for a long time digital quality was worse than film. it was good enough for most people, but not pro's. years ago when digital was still new our army photo guys got some $10,000 digital cameras in and they said the quality was no where near as good as regular film.
and i've heard some pro's say that film had faster exposure so you can shoot faster. my wedding photographer was a pro and one thing i learned when he took pictures is to take as many as you can as fast as you can and sort it out later. it's how all the pro's catch famous people in all the crazy poses and facial expressions. think all the GWB pics in the last decade
i used to use the designations of military units as passwords. something like HHC of the 72nd Armor Battallion would be hhc72armrbn. after the domain admins started to use 5 passwords remembered i switched to restaurant names and anything else i liked to do. for a little while i thought about using hashed versions of porn star names for system account passwords.
the last time i checked used book prices on ebay they were so low that it made sense to throw the books in the trash or donate them to a library. no resale value unless it's an expensive textbook or some rare book. i sold a bunch of books years ago just for the feedback. after fees and shipping i broke even to my selling costs. and i lost a lot of time.
most people will buy ebooks because they can do it right away and not go to a bookstore
used to be that they owned the classifieds. if you wanted to sell something you would advertise in a newspaper. then ebay, google, craigslist and others took the market and the newspapers didn't do anything about it. i know someone who advertised a condo for sale in the NY Times last year and i thought it was a joke and a waste of money. so 1990's. these days you do craiglist and sell it yourself or go to a realtor. even the realtors don't advertise anything in the newspapers. the same ad every weekend just to get customers in. the lead time is so long that it's a waste of time trying to advertise new properties in the newspaper.
if the newspapers want revenue they need to start an open source type for sale/job listing site and share the revenue. but it's too late
i've seen news specials about this 20 years ago after the wall first fell. as soon as the warsaw pact fell apart the french and some of our allies started spying on us
every bio of every band i read said that they had to tour constantly the first few years to get popular and make money. you get some popularity playing clubs and to make it big you need money that only the record companies are willing to lend. but it gives you free advertising to play bigger venues and make more money.
playing concerts has the same return on investment. bands probably get the same percentage after all the expenses of putting on a concert off the gross ticket sales as they do album sales. it's called the cost of doing business. average return is something like a nickel on the dollar for most companies in the USA. they would kill to have the returns that bands make on album sales. chineese manufactuing companies only make a few cents out of each dollar that they are paid
you still have to record your music. Apple takes 30% off the top. after you pay for studio time and Apple's nut you are probably looking at the same rate of return. except that most musicians don't have a lot of money to spend on studio fees and banks are aren't willing to lend to new bands without collateral. record companies are nothing more than hedge funds by another name. they take money from investors and invest it in musical acts. some pay off, some lose in the end hey make a decent rate or return in some years.
no one is going to give you a million $$$ to record an album and not expect to be paid back with profits
i just moved to a decent elementary school district from a crappy one since my son is a few years away from going to school. in this school the kids are expected to know how to read by the time they go to 1st grade. i know someone who moved to one of the best school districts in the US where parents pay crazy property taxes to pay for two teachers per class etc. same story, kids are expected to know a lot of things that in crappy school districts they would spend time learning since the parents are lazy. in the good public schools the regular classes are like the top classes in the crappy schools.
my kid starts daycare soon and the one he's going to they teach kids to read and write by the time they hit 4. you can buy all the tech you want and pay all your money in taxes, but if the parents ignore the kid and expect everyone else to teach their kid then don't expect any spectacular results. if you buy technology for your kids make sure they use it right. in my day you had to go to the library a mile away to look at an encyclopedia. today it's on a cell phone and organized better than Britannica could ever dream of
Re:No uptake from young people?
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
apple is making money off young people, not the media. the print/TV media let their advertising models get destroyed and now cry poverty
that and we have these things called study groups where people learn together. and the fact that there is only so many opinions you can form about any subject
digital cable boxes will work just fine on old CRT TV's. all they do is understand a different signal. and in NYC digital cable has been the same price or cheaper for years. only reason people stuck with analog is the ability to use pirated boxes that get every channel
It's actually very good that Comcast is doing this since it allows them to speed up internet access. Analog cable takes too much bandwidth. NYC recently allowed the cable companies here to shut down analog and it couldn't have come too soon.
probably because the venues don't want to sell tickets. they want their rent fee and parking fees and let someone else do the selling. they don't want to run servers or code the software to sell the tickets. it doesn't make sense for every venue to do this, which is why there is ticketmaster to do it for everyone. it's like outsourcing.
and something similar is already done for the crazed fans. You pay up to $1000 per ticket for backstage access to have the performers tell you how much they care about fans and make you believe they care. they call it some super duper package or something like that.
what i never understood is why the artists don't perform more shows since there is a demand for it? that will solve most problems and put the brokers out of business along with limiting the amount of tickets sold per person
message rules are on the exchange server. junk mail is handled by the SMTP gateway. BES does have an advantage since they have years of development lead time, but Apple/MS are catching up fairly fast. and the Apple/MS activesync solution is a lot cheaper and no server required. we've had a BES server for years and rarely used most of the management features. doesn't mean people don't use them, but a lot of organizations don't care to lock down people's cell phones. you can also write web apps with no itunes or any other deployment. last week i used my iphone to help troubleshoot a SQL issue.
the iphone web browser is better than blackberry. with HP iLO chips i can use my iphone to push the power button on a server remotely or get console access. can't do it on the stock blackberry browser.
the universal inbox is not as good as on my blackberry, but multiple exchange accounts is nice. i can easily add the accounts that hold the alert emails instead of relying on outlook rules in that mailbox to forward me the right emails.
the multitasking is also pretty good. listening to pandora uses about the same amount of battery as the ipod app.
and the iphone 4 has a slightly higher resolution screen, a gyro for some reason or other and you're paying for iTunes indirectly. price is about the same. not like the old days when you would pay 50% more for an apple product.
not like Android phones are any cheaper. the top of the line Droid and Evo's go for $199 with 8GB storage. iPhone comes in 16GB and 32GB. by the time you buy a SD card it's more than an iphone
the big advantage about the 5 year rule was better graphics. the latest generation of consoles also had online built in. the whole motion gaming thing sounds cooler and worth buying rather than just better graphics
Re:Windows XP is about to lose support
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
part of the support is MS supporting developers with questions and this is going away as well. kind of hard to debug software when the OS vendor won't help you
HTML5 is coming and Google/Apple/Mozilla will be dropping support for XP in their new browsers as they are released. No need to mention that IE9 won't support it. if you want the latest web standards you have to upgrade the OS
Re:Why should we move to Windows 7?
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
starting next year the programs people use will probably come out with new new versions that don't support XP since it's going out of support this year.
Slashdot Mirror
for a long time digital quality was worse than film. it was good enough for most people, but not pro's. years ago when digital was still new our army photo guys got some $10,000 digital cameras in and they said the quality was no where near as good as regular film.
and i've heard some pro's say that film had faster exposure so you can shoot faster. my wedding photographer was a pro and one thing i learned when he took pictures is to take as many as you can as fast as you can and sort it out later. it's how all the pro's catch famous people in all the crazy poses and facial expressions. think all the GWB pics in the last decade
i used to use the designations of military units as passwords. something like HHC of the 72nd Armor Battallion would be hhc72armrbn. after the domain admins started to use 5 passwords remembered i switched to restaurant names and anything else i liked to do. for a little while i thought about using hashed versions of porn star names for system account passwords.
the last time i checked used book prices on ebay they were so low that it made sense to throw the books in the trash or donate them to a library. no resale value unless it's an expensive textbook or some rare book. i sold a bunch of books years ago just for the feedback. after fees and shipping i broke even to my selling costs. and i lost a lot of time.
most people will buy ebooks because they can do it right away and not go to a bookstore
used to be that they owned the classifieds. if you wanted to sell something you would advertise in a newspaper. then ebay, google, craigslist and others took the market and the newspapers didn't do anything about it. i know someone who advertised a condo for sale in the NY Times last year and i thought it was a joke and a waste of money. so 1990's. these days you do craiglist and sell it yourself or go to a realtor. even the realtors don't advertise anything in the newspapers. the same ad every weekend just to get customers in. the lead time is so long that it's a waste of time trying to advertise new properties in the newspaper.
if the newspapers want revenue they need to start an open source type for sale/job listing site and share the revenue. but it's too late
i've seen news specials about this 20 years ago after the wall first fell. as soon as the warsaw pact fell apart the french and some of our allies started spying on us
every bio of every band i read said that they had to tour constantly the first few years to get popular and make money. you get some popularity playing clubs and to make it big you need money that only the record companies are willing to lend. but it gives you free advertising to play bigger venues and make more money.
playing concerts has the same return on investment. bands probably get the same percentage after all the expenses of putting on a concert off the gross ticket sales as they do album sales. it's called the cost of doing business. average return is something like a nickel on the dollar for most companies in the USA. they would kill to have the returns that bands make on album sales. chineese manufactuing companies only make a few cents out of each dollar that they are paid
you still have to record your music. Apple takes 30% off the top. after you pay for studio time and Apple's nut you are probably looking at the same rate of return. except that most musicians don't have a lot of money to spend on studio fees and banks are aren't willing to lend to new bands without collateral. record companies are nothing more than hedge funds by another name. they take money from investors and invest it in musical acts. some pay off, some lose in the end hey make a decent rate or return in some years.
no one is going to give you a million $$$ to record an album and not expect to be paid back with profits
i just moved to a decent elementary school district from a crappy one since my son is a few years away from going to school. in this school the kids are expected to know how to read by the time they go to 1st grade. i know someone who moved to one of the best school districts in the US where parents pay crazy property taxes to pay for two teachers per class etc. same story, kids are expected to know a lot of things that in crappy school districts they would spend time learning since the parents are lazy. in the good public schools the regular classes are like the top classes in the crappy schools.
my kid starts daycare soon and the one he's going to they teach kids to read and write by the time they hit 4. you can buy all the tech you want and pay all your money in taxes, but if the parents ignore the kid and expect everyone else to teach their kid then don't expect any spectacular results. if you buy technology for your kids make sure they use it right. in my day you had to go to the library a mile away to look at an encyclopedia. today it's on a cell phone and organized better than Britannica could ever dream of
apple is making money off young people, not the media. the print/TV media let their advertising models get destroyed and now cry poverty
this is OSS Linux. instead of being entertained you can spend all night hacking it and playing with the file system
a lot of new TV's will play media off a hard drive connected via a USB port. no need for separate media servers
that and we have these things called study groups where people learn together. and the fact that there is only so many opinions you can form about any subject
digital cable boxes will work just fine on old CRT TV's. all they do is understand a different signal. and in NYC digital cable has been the same price or cheaper for years. only reason people stuck with analog is the ability to use pirated boxes that get every channel
It's actually very good that Comcast is doing this since it allows them to speed up internet access. Analog cable takes too much bandwidth. NYC recently allowed the cable companies here to shut down analog and it couldn't have come too soon.
probably because the venues don't want to sell tickets. they want their rent fee and parking fees and let someone else do the selling. they don't want to run servers or code the software to sell the tickets. it doesn't make sense for every venue to do this, which is why there is ticketmaster to do it for everyone. it's like outsourcing.
and something similar is already done for the crazed fans. You pay up to $1000 per ticket for backstage access to have the performers tell you how much they care about fans and make you believe they care. they call it some super duper package or something like that.
what i never understood is why the artists don't perform more shows since there is a demand for it? that will solve most problems and put the brokers out of business along with limiting the amount of tickets sold per person
message rules are on the exchange server. junk mail is handled by the SMTP gateway.
BES does have an advantage since they have years of development lead time, but Apple/MS are catching up fairly fast. and the Apple/MS activesync solution is a lot cheaper and no server required. we've had a BES server for years and rarely used most of the management features. doesn't mean people don't use them, but a lot of organizations don't care to lock down people's cell phones. you can also write web apps with no itunes or any other deployment. last week i used my iphone to help troubleshoot a SQL issue.
the iphone web browser is better than blackberry. with HP iLO chips i can use my iphone to push the power button on a server remotely or get console access. can't do it on the stock blackberry browser.
the universal inbox is not as good as on my blackberry, but multiple exchange accounts is nice. i can easily add the accounts that hold the alert emails instead of relying on outlook rules in that mailbox to forward me the right emails.
the multitasking is also pretty good. listening to pandora uses about the same amount of battery as the ipod app.
last few SQL Server conferences i went to, almost everyone there looked at least 40 or close to it.
and the iphone 4 has a slightly higher resolution screen, a gyro for some reason or other and you're paying for iTunes indirectly. price is about the same. not like the old days when you would pay 50% more for an apple product.
not like Android phones are any cheaper. the top of the line Droid and Evo's go for $199 with 8GB storage. iPhone comes in 16GB and 32GB. by the time you buy a SD card it's more than an iphone
the hippies can't even agree on their hippie power sources. they hype wind but then fight it because it kills birds or ruins the view at the beach
the big advantage about the 5 year rule was better graphics. the latest generation of consoles also had online built in. the whole motion gaming thing sounds cooler and worth buying rather than just better graphics
for that special moment
part of the support is MS supporting developers with questions and this is going away as well. kind of hard to debug software when the OS vendor won't help you
HTML5 is coming and Google/Apple/Mozilla will be dropping support for XP in their new browsers as they are released. No need to mention that IE9 won't support it. if you want the latest web standards you have to upgrade the OS
starting next year the programs people use will probably come out with new new versions that don't support XP since it's going out of support this year.