That must explain why the Kodak image technology logo is on the front of my HP printer. Maybe that is why HP didn't get sued. They must be a Kodak license holder.
If I'm not mistaken, I think the threat was all machines had to ship with Windows to get the OEM price. If any (even a single special order) shipped with something else, then all the OS licenses would then be BOXED RETAIL PRICE, not OEM Price.
I remember a shop that sold a CPU adaptor and 8088 processor with Windows for less than a boxed copy of Windows. They did it as a publicity stunt of the MS license. Buy a processor without a case/power supply, memory, I/O devices but With Windows, for about half the price of Windows. I think I still have that 2 X 3 inch board kicking about somewhere.
4 PC's in the house may be unusaual for geeks, but for those with families, it's not too unusual. My wife has a PC and a laptop. I have a PC and a laptop. The kids have PC's. The house is networked. A file/print serer resides on the network for easy file transfers. I'm up to 7 PC's in a family of 4. The wife and kids are students. My laptop is used with the piano keyboard for lessons and GPS for Geocaching. The PC's have not had OS upgrades due to the costs except the Linux boxes. Therefore I have a mix of Win95, 98, ME, XP, SUSE, & Caldera. The students in the family and my laptop are stuck with apps that require the other OS.
I wish I could find the sources, please someone with more knowledge of law help me here..
As I understand it, the crisis started when a doctor who had only (insert amount here, I don't remember how much. Try about 3 million) coverage. He lost a malpratice suit. The jury awarded (I think hundreds of millions) in dammages. The insurance company paid the policy limit. The court objected and forced the insurer to pay way beyond the coverage plan. (I think it was a defective baby case). Due to this opening of the cap on insurance policies, insurers found they were charging rates for a (one or two) million policy, but had the liability of (a good part of a billion) in coverage. Needless to say they started to charge for (maybe 500) million policies instead of one or two because the court re-wrote the doctors policies. With a policy limit removed by the courts, we have the spiral of hit the deep pockets with lawsuits and charging for the big policies that the courts mandated. The mistake happened when a multi hundred million award was forced out of a several million policy. That broke the insurance system.
Any history buff want to help me fill in the blanks? Anybody want to prove me wrong?
Funny thing you mentioned Dell. My wife just bought a new dell computer and they included an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. It's a Dell A920. The funny thing is they sent instructions to use the printer box and a UPS label they provided to send them your old printer for recycling. This sounded OK, but I opened the printer and took at the itsy-bitsy printer cartridges. They are about a quarter the size of the HP cartridges. I decided to figure cost per page. I looked on the cartridge, the literature, and the Dell website looking for the capacity or yeild of the cartridges. This information is not provided anywhere! However their cartridges are about the same price as the half full HP cartridges. Shipping and handeling are extra. I can get HP cartridges localy without S&H charges. I have a good flatbed scanner. I have a FAX program. I tried networking the printer. There are no drivers for it except for Windows XP and Windows 2000. In a nutshell it won't work with any machine on my network except the new PC from Dell running XP home. I wished I could post pictures of the Dell cartridges sitting on my HP cartridges for size comparison.
Anybody want to guess which old printer gets sent back for recycling at their expense as soon as it's out of ink? It's the one that is the most expensive to operate and is not compatible with old versions of Windows and any version of Linux.
The real nasty one is what HP does with the printers that use the 78 cartridge. The full cartridge is about $60 and the half full one about $35. To conserver the expensive color ink, I tried printing some of my web pages in greyscale to use just the black ink. Guess what happened when I ran out of yellow ink? My greyscale prints didn't resemble anything grey. The printers print greyscale using color ink! Now that I know that, I have searched the web for updated drivers that fix this. They don't appear to exist for Windows. Now I print my greyscale webpages to the laserjet. It's much cheaper to run. A 3500 page cartridge is about $35. Contrasted to the 300-500 page $60 cartridge, it's an easy decision to use the old printer. I've pretty much retired my newest printer the HP950 and gone back to the HP722c for color printing. A twin pack of color cartridges are less then the price of a single full 78 cartridge for the new printer. Those foam HP color cartridges are a bear to get to work properly after refilling. The black ones are easy to refill. I don't notice much print quality until after the 5th refill. For the bulk of my printing I use a HP laserjet III. It's solid as a rock and very inexpensive to use.
Hawking stand alone Print Servers are a great way to drop your printers on your LAN. I've done that and never looked back. The ink saved by everyone using the laser instead of inkjet easly pays for the printservers.
I guess the point I was making is the piston and crankshaft part of the engine hasn't changed much. However the high failure parts of a car have changed greatly. How often do you replace a starter, alternatior, power steering hoses, brake shoes/pads, etc., to how often you replace the rings and valve guides?
You are correct in stating the electric motor acts as the starter and alternator. However this is all high voltage stuff. To run the low voltage stuff, a DC-DC converter is used, not an altinator. This keeps the lights from dimming when the engine cycles off. It also eliminates the need for a large 12 Volt battery. The 12 volt battery is not used to crank the engine.
By going this rate, we have eliminated two high maitnance/failure items, the starter and altinator. Both seem to have high failures of mechanical parts. Brushes and that bendix thing on the starter. The motor/generators in the Prius are brushless, permanant magnet, AC, and water cooled. I guess the only high failure item might be the electric water pump.
Power steering is linear electric motor instead of the pump, hose, leak prone assembly.
Brakes are regenerative as well as traditional disk, so even they are much lower maitenance.
The transmission has something like 13 moving parts total unlike a traditional transmission. None of the transmission parts are friction parts such as clutches and bands. It's just gears and nothing engages or disengages except the park pawl.
What are the major maitenance items on your car? Rings? Or brakes, starters, altenators, hoses, pumps, batteries, etc.
I think they have gone a long ways to make it a low failure rate car.
You think new cars every year is bad? Hell, at least the way an engine works stays pretty much the same year after year.
Bad example. My car has no distributor. The cam is under computer control. It has no starter, altinator, power steering pump, throttle cable/linkage, etc. There are only two items on the belt. The water pump and the AC compressor(old model, New model has removed the AC from being directly engine driven). There is no cable to the throttle. The power steering has no pump. The power brakes are not vacuum assist. The transmission has NO clutches, bands, torque converter, or friction parts of any kind. No mechanical linkages move from drive to reverse. The only mechanical shift piece is the park pin. The transmission doesn't even disengauge anything when the engine shuts itself off while cruising a parking lot. The transmission ratio is continusly variable from reverse to freeway speeds without using hydraulics. Oh did I mention the high voltage. A factory trained high voltage electrician is needed to change the traction battery. A regular mechanic is likely to get fried on the 300 (old model) or 500 volt (2004 model) traction battery. A guy with just a feeler gauge and torque wrench isn't going to be able to fix much on it. Car engines are new technology and bad example of old tech.
I love my Prius. Check out how the transmission works.
Actualy, personaly I've already made the decision to find the local store. It's not as close as the Shucks or Napa, but they are on my must visit list. I think I need some windshield wiper solution.
I think it would be funny if Google closed shop and pointed all search results to two sites. One by Google explaining pirates attacked them, and the other to SCO. The media would have a heyday.
Yes you are missing something. It's a cable box for subscription content. Those who want to listen to the pay to play subscription content will need a player that will play it. Think of it as a Satelite receiver. Your NON DRM TV can't view satelite stations. Your car radio can't receive XM or Sireus broadcasts. Hmm, I guess you need a DRM enabled Satelite receiver with a subscription. Funny thing, the Satelite receiver can't pick up the non-DRM evening news, or local clear channel morning ZOO show. The DRM MP3 is nothing more than a subscription box for the latest subscription content. It isn't for the non-subscription stuff the same way your XM tuner can't get the local traffic report in the morning. It doesn't replace your current car radio. It supliments it. Just like subscription radio, it's not for everyone.
Actualy there was a company that tried it with a small optical drive. Remember the Data Play? Remember nobody bought it because it's use was so limited? It's media was so expensive, so restricted? Expect the same for DRM MP3's. Lack of DRM is what makes MP3 such a popular format. If you want DRM, just stick with Windows or Apple formats. DRM MP3 would be just an also ran against the giants, just like Liquid Audio format.
Unless you had good backups, all your MP3's are now DRM enabled.
Anything worth keeping is backed up on write once media (CDR). Any OS that changes the format when moved with the OS is a defect in the OS. If my copy of my CD MP3's won't play in my car, the hardware/software that made the copy is broken and will be treated as such. I have a good back up of a working OS and media.
players start refusing to play music encoded without the DRM support.
I'm guessing you are referring to new players. Currently the oposite is true. My indash, My DVD, and Panasonic CD MP3 players all would be unable to play DRM MP3's. Getting me to buy and use a player that won't play my library is going to be a very hard sell. Manufactures know making a player that won't support NON DRM files is a kiss of death. There is just too much stuff out there that is in the public domain (Old Time Radio for instance), Creative Commons, Home Ripping of CD's, LP's Cassettes, 8 Track, Reel-to Reel, Church sermon recordings for shut-in's, etc. There is little reason to deal with an incompatible player. They will be as readly made and avaliable as over the air DTV receivers. (Hint, go to your local store and ask for a 20 inch digital TV because you want to watch Public Broadcast in digital. You will get laughed out of the store. They will be willing to sell you a digital ready moniotr, but not an integrated receiver. Small digital televisions (DTV not NTSC) don't exist in the USA.)
All that realy needs done is to provide value. I bought a program to make lables with barcodes on them. It's called Lables Unlimited. It was less than $15 off the shelf. Before I found it, I found fonts for $200, Label programs from $50-600. Needless to say most stuff was way overpriced as they were trying to sell automation solutions instead of a simple version of Printshop. When the choices were part with lots of money or do without, I did without. When a reasonable priced program came out, I bought 2 copies. One for home and one for work. (It can be registered either way. I did both.) After that with word of mouth advertising, (the best kind) I bought and re-sold 5 more to coworkers.
Trying to own and sell automation using barcodes (the concept, not the product) is viewed by most as open seas type piracy. One of the major bar code manufactures was sued for patent infringement for providing factory automation solutions which used barcodes with a workflow database. Somehow someone thought the concept of tracking with a database and barcodes instead of hand entry was a violation of IP. It got thrown out (thank goodness). Unfortunately more and more stuff is being tyed up in a concept as IP rights, not product rights. This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.
Imagine if the concept were copied to the building industry. Someone makes nails. Someone else makes screws. Someone else makes glue. Someone makes 2X4's. They all patent the idea. Do you know the problems this would create for the building industry. Screws and screwdrivers only from International Fastener, Nails only from National Wire, 2X4's only from Georga Pacific.. etc. Some in the fastener industry have already done some of this. Posi-drive screws, Torx tm., etc.
Building materials are much cheaper if there is not a single vendor choice. Market forces set prices.
I see Open Source, Creative Commons, Public Domain, and the internet as a great equalizer. We just have to wean ourselves off the **AA licensed stuff. Tonight I was downloading free Public Domain radio programs. Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee, and Jack Benny are great alternitves to much of the high priced stuff. Don't pirate. Shop for the deals. They are out there.
There are lots of sites dedicated to collecting the material, selling or trading for very reasonable prices. Why can't BMI, Capitol, etc. sell MP3 CD's full of over 20 year old stuff for $5 each? You just can't tell me it's the cost of production and distribution. They would rather sell a couple of copies of $100 CD collections of old stuff than sell thousands at $5. They are also unwilling to use MP3's. Funny but the competion is using MP3's. All the radio programms I downloaded tonight are unencumbered MP3's. They will work in my MP3 CD player unlike what they are selling.
Do a search of Old Time Radio MP3's. You can literaly get days worth of material on MP3 CD's for under $10. Hey RIAA, are you listening? Want to sell from your old catalog? Naw, they would rather sit on their archive while I shop the competion. Their artificaly scarce material is being diluted by the competion. Piracy isn't their only competion. Games, movies, Public domain, Creative Commons, and freebies are their competion. Killing piracy won't make it go away.
My non-tethered scope is a DSO (budget Tektronics TDS series) that can save internaly two waveforms that can later be downloaded to a PC for student material creation.
Look for a TDS 200 series. Mine is dual channel, dual timebase, with onscreen markers and settings. It's a few years old now. Look for them on the used market. I spent the extra to get the printer/communications module. It doens't mean a PC tether. The save/retrieve is one of the more useful functions.
Don't overlook the inexpensive DSO's. The Tektronix TDS200 series can take a communications module. With it you can easly printscreen directly to a printer or a file. (Tektronics wanted a small fortune for the software to export the screen captures, but search the web for 3rd party free utilities.) I use mine for comparison of long term drift of aging. Printing to a file or transparancies makes overlays of pre-failure signal degradition a simple matter. Using it to produce classroom materials would be simple as the screen prints include all the on screen markers and sweep and gain settings. It makes student set-up of the scope for matching expected results an easly understood concept.
Does security through obscurity make you feel better?
It does, but just for the combination on my safe which I set myself. If all the safes had the same unchangable combination to open them, I wouldn't feel secure at all.
Unfortunately all Windows XP and all Windows Server models come with a limited knowledge combination that opens them wide open. This does not make me feel secure at all. (except I'm not running Windows)
...the patent can't be granted because there's another piece of software that used that same pager-thingy before the patent was filed?
I'm suprised they didn't notice the prior art. After all they bought 10 Million dollars worth of SCO IP licenses so they could run Linux in house for security.
Netscape wasn't free. It became free when they couldn't compete with free from MS. Check the history. Don't distort it.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. MS is going to have to figure out how to compete with free Open Office. Unfortunately Open Office doesn't come bundles in Windows by default like IE was. However I expect it to be bundles in most major distributions of Linux. As Linux picks up market share on the desktop, MS is going to face stronger competion from Open Office just as Netscape had to compete with the free Microsoft browser.
It wouldn't be too hard to study this, hook someone up to headphones, blindfold them, and play them identical excerpts from a CD and then MP3 and make them guess which was which; or just say which was "better quality."
Now do the same thing in a car with road noise and such. Don't crank it. Some uses of music is background. That's what MP3 jukeboxes are for. Too bad the stuff for sale is incompatible with it's intended use. Well you could, but be sure to tack on the added expense of burning a CD, ripping it, having to type in all the ID3 tags as the burned copy is incompatible with the CDDB, and then burning the MP3 CD for the jukebox. Sorry the extra work and high price just isn't worth it. Please sell MP3's for my jukebox. The extra work raises the TCO. IT's much easier to load a real CD, connect to CDDB, and rip.
Unfortunately, weedshare seems to be another DRM format not supported by my hardware.
How many times do I have to say it. My hardware is unable to install your required software.
Stick to industry standards that the hardware already supports. There isn't much out there that can't play MP3's. Very few people are selling MP3's.
Clip from the site,
System Requirements: A Windows 98 or later PC and a current media player that supports the Windows Media Format. We also recommend a broadband Internet connection, as Weed files average around 5 MB in size.
That leaves out my car jukebox(MP3), my CD jukebox (MP3's only) Winamp on the PC, Living room DVD player (the main audio playback device) and my MP3 player.
Paying a premium to buy music that plays only on the internet connected PC and it's junk speakers is not my relaxing sound system of choice. Don't try to sweettalk me into burning CD's. Why change format twice to get it to a CD MP3 jukebox? I see no need to burn a CD just to rip it.
Somebocy get a clue and sell tunes in all the popular formats. Those who want Apple format can have it. Those who want MS format WMA can have it. Those who have MP3 jukeboxes... Well we are waiting...
Simply find a hidden spot to view the machine and use a telephoto lens. The batteries only last a short while in the hack. They are usualy installed to capture weekend activity. If it's on a drive up machine, be sure to captuere the plates of all traffic and note which took the device. Let the authorities deal with contacting the mob. Be sure to forward the photos of the scammers and plate to the local newspaper with close up photos of the modified ATM. Post photos of the scam on the ATM itself. Stake it out and see who removes the photos.
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That must explain why the Kodak image technology logo is on the front of my HP printer. Maybe that is why HP didn't get sued. They must be a Kodak license holder.
If I'm not mistaken, I think the threat was all machines had to ship with Windows to get the OEM price. If any (even a single special order) shipped with something else, then all the OS licenses would then be BOXED RETAIL PRICE, not OEM Price.
I remember a shop that sold a CPU adaptor and 8088 processor with Windows for less than a boxed copy of Windows. They did it as a publicity stunt of the MS license. Buy a processor without a case/power supply, memory, I/O devices but With Windows, for about half the price of Windows. I think I still have that 2 X 3 inch board kicking about somewhere.
4 PC's in the house may be unusaual for geeks, but for those with families, it's not too unusual. My wife has a PC and a laptop. I have a PC and a laptop. The kids have PC's. The house is networked. A file/print serer resides on the network for easy file transfers. I'm up to 7 PC's in a family of 4. The wife and kids are students. My laptop is used with the piano keyboard for lessons and GPS for Geocaching. The PC's have not had OS upgrades due to the costs except the Linux boxes. Therefore I have a mix of Win95, 98, ME, XP, SUSE, & Caldera. The students in the family and my laptop are stuck with apps that require the other OS.
Certianly. Arsnic is a common dopant.
I wish I could find the sources, please someone with more knowledge of law help me here..
As I understand it, the crisis started when a doctor who had only (insert amount here, I don't remember how much. Try about 3 million) coverage. He lost a malpratice suit. The jury awarded (I think hundreds of millions) in dammages. The insurance company paid the policy limit. The court objected and forced the insurer to pay way beyond the coverage plan. (I think it was a defective baby case). Due to this opening of the cap on insurance policies, insurers found they were charging rates for a (one or two) million policy, but had the liability of (a good part of a billion) in coverage. Needless to say they started to charge for (maybe 500) million policies instead of one or two because the court re-wrote the doctors policies. With a policy limit removed by the courts, we have the spiral of hit the deep pockets with lawsuits and charging for the big policies that the courts mandated. The mistake happened when a multi hundred million award was forced out of a several million policy. That broke the insurance system.
Any history buff want to help me fill in the blanks? Anybody want to prove me wrong?
Funny thing you mentioned Dell. My wife just bought a new dell computer and they included an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. It's a Dell A920. The funny thing is they sent instructions to use the printer box and a UPS label they provided to send them your old printer for recycling. This sounded OK, but I opened the printer and took at the itsy-bitsy printer cartridges. They are about a quarter the size of the HP cartridges. I decided to figure cost per page. I looked on the cartridge, the literature, and the Dell website looking for the capacity or yeild of the cartridges. This information is not provided anywhere! However their cartridges are about the same price as the half full HP cartridges. Shipping and handeling are extra. I can get HP cartridges localy without S&H charges. I have a good flatbed scanner. I have a FAX program. I tried networking the printer. There are no drivers for it except for Windows XP and Windows 2000. In a nutshell it won't work with any machine on my network except the new PC from Dell running XP home. I wished I could post pictures of the Dell cartridges sitting on my HP cartridges for size comparison.
Anybody want to guess which old printer gets sent back for recycling at their expense as soon as it's out of ink? It's the one that is the most expensive to operate and is not compatible with old versions of Windows and any version of Linux.
The real nasty one is what HP does with the printers that use the 78 cartridge. The full cartridge is about $60 and the half full one about $35. To conserver the expensive color ink, I tried printing some of my web pages in greyscale to use just the black ink. Guess what happened when I ran out of yellow ink? My greyscale prints didn't resemble anything grey. The printers print greyscale using color ink! Now that I know that, I have searched the web for updated drivers that fix this. They don't appear to exist for Windows. Now I print my greyscale webpages to the laserjet. It's much cheaper to run. A 3500 page cartridge is about $35. Contrasted to the 300-500 page $60 cartridge, it's an easy decision to use the old printer. I've pretty much retired my newest printer the HP950 and gone back to the HP722c for color printing. A twin pack of color cartridges are less then the price of a single full 78 cartridge for the new printer. Those foam HP color cartridges are a bear to get to work properly after refilling. The black ones are easy to refill. I don't notice much print quality until after the 5th refill. For the bulk of my printing I use a HP laserjet III. It's solid as a rock and very inexpensive to use.
Hawking stand alone Print Servers are a great way to drop your printers on your LAN. I've done that and never looked back. The ink saved by everyone using the laser instead of inkjet easly pays for the printservers.
I guess the point I was making is the piston and crankshaft part of the engine hasn't changed much. However the high failure parts of a car have changed greatly. How often do you replace a starter, alternatior, power steering hoses, brake shoes/pads, etc., to how often you replace the rings and valve guides?
You are correct in stating the electric motor acts as the starter and alternator. However this is all high voltage stuff. To run the low voltage stuff, a DC-DC converter is used, not an altinator. This keeps the lights from dimming when the engine cycles off. It also eliminates the need for a large 12 Volt battery. The 12 volt battery is not used to crank the engine.
By going this rate, we have eliminated two high maitnance/failure items, the starter and altinator. Both seem to have high failures of mechanical parts. Brushes and that bendix thing on the starter. The motor/generators in the Prius are brushless, permanant magnet, AC, and water cooled. I guess the only high failure item might be the electric water pump.
Power steering is linear electric motor instead of the pump, hose, leak prone assembly.
Brakes are regenerative as well as traditional disk, so even they are much lower maitenance.
The transmission has something like 13 moving parts total unlike a traditional transmission. None of the transmission parts are friction parts such as clutches and bands. It's just gears and nothing engages or disengages except the park pawl.
What are the major maitenance items on your car? Rings? Or brakes, starters, altenators, hoses, pumps, batteries, etc.
I think they have gone a long ways to make it a low failure rate car.
You think new cars every year is bad? Hell, at least the way an engine works stays pretty much the same year after year.
Bad example. My car has no distributor. The cam is under computer control. It has no starter, altinator, power steering pump, throttle cable/linkage, etc. There are only two items on the belt. The water pump and the AC compressor(old model, New model has removed the AC from being directly engine driven). There is no cable to the throttle. The power steering has no pump. The power brakes are not vacuum assist. The transmission has NO clutches, bands, torque converter, or friction parts of any kind. No mechanical linkages move from drive to reverse. The only mechanical shift piece is the park pin. The transmission doesn't even disengauge anything when the engine shuts itself off while cruising a parking lot. The transmission ratio is continusly variable from reverse to freeway speeds without using hydraulics. Oh did I mention the high voltage. A factory trained high voltage electrician is needed to change the traction battery. A regular mechanic is likely to get fried on the 300 (old model) or 500 volt (2004 model) traction battery. A guy with just a feeler gauge and torque wrench isn't going to be able to fix much on it. Car engines are new technology and bad example of old tech.
I love my Prius. Check out how the transmission works.
Actualy, personaly I've already made the decision to find the local store. It's not as close as the Shucks or Napa, but they are on my must visit list. I think I need some windshield wiper solution.
I sure hope Autozone wins this one.
I think it would be funny if Google closed shop and pointed all search results to two sites. One by Google explaining pirates attacked them, and the other to SCO. The media would have a heyday.
Pirates killed the best search engine.
but with DRM, maybe people would tolerate it.
Yes you are missing something. It's a cable box for subscription content.
Those who want to listen to the pay to play subscription content will need a player that will play it. Think of it as a Satelite receiver. Your NON DRM TV can't view satelite stations. Your car radio can't receive XM or Sireus broadcasts. Hmm, I guess you need a DRM enabled Satelite receiver with a subscription. Funny thing, the Satelite receiver can't pick up the non-DRM evening news, or local clear channel morning ZOO show. The DRM MP3 is nothing more than a subscription box for the latest subscription content. It isn't for the non-subscription stuff the same way your XM tuner can't get the local traffic report in the morning.
It doesn't replace your current car radio. It supliments it. Just like subscription radio, it's not for everyone.
Actualy there was a company that tried it with a small optical drive. Remember the Data Play? Remember nobody bought it because it's use was so limited? It's media was so expensive, so restricted? Expect the same for DRM MP3's. Lack of DRM is what makes MP3 such a popular format. If you want DRM, just stick with Windows or Apple formats. DRM MP3 would be just an also ran against the giants, just like Liquid Audio format.
Unless you had good backups, all your MP3's are now DRM enabled.
Anything worth keeping is backed up on write once media (CDR). Any OS that changes the format when moved with the OS is a defect in the OS. If my copy of my CD MP3's won't play in my car, the hardware/software that made the copy is broken and will be treated as such. I have a good back up of a working OS and media.
players start refusing to play music encoded without the DRM support.
I'm guessing you are referring to new players. Currently the oposite is true. My indash, My DVD, and Panasonic CD MP3 players all would be unable to play DRM MP3's. Getting me to buy and use a player that won't play my library is going to be a very hard sell. Manufactures know making a player that won't support NON DRM files is a kiss of death. There is just too much stuff out there that is in the public domain (Old Time Radio for instance), Creative Commons, Home Ripping of CD's, LP's Cassettes, 8 Track, Reel-to Reel, Church sermon recordings for shut-in's, etc. There is little reason to deal with an incompatible player. They will be as readly made and avaliable as over the air DTV receivers. (Hint, go to your local store and ask for a 20 inch digital TV because you want to watch Public Broadcast in digital. You will get laughed out of the store. They will be willing to sell you a digital ready moniotr, but not an integrated receiver. Small digital televisions (DTV not NTSC) don't exist in the USA.)
All that realy needs done is to provide value. I bought a program to make lables with barcodes on them. It's called Lables Unlimited. It was less than $15 off the shelf. Before I found it, I found fonts for $200, Label programs from $50-600. Needless to say most stuff was way overpriced as they were trying to sell automation solutions instead of a simple version of Printshop. When the choices were part with lots of money or do without, I did without. When a reasonable priced program came out, I bought 2 copies. One for home and one for work. (It can be registered either way. I did both.) After that with word of mouth advertising, (the best kind) I bought and re-sold 5 more to coworkers.
Trying to own and sell automation using barcodes (the concept, not the product) is viewed by most as open seas type piracy. One of the major bar code manufactures was sued for patent infringement for providing factory automation solutions which used barcodes with a workflow database. Somehow someone thought the concept of tracking with a database and barcodes instead of hand entry was a violation of IP. It got thrown out (thank goodness). Unfortunately more and more stuff is being tyed up in a concept as IP rights, not product rights. This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.
Imagine if the concept were copied to the building industry. Someone makes nails. Someone else makes screws. Someone else makes glue. Someone makes 2X4's. They all patent the idea. Do you know the problems this would create for the building industry. Screws and screwdrivers only from International Fastener, Nails only from National Wire, 2X4's only from Georga Pacific.. etc. Some in the fastener industry have already done some of this. Posi-drive screws, Torx tm., etc.
Building materials are much cheaper if there is not a single vendor choice. Market forces set prices.
I see Open Source, Creative Commons, Public Domain, and the internet as a great equalizer. We just have to wean ourselves off the **AA licensed stuff. Tonight I was downloading free Public Domain radio programs. Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee, and Jack Benny are great alternitves to much of the high priced stuff. Don't pirate. Shop for the deals. They are out there.
There are lots of sites dedicated to collecting the material, selling or trading for very reasonable prices. Why can't BMI, Capitol, etc. sell MP3 CD's full of over 20 year old stuff for $5 each? You just can't tell me it's the cost of production and distribution. They would rather sell a couple of copies of $100 CD collections of old stuff than sell thousands at $5. They are also unwilling to use MP3's. Funny but the competion is using MP3's. All the radio programms I downloaded tonight are unencumbered MP3's. They will work in my MP3 CD player unlike what they are selling.
Do a search of Old Time Radio MP3's. You can literaly get days worth of material on MP3 CD's for under $10. Hey RIAA, are you listening? Want to sell from your old catalog? Naw, they would rather sit on their archive while I shop the competion. Their artificaly scarce material is being diluted by the competion. Piracy isn't their only competion. Games, movies, Public domain, Creative Commons, and freebies are their competion. Killing piracy won't make it go away.
My non-tethered scope is a DSO (budget Tektronics TDS series) that can save internaly two waveforms that can later be downloaded to a PC for student material creation.
Look for a TDS 200 series. Mine is dual channel, dual timebase, with onscreen markers and settings. It's a few years old now. Look for them on the used market. I spent the extra to get the printer/communications module. It doens't mean a PC tether. The save/retrieve is one of the more useful functions.
Don't overlook the inexpensive DSO's. The Tektronix TDS200 series can take a communications module. With it you can easly printscreen directly to a printer or a file. (Tektronics wanted a small fortune for the software to export the screen captures, but search the web for 3rd party free utilities.) I use mine for comparison of long term drift of aging. Printing to a file or transparancies makes overlays of pre-failure signal degradition a simple matter. Using it to produce classroom materials would be simple as the screen prints include all the on screen markers and sweep and gain settings. It makes student set-up of the scope for matching expected results an easly understood concept.
Does security through obscurity make you feel better?
It does, but just for the combination on my safe which I set myself. If all the safes had the same unchangable combination to open them, I wouldn't feel secure at all.
Unfortunately all Windows XP and all Windows Server models come with a limited knowledge combination that opens them wide open. This does not make me feel secure at all. (except I'm not running Windows)
...the patent can't be granted because there's another piece of software that used that same pager-thingy before the patent was filed?
I'm suprised they didn't notice the prior art. After all they bought 10 Million dollars worth of SCO IP licenses so they could run Linux in house for security.
You are joking aren't you?
Netscape wasn't free. It became free when they couldn't compete with free from MS. Check the history. Don't distort it.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. MS is going to have to figure out how to compete with free Open Office. Unfortunately Open Office doesn't come bundles in Windows by default like IE was. However I expect it to be bundles in most major distributions of Linux. As Linux picks up market share on the desktop, MS is going to face stronger competion from Open Office just as Netscape had to compete with the free Microsoft browser.
That's my primary criterion before beginning a hacking project - will the electric shock cause permanent injury or death?
Sounds like the quailification to build tesla coils and spud guns.
Is building a spud gun qualify as hacking ABS or PVC pipe?
It wouldn't be too hard to study this, hook someone up to headphones, blindfold them, and play them identical excerpts from a CD and then MP3 and make them guess which was which; or just say which was "better quality."
Now do the same thing in a car with road noise and such. Don't crank it. Some uses of music is background. That's what MP3 jukeboxes are for. Too bad the stuff for sale is incompatible with it's intended use. Well you could, but be sure to tack on the added expense of burning a CD, ripping it, having to type in all the ID3 tags as the burned copy is incompatible with the CDDB, and then burning the MP3 CD for the jukebox. Sorry the extra work and high price just isn't worth it. Please sell MP3's for my jukebox. The extra work raises the TCO. IT's much easier to load a real CD, connect to CDDB, and rip.
Why pay extra for less?
Unfortunately, weedshare seems to be another DRM format not supported by my hardware.
How many times do I have to say it. My hardware is unable to install your required software.
Stick to industry standards that the hardware already supports. There isn't much out there that can't play MP3's. Very few people are selling MP3's.
Clip from the site,
System Requirements:
A Windows 98 or later PC and a current media player that supports the Windows Media Format. We also recommend a broadband Internet connection, as Weed files average around 5 MB in size.
That leaves out my car jukebox(MP3), my CD jukebox (MP3's only) Winamp on the PC, Living room DVD player (the main audio playback device) and my MP3 player.
Paying a premium to buy music that plays only on the internet connected PC and it's junk speakers is not my relaxing sound system of choice. Don't try to sweettalk me into burning CD's. Why change format twice to get it to a CD MP3 jukebox?
I see no need to burn a CD just to rip it.
Somebocy get a clue and sell tunes in all the popular formats. Those who want Apple format can have it. Those who want MS format WMA can have it. Those who have MP3 jukeboxes... Well we are waiting...
One word. Stakeout.
Simply find a hidden spot to view the machine and use a telephoto lens. The batteries only last a short while in the hack. They are usualy installed to capture weekend activity. If it's on a drive up machine, be sure to captuere the plates of all traffic and note which took the device. Let the authorities deal with contacting the mob. Be sure to forward the photos of the scammers and plate to the local newspaper with close up photos of the modified ATM. Post photos of the scam on the ATM itself. Stake it out and see who removes the photos.