What you have done with your TiVo sounds great. My guess is you have a good deal of free time (or had at one point) to get your system running.
Me? I've found that a couple of hours of searching for those types of hacks for the box usually ends in a bunch of broken links and just enough information and acronyms to give up on hacks. You see, that's the problem with TiVo - especially DTiVo. Everything cool requires a serious hack, and dealing with people who would rather hack than teach. Not that I blame them - documentation and help-desk support for newbies sucks. TiVo can do all these great things, but most of us don't have the time to invest in getting them to work.
It sounds like MCE might actually be worth looking at, though I would miss the suggestions. I wouldn't use it for my wife as she's not tolerant of TV recording failures, but It might be easier to play around with supported software. *shrug*
Wow, I was clearly under the false impression that the superdrive had always been +R. Mea culpa. Well, just goes to show that -R didn't succeed even with Apple's support. I'M KIDDING!
Seriously, though. A single vendor (even a big, a/v production conencted one like apple) won't make or break a format. Consumer acceptance is bigger than that.
Make it universal, make it cheap, make it easy, make it good...in that order. (I toyed around with changing the order of the first two, but DishNetwork remided me that cheap without brand names won't fly in the long run)
I keep USCellular (which is evil, I know) because (1) they're the only ones with coverage in the mountains where I work and (2) I can get the cheapest plan for two people that works well for the way we use the phones ($60 for two phones sharing 700 minutes, free incoming, and regional in practially every state I'll visit for more than two days out of the entire year)
I asked three other carriers about coverage before I re-upped, and their uniform response was "we don't do analog, and we probably won't have towers there for several years, if ever." Nice.
Corporations don't die, they are simply recycled. The assets are sold and the corporation gets a fresh start. Is Enron in business? Is eToys selling toys? Of course they are, and all the old stockholders got squat.
If I declared bankruptcy like a corporation, my family would remove all my valuable possesions from me, My creditors would sell the reamins, I would get a clean, fresh credit report, and my family would give me a bunch of my stuff back to re-start my life, free of any association with the old me. Heck, I'd even get to keep my name, as long as a family member "bought" it in the dispsoal auction.
Sounds a lot better than personal bankruptcy to me!
Yes, apple backed +R. But +R lagged behind early on because the discs were 2X the price (even thought they burned at 2.4x vs 2x...nobody was impressed).
The reason +R survived was that manufacturers created +/- drives. Now +R discs are comparable in price to -R. +R also has a better following now because its supported by about the same number of consumer players, usually as a brief edge in speed and is the only DL format. But those last three are just icing. The real reason it's alive is the dual format burners. The real reason it's popular is because its price competitive.
Hint: if you want BluRay to succeed, make sure that all the pressed content is out there in BR. If you want it to crush HD-DVD, make Blu-ray cheaper to buy blank media, cheaper to manufacture pressed discs, and make the hardware the same cost as HD-DVD. As icing, make sure every BluRay player can play HD-DVD as well.
...you still won't be able to get anything onto or off of that drive without paying for both a monthly subscription and a per-file fee.
(USCC will sell you a camera phone, but thy have disabled the phone to disallow the use of a local connection cable to upload or download any audio or graphics. Nice, huh.)
"as possible" is the key phrase. Pay your bills, don't live like you've made a million before you cash your first check.
Suggestions: DO: by furniture at auction, pick up technology on sale, put down $.49/sf carpet, do you own work rather than hiring consultants, market by word of mouth or through your first clients. DON'T: Buy solid mahogany desks, aeron chairs, and 30" HD montors, take out full page ads, or lease prime downtown office space in your first year.
Yes, I have a startup (of sorts). Yes, I made money in my second year. No, it wasn't a lot. Yes, I stared out with less than $10k in capital. No, I don't advertise (unless you count the yellow pages, where I buy an extra line with my web page address). Yes, I rent cheap, not-too-beautiful space four blocks from the "high rent" district - I pay 1/3 the SF rate.
I may not "live and breathe" my work - I have a family who gets as much of me as I can give - but I'm pretty good at what I do, I keep my customers happy, and I love what I do.
Oh, and I write off half my conputer toys as business expenses:-)
Huh? You mean the banks want their money back if you fail miserably? That's just ridculous!
Maybe this will make America a leader in personal responsibility. All we need is to revamp the rest of the code.
(FWIW, I have a business loan I personally signed for in order to upfit my first office. You'd better believe I'm working my ass off to make sure I can pay for it)
According to ebay, YOU are selling the item and are responsible for it. Ebay is just an online location where you may auction or sell your wares at a fixed price. eBay is just a location, like a flea market. Each vendor sets up their wares in this virtual stall and warrants their own descriptions.
You many not like it, but it you're a seller on eBay, you agreed to this arrangement in their TOS when you signed up (or continued to use their services, if they've changed since you signed up).
You know, you can buy those for a small fee (to a private company), right? The state gets a $200 license fee per year. That's it.
This yahoo probably had a friend get burned on eBay, and he's going to use his legislative powers to make sure it doesn't happen again. At least not to his friend. When he buys from someone in Ohio. Who decides to register with the state. Yeah, right.
Thi is one of those cases where you have two guys pointing the finger at each other and saying "It's his fault."
Ebay disclaims any part in the transaction itself. Sort of like a flea market owner - lots of land and tents and marketing, but no selling. The selling, accoring to Ebay's TOS and agreed to each ebay applicant, occurs between the buyer and seller.
This is a typical case of applying brick and mortar laws to an online endeavor, and finding that certain things are just not reasonable. The one year apprenticeship is a good example.
My guess is that the sponsor has a friend (or a FOAF) who got stung on ebay by a less than reputable seller. As a result, he's going to fix the world by licensing these folks and making sure they can make good on their commitments. Typical knee-jerk reaction.
Nope, has nothing to do with interstate commerce. It's a licensing regulation, just as if you opened up a beauty salon, started a general contracting business, or opened a professional services firm.
They WOULD get in trouble if they required that everyone who sells to buyers in OH pay the license fee and post the bond.
Oh, and IANAL, of course, but I do run a business licenced in several states.
Wish I had mod points for you. As much as we want to believe that legal at the source = legal at the destination, the law was written by and for the recording industry. No other works, save computer programs, have such strong protections.
I personally hope that they do well, primarily because they provide a service I can't get in the US - pick-your-own codec, pay more for higher quality, choose the tracks you want. For domestic suppliers, you only get the last one. I archive my CDs in FLAC, and look for stuff I want to keep in the same format. If I just want to see if I like it, I can stomach 128kb for a listening or two - especially if it means I can sample a CD on my own time / in my own equipment for less than a dollar.
I want them to succeed because I like the options, but I don't like the selection. I want it all - is that too much to ask? The fact that it's wildly popular speaks to it's desirability (even without mainstream marketing). I just want someone over here to say, "damnit, with our resources, we could do that - and drive those Russian rat-bastards off the net." By the time they're done, there might be enough legal players to keep the idea going.
Yes, the artist is too lazy. I mean that in a businss sense, not a personal one. The last time AllofMP3 came up here, someone from a small label posted about how difficult is was to get registered with the Russian law firm which distributed the payments for the songs. Their complaint was that over half the documents were in Russian, and their US phone calls were not returned.
Why didn't they retain a Russian lawyer? Calling them stuipid seems a bit harsh, so I'll settle for lazy.
See my other posts (grossly incorrect about US organizations and pay schemes, as I'm not inthe business) for my thoughts on why this is no different that the US system, save ease-of-use for natives.
As for your question...let's make it closer to the topic: If I start broadcasting your songs on my new FM station and pay my ASCAP (or whoever) fees, and you don't sign up to receive your share - or you don't pick up your check or provide a current address, I'd say you were too lazy to get paid.
So.....your local FM station is also "skirting the laws," eh? You see, it's a similar provision which All of MP3 has gotten. They pay their fee (kind of like an ASCAP fee) and they're done. If the musicians want their money, they have to sign up. In Russia.
Let's sya you're a Russian Artist, and have never been to the States, or even want to go. Some young DJ finds your CD on his vacation to Minsk, and starts playing it in rotation on HotRock98 back in Bumfark, ID. Will you get a check for your part of the royalties mailed to you? HELL NO! Will you get to apply to (whoever does that stuff in he US...sorry, not an artist - only have friends who are) get your money by reading all the appropriate documentation in Russian, and get to speak to someone fluent in Russian to help you fill in the forms? HELL NO.
See, you have to play ball, and you have to play ball they way they play it "over there." If you don't like it, get a Russian Lawyer to apply for your share of he pie. If you don't like that, go buy key Russian politicians and ge the system changed. That's the way it's done - the labels just don't want to spend the money.
Don't think that's the way it is in he US? Why do you think it's a violation of copyright to rent music CDs and cassettes, but not DVDs and Videotapes? That's right - politics. It's a pay-to-play system.
No, you pay for good, clean rips in the format of your choice, from an easily searchable catalog on servers with a fat pipe. FWIW, a.wav may cost you as much as the original CD in many cases.
As I understand it, they are required to pay a fee to the artist/label for each download, but most (labels/artists) are too lazy/stubburn/poor to register with the Russians. (Hint: when dealing with Russia, hire a Russian lawyer).
Huh? We're talking about local taxes for local service. Not some suck-the-money-out-of-NOVA program (though that would probably be fair given the amount of $$$ they hog for highway services).
*note for non-locals: NOVA is Northern Viginia, basically an overpopulated hot bed of rich folks in a suburb of DC who make most of their money off of government contracts, aka Beltway Bandits. The produce the lions share of taxes in the state, and the roads are a never ending money-pit. The only Viginians with their noses hiher in the air tend to live around Charlottesville.
So...you would expect that to get wireless in your town would increase you taxes by $700/year? That's what "basic" cable internet costs around me. I'd say I'm in the above-average group for home costs in my area, and my annual taxes are somewhere around $1500. I'm going to make a wild guess that it would take less than a 50% bump in RE taxes to get wireless running in my whole town - and we're fairly spread out. And every family who doesn't have that $700/yr to get broadband with their $299 WalMart computer can now surf with me.
Except you've already paid for most of the infrastructure (via the existing network the government uses). This law just makes sure that you won't have to pay an extra $1 in taxes because the telecom who own the politicians plans on billing you $30/mo for the same service, and a dollar seems like unfair competition to them.
Interestingly, my local government offers trash service for about $12/mo. Can I decline? Actually, I think I can. But I'll have to pay a private company $50/mo for service or use the local (private) landfill which has a $25 minimum tipping fee. The local gov already has a large conract for trash and tipping services, and I get the resulting efficiencies. I paid for the infrastructure via taxes, and I pay fo the add-on service at a (lower) bulk rate.
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What you have done with your TiVo sounds great. My guess is you have a good deal of free time (or had at one point) to get your system running.
Me? I've found that a couple of hours of searching for those types of hacks for the box usually ends in a bunch of broken links and just enough information and acronyms to give up on hacks. You see, that's the problem with TiVo - especially DTiVo. Everything cool requires a serious hack, and dealing with people who would rather hack than teach. Not that I blame them - documentation and help-desk support for newbies sucks. TiVo can do all these great things, but most of us don't have the time to invest in getting them to work.
It sounds like MCE might actually be worth looking at, though I would miss the suggestions. I wouldn't use it for my wife as she's not tolerant of TV recording failures, but It might be easier to play around with supported software. *shrug*
Wow, I was clearly under the false impression that the superdrive had always been +R. Mea culpa. Well, just goes to show that -R didn't succeed even with Apple's support. I'M KIDDING!
Seriously, though. A single vendor (even a big, a/v production conencted one like apple) won't make or break a format. Consumer acceptance is bigger than that.
Make it universal, make it cheap, make it easy, make it good...in that order. (I toyed around with changing the order of the first two, but DishNetwork remided me that cheap without brand names won't fly in the long run)
I keep USCellular (which is evil, I know) because (1) they're the only ones with coverage in the mountains where I work and (2) I can get the cheapest plan for two people that works well for the way we use the phones ($60 for two phones sharing 700 minutes, free incoming, and regional in practially every state I'll visit for more than two days out of the entire year)
I asked three other carriers about coverage before I re-upped, and their uniform response was "we don't do analog, and we probably won't have towers there for several years, if ever." Nice.
Corporations don't die, they are simply recycled. The assets are sold and the corporation gets a fresh start. Is Enron in business? Is eToys selling toys? Of course they are, and all the old stockholders got squat.
If I declared bankruptcy like a corporation, my family would remove all my valuable possesions from me, My creditors would sell the reamins, I would get a clean, fresh credit report, and my family would give me a bunch of my stuff back to re-start my life, free of any association with the old me. Heck, I'd even get to keep my name, as long as a family member "bought" it in the dispsoal auction.
Sounds a lot better than personal bankruptcy to me!
What happens if your income changes? Is it based on what your income was when the loan was made, or what it is at the moment you default?
Yes, apple backed +R. But +R lagged behind early on because the discs were 2X the price (even thought they burned at 2.4x vs 2x...nobody was impressed).
The reason +R survived was that manufacturers created +/- drives. Now +R discs are comparable in price to -R. +R also has a better following now because its supported by about the same number of consumer players, usually as a brief edge in speed and is the only DL format. But those last three are just icing. The real reason it's alive is the dual format burners. The real reason it's popular is because its price competitive.
Hint: if you want BluRay to succeed, make sure that all the pressed content is out there in BR. If you want it to crush HD-DVD, make Blu-ray cheaper to buy blank media, cheaper to manufacture pressed discs, and make the hardware the same cost as HD-DVD. As icing, make sure every BluRay player can play HD-DVD as well.
...you still won't be able to get anything onto or off of that drive without paying for both a monthly subscription and a per-file fee.
(USCC will sell you a camera phone, but thy have disabled the phone to disallow the use of a local connection cable to upload or download any audio or graphics. Nice, huh.)
"as possible" is the key phrase. Pay your bills, don't live like you've made a million before you cash your first check.
:-)
Suggestions:
DO: by furniture at auction, pick up technology on sale, put down $.49/sf carpet, do you own work rather than hiring consultants, market by word of mouth or through your first clients.
DON'T: Buy solid mahogany desks, aeron chairs, and 30" HD montors, take out full page ads, or lease prime downtown office space in your first year.
Yes, I have a startup (of sorts). Yes, I made money in my second year. No, it wasn't a lot. Yes, I stared out with less than $10k in capital. No, I don't advertise (unless you count the yellow pages, where I buy an extra line with my web page address). Yes, I rent cheap, not-too-beautiful space four blocks from the "high rent" district - I pay 1/3 the SF rate.
I may not "live and breathe" my work - I have a family who gets as much of me as I can give - but I'm pretty good at what I do, I keep my customers happy, and I love what I do.
Oh, and I write off half my conputer toys as business expenses
Huh? You mean the banks want their money back if you fail miserably? That's just ridculous!
Maybe this will make America a leader in personal responsibility. All we need is to revamp the rest of the code.
(FWIW, I have a business loan I personally signed for in order to upfit my first office. You'd better believe I'm working my ass off to make sure I can pay for it)
If you can pull that one off, you may as well just play the stock market. One rule: buy low, sell high. How can you lose?
Cost of hardware (he got it for free) and cost o software (he writes his own).
Hey, I'd take it too, given that kind of deal!
According to ebay, YOU are selling the item and are responsible for it. Ebay is just an online location where you may auction or sell your wares at a fixed price. eBay is just a location, like a flea market. Each vendor sets up their wares in this virtual stall and warrants their own descriptions.
You many not like it, but it you're a seller on eBay, you agreed to this arrangement in their TOS when you signed up (or continued to use their services, if they've changed since you signed up).
Way higher, especially in the *drool* 30" model. Actually, my laptop has higher resolution (1920x1200) than this screen.
You know, you can buy those for a small fee (to a private company), right? The state gets a $200 license fee per year. That's it.
This yahoo probably had a friend get burned on eBay, and he's going to use his legislative powers to make sure it doesn't happen again. At least not to his friend. When he buys from someone in Ohio. Who decides to register with the state. Yeah, right.
Thi is one of those cases where you have two guys pointing the finger at each other and saying "It's his fault."
Ebay disclaims any part in the transaction itself. Sort of like a flea market owner - lots of land and tents and marketing, but no selling. The selling, accoring to Ebay's TOS and agreed to each ebay applicant, occurs between the buyer and seller.
This is a typical case of applying brick and mortar laws to an online endeavor, and finding that certain things are just not reasonable. The one year apprenticeship is a good example.
My guess is that the sponsor has a friend (or a FOAF) who got stung on ebay by a less than reputable seller. As a result, he's going to fix the world by licensing these folks and making sure they can make good on their commitments. Typical knee-jerk reaction.
Nope, has nothing to do with interstate commerce. It's a licensing regulation, just as if you opened up a beauty salon, started a general contracting business, or opened a professional services firm.
They WOULD get in trouble if they required that everyone who sells to buyers in OH pay the license fee and post the bond.
Oh, and IANAL, of course, but I do run a business licenced in several states.
I'm guessing this guy (GP) watches only FOX. He's knows it's unbiased, because they tell him it is :-)
Most of the accounting practices of corporations in America are based on this premise.
Wish I had mod points for you. As much as we want to believe that legal at the source = legal at the destination, the law was written by and for the recording industry. No other works, save computer programs, have such strong protections.
I personally hope that they do well, primarily because they provide a service I can't get in the US - pick-your-own codec, pay more for higher quality, choose the tracks you want. For domestic suppliers, you only get the last one. I archive my CDs in FLAC, and look for stuff I want to keep in the same format. If I just want to see if I like it, I can stomach 128kb for a listening or two - especially if it means I can sample a CD on my own time / in my own equipment for less than a dollar.
I want them to succeed because I like the options, but I don't like the selection. I want it all - is that too much to ask? The fact that it's wildly popular speaks to it's desirability (even without mainstream marketing). I just want someone over here to say, "damnit, with our resources, we could do that - and drive those Russian rat-bastards off the net." By the time they're done, there might be enough legal players to keep the idea going.
Yes, the artist is too lazy. I mean that in a businss sense, not a personal one. The last time AllofMP3 came up here, someone from a small label posted about how difficult is was to get registered with the Russian law firm which distributed the payments for the songs. Their complaint was that over half the documents were in Russian, and their US phone calls were not returned.
Why didn't they retain a Russian lawyer? Calling them stuipid seems a bit harsh, so I'll settle for lazy.
See my other posts (grossly incorrect about US organizations and pay schemes, as I'm not inthe business) for my thoughts on why this is no different that the US system, save ease-of-use for natives.
As for your question...let's make it closer to the topic: If I start broadcasting your songs on my new FM station and pay my ASCAP (or whoever) fees, and you don't sign up to receive your share - or you don't pick up your check or provide a current address, I'd say you were too lazy to get paid.
So.....your local FM station is also "skirting the laws," eh? You see, it's a similar provision which All of MP3 has gotten. They pay their fee (kind of like an ASCAP fee) and they're done. If the musicians want their money, they have to sign up. In Russia.
Let's sya you're a Russian Artist, and have never been to the States, or even want to go. Some young DJ finds your CD on his vacation to Minsk, and starts playing it in rotation on HotRock98 back in Bumfark, ID. Will you get a check for your part of the royalties mailed to you? HELL NO! Will you get to apply to (whoever does that stuff in he US...sorry, not an artist - only have friends who are) get your money by reading all the appropriate documentation in Russian, and get to speak to someone fluent in Russian to help you fill in the forms? HELL NO.
See, you have to play ball, and you have to play ball they way they play it "over there." If you don't like it, get a Russian Lawyer to apply for your share of he pie. If you don't like that, go buy key Russian politicians and ge the system changed. That's the way it's done - the labels just don't want to spend the money.
Don't think that's the way it is in he US? Why do you think it's a violation of copyright to rent music CDs and cassettes, but not DVDs and Videotapes? That's right - politics. It's a pay-to-play system.
No, you pay for good, clean rips in the format of your choice, from an easily searchable catalog on servers with a fat pipe. FWIW, a .wav may cost you as much as the original CD in many cases.
As I understand it, they are required to pay a fee to the artist/label for each download, but most (labels/artists) are too lazy/stubburn/poor to register with the Russians. (Hint: when dealing with Russia, hire a Russian lawyer).
Huh? We're talking about local taxes for local service. Not some suck-the-money-out-of-NOVA program (though that would probably be fair given the amount of $$$ they hog for highway services).
*note for non-locals: NOVA is Northern Viginia, basically an overpopulated hot bed of rich folks in a suburb of DC who make most of their money off of government contracts, aka Beltway Bandits. The produce the lions share of taxes in the state, and the roads are a never ending money-pit. The only Viginians with their noses hiher in the air tend to live around Charlottesville.
So...you would expect that to get wireless in your town would increase you taxes by $700/year? That's what "basic" cable internet costs around me. I'd say I'm in the above-average group for home costs in my area, and my annual taxes are somewhere around $1500. I'm going to make a wild guess that it would take less than a 50% bump in RE taxes to get wireless running in my whole town - and we're fairly spread out. And every family who doesn't have that $700/yr to get broadband with their $299 WalMart computer can now surf with me.
Except you've already paid for most of the infrastructure (via the existing network the government uses). This law just makes sure that you won't have to pay an extra $1 in taxes because the telecom who own the politicians plans on billing you $30/mo for the same service, and a dollar seems like unfair competition to them.
Interestingly, my local government offers trash service for about $12/mo. Can I decline? Actually, I think I can. But I'll have to pay a private company $50/mo for service or use the local (private) landfill which has a $25 minimum tipping fee. The local gov already has a large conract for trash and tipping services, and I get the resulting efficiencies. I paid for the infrastructure via taxes, and I pay fo the add-on service at a (lower) bulk rate.