I, along with 31 other people (plus one department manager and 3 shift managers) were hired to do end user technical support and basic QC work for a company web site (a research service) at $8/hr. 8 years later we had a staff of 15 (covered by a total of 6 managers who didn't seem to do anything at all) with half the vacation time and 3 times higher medical benefit payments than we had when I started due to a "benefit restructuring" 4 years into my employment when we were bought out by a larger company.
And our job duties had gone from supporting that one website to supporting 9 websites and 130 specialized CD-Rom products; most with wildly different technical formats (they dissolved the 4 companies and dropped 2 support contracts that used to handle support for them), handling billing support phone calls (they dissolved the billing department), handling customer orientation calls and doing customer training (they eliminated the sales support staff that used to do that), filing new paperwork (sales support and billing paperwork that was handled by those departments), scanning old paper documents into electronic documents (they were going to hire people to do it, but decided to drop it on us), sorting and addressing marketing flyers (over 8 years the marketing department went from 25 people to 3 and we got their spillover), processing returns on products due to incorrect mailing addresses (the mail department over 8 years went from 6 people to one semi-retired old lady who worked part time 3 days a week), handling internal support calls when some sales rep's computer was so bogged down with adware that it would blue screen 5 or 6 times a day (they dissolved the Internal Help Desk department), and any of a half dozen or more "special projects" that were dumped on us from sister companies, other departments, or stuff the mangers and their assistants should be doing but just "didn't have time" for.
But I got supremely lucky and ended up becoming financially secure when my parents' business got bought out for an insane amount of money (I got 10% which was enough to ensure I could live fairly well without ever having to work again). I didn't tell anyone about it but I did start saying I wouldn't take on more responsibilities unless there was an appropriate increase in pay and benefits when they'd try to drop more and more work on us. I wasn't being beligerant or anything. Just reasonable. I wanted to keep working because I have a family and am no socialite, I liked most of the people I worked with, and sitting around the house watching TV every day would drive me mad pretty quickly. But I also didn't have to eat crap and smile about it.
Within 3 months, suddenly my submission of a daily report we each had to submit into a database (that had no activity logs attached to it and which the managers all had full admin access to) suddenly wasn't appearing in the database at the end of the week. My assertion that I was submitting it was countered (if he was doing it, they'd be there. Everyone else's is!) by the managers I'd become a PITA to and I was fired for not being "capable of performing basic job duties". Which was nothing less than I expected. Although I didn't think they'd be quite that sleazy about it. After all, I'm in an at-will work state, they could have just said GTFO without contriving false incompetance.
But, it did serve notice to everyone else working there just what sort of employer that place had become. And it started a chain reaction. That was just about 3 years ago. Within 6 months of me getting fired all but one person in the department had found a new job and left the company and not a one gave any notice (and when the last one graduates from College next year, he's outta there). Within a year they'd lost half their customers to competitors because the support and training had become attrocious due the fact that the economy hadn't tanked yet and most of the people they could get to stay past the first 2 weeks were a bunch o
It considered slaves to be 3/5 a person. Which was actually granting them more status than they had. Before that, they were merely property with no human rights at all. Originally the African "slaves" in America were actually indentured servants. Orignally (in America) it was Native Americans who were used as Slaves. But Indians weren't very skilled at laborious farming, they were not born into slavery and thus were often very motivated to escape and didn't have far to go to do it, and they were highly susceptible to European diseases and thus had a nasty habit of being constantly sick and often dying on their masters. Africans however were skilled farmers, much less susceptible to European and tropical diseases than the Indians, and in Africa the enslavement of conquered people whose children were born into slavery and self-imposed slavery by the impoverished was commonplace so African slaves were much more accepting of enslavement and less inclined to escape, and if they did wish to escape they had the issue of standing out among the white population and tended to have a problem with the 4000 mile swim back to their native land.
The tobacco boom in Virginia and the Carolinas in the early to mid 1600s, coupled with the expiration of many indentured servant agreements created a massive labor shortage. This created a business opportunity that the Dutch recognized and they began buying slaves from their African masters and importing them to the US to work the Tobacco fields. And as with any other valuable commodity, nefarious people who didn't have legitimate slaves to sell stole (ie kidnapped) them and sold them as their own.
But originally they were still bought as indentured servants who were to be freed after a certain period of time. But as we still see so often today, the corporations (plantation owners) lobbied for, and were eventually successful (first in 1661 in Massachusetts) in getting perpetual servitude laws passed which in effect created true slavery. Over time those laws were expanded and eventually relegated slaves to the same status as livestock.
By giving them the status of 3/5 a person, the Constitution reimposed some humanity to those who had been completely stripped of it over the preceding 100-or-so years.
I haven't listened to terrestrial radio in at least a decade. Can't wait for that medium to die so we can use that spectrum for something worthwhile.
But Dr. Demento was a major source of entertainment for those pre-CD/MP3 years. His show introduced me to Wierd Al, it was during his show that the news of Sam Kinison's Death was broadcast, it's where I learned what was in that little girl's chimney, and it's where Cheech and Chong explained why Santa had to go underground.
'Tis a very sad day.
States already have that ability. Roe Vs. Wade only made it illegal for states to outlaw abortion during (approximately) the first trimester. After that, they can do pretty much anything they like. If a State wanted to make abortion legal up until the fetus could survive on it's own outside the mother unassisted, they are already free to do so. The court only ruled that abortion during the first trimester is a basic fundamental right.
Equal protection under the law does not mean equal rights under the law.
That's wrong. We only laugh when we know that the person/animated character is not seriously hurt.
I've watched hundreds of people get seriously hurt in hilarious ways on YouTube over the past few years and I always laugh heartily at their misfortune.
Skateboarders with shattered arms and legs... Home shopping prop people who fall off ladders or electrocute themselves plugging in some $12 Taiwanese Blender... Animal Handlers getting eaten by Killer Whales... Darwinism in action is hilarious.
Yep. I have a couple of these running XBMC Live off a USB stick.
Mostly they're used in the living room and the family room to play my DVD collection which I ripped to ISOs on a 12TB Windows Home Server machine. I have a few 1080p.ts vids that won't play well on it but it handles my Music Video collection; which are all 1080p x264 MKVs with around a 10MB/s bitrate; without a problem. The cheaper Revo 230 can easily handle anything an old Xbox could and a lot more. The one I bought as a test when I was setting up my system is now an emulator machine and it plays many emulated games that the Xbox would choke on beautifully.
Bell bottoms have come back 3 or 4 times. Jeans bounce around between skinny, baggy, tight, ripped, faded, and a half dozen other styles 2 or 3 times a year. First it's hip. Then it dies for awhile. Then comes back as retro. Then dies again. And then gets combined with something else and the cycle starts all over.
Movies and books aren't really much different. Look at the 100s of remakes of movies from the 70 and 80s that Hollywood is pumping out right now. Not to mention all the reboots and movies based on old IP like GI Joe, Transformers, etc.
And then there was a vampire craze when Dracula was released. Another when Interview with the Vampire came out. Another with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And now there's the one created by Twilight. Same has happened with Wizards, Zombies, supernatural horror, disaster scenarios, alternate histories, and a 100 other ideas that spawn one big hit and then are copied until people get sick of them and move to the next craze.
Music is no different either. When bands like Motley Crue got big in the 80s, suddenly every band in West Hollywood who wore leather pants and 3 lbs of Revlon was getting a record deal and heavy airplay. When Nirvana hit the scene, anyone who wore flannel got a record deal. Now it's anyone who shows up on a TV Talent show.
In the artistic world, IP is meaningless because you can just create a knock off with the same theme.
Technical IP however, is often much more insidious because of how broad the legal system has allowed them to push copyright. If music IP were treated the same way that technical IP is, then Nirvana would have had put out Smells Like Teen Spirit and then just spent the next 10 years suing Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots for infringing on their IP.
Here's my setup that's currently capable of holding 44TB of storage (I have 18TB so far). Nothing fancy, Just something to hold all my media that isn't horribly noisy or hot and that was still relatively cheap. I have it sitting on a coffee table in my home office so you could put it pretty much anywhere.
A $320 Norco 4020 case that has 20 hot swappable drive bays plus 2 more fixed drive bays inside.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219021
A $250 server motherboard with at least 2 PCI-X slots. I chose http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182142 because it takes a Core 2 CPU and DDR2 and I already had plenty of those laying around so I saved a few bucks in parts. I also had a CORSAIR CMPSU-850HX laying around and used it for a power supply which runs about $190.
$99 SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 SATA card. 2 of them will fill the server if you pull the DVD drive (I use an external anyway). 6 sata on the Mobo + 16 more from the 2 cards. Some people complain they're slow but I can pull 60+ Mb/s over the network from them. My guess is they're putting them in regular PCI slots on regular MoBos and not PCI-X slots on a server board.
For an OS, I simply use Windows Home Server. It's $99, windows simple, and is perfect for just storing video files. Reinstalling the OS can be a massive pain though as WHS reinstall script thing never works when there's a controller that WHS doesn't support out of the box (ie. the Supermicro cards). And the new version of WHS based on WS 2008R2 is on the way and there won't be an easy way to migrate. I also use Flex Raid (Software Raid 4) and sacrifice one disk as a parity drive because duplication isn't much safer but eats a lot more of my space. I just have it do the rSync when no one is likely to be doing anything with the server so it's never a hassle.
So the base cost is within a few hundred bucks on either side of a grand. Less, if you have parts that can be cannibalized from old machines
From there, I just add Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drives as needed. They're cheap, quiet and run cool. The EARS ones need a jumper (and none are included with the drive) to run under WHS but are $15 cheaper than the EADS ones on Newegg. And of course you can use any old drives you have laying around too.
I have Acer Aspire Revos ($330 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103235) running XBMC Live installed on a USB Drive (xbmc.org) hooked up to each of the TVs in the house and use wired Gigabit (provided by whatever the cheapest 5 port Gigabit switch was on Newegg at the time, I think it was about $25) to stream DVD ISOs from the server to the TV. I don't have much HD stuff and the Revo can get bogged down when you try to play really high def video. 10Mbps works fine with XBMC using vdpau, but an 18Mbps MKV was a bit too much and went slideshow in places.
The reason people hold on to the past is because, from an end user standpoint, Usenet is in many ways vastly superior to P2P for pirates or anyone who shares files.
It's more efficient for end users as well. You can upload a file once, and it's available to be dowloaded, at very high speed (assuming you have a decent Usenet provider) to everyone who wants it almost immediately.
It also has the benefit of longevity. Most premium Usenet provider now have 300-600 day retention. But many torrents lose most of their seeds within the first couple of months. If you're looking for a file that was posted a year ago, chances are there's few, if any seeders left and you either can't get the file or if you can, it's rarely going to be with any great amount of speed.
It's far less of a risk to the end user. I've never known anyone to get a DMCA notice from anything they've uploaded or downloaded via Usenet. And Usenet providers don't host many files, they host articles. And it's a pain for a copyright holder to have to compile a list of the thousands of articles that make up the file they want to request removed. Especially if it's a file that's been crossposted to a dozen different groups. For awhile Copyright holders were just requesting that a handful of articles be removed so the files would end up incomplete and corrupt but par2 files make that a lot less effective.
There's some downsides of course, but Usenet is still arguably a better method for file sharing than P2P.
However, as someone who both uses Usenet and has Cox, I don't care about Cox dropping Usenet. Their service has always been horrendously slow, with poor retention, poor completion, and horrendously unreliable. And it's not even something they've advertised as a service, at least nowhere I've seen, for many years. Unless you went digging through FAQs to find out if they had it you'd never know it was offered.
If this guy has any personality and Charisma whatsoever, Apple needs to put the guy on the talk show circuit IMMEDIATLY.
You know everyone in the world wants to talk to this guy right now. Get him on the Daily Show, Colbert Report, Leno, George Lopez, Letterman, etc.
If Apple fires him, they'll just come across as a bunch of paranoid corporate bastards. But if they make a big joke out of it, they could make the guy a mascot. He could be bigger than Steve the Dell Dude.
Why would anyone buy a DVD when it's either based on a book you've already read (or Oprah told your wife to read) or it's a remake/reboot/reinvention of something you bought on DVD 10 years ago?
Currently Hollywood is remaking, reinventing or rebooting (some of these are just rumored, but most are confirmed to at least be on the drawing board): 10, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Adventures In Babysitting, Alien, American Graffiti, American Pie, Arthur, Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes, Back To School, Battle Royale, Better Off Dead, Brewster's Millions, "Buffy The Vampire Slayer (The movie. With the same director as the original), Can't Buy Me Love, Child's Play, Cliffhanger, Cloak And Dagger, Clue, Cocktail, Conan, Creature From The Black Lagoon, Daredevil, Death Wish, Dirty Dancing, Dream A Little Dream, Drop Dead Fred, Dune, Earth Girls Are Easy, Endless Love, Escape From New York, Explorers, Fantastic Four, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Flash Gordon, Fletch, Flight Of The Navigator, Footloose, Fright Night, Ghostbusters, Gilligan's Island, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Goonies, Gotcha, Gremlins, Heathers, Hellraiser, Highlander, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Iron Eagle, Jurassic Park, La Femme Nikita, License To Drive, Little Shop Of Horrors, Logan’s Run (, Look Who's Talking, Meatballs, Monster Squad, My Fair Lady, National Lampoon's Vacation, Night Of The Comet, Pet Semetary, Planet Of The Apes, Point Break, Police Academy, Poltergeist, Porky's, Private Benjamin, Real Genius, Reanimator, Red Dawn, Robocop, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Romancing The Stone, Rosemary's Baby, Scanners, Shocker, Short Circuit, Silent Night Deadly Night, Smokey And The Bandit, Spawn, Spider-Man, Spy Kids, Stand By Me, Stephen King's It, Summer School, Superman, Teen Witch, Teen Wolf, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, The Birds, The Black Hole, The Breakfast Club, The Crow, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Karate Kid, The Last Starfighter, The Lost Boys, The Neverending Story, The Pirates Of Penzance, The Thing, The Warriors, Thelma And Louise, They Live, Tomb Raider, Total Recall, Toxic Avenger, Tron, True Grit, Valley Girl, Weekend At Bernies, Weird Science, Where The Boys Are, Weird Science and I'm sure there's plenty more.
Why pay $17 to sit through 90 minutes of some dreadful book adaptation or 80s movie remake when I can pay $25 for 10 hours of Dexter or $50 for a season of 24? They're at least as good as anything Hollywood is pumping out, a far better value, and I don't have to deal with sticky floors and cell phones. And I've yet to see any TV DvDs pull the "10 minutes of ads before you can go to the main menu" stunt that half the new release movies I've bought seem to have these days.
Is it? How much does it cost to reattach a finger or a thumb?
Millions of people use saws every year and don't cut off their fingers. If every one of those people had to pay an extra $169 when they buy a saw the total costs would seem to be astronomical. Seems it'd be cheaper to add a $5 "Severed Appendage Tax" to all power tools to cover the costs of reattaching fingers than it would be to require it on all saws.
It's getting to the point where it seems the only option is to hold a safety course and make people sign a release before you sell them a cup of coffee.
Did you try calling them to see if it was en error?
I had the same thing happen with a video card I returned. I called them and they not only refunded the 15% restocking fee but also gave me a $50 credit as an apology for the error.
It makes a lot more sense that these were units made to be used internally as mock ups than it does that someone did it to try and swindle anyone. The quality of the fakes wasn't good enough to pass any inspection that went farther than glancing at the box and for that, a crook could have glued rocks inside the box. Making full epoxy mock ups of the actual parts, and adding a machined aluminum shroud to the "CPU" doesn't make any sense if the point was simply fraud.
Distributors *do* often get mock ups of fragile and expensive parts to make sure it goes through their machines without getting damaged or stuck. They'd also need wight accurate mock ups to plan how to stack it on pallets so they don't fall over, how to stack them on trucks so the trucks are balanced, make sure they pass through security scanners, etc.
I worked in an distribution center for Chief Auto Parts back in HS (late 80s) and we'd constantly get pallets of fake parts to use for planning purposes. And they often had spelling and other printing issues with things like labels because they were done by some printer hired by whoever did the mockups which means a distributor based in China gets Engrish labels.
Although back in the 80s mock parts came in palette swapped boxes with "DEMO UNIT! NOT FOR RESALE!" stamped all over the box and parts so it was impossible to get the two mixed up. Maybe Intel just isn't as smart about making fakes as Raybestos is.
Sliders is definitely one deserving of a remake. The premise was fantastic. The writing and execution just went badly off the rails.
Another Jerry O'Connell show that could use a remake would be My Secret Identity. It'd fit right in with half of Disney's current hit shows.
I'd also like to see Quantum Leap remade. And of course, MacGyver has to be remade at some point.
Microsoft also used forced aad watching back in the late 90s on people who used WebTV boxes.
You'd get a screen with a banner ad in the middle of it and have to chose to go the the site you wanted or the ad site.
It only lasted a few days. It was a quick replacement after they had to change over from using a overlaid banner ad on pages when Chevy got mad that there were Ford ads being superimposed over their website.
Outcry caused them to change it yet again so the ad disappeared automatically after a few seconds. But they had forced ads that rendered the device useless until you acknowledged you'd been properly induced into a seizure by a flashing ad banner long before Apple did.
Dump the Xbox 360. Any of the methods for installing Homebrew apps will void your warranty and the Red Ring of Death error is still so common you risk ending up with a useless doorstop at any moment. Plus, it can be finicky about the formats it will play without a hassle.
My kids play games on our 360 and we have family Guitar Hero sessions so I do use the 360 with TVersity as a media center as it saves me another box on the shelf. But if you don't have a use for the gaming console part, there's no compelling reason not to go with something more suitable.
If you sell it, you can use the cash and get an Apple TV ($230 retail) and load Xbox Media Center on it (the software that made the original Xbox such a great Media Extender) and it will play pretty much anything you can throw at it. Or you can get something like Popcorn Hour C-200, D-Link MediaLounge or any of the numerous other Digital Media Players that are out there which offer better media compatibility and features more suitable to a modern media player then a gaming console.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Same thing happened to me.
I, along with 31 other people (plus one department manager and 3 shift managers) were hired to do end user technical support and basic QC work for a company web site (a research service) at $8/hr. 8 years later we had a staff of 15 (covered by a total of 6 managers who didn't seem to do anything at all) with half the vacation time and 3 times higher medical benefit payments than we had when I started due to a "benefit restructuring" 4 years into my employment when we were bought out by a larger company.
And our job duties had gone from supporting that one website to supporting 9 websites and 130 specialized CD-Rom products; most with wildly different technical formats (they dissolved the 4 companies and dropped 2 support contracts that used to handle support for them), handling billing support phone calls (they dissolved the billing department), handling customer orientation calls and doing customer training (they eliminated the sales support staff that used to do that), filing new paperwork (sales support and billing paperwork that was handled by those departments), scanning old paper documents into electronic documents (they were going to hire people to do it, but decided to drop it on us), sorting and addressing marketing flyers (over 8 years the marketing department went from 25 people to 3 and we got their spillover), processing returns on products due to incorrect mailing addresses (the mail department over 8 years went from 6 people to one semi-retired old lady who worked part time 3 days a week), handling internal support calls when some sales rep's computer was so bogged down with adware that it would blue screen 5 or 6 times a day (they dissolved the Internal Help Desk department), and any of a half dozen or more "special projects" that were dumped on us from sister companies, other departments, or stuff the mangers and their assistants should be doing but just "didn't have time" for.
But I got supremely lucky and ended up becoming financially secure when my parents' business got bought out for an insane amount of money (I got 10% which was enough to ensure I could live fairly well without ever having to work again). I didn't tell anyone about it but I did start saying I wouldn't take on more responsibilities unless there was an appropriate increase in pay and benefits when they'd try to drop more and more work on us. I wasn't being beligerant or anything. Just reasonable. I wanted to keep working because I have a family and am no socialite, I liked most of the people I worked with, and sitting around the house watching TV every day would drive me mad pretty quickly. But I also didn't have to eat crap and smile about it.
Within 3 months, suddenly my submission of a daily report we each had to submit into a database (that had no activity logs attached to it and which the managers all had full admin access to) suddenly wasn't appearing in the database at the end of the week. My assertion that I was submitting it was countered (if he was doing it, they'd be there. Everyone else's is!) by the managers I'd become a PITA to and I was fired for not being "capable of performing basic job duties". Which was nothing less than I expected. Although I didn't think they'd be quite that sleazy about it. After all, I'm in an at-will work state, they could have just said GTFO without contriving false incompetance.
But, it did serve notice to everyone else working there just what sort of employer that place had become. And it started a chain reaction. That was just about 3 years ago. Within 6 months of me getting fired all but one person in the department had found a new job and left the company and not a one gave any notice (and when the last one graduates from College next year, he's outta there). Within a year they'd lost half their customers to competitors because the support and training had become attrocious due the fact that the economy hadn't tanked yet and most of the people they could get to stay past the first 2 weeks were a bunch o
It considered slaves to be 3/5 a person. Which was actually granting them more status than they had. Before that, they were merely property with no human rights at all.
Originally the African "slaves" in America were actually indentured servants. Orignally (in America) it was Native Americans who were used as Slaves. But Indians weren't very skilled at laborious farming, they were not born into slavery and thus were often very motivated to escape and didn't have far to go to do it, and they were highly susceptible to European diseases and thus had a nasty habit of being constantly sick and often dying on their masters.
Africans however were skilled farmers, much less susceptible to European and tropical diseases than the Indians, and in Africa the enslavement of conquered people whose children were born into slavery and self-imposed slavery by the impoverished was commonplace so African slaves were much more accepting of enslavement and less inclined to escape, and if they did wish to escape they had the issue of standing out among the white population and tended to have a problem with the 4000 mile swim back to their native land.
The tobacco boom in Virginia and the Carolinas in the early to mid 1600s, coupled with the expiration of many indentured servant agreements created a massive labor shortage. This created a business opportunity that the Dutch recognized and they began buying slaves from their African masters and importing them to the US to work the Tobacco fields. And as with any other valuable commodity, nefarious people who didn't have legitimate slaves to sell stole (ie kidnapped) them and sold them as their own.
But originally they were still bought as indentured servants who were to be freed after a certain period of time. But as we still see so often today, the corporations (plantation owners) lobbied for, and were eventually successful (first in 1661 in Massachusetts) in getting perpetual servitude laws passed which in effect created true slavery. Over time those laws were expanded and eventually relegated slaves to the same status as livestock.
By giving them the status of 3/5 a person, the Constitution reimposed some humanity to those who had been completely stripped of it over the preceding 100-or-so years.
I haven't listened to terrestrial radio in at least a decade. Can't wait for that medium to die so we can use that spectrum for something worthwhile.
But Dr. Demento was a major source of entertainment for those pre-CD/MP3 years. His show introduced me to Wierd Al, it was during his show that the news of Sam Kinison's Death was broadcast, it's where I learned what was in that little girl's chimney, and it's where Cheech and Chong explained why Santa had to go underground.
'Tis a very sad day.
Gazebo.
States already have that ability. Roe Vs. Wade only made it illegal for states to outlaw abortion during (approximately) the first trimester. After that, they can do pretty much anything they like. If a State wanted to make abortion legal up until the fetus could survive on it's own outside the mother unassisted, they are already free to do so. The court only ruled that abortion during the first trimester is a basic fundamental right.
Equal protection under the law does not mean equal rights under the law.
That's wrong. We only laugh when we know that the person/animated character is not seriously hurt.
I've watched hundreds of people get seriously hurt in hilarious ways on YouTube over the past few years and I always laugh heartily at their misfortune.
Skateboarders with shattered arms and legs... Home shopping prop people who fall off ladders or electrocute themselves plugging in some $12 Taiwanese Blender... Animal Handlers getting eaten by Killer Whales...
Darwinism in action is hilarious.
Yep. I have a couple of these running XBMC Live off a USB stick.
.ts vids that won't play well on it but it handles my Music Video collection; which are all 1080p x264 MKVs with around a 10MB/s bitrate; without a problem.
Mostly they're used in the living room and the family room to play my DVD collection which I ripped to ISOs on a 12TB Windows Home Server machine. I have a few 1080p
The cheaper Revo 230 can easily handle anything an old Xbox could and a lot more. The one I bought as a test when I was setting up my system is now an emulator machine and it plays many emulated games that the Xbox would choke on beautifully.
Bell bottoms have come back 3 or 4 times. Jeans bounce around between skinny, baggy, tight, ripped, faded, and a half dozen other styles 2 or 3 times a year. First it's hip. Then it dies for awhile. Then comes back as retro. Then dies again. And then gets combined with something else and the cycle starts all over.
Movies and books aren't really much different. Look at the 100s of remakes of movies from the 70 and 80s that Hollywood is pumping out right now. Not to mention all the reboots and movies based on old IP like GI Joe, Transformers, etc. And then there was a vampire craze when Dracula was released. Another when Interview with the Vampire came out. Another with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And now there's the one created by Twilight. Same has happened with Wizards, Zombies, supernatural horror, disaster scenarios, alternate histories, and a 100 other ideas that spawn one big hit and then are copied until people get sick of them and move to the next craze.
Music is no different either. When bands like Motley Crue got big in the 80s, suddenly every band in West Hollywood who wore leather pants and 3 lbs of Revlon was getting a record deal and heavy airplay. When Nirvana hit the scene, anyone who wore flannel got a record deal. Now it's anyone who shows up on a TV Talent show.
In the artistic world, IP is meaningless because you can just create a knock off with the same theme.
Technical IP however, is often much more insidious because of how broad the legal system has allowed them to push copyright. If music IP were treated the same way that technical IP is, then Nirvana would have had put out Smells Like Teen Spirit and then just spent the next 10 years suing Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots for infringing on their IP.
Here's my setup that's currently capable of holding 44TB of storage (I have 18TB so far). Nothing fancy, Just something to hold all my media that isn't horribly noisy or hot and that was still relatively cheap. I have it sitting on a coffee table in my home office so you could put it pretty much anywhere.
A $320 Norco 4020 case that has 20 hot swappable drive bays plus 2 more fixed drive bays inside. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219021
A $250 server motherboard with at least 2 PCI-X slots. I chose http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182142 because it takes a Core 2 CPU and DDR2 and I already had plenty of those laying around so I saved a few bucks in parts. I also had a CORSAIR CMPSU-850HX laying around and used it for a power supply which runs about $190.
$99 SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 SATA card. 2 of them will fill the server if you pull the DVD drive (I use an external anyway). 6 sata on the Mobo + 16 more from the 2 cards. Some people complain they're slow but I can pull 60+ Mb/s over the network from them. My guess is they're putting them in regular PCI slots on regular MoBos and not PCI-X slots on a server board.
For an OS, I simply use Windows Home Server. It's $99, windows simple, and is perfect for just storing video files. Reinstalling the OS can be a massive pain though as WHS reinstall script thing never works when there's a controller that WHS doesn't support out of the box (ie. the Supermicro cards). And the new version of WHS based on WS 2008R2 is on the way and there won't be an easy way to migrate.
I also use Flex Raid (Software Raid 4) and sacrifice one disk as a parity drive because duplication isn't much safer but eats a lot more of my space. I just have it do the rSync when no one is likely to be doing anything with the server so it's never a hassle.
So the base cost is within a few hundred bucks on either side of a grand. Less, if you have parts that can be cannibalized from old machines
From there, I just add Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drives as needed. They're cheap, quiet and run cool. The EARS ones need a jumper (and none are included with the drive) to run under WHS but are $15 cheaper than the EADS ones on Newegg. And of course you can use any old drives you have laying around too.
I have Acer Aspire Revos ($330 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103235) running XBMC Live installed on a USB Drive (xbmc.org) hooked up to each of the TVs in the house and use wired Gigabit (provided by whatever the cheapest 5 port Gigabit switch was on Newegg at the time, I think it was about $25) to stream DVD ISOs from the server to the TV. I don't have much HD stuff and the Revo can get bogged down when you try to play really high def video. 10Mbps works fine with XBMC using vdpau, but an 18Mbps MKV was a bit too much and went slideshow in places.
Now we just need the crackers to sue Rockstar for infringing on their Intellectual Property Rights.
The reason people hold on to the past is because, from an end user standpoint, Usenet is in many ways vastly superior to P2P for pirates or anyone who shares files.
It's more efficient for end users as well. You can upload a file once, and it's available to be dowloaded, at very high speed (assuming you have a decent Usenet provider) to everyone who wants it almost immediately.
It also has the benefit of longevity. Most premium Usenet provider now have 300-600 day retention. But many torrents lose most of their seeds within the first couple of months. If you're looking for a file that was posted a year ago, chances are there's few, if any seeders left and you either can't get the file or if you can, it's rarely going to be with any great amount of speed.
It's far less of a risk to the end user. I've never known anyone to get a DMCA notice from anything they've uploaded or downloaded via Usenet. And Usenet providers don't host many files, they host articles. And it's a pain for a copyright holder to have to compile a list of the thousands of articles that make up the file they want to request removed. Especially if it's a file that's been crossposted to a dozen different groups. For awhile Copyright holders were just requesting that a handful of articles be removed so the files would end up incomplete and corrupt but par2 files make that a lot less effective.
There's some downsides of course, but Usenet is still arguably a better method for file sharing than P2P.
However, as someone who both uses Usenet and has Cox, I don't care about Cox dropping Usenet. Their service has always been horrendously slow, with poor retention, poor completion, and horrendously unreliable. And it's not even something they've advertised as a service, at least nowhere I've seen, for many years. Unless you went digging through FAQs to find out if they had it you'd never know it was offered.
If this guy has any personality and Charisma whatsoever, Apple needs to put the guy on the talk show circuit IMMEDIATLY. You know everyone in the world wants to talk to this guy right now. Get him on the Daily Show, Colbert Report, Leno, George Lopez, Letterman, etc.
If Apple fires him, they'll just come across as a bunch of paranoid corporate bastards. But if they make a big joke out of it, they could make the guy a mascot. He could be bigger than Steve the Dell Dude.
Why would anyone buy a DVD when it's either based on a book you've already read (or Oprah told your wife to read) or it's a remake/reboot/reinvention of something you bought on DVD 10 years ago?
Currently Hollywood is remaking, reinventing or rebooting (some of these are just rumored, but most are confirmed to at least be on the drawing board): 10, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Adventures In Babysitting, Alien, American Graffiti, American Pie, Arthur, Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes, Back To School, Battle Royale, Better Off Dead, Brewster's Millions, "Buffy The Vampire Slayer (The movie. With the same director as the original), Can't Buy Me Love, Child's Play, Cliffhanger, Cloak And Dagger, Clue, Cocktail, Conan, Creature From The Black Lagoon, Daredevil, Death Wish, Dirty Dancing, Dream A Little Dream, Drop Dead Fred, Dune, Earth Girls Are Easy, Endless Love, Escape From New York, Explorers, Fantastic Four, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Flash Gordon, Fletch, Flight Of The Navigator, Footloose, Fright Night, Ghostbusters, Gilligan's Island, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Goonies, Gotcha, Gremlins, Heathers, Hellraiser, Highlander, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Iron Eagle, Jurassic Park, La Femme Nikita, License To Drive, Little Shop Of Horrors, Logan’s Run (, Look Who's Talking, Meatballs, Monster Squad, My Fair Lady, National Lampoon's Vacation, Night Of The Comet, Pet Semetary, Planet Of The Apes, Point Break, Police Academy, Poltergeist, Porky's, Private Benjamin, Real Genius, Reanimator, Red Dawn, Robocop, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Romancing The Stone, Rosemary's Baby, Scanners, Shocker, Short Circuit, Silent Night Deadly Night, Smokey And The Bandit, Spawn, Spider-Man, Spy Kids, Stand By Me, Stephen King's It, Summer School, Superman, Teen Witch, Teen Wolf, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, The Birds, The Black Hole, The Breakfast Club, The Crow, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Karate Kid, The Last Starfighter, The Lost Boys, The Neverending Story, The Pirates Of Penzance, The Thing, The Warriors, Thelma And Louise, They Live, Tomb Raider, Total Recall, Toxic Avenger, Tron, True Grit, Valley Girl, Weekend At Bernies, Weird Science, Where The Boys Are, Weird Science and I'm sure there's plenty more.
Why pay $17 to sit through 90 minutes of some dreadful book adaptation or 80s movie remake when I can pay $25 for 10 hours of Dexter or $50 for a season of 24? They're at least as good as anything Hollywood is pumping out, a far better value, and I don't have to deal with sticky floors and cell phones. And I've yet to see any TV DvDs pull the "10 minutes of ads before you can go to the main menu" stunt that half the new release movies I've bought seem to have these days.
I KNOW IT IS CHEAPER THAN A FINGER OR THUMB.
Is it? How much does it cost to reattach a finger or a thumb? Millions of people use saws every year and don't cut off their fingers. If every one of those people had to pay an extra $169 when they buy a saw the total costs would seem to be astronomical. Seems it'd be cheaper to add a $5 "Severed Appendage Tax" to all power tools to cover the costs of reattaching fingers than it would be to require it on all saws. It's getting to the point where it seems the only option is to hold a safety course and make people sign a release before you sell them a cup of coffee.
Did you try calling them to see if it was en error? I had the same thing happen with a video card I returned. I called them and they not only refunded the 15% restocking fee but also gave me a $50 credit as an apology for the error.
It makes a lot more sense that these were units made to be used internally as mock ups than it does that someone did it to try and swindle anyone. The quality of the fakes wasn't good enough to pass any inspection that went farther than glancing at the box and for that, a crook could have glued rocks inside the box. Making full epoxy mock ups of the actual parts, and adding a machined aluminum shroud to the "CPU" doesn't make any sense if the point was simply fraud.
Distributors *do* often get mock ups of fragile and expensive parts to make sure it goes through their machines without getting damaged or stuck. They'd also need wight accurate mock ups to plan how to stack it on pallets so they don't fall over, how to stack them on trucks so the trucks are balanced, make sure they pass through security scanners, etc.
I worked in an distribution center for Chief Auto Parts back in HS (late 80s) and we'd constantly get pallets of fake parts to use for planning purposes. And they often had spelling and other printing issues with things like labels because they were done by some printer hired by whoever did the mockups which means a distributor based in China gets Engrish labels. Although back in the 80s mock parts came in palette swapped boxes with "DEMO UNIT! NOT FOR RESALE!" stamped all over the box and parts so it was impossible to get the two mixed up. Maybe Intel just isn't as smart about making fakes as Raybestos is.
Sliders is definitely one deserving of a remake. The premise was fantastic. The writing and execution just went badly off the rails. Another Jerry O'Connell show that could use a remake would be My Secret Identity. It'd fit right in with half of Disney's current hit shows. I'd also like to see Quantum Leap remade. And of course, MacGyver has to be remade at some point.
Microsoft also used forced aad watching back in the late 90s on people who used WebTV boxes. You'd get a screen with a banner ad in the middle of it and have to chose to go the the site you wanted or the ad site. It only lasted a few days. It was a quick replacement after they had to change over from using a overlaid banner ad on pages when Chevy got mad that there were Ford ads being superimposed over their website. Outcry caused them to change it yet again so the ad disappeared automatically after a few seconds. But they had forced ads that rendered the device useless until you acknowledged you'd been properly induced into a seizure by a flashing ad banner long before Apple did.
Dump the Xbox 360. Any of the methods for installing Homebrew apps will void your warranty and the Red Ring of Death error is still so common you risk ending up with a useless doorstop at any moment. Plus, it can be finicky about the formats it will play without a hassle. My kids play games on our 360 and we have family Guitar Hero sessions so I do use the 360 with TVersity as a media center as it saves me another box on the shelf. But if you don't have a use for the gaming console part, there's no compelling reason not to go with something more suitable. If you sell it, you can use the cash and get an Apple TV ($230 retail) and load Xbox Media Center on it (the software that made the original Xbox such a great Media Extender) and it will play pretty much anything you can throw at it. Or you can get something like Popcorn Hour C-200, D-Link MediaLounge or any of the numerous other Digital Media Players that are out there which offer better media compatibility and features more suitable to a modern media player then a gaming console.