Between increased maintenance, broken printers and destroyed print outs I can't see how the TCO was much less than double the price of the branded inks.
I bought small amounts. What worked I kept using. What didn't I junked.
Here is what works for me. My wife's re-branded Dell all in one - donated to goodwill. I couldn't see the thimble size carts priced the same as half full HP carts as a value. The carts could not be picked up down the street, so S & H from Dell was extra. I found no refilling instructions online. It never got it's first refill.
My HP laserjet III uses refilled carts. I would refill myself except it only needs a replacement once every couple years. Cost to operate is about $18/year in toner.
My HP950 The color carts were not reliable when refilled. Sometimes the printer simply stopped mid photograph. Black refills worked great. Bought black ink by the pint bottle. One time when one color died, I switched to B/W printing to get greyscale prints. Got a lovely purple picture. WTF? It uses color ink to print black and white. Printer now sits in a box on the shelf. I liked the self alignment it does, so it would make a good networked printer, but cost of supplies retired it to spare status.
HP922c Color refills not reliable. Refills work if running a large batch of photos, but don't expect it to work the next day. Black refills work great. Uses the same black cart as the HP950. I am on my third re-order of ultra black pigmented ink. The twin pack of color carts are less than the price of a single color cart for the HP950. I buy the ocasional twin pack. I do photo printing through my local Costco at $0.19 per 4X6 and $1.99 per 8X10.
Most B/W printing gets done on the laser. Web pages go on the HP722c. I don't home print photos anymore.
All my printers are on network printservers (Hawking). At less than the price of one set of carts for the HP950, a printservers is a good investment. The inkjet printer sits on a shelf in the hall closet so the whole family can use it. This cuts down on problems of dried out carts and supporting a fleet of printers for each PC.
We have the 2 printers online and the HP950 sits as a spare.
I've heard that some European banks do one-time passwords - you just print out a sheet and bring it with you. This would be the ideal solution if you don't care about privacy, but of course if, like me, you live in the U.S., you probably don't have this option.
Nobody has mentioned the simple way to limit your losses. Open a travel account at another bank. Set up automatic weekly transfers. Use it for gas and such. My travel account gets $200/week. If it gets hit, I contact my bank. My potential loss is very limited. The checking account is not backed up with overdraft protection. Keep track of your balance and use the bank ATM whenever possible. The rest of the bills are set up from the primary account at another bank with auto payments. If the electric is a little off one month, it can be adjsted upon my return. They are happy to receive a regular payment even if it is a little over or under. Let them know what's up. They are very good working with you to get paid.
As others have said, this setup has all sorts of problems, from a reliance upon a source of ice that may very well be dumping more heat into the local environment than it saves, to wasting water.
Very good point. Just where is the fridge located that produces the ice? Where is it putting the heat. The fridge is not included in the price of the project. Why not just take the door off the fridge and mount the fridge in the wall to expell the heat elswhere?
For those who don't know, fridges use a small compressor because they are cooling a small insulated enclosed space. They do not provide enough cooling to deal with the heat influx of a large room. It's BTU capacity is way undersized.
His fridge would not produce enough ice to keep his cooler supplied. The ice is a overnight creation cold storage medium to provide a short coling burst. This is not a cooling solution.
Air conditioning compressors displacement is designed to be effecient at expected cold side pressures and high (hot) side pressures. A fridge compressor is sized to work with lower suction pressures (larger displacement) for the creation of Ice in the freezer compartment. Running it with constantly elevated tempratures will overload the compressor causing ineffeciency.
When buying a compressor, they are sized for high temp use (air conditioning) and low temprature (freezers) The diffrence is the displacement is sized to the expected low side pressure.
High pressure moves more BTU/watt. Low pressure is for a large temprature differential.
those of you without PS2 ports can get a USB adapter that you can plug both a keyboard and a mouse into - works fine for mine
That PS2 to USB adaptor is great, even without the bar code reader. I put a second keyboard on a computer the pre-school kids use. That way they have a kid friendly keyboard. I don't have to worry about them hitting the Start menu key all the time. The key is on the other keyboard.
The other use is using a good keyboard with a laptop. Many laptops have a couple USB ports, but lack PS2 ports for an external keyboard. It was a tough choice. Do I want to plug in a good optical mouse or a good keyboard. Now I can do both.
not bad, considering the cost barrier drops nearly to zero.
It helps with the TCO of my Win98. On it's regular re-install, I just swipe the CD Key. It saves having to type all the boxes of random letters and numbers which saves time. Having a key rejected for a typo is the pits.
Yea, I still have an old Win 98 box. It's used with my GPS map applications and MIDI music.
New computers seem to leave out the second RS-232 and MPU-401 ports in favor of USB.
So if you've bought a printer without researching the prices of cartridges and the quality/prices of third-party cartridges, that's your fault.
Good point. It's not quite complete however. Quanity of ink and page yield are important in figuring the cost per page. There is some deception out there (not a lie, deception)
HP sells two versions of it's 78 cart. The $35 half full economy version and the high capacity $60 version. The website lists the estimated page yield.
Doing my homework I checked it out. I was using an older HP printer that used the 23D carts. They are cheaper. I found the page yield numbers. They were a little less then the High capacity 78 cart. Wow. Sounds good, except the 23 carts were listed as tested with 15% color page coverage and the 78 cart was listed with 5% color page coverage. Using less ink per page will certanly make the more expensive cartridge yield more pages. If you adjust the % coverage and adjust the yield to match, then the new cartridge doesn't look like a bargan at all.
The fact is that photo-printing to any reasonable quality is *hugely expensive* on a home use printer & PC combination and it's still much cheaper to drop a CD into a shop or a memory card into a machine and get the photos printed that way. Even much cheaper third party cartridges suffer from quality issues - it really is a case of "you get what you pay for".
You got that right. I use color for web pages and document highlights. I let the photofinisher deal with the photos. It is cheaper and the results are much better.
But ignorance is no excuse - if the majority of people are too stupid to see beyond the glossy adverts that they are constantly bombarded with, then more fool them.
I hear that. My new printer did a nice job on photos, and the estimated page yield looked good. When it ran out way too soon from printing photos, I did my homework on what page yield really meant. Then I stopped printing photos. Photos are not 5% page coverage printing.
HP does it a smarter (albeit similarly devious) way. Make your cartridges incompatible by constantly releasing new printer models with new cartridge interfaces. The latest HP inkjet models with the HP 94/95/96/97 cartriges are just the latest example of this tactic.
The big thing I noticed is my HP 95 printer uses a $60 color cart ($35 for the half full economy version) where my HP722c uses a 2 pack color cart ($43) for the same size cart. Needless to say, their old printer is competiting with the new printer. For web pages, Yahoo maps and other color printing, I use the 722, not the 950. The newer 950 sits in a box on the shelf. It's just a spare in case the 722 dies.
HP tried a public relations campaign by touting how much further the 78 cartridge prints by advertising the page count. I did my homework. I found the 722c printer's cartridge was listed by page count at 15% color page coverage.
The 950's color cart would print many more pages.. but at 5% color page coverage. They did not do a page count for both cartridges using the same amount of color printing per page! Needless to say, if I did a simple assumption that if the 722's printer cart did 5% coverage instead of 15% coverage I would get 3X more pages printed for my estimate. Then the comparison fell apart. The 722 printer prints more color pages using less ink from a cartridge at less than half the price.
I'll not buy another color printer until I have the hard numbers on estimated cart yield, cost per cart, and ultimately the cost/page at X percent color coverage.
My wife bought a Dell computer. It came with a Dell all in one printer. The carts are about 1/4 the size of the HP carts. The volume and estimated page yield are not stated anywhere. Needless to say, when it ran out of ink, it became a Goodwill item. I did not let the wife order ink. My laser and inkjet printers are networked. The Hawking printservers I use are about the same price as a HP cart.
Its still shipping with the DRM in the chipset, fully activated and ready to go.
Which means to the masses that the chips will be able to play the future version of I-Tunes where the competition without it will not. It does not mean that your unprotected MP3's won't play.
It's like my C-Band TV receiver. Without the Videocypher module I can watch un-protected content. With the module and a subscription, I can watch un-protected content and protected content.
If you want a C-Band reciever without any DRM, drop me a line. There isn't much it can view.
These features in the chipset don't lock out unprotected content. They do enable secure transactions of protected content. This may include your online banking transactions in the future. A copy of your online statement may be scrambled to a man in the middle sniffing packets and the lock is tied to your hardware key.
The same protection can be given to online movie rentals and other protected content.
I personally have had the "same" computer for about 4 years.
That's about normal. Take a typical power user. They have a good desk machine and the kids have to cast off. They also have a laptop. The desk top gets used at least 4 years and gets pawned off on the kids to extend it. A cola gets spilled on the keyboard and the keyboard gets replaced.
Laptops... Either the battery dies after 12-18 months and it's considered obsolete. The laptop gets replaced instead getting a new battery. The coke gets spilled into the keyboard. The laptop gets replaced. The briefcase is left on the roof of the car while the presentation is loaded then forgotton. Know how many laptops are left in taxi cabs each year? These things don't happen to a desktop.
When laptop and desktop sales are equal, I'm guessing desktops are still used 4:1 more than laptops. Laptops just get replaced more often due to them getting the hard knocks of mobile life.
In fact, such a synthesis program should really include an improvisatory component -- a "learning" program that offers slight deviations in appropriate moments. Of course, learning what those are is probably less quantitative than such a system might allow...
Dude, Windows is not a real time OS. Use MIDI on Windows. Next..
I say who cares? If it sounds good, and the parent suggests it does, then I'll listen to it.
I second that. I have a Yamaha XG sound module. A lot of people have put their piano masterpieces online as a MIDI. I enjoy them more that most CD's of the same piano masterpieces. I can't complain about the fidelety. A CD uses 16 bit sampling. The Yamama module uses 18 bit. It has none of the artifacts of an MP3.
Yes. Only when it prevents sales. Remember protected floppies of the 1980's?
If it won't play in my car and portable and living room DVD and in Winamp, there is a good chance I'll return it as broken. If the retrun in rejected, then future sales are dead. I don't get burned twice.
the main way they did this was by crippling network security to the point that it was WORSE than 9x.
That is the reason I consider my wife's XP Home a stand-alone version. I spent over 3 hours looking to find where Microsoft moved the File Permissions. I figured I wasn't looking in the right place simply because so many other things have new homes. The help file is useless. It makes no assumptions the user may have used permissions in an earlier version and let them know it isn't there. Instead the Help simply lacks anything on LAN sharing permissions just like the OS. It's better with several users using one machine, but for LAN use, it is a downgrade. I do not permit XP Home to be set up for file sharing on the LAN. It simply would be a sitting duck with no file protection from any of the kids on the LAN. Anyone will have full permission to alter, delete, move or add files to an XP Home share. This is insecure by design.
This website hosts the application that encodes files on the user's local hard disk and on any mapped drives on the machine.
This is the big reason I dislike my wife's XP box. XP home is a downgrade in network security if you use SMB on it. Old versions of windows permitted you to share folders and set read passwords and full access passwords. XP Home has done away with that security completely. This leaves shared folders on an XP Home very prone to anyone on your local LAN with a nasty bug or deletion fumblefingers. With passwords on shares (Win 95, 98, ME, NT) shares on other machines not in use are protected from write/delete accidents by a password. That is the reason my photos and music are not hosted by the XP Home machine. The read many times but write once in a while files are protected by passwords.
When I get a bigger hard drive, they are moving to a SAMBA share.
The great thing about it is that you get AT&T's big footprint, albeit their old TDMA footprint, and your minutes never expire, as long as you use at least one minute every two months--pretty easy to do.
Watch out for a gotcha. Read the fine print. Many of the pre-paid plans expire at 24 months regardless of usage. It changes the price of the paging service if you bought a $100 pre-pay.
With a $10 pre pay, it's closer to 84 + 14.2 cents per 2 months. It's even higher if you pre-paid for more minutes.
I have a HP computer that is a couple years old. The CD writer software that came with it suddnly started crashing when it finished burning 1 cd. To recover would require a reboot. No problem. It must have a damaged file somewhere. I deleted the program and got out the original disks to re-install the application.
This is when I found out the application is part of the Ghost install. To re-install the application would mean a total hard drive re-image. I have suffered through 2 hard drive failures and re-install's. (the troublesome 30 gig IBM drives) I wasn't willing to do a full wipe of the drive to reinstall one troublesome app. I borrowed a copy of the same program and installed it.
I wish computer manufactures wouldn't be so difficult in the ablility to re-install a single application. The drivers were on a seprate install disk so I could re-install the LAN or Sound drivers, but an application re-install would require a wipe of the drive.. Give me a break. I wouldn't have pirated a copy of the CD burner program if they provided a way to re-install a damaged copy that would not wipe the hard drive.
Wanna bet? Simply refuse to deal with hard to use content. It will show in the ratings. Ratings matter. Tell the sponsors. I wanted to watch the show, but I didn't because....
Could not time shift, did not have the needed software upgrade, I dont' have a Windows computer, could not stream due to a proxy, subscription is exposing too much personal information and is an ID theft risk, I couldn't download and watch on my commute to work on the laptop, etc.
You do have a say. The question is; are there enough of you to be heard? Fear of not being heard is not a reason to not vote and speak up.
So this is like TiVo, except you have less control
I would expect that. I have found many of the subscription services to be expensive on top of the rest of the insult.
As a case in point, one of the online radio stations permits you to subscribe to a NPR show "Car Talk". The subscription for one program on one channel is $12.95/month.
Why would anyone pay for one show on one channel for almost the price for XM radio? On XM you get many channels and all the programms on each channel. It just doesn't make sense the rates they try to charge for one program.
Something needs to be done about the prices for a-la-carte programming.
If the RIAA realy wanted to rake in the dough, they could have charged $0.05 per track in the heyday of Napster. I would be buying MP3's. Instead they drove the consumers away. For most people the prices are a showstopper.
At a nickel a track, it could have been paid by either the consumer or a sponsor for ad placement.
What's it cost the RIAA. They wouldn't have to press the CD's, put them in boxes, warehouse, and retail them. Instead they killed the golden goose.
I expect if you select 8 or 10 shows, your subscription for the a-la-carte TV could be as high as a regular cable bill if they get greedy and don't contain the retail price.
but just wait until the sensor shorts out and tells the engine that I want to floor it, or vice versa.
Unlike your stereo, the Prius uses redundant position sensors on both the throttle and shift. Look it up. One is digital and the other is analog. If they don't match, you get an error. Don't expect to drive it long with a twitchy sensor. It will detect it and shut down first. They did engineer in some safety.
How does everyone feel giving up full control of thier car?
I love it. I used to drive a manual 5 speed. It had cruise control. The brakes would dis-engauge the cruise control. The clutch would not. I about blew the engine downshifting for a hill. Sure caused a panic when I touched the brakes going up a hill to shut off the cruise control. (Ford product)
Now I have a Prius (not the model with the glitch). It's just about impossible to blow the engine. Ask someone with a Prius to floor it in either Nutral or Park. I find the electric response is good. The gas engine has a little lag while the servo operates, but it is livable. The benifits outweigh the con's by a large margin. Having the engine shut off at traffic lights and such both saves gas and eliminates the engine running when it would have been the most dirty. I've been changing my oil at 7500 mile intervals. The oil doesn't even look dirty at all when I change it unlike my old car which had black oil at 3K miles.
For the trade, I expect the engine to last much longer and have much less problems as a result of the fly by wire throttle.
I should think Macrovision would hardly mind if other companies copy them and start similarly interdicting P2P users.
I'm thinking the only place this would be legal would be on private networks, not the common carrier Internet. I could see Macrovision offering the service to universities and businesses to help them curb their bandwidth usage and lawsuit exposure.
I think it would be offered just like Macrovision is offered to DVD and VHS tape publishers.
I hope Google, Yahoo, and MS sues them out of existance for tampering with search engine results.
Just wait for a spammer to use the technology to distribute their infomercials. Video spam is on the way. Thanks Macrovision. Spammers might be our friend here! (Ducks swiftly)
An '01 Prius with 16K sells at a dealer for about $16.5K around here. An '02: $18K. An '03: $19K
FYI, the O1 didn't have the NAV option or the cruise control. The 18K price is the current prices at dealers without the options and is the price I paid 2 years ago for the fully loaded 02. It's depreciation has been zip for the first 2 years. I haven't had any other car hold value like that. I got the Car Facts printout on it. I've been happy with it. As far as performance, it's a lot more peppy than my old 4 banger with a 2.3 L engine. I wasn't expecting a 1.5 L car run better than a 2.3 of about the same size and weight.
but when people's iPods break, they'll already have a device that can play music
and they have trouble replacing their music, then they will use another alternative.
If MS is smart, they will keep a list of the tunes in a phone and auto-move it with their phone is lost, stolen, or broken. If they don't offer a backup plan for their purchased IP (music and books), then they will only be anothrer also ran.
Somehow with the infighting with the **AA industry and DRM, I see MS only looking to sell it's OS for phones, not selling music. I don't know how far they will have to bend to kiss **AA's *SS to be able to provide a gurantee on content. The **AA wants to sell and resell the content for each new medium. They depend on breakage. For consumers carying the bill, they are not interested in another high breakage formst. That will be a big limiter and make the MS OS on phones simply another also ran.
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Between increased maintenance, broken printers and destroyed print outs I can't see how the TCO was much less than double the price of the branded inks.
I bought small amounts. What worked I kept using. What didn't I junked.
Here is what works for me. My wife's re-branded Dell all in one - donated to goodwill. I couldn't see the thimble size carts priced the same as half full HP carts as a value. The carts could not be picked up down the street, so S & H from Dell was extra. I found no refilling instructions online. It never got it's first refill.
My HP laserjet III uses refilled carts. I would refill myself except it only needs a replacement once every couple years. Cost to operate is about $18/year in toner.
My HP950 The color carts were not reliable when refilled. Sometimes the printer simply stopped mid photograph. Black refills worked great. Bought black ink by the pint bottle. One time when one color died, I switched to B/W printing to get greyscale prints. Got a lovely purple picture. WTF? It uses color ink to print black and white. Printer now sits in a box on the shelf.
I liked the self alignment it does, so it would make a good networked printer, but cost of supplies retired it to spare status.
HP922c Color refills not reliable. Refills work if running a large batch of photos, but don't expect it to work the next day. Black refills work great. Uses the same black cart as the HP950. I am on my third re-order of ultra black pigmented ink. The twin pack of color carts are less than the price of a single color cart for the HP950. I buy the ocasional twin pack. I do photo printing through my local Costco at $0.19 per 4X6 and $1.99 per 8X10.
Most B/W printing gets done on the laser. Web pages go on the HP722c. I don't home print photos anymore.
All my printers are on network printservers (Hawking). At less than the price of one set of carts for the HP950, a printservers is a good investment. The inkjet printer sits on a shelf in the hall closet so the whole family can use it. This cuts down on problems of dried out carts and supporting a fleet of printers for each PC.
We have the 2 printers online and the HP950 sits as a spare.
I've heard that some European banks do one-time passwords - you just print out a sheet and bring it with you. This would be the ideal solution if you don't care about privacy, but of course if, like me, you live in the U.S., you probably don't have this option.
Nobody has mentioned the simple way to limit your losses. Open a travel account at another bank. Set up automatic weekly transfers. Use it for gas and such. My travel account gets $200/week. If it gets hit, I contact my bank. My potential loss is very limited. The checking account is not backed up with overdraft protection. Keep track of your balance and use the bank ATM whenever possible. The rest of the bills are set up from the primary account at another bank with auto payments. If the electric is a little off one month, it can be adjsted upon my return. They are happy to receive a regular payment even if it is a little over or under. Let them know what's up. They are very good working with you to get paid.
As others have said, this setup has all sorts of problems, from a reliance upon a source of ice that may very well be dumping more heat into the local environment than it saves, to wasting water.
Very good point. Just where is the fridge located that produces the ice? Where is it putting the heat. The fridge is not included in the price of the project. Why not just take the door off the fridge and mount the fridge in the wall to expell the heat elswhere?
For those who don't know, fridges use a small compressor because they are cooling a small insulated enclosed space. They do not provide enough cooling to deal with the heat influx of a large room. It's BTU capacity is way undersized.
His fridge would not produce enough ice to keep his cooler supplied. The ice is a overnight creation cold storage medium to provide a short coling burst. This is not a cooling solution.
Air conditioning compressors displacement is designed to be effecient at expected cold side pressures and high (hot) side pressures. A fridge compressor is sized to work with lower suction pressures (larger displacement) for the creation of Ice in the freezer compartment. Running it with constantly elevated tempratures will overload the compressor causing ineffeciency.
When buying a compressor, they are sized for high temp use (air conditioning) and low temprature (freezers) The diffrence is the displacement is sized to the expected low side pressure.
High pressure moves more BTU/watt. Low pressure is for a large temprature differential.
those of you without PS2 ports can get a USB adapter that you can plug both a keyboard and a mouse into - works fine for mine
That PS2 to USB adaptor is great, even without the bar code reader. I put a second keyboard on a computer the pre-school kids use. That way they have a kid friendly keyboard. I don't have to worry about them hitting the Start menu key all the time. The key is on the other keyboard.
The other use is using a good keyboard with a laptop. Many laptops have a couple USB ports, but lack PS2 ports for an external keyboard. It was a tough choice. Do I want to plug in a good optical mouse or a good keyboard. Now I can do both.
not bad, considering the cost barrier drops nearly to zero.
It helps with the TCO of my Win98. On it's regular re-install, I just swipe the CD Key. It saves having to type all the boxes of random letters and numbers which saves time. Having a key rejected for a typo is the pits.
Yea, I still have an old Win 98 box. It's used with my GPS map applications and MIDI music.
New computers seem to leave out the second RS-232 and MPU-401 ports in favor of USB.
Funny that a TWINPACK of the largest volume cartridge gives you 28 ml of ink, which is just UNDER what one HP 23 color cartridge gave you!
That's exactly why I still use the 722c printer with the 23 cartridge twin pack and not a newer printer.
So if you've bought a printer without researching the prices of cartridges and the quality/prices of third-party cartridges, that's your fault.
Good point. It's not quite complete however. Quanity of ink and page yield are important in figuring the cost per page. There is some deception out there (not a lie, deception)
HP sells two versions of it's 78 cart. The $35 half full economy version and the high capacity $60 version. The website lists the estimated page yield.
Doing my homework I checked it out. I was using an older HP printer that used the 23D carts. They are cheaper. I found the page yield numbers. They were a little less then the High capacity 78 cart. Wow. Sounds good, except the 23 carts were listed as tested with 15% color page coverage and the 78 cart was listed with 5% color page coverage. Using less ink per page will certanly make the more expensive cartridge yield more pages. If you adjust the % coverage and adjust the yield to match, then the new cartridge doesn't look like a bargan at all.
The fact is that photo-printing to any reasonable quality is *hugely expensive* on a home use printer & PC combination and it's still much cheaper to drop a CD into a shop or a memory card into a machine and get the photos printed that way. Even much cheaper third party cartridges suffer from quality issues - it really is a case of "you get what you pay for".
You got that right. I use color for web pages and document highlights. I let the photofinisher deal with the photos. It is cheaper and the results are much better.
But ignorance is no excuse - if the majority of people are too stupid to see beyond the glossy adverts that they are constantly bombarded with, then more fool them.
I hear that. My new printer did a nice job on photos, and the estimated page yield looked good. When it ran out way too soon from printing photos, I did my homework on what page yield really meant. Then I stopped printing photos. Photos are not 5% page coverage printing.
HP does it a smarter (albeit similarly devious) way. Make your cartridges incompatible by constantly releasing new printer models with new cartridge interfaces. The latest HP inkjet models with the HP 94/95/96/97 cartriges are just the latest example of this tactic.
The big thing I noticed is my HP 95 printer uses a $60 color cart ($35 for the half full economy version) where my HP722c uses a 2 pack color cart ($43) for the same size cart. Needless to say, their old printer is competiting with the new printer. For web pages, Yahoo maps and other color printing, I use the 722, not the 950. The newer 950 sits in a box on the shelf. It's just a spare in case the 722 dies.
HP tried a public relations campaign by touting how much further the 78 cartridge prints by advertising the page count. I did my homework. I found the 722c printer's cartridge was listed by page count at 15% color page coverage.
The 950's color cart would print many more pages.. but at 5% color page coverage. They did not do a page count for both cartridges using the same amount of color printing per page! Needless to say, if I did a simple assumption that if the 722's printer cart did 5% coverage instead of 15% coverage I would get 3X more pages printed for my estimate. Then the comparison fell apart. The 722 printer prints more color pages using less ink from a cartridge at less than half the price.
I'll not buy another color printer until I have the hard numbers on estimated cart yield, cost per cart, and ultimately the cost/page at X percent color coverage.
My wife bought a Dell computer. It came with a Dell all in one printer. The carts are about 1/4 the size of the HP carts. The volume and estimated page yield are not stated anywhere. Needless to say, when it ran out of ink, it became a Goodwill item. I did not let the wife order ink. My laser and inkjet printers are networked. The Hawking printservers I use are about the same price as a HP cart.
Its still shipping with the DRM in the chipset, fully activated and ready to go.
Which means to the masses that the chips will be able to play the future version of I-Tunes where the competition without it will not. It does not mean that your unprotected MP3's won't play.
It's like my C-Band TV receiver. Without the Videocypher module I can watch un-protected content. With the module and a subscription, I can watch un-protected content and protected content.
If you want a C-Band reciever without any DRM, drop me a line. There isn't much it can view.
These features in the chipset don't lock out unprotected content. They do enable secure transactions of protected content. This may include your online banking transactions in the future. A copy of your online statement may be scrambled to a man in the middle sniffing packets and the lock is tied to your hardware key.
The same protection can be given to online movie rentals and other protected content.
I personally have had the "same" computer for about 4 years.
That's about normal. Take a typical power user. They have a good desk machine and the kids have to cast off. They also have a laptop. The desk top gets used at least 4 years and gets pawned off on the kids to extend it. A cola gets spilled on the keyboard and the keyboard gets replaced.
Laptops... Either the battery dies after 12-18 months and it's considered obsolete. The laptop gets replaced instead getting a new battery. The coke gets spilled into the keyboard. The laptop gets replaced. The briefcase is left on the roof of the car while the presentation is loaded then forgotton. Know how many laptops are left in taxi cabs each year? These things don't happen to a desktop.
When laptop and desktop sales are equal, I'm guessing desktops are still used 4:1 more than laptops. Laptops just get replaced more often due to them getting the hard knocks of mobile life.
In fact, such a synthesis program should really include an improvisatory component -- a "learning" program that offers slight deviations in appropriate moments. Of course, learning what those are is probably less quantitative than such a system might allow...
Dude, Windows is not a real time OS. Use MIDI on Windows. Next..
I say who cares? If it sounds good, and the parent suggests it does, then I'll listen to it.
I second that. I have a Yamaha XG sound module. A lot of people have put their piano masterpieces online as a MIDI. I enjoy them more that most CD's of the same piano masterpieces. I can't complain about the fidelety. A CD uses 16 bit sampling. The Yamama module uses 18 bit. It has none of the artifacts of an MP3.
My module is a converted DB50XG.
Will this DRM magically evaporate?
Yes. Only when it prevents sales. Remember protected floppies of the 1980's?
If it won't play in my car and portable and living room DVD and in Winamp, there is a good chance I'll return it as broken. If the retrun in rejected, then future sales are dead. I don't get burned twice.
the main way they did this was by crippling network security to the point that it was WORSE than 9x.
That is the reason I consider my wife's XP Home a stand-alone version. I spent over 3 hours looking to find where Microsoft moved the File Permissions. I figured I wasn't looking in the right place simply because so many other things have new homes. The help file is useless. It makes no assumptions the user may have used permissions in an earlier version and let them know it isn't there. Instead the Help simply lacks anything on LAN sharing permissions just like the OS. It's better with several users using one machine, but for LAN use, it is a downgrade. I do not permit XP Home to be set up for file sharing on the LAN. It simply would be a sitting duck with no file protection from any of the kids on the LAN. Anyone will have full permission to alter, delete, move or add files to an XP Home share. This is insecure by design.
This website hosts the application that encodes files on the user's local hard disk and on any mapped drives on the machine.
This is the big reason I dislike my wife's XP box. XP home is a downgrade in network security if you use SMB on it. Old versions of windows permitted you to share folders and set read passwords and full access passwords. XP Home has done away with that security completely. This leaves shared folders on an XP Home very prone to anyone on your local LAN with a nasty bug or deletion fumblefingers. With passwords on shares (Win 95, 98, ME, NT) shares on other machines not in use are protected from write/delete accidents by a password. That is the reason my photos and music are not hosted by the XP Home machine. The read many times but write once in a while files are protected by passwords.
When I get a bigger hard drive, they are moving to a SAMBA share.
I can't avoid remembering the good laughs I had when Episode II came out and Triumph the insulting dog did this video.
Norton does not like the link. It's listed as a trojan. Make sure your AV is up to date before following the link.
The great thing about it is that you get AT&T's big footprint, albeit their old TDMA footprint, and your minutes never expire, as long as you use at least one minute every two months--pretty easy to do.
Watch out for a gotcha. Read the fine print. Many of the pre-paid plans expire at 24 months regardless of usage. It changes the price of the paging service if you bought a $100 pre-pay.
With a $10 pre pay, it's closer to 84 + 14.2 cents per 2 months. It's even higher if you pre-paid for more minutes.
Still for 50 cents/month, it's cheap paging.
I have to admit I just pirated a program.
I have a HP computer that is a couple years old. The CD writer software that came with it suddnly started crashing when it finished burning 1 cd. To recover would require a reboot. No problem. It must have a damaged file somewhere. I deleted the program and got out the original disks to re-install the application.
This is when I found out the application is part of the Ghost install. To re-install the application would mean a total hard drive re-image. I have suffered through 2 hard drive failures and re-install's. (the troublesome 30 gig IBM drives) I wasn't willing to do a full wipe of the drive to reinstall one troublesome app. I borrowed a copy of the same program and installed it.
I wish computer manufactures wouldn't be so difficult in the ablility to re-install a single application. The drivers were on a seprate install disk so I could re-install the LAN or Sound drivers, but an application re-install would require a wipe of the drive.. Give me a break. I wouldn't have pirated a copy of the CD burner program if they provided a way to re-install a damaged copy that would not wipe the hard drive.
Writers, directors, actors, yes.
....
Audience, no.
Wanna bet? Simply refuse to deal with hard to use content. It will show in the ratings. Ratings matter. Tell the sponsors. I wanted to watch the show, but I didn't because
Could not time shift, did not have the needed software upgrade, I dont' have a Windows computer, could not stream due to a proxy, subscription is exposing too much personal information and is an ID theft risk, I couldn't download and watch on my commute to work on the laptop, etc.
You do have a say. The question is; are there enough of you to be heard? Fear of not being heard is not a reason to not vote and speak up.
So this is like TiVo, except you have less control
I would expect that. I have found many of the subscription services to be expensive on top of the rest of the insult.
As a case in point, one of the online radio stations permits you to subscribe to a NPR show "Car Talk". The subscription for one program on one channel is $12.95/month.
Why would anyone pay for one show on one channel for almost the price for XM radio? On XM you get many channels and all the programms on each channel. It just doesn't make sense the rates they try to charge for one program.
Something needs to be done about the prices for a-la-carte programming.
If the RIAA realy wanted to rake in the dough, they could have charged $0.05 per track in the heyday of Napster. I would be buying MP3's. Instead they drove the consumers away. For most people the prices are a showstopper.
At a nickel a track, it could have been paid by either the consumer or a sponsor for ad placement.
What's it cost the RIAA. They wouldn't have to press the CD's, put them in boxes, warehouse, and retail them. Instead they killed the golden goose.
I expect if you select 8 or 10 shows, your subscription for the a-la-carte TV could be as high as a regular cable bill if they get greedy and don't contain the retail price.
but just wait until the sensor shorts out and tells the engine that I want to floor it, or vice versa.
Unlike your stereo, the Prius uses redundant position sensors on both the throttle and shift. Look it up. One is digital and the other is analog. If they don't match, you get an error. Don't expect to drive it long with a twitchy sensor. It will detect it and shut down first. They did engineer in some safety.
How does everyone feel giving up full control of thier car?
I love it. I used to drive a manual 5 speed. It had cruise control. The brakes would dis-engauge the cruise control. The clutch would not. I about blew the engine downshifting for a hill. Sure caused a panic when I touched the brakes going up a hill to shut off the cruise control. (Ford product)
Now I have a Prius (not the model with the glitch). It's just about impossible to blow the engine. Ask someone with a Prius to floor it in either Nutral or Park. I find the electric response is good. The gas engine has a little lag while the servo operates, but it is livable. The benifits outweigh the con's by a large margin. Having the engine shut off at traffic lights and such both saves gas and eliminates the engine running when it would have been the most dirty. I've been changing my oil at 7500 mile intervals. The oil doesn't even look dirty at all when I change it unlike my old car which had black oil at 3K miles.
For the trade, I expect the engine to last much longer and have much less problems as a result of the fly by wire throttle.
I should think Macrovision would hardly mind if other companies copy them and start similarly interdicting P2P users.
I'm thinking the only place this would be legal would be on private networks, not the common carrier Internet. I could see Macrovision offering the service to universities and businesses to help them curb their bandwidth usage and lawsuit exposure.
I think it would be offered just like Macrovision is offered to DVD and VHS tape publishers.
I hope Google, Yahoo, and MS sues them out of existance for tampering with search engine results.
Just wait for a spammer to use the technology to distribute their infomercials. Video spam is on the way. Thanks Macrovision. Spammers might be our friend here! (Ducks swiftly)
An '01 Prius with 16K sells at a dealer for about $16.5K around here. An '02: $18K. An '03: $19K
FYI, the O1 didn't have the NAV option or the cruise control. The 18K price is the current prices at dealers without the options and is the price I paid 2 years ago for the fully loaded 02. It's depreciation has been zip for the first 2 years. I haven't had any other car hold value like that. I got the Car Facts printout on it. I've been happy with it. As far as performance, it's a lot more peppy than my old 4 banger with a 2.3 L engine. I wasn't expecting a 1.5 L car run better than a 2.3 of about the same size and weight.
but when people's iPods break, they'll already have a device that can play music
and they have trouble replacing their music, then they will use another alternative.
If MS is smart, they will keep a list of the tunes in a phone and auto-move it with their phone is lost, stolen, or broken. If they don't offer a backup plan for their purchased IP (music and books), then they will only be anothrer also ran.
Somehow with the infighting with the **AA industry and DRM, I see MS only looking to sell it's OS for phones, not selling music. I don't know how far they will have to bend to kiss **AA's *SS to be able to provide a gurantee on content. The **AA wants to sell and resell the content for each new medium. They depend on breakage. For consumers carying the bill, they are not interested in another high breakage formst. That will be a big limiter and make the MS OS on phones simply another also ran.