1. Even if you're using the CD player as just a source of bits, the quality of the drive, error correction and so on make a difference. Plus, how many people actually use a CD player with digital out only, and do the D/A in the amp? Only home theater fans in my experience, and that's a completely different set of problems.
2. The fact that headphones produce a different sound field than speakers is one of the reasons why you need a headphone amp, which solves the problem.
3. No, the computer fan does not produce more sound than the sound difference of an improved sound card, at least not for a Mac or a well-built PC. If your computer fan is that loud, replace it.
I prefer an analog watch, but I can't find one that's reliable. I need a watch which keeps time to within a few seconds a month, doesn't need me to remember to give it regular maintenance (winding, changing batteries, etc), and can stand up to being accidentally smacked against walls, doors and so on.
I went through several analog watches before reluctantly settling on a Casio G-Shock. If they had a solar Casio G-Shock with hands, I'd probably have gone for that.
If you want to experience some amazing sound without the inconvenience of paying $100 for rare vinyl and only being able to play it a handful of times before it starts to wear down, there are some pretty simple things you can do. You also don't need to spend thousands of dollars on hardware to get something far better than you likely have at the moment.
1. Audition some CD players. No, they don't all sound the same, in fact you'll be amazed how different a handful of $300-400 CD players can sound. Last time I did this a Denon multibit player blew everything else away. Ignore the specs, they're largely meaningless at this point.
2. Get a pair of good headphones. Headphones have much better bang-for-the-buck than speakers, you don't have to be careful with room layout, there's no complicated setup or calibration, and so on. You can get a good pair of headphones for under $150 if you shop around. Sennheisers are generally good, go and sit and audition some; the most expensive are often not the best. For portable listening, I particularly like Sennheiser's PX200s, which fold up to pocket size and are good enough that I use them at home, and cheap enough that I'm prepared to risk sitting on them. The PX250 is the same headphone, but with noise cancellation, for plane flights.
3. Get a headphone amplifier. Even a cheap $150 headphone amp will let you hear detail you never knew existed, and open up the sound so it sounds like the musicians are in the room with you. If you like portable, get a Xin mini amp, it's the size of a matchbox and runs on 3xAAAs and will make your iPod or other portable device sound several times better. Any headphone amp with crossfeed will be a big improvement over no headphone amp at all, so don't worry too much over which to get.
4. If you listen to computer audio, either get an audiophile quality sound card, or get an external USB sound processor. I have an M-Audio Audiophile USB, which just craps all over the built in sound of any Mac, and Apple's sound hardware is pretty good compared to the average PC's generic hardware. Again, cost can be under $150.
So there you go, four ways to massively improve your sound, three for under $150 each, no major skills involved.
Of course, you can go much further. A pair of electrostatic headphones will blow away your $150 Sennheisers, but most people don't have a couple of grand to spend on headphones. I'm sure your goldenears friend would be unimpressed by my choices above. I just wanted to say that most people don't need lots of technical knowledge or massive amounts of cash to make a huge improvement in the quality of sound they listen to.
Not at all. The poor are getting screwed and dying early from lack of medical treatment because that's the way the system is supposed to work. And so long as they keep voting to get screwed, it'll continue.
Bill Gates giving Stanford $20 million is like me giving them about $100, based on our relative riches. If I give Stanford $100, will they name a building after me?
Furthermore, chances are Bill didn't actually give anything away. The mega-rich put a chunk of their capital into foundations, and fund their 'generous' 'charitable' donations out of the profit the foundations make by investing that cash. None of Bill's actual cash is given away, just the profit he makes lending it to people like us.
Plus the guy's a crook who lied under oath in a court of law. We all saw the tapes of him lying outrageously. He escaped by buying off the Justice Department, funding Ashcroft's re-election campaign.
I look forward to Stanford announcing the Ken Lay School of Business and the Harold Shipman Department of Medicine.
Slashdot says the park is tagging everybody, but the article says it's issuing tags to everyone. So is the park really 'tagging' everyone as they enter? Like what happens to cows?
The cows are, like, politely told they can't enter the theme park.
We would be happy to accept Apple's check to license our useless (to Apple) tech. But we all know that won't happen because Apple is all about keeping people as locked into Quicktime's own codecs as possible.
Nice incorrection. Actually, Apple's codec for the iTMS is MPEG-4, which is an open published standard. The QuickTime container format is also an open published standard.
Real's rm format is neither open nor published; they specifically prohibit turning rm files into anything else, and sue anyone who writes software for doing so. I wanted to ask about that piece of hypocrisy, but my question didn't get modded up far enough.
Yeah, damn right. His program was aimed at taking DivX and MPG movies in commonly downloaded formats, and turning them into DVDs.
So, he wrote a program whose main audience was people who violate copyright, and was then surprised to find people pirating his software? Oh, cry me a river.
I feel the same way about people who write shareware "file sharing" applications, and then act all irate when we share the registration codes for those applications. If you don't want your work to be ripped off, it'd help if you didn't go out of your way to assist people in ripping off the work of others. I've registered fifteen pieces of shareware, but I'm sure as hell not registering "file sharing" software.
Plus, the "meat" of his software was apparently GPLed projects such as ffmpeg anyway...
Well, I just took a look at Net Weasel. It looks to me as if you've made a few fairly basic mistakes from the marketing perspective, so let me try and come up with some helpful comments as to why you're not getting the response you're looking for.
1. Firstly, as far as I can tell your product is an HTML editor with no CSS support. Well, these days that's like trying to sell a graphics editor that doesn't do PNG, or an e-mail program that doesn't handle attachments. Even people who don't want to do their entire site design in CSS still want to be able to do the neat stuff you can only do with CSS.
2. Related to the above, HTML standards have changed a bit in the last 5 years, and you haven't kept up to date by the looks of things. Not valid XHTML, no DTD statement, and so on.
3. You've chosen a field where there is massive amounts of competition, and that's never a good way to make money. Everyone and his dog has made a simple text editor that handles HTML and makes it a bit easier. So, even if you had the best HTML editor in the world, I still wouldn't expect you to be raking in big bucks, because you'd be up against at least half a dozen big companies with big advertising dollars, shelf space in every Best Buy, and major mindshare.
4. Think about who your target market is. You're not going to stand a chance of cracking the pro web designer market with the product you have; pro web designers need CSS, template libraries, DTD validation, image slicing, applet and plugin integration, and so on. At the opposite end, you're not going to get the Joe Sixpack market either, because they'll see raw HTML and recoil in horror. So, you're going after what I'll call the "dabbler" market--people who've learned a bit of HTML for fun and want to build a small personal web site. That's a pretty small niche to be in.
5. You don't have enough differentiation from the free offerings for that niche, in my view. Every half-decent free text editor can edit HTML with syntax coloring, and usually validate it and generate IMG tags too. You clearly know what your differentiators are, which is good: they're the table editor, the form editor and the frameset editor, and maybe the font dialog if it supported CSS, which it doesn't. Trouble is, dabblers generally don't need forms or tabular data--they use tables for layout, which it doesn't look as if your table editor is suitable for. They sometimes use framesets, but most of them know by now that frames suck. So, what can your product do that makes it an essential $20 upgrade from vim or jEdit? Nothing as far as I can see, and...
6....if I've missed some compelling must-have functionality your program offers, then your web site needs drastic improvement.
I don't honestly think that you can hope to make money in the market you're currently aiming at. To do so, you'd have to fix all the defects and shortcomings, and then come up with some "killer app" functionality to beat Mozilla Composer, jEdit and the rest.
So you'd have to get up to date with the standards, and support XHTML and CSS. Then you'd need to add all the other features the free text editors have that people just expect these days, like file browsers, folding, abbreviations/macros, regexp search and replace, autosave, bracket/tag matching, multiple cut/paste buffers, and spelling correction. And then, you'd need to add more compelling features, like a graphical color selector with tools to help users pick complementary colors, and something to search and replace across multiple pages.
That's a hell of a lot of work for a product which, realistically, people would still only pay $20 or $30 for. If I were you, I'd cut your losses and write software that does something nobody else has done yet, or nobody has done cheaply, or nobody else has done well.
Skunk farms generally descent the kittens shortly after birth, by removing their musk-producing glands.
Skunks themselves aren't stinky, only the musk they spray for defense. Even right next to a wild skunk, the smell is faint enough that you can barely notice it.
yes, the recession started while Clinton was still in office
If you're going to lie, you might at least attempt a slightly convincing lie. The NBER web site has a nice summary of the official government figures showing when the recession began. It began in March 2001. If you don't believe that page, download the original data and graph it yourself with GNUplot (yes, I have done so) and you'll see that the first dip began in December 2000 just after the elections, with the downswing as W took power in January, and the official recession starting in March.
Hey, if they were honest about it and people still voted for 'em, I'd be happy. What bothers me is when the majority get suckered into voting for their own destruction.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Even if you're using the CD player as just a source of bits, the quality of the drive, error correction and so on make a difference. Plus, how many people actually use a CD player with digital out only, and do the D/A in the amp? Only home theater fans in my experience, and that's a completely different set of problems.
2. The fact that headphones produce a different sound field than speakers is one of the reasons why you need a headphone amp, which solves the problem.
3. No, the computer fan does not produce more sound than the sound difference of an improved sound card, at least not for a Mac or a well-built PC. If your computer fan is that loud, replace it.
I prefer an analog watch, but I can't find one that's reliable. I need a watch which keeps time to within a few seconds a month, doesn't need me to remember to give it regular maintenance (winding, changing batteries, etc), and can stand up to being accidentally smacked against walls, doors and so on.
I went through several analog watches before reluctantly settling on a Casio G-Shock. If they had a solar Casio G-Shock with hands, I'd probably have gone for that.
If you want to experience some amazing sound without the inconvenience of paying $100 for rare vinyl and only being able to play it a handful of times before it starts to wear down, there are some pretty simple things you can do. You also don't need to spend thousands of dollars on hardware to get something far better than you likely have at the moment.
1. Audition some CD players. No, they don't all sound the same, in fact you'll be amazed how different a handful of $300-400 CD players can sound. Last time I did this a Denon multibit player blew everything else away. Ignore the specs, they're largely meaningless at this point.
2. Get a pair of good headphones. Headphones have much better bang-for-the-buck than speakers, you don't have to be careful with room layout, there's no complicated setup or calibration, and so on. You can get a good pair of headphones for under $150 if you shop around. Sennheisers are generally good, go and sit and audition some; the most expensive are often not the best. For portable listening, I particularly like Sennheiser's PX200s, which fold up to pocket size and are good enough that I use them at home, and cheap enough that I'm prepared to risk sitting on them. The PX250 is the same headphone, but with noise cancellation, for plane flights.
3. Get a headphone amplifier. Even a cheap $150 headphone amp will let you hear detail you never knew existed, and open up the sound so it sounds like the musicians are in the room with you. If you like portable, get a Xin mini amp, it's the size of a matchbox and runs on 3xAAAs and will make your iPod or other portable device sound several times better. Any headphone amp with crossfeed will be a big improvement over no headphone amp at all, so don't worry too much over which to get.
4. If you listen to computer audio, either get an audiophile quality sound card, or get an external USB sound processor. I have an M-Audio Audiophile USB, which just craps all over the built in sound of any Mac, and Apple's sound hardware is pretty good compared to the average PC's generic hardware. Again, cost can be under $150.
So there you go, four ways to massively improve your sound, three for under $150 each, no major skills involved.
Of course, you can go much further. A pair of electrostatic headphones will blow away your $150 Sennheisers, but most people don't have a couple of grand to spend on headphones. I'm sure your goldenears friend would be unimpressed by my choices above. I just wanted to say that most people don't need lots of technical knowledge or massive amounts of cash to make a huge improvement in the quality of sound they listen to.
Not at all. The poor are getting screwed and dying early from lack of medical treatment because that's the way the system is supposed to work. And so long as they keep voting to get screwed, it'll continue.
Bill Gates giving Stanford $20 million is like me giving them about $100, based on our relative riches. If I give Stanford $100, will they name a building after me?
Furthermore, chances are Bill didn't actually give anything away. The mega-rich put a chunk of their capital into foundations, and fund their 'generous' 'charitable' donations out of the profit the foundations make by investing that cash. None of Bill's actual cash is given away, just the profit he makes lending it to people like us.
Plus the guy's a crook who lied under oath in a court of law. We all saw the tapes of him lying outrageously. He escaped by buying off the Justice Department, funding Ashcroft's re-election campaign.
I look forward to Stanford announcing the Ken Lay School of Business and the Harold Shipman Department of Medicine.
The cows are, like, politely told they can't enter the theme park.
Welcome to America. Oh, wait, you were talking about theme parks...
Try the vanilla Debian beta CD installer. It pretty much solves the "hard to install" problem.
Yes, the curve started turning down at election time, when people began to realize Bush might gain power.
Distributed software installs are an OS function or a system management software function.
You don't really want every application having its own incompatible interface for managing end user desktops, do you?
We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html. Have a nice day.
Started under Bush, continued under Bush. We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html
Ah, the old "recession started during the Clinton administration" lie being passed around again.
No, it didn't. We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html
Do you have any actual statistics supporting the novel notion that the job crash started in 2000, or just your personal anecdote?
Speaking personally:
Allow me to convert Real audio files to other formats, and I'll stop complaining. I might even start choosing content in Real format.
Until then, you're just another vendor attempting proprietary lock-in, and you can't expect to be treated otherwise.
Nice incorrection. Actually, Apple's codec for the iTMS is MPEG-4, which is an open published standard. The QuickTime container format is also an open published standard.
Real's rm format is neither open nor published; they specifically prohibit turning rm files into anything else, and sue anyone who writes software for doing so. I wanted to ask about that piece of hypocrisy, but my question didn't get modded up far enough.
Yeah, damn right. His program was aimed at taking DivX and MPG movies in commonly downloaded formats, and turning them into DVDs.
So, he wrote a program whose main audience was people who violate copyright, and was then surprised to find people pirating his software? Oh, cry me a river.
I feel the same way about people who write shareware "file sharing" applications, and then act all irate when we share the registration codes for those applications. If you don't want your work to be ripped off, it'd help if you didn't go out of your way to assist people in ripping off the work of others. I've registered fifteen pieces of shareware, but I'm sure as hell not registering "file sharing" software.
Plus, the "meat" of his software was apparently GPLed projects such as ffmpeg anyway...
Well, I just took a look at Net Weasel. It looks to me as if you've made a few fairly basic mistakes from the marketing perspective, so let me try and come up with some helpful comments as to why you're not getting the response you're looking for.
...if I've missed some compelling must-have functionality your program offers, then your web site needs drastic improvement.
1. Firstly, as far as I can tell your product is an HTML editor with no CSS support. Well, these days that's like trying to sell a graphics editor that doesn't do PNG, or an e-mail program that doesn't handle attachments. Even people who don't want to do their entire site design in CSS still want to be able to do the neat stuff you can only do with CSS.
2. Related to the above, HTML standards have changed a bit in the last 5 years, and you haven't kept up to date by the looks of things. Not valid XHTML, no DTD statement, and so on.
3. You've chosen a field where there is massive amounts of competition, and that's never a good way to make money. Everyone and his dog has made a simple text editor that handles HTML and makes it a bit easier. So, even if you had the best HTML editor in the world, I still wouldn't expect you to be raking in big bucks, because you'd be up against at least half a dozen big companies with big advertising dollars, shelf space in every Best Buy, and major mindshare.
4. Think about who your target market is. You're not going to stand a chance of cracking the pro web designer market with the product you have; pro web designers need CSS, template libraries, DTD validation, image slicing, applet and plugin integration, and so on. At the opposite end, you're not going to get the Joe Sixpack market either, because they'll see raw HTML and recoil in horror. So, you're going after what I'll call the "dabbler" market--people who've learned a bit of HTML for fun and want to build a small personal web site. That's a pretty small niche to be in.
5. You don't have enough differentiation from the free offerings for that niche, in my view. Every half-decent free text editor can edit HTML with syntax coloring, and usually validate it and generate IMG tags too. You clearly know what your differentiators are, which is good: they're the table editor, the form editor and the frameset editor, and maybe the font dialog if it supported CSS, which it doesn't. Trouble is, dabblers generally don't need forms or tabular data--they use tables for layout, which it doesn't look as if your table editor is suitable for. They sometimes use framesets, but most of them know by now that frames suck. So, what can your product do that makes it an essential $20 upgrade from vim or jEdit? Nothing as far as I can see, and...
6.
I don't honestly think that you can hope to make money in the market you're currently aiming at. To do so, you'd have to fix all the defects and shortcomings, and then come up with some "killer app" functionality to beat Mozilla Composer, jEdit and the rest.
So you'd have to get up to date with the standards, and support XHTML and CSS. Then you'd need to add all the other features the free text editors have that people just expect these days, like file browsers, folding, abbreviations/macros, regexp search and replace, autosave, bracket/tag matching, multiple cut/paste buffers, and spelling correction. And then, you'd need to add more compelling features, like a graphical color selector with tools to help users pick complementary colors, and something to search and replace across multiple pages.
That's a hell of a lot of work for a product which, realistically, people would still only pay $20 or $30 for. If I were you, I'd cut your losses and write software that does something nobody else has done yet, or nobody has done cheaply, or nobody else has done well.
Except the Win-dows you are required to purchase with the machine, with profits sent to Microsoft. That's the deal-breaker for me.
Let me guess... you're moving computers out of the Hormel world headquarters and SPAM factory in Austin, Minnesota?
Skunk farms generally descent the kittens shortly after birth, by removing their musk-producing glands.
Skunks themselves aren't stinky, only the musk they spray for defense. Even right next to a wild skunk, the smell is faint enough that you can barely notice it.
Yeah, I know, off-topic...
If you're going to lie, you might at least attempt a slightly convincing lie. The NBER web site has a nice summary of the official government figures showing when the recession began. It began in March 2001. If you don't believe that page, download the original data and graph it yourself with GNUplot (yes, I have done so) and you'll see that the first dip began in December 2000 just after the elections, with the downswing as W took power in January, and the official recession starting in March.
Because I run Debian, you insensitive clod!
Err... OK. Well, round here you just walk into Best Buy or Circuit City, and they have MD recorders, and discs for $2 each or less.
Or there's minidisco.com.
Hey, if they were honest about it and people still voted for 'em, I'd be happy. What bothers me is when the majority get suckered into voting for their own destruction.