But can someone please explain how guns can ever be used in good ways.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean the smartcard is responsible to carry the correct balance, rather than the bank, being that the private key is used to decrypt the information?
The only other way I can see that working is for the card to report back the balance to the machine, but that would be either cleartext or encrypted to the ATMs public key, something that wouldn't stay private for long.
>b) The store has to pay a debit fee with each transaction. Whoopie, you've bought an 80cent pack of gum (on which only 20 cents profit at most), and are asking the guy to incur 50cents to 75cents worth of debit fees on his end. This is why some stores have a minimum purchase requirement to use debit.
:-S
I dunno about where you are, but my store pays 15 cents CDN per debit transaction. The 50 cents thing is just a way to rip you off in stores that are cutting a thin dime on profits to purposely undercut the competition (such as us). Of course, you only get the customer once when you do nasty tricks like that...
Also, the 3 - 4% some shops charge on non-cash purchases is a load of bunk too. We're a new shop, the worst percentage you should be getting charged is 2.8% (that's what we're charged). However, as we're with the BBB (YAY! More protection fees!), next year it will be the 1.8% that most established shops should be paying.
As far as cashback, if people asked for it, I'd deal with it. Since nobody has asked, I haven't bothered. Even if someone did, they wouldn't get much more than $40, as that's all I try to keep in the till at max.
Change hasn't been a problem. My estimate is about 4 cash transactions out of about 40 - 50 a week (it's the low season right now). We saw a bit more cash at Christmas, but that's how people budget (if they're smart).
If your store is hurting so bad that you have to sqeeze $0.35 or 1.2% extra from a customer, put yourself out of your misery. Seriously. You're screwed.
>Even if you pay quickly and on time, a credit card advance will have a nasty surprise attached.
Ain't that the truth.
>What I want to know is, if the British are supposed to use their fancy metric system, why do they use standard units for their money?
They do. It used to be measured in shillings, pennies, guineas, crowns, farthings, groats, florins, nobles, marks, merks, etc, etc. It's now just Pounds (full units) & Pence/Pennies (1/100 of a pound).
>People saw a low cost CPU and got burned for it
;-) TANSTAAFL.
Bah! I was PERFECTLY happy with my Cyrix processor. It wasn't fast, but boy oh boy was it cheap. Way cheaper than I SHOULD have been able to get a CPU for, at the time. Integer performance was exemplary, although the FPU was abysmal. The whole overheating CPU thing was a bit fat load of crap, IMHO, ran mine with an eensy-weensy heatsink, no problems. Most problems actually came from overheating power regulators on cheap-ass motherboards (which, understandably, were what most Cyrixes were coupled with).
The only people complaining were idiots thinking they'd get something for nothing.
>then there was no alternative to Intel until the original Athlon which meant that the Pentium and Pentium II were unchallenged.
I found the AMD K6 (and K6 3DNow! & K6-II K6-III) a great competitor, again, but with the usual caveats. My 333 Mhz AMD computer was nice and speedy, probably similar to a PII-266...
>Appletalk ships in every Linux distro.
Yup. And so does XT HDD support. You point, if you have one?
>You're a fucking idiot.
Ad hominem attacks are something I've come to expect from Apple Zealots.
>Gigabit ethernet does speed up TCPIP connections on your LAN.
No shit. And a 747 would get me to work faster. Does that make it useful to me, or the vast majority of users? HELL NO.
>Apple users are apparently better informed about technology than you.
And they apparently have more attitude problems to boot.
>SCSI is still shipped in high volume today.
High volume being 1/10th of a percent of all drives sold?
>As is postscript.
1/100th of a percent of all printers shipped, if you're LUCKY. And I mean LUCKY.
>For every one of those stupid things I can name ten or a hundred failed attempts by microsoft or intel to introduce standards.
Good. Show me 150 failures by each. Have fun.
>EG: by your argument the X86 market is a failure because microbus was not successfu.
Of course, unlike older Macs, there were many choices for buses back then, ISA being on every PC sold, apart from a select few. Can you show me that it was the case, for older Macs, that NuBus was just a sideshow, that the real action was something more popular with the computer industry? I so highly doubt it.
>Never mine that NuBus was a standard bus used by many besides apple (like SCSI), while the "IDE" and "ISA" busses-- which are really the same signalling thing-- are non-standards, and default standards.
Yes, and, like a lot of unpopular standards that were used by the underdog, it died. It died really well.
>RISC processing
Bzzt! HP, 1986, *WAY* before Apple even thought about that.
>The GUI
Debateable, but legend puts it this way, despite Xerox PARC.
>The freakin; CD-ROM! You have apple to thank for that.
How the fuck is that possible when the CD-ROM was invented in 1983? You're claiming things for Apple that happened prior to the Mac being released? Are you nuts?
>USB
I think we've beat that one to death, TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS Intel beat Apple to the punch on that one. Fuck, can you read what I wrote? Are you that stupid?
>FireWire
You mean IEEE-1394, right? Apple wanted to keep the iron fist on firewire, make sure it was dead out of the gate. That's why nobody wanted it. Nobody knew that the hell it was: i.Link? S400? IEEE-1394? All because Apple is a greedy bastard company. They got what they deserved here.
>Flat Panel Displays
What the FUCK are you smoking man? LCDs were invented WAAAAAY before Apple existed. Heck, I had a digital watch before the Mac existed. You can't claim shit that's older than the whole company. Get real.
>Tower cases!
Whaaaaat the hell are you talking about? You have NEVER been to a computer junk sale, have you?
>the 3.5 inch floppy drive
Yawn... same as before. Claiming shit that happened before the Mac was invented.
>The Laser Printer
Again... And there's a tasty tidbit that I must remember the next time someone claims the GUI was first sold in the Mac:
1981 May Xerox unveils the Star 8010, at the National Computer Conference. Many features that were developed on the Alto are incorported. It includes a bitmapped screen, WYSIWYG word processor, mouse, laser printer, Smalltalk language, Ethernet, and software for combining text and graphics in the same document. At a starting price of US$16-17,000, the computer is not a commercial success. During its lifetime, 100,000 units are produced.
>The
>The newton only died to idiots like you
And idiots like Jobs? He shut it down, remember. Of course you don't, because Apple zealots don't like to remember the stupid mistakes. Just the good stuff.
>The newton, and virtually every other of those items you list-- was and is an unqualified success.
Ahhh, that explains why I've never seen one. Because it was so successful... yeah... right... uhhhhh... sure. Good logic there!
>But then, you're an idiot who will look at a few things that don't work
Yeah, 15 things, that's a "few". Yup. A "few". You know, like if you take 15 keys off your keyboard, that's a "few". Get a hold of the english language man! 15 is not a "few". And I came up with that list in under 30 minutes. Give me a week (and pay me for the work), I bet I could sqeeze in another hundred, easy.
>and look at a company that has never introduced anything original (say Microsoft) and call them a success on innovation.
I said nothing of the sort. However, you're certainly free to be as deluded as you would like to be.
>You're a fucking idiot. Go kill yourself.
Wow! Such intelligent discourse rarely becomes an Apple zealot.
Get a clue. And welcome to another foes list. Moron.
From your rants about the Mac on your userpage:
The Fountainhead My little iMac can encode MPEG4 video in realtime. Show me an x86 that can do that. Or, shut up about x86 performance.
Sure. My 333 Mhz AMD was doing that. I'd give it to you, but you're an asshole, and shipping is expensive.
Whoops! Or did you forget about that little bit of zealotry? Damn! You'd better get editing that user page fast, my foe!
If you were to shave (with anything) for 24 hours straight, you'd probably manage to give yourself a skin graft.
However, the average man likely shaves for 24 hours total each year (or so, depends on how long you take), yet doesn't experience side effects requiring a trip to the hospital.
I expect the same will be shown for this study.
>Whether or not they failed at other things is irrelevant to whether or not they drove the adoption of USB.
When citing difficult-to-impossible to prove stats, it's often handy to be able to back them up with good, solid indicators that you're right.
For that matter, it's my personal opine that the lack of a floppy drive on the iMac is what drove iMac USB usage. Since you couldn't hook it up any other way without breaking the seal (which, as can be evidenced by internet guides, was actually preferred to being wallet-raped on an overpriced floppy drive), you didn't have much choice but to use USB.
Of course, we'll ignore the fact that intel integrated USB into its chipsets long before the iMac was a gleam in Apple's eye, and we'll ignore the fact that the USB installed userbase was primarialy PC users, even after the infusion of bondi blue iMacs had ceased. Heck, we'll even ignore the fact that intel was shipping USB to the masses in its Triton VX chipset OVER TWO AND A HALF YEARS before the iMac existed.
Sure, we'll just ignore all those facts and pretend the iMac was what made USB USB. We'll just pretend that PCs didn't really have USB until the iMac existed. For the hell of it, we'll even pretend that Apple created USB.
Why?
Because it makes people feel better that Apple made USB popular. Nobody likes to think that in January, 1996 headers were on PC motherboards just waiting to be connected to all the fresh, new, (expensive), USB devices out there.
Now, all that being told, if iMacs drove USB acceptance, likely through mass purchases of USB products driving down prices, WHY THE HELL ARE ALL THE USB FLOPPY DRIVES ALWAYS SO EXPENSIVE?
Okay, well, I argued about GbEthernet simply because I hear enough Mac users who have no need for it ("It'll speed up my internet connection" type users) pretend it's some sort of feature from the gods. Hint: It isn't. And it's totally pointless (IMHO) for your desktop PC to have a network connection faster than your hard drive. Perhaps its useful to abuse a fast server as a memory cache for these computers? :-)
:-) Either way, one button is absolutely backwards thinking today, and it still totally sucks. And won't catch on. Ever. Thank God. Although I hear that it has created a booming industry for third party replacement Mac mice.
:-)
AppleTalk was out and about after Arcnet, which actually *was* better, in a lot of ways. I love Arcnet, and have never seen anything that nears it's robustness (and now cheapness) in a long time. 20,000 ft and still strong. After working with it I wondered why the hell Ethernet took off (Hubs? Switches? Network Jams? 3-4-5 rules? BARF!). Oh well, beggars can't be choosers.
I'm not bashing postscript, but it's useless for the consumer as long as it's confined to $500+ laser printers. Unbelieveable that in this day and age you have to go out and buy a used printer to get one with postscript that doesn't break the bank.
DVI -- You're right, sorry, I meant whatever that wacky Apple VGA connector was. My bad. I always get confused as to what's on the other end of that dongle with the VGA port and dip switches. Still not sure what it's called, but I do know it caused me all sorts of hell (probably from unlabelled dipswitches on cheap Chinese imports).
I'll throw you a curve ball on the mouse argument. The PC didn't put two buttons on it. In fact, I'm somewhat thinking commodore did in January, 1985. Although I hear the PC Jr. may have beaten them to the punch. But, back then, my interest in mice was zilch.
As far as Portrait Displays go, I do recall the Mac commercials portraying it as the new way for an average consumer to enjoy using a computer. Something about using a monitor like you read a page or something. I never saw the commercial more than once or twice in my life, the only thing sticking with me being "Who the hell thought that up?" Having used a portrait display on an NCD Xterm, though, it isn't a half bad idea, but it is still a little half baked, IMHO.
You'd be surprised about the keyboards/soft power thing. I do recall being on a field trip, getting my first experience with a mac. The entire class, having been "raised" on Tandy 1000s spent the better part of 10 minutes wondering how the hell to get the things to turn on. One more hint for apple: |> does not mean "ON" in North America. (|), strangely enough, does.
Hey, I went lightly on ya, though... how about pioneering Black and White computing!
If Apple tech drives sales, explain the following being failures for the general consumer market (no, not specialized 5% of the world uses it market, the "it's on every computer" market):
- RS-422
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Appletalk
- Postscript
- SCSI
- DVI
- Firewire
- NuBUS
- Passive Cooling
- Built-in Monitors on desktops
- Single button mice
- Foot pedal mice (Separate because it has to be the dumbest idea I've ever had the displeasure of having to use. How absolutely un-ergonomic can you get?)
- Portrait oriented displays
- Keyboards with power buttons
Also explain why the newton died and Palm beat the hell out of its remains.
The way I see it, we're talking, assuming we believe you (we don't), an Apple track record of 2 to 15. That totally blows huge chunks.
>Part of the prima facie case at every DJ's office in PA where a DUI case is brought is to bring in the calibration papers for the Intoxilyzer-5000. They do calibrate them regularly and they have the documentation to prove it. Cops may be jackbooted fascist thugs, but when it comes to DUI, they generally aren't stupid.
:-)
Good to hear -- no, I don't agree, though, most cops aren't fascist. A few corrupt ones, maybe, but the rest just do the job they're forced too (example: They're forced to hand out tickets when they go to accident scenes if they can, even if they don't want to. I'm pretty sure that's why most all of them are screwed up -- the cops do it on purpose, IMHO, because many times they just don't think a ticket is the right medicine.)
>Listen, people: There is no "magic bullet" DUI defense.
Very true. And for those not believing it, watch MythBusters! They did a part episode on this, and nothing works, except one thing (which actually works against you): Mouthwash. The high alcohol concentration will cause the meter to give a totally insane reading (in their case the person blowing should have been dead). That just means they'll test you at the station, and it just gives them more proof you're a crappy liar.
>Say as little as possible (name, rank, and social security number, essentially). Don't tell them where you've been or where you're going.
Good advice. And on the lawyer thing, good luck. The cost of getting it contested (pointlessly) is probably not worth it. If you really haven't been drinking, you might win, but if you have, the best a lawyer will do for you is get the sentence busted down a bit. Maybe.
And yeah, I hate drunk drivers just as much as anyone.
>Better yet, make breathalizers even more accessable than that. Every bar should have one, or even personal ones
They tried that with payphones at bars (ever wondered why bars in the middle of nowhere, and I mean NOWHERE, have payphones?). It doesn't work. People just ignore the phones, not calling a cab, neighbour, friend, family member, whatever.
Why do you think they'll use a breathalizer? Besides, I've seen a few bars have them there voluntarialy ($0.25 a blow) and nobody uses the damn thing.
The better answer, in Ontario, is to better enforce Drunk Driving laws. Why the hell a judge lets a wino drive to work after being convicted, I don't know. But it happens ALL THE TIME.
You get caught drunk driving, you should get the license taken away for a year. Then you should be forced to start at a G1 license. Hopefully, having to drive with friends for a year should sober you up.
Better yet, fix the insurance laws too. I do two rear end crashes totalling $348 in damages, and my insurance is now *HIGHER* than a chronic drunk driver! Who the hell thought that one up?
Breathalizers and snow clean up laws aren't the solution. Good, solid, consistent enforcement of punishments is. Show the drunk driver they simply aren't acceptable to society. Right now, to judges and insurance companies, they're just funny jokes. Not a "danger". Stupid.
>When you receive a PA drivers license, you agree in advance to consent to a breath test if stopped and that you understand that failure to comply will result in 12 month suspension of the license regardless of its outcome.
Does PA law allow you to select where to have the test?
ie: Do you have to take the test on the road, or at the station?
IMHO, the equipment at the station is probably far more accurate than the handheld meters.
(And, as for calibration, like that's ever done! They never even keep the speed guns calibrated! [Makes a great defence in court, I'm told, if you can actually prove the gun wasn't calibrated in a reasonable period])
(Not that it matters to me)
>I wouldn't think so, and this makes your $20 price tag inaccurate, especially since you're implying that you have other Windows boot disks as well.
:-)
Good point. I know we've had to pay people to take away boat anchors from where I previously worked (with Win98 installed, of course).
So, yeah, the price is probably less than $20.
>You are still allowed to modify and redistribute the code to your heart's content, as long as you acknowledge the original authors. Wouldn't you want your work acknowledged?
You already broke your idea!
Where's the:
(TM) - This post includes "IP" from Hayes, Inc.?
That's why advertising clauses suck. *EVERYTHING* we know of is a dervative of something. Sometimes it'd be nice, though, because it would force companies like Disney to face the music. But most of the time it sucks because you waste more ink thanking dead people and companies than getting work done.
>If you can't use your phone because of no signal who cares if you can switch providers?
Sometimes the Devil you know really *IS* worse than the one you don't know...
(Cell providers in Canada are *easily* worse than the ones in the US for service, IMHO. Sometimes I wonder why anyone bothers to get a phone here at all...)