How about coax?
on
Portable Hubs?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
When I was in college, we used to do the same basic thing but none of us had a hub. The solution we found was to get combo ethernet cards that had rj-45 connectors as well as coax connectors (I think that's what they're called). But a few lengths of coax along with t-connectors and terminators and there's no need for a hub. Works great and is (relatively) portable, just throw all the cables and connectors in a bag.
Excellent though the book was, it badly needed updating.
Thanks, Yoda...
Re:Freedom and the USA
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
It's not that we invented it, but for the most part we are one of the few countries that has made it work. Considering the amount of land and people we have, our form of government has been far more successful than most others that have existed, whether they be democratic or not.
The separation of powers that are employed by the US have really been the foundation of our government. Many hairbrained suggestions (DMCA excluded) have been prevented from being passed into law becaues they couldn't be approved through congress and the president. In addition , the application/interpretation of these laws by the Supreme Court adds another layer that prevents misuse. There are so many people that have a limited amount of power that it can't be abused. That's really why our system has proven to be, while not the best at all times, better than the alternatives on average.
In order to effectively block all forms of cracking, they would have to make hardware that wasn't backwards compatible with the software, and vice-versa. Much of a software vendor's clientel is government/large companies...they will never buy something that doesn't allow for backwards compatibility. It would end up costing them much more in headaches than any possible promotion MS would provide.
--trb
Re:"good technology outdone by better marketing"
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
here's a link that might help you. Essentially, Beta was first and had most of the innovations, but VHS won out overall. Betas quality was, as everyone will state, better but the record time and lack of pre-recorded media helped to kill it.
Vehicle searches are permitted, that's why if you have a jacket in the backseat that has 'something' in it, make sure you grab it before the cop walks up. As long as it's on your person, the cop can't do anything about it.
The war on drugs is, in general, stupid. My feeling on it is legalize everything and let the addicts kill themselves off, tax it to death and remove the drug lords from power by increasing the supply and keeping the demand relatively steady. Think of how our budget problem would be solved then:)
Okay, you're still wrong. "Less process", as you put it, has nothing to do with due process. They have not been charged with anything, have not been detained, have not been held against their will.
Your personal effects, as another poster wrote, are NOT your face or description or name. You are a citizen of the United States, you pay taxes, these things are on file. It's not an invasion of privacy or a search for people to look through them. "Person and effects" means that a cop can not legally search you walking down the street without your permission. When a cop pulls you over, if he pats you down and finds a bulge in your pocket that he knows isn't a weapon, he can't remove it from your pocket or tell you to. He can ask, and you can tell him "No". You could have a bag of and it doesn't matter, you can't be searched without a warrant.
The language of the law gets interesting when it comes to personal possessions. If it's something you wear on your body (jacket, hat, etc.) you can refuse to let them search it and they can't do anything. You get harassed by them, you report it. They grab you, you press charges for illegal seizure. If there is a witness around, he can testify that you did nothing wrong or outside of your rights. A duffle bag I'm not sure about, it may count as being on your person, it may not.
Either way, you may get hassled a little. Cops have a tough ass job, give them some slack. Don't do anything wrong and cooperate with the cops and you have nothing to worry about, it's really that simple.
In the US, if the camera is out in the open (ie, the people realize you are taking their pictures) you can do pretty much anything with the pictures. If the camera is hidden, you have to have their consent to publish it. But out in the open cameras are no problem, that's how those "Girls Gone Wild" DVDs are done...(that may be an America only reference)
suspect is somebody who's guilty of some terrible crime but just hasn't been caught yet
Hold the presses there, Webster. I'm never seen anyone determine the word suspect to mean this. A suspect is someone who, once a crime is committed there is slight proof that the person could have committed the crime. I could see you calling the people in this list possible suspects, but more than likely that's what they are.
Also, let's not forget that people DO have rights. After talking to a friend of mine this weekend who is a cadet, cops aren't allowed to lay a hand on you on the street. It's called illegal seizure. The copy can question you, and you can choose to refuse answering every question. They can't lay a hand on you without motive. Even if they ask you what you have on you, you can choose to deny answering that as well. If they break the law, any attorney in the world could you get you off.
Due process grants you not being held without knowing your charges and having a quick and timely judicial process. When/If these people are arrested, they will still be given that right.
No unauthorized searches guarantees no law entity can come into your house (or any kind of domicile) without a warrant which they must show cause in order to get. Being around drug dealers/convicted felons is a reason, as is having previously broken the law (loitering is breaking the law in some places).
Equal protection under the law...you make me laugh. If this person was accused of a crime, he'd have the same rights as every other individual...the right to an attorney, presumed innocent until proven guilty (yes, the state's attorney would STILL have to make a case against him, he's not automatically jailed), the right to a speedy trial, no unlawful search and seizures, the right to free speech, even the right to run for office (assuming he's a citizen and natural born, which most of the people probably are not).
In short, you're making the case that because people are now watching them, they have lost rights. In fact, they have lost nothing, the rest of us have gained some protection.
These people are NOT having their rights infringed on. I can make a database of any group of people I want...hell, I can go through the phonebook, find out where the person lives and go take a picture of them AND IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL. All this organization is doing is keeping track of people that have been caught in 'questionable activities' and making a list.
If these peoples' civil rights are infringed upon, please, get up in arms...I'll join right along with you. But if the police are just compiling a database, not performing searches, pulling them over unnecessarily (note: I am not referring to racial profiling) or taking them into jail without cause, I see no problem with this. It could, in fact, be a good way to keep an eye on potential trouble makers. If the cops checked what these individuals were doing on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis, it would keep some innocents from getting harmed.
Remember, these are not random picks from the phone book...there's a reason why these people are in this database. Maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but doubtful...the majority were probably in the process of or about to commit crimes (drugs, vandalism, murder) when they were picked up.
--trb
...and to anyone with that "Those who give up a little liberty to get safety..." line in your sig, remember NO LIBERTIES have been sacrificed here
I guarantee eBay still has 5.25" disk drives for sale...I would almost guarantee you could still find an 8" drive around here. Media might be a little harder, but there's somebody out there with a warehouse full of those disks.
My point is, don't worry about not being able to find media/drives. They're still around, you just won't be able to stroll out to CompUSA and pick yourself up one. And like another poster said, you really can't copy protect audio/video...SOMETHING has to decode it, and from the decoder you just reencode it any way you want. Same quality? Probably not, but near perfect and certainly close enough for casual listening.
I admit, not helping students because you want them to "sink or swim" is kinda harsh, but I wouldn't advocate that. There's a certain level of help that I would suggest giving someone, but they really have to understand the basic concepts for themselves. I knew loads of people in my 3rd/4th year classes that weren't too sure how to write a queue/stack/linked list implementation. And please, don't ask them to write one and then inherit it to other classes...the whole OOP approach was beyond them, and functional programming wasn't always good either.
Absolutely you should help people, but do it in the form of answering questions, not providing them with a large amount of "here's how you do it" material. I had one professor (digital design, part II) who refused to answer questions in his office hours, citing the fact that "[He] went over this in class...if you didn't understand it then, too bad". That killed me, I couldn't stand it. But the opposite was just as bad, when someone would take a problem to a teacher and instead of answering questions they would draw out the headers for the classes and give them some actual code. The two extremes are equally bad.
It's not like there is anything you actually learn in four years of CS education that you can't learn in 3 months with a pile of books.
I don't disagree with you, per se, but I don't agree either. There's a certain amount of appreciation for the subject you have to have coming in and, if you don't have that, CS will not be a good career (lifestyle?) choice for you. However, there's a great deal of theory and a definite style that you pick up from some of the really talented professors.
My favorite course in my undergrad CS courses (I was a CpE so please, don't flame me too much) was my operating systems class. That one class taught me more about system dataflow than any book ever has. True, I could probably have gone out and bought a "Theory of Operating Systems" and learned why deadlock occurs, how to resolve it, how to order processes by priority and handle them, but my professor gave her own unique theories that were much more impressive then reading something out of a book.
That being said, let me take the other route and say that I really didn't learn too terribly much in my classes that I didn't already know. The 2-3 semesters of data objects was a bit much but definitely helped to raise my GPA and weed out the incompetent students who would NEVER make it in CS. I thought it was kind of a shame that my curriculum was so filled with mandatory engineering classes I didn't get the time to take a nice graphics or advanced OS class, but that's the tradeoff I made for my microprocessor design classes (which were excellent, btw...I advise any CS student to find a few good hardware classes at their university and learn lots from them...understanding hardware and how assembly code interfaces with it will give you a greater appreciation of systems as a whole, IMHO)
I got out of college pretty much at the height of the dotcom saga (May, 2000). I was/am no slouch when it comes to programming...I went to Virginia Tech and was on the school's ACM computer team (unfortunately, I graduated before they won 3rd place in the international finals, but I cheered for them:). When it came time for interviewing, I knew I wouldn't have a problem finding a job but I thought some of my peers might since many of the people I knew from class could barely write C code for their projects. I remember practically writing their code for them while I was in school and figured eventually this would catch up with them when it came time for the real world.
Yeah, I was wrong.
These people still managed to get 50k+ starting salaries with signing bonuses that were just sick. They weren't GOOD at what they did, they just knew what a computer was and how to program a little, but that was enough for most companies. And we wonder why those companies didn't do well...
Anyways, back to the point. I was a computer engineer in college and I still remember the first day of orientation. All the engineers in our orientation group (you were a 'general engineer' until your sophmore year) were gathered in an auditorium to listen to the dean speak. One of the first things he said was "Take a look around...3 of the 5 people sitting near you won't be here when you graduate". I was PROUD of that fact, knowing that I would be one of the few engineers to make it through my 4 years at school.
I wish CS were the same way. I wish people had a rough time and were forced to drop/fail out of of the major, then maybe we wouldn't have the glut of horrible programmers passing resumes around and making it very, very difficult to find a job these days even if you are an excellent developer. Please, don't help these people more than they deserve, it's doing them and the rest of us a great disservice.
"We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That's basically why we secured this patent," Kay said.
Uh-huh...
"Hi, we're assholes who want to patent something that's clearly been done before and wasn't terribly original when it was done, just so we can make a buck or two."
Gym memberships really aren't all that expensive. You can find Gold's or Olympus Gyms across the country that cost $20 or so a month, which really isn't bad at all. Look online for articles about how to lift or find a non-geek friend that already lifts to help you. I just started taking a book with me so after my workout I'm cycling for 30-60 minutes and reading.
A lot of the guys at my office lift/run/bike during lunch. Take a granola bar or two, eat on the way over/back and cycle for 30-45 minutes. Still have time for a shower and you'll feel refreshed during those afternoon low times.
Drink lots of water too...it actually keeps you more aware than coffee, I think. You'll feel 'cleaner' within a few days if you finish a couple bottles of water during the day, and it's great for keeping your body hydrated during workouts.
Repeat after me: anything not specifically prohibited is permitted.
Okay, I didn't cut and paste enough of the paragraph from the original article. They went on to say that court cases have actually ruled that music ISN'T covered by the archival section of copyright law. If a court rules that, it's not written into law but it does establish a precedent that can be used in future cases. Thus, if we're measuring on the legal stick where 0 is clearly illegal and 100 is clearly legal, a ruling like this may have just pushed us to below 50, say 40ish.
I had always thought that it was digital material itself, not the type of data, was the subject of the archiving clause. That was more my question, sorry for not being clear.
It is not a fact that "archival" copies are allowed. Copyright law specifically allows certain kinds of archival copies of software, but not of music, movies, books or anything else.
Interesting...could someone validate whether this really is true or not? If it is, it would invalidate a number of the fair use arguments you typically see on Slashdot.
All in all, I thought the interview was pretty good...definitely some slick talking, but I would like to see the surveys used to find some of those percentages. And why, in God's name, didn't the interviewer mention that the reason for the decline in sales could have been from a general decline in US markets? I've been waiting to hear an RIAA spokesman answer the question "Couldn't the decline be because of the current recession?" Grrr!
This actually is a great idea for one reason...being able to digitize all the stuff I have on old casettes. Up til now, the only feasible way was to take a line out of the headphone jack, connect it to the mic in/line in on my soundcard and try to get the levels right in my recording software (this was NOT easy to do). I can take all those bootlegged concert tapes (legal ones, mind you:) and put them in mp3 format. Wow.
This will make it 10 times easier, and for that reason alone it's worth it. Being able to take mp3s in my car is another great feature but with CDRs being so cheap, it's not nearly as important.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in college, we used to do the same basic thing but none of us had a hub. The solution we found was to get combo ethernet cards that had rj-45 connectors as well as coax connectors (I think that's what they're called). But a few lengths of coax along with t-connectors and terminators and there's no need for a hub. Works great and is (relatively) portable, just throw all the cables and connectors in a bag.
--trb
Oh, would that distro come pre-installed with this?
--trb
it was a joke dude, just laugh and move on...
Excellent though the book was, it badly needed updating.
Thanks, Yoda...
It's not that we invented it, but for the most part we are one of the few countries that has made it work. Considering the amount of land and people we have, our form of government has been far more successful than most others that have existed, whether they be democratic or not.
The separation of powers that are employed by the US have really been the foundation of our government. Many hairbrained suggestions (DMCA excluded) have been prevented from being passed into law becaues they couldn't be approved through congress and the president. In addition , the application/interpretation of these laws by the Supreme Court adds another layer that prevents misuse. There are so many people that have a limited amount of power that it can't be abused. That's really why our system has proven to be, while not the best at all times, better than the alternatives on average.
Ofcourse, this is all just MHO, others may vary.
--trb
In order to effectively block all forms of cracking, they would have to make hardware that wasn't backwards compatible with the software, and vice-versa. Much of a software vendor's clientel is government/large companies...they will never buy something that doesn't allow for backwards compatibility. It would end up costing them much more in headaches than any possible promotion MS would provide.
--trb
here's a link that might help you. Essentially, Beta was first and had most of the innovations, but VHS won out overall. Betas quality was, as everyone will state, better but the record time and lack of pre-recorded media helped to kill it.
--trb
Vehicle searches are permitted, that's why if you have a jacket in the backseat that has 'something' in it, make sure you grab it before the cop walks up. As long as it's on your person, the cop can't do anything about it.
:)
The war on drugs is, in general, stupid. My feeling on it is legalize everything and let the addicts kill themselves off, tax it to death and remove the drug lords from power by increasing the supply and keeping the demand relatively steady. Think of how our budget problem would be solved then
--trb
Okay, you're still wrong. "Less process", as you put it, has nothing to do with due process. They have not been charged with anything, have not been detained, have not been held against their will.
Your personal effects, as another poster wrote, are NOT your face or description or name. You are a citizen of the United States, you pay taxes, these things are on file. It's not an invasion of privacy or a search for people to look through them. "Person and effects" means that a cop can not legally search you walking down the street without your permission. When a cop pulls you over, if he pats you down and finds a bulge in your pocket that he knows isn't a weapon, he can't remove it from your pocket or tell you to. He can ask, and you can tell him "No". You could have a bag of and it doesn't matter, you can't be searched without a warrant.
--trb
The language of the law gets interesting when it comes to personal possessions. If it's something you wear on your body (jacket, hat, etc.) you can refuse to let them search it and they can't do anything. You get harassed by them, you report it. They grab you, you press charges for illegal seizure. If there is a witness around, he can testify that you did nothing wrong or outside of your rights. A duffle bag I'm not sure about, it may count as being on your person, it may not.
Either way, you may get hassled a little. Cops have a tough ass job, give them some slack. Don't do anything wrong and cooperate with the cops and you have nothing to worry about, it's really that simple.
--trb
In the US, if the camera is out in the open (ie, the people realize you are taking their pictures) you can do pretty much anything with the pictures. If the camera is hidden, you have to have their consent to publish it. But out in the open cameras are no problem, that's how those "Girls Gone Wild" DVDs are done...(that may be an America only reference)
--trb
suspect is somebody who's guilty of some terrible crime but just hasn't been caught yet
Hold the presses there, Webster. I'm never seen anyone determine the word suspect to mean this. A suspect is someone who, once a crime is committed there is slight proof that the person could have committed the crime. I could see you calling the people in this list possible suspects, but more than likely that's what they are.
Also, let's not forget that people DO have rights. After talking to a friend of mine this weekend who is a cadet, cops aren't allowed to lay a hand on you on the street. It's called illegal seizure. The copy can question you, and you can choose to refuse answering every question. They can't lay a hand on you without motive. Even if they ask you what you have on you, you can choose to deny answering that as well. If they break the law, any attorney in the world could you get you off.
--trb
You are wrong on every count.
Due process grants you not being held without knowing your charges and having a quick and timely judicial process. When/If these people are arrested, they will still be given that right.
No unauthorized searches guarantees no law entity can come into your house (or any kind of domicile) without a warrant which they must show cause in order to get. Being around drug dealers/convicted felons is a reason, as is having previously broken the law (loitering is breaking the law in some places).
Equal protection under the law...you make me laugh. If this person was accused of a crime, he'd have the same rights as every other individual...the right to an attorney, presumed innocent until proven guilty (yes, the state's attorney would STILL have to make a case against him, he's not automatically jailed), the right to a speedy trial, no unlawful search and seizures, the right to free speech, even the right to run for office (assuming he's a citizen and natural born, which most of the people probably are not).
In short, you're making the case that because people are now watching them, they have lost rights. In fact, they have lost nothing, the rest of us have gained some protection.
--trb
These people are NOT having their rights infringed on. I can make a database of any group of people I want...hell, I can go through the phonebook, find out where the person lives and go take a picture of them AND IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL. All this organization is doing is keeping track of people that have been caught in 'questionable activities' and making a list.
...and to anyone with that "Those who give up a little liberty to get safety..." line in your sig, remember NO LIBERTIES have been sacrificed here
If these peoples' civil rights are infringed upon, please, get up in arms...I'll join right along with you. But if the police are just compiling a database, not performing searches, pulling them over unnecessarily (note: I am not referring to racial profiling) or taking them into jail without cause, I see no problem with this. It could, in fact, be a good way to keep an eye on potential trouble makers. If the cops checked what these individuals were doing on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis, it would keep some innocents from getting harmed.
Remember, these are not random picks from the phone book...there's a reason why these people are in this database. Maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but doubtful...the majority were probably in the process of or about to commit crimes (drugs, vandalism, murder) when they were picked up.
--trb
I guarantee eBay still has 5.25" disk drives for sale...I would almost guarantee you could still find an 8" drive around here. Media might be a little harder, but there's somebody out there with a warehouse full of those disks.
My point is, don't worry about not being able to find media/drives. They're still around, you just won't be able to stroll out to CompUSA and pick yourself up one. And like another poster said, you really can't copy protect audio/video...SOMETHING has to decode it, and from the decoder you just reencode it any way you want. Same quality? Probably not, but near perfect and certainly close enough for casual listening.
--trb
"FREE NELSON MANDELLA!"
"He's already BEEN freed..."
"Oh."
I admit, not helping students because you want them to "sink or swim" is kinda harsh, but I wouldn't advocate that. There's a certain level of help that I would suggest giving someone, but they really have to understand the basic concepts for themselves. I knew loads of people in my 3rd/4th year classes that weren't too sure how to write a queue/stack/linked list implementation. And please, don't ask them to write one and then inherit it to other classes...the whole OOP approach was beyond them, and functional programming wasn't always good either.
Absolutely you should help people, but do it in the form of answering questions, not providing them with a large amount of "here's how you do it" material. I had one professor (digital design, part II) who refused to answer questions in his office hours, citing the fact that "[He] went over this in class...if you didn't understand it then, too bad". That killed me, I couldn't stand it. But the opposite was just as bad, when someone would take a problem to a teacher and instead of answering questions they would draw out the headers for the classes and give them some actual code. The two extremes are equally bad.
--trb
It's not like there is anything you actually learn in four years of CS education that you can't learn in 3 months with a pile of books.
I don't disagree with you, per se, but I don't agree either. There's a certain amount of appreciation for the subject you have to have coming in and, if you don't have that, CS will not be a good career (lifestyle?) choice for you. However, there's a great deal of theory and a definite style that you pick up from some of the really talented professors.
My favorite course in my undergrad CS courses (I was a CpE so please, don't flame me too much) was my operating systems class. That one class taught me more about system dataflow than any book ever has. True, I could probably have gone out and bought a "Theory of Operating Systems" and learned why deadlock occurs, how to resolve it, how to order processes by priority and handle them, but my professor gave her own unique theories that were much more impressive then reading something out of a book.
That being said, let me take the other route and say that I really didn't learn too terribly much in my classes that I didn't already know. The 2-3 semesters of data objects was a bit much but definitely helped to raise my GPA and weed out the incompetent students who would NEVER make it in CS. I thought it was kind of a shame that my curriculum was so filled with mandatory engineering classes I didn't get the time to take a nice graphics or advanced OS class, but that's the tradeoff I made for my microprocessor design classes (which were excellent, btw...I advise any CS student to find a few good hardware classes at their university and learn lots from them...understanding hardware and how assembly code interfaces with it will give you a greater appreciation of systems as a whole, IMHO)
--trb
Yes, yes, double YES!
:). When it came time for interviewing, I knew I wouldn't have a problem finding a job but I thought some of my peers might since many of the people I knew from class could barely write C code for their projects. I remember practically writing their code for them while I was in school and figured eventually this would catch up with them when it came time for the real world.
I got out of college pretty much at the height of the dotcom saga (May, 2000). I was/am no slouch when it comes to programming...I went to Virginia Tech and was on the school's ACM computer team (unfortunately, I graduated before they won 3rd place in the international finals, but I cheered for them
Yeah, I was wrong.
These people still managed to get 50k+ starting salaries with signing bonuses that were just sick. They weren't GOOD at what they did, they just knew what a computer was and how to program a little, but that was enough for most companies. And we wonder why those companies didn't do well...
Anyways, back to the point. I was a computer engineer in college and I still remember the first day of orientation. All the engineers in our orientation group (you were a 'general engineer' until your sophmore year) were gathered in an auditorium to listen to the dean speak. One of the first things he said was "Take a look around...3 of the 5 people sitting near you won't be here when you graduate". I was PROUD of that fact, knowing that I would be one of the few engineers to make it through my 4 years at school.
I wish CS were the same way. I wish people had a rough time and were forced to drop/fail out of of the major, then maybe we wouldn't have the glut of horrible programmers passing resumes around and making it very, very difficult to find a job these days even if you are an excellent developer. Please, don't help these people more than they deserve, it's doing them and the rest of us a great disservice.
--trb
"We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That's basically why we secured this patent," Kay said.
Uh-huh...
"Hi, we're assholes who want to patent something that's clearly been done before and wasn't terribly original when it was done, just so we can make a buck or two."
These people make me violently ill.
--trb
Gym memberships really aren't all that expensive. You can find Gold's or Olympus Gyms across the country that cost $20 or so a month, which really isn't bad at all. Look online for articles about how to lift or find a non-geek friend that already lifts to help you. I just started taking a book with me so after my workout I'm cycling for 30-60 minutes and reading.
A lot of the guys at my office lift/run/bike during lunch. Take a granola bar or two, eat on the way over/back and cycle for 30-45 minutes. Still have time for a shower and you'll feel refreshed during those afternoon low times.
Drink lots of water too...it actually keeps you more aware than coffee, I think. You'll feel 'cleaner' within a few days if you finish a couple bottles of water during the day, and it's great for keeping your body hydrated during workouts.
--trb
Repeat after me: anything not specifically prohibited is permitted.
Okay, I didn't cut and paste enough of the paragraph from the original article. They went on to say that court cases have actually ruled that music ISN'T covered by the archival section of copyright law. If a court rules that, it's not written into law but it does establish a precedent that can be used in future cases. Thus, if we're measuring on the legal stick where 0 is clearly illegal and 100 is clearly legal, a ruling like this may have just pushed us to below 50, say 40ish.
I had always thought that it was digital material itself, not the type of data, was the subject of the archiving clause. That was more my question, sorry for not being clear.
--trb
It is not a fact that "archival" copies are allowed. Copyright law specifically allows certain kinds of archival copies of software, but not of music, movies, books or anything else.
Interesting...could someone validate whether this really is true or not? If it is, it would invalidate a number of the fair use arguments you typically see on Slashdot.
All in all, I thought the interview was pretty good...definitely some slick talking, but I would like to see the surveys used to find some of those percentages. And why, in God's name, didn't the interviewer mention that the reason for the decline in sales could have been from a general decline in US markets? I've been waiting to hear an RIAA spokesman answer the question "Couldn't the decline be because of the current recession?" Grrr!
--trb
This actually is a great idea for one reason...being able to digitize all the stuff I have on old casettes. Up til now, the only feasible way was to take a line out of the headphone jack, connect it to the mic in/line in on my soundcard and try to get the levels right in my recording software (this was NOT easy to do). I can take all those bootlegged concert tapes (legal ones, mind you :) and put them in mp3 format. Wow.
This will make it 10 times easier, and for that reason alone it's worth it. Being able to take mp3s in my car is another great feature but with CDRs being so cheap, it's not nearly as important.
--trb
...if the next step is to offer free 'feature filled' tatooing of these numbers onto every persons' arm at the time of birth?
Now where have I heard of this concept before...
--trb