And what would you recommend? I'm not being sarcastic...my old iPod just broke (that'll teach me to take it rock-climbing) and I'm in the market for a new player I could use with all three major OSes, if possible. Any ideas?
Many of the cheap flash players are DRM free. Because of that they are incompatible with the offerings of most online music stores. Personaly, I bought a no-name brand (Coby). It was less than $40 US. It connects as a flash drive. It includes a MIC and FM tuner and records from both. It saves the result as a plain MP3 file. It has a SD card slot so it is easly expanded.
MP3 players get hard knocks. It's the main reason I went cheap. I primarly use Linux. A true no driver or sysc software install makes this player truly OS independant. It's incompatible with Windows 95 simply becuause Windows 95 does not support USB.
Look at the off brands. Find one that claims MP3 maybe WMA support but does not do DRM. Most likely it works as a flash drive. I hope this helps. A $40 player with an extra $20 SD card is an afordable option for rock climbing. If it gets smashed, you will likely be able to recover the SD card.
And what makes you think the market in the U.S. is a "free market"?
Some parts are and some are not. For the above, I can still use Mplayer on Linux as an alternative to CSS on DVD players and I can still build a Myth TV box in place of a TIVO or WindowsMCE box. However, the move is in place to restrict these rogue players and recorders.
All they have to do is to remove your ability to boot an unsigned bootloader, and the game is over (with you as the loser).
Um no. In a free market, the alternatives look better. In a non-free market, the alternatives are outlawed. Game is over only when the alternatives are restricted. DRM TV content will have to contend with non-over the air alternatives such as the Internet.
We heard about this problem so when the time came to issue a cell to a teen, we specified no data plans of any kind. We do not want the phone to be a blank check. The demo games play a half level and die, the ring tone selection is limited to the tones on the phone, the Cingular mall does not connect. IM's don't. I thought it was pretty cheezy on Cingular's part to blurr the seperation of DL and local content. Crusing the ring tones would have incurred data charges without warning. The ah-hah moment was the connection error. This has worked well for us in keeping the cost in line. The cavot is any plan change defaults data service on. Be sure to ask if it is off on all phones every time. We had a data charge for ringtones once. We got it reversed when we pointed out we specified no data charges or service in our plan.
I betcha that this has everything to do with it... and you can't really move to Linux because not every Windows app is compatible with Linux.:\
On the flip side, not every Linux app is compatible with Windows. I have 3 Linux machines and one Windows machine. Incompatibility with Windows malware is the driving force here along with price. The Windows machine is for Windows programs. The Linux machines are for web, media, and learning. Nero incompatibility with Linux is not an issue since making, burning, editing ISO's is built in the OS. For media, it is the best DVD player. Putting in a movie, plays the movie, not bombard you with adverts, warnings, and menu's some of which break basic functions such as exiting to the movie or menu. If I want special features or the menu or warnings, I can go to them after the movie thank you.
The more I use Linux, the more I find what is missing Windows.
Since I have a collection of old hardware I still use, I have problems with the one copy per machine license model. OSS has a much better model.
This is why my Wife has the single XP machine with MS office & Turbo Tax. It's also why I retired Windows 98 on a PIII machine and installed Ubuntu along with my Windows 2K laptop and a home built P4 white box (Media Center with TV tuner card and DVD burner)
The Windows license is clear, install on one machine only and do not transfer an OEM install. MS policy is why I have one XP machine and 3 Ubuntu machines.
I don't need 4 copies of XP, Office, Nero, AV, etc. As soon as the MS compatibilities go away, we can convert the XP machine also and save on the upgrade/update treadmill.
It's suggested that this single annoyance drives ordinary people to learn how to rip dvds and in the process eliminate the wonderful story about drug dealing pirates; I couldn't possibly comment.
I will comment. It's the reason I use a Linux based DVD player. I put the DVD in, it starts.. The movie, not a menu, not advertisements, not warnings, the movie. It's what you bought the DVD for was to watch the movie. If I want the menu or any of the extras such as the warning, I can find that also.
I hope someday they change the way players are made. Maybe the studios will get smart and figure out they can sell more movies if they can either release players that start with the movie, or DVD's that start with the movie. There is a MENU button on the remote if you should desire to go to the menu for any of the other content.
What DVDs have *you* bought lately? Mine have all come with 10 freakin' minutes of advertisements at the front that can't be skipped!
Yes they can. Use a PC instead of a DVD player. If you are stuck with Windows and think you are still stuck with the problem, a simple fix is to download GeeXbox. Burn it as an ISO to a CD. Boot the CD and wait for it to give back the CD. Play the DVD... Enjoy the movie.
There must be some kind of trick here, I think. Why is this coming so late? It seems to good to be true, but I really hope it's true
Price fixiing by the music cartel. Don't expect any song to have a lower price than the iTunes protected market. Protection of the iTunes market is in the contract you will never see. You will see the results however. No DRM free track under $1.29.
That would require our Viewer plugin, which is not yet available for your current web browser and/or operating system."
Even worse, it's DRM'ed. Read the part about viewing the tabs on another computer other than the one used to purchase a song.. It's bad. Read the FAQ. It is full of bugs and has a whole laundry list of bugs and possible fixes.
The letter refers to the easy availability of digital sheet music, ignoring the fact that a single song typically costs US$5.00, far more than it's worth to garage musicians.
This is exactly why the last sheet music I bought was purchased over 8 years ago. At fifty cents a copy, I would have collected all my favorite pieces and been learning them.
Instead I work with MIDI files. Sequenced files can be printed if they were properly created. Too bad sheet music publishers are pricing themselves out of the market. At the high prices for sheet music, the selection in the music store is very limited as they can only afford the floor space for the popular pieces of the day. Nothing else sells enough to bother stocking. Notice in most music stores, the sheet music section is very small? It is no longer a high volume item.
I imagine they will start leaning hard on MIDI files again soon. When retailers carried 20K songs on one MIDI or Karaoke CD, I picked up a few. Now I have material for a while. Music publishers simply think since few copies sell they need to price them higher. Low sales must be due to piracy, not high prices. Idiots...
I have the network switch at my desk. It is bolted in place. If i'm not online and there is activity to the router/cable modem, I know I have to check the system. (I know Windows does this all the time) I get used to the scheduled events such as fetchmail. Unexpected traffic has me unplugging things then troubleshooting. Firewalls and AV software only go so far. Knowing normal activity is important. I've learned to ignore the high traffic between the cable modem and the router. The router is constantly hammered on. I feel sorry for anyone trying to run a cable modem directly to a Windows computer. There are lots of people interested in it and they are constantly looking.
If they were to go off, it means something is seriously wrong with the network and not my computer.
I can't agree more. The constant probes is an indication the internet connection is up. A lack of probes is a sure sign the internet connection is down hard.
In fact, hybrids do much better in heavy traffic because under a certain speed (35 Km/h for the Prius for instance) it's just running on batteries.
In the escape Katrina traffic which was at a standstill much of the time, many people ran out of gas within 60 miles of New Orleans because they were traveling at less than 2 MPH. At 2 MPH a Prius can run for days (literaly) on a tank of gas. (keep the AC off)
I know this is possible as I have put an inverter in mine and use it for emergency power. In an ice storm here in the Pacific NW, we ran off the car running the fridge, TV, some lights, the blower on the wood stove, and the computer for 3 days. Dial-up internet still worked. We used less than a half tank of gas. Sitting in traffic not moving much, we would have had about the same gas consumption rate.
As long as you never fill your tank halfway, and you don't top off or otherwise force the gas pump to keep going after it shuts off automatically, and you reset the odo every time you fill up, you can get pretty good mileage estimates this way.
Tank to tank gives a noisy result. Keep a milage / gas log. Varations caused by various top off levels average out over the long term. A half filled tank doesn't have much to do with the results if you are computing over the last 20,000 miles and 1,000 gallons. A + or - 5 gallons will not change the long term trend in the example much from 20 MPG. Many cars average the last 5 minutes of driving. This often gives false impressions of economy. Going down the hill creeping in traffic to town may show over 60 MPG over 5 minutes. In reality that 5 minutes may only be 2 miles. Leaving town going 8 MPG back up the hill does not equal an average of 26 MPG. You need a longer sample size.
My long term average over 6 months is 44.8 MPG. From the article you should be able to figure out what I drive.
There is something wrong with the article. I could read it without loading any DRM software.. Even more important, there is absolutely nothing to prevent a copy and paste or a screen capture of the copyrighted article.
As an example of this failure to protect the copyrighted content, here is a copy/paste from the article. MRT and Bluebeat said the failure to use an available copyright protection solution contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology designed to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or protects the rights of copyright owners.
I think this article would have been best posted in an encrypted form such as they use on Yahoo Music where you need an account to download the article and the article can't be freely posted online on slashdot due to effective DRM. I hope they properly sue Forbes for posting the article without DRM. In the future, I won't be bothered by these type of articles. because I don't do DRM.
I should post as AC so I don't get nailed for the above copyright violation.
Oh except for the above copyrighted quote, I'm posting this post as freeware. Feel free to repost. I hope that takes care of the requirement to post this with DRM.
Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell".
At home my son thinks so. Having had problems getting him off to go to bed and come to dinner, I set up a schedule in the router. The connection goes dead a half hour before dinner and before bedtime on school nights. If he is a pain, I change his password to deny use entirely for a while. Sometimes I just add myspace to the hosts file.
I drive a Golf TDI - not a hybrid, and slightly older than your prius.
It is not a gas car. Diesel fuel has a higher energy density of about 15%. The Golf is a smaller car sold as a compact car. You indicate needing to put the pedal through the floor often. You get great milage by having a higher density fuel, smaller car, and undesized enging. It does 0-60 in 9 seconds. With a 1.9 Liter engine, it has a larger engine than the 1.5 Liter Pirus. It has an EPA highway rating of 44 MPG.
The Prius makes up for lost engine horsepower by using the battery and electric. This gives better city and stop and go effeciency.
I would like to have a diesel Prius just to see what it could do in the MPG game. I would expect to get the 15% energy advantage. In the newer Midsize configuration, it may go from about 60MPG to 68 MPG in a midsize car instead of a compact car.
What I don't understand is why there are not any hybrid minivans for all the soccer moms. 18-22 MPG and $60 fill-ups suck.
Hypermilers use a "pulse and glide" system, and it said that accelerating at an RPM where your engine gives peak torque is more fuel efficient than going the absolute slowest RPM you can. Accelerating then coasting. Then accelerate again.
Do Hypermilers keep the speed under 35 MPH to cut air resistance? Do they cut of the engine to save gas?
In a hybrid such as a prius, there is a group who basicaly take a 50 MPG car and try to get over 100 MPG. This is done by gradualy speeding up to about 35 MPH and then starting to coast using just enough throttle to not regenerative brake but enough to have the engine shut down. At about 25 MPH they repeat the cycle. This driving though effecient is not appreciated on the freeway or limited passing space 2 lane roads.
In the late 1970, I had to drive that way once in a stick shift. They tried price controls to keep the gas companies from gouging the public (see a pattern here?). The result was predictable. With rising crude prices and fixed retail prices, refineries simply took the oppertunity to schedule maitnance. This rusulted in even/odd buying days, $2 limits on purchases, and the flag system of red = no gas, yellow = gas for emergency vehicles only, and green = we have gas but you are limited to $2.00 worth. Having been on a trip, I went from small town to small town with red flags until I parked in one and waited for the delivery in the morning. Then I needed to limp to the next town.
For the brain dead calling for limits on gas prices, are you ready to create a gas shortage? We already did that once in the 1970's. Those who don't learn from history are condemmed to repeat it.
Also, energy capture during regenerative braking is imperfect both because it is easy to exceed the maximum charging rate of the batteries, and also because the charge/discharge cycle is not all that efficient (about 70% both ways, if memory serves.)
I have a hybrid and you are entirely correct in your assessment. Stop and go driving is hard on gas in both a conventional car and a hybrid. Mine shows the KW regenerated. Best economy is when I have little to no regeneration. Slowing gently instead of rush to a light and slam on the brakes saves gas by shutting down burning gas early. In creep and stop traffic a hybrid gets poor economy, but not near as bad as a conventional car simply becasue it shuts down. To get good MPG you have to travel the miles. Real slow and stopped do not acheive miles very fast. A hybrid makes great sense for stop and go driving such as UPS deliveries, City Buses, and Taxi Cabs.
Remember Katrina and the people running out of gas between 30 and 60 miles from New Orleans? In the same situation, in a hybrid, you may drop from about 50 MPG to 35 MPG, but you are not going to drain the tank of 16 gallons in 60 miles like many cars did. I'll take 25-30 MPG in a hybrid in creep and crawl traffic instead of 2-5 MPG some cars got. Just remember to shut off the AC and roll down the windows. Running the engine to run the AC when not moving burns a lot of gas.
A big advantage of regenerative braking is the majority of braking is regenerative at higher speeds. This greatly reduces wear. At 80 K miles, I bought new tires and had the brakes checked. I have 80% of the pads left. There is no alternator, power steering pump, fan, water pump, and other belt driven high failure items. My only belt is for the AC. On newer models they eliminated that belt and went to sealed electric AC. This change eliminating several other high wear high failure parts. (belts, AC clutch, flaxible hoses, shaft seal) As a benifit, the engine can run much less to provide AC in creep and go driving saving fuel. There is further saving by running the compresser at a speed independant of the enging speed. You get good cooling at a stop sign and you are not wasting fuel on the freeway by running the compressor at higher speed than needed. The savings is greater than the effeciency loss of the electric drive instead of the belt drive. Reliability by removal of high wear item is built in. I wish I had this feature on my car.
A smart car assumes an ocassional traffic slowdown. In a creep and stop situation, a smart car will not perform better than a hybrid which shuts the engine off before reaching a stop.
FYI, my average for last month is 45.6 MPG. It includes typical rush hour traffic with some creep and stop driving and a long trip of 180 miles each way over the mountains. I drive an 02 Prius. How you drive makes big changes in your results.
You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers...
We are moving back in that direction with DRM, Trusted Computing, & High Definition. Your hardware is a dongle nowdays with single machine tethered DRM software.
When you get a phishing eMail, go to the URL. Enter some information. Not valid information unless you are a fool. Enter bogus crap. It's fun
and doesn't work on many phishing sites. Many sites do a man in the middle attack. What you enter is relayed to the real site in real time. A failed login is ignored. A valid login is considered valid. I have hit many phishing sites where the spoofed site is for someplace I don't have an account. Manytimes I have failed to properly login even though I know the format of the account numbers. My last few fake ebay attempts were of this nature. My login failed on the phishing sites. I don't have a real ebay account.
Suing someone without a case is extortion in all but name. Infact it's worse than extortion. If you try to extort me by coming around with a baseball bat, I'd be allowed to take your head off with a big sword, if you did it with a court I have to roll over and take it, or end up in jail/dead. What do you think about the judge who's suing a dry cleaners for $65million over a lost pair of trousers? if he wins outright they'll be ruined. If he wins 1% of what he's suing for they'll be ruined. Even if he doesn't win, the hidden costs that they've incurred (maybe the stress has caused them to make mistakes and damage other people's trousers) will be close to ruinous (assuming, then, that they get their costs back, which given that they did misplace his trousers, isn't guaranteed). How does that NOT fit the common definition of 'extortion', just because his enforcers have badges and are lead by a man in a wig and a toy hammer?
Trial by press is a big thing in the US. Many cases like the lost pants could have been lost behind closed doors or if the amount much smaller pretty much ignored.
However when a judge of all people sworn to uphold justice does something this outragious, the trial by the press is vicious. The judge is exposed as being unfit as it is clear he has no sense of justice at all. This is a case to watch. Expect the judge to be fully discredited first by press, then by partners and the bar.
The partners and bar will have to move or be discredited themselves for permitting the fool to remain on the bench.
I boycott it. I started boycotting the RIAA labels and their artists when Napster (the real one) got taken down.
I stopped buying CD's when I couldn't tell real CD's from the Defective By Design CD's. Labels noticed the consumer didn't pay attention to the discs that lacked the Compact Disk tm. logo and stopped paying Phillips for the trademark. Soon afterward, they started dinking with putting autorun/autoinstall software on fake CD's. Since you can't tell a real CD due to the lack of the Philips logo, the defective CD's poisoned the pot. I picked up a policy... No Compact Disc logo, No Sale. I soon gave up trying to find anything in the vast wasteland of shiny discs without the logo. The high prices and reduced quality (audio compression to sound loud) finished off the intrest in defective shiny discs. I got much better value in other products for my money.
The encryption keeps people from making backups of their movies.
HD movies are a replacement for DVD movies. There is a propoganda site explaining copy protection on movies. They claim there is no need for back-up copies as with reasonable care DVD's will last forever.
www.copyprotected.com
Reasonable care and children never mixed. In both sofware and movies, it's the high usage childrens content that is either broken, missing, or otherwise unplayable. The industry in all their wisdom do not have an exchange program for maltreated shiny discs. With kids, backups and working copies are essential.
Other than the dream of perfectly locked down content with HD, the industry on the other side of their face are admiting that users want to put their purchased movies on their cell phone, media server, PDA, iPod, Zen Vision, etc. just like they want to do with their music.
The major fear of course is the nth copy of the first copy is exactly the same down to the last bit. With video tape and analog cassette copies, each generation of a copy of a copy degrades adding all the defects of noise, dropouts, loss of fideliety, AGC compression, etc so they tolorated LP's copied onto tape to use in your walkman and car stereo.
With the advent of perfect copies of copies, they are desprate to lock down the ability to make the first copyable digital copy. This of course is anti-consumer who is used to making back-up copies of valuable data to prevent loss. To get back-up copies, working copies are naturaly shared.
Notice how nobody bothers making a tape to tape copy of a $5.00 VHS movie? (disregarding Macrovision) When the same moves were $65 and blank VHS tapes were $20 each, piracy was a big problem. (admiting my age, these were a large part of my library) Video stabelizers were the norm to bypass Magnaguard and early Macrovision. The industry needs to get a clue. Nobody takes the time to photocopy a 35 cent daily newspaper to back it up. A $30 movie on the other hand is considered worth backing up.
SONY recently adding more copy protection to their recent DVD's has put me on the ex-consumer list. Until they permanently change their ways, they have lost me.
To their credit, they are sending me a replacement for my DRM'ed copy of Open Season. Hopefully I will be able to install it on my media server for the kids. Acidrip wouldn't even recognise the disk.
If all HD moves were released with retail prices under $6 each, piracy wouldn't be much of a problem. It's less hasle to just go out and pick up a copy.
Here is a clue to increase sales; 1 DROP DRM 2 DROP PRICES 3 RAISE VALUE 4 Enjoy increased volume.
Since they have all of the first 3 wrong, 4 is going the wrong way. Raising quality is only part of raising value. Making it unplayable on many of my systems including media server is a reduction in value. They are walking a tightrope. The RIAA is keeping volume down by dropping DRM and offsetting the potential to raise volume by raising prices. Just how stupid is that? Are they trying to keep volume down?
Hint Cluestick time. Want to increase volume at current prices? DROP DRM, raise quality. Leave the price alone or lower it.
I think the RIAA has enough money. If they didn't, they would do someting that made economic sense instead of trying to game the system.
Slashdot Mirror
And what would you recommend? I'm not being sarcastic...my old iPod just broke (that'll teach me to take it rock-climbing) and I'm in the market for a new player I could use with all three major OSes, if possible. Any ideas?
Many of the cheap flash players are DRM free. Because of that they are incompatible with the offerings of most online music stores. Personaly, I bought a no-name brand (Coby). It was less than $40 US. It connects as a flash drive. It includes a MIC and FM tuner and records from both. It saves the result as a plain MP3 file. It has a SD card slot so it is easly expanded.
MP3 players get hard knocks. It's the main reason I went cheap. I primarly use Linux. A true no driver or sysc software install makes this player truly OS independant. It's incompatible with Windows 95 simply becuause Windows 95 does not support USB.
Look at the off brands. Find one that claims MP3 maybe WMA support but does not do DRM. Most likely it works as a flash drive. I hope this helps. A $40 player with an extra $20 SD card is an afordable option for rock climbing. If it gets smashed, you will likely be able to recover the SD card.
And what makes you think the market in the U.S. is a "free market"?
Some parts are and some are not. For the above, I can still use Mplayer on Linux as an alternative to CSS on DVD players and I can still build a Myth TV box in place of a TIVO or WindowsMCE box. However, the move is in place to restrict these rogue players and recorders.
All they have to do is to remove your ability to boot an unsigned bootloader, and the game is over (with you as the loser).
Um no. In a free market, the alternatives look better. In a non-free market, the alternatives are outlawed. Game is over only when the alternatives are restricted. DRM TV content will have to contend with non-over the air alternatives such as the Internet.
Prepaid phone
or;
NO DATA
We heard about this problem so when the time came to issue a cell to a teen, we specified no data plans of any kind. We do not want the phone to be a blank check. The demo games play a half level and die, the ring tone selection is limited to the tones on the phone, the Cingular mall does not connect. IM's don't. I thought it was pretty cheezy on Cingular's part to blurr the seperation of DL and local content. Crusing the ring tones would have incurred data charges without warning. The ah-hah moment was the connection error. This has worked well for us in keeping the cost in line. The cavot is any plan change defaults data service on. Be sure to ask if it is off on all phones every time. We had a data charge for ringtones once. We got it reversed when we pointed out we specified no data charges or service in our plan.
I betcha that this has everything to do with it... and you can't really move to Linux because not every Windows app is compatible with Linux. :\
On the flip side, not every Linux app is compatible with Windows. I have 3 Linux machines and one Windows machine. Incompatibility with Windows malware is the driving force here along with price. The Windows machine is for Windows programs. The Linux machines are for web, media, and learning. Nero incompatibility with Linux is not an issue since making, burning, editing ISO's is built in the OS. For media, it is the best DVD player. Putting in a movie, plays the movie, not bombard you with adverts, warnings, and menu's some of which break basic functions such as exiting to the movie or menu. If I want special features or the menu or warnings, I can go to them after the movie thank you.
The more I use Linux, the more I find what is missing Windows.
I knew someone would not pay for Windows.
Since I have a collection of old hardware I still use, I have problems with the one copy per machine license model. OSS has a much better model.
This is why my Wife has the single XP machine with MS office & Turbo Tax. It's also why I retired Windows 98 on a PIII machine and installed Ubuntu along with my Windows 2K laptop and a home built P4 white box (Media Center with TV tuner card and DVD burner)
The Windows license is clear, install on one machine only and do not transfer an OEM install. MS policy is why I have one XP machine and 3 Ubuntu machines.
I don't need 4 copies of XP, Office, Nero, AV, etc. As soon as the MS compatibilities go away, we can convert the XP machine also and save on the upgrade/update treadmill.
It's suggested that this single annoyance drives ordinary people to learn how to rip dvds and in the process eliminate the wonderful story about drug dealing pirates; I couldn't possibly comment.
I will comment. It's the reason I use a Linux based DVD player. I put the DVD in, it starts.. The movie, not a menu, not advertisements, not warnings, the movie. It's what you bought the DVD for was to watch the movie. If I want the menu or any of the extras such as the warning, I can find that also.
I hope someday they change the way players are made. Maybe the studios will get smart and figure out they can sell more movies if they can either release players that start with the movie, or DVD's that start with the movie. There is a MENU button on the remote if you should desire to go to the menu for any of the other content.
What DVDs have *you* bought lately? Mine have all come with 10 freakin' minutes of advertisements at the front that can't be skipped!
Yes they can. Use a PC instead of a DVD player. If you are stuck with Windows and think you are still stuck with the problem, a simple fix is to download GeeXbox. Burn it as an ISO to a CD. Boot the CD and wait for it to give back the CD. Play the DVD... Enjoy the movie.
There must be some kind of trick here, I think. Why is this coming so late? It seems to good to be true, but I really hope it's true
Price fixiing by the music cartel. Don't expect any song to have a lower price than the iTunes protected market. Protection of the iTunes market is in the contract you will never see. You will see the results however. No DRM free track under $1.29.
That would require our Viewer plugin, which is not yet available for your current web browser and/or operating system."
Even worse, it's DRM'ed. Read the part about viewing the tabs on another computer other than the one used to purchase a song.. It's bad. Read the FAQ. It is full of bugs and has a whole laundry list of bugs and possible fixes.
The letter refers to the easy availability of digital sheet music, ignoring the fact that a single song typically costs US$5.00, far more than it's worth to garage musicians.
This is exactly why the last sheet music I bought was purchased over 8 years ago. At fifty cents a copy, I would have collected all my favorite pieces and been learning them.
Instead I work with MIDI files. Sequenced files can be printed if they were properly created. Too bad sheet music publishers are pricing themselves out of the market. At the high prices for sheet music, the selection in the music store is very limited as they can only afford the floor space for the popular pieces of the day. Nothing else sells enough to bother stocking. Notice in most music stores, the sheet music section is very small? It is no longer a high volume item.
I imagine they will start leaning hard on MIDI files again soon.
When retailers carried 20K songs on one MIDI or Karaoke CD, I picked up a few. Now I have material for a while. Music publishers simply think since few copies sell they need to price them higher. Low sales must be due to piracy, not high prices. Idiots...
I have the network switch at my desk. It is bolted in place. If i'm not online and there is activity to the router/cable modem, I know I have to check the system. (I know Windows does this all the time) I get used to the scheduled events such as fetchmail. Unexpected traffic has me unplugging things then troubleshooting. Firewalls and AV software only go so far. Knowing normal activity is important. I've learned to ignore the high traffic between the cable modem and the router. The router is constantly hammered on. I feel sorry for anyone trying to run a cable modem directly to a Windows computer. There are lots of people interested in it and they are constantly looking.
If they were to go off, it means something is seriously wrong with the network and not my computer.
I can't agree more. The constant probes is an indication the internet connection is up. A lack of probes is a sure sign the internet connection is down hard.
In fact, hybrids do much better in heavy traffic because under a certain speed (35 Km/h for the Prius for instance) it's just running on batteries.
In the escape Katrina traffic which was at a standstill much of the time, many people ran out of gas within 60 miles of New Orleans because they were traveling at less than 2 MPH. At 2 MPH a Prius can run for days (literaly) on a tank of gas. (keep the AC off)
I know this is possible as I have put an inverter in mine and use it for emergency power. In an ice storm here in the Pacific NW, we ran off the car running the fridge, TV, some lights, the blower on the wood stove, and the computer for 3 days. Dial-up internet still worked. We used less than a half tank of gas. Sitting in traffic not moving much, we would have had about the same gas consumption rate.
As long as you never fill your tank halfway, and you don't top off or otherwise force the gas pump to keep going after it shuts off automatically, and you reset the odo every time you fill up, you can get pretty good mileage estimates this way.
Tank to tank gives a noisy result. Keep a milage / gas log. Varations caused by various top off levels average out over the long term. A half filled tank doesn't have much to do with the results if you are computing over the last 20,000 miles and 1,000 gallons. A + or - 5 gallons will not change the long term trend in the example much from 20 MPG. Many cars average the last 5 minutes of driving. This often gives false impressions of economy. Going down the hill creeping in traffic to town may show over 60 MPG over 5 minutes. In reality that 5 minutes may only be 2 miles. Leaving town going 8 MPG back up the hill does not equal an average of 26 MPG. You need a longer sample size.
My long term average over 6 months is 44.8 MPG. From the article you should be able to figure out what I drive.
There is something wrong with the article. I could read it without loading any DRM software.. Even more important, there is absolutely nothing to prevent a copy and paste or a screen capture of the copyrighted article.
As an example of this failure to protect the copyrighted content, here is a copy/paste from the article.
MRT and Bluebeat said the failure to use an available copyright protection solution contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology designed to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or protects the rights of copyright owners.
I think this article would have been best posted in an encrypted form such as they use on Yahoo Music where you need an account to download the article and the article can't be freely posted online on slashdot due to effective DRM. I hope they properly sue Forbes for posting the article without DRM. In the future, I won't be bothered by these type of articles. because I don't do DRM.
I should post as AC so I don't get nailed for the above copyright violation.
Oh except for the above copyrighted quote, I'm posting this post as freeware. Feel free to repost. I hope that takes care of the requirement to post this with DRM.
Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell".
At home my son thinks so. Having had problems getting him off to go to bed and come to dinner, I set up a schedule in the router. The connection goes dead a half hour before dinner and before bedtime on school nights. If he is a pain, I change his password to deny use entirely for a while. Sometimes I just add myspace to the hosts file.
It's a dirty job, but he will be better for it.
I drive a Golf TDI - not a hybrid, and slightly older than your prius.
It is not a gas car. Diesel fuel has a higher energy density of about 15%. The Golf is a smaller car sold as a compact car. You indicate needing to put the pedal through the floor often. You get great milage by having a higher density fuel, smaller car, and undesized enging. It does 0-60 in 9 seconds. With a 1.9 Liter engine, it has a larger engine than the 1.5 Liter Pirus. It has an EPA highway rating of 44 MPG.
The Prius makes up for lost engine horsepower by using the battery and electric. This gives better city and stop and go effeciency.
I would like to have a diesel Prius just to see what it could do in the MPG game. I would expect to get the 15% energy advantage. In the newer Midsize configuration, it may go from about 60MPG to 68 MPG in a midsize car instead of a compact car.
What I don't understand is why there are not any hybrid minivans for all the soccer moms. 18-22 MPG and $60 fill-ups suck.
Hypermilers use a "pulse and glide" system, and it said that accelerating at an RPM where your engine gives peak torque is more fuel efficient than going the absolute slowest RPM you can. Accelerating then coasting. Then accelerate again.
Do Hypermilers keep the speed under 35 MPH to cut air resistance? Do they cut of the engine to save gas?
In a hybrid such as a prius, there is a group who basicaly take a 50 MPG car and try to get over 100 MPG. This is done by gradualy speeding up to about 35 MPH and then starting to coast using just enough throttle to not regenerative brake but enough to have the engine shut down. At about 25 MPH they repeat the cycle. This driving though effecient is not appreciated on the freeway or limited passing space 2 lane roads.
In the late 1970, I had to drive that way once in a stick shift. They tried price controls to keep the gas companies from gouging the public (see a pattern here?). The result was predictable. With rising crude prices and fixed retail prices, refineries simply took the oppertunity to schedule maitnance. This rusulted in even/odd buying days, $2 limits on purchases, and the flag system of red = no gas, yellow = gas for emergency vehicles only, and green = we have gas but you are limited to $2.00 worth. Having been on a trip, I went from small town to small town with red flags until I parked in one and waited for the delivery in the morning. Then I needed to limp to the next town.
For the brain dead calling for limits on gas prices, are you ready to create a gas shortage? We already did that once in the 1970's. Those who don't learn from history are condemmed to repeat it.
Also, energy capture during regenerative braking is imperfect both because it is easy to exceed the maximum charging rate of the batteries, and also because the charge/discharge cycle is not all that efficient (about 70% both ways, if memory serves.)
I have a hybrid and you are entirely correct in your assessment. Stop and go driving is hard on gas in both a conventional car and a hybrid. Mine shows the KW regenerated. Best economy is when I have little to no regeneration. Slowing gently instead of rush to a light and slam on the brakes saves gas by shutting down burning gas early. In creep and stop traffic a hybrid gets poor economy, but not near as bad as a conventional car simply becasue it shuts down. To get good MPG you have to travel the miles. Real slow and stopped do not acheive miles very fast. A hybrid makes great sense for stop and go driving such as UPS deliveries, City Buses, and Taxi Cabs.
Remember Katrina and the people running out of gas between 30 and 60 miles from New Orleans? In the same situation, in a hybrid, you may drop from about 50 MPG to 35 MPG, but you are not going to drain the tank of 16 gallons in 60 miles like many cars did. I'll take 25-30 MPG in a hybrid in creep and crawl traffic instead of 2-5 MPG some cars got. Just remember to shut off the AC and roll down the windows. Running the engine to run the AC when not moving burns a lot of gas.
A big advantage of regenerative braking is the majority of braking is regenerative at higher speeds. This greatly reduces wear. At 80 K miles, I bought new tires and had the brakes checked. I have 80% of the pads left. There is no alternator, power steering pump, fan, water pump, and other belt driven high failure items. My only belt is for the AC. On newer models they eliminated that belt and went to sealed electric AC. This change eliminating several other high wear high failure parts. (belts, AC clutch, flaxible hoses, shaft seal) As a benifit, the engine can run much less to provide AC in creep and go driving saving fuel. There is further saving by running the compresser at a speed independant of the enging speed. You get good cooling at a stop sign and you are not wasting fuel on the freeway by running the compressor at higher speed than needed. The savings is greater than the effeciency loss of the electric drive instead of the belt drive. Reliability by removal of high wear item is built in. I wish I had this feature on my car.
A smart car assumes an ocassional traffic slowdown. In a creep and stop situation, a smart car will not perform better than a hybrid which shuts the engine off before reaching a stop.
FYI, my average for last month is 45.6 MPG. It includes typical rush hour traffic with some creep and stop driving and a long trip of 180 miles each way over the mountains. I drive an 02 Prius. How you drive makes big changes in your results.
You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers...
We are moving back in that direction with DRM, Trusted Computing, & High Definition. Your hardware is a dongle nowdays with single machine tethered DRM software.
When you get a phishing eMail, go to the URL. Enter some information. Not valid information unless you are a fool. Enter bogus crap. It's fun
and doesn't work on many phishing sites. Many sites do a man in the middle attack. What you enter is relayed to the real site in real time. A failed login is ignored. A valid login is considered valid. I have hit many phishing sites where the spoofed site is for someplace I don't have an account. Manytimes I have failed to properly login even though I know the format of the account numbers. My last few fake ebay attempts were of this nature. My login failed on the phishing sites. I don't have a real ebay account.
Suing someone without a case is extortion in all but name. Infact it's worse than extortion. If you try to extort me by coming around with a baseball bat, I'd be allowed to take your head off with a big sword, if you did it with a court I have to roll over and take it, or end up in jail/dead.
What do you think about the judge who's suing a dry cleaners for $65million over a lost pair of trousers? if he wins outright they'll be ruined. If he wins 1% of what he's suing for they'll be ruined. Even if he doesn't win, the hidden costs that they've incurred (maybe the stress has caused them to make mistakes and damage other people's trousers) will be close to ruinous (assuming, then, that they get their costs back, which given that they did misplace his trousers, isn't guaranteed). How does that NOT fit the common definition of 'extortion', just because his enforcers have badges and are lead by a man in a wig and a toy hammer?
Trial by press is a big thing in the US. Many cases like the lost pants could have been lost behind closed doors or if the amount much smaller pretty much ignored.
However when a judge of all people sworn to uphold justice does something this outragious, the trial by the press is vicious. The judge is exposed as being unfit as it is clear he has no sense of justice at all. This is a case to watch. Expect the judge to be fully discredited first by press, then by partners and the bar.
The partners and bar will have to move or be discredited themselves for permitting the fool to remain on the bench.
I boycott it. I started boycotting the RIAA labels and their artists when Napster (the real one) got taken down.
I stopped buying CD's when I couldn't tell real CD's from the Defective By Design CD's. Labels noticed the consumer didn't pay attention to the discs that lacked the Compact Disk tm. logo and stopped paying Phillips for the trademark. Soon afterward, they started dinking with putting autorun/autoinstall software on fake CD's. Since you can't tell a real CD due to the lack of the Philips logo, the defective CD's poisoned the pot. I picked up a policy... No Compact Disc logo, No Sale. I soon gave up trying to find anything in the vast wasteland of shiny discs without the logo. The high prices and reduced quality (audio compression to sound loud) finished off the intrest in defective shiny discs. I got much better value in other products for my money.
because both companies produce more fanboys than actual products.
;-)
How many fanboys are there with no PC? How many fanboys have more than one PC?
I fail to see the same ratio of fanboys/products that you see..
The encryption keeps people from making backups of their movies.
HD movies are a replacement for DVD movies. There is a propoganda site explaining copy protection on movies. They claim there is no need for back-up copies as with reasonable care DVD's will last forever.
www.copyprotected.com
Reasonable care and children never mixed.
In both sofware and movies, it's the high usage childrens content that is either broken, missing, or otherwise unplayable. The industry in all their wisdom do not have an exchange program for maltreated shiny discs. With kids, backups and working copies are essential.
Other than the dream of perfectly locked down content with HD, the industry on the other side of their face are admiting that users want to put their purchased movies on their cell phone, media server, PDA, iPod, Zen Vision, etc. just like they want to do with their music.
The major fear of course is the nth copy of the first copy is exactly the same down to the last bit. With video tape and analog cassette copies, each generation of a copy of a copy degrades adding all the defects of noise, dropouts, loss of fideliety, AGC compression, etc so they tolorated LP's copied onto tape to use in your walkman and car stereo.
With the advent of perfect copies of copies, they are desprate to lock down the ability to make the first copyable digital copy. This of course is anti-consumer who is used to making back-up copies of valuable data to prevent loss. To get back-up copies, working copies are naturaly shared.
Notice how nobody bothers making a tape to tape copy of a $5.00 VHS movie? (disregarding Macrovision) When the same moves were $65 and blank VHS tapes were $20 each, piracy was a big problem. (admiting my age, these were a large part of my library) Video stabelizers were the norm to bypass Magnaguard and early Macrovision. The industry needs to get a clue. Nobody takes the time to photocopy a 35 cent daily newspaper to back it up. A $30 movie on the other hand is considered worth backing up.
SONY recently adding more copy protection to their recent DVD's has put me on the ex-consumer list. Until they permanently change their ways, they have lost me.
To their credit, they are sending me a replacement for my DRM'ed copy of Open Season. Hopefully I will be able to install it on my media server for the kids. Acidrip wouldn't even recognise the disk.
If all HD moves were released with retail prices under $6 each, piracy wouldn't be much of a problem. It's less hasle to just go out and pick up a copy.
Here is a clue to increase sales;
1 DROP DRM
2 DROP PRICES
3 RAISE VALUE
4 Enjoy increased volume.
Since they have all of the first 3 wrong, 4 is going the wrong way. Raising quality is only part of raising value. Making it unplayable on many of my systems including media server is a reduction in value. They are walking a tightrope. The RIAA is keeping volume down by dropping DRM and offsetting the potential to raise volume by raising prices. Just how stupid is that? Are they trying to keep volume down?
Hint Cluestick time. Want to increase volume at current prices? DROP DRM, raise quality. Leave the price alone or lower it.
I think the RIAA has enough money. If they didn't, they would do someting that made economic sense instead of trying to game the system.