Safely storing your serial/product keys these days for long term use is pretty useless.
Using software that needs to connect to the mother ship to ask permission is pretty useless when there are plenty of alternatives.
I keep the keys for my older software as barcodes for easy entry with a barcode gun for quick reinstalls. Chance of accidental deletion or copy is pretty nil. They are pasted on the CD boxes.
I personally have the exact same stuff on my thumb drive - my resume and some cracking tools. What is important to learn is to learn from mistakes. Some learn from other's mistakes. Others wait till it happens to them. This is why proceedures are put into place. Often they are there to prevent common mistakes. Bypassing written proceedures is a gateway to making known types of mistakes.
Thumb drives are nice, but what exactly is your company policy regarding their use?
The one hanging on my employee badge is not treated the same as the one hanging on my keyring. Personal and professional never mix.
I don't know about the first one, but the second has no real bearing on anything. McCain, for instance, was not born on American soil, but rather to two American parents who were in another country at the time of his birth. As such he is an American citizen and qualified to run for president.
Are you trying to rewrite the US constitution, or simply don't have a copy?
"No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President."
From Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition: "Natural born citizen. Persons who are born within the jurisdiction of a national government, i.e. in its territorial limits, or those born of citizens temporarily residing abroad."
So the question is still here, where was he born. Was his parents US citizens at the time and if so, were they temporarily residing abroad? When did his parents become US citizens? There are lots of unanswered questions. It is OK to ask questions even if the answers are not your liking.
"in my opinion" is not a magic word that lets you defame people with impunity.
Actually, that phrase provides lots of free speech protections. I can say that I think taking the oil company profits and capping the price will cause oil shipments to stop to the US just like they did in the 1970's. I can say In my opinion, I think someone is an idiot for suggesting it. This is not defamation. This is stating what someone is suggesting and my opinion of his suggestion.
Mentioning that I think there is reason to believe he is not a native born citizen and therefore ineligible to run for president is also not defamation. It is based on the lawsuit that he was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. This is not defamation. References provided.
In reading between the lines, I think it is important that he is not being sued for calling the Media Sentry investigations Illegal. If the RIAA thought they had a case in which to sue, I would have expected an attack on this. The silence is deafening.
I wonder if Ray can keep his blog entries up if he simply stated the line in contention as in my opinion.
The stating an opinion as fact is the basis of the action. His opinion may indeed be fact. It would be interesting if the RIAA lost and it was proven in court to be fact. I think the RIAA may have a tiger by the tail on this one.
This is not news. Intelligence gathering has been from two types of operations. Covert is the stuff spy movies are made of with wire taps, break-ins, etc. Less glamorous is the overt gathering of info which is still a huge part of any intelligence operation. This is classic observation of publicly exposed information. Overt intelligence is still kept under wraps as it is not a good idea to reveal just what you are looking for.
Overt intelligence includes reading local newspapers, picking up over the air radio traffic, including encrypted (who and how much traffic is important even without breaking the code) and simply watching train, ship, truck traffic. A train load of military vehicles doesn't need covert operations to notice. The fact you noticed is often classified. A fishing boat using lots of encrypted radio traffic is of interest for example, but watching ports and keeping track of where it visits is an overt operation, but what is found out is kept under wraps from the public for good reason.
Watching train watchers, and other sets of eyes online is the only new angle in addition to picking up local newspapers and watching trains arrive and leave. It saves on manpower and may pick up something of interest.
Understanding what happened to the nuclear core of the Trogan Nuclear plant does not require covert ops to know the core was loaded on a boat and shipped up the Columbia River. If it headed out to sea instead, it would have been noticed without covert ops.
Anybody else read that as "3M Pocket Protector"? Because with those specs, that would be AWESOME!
3M pocket protectors have been with us for many years. To make one, take the sleve from a 3M floppy (5-1/4in) and fold it in half. Fill the front with pens and the back with your calculator and you are all set.
"The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server."
I still installed Kubuntu on both. Windows is nice to have around if you ever need it (BIOS updates on the HP, or calling for tech support on either machine, for example) but really not right for daily use for me.
The easy way to save your factory installation and your Kubuntu installation is simply buy a new hard disk and install the choice OS on it. My older Thinkpad is this way and an OS swap takes about 3 minutes with all settings. It's as simple as remove a screw, remove the cover from headphone jack which slides out the HD with it, change carriers to the other drive and slide the other one in and replace the screw. Updates and Turbotax are done and ready for next year's need for Windows.
I did this with Dark Side of the Moon with Audacity. Ripped it to FLAC, edited out the dead spots carefully matching the waveform tails and saved the result. My Album now has 2 tracks, side A and Side B. Awesome. I need to take the time to do the rest.
Watching a movie on TV has got to be a pain these days due to the incessant ad breaks.
Agreed, which is why I won't miss TV when they switch off analog. I almost never watch it now.
Aren't you afraid you are going to burn in hell? You go to church and brazenly conduct illegal activities, surely you aren't expecting to go heaven?
Think young military pre-CD's. Piracy days. Later CD's, church. I have never ever used Napster, Kaza, Limewire, etc. I used Bit Torrent for Linux distro's, but Comcast broke that, so I just use mirrors.
My early days do not reflect current activities. Be not quick to judge lest ye be judged. Remember, I bought DC Talk, not pirated it. I wish I hadn't bought it or sampled the original performance before deciding not to buy it. I heard a church choir perform the one track and I enjoyed that. If the church choir released it on CD, it would have been worth the money.
Even in the piracy days, I bought a lot of great albums from artists such as Pink Floyd, Styx, ELO (go ahead and laugh), Tomita, Cornerstone, Mariner, etc. This was stuff not played on the local radio stations. It was from sharing I discovered these artists and bought the albums. Without the military housing environment, I would have bought much less music or the great audiophile stereo to enjoy it on.
Today with the youth, piracy is even cheaper (no need to buy blank tapes and copy them real time) so many people invest nothing in music unlike the older days where there was great pride in a great collection and great equipment to play it on. Much music today is compressed to lower bit rates and played on small cheap speakers or headphones. The studios have entered the loudness wars to work in noisy environments. THD of 1% to.1% is the norm. S/N ratios are not important anymore as the signal is compressed to be always loud. My used 30 year old speakers alone are worth the average price of a new iPod. I looked them up on e-bay.
Recording for a clean natural sound is no longer desirable. For me, modern recordings are undesirable, and the online stuff legal and otherwise is even lower quality. I don't bother with piracy or purchases anymore.
It is possible to build a profitable, long-lasting, and legal online music business,
It WAS possible to build a profitable,
There, fixed it for you. The industry has tried to push Apple into a layered pricing service with higher prices for more popular stuff. By then Apple was big enough to push back and win.
Small potatoes startup companies don't have that kind of clout. They also have no way to unseat Apple.
But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
It's a common scapegoat, but missing the mark. Percieved value and retail price are an order of magnitude out of place.
Instead of wasting money on a shiney disk with about 45 minutes of stuff along with one good song, I can buy a DVD for half the price.
I can carbonate water at home and add my own flavoring and sugar, but I still purchase fountain drinks for the convience.
CD's are now the oposite of convience for more money. Downloads go right on to an MP3 player. CD's have to be found if still in print, ripped and put on a player.
Online is a-la-carte. CD is a canned package.
Some compainies wanted to make and install in store CD burning kiosks. Guess who killed that in the bud?
For an industry who doesn't listen to their consumers, they sure scream P-P a lot for their lack of adjusting to the market.
If you scream P-P enough, will the death of your scapegoat really fix your root problems?
Some people are offended by my blacklist system.
This would be mostly your best customers. Those who don't listen to music don't buy CD's. Those deeply into music purchases CD's and shares copies of out of print stuff or the one good song on a CD. Blacklisting them is a great way of killing the biggest part of your business. Thanks for providing great evidence the industry doesn't understand the market.
Much of the industry is selling pig in a poke packages. I bought the DC Talk album Supernatural because our church performed Red Letters, and I enjoyed the choir rendition. I hated the album, even the good track. I'm not into acid rock. Needless to say, once burnt, twice shy.
How many times have you bought an album because you only heard one song and then didn't like the rest of the album at all?
P-P expands music horizons. Most of the time when I bought albums, I heard it from friends first. (I quit buying entirely when the industry started dropping the nuke bomb on some unlucky few as a protest.)
My peak buying days was when I was in the military while in my peak piracy days with cassette tapes. The industry doesn't understand their consumers or the market.
Believe me, now that the oil industry has raised the bar for profit, the other monopolistic industries are going to go whole hog, especially if their favorite Party gets another four years in office.
Man, I lived through the '70's. I survived fixed prices. Prices were fixed to prevent price gouging. In a production crunch it simply means sold out. Been there, done that. Sat in gas lines with $2.00 purchase limits, green flags, yellow flags, and red flags. I drove through small towns that were out of gas, out of gas, out of gas, and sat stranded in a small town and awaited the gas truck delivery in the morning.
Are you serious recommending government mess with the free market again?
Government mandated $1.50/gal gas prices simply mean the deliveries will be elsewhere while we face sold out signs, even and odd day restrictions, and $5.00 limits so everyone can get some with lines from station to station down the street. Seen it, Lived it, don't care to repeat it.
California is simply doing what the rest of the industry is doing. Take for example you want to install a solar panel on the roof of your house. It's covered under the National Electrical Code. Get your own copy here. Bring money.
Great for the end consumer, however. Possibly even really really good for me as a United States citizen as Intel/AMD will be forced to drop prices to compete in the world market.
You missed a few basics in economics 101. Cost of production, Cost of development, Economy of scale.
The cost of R & D, FAB construction and operation is why these complex parts are dirt cheap now. Cutting production in half due to competition will not reduce prices. It runs up costs and slows R & D as each product must remain on the market longer.
AMD is screaming foul now because their yeild is about 1/2 that of Intel, so they are swearing that Intel is dumping on the market below manufacturing cost. For the same manufacturing cost, Intel is shipping about twice as many parts. They can sell below AMD's production cost and still sell at a profit because more of AMD chips can't ship.
Forcing lower prices the market simply stops production if you can't manufacture for that price. Ask AMD what this feels like. Last time I checked their profit margin is -58.24%. They can't continue for long in the price war. Link http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD
AMD can't lower prices without fixing yield, They will fold first.
Intel is operating at a profit and NOT dumping on the market to kill AMD. Their profit margin is 17.79% Link http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=INTC
Don't expect competition to cause either company to suddenly cut prices in half. It ain't gonna happen because it can't. If the prices are lower, it is because the parts are cheaper with less performance to meet the lower prices the market will bear. Example Intel's Atom. Smaller, lower power, lower performance, lower cost. You won't be buying Core Extreme quad chips for Atom prices. It can't happen.
China has lower labor costs as well as lower FAB costs (less EPA costs) so even with a lower yield, they may be able to under price Intel/AMD. AMD can't enter a price war, they are already in the red. Intel can come down a little until the volume drops off, then the unit price will stall as the divide between red and black ink rises due to lower volume. The margins can be cut some, but as volume is cut, the red ink price line will rise as the cost per unit increases. Cross that line and jobs and FABs are cut. R & D is reduced. You get less for the buck.
Take finance 101 again and try again.
Intel pushes faster, better, cheaper. Without all three, someone else will take the market.
Let's face it, you can buy an Atom chip for less than the price of a good steak dinner for a family of 2. Guess which has much more R & D and manufacturing costs. Only through volume at high manufacturing yield is the prices this low. Cut volume or yield, and the price takes a hit.
Maybe you're a dumbass? Just uninstall the application and reinstall?
If you are in the Portland OR area and would like a shot at it, drop me a line.
It's a possiblility, But, a reinstall was attempted. The broken photocopier does not reinstall the existing TWAIN driver. Reinstall left it in the same condition. Reinstalled the TWAIN driver.. Same result, still hooked to the uninstalled photo editor.
At this point we've reached 3 hours of un-billable hours as it isn't fixed yet. Even worse is there is absolutely no sign of improvement at all. How many dead end tries does it take to fix and how much can you bill for this type repair. This is why there are few mom and pop shops.
The little fix this takes hours and hours and is only worth a few bucks to the consumer. These types of repairs simply are no longer offered as they don't pay the rent. Nobody tries to fix this type problem for a living anymore as they quickly find they burn the midnight oil and get paid maybe an hour for the 3-12 hours it actually took. I quit at 3 hours. The work performed didn't fix it and was un-billable.
This is typical of Windows problems. Easily broken like glass windows and replacement is the practical fix. Reassembling the pieces is a waste of time and is never quite right.
In my area, there are virtually no computer repair shops left.
That is because the repairs (Windows bugs) have become too complex to effectively troubleshoot and repair. To do the job right requires too much time for which you can't bill. After spending a day attempting to recover a Windows box without a reformat, I learned the level of futility. I now too, reformat, reinstall when working with Windows boxes. The software is too complex to repair after a modern malware attack.
The amount of undocumented crap that can hose the sytem is too great.
Here is a typical reason to reformat instead of repair.. 1 factory Windows XP install 1 aftermarket freeware photocopier (Scanner to printer) 1 demo factory loaded photo editor
Photocopier works fine, until the need arose one day to crop a photo to post online.. Tried the default photo editor.. the 30 day trial expired a year ago, would you like to spend $$$ for the full version? No.
Now the photocopier is broken. Attempts to photocopy simply launch the dead photo editor as it hijacked the TWAIN driver and launches upon any scan. Removing the photo editor does not fix the photocopier. Windows reports the photo editor is missing, would you like help searching for it?
How to fix??? How much time would be required to find where the TWAIN driver has been repointed. It's buried in the registery and not documented.. It's reformat to fix. Anything else is a massive waste of time.
The wife doesn't want to lose her settings and email so this has been broken for about 2 years. Photocopier functions and photo editing is done on the Linux box now because it works.
The wife is migrating away from Windows as it decays and she too looks for the tools that work.
To learn to like Linux, simply use Windows for a while.
If I stop buying, say, Sony albums, what does that tell Sony? What does it tell them of my reasons? Money doesn't leave any clues, and it's not as if they can spot an extra twenty dollars spent on, say, tomatoes and say that that's where my money has gone.
They spend lots of money on market research. The watch what each other is doing. They watch P-P to see if piracy is really a problem (it is). They test the market.. Spend a few extra cents on iTunes for DRM free.. Amazon has DRM free for no extra.. Hmm, Amazon suddenly has a lot more sales.. They follow the money. They tried DRM and it failed. They noticed that less than a few single digit percent of songs on an iPod were encumbered by DRM. They noticed the biggest technical problems faced with purchased music was DRM related.
Sony put out some DVD's with extra DRM. My wife picked up Open Season for the kids and it wouldn't play on my Linux box. They got the message when I called and complained. They sent me a replacement DRM free (standard CSS) replacement free of charge and they know I won't buy any more broken DVD's.
Stopping purchases is part of the solution. Calling tech support for broken products is the other way to send the message. DRM kills sales and requires tech support is the message sent loud and clear. If my vote didn't count, they would never have made a normal DVD replacement.
Now, this is great for the end user to know - but even better if people in industry would pay attention!
Your vote counts. The industry will only listen to your votes. How to vote is simple. It's a free market. Vote wisely and the industry has no choice but to follow the money or die. I have been wanting all along for this to happen. I was afraid I was going to be out voted by those who buy DRM anyway, but it is not the case.
Now if we can only get the closed format of DVD's fixed. That format came wrapped in copy protection. The HD formats are even worse. I'm wishing the new formats prove a bust for the high prices and copy protection problems.
Oh crap, get ready for another wave of "omg where is the start button" questions on the Ubuntu message boards.
Finding the start button isn't the problem. It's pointing them to the way the fix the broken MP3 playback and explaining the lack of the registry that isn't so easy.
a) 10MB is 20x 500KB; even my crappy phone line gets me 75x the speed of my old modem, so that site is still loading in less than a third the time of the old one
My parents live in the country and dial-up is their only option. Do you have any idea of how much of the USA is still on dial-up?
According to this site, it was just recently that the 90% on broadband was reached. Prior to June, over 10% of the USA was on less than broadband service. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/ For the first time, US broadband penetration broke ninety percent among active Internet users in June 2008.
And in this case, twice in a row, the mysterious occurrence of at least one floor giving way completely and simultaneously such that it would cause a chain reaction
Just how many buildings in history have a 7 hour fire with no firefighting to compare this to? Remember, the sprinkler system was dead due to the other buildings water breaks.
7 hours of baking has very little history to compare it to. Other than the fire was allowed to burn with no cooling for 7 hours, what's the point?
The log rack in my fireplace has the same sagging from only a small wood fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Safely storing your serial/product keys these days for long term use is pretty useless.
Using software that needs to connect to the mother ship to ask permission is pretty useless when there are plenty of alternatives.
I keep the keys for my older software as barcodes for easy entry with a barcode gun for quick reinstalls. Chance of accidental deletion or copy is pretty nil. They are pasted on the CD boxes.
I personally have the exact same stuff on my thumb drive - my resume and some cracking tools.
What is important to learn is to learn from mistakes. Some learn from other's mistakes. Others wait till it happens to them. This is why proceedures are put into place. Often they are there to prevent common mistakes. Bypassing written proceedures is a gateway to making known types of mistakes.
Thumb drives are nice, but what exactly is your company policy regarding their use?
The one hanging on my employee badge is not treated the same as the one hanging on my keyring. Personal and professional never mix.
I don't know about the first one, but the second has no real bearing on anything. McCain, for instance, was not born on American soil, but rather to two American parents who were in another country at the time of his birth. As such he is an American citizen and qualified to run for president.
Are you trying to rewrite the US constitution, or simply don't have a copy?
http://www.presidentsusa.net/qualifications.html
"No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President."
http://home.comcast.net/~sharonday7/Presidents/AP0601.htm
2. What does it mean in the Constitution when it says "natural born Citizen?"
From Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition: "Natural born citizen. Persons who are born within the jurisdiction of a national government, i.e. in its territorial limits, or those born of citizens temporarily residing abroad."
So the question is still here, where was he born. Was his parents US citizens at the time and if so, were they temporarily residing abroad?
When did his parents become US citizens? There are lots of unanswered questions. It is OK to ask questions even if the answers are not your liking.
"in my opinion" is not a magic word that lets you defame people with impunity.
Actually, that phrase provides lots of free speech protections. I can say that I think taking the oil company profits and capping the price will cause oil shipments to stop to the US just like they did in the 1970's. I can say In my opinion, I think someone is an idiot for suggesting it. This is not defamation. This is stating what someone is suggesting and my opinion of his suggestion.
Mentioning that I think there is reason to believe he is not a native born citizen and therefore ineligible to run for president is also not defamation. It is based on the lawsuit that he was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. This is not defamation. References provided.
http://bobmccarty.com/2008/08/23/lawsuit-challenges-barack-obama-citizenship/
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/gaynor/080214
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/08/barack-obama-is-citizen-of-kenya.html
If he was born here, how does he have citizenship of Kenya?
If he wasn't born on American soil, how is he qualified to run for President?
In reading between the lines, I think it is important that he is not being sued for calling the Media Sentry investigations Illegal. If the RIAA thought they had a case in which to sue, I would have expected an attack on this. The silence is deafening.
I wonder if Ray can keep his blog entries up if he simply stated the line in contention as in my opinion.
The stating an opinion as fact is the basis of the action. His opinion may indeed be fact. It would be interesting if the RIAA lost and it was proven in court to be fact. I think the RIAA may have a tiger by the tail on this one.
This is not news. Intelligence gathering has been from two types of operations. Covert is the stuff spy movies are made of with wire taps, break-ins, etc. Less glamorous is the overt gathering of info which is still a huge part of any intelligence operation. This is classic observation of publicly exposed information. Overt intelligence is still kept under wraps as it is not a good idea to reveal just what you are looking for.
Overt intelligence includes reading local newspapers, picking up over the air radio traffic, including encrypted (who and how much traffic is important even without breaking the code) and simply watching train, ship, truck traffic. A train load of military vehicles doesn't need covert operations to notice. The fact you noticed is often classified. A fishing boat using lots of encrypted radio traffic is of interest for example, but watching ports and keeping track of where it visits is an overt operation, but what is found out is kept under wraps from the public for good reason.
Watching train watchers, and other sets of eyes online is the only new angle in addition to picking up local newspapers and watching trains arrive and leave. It saves on manpower and may pick up something of interest.
Understanding what happened to the nuclear core of the Trogan Nuclear plant does not require covert ops to know the core was loaded on a boat and shipped up the Columbia River. If it headed out to sea instead, it would have been noticed without covert ops.
Anybody else read that as "3M Pocket Protector"? Because with those specs, that would be AWESOME!
3M pocket protectors have been with us for many years. To make one, take the sleve from a 3M floppy (5-1/4in) and fold it in half. Fill the front with pens and the back with your calculator and you are all set.
The disc is copy controlled:
Which next to piracy, high cost, and compression to sound loud, finishes killing sales.
They are fixing piracy (NOT) by killing sales of all CD's. Doesn't make sense to me.
If only the studios would release what the consumer wants instead of poisoning the soup there may still be interest in CD's.
I don't know which is defective by design, so I don't buy any as the warranty is useless.
Here is the link to the server behind the wall;
"The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server."
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012
I still installed Kubuntu on both. Windows is nice to have around if you ever need it (BIOS updates on the HP, or calling for tech support on either machine, for example) but really not right for daily use for me.
The easy way to save your factory installation and your Kubuntu installation is simply buy a new hard disk and install the choice OS on it. My older Thinkpad is this way and an OS swap takes about 3 minutes with all settings. It's as simple as remove a screw, remove the cover from headphone jack which slides out the HD with it, change carriers to the other drive and slide the other one in and replace the screw. Updates and Turbotax are done and ready for next year's need for Windows.
I did this with Dark Side of the Moon with Audacity. Ripped it to FLAC, edited out the dead spots carefully matching the waveform tails and saved the result. My Album now has 2 tracks, side A and Side B. Awesome. I need to take the time to do the rest.
Watching a movie on TV has got to be a pain these days due to the incessant ad breaks.
Agreed, which is why I won't miss TV when they switch off analog. I almost never watch it now.
Aren't you afraid you are going to burn in hell? You go to church and brazenly conduct illegal activities, surely you aren't expecting to go heaven?
Think young military pre-CD's. Piracy days. Later CD's, church. I have never ever used Napster, Kaza, Limewire, etc. I used Bit Torrent for Linux distro's, but Comcast broke that, so I just use mirrors.
My early days do not reflect current activities. Be not quick to judge lest ye be judged. Remember, I bought DC Talk, not pirated it. I wish I hadn't bought it or sampled the original performance before deciding not to buy it. I heard a church choir perform the one track and I enjoyed that. If the church choir released it on CD, it would have been worth the money.
Even in the piracy days, I bought a lot of great albums from artists such as Pink Floyd, Styx, ELO (go ahead and laugh), Tomita, Cornerstone, Mariner, etc. This was stuff not played on the local radio stations. It was from sharing I discovered these artists and bought the albums. Without the military housing environment, I would have bought much less music or the great audiophile stereo to enjoy it on.
Today with the youth, piracy is even cheaper (no need to buy blank tapes and copy them real time) so many people invest nothing in music unlike the older days where there was great pride in a great collection and great equipment to play it on. Much music today is compressed to lower bit rates and played on small cheap speakers or headphones. The studios have entered the loudness wars to work in noisy environments. THD of 1% to .1% is the norm. S/N ratios are not important anymore as the signal is compressed to be always loud. My used 30 year old speakers alone are worth the average price of a new iPod. I looked them up on e-bay.
Recording for a clean natural sound is no longer desirable. For me, modern recordings are undesirable, and the online stuff legal and otherwise is even lower quality.
I don't bother with piracy or purchases anymore.
It is possible to build a profitable, long-lasting, and legal online music business,
It WAS possible to build a profitable,
There, fixed it for you. The industry has tried to push Apple into a layered pricing service with higher prices for more popular stuff. By then Apple was big enough to push back and win.
Small potatoes startup companies don't have that kind of clout. They also have no way to unseat Apple.
But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
It's a common scapegoat, but missing the mark. Percieved value and retail price are an order of magnitude out of place.
Instead of wasting money on a shiney disk with about 45 minutes of stuff along with one good song, I can buy a DVD for half the price.
I can carbonate water at home and add my own flavoring and sugar, but I still purchase fountain drinks for the convience.
CD's are now the oposite of convience for more money. Downloads go right on to an MP3 player. CD's have to be found if still in print, ripped and put on a player.
Online is a-la-carte. CD is a canned package.
Some compainies wanted to make and install in store CD burning kiosks. Guess who killed that in the bud?
For an industry who doesn't listen to their consumers, they sure scream P-P a lot for their lack of adjusting to the market.
If you scream P-P enough, will the death of your scapegoat really fix your root problems?
Some people are offended by my blacklist system.
This would be mostly your best customers. Those who don't listen to music don't buy CD's. Those deeply into music purchases CD's and shares copies of out of print stuff or the one good song on a CD. Blacklisting them is a great way of killing the biggest part of your business. Thanks for providing great evidence the industry doesn't understand the market.
Much of the industry is selling pig in a poke packages. I bought the DC Talk album Supernatural because our church performed Red Letters, and I enjoyed the choir rendition. I hated the album, even the good track. I'm not into acid rock. Needless to say, once burnt, twice shy.
How many times have you bought an album because you only heard one song and then didn't like the rest of the album at all?
P-P expands music horizons. Most of the time when I bought albums, I heard it from friends first. (I quit buying entirely when the industry started dropping the nuke bomb on some unlucky few as a protest.)
My peak buying days was when I was in the military while in my peak piracy days with cassette tapes. The industry doesn't understand their consumers or the market.
Believe me, now that the oil industry has raised the bar for profit, the other monopolistic industries are going to go whole hog, especially if their favorite Party gets another four years in office.
Man, I lived through the '70's. I survived fixed prices. Prices were fixed to prevent price gouging. In a production crunch it simply means sold out. Been there, done that. Sat in gas lines with $2.00 purchase limits, green flags, yellow flags, and red flags. I drove through small towns that were out of gas, out of gas, out of gas, and sat stranded in a small town and awaited the gas truck delivery in the morning.
Are you serious recommending government mess with the free market again?
Government mandated $1.50/gal gas prices simply mean the deliveries will be elsewhere while we face sold out signs, even and odd day restrictions, and $5.00 limits so everyone can get some with lines from station to station down the street. Seen it, Lived it, don't care to repeat it.
California is simply doing what the rest of the industry is doing. Take for example you want to install a solar panel on the roof of your house. It's covered under the National Electrical Code. Get your own copy here. Bring money.
http://www.bookmarki.com/2008-National-Electrical-Code-s/252.htm
Great for the end consumer, however. Possibly even really really good for me as a United States citizen as Intel/AMD will be forced to drop prices to compete in the world market.
You missed a few basics in economics 101. Cost of production, Cost of development, Economy of scale.
The cost of R & D, FAB construction and operation is why these complex parts are dirt cheap now. Cutting production in half due to competition will not reduce prices. It runs up costs and slows R & D as each product must remain on the market longer.
AMD is screaming foul now because their yeild is about 1/2 that of Intel, so they are swearing that Intel is dumping on the market below manufacturing cost. For the same manufacturing cost, Intel is shipping about twice as many parts. They can sell below AMD's production cost and still sell at a profit because more of AMD chips can't ship.
Forcing lower prices the market simply stops production if you can't manufacture for that price. Ask AMD what this feels like.
Last time I checked their profit margin is -58.24%. They can't continue for long in the price war.
Link http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD
AMD can't lower prices without fixing yield, They will fold first.
Intel is operating at a profit and NOT dumping on the market to kill AMD.
Their profit margin is 17.79%
Link http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=INTC
Don't expect competition to cause either company to suddenly cut prices in half. It ain't gonna happen because it can't.
If the prices are lower, it is because the parts are cheaper with less performance to meet the lower prices the market will bear. Example Intel's Atom. Smaller, lower power, lower performance, lower cost. You won't be buying Core Extreme quad chips for Atom prices. It can't happen.
China has lower labor costs as well as lower FAB costs (less EPA costs) so even with a lower yield, they may be able to under price Intel/AMD. AMD can't enter a price war, they are already in the red. Intel can come down a little until the volume drops off, then the unit price will stall as the divide between red and black ink rises due to lower volume. The margins can be cut some, but as volume is cut, the red ink price line will rise as the cost per unit increases. Cross that line and jobs and FABs are cut. R & D is reduced. You get less for the buck.
Take finance 101 again and try again.
Intel pushes faster, better, cheaper. Without all three, someone else will take the market.
Let's face it, you can buy an Atom chip for less than the price of a good steak dinner for a family of 2. Guess which has much more R & D and manufacturing costs. Only through volume at high manufacturing yield is the prices this low. Cut volume or yield, and the price takes a hit.
Maybe you're a dumbass? Just uninstall the application and reinstall?
If you are in the Portland OR area and would like a shot at it, drop me a line.
It's a possiblility, But, a reinstall was attempted. The broken photocopier does not reinstall the existing TWAIN driver. Reinstall left it in the same condition. Reinstalled the TWAIN driver.. Same result, still hooked to the uninstalled photo editor.
At this point we've reached 3 hours of un-billable hours as it isn't fixed yet. Even worse is there is absolutely no sign of improvement at all. How many dead end tries does it take to fix and how much can you bill for this type repair. This is why there are few mom and pop shops.
The little fix this takes hours and hours and is only worth a few bucks to the consumer. These types of repairs simply are no longer offered as they don't pay the rent. Nobody tries to fix this type problem for a living anymore as they quickly find they burn the midnight oil and get paid maybe an hour for the 3-12 hours it actually took. I quit at 3 hours. The work performed didn't fix it and was un-billable.
This is typical of Windows problems. Easily broken like glass windows and replacement is the practical fix. Reassembling the pieces is a waste of time and is never quite right.
In my area, there are virtually no computer repair shops left.
That is because the repairs (Windows bugs) have become too complex to effectively troubleshoot and repair. To do the job right requires too much time for which you can't bill. After spending a day attempting to recover a Windows box without a reformat, I learned the level of futility. I now too, reformat, reinstall when working with Windows boxes. The software is too complex to repair after a modern malware attack.
The amount of undocumented crap that can hose the sytem is too great.
Here is a typical reason to reformat instead of repair..
1 factory Windows XP install
1 aftermarket freeware photocopier (Scanner to printer)
1 demo factory loaded photo editor
Photocopier works fine, until the need arose one day to crop a photo to post online.. Tried the default photo editor.. the 30 day trial expired a year ago, would you like to spend $$$ for the full version? No.
Now the photocopier is broken. Attempts to photocopy simply launch the dead photo editor as it hijacked the TWAIN driver and launches upon any scan. Removing the photo editor does not fix the photocopier. Windows reports the photo editor is missing, would you like help searching for it?
How to fix??? How much time would be required to find where the TWAIN driver has been repointed. It's buried in the registery and not documented.. It's reformat to fix. Anything else is a massive waste of time.
The wife doesn't want to lose her settings and email so this has been broken for about 2 years. Photocopier functions and photo editing is done on the Linux box now because it works.
The wife is migrating away from Windows as it decays and she too looks for the tools that work.
To learn to like Linux, simply use Windows for a while.
If I stop buying, say, Sony albums, what does that tell Sony? What does it tell them of my reasons? Money doesn't leave any clues, and it's not as if they can spot an extra twenty dollars spent on, say, tomatoes and say that that's where my money has gone.
They spend lots of money on market research. The watch what each other is doing. They watch P-P to see if piracy is really a problem (it is). They test the market.. Spend a few extra cents on iTunes for DRM free.. Amazon has DRM free for no extra.. Hmm, Amazon suddenly has a lot more sales.. They follow the money. They tried DRM and it failed. They noticed that less than a few single digit percent of songs on an iPod were encumbered by DRM. They noticed the biggest technical problems faced with purchased music was DRM related.
Sony put out some DVD's with extra DRM. My wife picked up Open Season for the kids and it wouldn't play on my Linux box. They got the message when I called and complained. They sent me a replacement DRM free (standard CSS) replacement free of charge and they know I won't buy any more broken DVD's.
Stopping purchases is part of the solution. Calling tech support for broken products is the other way to send the message. DRM kills sales and requires tech support is the message sent loud and clear. If my vote didn't count, they would never have made a normal DVD replacement.
Now, this is great for the end user to know - but even better if people in industry would pay attention!
Your vote counts. The industry will only listen to your votes. How to vote is simple. It's a free market. Vote wisely and the industry has no choice but to follow the money or die. I have been wanting all along for this to happen. I was afraid I was going to be out voted by those who buy DRM anyway, but it is not the case.
Now if we can only get the closed format of DVD's fixed. That format came wrapped in copy protection. The HD formats are even worse. I'm wishing the new formats prove a bust for the high prices and copy protection problems.
Oh crap, get ready for another wave of "omg where is the start button" questions on the Ubuntu message boards.
Finding the start button isn't the problem. It's pointing them to the way the fix the broken MP3 playback and explaining the lack of the registry that isn't so easy.
a) 10MB is 20x 500KB; even my crappy phone line gets me 75x the speed of my old modem, so that site is still loading in less than a third the time of the old one
My parents live in the country and dial-up is their only option. Do you have any idea of how much of the USA is still on dial-up?
According to this site, it was just recently that the 90% on broadband was reached. Prior to June, over 10% of the USA was on less than broadband service.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/
For the first time, US broadband penetration broke ninety percent among active Internet users in June 2008.
Install Firefox, whack in AdBlock , NoScript, and FlashBlock and you have more privacy and security than with IE.
This is in addition to a good DNS and hosts file.
And in this case, twice in a row, the mysterious occurrence of at least one floor giving way completely and simultaneously such that it would cause a chain reaction
Just how many buildings in history have a 7 hour fire with no firefighting to compare this to? Remember, the sprinkler system was dead due to the other buildings water breaks.
7 hours of baking has very little history to compare it to. Other than the fire was allowed to burn with no cooling for 7 hours, what's the point?
The log rack in my fireplace has the same sagging from only a small wood fire.