Go there. Ask for a generator and installation. Hand them your credit card or a check for $10-12k.
If you don't have natural gas, go to the local LP supplier and buy a 250 or 500 gallon tank and have them install it.
Done.
Seriously, unless you happen to have a very large electric demand, such as electric heat/heat pump (and it sounds like you don't), you can probably get by with a 17-20kW Generac automatic standby generator. That'll push close to 80A@240V, so as long as you're not running everything at once you can squeak by. The easy ones will even auto-cycle every week or two to keep them in running condition, and will automatically start and transfer power without you're ever needing to lift a finger. 500 gallons of LP will run this baby for 10 days... http://www.generac.com/Products/Residential/AirCooled/20KW.aspx
I prefer using a gross receipts tax. Any money you receive in return for goods or services is generally recorded (unless it's an under the table transaction, which is currently invisible anyway). You pay a small percentage on that. No deductions, no exclusions. You can have a sliding scale percentage, but all the money is on the table. I'd like to see it identical for personal and corporate entities.
We have a GRT for businesses in my town, and it's very difficult to game. Of course it's a fraction of a percent, so hiding a transaction here or there doesn't really help much. I think I figured once that the federal government could live on 2-3% GRT. My mother hated the idea because she was about to sell a house, and that seemed unfair. I pointed out she just gave 6% to some fool who did nothing but put a sign in her yard - and how much was it worth to defend that land and guarantee her right to own it in the first place. She wasn't swayed:-)
T8s can be made to 98CRI, which is typically specified for doctors offices. Unfortunately, there is little public pressure to provide higher CRIs in consumer lamps, so the 98CRIs are only in 5000K lights which is great for good lighting and lousy for mimicking the incandescents they replace. The other problem is repeatability of spectrum. If you get an incandescent lamp, it will have practically the same temperature (and CRI=100 of course) as every other lamp in the room. Even if it's not the same wattage or style (save the goofy color correction lamps) the spectrum is blackbody so it blends well. Get two different temperature CFLs in a room (and this goes for LED, too) and you've got a washed out version of disco lighting. That may not be a big deal when you first lamp your fixtures, but as soon as the first one dies it becomes a big issue unless you've stockpiled identical lamps ahead of time.
...the congress should change the law to prohibit any infrastructure provider from also selling service over that infrastructure. If the cable, telephone, electric, etc. utility plants were required to be run as an independent, stand alone business from the content provided (electrical generation, content sourcing, telecommunication connection backend) there would be fewer tying problems.
Now, that said, there might still be other issues over interfaces and who's problem it is when things break, but physical connections are pretty easy to check.
I see it like the long distance telecom market. 30 years ago you had Ma Bell. You paid through the nose for anything you wanted. Then deregulation came to being, and as a result the long distance market - since it was content only and no infrastructure - became a seriously competitive area. We went from $0.25/min, minimum, for any LD call to a couple of cents a minute, and the price has been pretty stable.
Unfortunately, the "government is bad" mantra we've been fed by the right misses the point that standardization (open, IP unencumbered - or at least compulsory licensed) is good for consumers. Sure NTSC wasn't great, but it WORKED, for everyone. ATSC was an absolute abortion, and was the result of the FCC having no backbone whatsoever.
Unfortunately, we need more regulation of telecom, not less, but it needs to be GOOD regulation. Invalidation of all local monopoly contracts would be a good start. If you keep these companies from dipping their fingers into all the pies, you'll find they will play much better. They will kick and scream and throw money at lobbiests, but the best solution is a fixed standard. Hell, the gov't might as well commandeer IP for the purpose - the common good, you might say.
Remove the veil of corporate protection from officers and members of the board of directors. Make them, explicitly, jointly and severally, personally liable for all debts and obligations of the corporation. Make them criminally liable for any acts committed by the corporation.
Then you can eliminate SOX. There will still be problems, but you'll have asses to kick.
That's great, just as long as the sites they want to go to (which includes some Visa sites, such as the Signature home page, and many banking sites) will work in FF. I run into about a site a month which either wont' load or can't load in Firefox, and I have to use IE.
Most of the undereducated people I know who are freaking geniuses qualify for that title only in their own minds. Most are poorly adjusted to producing anything of value and utterly unreliable. Add that to the horribly shallow knowledge of even those things which they feel they are masters of simply makes them dangerous in any regulated environment. Most of the younger geniuses I've known have been bored and either found ways to apply themselves and advance to really understand their areas of expertise, or they've spiraled down into various psychoses and never really realized their potential. There are diminishingly few rare people who can rise above on pure intellectual merit alone. Most of the "successful" people without degrees possess both the additional attribute of being (a) very charismatic and (b) excellent/shrewd businessmen. Not all hurdles are achievable via technical knowledge.
As I understand it, wear leveling does occur in practically all CF cards, though it may not be as robust as a purpose built SSD. For what it's worth, the unRaid (slackware, iirc) operating system is kept on a flash drive, and is not much different than a CF for those purposes. It seems to do just fine in long term installations. 100,000 writes (well, erases) is a long time for most applications (10 years if the block gets rewritten every hour). If you fill half a 32GB card with static data, and run a gig worth of data at full speed in the remaining space, with in a continuous read-write cycle at about the highest speed most of these cards can do, it would take over two years to exhaust the typical write cycle limit - and that's assuming that the only "wear leveling" algorithm is a sequential use of cells. That's a higher data rate than you'd get if you used it to record a full spectrum broadcast HD channel 24/7. And why would you use your OS drive for that?
I really don't think that a real-world application, especially for a non-commercial user, for this type of machine is going to break one of these cards.
16GB is available on microSD, and I've seen adapters which allow them to slip into a USB slot with almost zero protrusion (http://www.amazon.com/DATA-MICRO-Reader-microSD-interface/dp/B000VE2PCG). Speed isn't great - 48Mbps - but your just booting the OS, and maybe a small app or two, right? If you can go a smidge bigger, 64GB SD are expected "soon." Speed is still low, but many lappys have an SD specific slot (which would also work with a microSD-SD adapter, of course)
Finally if you really need more space, 100GB is available on CF (http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08092306pretec_64gb_100gb_cf.asp). Speed is much better - up to 400Mbps. You can even get a CF to SATA/2.5HDD adapter (http://www.buyextras.com/criococsaadr.html?gclid=CKrE2LWLy5cCFQsaHgod5TIDTQ) for $15. There are 2-CF options out there, but the ones I saw were maxed at 32GB/CF.
So go out there and fire up that system with what exists. No need to wait for the manufacturers to put all the pieces together.
Instead of the current rate system. No deductions, no exemptions...every dollar that comes in gets taxed at 3%. Visa takes this amount from every purchase in the US, and they don't even provide a military or space program.
I know that this would never pass, because it would increase the corporate taxes, not lower them. The effective rate for most corporations, based on their cash flow, is vanishingly small.
What, at $69? How much time do you think it costs to set up a linux machine from scratch, including all the sharing necessary for a mixed environment? How much do you think a development person costs? In billable hours, most of these guys waste $69 worth of time on coffee breaks or taking a dump. I've set up two of these, and each one took about 30 minutes (exclusive of the hardware build, which was zero for the old Dell I had). The last time I installed ubuntu it took 30 minutes just to get to the startup boot.
Free is not the end-all, be-all, especially in business. This would be $0 if he didn't need more than, say, 2TB of storage (3x1TB, one for parity), but $69 is not really a heavy cost. There are a lot of things I could do instead of paying for, but I don't, because even at my pedestrian $130/hr billing rate it's better for me to pay for a widget that fixes my problem than spend 4 hours troubleshooting it and getting it fixed myself.
Okay, unRaid is not particularly fast compared to an optimized system, but it's expandable, had redundancy, is expandable, is web managed, plays nice with windows, sets up in about 20 minutes, costs $0 for a three disc license and $69(?) for a 6 disk license.
My total unoptimized box on an utterly unoptimized Gb network (stock cards, settings, with 100 and 1000 nodes) and unmanaged switches just transferred an 8.3GB file in a hair under three minutes. From a single, cheap SATA drive to a Vista box with an old EIDE drive. Now 380Mb/s is not blazingly fast, but remember that it took almost no effort.
No connection except as a happy customer with a 4TB media server that took longer to assemble the case than to get the SW running. If only my Vista Media Center install has been this easy.
First, the manufacturers in this country stripped the PE of most of its use by buy the law which exempts themselves from requiring their engineers be registered, even if it involves health and safety of the public. But it's better...
The California board (and many others, I suspect) can't lay a finger on a non-PE practicing professional engineering! Why? Because they are not PEs, and therefore outside of the jurisdiction of the board. You may laugh, but I recall that was the result of one such complaint which was lodged against a non-PE practicing engineering (structural, iirc). The AG may prosecute such a case, but it has to be high enough profile for that office to take on, which it typically isn't.
Now, one might argue that their expert witnesses must be PEs if the scope of the content falls within the breadth of PE licensure, but I believe that there are some legislative details which must exist to press that condition. It is the case in some states, but I don't follow that too closely. (dis: I am a PE, and I do expert witness work for architectural/building related cases for less than 5% of my practice).
The government may not classify something to prevent disclosure if it would cover up an illegal act. That's not the right wording, but it is the gist of the law. Basically, classifying info to cover it up is, in itself, illegal. The problem is that the people who are classifying the material are most likely the ones doing the illegal act in the first place, and adding a cover up charge is relatively inconsequential to the actual illegal activity. It's like perjury - if you lie and lose, you're no worse off; if you lie and win, you generally are scott free (since, based on the evidence available, you didn't actually lie).
In XP all my main apps are launched using Ctrl-Alt-{x}, where x is usually the first letter of the app (T for thunderbird, I for irfanview, N for notepad (well, textpad in my case), etc. Vista has the same functionality of course, but it's no faster.
You do know you can put web items on the XP desktop, right?
FWIW, I like Vista's Media Center much better than XPs version, though it's still a piss-poor attempt at a really good interface, imho (I can only presume that TiVo has the patent on intuitive interfaces). As with almost all microsoft software, it presumes that the only way you want it to operate is the single way the developers envisioned, and that there will never be more than a single person with data on a computer. *shrug*
I'll say that I've seen what looks like a context sensitive network connections on a colleague's laptop, which could be fantastic for those of us who struggle with multiple networks. I haven't played with it enough to know if it works as well as it promises.
It's not necessarily keeping the files in sync. Media monkey is supposed to be able to do it, but for some code reason I can't wrap my non-programmer mind around it appears that the program will run out of memory and silently exit a sync if it has to do too many different formats during the sync (FLAC, APE, and MP3, for example). I haven't quite figured out how that happens in a single threaded process with enough memory free to store two uncompressed versions of a file. After spending about 4 hours on the forum looking for answers I just gave up - it's either a known bug with very low priority or it's a quirk in my setup.
Anyway, the file syncing isn't so bad, but it would be nice to sync playlists back and forth so if I built the playlists in Media Monkey, it could back-sync from either the playlists in iTunes or froma second instance of Media Monkey using the "compressed" library.
Who cares about the battery charge time, I can refresh a primary cell light in about 15 seconds (20 if I have to take the new battery out of a blister pack). The whole advantage of rechargables is that they will be less expensive than primaries over time. At $170, you'd have to go through a lot of primaries to make it financially viable, and you could easily use a pair of swappable rechargeable batteries (one in the charger) to get the same effect for 1/5 the cost.
Not saying it's not neat, it's just not useful enough to be economical. I mean, if you're going to carry around a charger, why not just have that spare battery with you instead? (Unless you happen to be somewhere with a constant, line voltage power source but no access to batteries or a traditional charger...which would be practically nowhere never).
15 seconds to charge, two or three D cells worth of juice, and $10 should be the right spot.
I'm sorry my mod points just ran out. With Flac it's almost trivial to transcode to any format you want, and you don't have to worry about losses. I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC, and made a "second" library using AAC for my ipod. I wish I could keep the two libraries sync'd, but for some reason media monkey won't do it (transcode failures, not the inability to sync to a folder). Still, it works well, and if I decide to switch formats in the future, I just transcode again.
Well, in defense, FLAC is a free codec which has free (beer+speech) plugins written for most media player/conversion software. While I agree that there's a downside to having to convert your incoming files (and the requisite problems in translating tags one for one), ALAC is IP encumbered and it generally not available as a free plugin for most media players/converters.
Besides, I'm not aware of any iPod which can do a lossless file justice, from an audiophile perspective. You may as well run any lossless though a high bitrate AAC and save yourself 60%+ of the necessary lossless storage.
That's kind of what got them in trouble in the first place, don't you think?
(Though I'm old enough to remember it, I haven't heard that term in a couple of decades...the fact that it came up when discussing nudity made me chuckle)
It's a clause in the standard "rich and famous" contract any artist signs to get their break in the industry. They sell their [soul] talent to the record label in return for the promise of the ability to pursue their passion and get paid for it. There will always be people out there willing to sign just about anything in return for a check with a phone number. The decline in the quality of the music/performers is irrelevant to the industry, as they own (actually or through whatever mechanism currently skirts payola) the outlets for distribution. New is more important than good, and new is very easy.
Might you be referring to the joke that went around about 15 years ago (at least that's when I heard it) for keystroke powered word processor. It goes on to extol the virtues of such a machine, providing direct output onto paper, and using only the power of your fingers to run the entire operation. It is, of course, the venerable manual typewriter. I googled but couldn't find the old text of the "Advertisement".
Slashdot Mirror
Go there. Ask for a generator and installation. Hand them your credit card or a check for $10-12k.
If you don't have natural gas, go to the local LP supplier and buy a 250 or 500 gallon tank and have them install it.
Done.
Seriously, unless you happen to have a very large electric demand, such as electric heat/heat pump (and it sounds like you don't), you can probably get by with a 17-20kW Generac automatic standby generator. That'll push close to 80A@240V, so as long as you're not running everything at once you can squeak by. The easy ones will even auto-cycle every week or two to keep them in running condition, and will automatically start and transfer power without you're ever needing to lift a finger. 500 gallons of LP will run this baby for 10 days... http://www.generac.com/Products/Residential/AirCooled/20KW.aspx
The first time I saw it I thought it was an emoticon for teabagging. Looks a lot more like a sac than a heart, imho.
I prefer using a gross receipts tax. Any money you receive in return for goods or services is generally recorded (unless it's an under the table transaction, which is currently invisible anyway). You pay a small percentage on that. No deductions, no exclusions. You can have a sliding scale percentage, but all the money is on the table. I'd like to see it identical for personal and corporate entities.
We have a GRT for businesses in my town, and it's very difficult to game. Of course it's a fraction of a percent, so hiding a transaction here or there doesn't really help much. I think I figured once that the federal government could live on 2-3% GRT. My mother hated the idea because she was about to sell a house, and that seemed unfair. I pointed out she just gave 6% to some fool who did nothing but put a sign in her yard - and how much was it worth to defend that land and guarantee her right to own it in the first place. She wasn't swayed :-)
T8s can be made to 98CRI, which is typically specified for doctors offices. Unfortunately, there is little public pressure to provide higher CRIs in consumer lamps, so the 98CRIs are only in 5000K lights which is great for good lighting and lousy for mimicking the incandescents they replace. The other problem is repeatability of spectrum. If you get an incandescent lamp, it will have practically the same temperature (and CRI=100 of course) as every other lamp in the room. Even if it's not the same wattage or style (save the goofy color correction lamps) the spectrum is blackbody so it blends well. Get two different temperature CFLs in a room (and this goes for LED, too) and you've got a washed out version of disco lighting. That may not be a big deal when you first lamp your fixtures, but as soon as the first one dies it becomes a big issue unless you've stockpiled identical lamps ahead of time.
...the congress should change the law to prohibit any infrastructure provider from also selling service over that infrastructure. If the cable, telephone, electric, etc. utility plants were required to be run as an independent, stand alone business from the content provided (electrical generation, content sourcing, telecommunication connection backend) there would be fewer tying problems.
Now, that said, there might still be other issues over interfaces and who's problem it is when things break, but physical connections are pretty easy to check.
I see it like the long distance telecom market. 30 years ago you had Ma Bell. You paid through the nose for anything you wanted. Then deregulation came to being, and as a result the long distance market - since it was content only and no infrastructure - became a seriously competitive area. We went from $0.25/min, minimum, for any LD call to a couple of cents a minute, and the price has been pretty stable.
Unfortunately, the "government is bad" mantra we've been fed by the right misses the point that standardization (open, IP unencumbered - or at least compulsory licensed) is good for consumers. Sure NTSC wasn't great, but it WORKED, for everyone. ATSC was an absolute abortion, and was the result of the FCC having no backbone whatsoever.
Unfortunately, we need more regulation of telecom, not less, but it needs to be GOOD regulation. Invalidation of all local monopoly contracts would be a good start. If you keep these companies from dipping their fingers into all the pies, you'll find they will play much better. They will kick and scream and throw money at lobbiests, but the best solution is a fixed standard. Hell, the gov't might as well commandeer IP for the purpose - the common good, you might say.
Remove the veil of corporate protection from officers and members of the board of directors. Make them, explicitly, jointly and severally, personally liable for all debts and obligations of the corporation. Make them criminally liable for any acts committed by the corporation.
Then you can eliminate SOX. There will still be problems, but you'll have asses to kick.
That's great, just as long as the sites they want to go to (which includes some Visa sites, such as the Signature home page, and many banking sites) will work in FF. I run into about a site a month which either wont' load or can't load in Firefox, and I have to use IE.
Doesn't seem very sexy.
Most of the undereducated people I know who are freaking geniuses qualify for that title only in their own minds. Most are poorly adjusted to producing anything of value and utterly unreliable. Add that to the horribly shallow knowledge of even those things which they feel they are masters of simply makes them dangerous in any regulated environment. Most of the younger geniuses I've known have been bored and either found ways to apply themselves and advance to really understand their areas of expertise, or they've spiraled down into various psychoses and never really realized their potential. There are diminishingly few rare people who can rise above on pure intellectual merit alone. Most of the "successful" people without degrees possess both the additional attribute of being (a) very charismatic and (b) excellent/shrewd businessmen. Not all hurdles are achievable via technical knowledge.
As I understand it, wear leveling does occur in practically all CF cards, though it may not be as robust as a purpose built SSD. For what it's worth, the unRaid (slackware, iirc) operating system is kept on a flash drive, and is not much different than a CF for those purposes. It seems to do just fine in long term installations. 100,000 writes (well, erases) is a long time for most applications (10 years if the block gets rewritten every hour). If you fill half a 32GB card with static data, and run a gig worth of data at full speed in the remaining space, with in a continuous read-write cycle at about the highest speed most of these cards can do, it would take over two years to exhaust the typical write cycle limit - and that's assuming that the only "wear leveling" algorithm is a sequential use of cells. That's a higher data rate than you'd get if you used it to record a full spectrum broadcast HD channel 24/7. And why would you use your OS drive for that?
I really don't think that a real-world application, especially for a non-commercial user, for this type of machine is going to break one of these cards.
16GB is available on microSD, and I've seen adapters which allow them to slip into a USB slot with almost zero protrusion (http://www.amazon.com/DATA-MICRO-Reader-microSD-interface/dp/B000VE2PCG). Speed isn't great - 48Mbps - but your just booting the OS, and maybe a small app or two, right? If you can go a smidge bigger, 64GB SD are expected "soon." Speed is still low, but many lappys have an SD specific slot (which would also work with a microSD-SD adapter, of course)
Finally if you really need more space, 100GB is available on CF (http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08092306pretec_64gb_100gb_cf.asp). Speed is much better - up to 400Mbps. You can even get a CF to SATA/2.5HDD adapter (http://www.buyextras.com/criococsaadr.html?gclid=CKrE2LWLy5cCFQsaHgod5TIDTQ) for $15. There are 2-CF options out there, but the ones I saw were maxed at 32GB/CF.
So go out there and fire up that system with what exists. No need to wait for the manufacturers to put all the pieces together.
Instead of the current rate system. No deductions, no exemptions...every dollar that comes in gets taxed at 3%. Visa takes this amount from every purchase in the US, and they don't even provide a military or space program.
I know that this would never pass, because it would increase the corporate taxes, not lower them. The effective rate for most corporations, based on their cash flow, is vanishingly small.
What, at $69? How much time do you think it costs to set up a linux machine from scratch, including all the sharing necessary for a mixed environment? How much do you think a development person costs? In billable hours, most of these guys waste $69 worth of time on coffee breaks or taking a dump. I've set up two of these, and each one took about 30 minutes (exclusive of the hardware build, which was zero for the old Dell I had). The last time I installed ubuntu it took 30 minutes just to get to the startup boot.
Free is not the end-all, be-all, especially in business. This would be $0 if he didn't need more than, say, 2TB of storage (3x1TB, one for parity), but $69 is not really a heavy cost. There are a lot of things I could do instead of paying for, but I don't, because even at my pedestrian $130/hr billing rate it's better for me to pay for a widget that fixes my problem than spend 4 hours troubleshooting it and getting it fixed myself.
Okay, unRaid is not particularly fast compared to an optimized system, but it's expandable, had redundancy, is expandable, is web managed, plays nice with windows, sets up in about 20 minutes, costs $0 for a three disc license and $69(?) for a 6 disk license.
My total unoptimized box on an utterly unoptimized Gb network (stock cards, settings, with 100 and 1000 nodes) and unmanaged switches just transferred an 8.3GB file in a hair under three minutes. From a single, cheap SATA drive to a Vista box with an old EIDE drive. Now 380Mb/s is not blazingly fast, but remember that it took almost no effort.
http://lime-technology.com/
No connection except as a happy customer with a 4TB media server that took longer to assemble the case than to get the SW running. If only my Vista Media Center install has been this easy.
First, the manufacturers in this country stripped the PE of most of its use by buy the law which exempts themselves from requiring their engineers be registered, even if it involves health and safety of the public. But it's better...
The California board (and many others, I suspect) can't lay a finger on a non-PE practicing professional engineering! Why? Because they are not PEs, and therefore outside of the jurisdiction of the board. You may laugh, but I recall that was the result of one such complaint which was lodged against a non-PE practicing engineering (structural, iirc). The AG may prosecute such a case, but it has to be high enough profile for that office to take on, which it typically isn't.
Now, one might argue that their expert witnesses must be PEs if the scope of the content falls within the breadth of PE licensure, but I believe that there are some legislative details which must exist to press that condition. It is the case in some states, but I don't follow that too closely. (dis: I am a PE, and I do expert witness work for architectural/building related cases for less than 5% of my practice).
The government may not classify something to prevent disclosure if it would cover up an illegal act. That's not the right wording, but it is the gist of the law. Basically, classifying info to cover it up is, in itself, illegal. The problem is that the people who are classifying the material are most likely the ones doing the illegal act in the first place, and adding a cover up charge is relatively inconsequential to the actual illegal activity. It's like perjury - if you lie and lose, you're no worse off; if you lie and win, you generally are scott free (since, based on the evidence available, you didn't actually lie).
In XP all my main apps are launched using Ctrl-Alt-{x}, where x is usually the first letter of the app (T for thunderbird, I for irfanview, N for notepad (well, textpad in my case), etc. Vista has the same functionality of course, but it's no faster.
You do know you can put web items on the XP desktop, right?
FWIW, I like Vista's Media Center much better than XPs version, though it's still a piss-poor attempt at a really good interface, imho (I can only presume that TiVo has the patent on intuitive interfaces). As with almost all microsoft software, it presumes that the only way you want it to operate is the single way the developers envisioned, and that there will never be more than a single person with data on a computer. *shrug*
I'll say that I've seen what looks like a context sensitive network connections on a colleague's laptop, which could be fantastic for those of us who struggle with multiple networks. I haven't played with it enough to know if it works as well as it promises.
It's not necessarily keeping the files in sync. Media monkey is supposed to be able to do it, but for some code reason I can't wrap my non-programmer mind around it appears that the program will run out of memory and silently exit a sync if it has to do too many different formats during the sync (FLAC, APE, and MP3, for example). I haven't quite figured out how that happens in a single threaded process with enough memory free to store two uncompressed versions of a file. After spending about 4 hours on the forum looking for answers I just gave up - it's either a known bug with very low priority or it's a quirk in my setup.
Anyway, the file syncing isn't so bad, but it would be nice to sync playlists back and forth so if I built the playlists in Media Monkey, it could back-sync from either the playlists in iTunes or froma second instance of Media Monkey using the "compressed" library.
Who cares about the battery charge time, I can refresh a primary cell light in about 15 seconds (20 if I have to take the new battery out of a blister pack). The whole advantage of rechargables is that they will be less expensive than primaries over time. At $170, you'd have to go through a lot of primaries to make it financially viable, and you could easily use a pair of swappable rechargeable batteries (one in the charger) to get the same effect for 1/5 the cost.
Not saying it's not neat, it's just not useful enough to be economical. I mean, if you're going to carry around a charger, why not just have that spare battery with you instead? (Unless you happen to be somewhere with a constant, line voltage power source but no access to batteries or a traditional charger...which would be practically nowhere never).
15 seconds to charge, two or three D cells worth of juice, and $10 should be the right spot.
I'm sorry my mod points just ran out. With Flac it's almost trivial to transcode to any format you want, and you don't have to worry about losses. I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC, and made a "second" library using AAC for my ipod. I wish I could keep the two libraries sync'd, but for some reason media monkey won't do it (transcode failures, not the inability to sync to a folder). Still, it works well, and if I decide to switch formats in the future, I just transcode again.
Well, in defense, FLAC is a free codec which has free (beer+speech) plugins written for most media player/conversion software. While I agree that there's a downside to having to convert your incoming files (and the requisite problems in translating tags one for one), ALAC is IP encumbered and it generally not available as a free plugin for most media players/converters.
Besides, I'm not aware of any iPod which can do a lossless file justice, from an audiophile perspective. You may as well run any lossless though a high bitrate AAC and save yourself 60%+ of the necessary lossless storage.
exploited by an eager beaver prosecutor.
That's kind of what got them in trouble in the first place, don't you think?
(Though I'm old enough to remember it, I haven't heard that term in a couple of decades...the fact that it came up when discussing nudity made me chuckle)
It's a clause in the standard "rich and famous" contract any artist signs to get their break in the industry. They sell their [soul] talent to the record label in return for the promise of the ability to pursue their passion and get paid for it. There will always be people out there willing to sign just about anything in return for a check with a phone number. The decline in the quality of the music/performers is irrelevant to the industry, as they own (actually or through whatever mechanism currently skirts payola) the outlets for distribution. New is more important than good, and new is very easy.
Might you be referring to the joke that went around about 15 years ago (at least that's when I heard it) for keystroke powered word processor. It goes on to extol the virtues of such a machine, providing direct output onto paper, and using only the power of your fingers to run the entire operation. It is, of course, the venerable manual typewriter. I googled but couldn't find the old text of the "Advertisement".
We can always hope...