Your comment on cocaine tells me you've never tried it. Good quality cocaine is safer, cleaner, and less addictive than nicotine. It does not cause people to devolve into anarchy, those people were crazy in the first place, and the drug merely lifted their inhibitions, just as alcohol would have done. There are still plenty of reasons to avoid it, as with all psychoactive drugs it causes neurochemical changes, that most often manifest as depression symptoms, but so do nicotine and caffeine, which are legal and, in my not-so-humble opinion, far more dangerous.
The primary reason why drugs are associated with violent crime is that there is no legal way to buy cocaine. You wind up with perfectly respectable people being forced to mingle with thugs to acquire the product. They would rather buy it from a reputable vendor, over the counter, but they cannot. The so-called anarchy you fear is a direct consequence of prohibition, just as it was during the WWI era that helped establish the major crime families. I don't know about your neck of the woods, but I've never met a pharmacist carrying an automatic weapon.
Decriminalizing drugs will not remove the need for rehab clinics. Drug-seeking behaviour is a psychological issue that has little to do with the criminality, except for those who are specifically looking to get arrested and join the federal pity party. Rehab will be there to help people get back on track.
Gambling isn't illegal, yet gambling addiction is a very real problem with government-funded services to help steer people toward counseling and redress. Society's problems cannot be solved by a bunch of suit-wearing litigators and their armed henchmen.
Prohibition does not work. Criminalizing something only makes its practitioners into criminals, it does nothing to address the problem, if there even is one in the first place.
Some people want to get high. And by "some", I mean a lot. People use drugs because it makes them feel better. People abuse drugs because of psychological issues. You cannot fix those issues by writing up arbitrary laws. You need to TALK to them, find out what is this void they're trying to fill in their lives, and help them address it in a constructive fashion. Drug addiction is no different than any other addiction, be it chemical or emotional.
I'm going to use a mostly-legal drug as an example: alcohol. I drink a lot, not daily, but almost. I don't drink to escape my problems, nor dull some ethereal "pain" in my soul, I drink because I think beer is damn tasty. I'm not miserable during the times I'm not drinking, nor do I drink myself into said misery by overspending or destroying my liver. I am *not* an alcoholic. In that same vein (pardon the pun), I don't consider regular but responsible drug users to be addicts. They're just augmenting their experience and trying to enjoy life the way they see fit. They're not robbing liquor stores or beating people up to steal their stash. In almost all cases, their only interaction with the criminal world is to acquire product, an interaction forced by the war on drugs. There is no legal and safe way to acquire two grams of cocaine for the weekend's festivities; if there were, I conject that we would see a huge decrease in violent drug-related crime, because those two worlds would cease to overlap.
I'm a Canadian and I support this message. No, really, I cannot agree more with everything you've said. Ron Paul is not perfect, but he is the least crazy of all candidates, which is pretty freakin' scary for all of us watching from across the border. We know there are plenty of intelligent, educated, emotionally balanced Americans, but we never see them in politics, at least not at a high-enough level to be noticed. What does that say about the political system ?
Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul... this is the best a country of 300+ million people has to show ? A corrupt and sociopathic mormon (pardon the redundancy), a flip-flopping philanderer, a racist and homophobic corporatist, and a very out-of-touch climate change denier who likes to cushion his turn-of-the-century ideologies with libertarian buzzword issues he does not even comprehend.
Where's that offensive image macro about the special olympics ? No matter who wins, it's still retarded.
How realistically feasible is it to dismantle a federal agency, or any other unpleasant government function for that matter ? And please, pardon my cynicism... it's become an unvoluntary reflex.
Believe me, I would love nothing more than for the U.S. government to stop manufacturing problems out of thin air, oppressing its own people, because anything happening down there is almost exactly mirrored up here in Canada, thanks to our sock-puppet leaders. I just have a hard time seeing how they could possibly go against the hugely profitable prison industry, and what I can only conject are a large number of dirty cops directly profiting from clandestine drug ops. If it happens in my relatively clean and quiet city, then it's a safe bet the problem is 10 times worse in the average metropolitan centre.
If I read the sales pitch correctly, they just integrated Memcached as a backend storage module, so that it plays nicely wrt ACID compliance. Yeah, memory is 70x faster than disk I/O... big whoop!
Anyone running a sizeable MySQL installation already has heaps of RAM allocated to the InnoDB buffers/caches anyway. It sounds like Oracle compared a stock, distro-default MySQL to their memory-hungry tweaks. Yeah, DUH. I can get a 70x speedup too if I increase MySQL's memory usage from the default 64mb to 48 gigabytes.
To paraphrase Russell Peters: Those homicidal nutbars we see on TV are the Rednecks of the arab world. "YEE-HAW WE'RE GONNA KILL THE WHOLE FUCKIN' WORLD!"
Too bad we only see the rednecks on TV, but at least with catholics, they have different sub-genres that help us tell the apart. Unified protestant ? Not so bad. Southern Baptist ? KOS.
Of course they don't, they're too eager to get a job, because they think it's a gift from heaven. I think that's a big part of the employment problem in North America. People need to stop thinking of jobs as some benevolent act by the rich, and start thinking in terms of offering their services to the company.
"You want to get X done ? I am an expert on X. Here are my terms, do we have a deal ?"
That works fine for skill-based careers where great employees are what makes the company tick. Probably not so much for the Wal-Mart greeters, but that's why the dumb have unions.
This article embodies the general tone in schools and universities over here. Profs aren't allowed to think too hard, or else they will ruin the illusion of conformity the WASPs so desperately crave.
Looking back at my education, I can think of maybe... 5 profs that actually knew their stuff. Okay, 5 and a half, because I forcefully enlightened one of them. The other hundred-ish ? Mindless imbeciles, going through the motions, reading from cue cards, collecting their extortionate paycheques. Like any organisation, the larger it grows, the lower the common denominator. Of course, the cue card readers hated the real profs like a redneck hates an educated black man. "How dare they rock the boat ?"
If they want to ban Wi-Fi in the classrooms, they can knock themselves out. It will only make it ever so slightly more obvious that our educators are a cabal of imbecilic swine.
In the few places where such a policy applied, I had to run things by the legal team. In most cases, they just wanted to ensure I wasn't abusing insider info, or associating their brand with mine, and once their concerns were addressed, I was free and clear. There was one job where they threatened to sue me and appropriate my IP if I dared invent something cool, that had nothing to do with their line of business. So, I did it anyway and put it in my partner's name, and when the company started getting too nosy, I went on "stress leave" and found a better gig elsewhere. Well, okay, I really was stressed out and depressed from that shitty job, but I did it out of spite.
This isn't fucking China. Your employer does not own you. If you are truly concerned, seek (outside) legal counsel to find out if your employer's policy is enforceable, in many jurisdictions there are laws against this sort of thing. If you are a creative guy like me, you will want to be more mindful of these overreaching clauses in your future employment contracts.
Okay, I'm being an irresponsible arse here, but maybe - just maybe - those other muslims around the world, you know, the "moderates", should think about distancing themselves from the barbaric ones. If your frail mind cannot live on without religion, then at least splinter off into something that does not carry the weight of homicidally intolerant pre-civilized cultures.
Yeah, I'm an atheist, but I can respect freedom of faith. I just don't respect the use of that faith as an excuse to murder your fellow man in cold blood. I've known my share of muslims over here, and while they seemed a bit stuck-up against my amoral libertarian lifestyle, they did not express any desire to harm me for sharing my tales of rock-star antics. I would dare say they had a more progressive outlook on humanity than most of the purebred white folk I grew up with. Sure, there was this one guy who pulled a gun on me because I said he looked hot... but he went right the fuck back to Lebanon a week later.
What I'm saying is: faith is just faith, a belief system that breaks your fall when life knocks you down. The problem with the middle east is not Islam, the problem is their intolerant backwoods inbred leaders twisting that faith into a weapon of self genocide. Get rid of those charismatic leaders and the problem will resolve itself.
They're consoles. The whole point is to have a consistent hardware base, so developers can custom tailor their code to the platform, leading to simplified testing and improved stability. One CPU, one memory spec, one GPU... the key parts are consistent.
You want to upgrade your console ? Trade it in for a new one! Or, if you're like me, you put it away and take it out from time to time for nostalgia.
Only problem was the "popular shit" wasn't always popular. If your authentic song dared reach the first page in its category, you'd almost immediately get a flurry of inflammatory comments from the guys trying to game the system and basically libeling you on your own pages.
The PfP idea was fine, and I made a few bucks from it, but there were some very obviously shit tunes that got ridiculous numbers of plays/downloads because people were gaming the system. Their metrics were flawed and little was done to curb this cheating, which was quite disheartening to us since all uploads were supposedly reviewed (to avoid copyright infringement). They had all this manpower making sure you didn't upload commercial music, but nobody monitoring the fraudsters. Then the site just went to hell, was sold to CNet who promptly threw everything out and turned it into yet another shitty CNet site.
So it was a combination of PfP cheating and good ol' dot-com bubble pump-and-dump that killed mp3.com
I've seen that AP weirdness on some models, can't remember which ones though. I've never gone for the WiFi modems anyway, I just want a box that demuxes the coax into ethernet, and I provide my own router. My guess is the ghost SSID is some sort of tech support backdoor. I do something similar when I deploy a server with IPMI, I'll create myself an extra admin account, write the password somewhere, so when (not if) the client calls for help we don't need to fuss with passwords. The difference, of course, is I disclose this practice when I sell the equipment. Rogers techs probably don't even know the WiFi password anymore...;)
I'm getting 24mb down, 1 up, and no cap. I am an extremely heavy internet user as I work from home. My cell phone is elsewhere, and we don't bother with TV nor a conventional phone. I have a dirt cheap VoIP setup and the wife gets her TV fix from streaming sites and the occasional torrent.
What you're getting with Rogers sounds like a promo deal for new clients. I used to be on the same Express plan (which is now 12mb down), and the cap is still 60gb today as it was two years ago. Once you're of the promo, you'll be paying $48.99 + $7.00 modem rental, + tax so about $63, roughly the same I'm paying for the highest tier of Teksavvy cable. With Rogers though, you're probably getting a package discount for your TV and phone service, which makes the effective price difference quite negligible.
One important difference to me is that TekSavvy's cable service does not filter packets. Rogers and Bell do this to curb file sharing (they call it network management). For one, this made all torrents slow to a crawl, including World of Warcraft patches and other MMO's that use peer-to-peer techniques, but the biggest nuisance was that it interfered with online gaming, such as Xbox Live. On Rogers, playing something like Call of Duty meant I'd get booted out of every other match, because if the game randomly decided it was my turn to host, Rogers' filter would forcibly kill the connection. The only solution was to disable UPNP (or NAT), but then since I was technically unconnectable, I had a 50/50 chance of not being able to join my friends' lobbies nor chat with them. HUGE pain in the ass! With Teksavvy it all works flawlessly, plus you can run torrents and other peer-to-peer apps at full speed. No bullshit.
Bottom line, if you're happy with Rogers, you should probably stay with them. The activist in me wishes you wouldn't, but that is a purely political argument. For myself, even if Rogers were cheaper than Teksavvy, I'd still pay the premium to support a company that fights against discriminatory legislation like UBB.
Ok, let me specify then: I stream content that is stored locally, on my own giant NAS. In my home, there are at least a dozen devices that are capable of fetching content from that NAS... set-top boxes, desktop/laptop computers, tablets, phones, game consoles. I have no need for a disc. Before my NAS epiphany, I had a pretty sizeable DVD collection. Now it's all packed away in the garage, and when I feel like watching one of them, I just find a torrent. It's faster than ripping and compressing the original anyway!
There are LOTS of guys like me. Disney and friends can keep shitting down people's throats with their business practices, we do not care one bit. It takes one person to rip the movie and make it available online - no more national distributors, four less layers of middlemen, just simple efficient digital transmission.
I go through this spiel every time I sign a new artist to my label. They try to charge $20 for an indie CD, citing the retail price of mainstream music, so when the discs don't sell, I have to explain where that $20 actually goes with a big name release. At least here in Canada, a $20 CD nets the band about $2.50 per copy, assuming they wrote all their own music. Cover albums make a third of that. So I tell them, since we're selling direct, to drop the price to $8.99 for a disc and $6.99 for a download, and they shit bricks. When they finally go through with it, they're selling three times as many albums at every show, with some patrons buying multiple copies to give out to their friends because it's so inexpensive, it's not even worth burning a copy or uploading 100mb of MP3's via email. The convenience trumps the cost.
If the big studios would learn from this, ditch their obsolete retail channels and hand us a bit of a price break, piracy wouldn't be such a big deal anymore. Whether it's movies or music, the benefits are the same. I'd like to think that within the next 15-20 years, we won't use ANY physical medium to transfer data. The entertainment industry has every interest to adapt and adopt new tech before they're left in the dust.
Okay, we still have a respectable though dwindling community of commenters, so can we please get rid of these editors who can't even be bothered to read four lines of summary text before posting ?
The headline and summary do not make sense. Come on, we're supposed to be nerds, aka intelligent, focused, attentive knowledge aggregators.
the fuck is wrong with this goddamned site?! These failures are starting to make Digg look good!
$HIPSTERS and the $MEANINGLESS_ADJECTIVE return of $OBSOLETE_KITSCH
I am not a VHS fanatic. Even in the 80's, I hated the format. VHS tapes are/were made to the cheapest possible materials, so they wore out very easily and were highly susceptible to heat warping. Much like audio tapes, the sound tends to warble and even distort on overly bright video frames... such a kludgey format!
I do think we need to preserve the content of these tapes, but not the medium itself. I've been an all-streaming guy for 8-9 years and have no desire to go backward.
This study was bought and paid for by Rogers. It is complete and utter bullshit!
I have good, fast, uncapped and relatively affordable cable internet access. I get it from TekSavvy, a smaller "indie" ISP that leases the last mile from the incumbents but uses their own network after that point. On cable, this gets me around Rogers' throttling and filtering. DSL users aren't so lucky as Bell's throttling happens right at the client node.
When I was still with Rogers, my monthly bill for the mid-range service tier was $130. This consisted of $64.99 for the service itself, $50 in overage charges every month, and taxes. With Tek, I'm paying $62 for faster service and no caps.
Our internet is far from the best. Bell, Rogers and Telus are classic telco robber barons. They oversell like mad, throttle and cap in such a way as to protect their old phone and TV services, and spend fortunes on advertising to fool us into believing we're not actually getting fucked. If they took half the advertising budget, and spent it on infrastructure upgrades, we'd be the envy of every other crooked G7 nation. With the low-cost, no-nonsense indies it's a lot better, but the grand majority of users are still with the big three due to misplaced loyalty and laziness.
The man was a flight enthusiast. At least he went out doing what he loved. It's not like someone put him on that plane against his will.
It would be like me being killed in a freak audio production accident... I dunno, brain liquefied by bass resonance. After everyone got over their little cry-fest, they'd knock back a pint and say "Death by music, that's our Billco alright".
So in other words you have NEVER touched one and are just guessing.
I've touched several, I even installed two of them and repaired at least a dozen others. As I said way back in the original post, I am quite familiar with the Kaleidescape. At least I was, up until 4 years ago when I stopped moonlighting in the a/v installation field.
From what I read on their website, they do a LOT more than some nerd's "$800" solution. I'm with lumpy here. I dont see yours streaming to multiple rooms with bookmarking and all the other features their system has. You have a raid 5 for high availability in case a drive dies?
Well..... my solution cost way more than $800, but I could see a clever geek getting away with it. $300 ION mini-ITX box, $100 el-cheapo NAS RAID-1 box with $200 worth of hard drives, $100 for a cheap 5-port switch and a few long patch cables, and an evening to set it all up.
Me, well I have the equivalent of their fully decked-out 3U server and three zones. The key difference is I can do whatever the hell I want with my system. DVD, Xvid, MKV, Youtube, podcasts from iTunes, hell I can play video games on the damn thing *while* watching TV in a PiP-style box.
If Kaleidescape sold systems like mine, it would kick ass. They'd also get sued into the ground because they've already let the MPAA walk all over them. There is nothing inherently illegal in what the system does, the problem is their bowing to legal threats has been accepted as an admission of guilt for a crime they never committed. The Kaleidescape does not commit copyright infringement: users do!
This is exactly what I do, hence why I feel Kaleidescape is an archaic system, but I'm a geek - a geek who happens to sell NAS boxes for a living. If my wife didn't have me, she wouldn't have access to any of this tech. Most of my lesser geek chums get by with a $99 el-cheapo media player and USB pen drive or hard drive.
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Your comment on cocaine tells me you've never tried it. Good quality cocaine is safer, cleaner, and less addictive than nicotine. It does not cause people to devolve into anarchy, those people were crazy in the first place, and the drug merely lifted their inhibitions, just as alcohol would have done. There are still plenty of reasons to avoid it, as with all psychoactive drugs it causes neurochemical changes, that most often manifest as depression symptoms, but so do nicotine and caffeine, which are legal and, in my not-so-humble opinion, far more dangerous.
The primary reason why drugs are associated with violent crime is that there is no legal way to buy cocaine. You wind up with perfectly respectable people being forced to mingle with thugs to acquire the product. They would rather buy it from a reputable vendor, over the counter, but they cannot. The so-called anarchy you fear is a direct consequence of prohibition, just as it was during the WWI era that helped establish the major crime families. I don't know about your neck of the woods, but I've never met a pharmacist carrying an automatic weapon.
Decriminalizing drugs will not remove the need for rehab clinics. Drug-seeking behaviour is a psychological issue that has little to do with the criminality, except for those who are specifically looking to get arrested and join the federal pity party. Rehab will be there to help people get back on track.
Gambling isn't illegal, yet gambling addiction is a very real problem with government-funded services to help steer people toward counseling and redress. Society's problems cannot be solved by a bunch of suit-wearing litigators and their armed henchmen.
This.
Prohibition does not work. Criminalizing something only makes its practitioners into criminals, it does nothing to address the problem, if there even is one in the first place.
Some people want to get high. And by "some", I mean a lot. People use drugs because it makes them feel better. People abuse drugs because of psychological issues. You cannot fix those issues by writing up arbitrary laws. You need to TALK to them, find out what is this void they're trying to fill in their lives, and help them address it in a constructive fashion. Drug addiction is no different than any other addiction, be it chemical or emotional.
I'm going to use a mostly-legal drug as an example: alcohol. I drink a lot, not daily, but almost. I don't drink to escape my problems, nor dull some ethereal "pain" in my soul, I drink because I think beer is damn tasty. I'm not miserable during the times I'm not drinking, nor do I drink myself into said misery by overspending or destroying my liver. I am *not* an alcoholic. In that same vein (pardon the pun), I don't consider regular but responsible drug users to be addicts. They're just augmenting their experience and trying to enjoy life the way they see fit. They're not robbing liquor stores or beating people up to steal their stash. In almost all cases, their only interaction with the criminal world is to acquire product, an interaction forced by the war on drugs. There is no legal and safe way to acquire two grams of cocaine for the weekend's festivities; if there were, I conject that we would see a huge decrease in violent drug-related crime, because those two worlds would cease to overlap.
I'm a Canadian and I support this message. No, really, I cannot agree more with everything you've said. Ron Paul is not perfect, but he is the least crazy of all candidates, which is pretty freakin' scary for all of us watching from across the border. We know there are plenty of intelligent, educated, emotionally balanced Americans, but we never see them in politics, at least not at a high-enough level to be noticed. What does that say about the political system ?
Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul... this is the best a country of 300+ million people has to show ? A corrupt and sociopathic mormon (pardon the redundancy), a flip-flopping philanderer, a racist and homophobic corporatist, and a very out-of-touch climate change denier who likes to cushion his turn-of-the-century ideologies with libertarian buzzword issues he does not even comprehend.
Where's that offensive image macro about the special olympics ? No matter who wins, it's still retarded.
Disclaimer: I'm not in the U.S.
How realistically feasible is it to dismantle a federal agency, or any other unpleasant government function for that matter ? And please, pardon my cynicism... it's become an unvoluntary reflex.
Believe me, I would love nothing more than for the U.S. government to stop manufacturing problems out of thin air, oppressing its own people, because anything happening down there is almost exactly mirrored up here in Canada, thanks to our sock-puppet leaders. I just have a hard time seeing how they could possibly go against the hugely profitable prison industry, and what I can only conject are a large number of dirty cops directly profiting from clandestine drug ops. If it happens in my relatively clean and quiet city, then it's a safe bet the problem is 10 times worse in the average metropolitan centre.
If I read the sales pitch correctly, they just integrated Memcached as a backend storage module, so that it plays nicely wrt ACID compliance. Yeah, memory is 70x faster than disk I/O... big whoop!
Anyone running a sizeable MySQL installation already has heaps of RAM allocated to the InnoDB buffers/caches anyway. It sounds like Oracle compared a stock, distro-default MySQL to their memory-hungry tweaks. Yeah, DUH. I can get a 70x speedup too if I increase MySQL's memory usage from the default 64mb to 48 gigabytes.
To paraphrase Russell Peters: Those homicidal nutbars we see on TV are the Rednecks of the arab world. "YEE-HAW WE'RE GONNA KILL THE WHOLE FUCKIN' WORLD!"
Too bad we only see the rednecks on TV, but at least with catholics, they have different sub-genres that help us tell the apart. Unified protestant ? Not so bad. Southern Baptist ? KOS.
Of course they don't, they're too eager to get a job, because they think it's a gift from heaven. I think that's a big part of the employment problem in North America. People need to stop thinking of jobs as some benevolent act by the rich, and start thinking in terms of offering their services to the company.
"You want to get X done ? I am an expert on X. Here are my terms, do we have a deal ?"
That works fine for skill-based careers where great employees are what makes the company tick. Probably not so much for the Wal-Mart greeters, but that's why the dumb have unions.
This article embodies the general tone in schools and universities over here. Profs aren't allowed to think too hard, or else they will ruin the illusion of conformity the WASPs so desperately crave.
Looking back at my education, I can think of maybe... 5 profs that actually knew their stuff. Okay, 5 and a half, because I forcefully enlightened one of them. The other hundred-ish ? Mindless imbeciles, going through the motions, reading from cue cards, collecting their extortionate paycheques. Like any organisation, the larger it grows, the lower the common denominator. Of course, the cue card readers hated the real profs like a redneck hates an educated black man. "How dare they rock the boat ?"
If they want to ban Wi-Fi in the classrooms, they can knock themselves out. It will only make it ever so slightly more obvious that our educators are a cabal of imbecilic swine.
In the few places where such a policy applied, I had to run things by the legal team. In most cases, they just wanted to ensure I wasn't abusing insider info, or associating their brand with mine, and once their concerns were addressed, I was free and clear. There was one job where they threatened to sue me and appropriate my IP if I dared invent something cool, that had nothing to do with their line of business. So, I did it anyway and put it in my partner's name, and when the company started getting too nosy, I went on "stress leave" and found a better gig elsewhere. Well, okay, I really was stressed out and depressed from that shitty job, but I did it out of spite.
This isn't fucking China. Your employer does not own you. If you are truly concerned, seek (outside) legal counsel to find out if your employer's policy is enforceable, in many jurisdictions there are laws against this sort of thing. If you are a creative guy like me, you will want to be more mindful of these overreaching clauses in your future employment contracts.
Okay, I'm being an irresponsible arse here, but maybe - just maybe - those other muslims around the world, you know, the "moderates", should think about distancing themselves from the barbaric ones. If your frail mind cannot live on without religion, then at least splinter off into something that does not carry the weight of homicidally intolerant pre-civilized cultures.
Yeah, I'm an atheist, but I can respect freedom of faith. I just don't respect the use of that faith as an excuse to murder your fellow man in cold blood. I've known my share of muslims over here, and while they seemed a bit stuck-up against my amoral libertarian lifestyle, they did not express any desire to harm me for sharing my tales of rock-star antics. I would dare say they had a more progressive outlook on humanity than most of the purebred white folk I grew up with. Sure, there was this one guy who pulled a gun on me because I said he looked hot... but he went right the fuck back to Lebanon a week later.
What I'm saying is: faith is just faith, a belief system that breaks your fall when life knocks you down. The problem with the middle east is not Islam, the problem is their intolerant backwoods inbred leaders twisting that faith into a weapon of self genocide. Get rid of those charismatic leaders and the problem will resolve itself.
They're consoles. The whole point is to have a consistent hardware base, so developers can custom tailor their code to the platform, leading to simplified testing and improved stability. One CPU, one memory spec, one GPU... the key parts are consistent.
You want to upgrade your console ? Trade it in for a new one! Or, if you're like me, you put it away and take it out from time to time for nostalgia.
Only problem was the "popular shit" wasn't always popular. If your authentic song dared reach the first page in its category, you'd almost immediately get a flurry of inflammatory comments from the guys trying to game the system and basically libeling you on your own pages.
Botting.
The PfP idea was fine, and I made a few bucks from it, but there were some very obviously shit tunes that got ridiculous numbers of plays/downloads because people were gaming the system. Their metrics were flawed and little was done to curb this cheating, which was quite disheartening to us since all uploads were supposedly reviewed (to avoid copyright infringement). They had all this manpower making sure you didn't upload commercial music, but nobody monitoring the fraudsters. Then the site just went to hell, was sold to CNet who promptly threw everything out and turned it into yet another shitty CNet site.
So it was a combination of PfP cheating and good ol' dot-com bubble pump-and-dump that killed mp3.com
And, by "people", I mean idiot stoner kids with zero music appreciation.
FUCK NO SON! More like the opening scene in Back to the Future :)
Actually I am planning to make a satirical Dubstep tune just to piss people off...
I've seen that AP weirdness on some models, can't remember which ones though. I've never gone for the WiFi modems anyway, I just want a box that demuxes the coax into ethernet, and I provide my own router. My guess is the ghost SSID is some sort of tech support backdoor. I do something similar when I deploy a server with IPMI, I'll create myself an extra admin account, write the password somewhere, so when (not if) the client calls for help we don't need to fuss with passwords. The difference, of course, is I disclose this practice when I sell the equipment. Rogers techs probably don't even know the WiFi password anymore... ;)
I'm getting 24mb down, 1 up, and no cap. I am an extremely heavy internet user as I work from home. My cell phone is elsewhere, and we don't bother with TV nor a conventional phone. I have a dirt cheap VoIP setup and the wife gets her TV fix from streaming sites and the occasional torrent.
What you're getting with Rogers sounds like a promo deal for new clients. I used to be on the same Express plan (which is now 12mb down), and the cap is still 60gb today as it was two years ago. Once you're of the promo, you'll be paying $48.99 + $7.00 modem rental, + tax so about $63, roughly the same I'm paying for the highest tier of Teksavvy cable. With Rogers though, you're probably getting a package discount for your TV and phone service, which makes the effective price difference quite negligible.
One important difference to me is that TekSavvy's cable service does not filter packets. Rogers and Bell do this to curb file sharing (they call it network management). For one, this made all torrents slow to a crawl, including World of Warcraft patches and other MMO's that use peer-to-peer techniques, but the biggest nuisance was that it interfered with online gaming, such as Xbox Live. On Rogers, playing something like Call of Duty meant I'd get booted out of every other match, because if the game randomly decided it was my turn to host, Rogers' filter would forcibly kill the connection. The only solution was to disable UPNP (or NAT), but then since I was technically unconnectable, I had a 50/50 chance of not being able to join my friends' lobbies nor chat with them. HUGE pain in the ass! With Teksavvy it all works flawlessly, plus you can run torrents and other peer-to-peer apps at full speed. No bullshit.
Bottom line, if you're happy with Rogers, you should probably stay with them. The activist in me wishes you wouldn't, but that is a purely political argument. For myself, even if Rogers were cheaper than Teksavvy, I'd still pay the premium to support a company that fights against discriminatory legislation like UBB.
Ok, let me specify then: I stream content that is stored locally, on my own giant NAS. In my home, there are at least a dozen devices that are capable of fetching content from that NAS... set-top boxes, desktop/laptop computers, tablets, phones, game consoles. I have no need for a disc. Before my NAS epiphany, I had a pretty sizeable DVD collection. Now it's all packed away in the garage, and when I feel like watching one of them, I just find a torrent. It's faster than ripping and compressing the original anyway!
There are LOTS of guys like me. Disney and friends can keep shitting down people's throats with their business practices, we do not care one bit. It takes one person to rip the movie and make it available online - no more national distributors, four less layers of middlemen, just simple efficient digital transmission.
I go through this spiel every time I sign a new artist to my label. They try to charge $20 for an indie CD, citing the retail price of mainstream music, so when the discs don't sell, I have to explain where that $20 actually goes with a big name release. At least here in Canada, a $20 CD nets the band about $2.50 per copy, assuming they wrote all their own music. Cover albums make a third of that. So I tell them, since we're selling direct, to drop the price to $8.99 for a disc and $6.99 for a download, and they shit bricks. When they finally go through with it, they're selling three times as many albums at every show, with some patrons buying multiple copies to give out to their friends because it's so inexpensive, it's not even worth burning a copy or uploading 100mb of MP3's via email. The convenience trumps the cost.
If the big studios would learn from this, ditch their obsolete retail channels and hand us a bit of a price break, piracy wouldn't be such a big deal anymore. Whether it's movies or music, the benefits are the same. I'd like to think that within the next 15-20 years, we won't use ANY physical medium to transfer data. The entertainment industry has every interest to adapt and adopt new tech before they're left in the dust.
Okay, we still have a respectable though dwindling community of commenters, so can we please get rid of these editors who can't even be bothered to read four lines of summary text before posting ?
The headline and summary do not make sense. Come on, we're supposed to be nerds, aka intelligent, focused, attentive knowledge aggregators.
the fuck is wrong with this goddamned site?! These failures are starting to make Digg look good!
$HIPSTERS and the $MEANINGLESS_ADJECTIVE return of $OBSOLETE_KITSCH
I am not a VHS fanatic. Even in the 80's, I hated the format. VHS tapes are/were made to the cheapest possible materials, so they wore out very easily and were highly susceptible to heat warping. Much like audio tapes, the sound tends to warble and even distort on overly bright video frames... such a kludgey format!
I do think we need to preserve the content of these tapes, but not the medium itself. I've been an all-streaming guy for 8-9 years and have no desire to go backward.
This study was bought and paid for by Rogers. It is complete and utter bullshit!
I have good, fast, uncapped and relatively affordable cable internet access. I get it from TekSavvy, a smaller "indie" ISP that leases the last mile from the incumbents but uses their own network after that point. On cable, this gets me around Rogers' throttling and filtering. DSL users aren't so lucky as Bell's throttling happens right at the client node.
When I was still with Rogers, my monthly bill for the mid-range service tier was $130. This consisted of $64.99 for the service itself, $50 in overage charges every month, and taxes. With Tek, I'm paying $62 for faster service and no caps.
Our internet is far from the best. Bell, Rogers and Telus are classic telco robber barons. They oversell like mad, throttle and cap in such a way as to protect their old phone and TV services, and spend fortunes on advertising to fool us into believing we're not actually getting fucked. If they took half the advertising budget, and spent it on infrastructure upgrades, we'd be the envy of every other crooked G7 nation. With the low-cost, no-nonsense indies it's a lot better, but the grand majority of users are still with the big three due to misplaced loyalty and laziness.
The man was a flight enthusiast. At least he went out doing what he loved. It's not like someone put him on that plane against his will.
It would be like me being killed in a freak audio production accident... I dunno, brain liquefied by bass resonance. After everyone got over their little cry-fest, they'd knock back a pint and say "Death by music, that's our Billco alright".
So in other words you have NEVER touched one and are just guessing.
I've touched several, I even installed two of them and repaired at least a dozen others. As I said way back in the original post, I am quite familiar with the Kaleidescape. At least I was, up until 4 years ago when I stopped moonlighting in the a/v installation field.
From what I read on their website, they do a LOT more than some nerd's "$800" solution. I'm with lumpy here. I dont see yours streaming to multiple rooms with bookmarking and all the other features their system has. You have a raid 5 for high availability in case a drive dies?
Well..... my solution cost way more than $800, but I could see a clever geek getting away with it. $300 ION mini-ITX box, $100 el-cheapo NAS RAID-1 box with $200 worth of hard drives, $100 for a cheap 5-port switch and a few long patch cables, and an evening to set it all up.
Me, well I have the equivalent of their fully decked-out 3U server and three zones. The key difference is I can do whatever the hell I want with my system. DVD, Xvid, MKV, Youtube, podcasts from iTunes, hell I can play video games on the damn thing *while* watching TV in a PiP-style box.
If Kaleidescape sold systems like mine, it would kick ass. They'd also get sued into the ground because they've already let the MPAA walk all over them. There is nothing inherently illegal in what the system does, the problem is their bowing to legal threats has been accepted as an admission of guilt for a crime they never committed. The Kaleidescape does not commit copyright infringement: users do!
This is exactly what I do, hence why I feel Kaleidescape is an archaic system, but I'm a geek - a geek who happens to sell NAS boxes for a living. If my wife didn't have me, she wouldn't have access to any of this tech. Most of my lesser geek chums get by with a $99 el-cheapo media player and USB pen drive or hard drive.