We clearly live in very different cities. Here in Ottawa (Canada), one of the most popular record stores has an entire rack dedicated to local artists, and we have many vinyl stores with indies where you can actually listen to them in the store. It's great!
Now if your local shop doesn't want indies, either they suck, or your band sucks. How hard is it to stash 2-3 copies of "Bubba and the annoying punk kids" in the corner, along with a handful of other small time acts ? What little shelf space is "wasted" as you say, pays off tenfold in word-of-mouth advertising. Helping the local bands can work wonders for one's reputation.
I've been with GoDaddy for years. Really that's all I need, I handle the DNS and hosting myself. I just need them to hold onto my.com and leave me alone about it.
NetSol does have free DNS hosting with every domain, but for $50 a year I think it's a bit excessive when ZoneEdit does it for $10.95 per domain (and much less for multiple domains).
Like everything in the compute industry, the price depends on how much hand-holding you want.
I want to believe you, and I've pondered about this very subject several times in the past, but then can you explain why my car doesn't dip in power when my tri-amped 1.4 kilowatt stereo starts shaking the screws loose ? At full power it chews through 150 amps, and yes I tend to play it that loud, and the music tends to be very energetic and saturated:D With that kind of load I would expect to feel this "drag" on the engine. Hell, sometimes my headlights blink up and down like strobe lights:P
I want you to get your country back. It sucks being here in Canada, watching all this crap unfold and it's just a matter of time before the same hell crosses the border. We have lots of customer protection laws, thank Jebus, but one day the corporations will bring enough money to buy out the law, and then we'll all be heading to Costco for a gallon of K-Y because the corporate assfuckers sure are too cheap to provide any.
I may be biased, but I fail to see how this will be a good thing. They will offer premium wireless internet, charge through the nose and further cement their joint monopoly. Everything a telecom does is to increase profit, or save face so they can subsequently hike the rates. What we need is city-wide FREE wireless internet like some larger U.S. cities have or will soon have. A government-sanctioned wireless network would enable all sorts of enhancements and bring in more "good" people as a direct result of the facilitated business and mobility.
It's impossible for an indie to get into Best Buy / HMV / Music World because of the RIAA. They control the outlets, they control the distribution, they control everything like gangs control dope.
On the other hand, local record shops are much more accessible and I'm sure they'd love to negotiate honest terms with indie bands if their stuff is worth the plastic it's pressed on.
As for the marketing aspect, how hard is it to hire a graphic/web designer ? Hell, just from playing at local venues you could surely hook up with many folks who'd love to promote their favorite band. If you, as a musician, do not have the dedication to seek out these tools, if you don't deem your art worthy of exposure, then you may as well stay in your basement studio for now.
A record label makes it all very easy, but in exchange they take all the money AS WELL AS your creative freedom. They tell YOU what to do, and where to do it. You become essentially their employee, and you don't have worker's rights since you're technically a contractor. It SUCKS, but if that's the life you want then just keep that head of yours firmly planted in the sand.
I think the message would get through much clearer if it weren't coming from Courtney Love, whose public credibility is -100% thanks to her being such an outrageous dope fiend, and the ridiculous Kurt Cobain fiasco didn't help her image much either. If we could get a public icon, someone respected by the masses, to go out there and stick his/her neck out on behalf of the music, maybe then we'd start seeing change.
Our government isn't the root of all evil, it's merely a slave to the system like us all. We have an assload of overpaid jizz-dribbling seat-warmers, and our country has to take it up the ass in order to make ends meet. Decisions are made to please the ones who pay the most taxes, so we can keep on giving our seat-warmers raises so they can keep pumping gas into their luxury SUVs and we can reap mega taxes on the pump prices. lather, rinse, repeat.
If Vista has seven flavors, that means seven times more complexity in troubleshooting. I don't just mean for Microsoft's updates, I mean me, as a developer. I don't want to have to test my app in seven VM's to be sure Ultimate edition doesn't have funky conflicts, or the stripped-down basic edition is lacking certain dependencies.
I think they should produce one consumer product that works well, and then one enterprise product. None of this market segmentation bullcrap.
We're all going to crack the Ultimate edition anyways:P
This brings up the lovely issue of piracy. Let's say you buy the "crippled" version, like it, and want to see what more is to be had from the special edition. You can either pay for the same game AGAIN with the "special" extras, or fire up a P2P app and download a cracked copy "for evaluation purposes only". You like the new stuff, and burn the cracked special edition to disc for safe keeping. At least you paid for the original game, so you're not 100% evil, right ?
Six months later, another game comes out with the same crippled/premium edition distinction. Rememorating your experience with the previous title, you decide to leech the premium edition from Kazaa right away, because you know the standard edition is a rip-off. Game company makes zero, and you're a dirty rotten foul-smelling groggy pirate from hell. Boo hoo.
If the game companies insist on charging for the additional content, then maybe they could release a single version of the game in stores, and then offer an add-on as a downloadable purchase. Black & White 2, for 50$, and buy the extra creatures for 10$ from the company's web site. The irony is that they would probably make as much profit from the add-on as they do from the retail game, as they are cutting out the middle-men.
I will never cease to be shocked at the ridiculous costs of gaming. I remember many years ago when I was a young overpaid techie, I popped $500 on a PS2, and happily forked over another $50-60 for each game, until I realized I had invested well over two thousand dollars into something that provides merely a few hours of entertainment per week. That same money could have afforded me hundreds of nights at the cinema, many many music albums, or a healthy serving of any other conventional form of entertainment. The music industry is certainly healthy enough to heavy-hand every other artist on the planet. The film industry is happily giving billions away to Scientology year after year. Why is the game industry collapsing ?
I think the game industry is failing because it is trying to mimic its older siblings in the entertainment business. You can't sell a game like you would a movie or new artist. You can't just flash T&A, throw in a dash of racism and gang violence and make it into a blockbuster hit. You can't follow the same marketing principles and practices and expect to make money.
Let's make it simple: if games cost half what they cost today, I would buy more than double, in part because I would feel less monetary guilt for every purchase. Look at what goes into the retail price, trim off the fat and restrategize. Do I really need to walk into EBGames to see the pretty boxes ? Does the experience add to the game itself ? Not at all. Do the cinematic frame grabs on the back of the box give me any idea how much fun I will be having ? Often the contrary. Does the flashy embossed T&A on the cover make it a better product ? Sorry, I don't get off on triangle-boobed high-elf priestesses. Now stop laundering the publisher's money and give me what I want for a change.
If the BSA comes to your place of business with a bunch of pigs, politely order the BSA to get the hell off the premises. They have no legal jurisdiction, they are merely a bunch of for-hire office terrorists.
Software companies pay the BSA to work their scare tactics and offload the bad press. If Microsoft employees knocked on your door and strip-searched you, you'd get them locked up and their faces painted all over the news. Microsoft would lose mucho credibility. If the BSA does it, we don't give a hoot, they are a "bad" company from the get-go. Their "fines" are meaningless. The only organisation who can sue you for software theft is the IP holder, and even then it's a court matter.
As for the pigs, well, be nice; give them donuts and a pat on the head.
Rant aside, BartPE is 99.44% legal as it does almost the same thing as Windows' PE builder toolkit, which is only available to OEM's. Microsoft has no "PE" product for end users so they have no foot to stand on, should they decide to litigate. The best they can hope for is a crooked judge and expensive lawyers over something that's worth near-nothing.
Envy has nothing to do with VIA, except that VIA is an integrator so they build the Envy chip into their boards and chipsets. Envy is a sound processor that's used in many prosumer cards such as the M-Audio Delta series, the most famous being the Audiophile 2496. It does sound beautifully clean and quiet on those cards, but I honestly doubt it could perform nearly as well as an integrated component on a mainboard, simply due to the extreme noise on there and often shaky traces and/or marginal tolerances on Via stuff.
Meanwhile I've got the Realtek ALC650 on my NF4 board and for those times when I choose to forego my Audiophile, I have found it to be damned good.
Do keep in mind that I hate Sound Blasters with a passion ever since they came out with the Audigy and it's pathetic imitation of "pro" features. When someone asks me which sound card to get for gaming, I lead them to an M-Audio Revolution 7.1. That's about as good as it gets for $50.
For desktops and servers, the OS choice makes a huge difference in terms of usability and availability of software. For these high-end shops, they're mostly running their own in-house applications and toolchains. Why should it matter whether the underlying OS is Linux, Irix, BSD or even Beos.. they're not shopping for window managers!
Linux would be the logical choice because if you're not going to use something much, might as well get it cheap/free. They probably use Linux merely as a filesystem and multitasking kernel, with some simple network communication between nodes. They don't care about KDE vs Gnome, Konq vs Firefox.. it's just a dumb host for the custom software.
So why do they need a conference about this non-topic ?
I know I have it backwards. Nobody "needs" huge profits. Profit itself is flawed. You're making money for what ? A corporation! I'd be quite content in creating hundreds of jobs and recirculating this money.
Money's power rests in its ability to change hands quickly. You don't accomplish shit by sitting on a huge pile of cash, you have to keep it moving around. It's kind of like electricity; sure, you could have the biggest batteries in the world, but if you don't plug anything into those batteries they're useless.
Dude, from personal experience the problem with that "kid" is that he is likely too cheap/dumb to be running RAID in the first place. I swear by Maxtor because they run maybe 10-15% faster than the competition, and I thrash them HARD.
The big problem is heat. Sure, the kid will put an $80 Zalman CPU cooler so he can overclock his Celeron 50% beyond spec, but those hard drives run hot as hell. How hard is it to prop a cheap 120mm fan across the drive bays ? It'll even help cool the case by circulating all that stale air. I splurge and get Vantec Stealth fans because they're whisper quiet. My Antec cases even have the mounting holes for them. Haven't had a drive failure in several years now, and I have a total of 18 drives in this household. Did I mention I thrash like there's no tomorrow ? SATA raid is beautiful!
Cooling is the answer to everything. And cleaning the dust off every few months doesn't hurt either.
Don't worry, someone will come up with an open-source alternative or a gray-area patch/workaround. DRM is a fad, an annoying one, and the more crazy restrictive stunts they pull, the more imbeciles will start noticing. It's one thing to screw someone in the ass when it doesn't hurt, it's another to park a Mack truck up their rectum. At some point, even the careless ignorants will stand up and say "Leave my ass alone, Microsoft".
I must say, as a developer the one feature that I would want in a piece of hardware more than any other would be true random multi-streaming through multiple lasers.
You aren't the first person I've heard of asking for a feature like that. Unfortunately, this is a requirement driven purely by the console industry (pc's wouldn't support it, nor would dvd players; they don't need it) which means it will never happen. Not enough benefit to offset the development costs.
Kenwood had two CD-Rom drives like that waaaay back in the 20th century. They used Zen True-X technology, which was basically 7 lasers on one disc. I still have my 72x cd-rom and it really does read at 72x (a little over 10 meg per second). I know because it used to crash my PC back then because the shoddy BX chipset couldn't handle the abuse:D
I would LOVE to see a Zen-tech enabled DVD-Rom that could push 7 times 16x, or even just 7 times 8x I don't care. In a console this would be heaven, load times would be almost as fast as a hard drive (excluding seek times, which many developers still don't seem to understand, or care to fix). So where the hell is Zen technology now ? Back then it was hot, but Kenwood's drive was flaky and had a hard time with CD-R discs, so I'm guessing it spoiled the market for Zen, but it was great!
Why couldn't we have military supplies that kill soldiers faster ? Why the hell do we need to shoot everyone anyway ? The only advantage I see about wars is that it kills lots of retarded apes, otherwise it's all just a power trip that leads nowhere.
Police are for security. Armies are for destruction. There's a huuuuge difference.
I love capitalism. No really, I love watching people test just how hard they can screw each other in the ass for money without getting shot. Here's how I see it:
Company ABC invests X money into developing product. They estimate sales of Y quantity. Divide X by Y to get a per-item cost, mark it up for profit and a support allowance, then sell it.
The fact that I might run their software on multiple CPU's, or that it might be accessed by Terminal Server, doesn't change a single thing for the developer. They don't need to work harder, they don't lose sleep at night, their kids won't end up on Springer. It doesn't matter whether I use it to index my MP3 files, or run a Fortune-500 business with it. They did their work, and they get paid for that work. What happens afterward is not their problem, and more importantly none of their goddamned business.
When people learn to take just compensation for their efforts, and give up the "fight" for riches, we'll wonder how we ever survived through capitalism. There is a set amount of monetary value in the world, the more you have, the less someone else has, and the more that person is likely to do nasty things to make up for the loss. So why don't you just be happy to eat every day and give me a goddamned break with your license gouging.
You have to realize something, in Canada we don't actually have the balls (or arrogance) to go ahead and enforce such frivolous things. For sure, we won't be going after Google. Pretty much the only thing that's specifically designed to piss people off in Canada are traffic laws, otherwise it's all just "toolchest" legislation that we _can_ use should the need arise to stomp out some unethical capitalist pricks.
In this case, it's quite simple really: This law was conceived to slow down piracy within our borders. It's nothing that wasn't already illegal to begin with, they just made it very specific to go after Torrent trackers and the like. That's why things like The Pirate Bay have to host in Sweden or wherever. If they were to host their stuff here in Canada, we could sic this search engine law on them and shut them out with a much easier legal fight thanks to the specific wording.
Is your CPU so horribly slow that you can't even fathom the concept of compressing your stuff ? You don't _need_ a 7mb picture of someone else's kids. You can chomp that bugger down to 1mb easily and still retain ridiculously decadent image detail. Even better for video, run it through a decent encoder and chop it into high-bitrate Mpeg-2 or something, or maybe something like DivX/Xvid in the 4-5 mbit/sec range if you're ambitious.
Just quit it with your uncompressed DV. The camera probably induces more video noise than the compression algorithm ever will, such is the nature of pro-sumer equipment.
But hey, I just happen to run an OEM store so feel free to order as many 200gb drives as you like. You can lead a horse to water, but.......
Slashdot Mirror
We clearly live in very different cities. Here in Ottawa (Canada), one of the most popular record stores has an entire rack dedicated to local artists, and we have many vinyl stores with indies where you can actually listen to them in the store. It's great!
Now if your local shop doesn't want indies, either they suck, or your band sucks. How hard is it to stash 2-3 copies of "Bubba and the annoying punk kids" in the corner, along with a handful of other small time acts ? What little shelf space is "wasted" as you say, pays off tenfold in word-of-mouth advertising. Helping the local bands can work wonders for one's reputation.
I've been with GoDaddy for years. Really that's all I need, I handle the DNS and hosting myself. I just need them to hold onto my .com and leave me alone about it.
NetSol does have free DNS hosting with every domain, but for $50 a year I think it's a bit excessive when ZoneEdit does it for $10.95 per domain (and much less for multiple domains).
Like everything in the compute industry, the price depends on how much hand-holding you want.
I want to believe you, and I've pondered about this very subject several times in the past, but then can you explain why my car doesn't dip in power when my tri-amped 1.4 kilowatt stereo starts shaking the screws loose ? At full power it chews through 150 amps, and yes I tend to play it that loud, and the music tends to be very energetic and saturated :D With that kind of load I would expect to feel this "drag" on the engine. Hell, sometimes my headlights blink up and down like strobe lights :P
Torches ? Screw that, gasoline (preferably stolen) burns brighter :D
I want you to get your country back. It sucks being here in Canada, watching all this crap unfold and it's just a matter of time before the same hell crosses the border. We have lots of customer protection laws, thank Jebus, but one day the corporations will bring enough money to buy out the law, and then we'll all be heading to Costco for a gallon of K-Y because the corporate assfuckers sure are too cheap to provide any.
Rogers + Bell + wireless networks = big racket.
I may be biased, but I fail to see how this will be a good thing. They will offer premium wireless internet, charge through the nose and further cement their joint monopoly. Everything a telecom does is to increase profit, or save face so they can subsequently hike the rates. What we need is city-wide FREE wireless internet like some larger U.S. cities have or will soon have. A government-sanctioned wireless network would enable all sorts of enhancements and bring in more "good" people as a direct result of the facilitated business and mobility.
It's impossible for an indie to get into Best Buy / HMV / Music World because of the RIAA. They control the outlets, they control the distribution, they control everything like gangs control dope.
On the other hand, local record shops are much more accessible and I'm sure they'd love to negotiate honest terms with indie bands if their stuff is worth the plastic it's pressed on.
As for the marketing aspect, how hard is it to hire a graphic/web designer ? Hell, just from playing at local venues you could surely hook up with many folks who'd love to promote their favorite band. If you, as a musician, do not have the dedication to seek out these tools, if you don't deem your art worthy of exposure, then you may as well stay in your basement studio for now.
A record label makes it all very easy, but in exchange they take all the money AS WELL AS your creative freedom. They tell YOU what to do, and where to do it. You become essentially their employee, and you don't have worker's rights since you're technically a contractor. It SUCKS, but if that's the life you want then just keep that head of yours firmly planted in the sand.
It could easily be argued that the statement was a joke
Yes, because we all know murder is funny.
What's the difference between a canadian and american ? Americans are doomed.
I think the message would get through much clearer if it weren't coming from Courtney Love, whose public credibility is -100% thanks to her being such an outrageous dope fiend, and the ridiculous Kurt Cobain fiasco didn't help her image much either. If we could get a public icon, someone respected by the masses, to go out there and stick his/her neck out on behalf of the music, maybe then we'd start seeing change.
Our government isn't the root of all evil, it's merely a slave to the system like us all. We have an assload of overpaid jizz-dribbling seat-warmers, and our country has to take it up the ass in order to make ends meet. Decisions are made to please the ones who pay the most taxes, so we can keep on giving our seat-warmers raises so they can keep pumping gas into their luxury SUVs and we can reap mega taxes on the pump prices. lather, rinse, repeat.
If Vista has seven flavors, that means seven times more complexity in troubleshooting. I don't just mean for Microsoft's updates, I mean me, as a developer. I don't want to have to test my app in seven VM's to be sure Ultimate edition doesn't have funky conflicts, or the stripped-down basic edition is lacking certain dependencies.
:P
I think they should produce one consumer product that works well, and then one enterprise product. None of this market segmentation bullcrap.
We're all going to crack the Ultimate edition anyways
This brings up the lovely issue of piracy. Let's say you buy the "crippled" version, like it, and want to see what more is to be had from the special edition. You can either pay for the same game AGAIN with the "special" extras, or fire up a P2P app and download a cracked copy "for evaluation purposes only". You like the new stuff, and burn the cracked special edition to disc for safe keeping. At least you paid for the original game, so you're not 100% evil, right ?
Six months later, another game comes out with the same crippled/premium edition distinction. Rememorating your experience with the previous title, you decide to leech the premium edition from Kazaa right away, because you know the standard edition is a rip-off. Game company makes zero, and you're a dirty rotten foul-smelling groggy pirate from hell. Boo hoo.
If the game companies insist on charging for the additional content, then maybe they could release a single version of the game in stores, and then offer an add-on as a downloadable purchase. Black & White 2, for 50$, and buy the extra creatures for 10$ from the company's web site. The irony is that they would probably make as much profit from the add-on as they do from the retail game, as they are cutting out the middle-men.
I will never cease to be shocked at the ridiculous costs of gaming. I remember many years ago when I was a young overpaid techie, I popped $500 on a PS2, and happily forked over another $50-60 for each game, until I realized I had invested well over two thousand dollars into something that provides merely a few hours of entertainment per week. That same money could have afforded me hundreds of nights at the cinema, many many music albums, or a healthy serving of any other conventional form of entertainment. The music industry is certainly healthy enough to heavy-hand every other artist on the planet. The film industry is happily giving billions away to Scientology year after year. Why is the game industry collapsing ?
I think the game industry is failing because it is trying to mimic its older siblings in the entertainment business. You can't sell a game like you would a movie or new artist. You can't just flash T&A, throw in a dash of racism and gang violence and make it into a blockbuster hit. You can't follow the same marketing principles and practices and expect to make money.
Let's make it simple: if games cost half what they cost today, I would buy more than double, in part because I would feel less monetary guilt for every purchase. Look at what goes into the retail price, trim off the fat and restrategize. Do I really need to walk into EBGames to see the pretty boxes ? Does the experience add to the game itself ? Not at all. Do the cinematic frame grabs on the back of the box give me any idea how much fun I will be having ? Often the contrary. Does the flashy embossed T&A on the cover make it a better product ? Sorry, I don't get off on triangle-boobed high-elf priestesses. Now stop laundering the publisher's money and give me what I want for a change.
If the BSA comes to your place of business with a bunch of pigs, politely order the BSA to get the hell off the premises. They have no legal jurisdiction, they are merely a bunch of for-hire office terrorists.
Software companies pay the BSA to work their scare tactics and offload the bad press. If Microsoft employees knocked on your door and strip-searched you, you'd get them locked up and their faces painted all over the news. Microsoft would lose mucho credibility. If the BSA does it, we don't give a hoot, they are a "bad" company from the get-go. Their "fines" are meaningless. The only organisation who can sue you for software theft is the IP holder, and even then it's a court matter.
As for the pigs, well, be nice; give them donuts and a pat on the head.
Rant aside, BartPE is 99.44% legal as it does almost the same thing as Windows' PE builder toolkit, which is only available to OEM's. Microsoft has no "PE" product for end users so they have no foot to stand on, should they decide to litigate. The best they can hope for is a crooked judge and expensive lawyers over something that's worth near-nothing.
Envy has nothing to do with VIA, except that VIA is an integrator so they build the Envy chip into their boards and chipsets. Envy is a sound processor that's used in many prosumer cards such as the M-Audio Delta series, the most famous being the Audiophile 2496. It does sound beautifully clean and quiet on those cards, but I honestly doubt it could perform nearly as well as an integrated component on a mainboard, simply due to the extreme noise on there and often shaky traces and/or marginal tolerances on Via stuff.
Meanwhile I've got the Realtek ALC650 on my NF4 board and for those times when I choose to forego my Audiophile, I have found it to be damned good.
Do keep in mind that I hate Sound Blasters with a passion ever since they came out with the Audigy and it's pathetic imitation of "pro" features. When someone asks me which sound card to get for gaming, I lead them to an M-Audio Revolution 7.1. That's about as good as it gets for $50.
For desktops and servers, the OS choice makes a huge difference in terms of usability and availability of software. For these high-end shops, they're mostly running their own in-house applications and toolchains. Why should it matter whether the underlying OS is Linux, Irix, BSD or even Beos.. they're not shopping for window managers!
Linux would be the logical choice because if you're not going to use something much, might as well get it cheap/free. They probably use Linux merely as a filesystem and multitasking kernel, with some simple network communication between nodes. They don't care about KDE vs Gnome, Konq vs Firefox.. it's just a dumb host for the custom software.
So why do they need a conference about this non-topic ?
I know I have it backwards. Nobody "needs" huge profits. Profit itself is flawed. You're making money for what ? A corporation! I'd be quite content in creating hundreds of jobs and recirculating this money.
Money's power rests in its ability to change hands quickly. You don't accomplish shit by sitting on a huge pile of cash, you have to keep it moving around. It's kind of like electricity; sure, you could have the biggest batteries in the world, but if you don't plug anything into those batteries they're useless.
Dude, from personal experience the problem with that "kid" is that he is likely too cheap/dumb to be running RAID in the first place. I swear by Maxtor because they run maybe 10-15% faster than the competition, and I thrash them HARD.
The big problem is heat. Sure, the kid will put an $80 Zalman CPU cooler so he can overclock his Celeron 50% beyond spec, but those hard drives run hot as hell. How hard is it to prop a cheap 120mm fan across the drive bays ? It'll even help cool the case by circulating all that stale air. I splurge and get Vantec Stealth fans because they're whisper quiet. My Antec cases even have the mounting holes for them. Haven't had a drive failure in several years now, and I have a total of 18 drives in this household. Did I mention I thrash like there's no tomorrow ? SATA raid is beautiful!
Cooling is the answer to everything. And cleaning the dust off every few months doesn't hurt either.
How cheap is your boss that he can't even afford a Mini Mac to do what you wanted to do in the first place ? They're what, 500$ ? :P
Ask Slashdot always boils down to the same thing : How can I do something expensive for nothing with no willpower and/or skill.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Don't worry, someone will come up with an open-source alternative or a gray-area patch/workaround. DRM is a fad, an annoying one, and the more crazy restrictive stunts they pull, the more imbeciles will start noticing. It's one thing to screw someone in the ass when it doesn't hurt, it's another to park a Mack truck up their rectum. At some point, even the careless ignorants will stand up and say "Leave my ass alone, Microsoft".
Kenwood had two CD-Rom drives like that waaaay back in the 20th century. They used Zen True-X technology, which was basically 7 lasers on one disc. I still have my 72x cd-rom and it really does read at 72x (a little over 10 meg per second). I know because it used to crash my PC back then because the shoddy BX chipset couldn't handle the abuse
I would LOVE to see a Zen-tech enabled DVD-Rom that could push 7 times 16x, or even just 7 times 8x I don't care. In a console this would be heaven, load times would be almost as fast as a hard drive (excluding seek times, which many developers still don't seem to understand, or care to fix). So where the hell is Zen technology now ? Back then it was hot, but Kenwood's drive was flaky and had a hard time with CD-R discs, so I'm guessing it spoiled the market for Zen, but it was great!
Why couldn't we have military supplies that kill soldiers faster ? Why the hell do we need to shoot everyone anyway ? The only advantage I see about wars is that it kills lots of retarded apes, otherwise it's all just a power trip that leads nowhere.
Police are for security. Armies are for destruction. There's a huuuuge difference.
I love capitalism. No really, I love watching people test just how hard they can screw each other in the ass for money without getting shot. Here's how I see it:
Company ABC invests X money into developing product. They estimate sales of Y quantity. Divide X by Y to get a per-item cost, mark it up for profit and a support allowance, then sell it.
The fact that I might run their software on multiple CPU's, or that it might be accessed by Terminal Server, doesn't change a single thing for the developer. They don't need to work harder, they don't lose sleep at night, their kids won't end up on Springer. It doesn't matter whether I use it to index my MP3 files, or run a Fortune-500 business with it. They did their work, and they get paid for that work. What happens afterward is not their problem, and more importantly none of their goddamned business.
When people learn to take just compensation for their efforts, and give up the "fight" for riches, we'll wonder how we ever survived through capitalism. There is a set amount of monetary value in the world, the more you have, the less someone else has, and the more that person is likely to do nasty things to make up for the loss. So why don't you just be happy to eat every day and give me a goddamned break with your license gouging.
You have to realize something, in Canada we don't actually have the balls (or arrogance) to go ahead and enforce such frivolous things. For sure, we won't be going after Google. Pretty much the only thing that's specifically designed to piss people off in Canada are traffic laws, otherwise it's all just "toolchest" legislation that we _can_ use should the need arise to stomp out some unethical capitalist pricks.
In this case, it's quite simple really: This law was conceived to slow down piracy within our borders. It's nothing that wasn't already illegal to begin with, they just made it very specific to go after Torrent trackers and the like. That's why things like The Pirate Bay have to host in Sweden or wherever. If they were to host their stuff here in Canada, we could sic this search engine law on them and shut them out with a much easier legal fight thanks to the specific wording.
Mod this up before I die laughing! /lusting after a Mac Mini //can't afford the bugger
Is your CPU so horribly slow that you can't even fathom the concept of compressing your stuff ? You don't _need_ a 7mb picture of someone else's kids. You can chomp that bugger down to 1mb easily and still retain ridiculously decadent image detail. Even better for video, run it through a decent encoder and chop it into high-bitrate Mpeg-2 or something, or maybe something like DivX/Xvid in the 4-5 mbit/sec range if you're ambitious.
Just quit it with your uncompressed DV. The camera probably induces more video noise than the compression algorithm ever will, such is the nature of pro-sumer equipment.
But hey, I just happen to run an OEM store so feel free to order as many 200gb drives as you like. You can lead a horse to water, but.......
Cuz it's fun, silly!
And it's basically free money for anyone who doesn't have their head stuck in Jesusland.