"None of these computers have ever had a single hardware problem. Any manufacturer will ship some defective machines, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of Mac users have had experiences similar to mine."
I have an 11 month old dual-USB iBook. No problems yet but we shall see what happens as the original one year warranty is about to expire.
"I'm curious to know what is actually selling on iTunes, etc. Is it new stuff? Or classic, older stuff from the labels' catablogs?"
Top 10 Songs for Today: OutKast - Hey Ya! No Douby - It's My Life Kelis - Milkshake Fountains of Wayne - Stacy's Mom OutKast & Sleepy Brown - The Way You Move Dido - White Flag (up to this point, this is the first artist on the list that I've heard of) Coldplay - Clocks (it's been on this list for ages now) Beyonce - Crazy in Love Black Eyed Peas & Justin Timberlake - Where Is The Love? (Wasn't that a Hanson song or something?) The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be
Top 10 Albums for Today: Howard Shore - The Return of the King Soundtrack Chingy - Holidae In (Single) The Monkees - The Best of The Monkees Sarac MacLachlan - Afterglow Sarac MacLachlan - Remixed OutKast - Speakerboxxx Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (it's been in this list for ages) No Doubt - No Doubt: The Singles 1992-2003 Dido - Life for Rent
I use IM with my brother all the time. The thing is, he's in on the top floor and I'm 2 floors below in the basement.
So at night whichever one of us goes to bed first send the other an IM saying to please manage the internet connection. This means that when the other one of us goes to bed, we start up my sister's kazaa or shut down the gateway computer. (We are still on dialup, there's no broadband out here.)
It gets funny because sometimes I live in other cities for work purposes, but sometimes he still messages me at night, telling me to manage the internet connection and I have to remind him that I'm not even at home.
It's also great when we want to remind the other one that the over timer is beeping and our food is done cooking.
"I have been getting spammed by a legitimate company for the last five months. I have gone to their site to ask to be removed, and sent several e-mails to various address asking to be removed from their mailing list. I have been totally ignored."
I had the same problem a few years back and simply could not get them to remove me from their list. The recourse I took was probably not illegal but still satisfying and effective:
Eventually I created a 700K image with nothing but the word REMOVE in it. I sent it to them. I never got another message from them again.
"Let the relative handful who actually made more bank than they can spend start an artist friendly label that gets more money to the person who created the work."
Of all crazy things. Last tuesday was my real time systems final exam and modelling this "IP over Avian Carriers" using petri nets was part of the second question. I kid you not.
"Speaking of auto-payroll... is it just me or is everyone in the country paid w/ auto-payroll paid out by ADP?"
I've worked at 3 places with auto-payroll. The first one was a huge company will billions in assets and the pay stub was their own. The second one was a huge company with billions in assets and I had to open an account with them to get paid. (i.e. they were one of the big banks.) The pay stub was obviously their own. The third company was a big financial company, but not huge, and the pay stub was their own.
I've never seen an ADP auto payroll stub, but then again, I might just be a special case.
"Weird. I used my US debit card quite extensively in Japan this spring and I never got charged all those fees you are talking about. Granted, I was mostly using government-run ATM machines while there that I believe do not charge fees even if you are not a customer. But my bank sure didn't charge me any "disloyalty" or any of those currency exchange fees you are talking about. I was getting a pretty competitive exchange rate too (I was monitoring the amount actually debited from my account using Internet banking)."
It depends on the service agreement you have with your home back. You might have an agreement where there is no disloyalty fee. As to what the ATMs will charge you in Japan... I have no idea.
Me: "If it's a 'white label' machine that's not operated by a bank, then it's an ABM."
You: "Anti-Bank-Missile???"
Quite the opposite. The White Label ABM business means that big banks make money. Here's How: Canada's biggest bank and one of the top 10 in North America, the RBC Financial group (formerly Royal Bank) co-owns one of the white-label ABM companies!
So let's say I am a Royal Bank customer. (This was true up until a short time ago.) Royal bank gets my money in their account and pays me less than a dollar in interest per year. And then I go to a white label machine, pay the $1.50 disloyalty fee which goes straight to RBC, pay the ABM fee to the white label company (which RBC co-owns) and then I don't use up the receipt-paper, evelopes, cause wear and tear, etc. on Royal's own machines. It's a good deal for RBC and a bad deal for me.
The bottom line is that my bank makes more money if I go to the white label machines! Even if I go to another bank's machines, I am paying Royal's disloyalty fee and making them extra money. (I pay no fee if I use Royal's own machines.)
And a note for Canadians: If you are tired of stupid bank fees and low interest rates on your balances, consider President's Choice Financial. I am a satisfied customer and do not work for them. Sure, it's owned by CIBC but I've never paid a cent in fees, I get free internet banking, free phone banking, free chequebooks, free Interac at CIBC machines, the 'points' rewards are worthwhile and attainable, and the interest rates are decent. (There are some minor downsides like spotty support for ATMs outside Canada, and most depoits over $200 except auto-payroll are delayed for 5 days so they can make interest on it. I can live with it.)
"And this was all legal, no recourse was possible. I wonder who made off with the 'big money' though, my bank, the ATM company, or the chinese food joint."
The 'white label' ones (called ABMs) are operated privately and whatever restaurant or convenience store owns them can charge whatever service fees they want. I live in Canada and I never ever use the white label machines. The cost is insane. You were hit with the 'disloyalty fee' from your bank for not using their machine (not that there was one,) a PLUS/Cirrus fee for international transactions, a currency change fee from your bank, whatever normal fee is levied by the ABM's owner, and maybe a currency exhange fee levied by the ABM's owner.
If you had gone to a machine that was actually run by a bank (an ATM) then the service charges would have been much lower. Banks generally have lower surcharges than white label machines.
"The concept is very nice. We have used deep freeze from pre-schools to universities to make life a lot easier on everyone. Teachers simply start the machines in the morning. Next day, the machines are like a clean slate, waiting to be abused again."
An anecdote about deepfreeze: They have it installed in many of the labs at my university. It probably makes life a lot easier for the sysadmins and it's nice to not see kazaa, a bunch of spyware and other crap load up when I log in.
BUT there was one annoying side effect. They set all the machine to reboot (and thus refresh the image) at 5 AM every day. But I didn't know this until recently.
My friend and I were working hardcore on a software engineering project. We had been in the lab since 2PM the previous day and it was coming up on 5AM. We were just finishing off the documentation. Yep, you guessed it: I saw this thing on my screen that said the machine would reboot in 3 seconds. I clicked cancel but my partner was not so lucky. His machine rebooted and he lost all the documentation he had written in the last 2.5 hours. (He doesn't have the saving reflex.)
Thank you deepfreeze, you made my friend go to the sysadmin's office with a trash can to empty.
"Aging is a concern with most Li-ion batteries. For unknown reasons, battery manufacturers are silent about this issue."
Sounds like built-in obsolescence. If they made batteries that lasted forever, there would be no repeat-business. Everyone now 'believes' that it's normal for Li-ion batteries to die after a while and that this is a perfectly normal and natural thing. How convenient for the battery manufacturers.
" What's so great about subtitles? You spend half your time reading them and not watching what is going on. If you don't like the interpretation of the voices they selected, you're still at the mercy of the interpretation of the interpreter who did the subtitle."
Watching subtitles is a skill. When you start out, you do spend half the time watching the subtitle and not the show. When I first started watching anime I was pausing the show every 10 seconds but I stuck with it. But now I can watch the subtitle and the show because I am good at it.
As to "still at the mercy of the interpretation of the interpreter who did the subtitle," how is that any different than the dub? You're still at the mercy of the translator who wrote the script in your native language. When it comes to anime, I always listen to the Japanese dialogue as well as reading the dub. I am by no means fluent in the language but I can often catch the real vs. the translated meanings and those little jokes that you simply can't translate into english.
So when it comes to being at the mercy if the translator, I don't think you have a case. It's the same with the dub. When it comes to not watching the screen, it means that you're not skilled at watching subtitles. If you don't want to watch develop that skill then it's your choice. In that case the dub is for you.
"Regardless, Witch Hunter Robin won't sound too bad dubbed if they get good actors, because it's a very dramatic show."
I already have the first Official DVD and the English dub is actually much better than the average fare for anime. (I've already seen the entire series in Japanese with subtitles.) I am now collecting the official DVDs as they come out.
I have to agree that it's a very dramatic show. My only worry is that people will start to lose interest before episode 11. For those who don't know, the first 10 episodes are quite episodic. It's a monster of the week type affair whose main purpose is to introduce you to the world and the characters. And then in episodes 11-12 the real plot kicks in and then there is no turning back.
"...when we're going to get past this dubbing thing and see some subs."
Never. The mainstream audience wants and always will want dubbed products. Reading is just too much work for both.
Now with the case of Witch Hunter Robin, I can assure you that the dub is quite good. I've seen the series in its entirety in Japanese and the first five episodes on the official DVD and the dub is pretty impressive compared to what you typically get with north american released anime. The second official DVD is slated for a Dec 02 release. My pre-order is already in!
Re:When does this quote get old...
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Power of 10 nothing, CD-R's break apart at roughly the equivilant of 100-150X CDROM which would only be ~20-30X DVD drives. 60-100K RPM is the hard numbers, which is for an undamaged disk, damaged disk can go at slightly over 25K RPM's which is the speed of a 48X CDROM or an 8X DVD player."
So we say today;-)
Engineers are always coming up with tricks to 'bend' the Laws of Physics. Why not just add more lasers to the drive so you're burning twice as much data at once without increasing the spin rate? Why not spin those lasers in the opposite direction? (It would be evil to calibrate though.) What prevents companies from inventing discs with stronger polycarbonates in then?
I mean in the past people thought that if the human body travelled at more than 35 mph it would explode. And they thought that you couldn't break the sound barrier either.
Yes, someone will have a good laugh at this thread in the future.
"Buy wireless routers, leave the settings wide open, download their kiddy pron at heart's content, making sure to always get rid of temp files, history, and cookies. If they get busted, the simply say, "it wasn't me, someone hacked into my wireless router, and downloaded that stuff on their onw machine..."
I do understand what you're saying, but I am seeing things a bit differently:
(note: I am playing devil's avocate for the purposes of having a good debate)
If somebody goes and sets up a WiFi AP with no security, they've set up something that is actively sending out signals advertising its presence and how to access it. If the DHCP is turned on, then the person's AP is basically advertising how it can help others get onto the network.
Second Scenario: If you put up a big neon sign on your house that said "FREE BEER WITHIN (fully licensed)" and then got arrested because minors were partaking or someone got into a drunk driving accident afterwards, is it the fault of the person who accessed the beer or your fault for providing it irresponsibly?
Will you be blameless because it was some kook who wandered in and drank the beer and then acted irresponsibly?
Will you be blameless because someone took up the offer your AP's active advertising of its presence and active help from its DHCP server to get onto the net and then started downloading child pornography? I think you should be blameless for the child porn charges (but not the other guy obviously) but I don't see how the other person should be charged with theft of the services that your equipment actively advertised and helped the person obtain.
"This Person is not a Wardriver but an complete idiot. "Real" Wardrivers do not wardrive for the sake of downloading or getting a personal advantage, but just for the fun of finding and mapping unsecure networks."
For sure. And Toronto is a damn good place to wardrive. I've gone wardriving through TO suburbs (with someone else at the wheel of course) and there was rarely a time within a 60 minute period or so that I was *not* within range of a WiFi AP with no security.
"Problem with the Chinese strategy is that they don't have any content. All the major content providers won't release their content in the China-Uber-Alles format if they can't control it. "
So you're telling me that there are no western or european companies out ther who want to get a piece of the action in a billion+ person market that is just starting to truly industrialise and modernise?
Also check out Scamorama which is a similar site where the scammers fight back. One piece of my own handiwork can be found there.
My favourite anti-scam-scam on that site is the one where they got the Nigerian guy to pose for a business card photo under the name "IAMA DILDO." It's laughalicious!
Slashdot Mirror
I have an 11 month old dual-USB iBook. No problems yet but we shall see what happens as the original one year warranty is about to expire.
"I'm curious to know what is actually selling on iTunes, etc. Is it new stuff? Or classic, older stuff from the labels' catablogs?"
Top 10 Songs for Today:
OutKast - Hey Ya!
No Douby - It's My Life
Kelis - Milkshake
Fountains of Wayne - Stacy's Mom
OutKast & Sleepy Brown - The Way You Move
Dido - White Flag (up to this point, this is the first artist on the list that I've heard of)
Coldplay - Clocks (it's been on this list for ages now)
Beyonce - Crazy in Love
Black Eyed Peas & Justin Timberlake - Where Is The Love? (Wasn't that a Hanson song or something?)
The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be
Top 10 Albums for Today:
Howard Shore - The Return of the King Soundtrack
Chingy - Holidae In (Single)
The Monkees - The Best of The Monkees
Sarac MacLachlan - Afterglow
Sarac MacLachlan - Remixed
OutKast - Speakerboxxx
Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (it's been in this list for ages)
No Doubt - No Doubt: The Singles 1992-2003
Dido - Life for Rent
So at night whichever one of us goes to bed first send the other an IM saying to please manage the internet connection. This means that when the other one of us goes to bed, we start up my sister's kazaa or shut down the gateway computer. (We are still on dialup, there's no broadband out here.)
It gets funny because sometimes I live in other cities for work purposes, but sometimes he still messages me at night, telling me to manage the internet connection and I have to remind him that I'm not even at home.
It's also great when we want to remind the other one that the over timer is beeping and our food is done cooking.
Yeah, that's sometimes what we called Chretien. ;-)
Slashcode won't let me add the correct accent on his name. :-(
At worst, you'll just put a few extra megs onto the hard drive of the computer that's monitoring their fax line.
I had the same problem a few years back and simply could not get them to remove me from their list. The recourse I took was probably not illegal but still satisfying and effective:
Eventually I created a 700K image with nothing but the word REMOVE in it. I sent it to them. I never got another message from them again.
That's already happened.
Of all crazy things. Last tuesday was my real time systems final exam and modelling this "IP over Avian Carriers" using petri nets was part of the second question. I kid you not.
I've worked at 3 places with auto-payroll. The first one was a huge company will billions in assets and the pay stub was their own. The second one was a huge company with billions in assets and I had to open an account with them to get paid. (i.e. they were one of the big banks.) The pay stub was obviously their own. The third company was a big financial company, but not huge, and the pay stub was their own.
I've never seen an ADP auto payroll stub, but then again, I might just be a special case.
It depends on the service agreement you have with your home back. You might have an agreement where there is no disloyalty fee. As to what the ATMs will charge you in Japan ... I have no idea.
You: "Anti-Bank-Missile???"
Quite the opposite. The White Label ABM business means that big banks make money. Here's How: Canada's biggest bank and one of the top 10 in North America, the RBC Financial group (formerly Royal Bank) co-owns one of the white-label ABM companies!
So let's say I am a Royal Bank customer. (This was true up until a short time ago.) Royal bank gets my money in their account and pays me less than a dollar in interest per year. And then I go to a white label machine, pay the $1.50 disloyalty fee which goes straight to RBC, pay the ABM fee to the white label company (which RBC co-owns) and then I don't use up the receipt-paper, evelopes, cause wear and tear, etc. on Royal's own machines. It's a good deal for RBC and a bad deal for me.
The bottom line is that my bank makes more money if I go to the white label machines! Even if I go to another bank's machines, I am paying Royal's disloyalty fee and making them extra money. (I pay no fee if I use Royal's own machines.)
And a note for Canadians: If you are tired of stupid bank fees and low interest rates on your balances, consider President's Choice Financial. I am a satisfied customer and do not work for them. Sure, it's owned by CIBC but I've never paid a cent in fees, I get free internet banking, free phone banking, free chequebooks, free Interac at CIBC machines, the 'points' rewards are worthwhile and attainable, and the interest rates are decent. (There are some minor downsides like spotty support for ATMs outside Canada, and most depoits over $200 except auto-payroll are delayed for 5 days so they can make interest on it. I can live with it.)
The 'white label' ones (called ABMs) are operated privately and whatever restaurant or convenience store owns them can charge whatever service fees they want. I live in Canada and I never ever use the white label machines. The cost is insane. You were hit with the 'disloyalty fee' from your bank for not using their machine (not that there was one,) a PLUS/Cirrus fee for international transactions, a currency change fee from your bank, whatever normal fee is levied by the ABM's owner, and maybe a currency exhange fee levied by the ABM's owner.
If you had gone to a machine that was actually run by a bank (an ATM) then the service charges would have been much lower. Banks generally have lower surcharges than white label machines.
If it's owned by a bank, it's an ATM.
If it's a 'white label' machine that's not operated by a bank, then it's an ABM.
An anecdote about deepfreeze: They have it installed in many of the labs at my university. It probably makes life a lot easier for the sysadmins and it's nice to not see kazaa, a bunch of spyware and other crap load up when I log in.
BUT there was one annoying side effect. They set all the machine to reboot (and thus refresh the image) at 5 AM every day. But I didn't know this until recently.
My friend and I were working hardcore on a software engineering project. We had been in the lab since 2PM the previous day and it was coming up on 5AM. We were just finishing off the documentation. Yep, you guessed it: I saw this thing on my screen that said the machine would reboot in 3 seconds. I clicked cancel but my partner was not so lucky. His machine rebooted and he lost all the documentation he had written in the last 2.5 hours. (He doesn't have the saving reflex.)
Thank you deepfreeze, you made my friend go to the sysadmin's office with a trash can to empty.
Sounds like built-in obsolescence. If they made batteries that lasted forever, there would be no repeat-business. Everyone now 'believes' that it's normal for Li-ion batteries to die after a while and that this is a perfectly normal and natural thing. How convenient for the battery manufacturers.
Watching subtitles is a skill. When you start out, you do spend half the time watching the subtitle and not the show. When I first started watching anime I was pausing the show every 10 seconds but I stuck with it. But now I can watch the subtitle and the show because I am good at it.
As to "still at the mercy of the interpretation of the interpreter who did the subtitle," how is that any different than the dub? You're still at the mercy of the translator who wrote the script in your native language. When it comes to anime, I always listen to the Japanese dialogue as well as reading the dub. I am by no means fluent in the language but I can often catch the real vs. the translated meanings and those little jokes that you simply can't translate into english.
So when it comes to being at the mercy if the translator, I don't think you have a case. It's the same with the dub. When it comes to not watching the screen, it means that you're not skilled at watching subtitles. If you don't want to watch develop that skill then it's your choice. In that case the dub is for you.
It should have been www.witchhunteronline.com. Warning - you need flash to view it.
I already have the first Official DVD and the English dub is actually much better than the average fare for anime. (I've already seen the entire series in Japanese with subtitles.) I am now collecting the official DVDs as they come out.
I have to agree that it's a very dramatic show. My only worry is that people will start to lose interest before episode 11. For those who don't know, the first 10 episodes are quite episodic. It's a monster of the week type affair whose main purpose is to introduce you to the world and the characters. And then in episodes 11-12 the real plot kicks in and then there is no turning back.
Never. The mainstream audience wants and always will want dubbed products. Reading is just too much work for both.
Now with the case of Witch Hunter Robin, I can assure you that the dub is quite good. I've seen the series in its entirety in Japanese and the first five episodes on the official DVD and the dub is pretty impressive compared to what you typically get with north american released anime. The second official DVD is slated for a Dec 02 release. My pre-order is already in!
So we say today ;-)
Engineers are always coming up with tricks to 'bend' the Laws of Physics. Why not just add more lasers to the drive so you're burning twice as much data at once without increasing the spin rate? Why not spin those lasers in the opposite direction? (It would be evil to calibrate though.) What prevents companies from inventing discs with stronger polycarbonates in then?
I mean in the past people thought that if the human body travelled at more than 35 mph it would explode. And they thought that you couldn't break the sound barrier either.
Yes, someone will have a good laugh at this thread in the future.
I do understand what you're saying, but I am seeing things a bit differently:
(note: I am playing devil's avocate for the purposes of having a good debate)
If somebody goes and sets up a WiFi AP with no security, they've set up something that is actively sending out signals advertising its presence and how to access it. If the DHCP is turned on, then the person's AP is basically advertising how it can help others get onto the network.
Second Scenario: If you put up a big neon sign on your house that said "FREE BEER WITHIN (fully licensed)" and then got arrested because minors were partaking or someone got into a drunk driving accident afterwards, is it the fault of the person who accessed the beer or your fault for providing it irresponsibly?
Will you be blameless because it was some kook who wandered in and drank the beer and then acted irresponsibly?
Will you be blameless because someone took up the offer your AP's active advertising of its presence and active help from its DHCP server to get onto the net and then started downloading child pornography? I think you should be blameless for the child porn charges (but not the other guy obviously) but I don't see how the other person should be charged with theft of the services that your equipment actively advertised and helped the person obtain.
For sure. And Toronto is a damn good place to wardrive. I've gone wardriving through TO suburbs (with someone else at the wheel of course) and there was rarely a time within a 60 minute period or so that I was *not* within range of a WiFi AP with no security.
fool.
>man woman
>segfault (core dumped)
So you're telling me that there are no western or european companies out ther who want to get a piece of the action in a billion+ person market that is just starting to truly industrialise and modernise?
My favourite anti-scam-scam on that site is the one where they got the Nigerian guy to pose for a business card photo under the name "IAMA DILDO." It's laughalicious!