Oh, now I'm busted.
Alright, you're forcing me to reveal just how far my impractical DIY streak goes.
In fact, I'm still in the process of perfecting the silkscreen thing and I'll explain that in a bit of detail, but first I'll tell you what I do for the moment that isn't actually quite silkscreening, but is a kind of hand printing that looks cool enough that I'm proud to sell them.
For the moment, I use a rubber stamp dipped in standard art shop dayglo acrylic paint for a logo on the top and then I use flashy mirrored sticker with some text printed on it on the bottom. It looks pretty slick and any little imperfection still looks sweet with the mirrored background, but this technique doesn't enable me to cover the whole disc with the elaborate patterns that I've printed out as transparencies on my ink jet printer just for such use.
Oh, and by the way, I do use those all-silver CD-Rs you refer to. In fact, I've screwed up and printed the wrong sides of those things quite a few times so they really do look a lot like pressed CDs and I get them so cheap I can't afford not to use them.
As for the current state of the silkscreening adventure, it's a long story but I'll keep it condensed.
Apparently in the States you can get this stuff called Liquid Light which is a trade name for a prepared silkscren emulsion. From what I've read, that is the way to go and I probably should just buy some of this stuff and get on with it. Using that, you can find lots of directions from Google as it's a standard for T-shirts and what-not.
But myself being a DIY freak from hell, I decided to make my own emulsion from silver nitrate that I tracked down at a chemist shop here in Taipei. I got some okay screens using gelatin and albumin with some table salt. Well, by okay I mean they looked awesome when I developed them. The detail was crispy, Unfortunately, they didn't last long or resist the ink/paint well because I apparently needed to add this stuff called Chromium Tartrate which was a bit tougher to find although I have a good lead on it that I will pursue.
So, basically I must confess that wherever there's an easy and a hard way to go things, I'm likely to take the very roundabout way, which is one of the reasons I was being very self conscious about trying to look at the whole mechanized CDR thing from the simplest procedural vantage because I know one of my own weaknesses is always making things too complicated.
But not to fear, I love chemistry and elctronics and all such trivia so it makes sense in a twisted way. Any excuse to go cruising around the industrial chemical facilities outside of Taipei works for me. And as for makin a CD conveyer belt --hell, I relish the thought. I'll make the belt out of old bicycle inner-tubes. I love the details.
Thanks for asking though after I was so shitty up front.
Okay, well I'll concede on the silkscreen point. On a small batch, getting them screened and printed, everybody's got to find the right solution for themselves.
For me since I am doing them in the thousands and every penny counts, I silkscreen them by hand so that doesn't go into my costs.
And I was being a little snotty in my reply. You know, it was after work and I was playing Mr. Tough Guy. Didn't mean to be shitty and I was being a bit crass.
But I'm still gonna take a crack at this conveyer belt. My wife is gonna hate it, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Right, here's a tip that goes right along with what you're looking for.
If you look at global stock indices for cable companies, companies that sell the actual cable, you'll find that some of them have gone nuts in the last year. Why? Becuase you're absolutely right that it's bullshit that it costs a lot to light dark fiber. The 10GbE standard is already settled and preliminary switches were available already last year at about US$10000 per port for an 8 port configuration. Hint --10GbE switches connect directly to dark fiber. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, and give lots of details if you don't mind.
But supposing I'm right, can you imagine why certain wholesale fiber companies might have taken on massive capitalization last year in places like Asia and Northern Europe? Could it be that they've added data services to their product line by adding a few switches so some of that fiber they had laying aroud? We have to ask these questions, don't we?
Furthermore, wasn't the 10GbE or whatever the acronym for 10Gig ethernet standard is, supposed to be finalized like last month?
And if I recall, part of the standard was that 10GbE devices would be specifically geared for use with dark fiber. Am I wrong here? Anybody on the IEEE standards committee like to comment on this?
And finally, as an overseas American in Asia, I get the distinct impression that consumer telecoms in the US are falling behind what's going on in other parts of the world and I just can't believe that's going to continue. We've got no bandwidth problems where I'm at and we've got lots of options. Even the monopoly networks offer really cheap and fast DSL and then there's the competition offering fiber to the desktop or CAT5 into your aprtment for like twenty bucks a month. I can't imagine the US really has it so bad if we've got it the way we do here.
Well, to each his own I suppose. I'm not saying people can't do as they please with their money. Hey, coke, meth and heroin can look like good at their street prices under some circumstances to some people. More power to those folks with the will to burn the cash.
But! The topic at hand is people who ARE interested in a home automated rubberband and bailing wire solutions.
And, as a publisher of book/CD sets, I'm fairly sure that the point at which it actually becomes cheaper to get a stamped master CD is no less than ten thousand once you're buying CDRs for less than twenty cents a piece. I think I said I pay 20cents in my first post, but in fact I think my actual price is around 16cents when I buy them by the thousand.
If I'd agree with any of the nay sayers on automation, it would be simply to do what those "pro" CD dup scam artists are going to do you for --pay someone else to sit there and change CDs. Those motherfuckers are worse than used car salesman.
Allow me to help you out with some math.
At six bucks an hour operating two 32X CDRs, the ridiculously simple labor cost of a dedicated disc changing empolyee is going to add a little less than ten cents per disc. If you're getting blanks for 20 cents and paying some dork 10 cents a disc at minumum wage that's a grand fucking total of thirty big fat pennies. In that case, how in the hell is 89 cents a piece a good deal? Compared to being straight up robbed as you're walking to your car in a parking lot, it's a fabulous deal, othewise it sounds like shit.
And, if you think you break even on a stamped disk at 1000 pieces I don't think you know what you're talking about. That might have been true five years ago when CDRs cost more than a buck. But guess what . .
And furthermore, did you know that pressed CDs are more likely to fail and have errors than CDRs? I bet you didn't know that. Well now you do and it was a free as in beer tip from your bud Steve in Taiwan.
I've been looking into this quite a bit lately.
These kooks going on about having it done by a "pro" are so full of shit. $1.50 per disc is a great deal? Ehr, what if these are promo discs? Blanks are twenty cents in my neighborood?Besides, I very strongly suspect that most of these outfits do indeed simply hire someone to change the discs off of regular burners rather than using these way overpriced mechanized solutions. A buck fifty! Fuck that.
But enough ranting, what have I come up with?
Well first of all, I think an arm is not the way to go. The simplest thing I can come up with for the input is a conveyer belt that drops the loading disc into a shoot which lays it in place. Every time the player ejects, it hits a switch that advances the conveyer belt the length of a CD laying flat on the belt thus dumping the next CD into the shoot.
Of course before that can happen the old disc needs to be dumped. I think the simplest mechanical approach to that is a spinning wheel like a rubber RC car wheel that comes up from the bottom of the feeder tray on a little hydraulic jack. The wheel is offset from the center of the CD a bit, so it lifts the side of the CD and pulls it across the tray into a padded hopper.
I think that's a simple as it gets. Adapting an existing changer is probably an awesome idea, but I'm not in the States so E-Bay isn't an option for me and I haven't had a chance to try it.
I think a conveyer belt is going to be about as low tech as you can get and there's no reason you couldn't line up a hundred before you took off for work. It would be funky looking, but I think it's got a real chance of working. If I get something rigged together, I'll submit it as a story.
Personally, I'm quite into something like this. It's essential for people who have real live small businesses that need to cut costs wherever they can. Customers want to know where the costs come from and when you throw away money on bullshit services in order to get it done quick you've got to pass this along to the customer. When you're a small business and you've got lots of anaccountable expenses, you're toast.
Hey, I've been ranting about lack of Authorware support on a Linux desktop for years now. Stokin'. This is really a big deal because all sorts of multimedia educational apps are made with Authorware and only work on Mac and Windows. Getting Windows out of the schools seems like a primary (get it) starting point.
Of course it's not the K runtime I've been asking the good people at Macromedia to compile, but it's better than nothing which was what the options were before.
This is interesting. I'm an American living in Taiwan and I've had DSL for a few years for only $30 bucks a month with free phone service tossed in. Now they're offering 1.5 Meg DSL for $45 bucks a month and apparently we're getting several city wide MAN ethernet ISPs in the next six months that are advertising residential bi-directional 2Mbps for US$25 a month.
I head the same thing is going on in Korea, Hong Kong and some of the bigger cities in China. It's interesting that the US is finally falling behind in residential telecommunications. I understand parts of Scandanavian Europe and Auckland New Zealand also have residential ethernet service. Perhaps the future of the net lies well beyond the borders of the US and its restrictive net policies.
When my boss walks up behind me while I'm posting to/. or downloading who knows what on the company network, I don't even bother trying to be sly about it. I don't have to. I get paid for results. I take my breaks when and how I want. If he couldn't offer me that anymore I'll go elsewhere. But he'd never be foolish enough to give up the advantage he gets from a loose net policy. He can only benefit.
What this whole debate overlooks is that internet bandwidth is, indeed, an extremely cheap benefit to offer employees. It seems that most of the people offering opinions have little ability to see things from the perspective of one who has to keep employees by any means necessary and most importantly in the cheapest way possible. In a competitive small business whre keeping good employees actually counts, as opposed to say a middle or large size corporation running on momentum and capital built up years ago, letting employees do whatever they want on the net including check out porn and download movies and music only makes sense from an employers perspective.
As far as liability goes, written policy can be as draconian as you think a hanging judge would appreciate, but the reality of the workplace often has little more to do with a wrtitten policy than a team's performance on the field has to do with a coach's playbook. The reality is working for big corporations always sucked and small business can't afford not to let employees have free reign on the web. So, there's no news here, just rants.
Instructional media is one place where you've got to dumb it down so far it makes people wretch, but there's a reason it has to be that way and it's because students will use any excuse to say they don't understand what they're supposed to do. This means as an educational media deveoper you've got to provide a package that is totally self explanatory from any angle. Who's going to pay for service on something like that?
A great counter argument to this is that anybody creating software for an educational environment should be doing it out of their love of the subject and not for profit. After all, it's for education, for passing knowledge from generation to generation. What could be more noble? To sell educational media is akin to prostitution.
The catch here is that in reality education is a lot like a lot like prostitution and always has been --at least since Plato and probably long before that. In fact, both Aristotle and Socrates made reference to this in various writings so it's not quite as blasphemous as it initially sounds to the modern ear.
So, oddly enough, tax payer funded education is one place where free software simply cannot succeed. Students prefer whorish graphics and in-yer-face flashy multimedia for reasons that seem obvious to one who has some familiarity with the history of education. Getting true slut work is not something you get for free, but something you get from paid whores like myself who do gaudy educational apps that look like wannabee arcade splash screens. The acceptance of this within the educational mainstream is evidenced by the coinage of phrases like edutainment.
You might think that educational software can create jobs for teachers and thus still fit in the services model, but I wouldn't bet on that. More likely, software in classrooms can make teacher's jobs easier for the time being by eliminating tedious tasks like taking roll and keeping grades. Over time, these changes will be used to justify larger class sizes resulting in less teachers or perhaps the same amount of teachers with more time for the students, but probably not resulting in higher teacher to student ratios.
I don't think it's all bad as long as it's accompanied by a restructuring of the physical layout of the classroom which computer assisted instruction does push and that's a great thing. But in order for it to happen, there has to be lots of hired whores making tons of media that can hold the interest of jaded kids with vast media libraries sitting at home competing with the school's pathetic efforts at being slutty and almost attractive enough to hold their attention for more than a few minutes at a time.
This doesn't mean these apps have to run on MS. There's no reason commercial instructional media apps can't be made to run on Linux except of course the companies who make the tools that educational media developers use --like Macromedia for instance-- are scared shitless about having anything to do with rhetorical entities like the GPL.
I've had this problem before as a seller of such things and it is a major hassle when the CDs in book/CDs crack from bad handling. I had two such problems this month and the shipping costs of sending replacement media can kill a publisher. So, I can see the appeal, but I'm also skeptical. CDs are already quite flimsy. While these may be bendable, they're certainly not foldable. So, that's a sort of no-man's-land to be in. I can't help but flash back to little floppy vinyl albums printed in magazines in the 70s that invariably sucked on the turntable because they were all warped. Is an aging 50X CD reader with a dirty laser pickup going to be more forgiving?
And if they're primarily for promotional use, there's the question of whether the flimsy image is really a plus. It's not like conventional CDs are expesive either. Indeed, with blank CDs being what they are, it seems that the blank media has clearly become an insignificant cost compared to the cost of producing content that a normal consumer will actually take the time to look at when they've got so many movies to watch and old shows to catch up on that they've written to their incredibly cheap CDRs spilling across their desktop.
But I definitely like the idea of keeping a CD in my sock. Now that's handy.
But. . .
These comments about Native Americans -including that found in the 'from the dept of' line-- since they came from Asia as well. They may not have been Han Chinese, but that's a mythological identity anyway much in the vein of Aryan European.
And the mummies with tobacco, chocolate and cocaine thing fits right in with all this Chinese in America stuff rather than refutring it. Obviously, the Chinese were running trans-Pacific trade in these exquisite goods thousands of years before Christ and probably into the European Dark Ages.
So what does it all mean? China should be returned the exclusive distributorship of Central/South American cocaine within the guidelines of the WTO! There's historical precedent. In order to keep things even, Middle Eastern and North American countries will be allowed to return to hemp cultivation. Berkley will be allowed to redevelop its former LSD monopoly and Japan will be given back the global rights to methamphetamine.
I seem to be missing something here and I read the original Morpheus/ZaZZA story. I've got a ZaZZa client that is still downloading content from Morpheus hosts. This seems to be way blown out of proportion by people who don't use either of the products.
Not just install Flash, but make sure you have the latest version. Macromedia's web page, which half the time doesn't even come up in a browser, says that 98% of the browsers on the net have The Flash browser. Very cute how they use the article "the" which enables them to avoid the small issue that of this 98% figure, there are dozens of incompatible versions and there's simply no way of being sure which users have what.
Sadly, I don't have the link, but I did see a story about Sony previewing a violet laser DVD and according to that article what was supposed to be particularly impressive about this hundred Gig CD sized disk was that the disc itself was made in accordance with DVD standards. So, I'm a bit skeptical as to whether shorter wavelengths really require fundamental changes in the plastic.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I was off on a rant, but you're right and in fact I noticed the same thing that some other posters mentioned about their settings getting altered to allow maximum shares. It happened to me too, but I simply changed it back to a reasonable level and it stayed that way, so I don't think it's a huge issue.
But I think you're right that whether or not people are peeking at you, a person should be able to have a feeling of security. Having siad that though, I still think the paranoia thing gets a bit out of hand. You know, offense is not only a good defence, it's also the typical one.
Not only that, but I know of several shrink wrap apps that take info right out of reg keys and try to send it back to home base. For those guys as long as it's in the EULA, they've got an out and that's been going on for a long time. Knowing that makes me feel that the uproar over this stuff is a both misplaced and uninformed as well as being rooted in an overrated sense of self importance probably antagonized by an unnecessary sense of guilt.
Yeah, but who cares. That data is all crap. I don't give a fuck who wants to watch me web surf. Jesus, I don't care if the neighbors are watching me fuck my cat! Who fucking cares? It's their problem. The real question is what makes you think anybody is interested in all this garbled data they might be collecting. I seriously doubt it's really of any value. That doesn't mean somebody might not pay for it, but people might pay you to let them fuck your cat. That doesn't prove your cat is a great fuck, it just proves people spend money on stupid shit.
Spyware --hah! The very concept is only intriguing to people with an overinflated sense of importance. It could also be a reaction to porn --after consuming so many images of other people's intimacy, you begin to desire to be consumed intimately as an image yourself so you can consumate the sexual image relationship from which you are always distanced in reality. Perhaps that's a stretch, but I have a strong suspicion that most real spys like police detectives and FBI, CIA agents are so hung up on their own ego fantasies of being under constant surveilance that they aren't even very good at watching the people they're supposed to be watching because they're constantly off on these fantasy trips about being under surveillance themselves. This is a common theme in detective movies and may, in fact, be reflecting something that takes place in reality.
Even if someone is planting a backdoor into your machine, the notion that they're planning on reading your personal files is totally a symptom or a gigantic sense of self importance. Who cares what you do? I think most people don't want to face this harsh reality because it's too real, too close to the reality that surrounds us, the reality which includes death itself.
The vast homogenous herds of people are so concerned that somebody is watching them and let this become the motivation for all sorts of behaviors. I get the impression that it's a rather small minority who are willing to grow up and face the lonely fact that nobody really cares about other people that much.
I got news for ya, that only sounds reasonable to an US mindset. That would be the end of the story if most PCs were made in the US and consumed there too, but as we all know, most PC components are made in either Taiwan, Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea or Japan and roughly in that order.
Assuming that companies in these countries are foremost concerned with stabilizing the US market is folly at best. These asian PC parts suppliers want growth much more than they want stability and growth will come from the countries where PCs are still relatively rare and penetration of those monster growth markets --Brazil, Mainland China, India-- can only happen at low unit prices that will seem absurdly unprofittable to the American/. readership, but which are inevitable for a global growth strategy in a market where mass production essentially is the product. What is a chip after all? It's an etching, an image --lithography on a silicon plate. There is no inherent value in this process that will magically stabilize the market.
The sub $100 PC with all the bells and whistles is not just possible it's more or less inevitable given time and then MS may still exist in name, but the rules of the game will have been substantially changed and it will not be by the will of those Redmond fucks.
I even think people will still pay lots of bucks for software at that point, but not for a file manager or a set of drivers for the hardware. These guys suck, XP sucks. If you haven't lost a few Fat32 partitions to that beast, you obviously haven't tried it. It sucks. MS sucks. What else is new.
I say this a lot because it's all I know, but it's also true that Macromedia's most powerful development tool (an icon flow control multimedia development system called Authorware) is based on Pascal and I learned from hanging out in/. developer forums that the original Mac was Pascal. So, what does power mean here?
Wow, that is good.
A malicious individual (not me of course) could implement that in a million ways to various effects. Management types are gonna freak when they see their XP boxes going down left and right. What an impressive oversight by MS and it looks like it's here to stay rather than a quick patch up. No wonder they took a month to think about what they were doing.
What was MS thinking with XP anyway? The installs suck. Once upon a time that was their big advantage over Linux. It's like give them enough rope and sure enough they hang themselves.
And notice they dropped their talk back feature under the guise of a remodelling when it was quite clear that the number of responses had started dropping off and references to/. were all over the place.
They did post your picture sometimes though if you were a frequent talkback poster. That was cool./. should have a place for a photo in the user prefs. Sure, there's the home page link, but a lot of people's home pages aren't appropriate places for a mug shot.
Yeah, to an extent, you're correct. But you're talking about integrated circuits and I'm talking about individual transistors and capacitors not chips. PC cards and motherboards are mostly chips which don't offer a lot for DIY electronics, but PSUs and TVs and monitors have lots of fun stuff to play with and these are the parts that most amateurs neglect because they're the parts that have the warning labels on them. I agree that repurposing chips is hard to imagine, but you can certainly re-use transistors and capacitors. You could just buy them too, of course, but the article was about disposal issues and that's waht I'm talking about.
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Oh, now I'm busted.
Alright, you're forcing me to reveal just how far my impractical DIY streak goes.
In fact, I'm still in the process of perfecting the silkscreen thing and I'll explain that in a bit of detail, but first I'll tell you what I do for the moment that isn't actually quite silkscreening, but is a kind of hand printing that looks cool enough that I'm proud to sell them.
For the moment, I use a rubber stamp dipped in standard art shop dayglo acrylic paint for a logo on the top and then I use flashy mirrored sticker with some text printed on it on the bottom. It looks pretty slick and any little imperfection still looks sweet with the mirrored background, but this technique doesn't enable me to cover the whole disc with the elaborate patterns that I've printed out as transparencies on my ink jet printer just for such use.
Oh, and by the way, I do use those all-silver CD-Rs you refer to. In fact, I've screwed up and printed the wrong sides of those things quite a few times so they really do look a lot like pressed CDs and I get them so cheap I can't afford not to use them.
As for the current state of the silkscreening adventure, it's a long story but I'll keep it condensed.
Apparently in the States you can get this stuff called Liquid Light which is a trade name for a prepared silkscren emulsion. From what I've read, that is the way to go and I probably should just buy some of this stuff and get on with it. Using that, you can find lots of directions from Google as it's a standard for T-shirts and what-not.
But myself being a DIY freak from hell, I decided to make my own emulsion from silver nitrate that I tracked down at a chemist shop here in Taipei. I got some okay screens using gelatin and albumin with some table salt. Well, by okay I mean they looked awesome when I developed them. The detail was crispy, Unfortunately, they didn't last long or resist the ink/paint well because I apparently needed to add this stuff called Chromium Tartrate which was a bit tougher to find although I have a good lead on it that I will pursue.
So, basically I must confess that wherever there's an easy and a hard way to go things, I'm likely to take the very roundabout way, which is one of the reasons I was being very self conscious about trying to look at the whole mechanized CDR thing from the simplest procedural vantage because I know one of my own weaknesses is always making things too complicated.
But not to fear, I love chemistry and elctronics and all such trivia so it makes sense in a twisted way. Any excuse to go cruising around the industrial chemical facilities outside of Taipei works for me. And as for makin a CD conveyer belt --hell, I relish the thought. I'll make the belt out of old bicycle inner-tubes. I love the details.
Thanks for asking though after I was so shitty up front.
Okay, well I'll concede on the silkscreen point. On a small batch, getting them screened and printed, everybody's got to find the right solution for themselves.
For me since I am doing them in the thousands and every penny counts, I silkscreen them by hand so that doesn't go into my costs.
And I was being a little snotty in my reply. You know, it was after work and I was playing Mr. Tough Guy. Didn't mean to be shitty and I was being a bit crass.
But I'm still gonna take a crack at this conveyer belt. My wife is gonna hate it, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Right, here's a tip that goes right along with what you're looking for.
If you look at global stock indices for cable companies, companies that sell the actual cable, you'll find that some of them have gone nuts in the last year. Why? Becuase you're absolutely right that it's bullshit that it costs a lot to light dark fiber. The 10GbE standard is already settled and preliminary switches were available already last year at about US$10000 per port for an 8 port configuration. Hint --10GbE switches connect directly to dark fiber. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, and give lots of details if you don't mind.
But supposing I'm right, can you imagine why certain wholesale fiber companies might have taken on massive capitalization last year in places like Asia and Northern Europe? Could it be that they've added data services to their product line by adding a few switches so some of that fiber they had laying aroud? We have to ask these questions, don't we?
Furthermore, wasn't the 10GbE or whatever the acronym for 10Gig ethernet standard is, supposed to be finalized like last month?
And if I recall, part of the standard was that 10GbE devices would be specifically geared for use with dark fiber. Am I wrong here? Anybody on the IEEE standards committee like to comment on this?
And finally, as an overseas American in Asia, I get the distinct impression that consumer telecoms in the US are falling behind what's going on in other parts of the world and I just can't believe that's going to continue. We've got no bandwidth problems where I'm at and we've got lots of options. Even the monopoly networks offer really cheap and fast DSL and then there's the competition offering fiber to the desktop or CAT5 into your aprtment for like twenty bucks a month. I can't imagine the US really has it so bad if we've got it the way we do here.
Well, to each his own I suppose. I'm not saying people can't do as they please with their money. Hey, coke, meth and heroin can look like good at their street prices under some circumstances to some people. More power to those folks with the will to burn the cash.
But! The topic at hand is people who ARE interested in a home automated rubberband and bailing wire solutions.
And, as a publisher of book/CD sets, I'm fairly sure that the point at which it actually becomes cheaper to get a stamped master CD is no less than ten thousand once you're buying CDRs for less than twenty cents a piece. I think I said I pay 20cents in my first post, but in fact I think my actual price is around 16cents when I buy them by the thousand.
If I'd agree with any of the nay sayers on automation, it would be simply to do what those "pro" CD dup scam artists are going to do you for --pay someone else to sit there and change CDs. Those motherfuckers are worse than used car salesman.
Allow me to help you out with some math.
At six bucks an hour operating two 32X CDRs, the ridiculously simple labor cost of a dedicated disc changing empolyee is going to add a little less than ten cents per disc. If you're getting blanks for 20 cents and paying some dork 10 cents a disc at minumum wage that's a grand fucking total of thirty big fat pennies. In that case, how in the hell is 89 cents a piece a good deal? Compared to being straight up robbed as you're walking to your car in a parking lot, it's a fabulous deal, othewise it sounds like shit.
And, if you think you break even on a stamped disk at 1000 pieces I don't think you know what you're talking about. That might have been true five years ago when CDRs cost more than a buck. But guess what . .
And furthermore, did you know that pressed CDs are more likely to fail and have errors than CDRs? I bet you didn't know that. Well now you do and it was a free as in beer tip from your bud Steve in Taiwan.
I've been looking into this quite a bit lately.
These kooks going on about having it done by a "pro" are so full of shit. $1.50 per disc is a great deal? Ehr, what if these are promo discs?
Blanks are twenty cents in my neighborood?Besides, I very strongly suspect that most of these outfits do indeed simply hire someone to change the discs off of regular burners rather than using these way overpriced mechanized solutions. A buck fifty! Fuck that.
But enough ranting, what have I come up with?
Well first of all, I think an arm is not the way to go. The simplest thing I can come up with for the input is a conveyer belt that drops the loading disc into a shoot which lays it in place. Every time the player ejects, it hits a switch that advances the conveyer belt the length of a CD laying flat on the belt thus dumping the next CD into the shoot.
Of course before that can happen the old disc needs to be dumped. I think the simplest mechanical approach to that is a spinning wheel like a rubber RC car wheel that comes up from the bottom of the feeder tray on a little hydraulic jack. The wheel is offset from the center of the CD a bit, so it lifts the side of the CD and pulls it across the tray into a padded hopper.
I think that's a simple as it gets. Adapting an existing changer is probably an awesome idea, but I'm not in the States so E-Bay isn't an option for me and I haven't had a chance to try it.
I think a conveyer belt is going to be about as low tech as you can get and there's no reason you couldn't line up a hundred before you took off for work. It would be funky looking, but I think it's got a real chance of working. If I get something rigged together, I'll submit it as a story.
Personally, I'm quite into something like this. It's essential for people who have real live small businesses that need to cut costs wherever they can. Customers want to know where the costs come from and when you throw away money on bullshit services in order to get it done quick you've got to pass this along to the customer. When you're a small business and you've got lots of anaccountable expenses, you're toast.
Hey, I've been ranting about lack of Authorware support on a Linux desktop for years now. Stokin'. This is really a big deal because all sorts of multimedia educational apps are made with Authorware and only work on Mac and Windows. Getting Windows out of the schools seems like a primary (get it) starting point.
Of course it's not the K runtime I've been asking the good people at Macromedia to compile, but it's better than nothing which was what the options were before.
This is interesting. I'm an American living in Taiwan and I've had DSL for a few years for only $30 bucks a month with free phone service tossed in. Now they're offering 1.5 Meg DSL for $45 bucks a month and apparently we're getting several city wide MAN ethernet ISPs in the next six months that are advertising residential bi-directional 2Mbps for US$25 a month.
I head the same thing is going on in Korea, Hong Kong and some of the bigger cities in China. It's interesting that the US is finally falling behind in residential telecommunications. I understand parts of Scandanavian Europe and Auckland New Zealand also have residential ethernet service. Perhaps the future of the net lies well beyond the borders of the US and its restrictive net policies.
When my boss walks up behind me while I'm posting to /. or downloading who knows what on the company network, I don't even bother trying to be sly about it. I don't have to. I get paid for results. I take my breaks when and how I want. If he couldn't offer me that anymore I'll go elsewhere. But he'd never be foolish enough to give up the advantage he gets from a loose net policy. He can only benefit.
What this whole debate overlooks is that internet bandwidth is, indeed, an extremely cheap benefit to offer employees. It seems that most of the people offering opinions have little ability to see things from the perspective of one who has to keep employees by any means necessary and most importantly in the cheapest way possible. In a competitive small business whre keeping good employees actually counts, as opposed to say a middle or large size corporation running on momentum and capital built up years ago, letting employees do whatever they want on the net including check out porn and download movies and music only makes sense from an employers perspective.
As far as liability goes, written policy can be as draconian as you think a hanging judge would appreciate, but the reality of the workplace often has little more to do with a wrtitten policy than a team's performance on the field has to do with a coach's playbook. The reality is working for big corporations always sucked and small business can't afford not to let employees have free reign on the web. So, there's no news here, just rants.
Instructional media is one place where you've got to dumb it down so far it makes people wretch, but there's a reason it has to be that way and it's because students will use any excuse to say they don't understand what they're supposed to do. This means as an educational media deveoper you've got to provide a package that is totally self explanatory from any angle. Who's going to pay for service on something like that?
A great counter argument to this is that anybody creating software for an educational environment should be doing it out of their love of the subject and not for profit. After all, it's for education, for passing knowledge from generation to generation. What could be more noble? To sell educational media is akin to prostitution.
The catch here is that in reality education is a lot like a lot like prostitution and always has been --at least since Plato and probably long before that. In fact, both Aristotle and Socrates made reference to this in various writings so it's not quite as blasphemous as it initially sounds to the modern ear.
So, oddly enough, tax payer funded education is one place where free software simply cannot succeed. Students prefer whorish graphics and in-yer-face flashy multimedia for reasons that seem obvious to one who has some familiarity with the history of education. Getting true slut work is not something you get for free, but something you get from paid whores like myself who do gaudy educational apps that look like wannabee arcade splash screens. The acceptance of this within the educational mainstream is evidenced by the coinage of phrases like edutainment.
You might think that educational software can create jobs for teachers and thus still fit in the services model, but I wouldn't bet on that. More likely, software in classrooms can make teacher's jobs easier for the time being by eliminating tedious tasks like taking roll and keeping grades. Over time, these changes will be used to justify larger class sizes resulting in less teachers or perhaps the same amount of teachers with more time for the students, but probably not resulting in higher teacher to student ratios.
I don't think it's all bad as long as it's accompanied by a restructuring of the physical layout of the classroom which computer assisted instruction does push and that's a great thing. But in order for it to happen, there has to be lots of hired whores making tons of media that can hold the interest of jaded kids with vast media libraries sitting at home competing with the school's pathetic efforts at being slutty and almost attractive enough to hold their attention for more than a few minutes at a time.
This doesn't mean these apps have to run on MS. There's no reason commercial instructional media apps can't be made to run on Linux except of course the companies who make the tools that educational media developers use --like Macromedia for instance-- are scared shitless about having anything to do with rhetorical entities like the GPL.
I've had this problem before as a seller of such things and it is a major hassle when the CDs in book/CDs crack from bad handling. I had two such problems this month and the shipping costs of sending replacement media can kill a publisher. So, I can see the appeal, but I'm also skeptical. CDs are already quite flimsy. While these may be bendable, they're certainly not foldable. So, that's a sort of no-man's-land to be in. I can't help but flash back to little floppy vinyl albums printed in magazines in the 70s that invariably sucked on the turntable because they were all warped. Is an aging 50X CD reader with a dirty laser pickup going to be more forgiving?
And if they're primarily for promotional use, there's the question of whether the flimsy image is really a plus. It's not like conventional CDs are expesive either. Indeed, with blank CDs being what they are, it seems that the blank media has clearly become an insignificant cost compared to the cost of producing content that a normal consumer will actually take the time to look at when they've got so many movies to watch and old shows to catch up on that they've written to their incredibly cheap CDRs spilling across their desktop.
But I definitely like the idea of keeping a CD in my sock. Now that's handy.
But. . . .
These comments about Native Americans -including that found in the 'from the dept of' line-- since they came from Asia as well. They may not have been Han Chinese, but that's a mythological identity anyway much in the vein of Aryan European.
And the mummies with tobacco, chocolate and cocaine thing fits right in with all this Chinese in America stuff rather than refutring it. Obviously, the Chinese were running trans-Pacific trade in these exquisite goods thousands of years before Christ and probably into the European Dark Ages
So what does it all mean? China should be returned the exclusive distributorship of Central/South American cocaine within the guidelines of the WTO! There's historical precedent. In order to keep things even, Middle Eastern and North American countries will be allowed to return to hemp cultivation. Berkley will be allowed to redevelop its former LSD monopoly and Japan will be given back the global rights to methamphetamine.
Right, if you want to --as others have mentioned-- make a dozen different versions of your site.
I seem to be missing something here and I read the original Morpheus/ZaZZA story. I've got a ZaZZa client that is still downloading content from Morpheus hosts. This seems to be way blown out of proportion by people who don't use either of the products.
Not just install Flash, but make sure you have the latest version. Macromedia's web page, which half the time doesn't even come up in a browser, says that 98% of the browsers on the net have The Flash browser. Very cute how they use the article "the" which enables them to avoid the small issue that of this 98% figure, there are dozens of incompatible versions and there's simply no way of being sure which users have what.
Sadly, I don't have the link, but I did see a story about Sony previewing a violet laser DVD and according to that article what was supposed to be particularly impressive about this hundred Gig CD sized disk was that the disc itself was made in accordance with DVD standards. So, I'm a bit skeptical as to whether shorter wavelengths really require fundamental changes in the plastic.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I was off on a rant, but you're right and in fact I noticed the same thing that some other posters mentioned about their settings getting altered to allow maximum shares. It happened to me too, but I simply changed it back to a reasonable level and it stayed that way, so I don't think it's a huge issue.
But I think you're right that whether or not people are peeking at you, a person should be able to have a feeling of security. Having siad that though, I still think the paranoia thing gets a bit out of hand. You know, offense is not only a good defence, it's also the typical one.
Not only that, but I know of several shrink wrap apps that take info right out of reg keys and try to send it back to home base. For those guys as long as it's in the EULA, they've got an out and that's been going on for a long time. Knowing that makes me feel that the uproar over this stuff is a both misplaced and uninformed as well as being rooted in an overrated sense of self importance probably antagonized by an unnecessary sense of guilt.
Yeah, but who cares. That data is all crap. I don't give a fuck who wants to watch me web surf. Jesus, I don't care if the neighbors are watching me fuck my cat! Who fucking cares? It's their problem. The real question is what makes you think anybody is interested in all this garbled data they might be collecting. I seriously doubt it's really of any value. That doesn't mean somebody might not pay for it, but people might pay you to let them fuck your cat. That doesn't prove your cat is a great fuck, it just proves people spend money on stupid shit.
Spyware --hah! The very concept is only intriguing to people with an overinflated sense of importance. It could also be a reaction to porn --after consuming so many images of other people's intimacy, you begin to desire to be consumed intimately as an image yourself so you can consumate the sexual image relationship from which you are always distanced in reality. Perhaps that's a stretch, but I have a strong suspicion that most real spys like police detectives and FBI, CIA agents are so hung up on their own ego fantasies of being under constant surveilance that they aren't even very good at watching the people they're supposed to be watching because they're constantly off on these fantasy trips about being under surveillance themselves. This is a common theme in detective movies and may, in fact, be reflecting something that takes place in reality.
Even if someone is planting a backdoor into your machine, the notion that they're planning on reading your personal files is totally a symptom or a gigantic sense of self importance. Who cares what you do? I think most people don't want to face this harsh reality because it's too real, too close to the reality that surrounds us, the reality which includes death itself.
The vast homogenous herds of people are so concerned that somebody is watching them and let this become the motivation for all sorts of behaviors. I get the impression that it's a rather small minority who are willing to grow up and face the lonely fact that nobody really cares about other people that much.
You lucky bastard!
I got news for ya, that only sounds reasonable to an US mindset. That would be the end of the story if most PCs were made in the US and consumed there too, but as we all know, most PC components are made in either Taiwan, Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea or Japan and roughly in that order. /. readership, but which are inevitable for a global growth strategy in a market where mass production essentially is the product. What is a chip after all? It's an etching, an image --lithography on a silicon plate. There is no inherent value in this process that will magically stabilize the market.
Assuming that companies in these countries are foremost concerned with stabilizing the US market is folly at best. These asian PC parts suppliers want growth much more than they want stability and growth will come from the countries where PCs are still relatively rare and penetration of those monster growth markets --Brazil, Mainland China, India-- can only happen at low unit prices that will seem absurdly unprofittable to the American
The sub $100 PC with all the bells and whistles is not just possible it's more or less inevitable given time and then MS may still exist in name, but the rules of the game will have been substantially changed and it will not be by the will of those Redmond fucks.
I even think people will still pay lots of bucks for software at that point, but not for a file manager or a set of drivers for the hardware. These guys suck, XP sucks. If you haven't lost a few Fat32 partitions to that beast, you obviously haven't tried it. It sucks. MS sucks. What else is new.
I say this a lot because it's all I know, but it's also true that Macromedia's most powerful development tool (an icon flow control multimedia development system called Authorware) is based on Pascal and I learned from hanging out in /. developer forums that the original Mac was Pascal. So, what does power mean here?
Wow, that is good.
A malicious individual (not me of course) could implement that in a million ways to various effects. Management types are gonna freak when they see their XP boxes going down left and right. What an impressive oversight by MS and it looks like it's here to stay rather than a quick patch up. No wonder they took a month to think about what they were doing.
What was MS thinking with XP anyway? The installs suck. Once upon a time that was their big advantage over Linux. It's like give them enough rope and sure enough they hang themselves.
And notice they dropped their talk back feature under the guise of a remodelling when it was quite clear that the number of responses had started dropping off and references to /. were all over the place. /. should have a place for a photo in the user prefs. Sure, there's the home page link, but a lot of people's home pages aren't appropriate places for a mug shot.
They did post your picture sometimes though if you were a frequent talkback poster. That was cool.
And education.
Might as well toss in a me too here. Macromedia's development tools commonly used for instructional software are based on Pascal!
Yeah, to an extent, you're correct. But you're talking about integrated circuits and I'm talking about individual transistors and capacitors not chips. PC cards and motherboards are mostly chips which don't offer a lot for DIY electronics, but PSUs and TVs and monitors have lots of fun stuff to play with and these are the parts that most amateurs neglect because they're the parts that have the warning labels on them. I agree that repurposing chips is hard to imagine, but you can certainly re-use transistors and capacitors. You could just buy them too, of course, but the article was about disposal issues and that's waht I'm talking about.