I think judgement procedures are there for the very reason I got one. The judge, lawyers on both sides *know* that the plaintiff is crazy and wasting everybodies time. I'm not a lawyer or know anything about court costs, but lets try and itemize things here.
Santa Clara County Judge salary --$120,000 yr Court Reporter -- 60,000yr Baliff -- 60,000yr Court Clerk -- 60,000 yr Lawyers (both sides) $300,000yr
I'm sure this isn't even scratching the surface of what court costs are but, all of those combined we're looking at $600,000@year. Divide that by 365 days in a year (or by number of business days in a year) and you'll get a number around $1600 @ day.
Now lets say my trivial case dragged on for a few weeks. It could have easily costed the county $20,000+ when the judge could have been handling *REAL* cases.
$1500 is a drop in the bucket compared to that. That's not even considering how much the CTO must have spent in time and money getting his lawyer to prepare his case. Sure, i'm out $1500 bucks, but I could care less. Nobody is ever going to hire this CTO again(unless they're mormon). This judgement procedure ensures he can never come after me again.
I would have easily spent more than $1500 on my lawyer had this gone to trial, with no clear outcome. This way I had a clear outcome, and everyone was happy. (Especially the judge)
One of the dot coms I worked for imploded. During the implosion there was a lot of confusion over who owned what, at the center of all this controversy was a little sun box that contained the source code for the company product.
At the time I was the IT guy for this company. I took my orders from the CEO because the CTO was just psycho. In one of the meetings between me, the CEO and CTO the CTO accused me of being on "Mind Altering drugs" at work because I had a can of get this.. Jolt Cola on my desk (This CTO was a devout mormon)
The CEO fired the CTO, then decided to pack up our office and head north from Sunnyvale to Alameda. Being the IT guy, it was my job to make sure the computers made it up there safely. A few months later the company completely imploded, everyone went off to work for different companies, and that was that or so I thought.
About a year later I got a court summons. The CTO was suing me for $15 million dollars. I was being accused of "Stealing his source code" because apparently the company didn't own that little sun box I moved. After a few initial rounds in pre-trial we were all set to go to trial.
My lawyer and I were sitting out in front of the courtroom when we got a surprise. The judges assistant came up to us and started telling us the CTO was willing to settle for $1500. He explained it like this..
"You know toq, we're really sick of this asshole. Me, the judge, the other lawyers all think he's a cocksucker, but you already know that. Just take the settlement"
Me, "But I didn't do anything wrong"
Assitant, "Well let me put it to you another way. If you don't take this settlement, it's going to mean a trial, which is going to mean jurors, and a whole bunch of menusha I don't want to get into, but it's going to cost ALOT of money. The judge is going to look at the fact that you didn't take this $1500 settlement, and wonder why you costed all these people time and money"
Me: "So the judge just wants this out of his hair, is that what you're saying?"
Assistant: "Yes"
So I took the settlement, nothing went down on my record.
I'm guessing this $300 RIAA case is the same deal. The judge probably got sick of the team of lawyers that represent the RIAA tying up his courtroom with petty bullshit, and i'm guessing the person taking the settlement got the same speech I did.
It's a weed. It grows anywhere. Little water, little sunlight, it's happy.
We'd have to find a place with a plentiful water supply, cheap real estate, and lots of sun. My bets are the area's around the grand canyon. Plenty of sun, colorado river has lots of water.
Sure we'd have to build massive irrigation and pumping from the colorado, but that's easy stuff.
Late reply, late enough I won't get downmodded for calling you a dumb ass.
The article was about a global music collaboration project. My post was that Justin has been doin this work since 2004. Though it might not be open source, Justin has traditionally released his shareware with..
A reasonable price tag. B No time limit on the trial period C Fully uncrippled trial, all features enabled.
He did it with winamp, and he's carrying that same style with these new products. I think someone releasing software the way he does is really great, unlike all the other products out there who's trials make the software stop working after 30 days, or only lets you record to low bittrate audio. Remember Cool Edit? You'd open it up, and they'd only let you use 3 features of the software at a time during the trial. Kinda lame.
Maybe that's the problem.. You don't have a lameness detector. sux2bu.
Justin Frankel, you know, wrote winamp? Sold Winamp? Well, he wrote this program called Ninjam that allows folks to collaborate music in psuedo real time.
This all started circa 2004 or so. Justin has set up some public Ninjam servers, and everything played on these servers is released under the Creative Commons License...
Point being, I probably submitted this quite a few times over the years. Don't understand why slashdot would ignore a story about someone who pretty much revolutionized how we listen to music. Time for slash to get new editors again.
Small real estate company with several sattelite offices around the bay area. Owner was cheap. Sometimes a cheap boss can force you to be creative, which can be fun.
Most of the IPcop firewalls in the sattelite offices are running on PII or less machines, with the main office on a P4 1.4ghz. Freeswan VPN's are setup between all the office.
Not much more to say than that. Other than a few upgrades (easily done through the web interface) my ipcop boxes have had uptimes around 2 years. Very awesome, reliable firewall.
I'm not sure how to respond to this one without getting downmodded into the pits of hell, but here goes...
This article was very scant on what exactly intel isn't supporting. All it says is some blurb about requiring folks to download firmware before they can use their OS of choice on intel hardware.
WHAT HARDWARE ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
CPU? Chipset? NIC? Router? Switches? What.. What the hell are you complaining about? Bios updates for Motherboards?
I hate to bitch, but when you get some pretty good in depth stories rejected for lame hoopla like this, you get mad.
Prolly too late for a little karma whoring here, but since i've been here in karaoke 5 years, I have to tell this tale.
In 2001 I was a laid off Sysadmin in Silicon Valley. I had no desire to move from here, I was staying. I took a job at a karaoke bar after looking for 6 months to get back into the trade I had been in for 10 years. I figured at this point, anything as long as it was money.
Being a Sysadmin type, I showed the former KJ how to use a PC with karaoke. After he quit, I got promoted from doorman to KJ. Shortly after I got promoted, I started broadcasting the show online, got a shoutcast partner sponsorship from Nullsoft, got printed up in the new york times and the rest was history. My tips skyrocketed, business here at 7 Bamboo was slamming in 2003.
We got printed up in a lot of newspapers around here as well. Folks would come in, see our PC setup and figure if it's that easy, they could do the same thing themselves. San Jose has seen a hardcore proliferation in PC based karaoke setups over the last 2 years.
Well, here's where the trickle effect comes in.
I would say most of these new KJ's are pirating. 7 Bamboo has been in business over 20 years, and has a collection of about 6000 songs. (Retail value of over $15,000) Most of these new guys have collections of anywhere from 20-100,000 songs. How is it someone that has only been in business less than a year can afford that much karaoke? The answer is they can't, the answer is they just download songs from limewire, alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke and other P2P type places. Karaoke piracy is so rampant, it's really affected our attendance here.
In 2003, we were one of only 5 or 6 venues here in San Jose. Now there is over 50. When my old 70yro boss scratches his head wondering WTF is going on, it's hard to explain to him. Conversations go like this:
Toshi: Bobbysan, what's happening? (note, heavy japanese accent) Me: Toshi, bad people, steal karaoke, start business Toshi: Steal from us? Me: No toshi, steal from the internet Toshi: Should unplug the internet when you leave Me: No not like that toshi Toshi: Oh? Explain bobbysan Me: There are places on the internet people download them for free Toshi: Oh? Why don't we do the same?
You guys get the idea. Trying to explain this to a 70yro Japanese man is near impossible.
Bottom line though is there are so many new karaoke venues that have been enabled by piracy, it's really hurting us. We play it straight, but remember karaoke is a small pond compared to film or regular music. A small pebble of piracy here is like having a boulder chucked into a puddle.
This would be one. Since it's a slashvertisement article, i'm gonna join in the slashvertising fun. Click Here if you have winamp, watch some hot karaoke action on my live video stream from the 7 Bamboo karaoke lounge in San Jose California.
Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer are very closely related. I think the only major difference is the packaging.
From my model airplane experience, LiPo has been a pretty dangerous battery when used improperly. Here is 1 2 3 video's of small Lipo's (3 cells is the biggest) exploding.
As you can see from the videos, just a small lipo cell can create a big 6 foot fireball. LiPo explosions are like a chain reaction, if one cell blows, you can almost bet that any ajacent cells will explode as well.
Over at there is 100's of reported incedents of leaving LiPo's to charge, and the owner returns to find their kitchen/car/garage engulfed in flames. An improperly charging Telsa LithIon pack could probably blow the roof off your house.
3 cell Lithium Battery in a model aircraft 500 feet over my head is fine, but I wouldn't want to park a huge pack like what's in the Telsa anywhere near my house.
AOL sucks. We all know this. So they think that providing their services for free, in an advertising based model will help them.
I strongly disagree...
AOL has some really good properties under its belt. Namely, i'm talking about Winamp. Let's not forget about all the Time Warner stuff they have access to as well.
With Winamp and it's shoutcast technologies, they have a good platform for content delivery, a really smart user base that constantly provides free features for Winamp through plugins. Since the 5x series Winamp has moved beyond just being a mp3 player, it has live streaming content, access to tons of Time Warner properties (Animaniacs/Freakazoid anyone?) and there's a ton more stuff planned on the horizon.
Recently a job for Music Director has popped up. Part of the description talks about things going towards social networking in the Winamp microchasm. As we know, Nullsoft is sort of the place where new AOL technologies are being developped, so it stands to reason that the social networking on the horizon for AOL and Winamp is going to include some aspects of both communities, myspace with NSV video is my guess.
The AOL client isn't completely suck ass either. Now before I get boo's from the peanut gallery let me explain... I run my own consulting company, and today I had to do some work at a lawyers office, and she's been using AOL as her email for years. She got a new PC, wanted me to transfer files from her old PC to her new PC, then hand-me-down her old PC to her assistant. I walked in thinking "OH noes! PST and outlook!" Since the AOL email client stores all the emails on the server, it was pretty painless. It wasn't *that* bad. They just logged in with their screen names, and like magic, all their stuff was there.
The AOL client isn't too shabby for reading news or other things either. Sure you can fire up Moz, but it's really not that bad... If AIM was so terrible, why do so many people use it?
About the only thing that has been bad with AOL is their dialup. Even there, not that bad. AOL has always had the biggest banks of blade modem banks. Dial up numbers just about anywhere you can think of.
It's a shame so many people judge AOL on what it was 20 years ago. Sure, it was crap then, but over the years AOL has been pretty good about responding to customers outcries about the bad, and then AOL has always moved quickly to resolve it. Remember when folks complained about busy signals? AOL took care of it. Hard time cancelling your account? AOL fired the person who got recorded, then told all their staff to not give customers a hard time. Despite all outward appearances of AOL being a hard company to deal with, force feeding their customers what they want, in reality the opposite is true.
Anyways, I have no beef against AOL. It's made the internet easier for some people, which is a good thing in my opinion. It takes a corporation with deep pockets to accomplish what AOL has, and my hats are off to them. Money well spent.
Sure lots of folks like to say that consoles killed the arcade, but I just don't believe it. Arcades have always offered "You can't get this experience at home."
What I think really killed the arcade industry was operators that had Mr Crabs or Scrooge Mc Duck as operators.
I can't remember how many times I went into an arcade, plopped a token/quarter in the slot only to find that a button was broken, or a joystick and or steering wheel was loose. When i'd go to the operator asking for a refund, it was always met with some fat guy smelling like he hadn't showered in a week pointing at a sign that said, "Play at your own risk, no refunds!"
$0.25 is all it would have taken to keep me happy and coming back to my local arcade. Instead of cultivating customers for the long term though, most arcade operators just don't care. Attendance started dropping off, and as a result people started turning to PC's and console systems for their fix.
Kinda cool you mentioning composites, it allows me to segway into a little known fact about them.
I fly RC airplanes, on the net I hang out at rcgroups.com, wattflyer.com, and just generally browse here and there for info.
I'm a little lazy to look it up ATM, but one of the things folks that build rc planes use is carbon fiber rods to stiffen the wings. One of the drawbacks to CF though is it blocks RF. So when you're running your antenna wire, it's best to run it as far away from your CF rod as possible to avoid blackout areas.
The idea of an RF control system inside of a CF plane is scary. Especially after how many horror stories i've heard from my fellow RC pilots about their RX suddenly cutting out because they didn't take proper precautions with the CF.
I don't think a Union would be good for programmers. Programming is more or less a personal skill, some programmers have an almost rock star status for their greatness, and they should have a rock star salary to go with it. You can't really certify a programmers skill level.
Desktop support should be unionized. I worked 10 years in IT before the bubble burst. My bubble burst 2 weeks after I bought my house, then 9/11 happened 2 weeks later.
I have friends at Xilinx. The entire bay area desktop support was outsourced to Ireland or Scotland(I get the two confused, apologies in advanced). All desktop support was handled by remote desktop, with drop in ghosted machines to fix more serious problems.
Problem was, it turns out that employees and managers did not like the outsourced remote support. Face it, when someone fucks up their computer with remote support, it's not like you got a desktop guy there upon who's broad masculine shoulders you can cry upon. Or the flip side, pass the failure of the machine onto them.
So Xilinx got all new desktop support people now. They didn't bother calling back the ones they shitcanned either. (Or at least the ones I know).
I can say within a very wide margin of confidence, that in the desktop support trade, it doesn't require a supergenius to go around installing apps, configuring email and printers, and being a nurse not only to sick PC's, but the users as well. For a group, we're pretty cookie cutter. We can be certified, trained, tested in addition to any experience we gain OTJ.
For me desktop was just a train stop along the way of computer science. I can do way beyond what I used to do 10 years ago.
It matters alot where stuff gets manufactured. Especially in the case of Apple.
When everything Apple happened mostly in Cupertino, if Steve Jobs got a whim that something needed to be changed right that second, he could just take a golf cart over to the other campus, bark out some orders and probably %80 of them could understand the mans english.
Now he has to make a call to someone else. That person takes his orders to "make a plexiglass window with cool LED's" and translates them to "Blossoming lotus spreads its petals for the bees inside" That bad translation gets out to the manufacturing floor where %2 of the people *might* understand steves direct order and totally fuck it up. The other %98 percent say "That's a fucked up translation" and goes about building the machine like all the other machines being ordered on the line.
Finally, it takes a week or two for the first production run machines to arrive. QA back at ASUS realizes there's a %30 failure rate, but figure they'll take their chances on RMA's and refurbs. Apple just gets the cream of the crop machines to look at before the entire production run starts shipping.
The new machines are in stores, people are buying them not realizing %30 of them are ticking time bombs waiting to fail. Some do, folks get pissed off and return them.
There is some value in having your manufacturing 2 blocks away from your office. You have very tight nit control over quality, and changes to the assembly line can be done on a daily basis.
Finally, the reason i'm making this argument, this used to be part of the price of buying an apple. Apples used to be made to very high standards, at least compared to screwdriver shop PC's. I'm still a PC fan, you can't beat the satisfaction of "rolling your own" and saving a buck or two in the process, but that was never apples market. Apples market has always been "I just want to plug it in and it works" You can't have that guarantee with the shoddy overseas craftsmanship happening now.
[b][1] In other words, if anyone is going to say "Apple sucks" on this front[/b]
Apple sucks.
I'm just itching for some troll modding, so here goes.
Apple used to have it's manufacturing here in the US. Not just their manufacturing, their design, marketing, the whole shebangs.
What has happened to apple, like what has happened to a lot of companies is they've outsourced. Yes, the big evil globalization. The large corporate excuse to use underpaid labor in other countries, the excuse to dump tons of enviromentally unfriendly chemicals into the wild, the excuse to make crap overpriced products that are really no different than their competitors.
So much for think different.
Apples computers used to be cutting edge. I've never been a macfan myself, but I've worked with plenty. I've seen innovations out of apple that made me wish the PC had the same innovating designs.
I thought the G3 powerbook was amazing, just a few tabs, keyboard comes off, and you have complete access to your hard drive, ram, and just about everything.
Same goes for the G3 blue tower. Swing out motherboard design, easy access to everything.
G3 Cube, used thermal convections, heat pipes, and proper venting to create a positive airflow on top.
So many cool ideas, well put together and packaged. Even though I couldn't run windows on these boxes, they were still very cool to me.
It just sucks to see apple going the way of the PC.
I'm working on a download system for karaoke music in winamp. I've asked myself this question when concerning karaoke, but the same thing applies to regular music.
Our system downloads a XML catalog of karaoke songs through an RSS feed. Why don't artists sell downloads themselves?
Webhosting with a little PHP IPN & RSS= $5@mo? Less even? Paypal fee's = $0.30 @ song Domain Name = $35 @ year
I've tried contacting several artists about selling karaoke downloads of their music, but most of the managers i've talked to are kind of dipshits. Why give someone else such a big cut of your sales when you could just as easily setup a system yourself?
First round, they tried to steer the web in their direction. Fortunatly open standards kept things under the public's control.
IE7 they're starting to get a little better supporting stuff like AJAX, and PNG transparencies. What i'm seeing is a shift in Microsoft from "Let's make all the rules" to "Let's adopt everything".
Not a long comment, but that's my thoughts on their strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
I figured i'd elaborate a bit more..
I think judgement procedures are there for the very reason I got one. The judge, lawyers on both sides *know* that the plaintiff is crazy and wasting everybodies time. I'm not a lawyer or know anything about court costs, but lets try and itemize things here.
Santa Clara County Judge salary --$120,000 yr
Court Reporter -- 60,000yr
Baliff -- 60,000yr
Court Clerk -- 60,000 yr
Lawyers (both sides) $300,000yr
I'm sure this isn't even scratching the surface of what court costs are but, all of those combined we're looking at $600,000@year. Divide that by 365 days in a year (or by number of business days in a year) and you'll get a number around $1600 @ day.
Now lets say my trivial case dragged on for a few weeks. It could have easily costed the county $20,000+ when the judge could have been handling *REAL* cases.
$1500 is a drop in the bucket compared to that. That's not even considering how much the CTO must have spent in time and money getting his lawyer to prepare his case. Sure, i'm out $1500 bucks, but I could care less. Nobody is ever going to hire this CTO again(unless they're mormon). This judgement procedure ensures he can never come after me again.
I would have easily spent more than $1500 on my lawyer had this gone to trial, with no clear outcome. This way I had a clear outcome, and everyone was happy. (Especially the judge)
One of the dot coms I worked for imploded. During the implosion there was a lot of confusion over who owned what, at the center of all this controversy was a little sun box that contained the source code for the company product.
At the time I was the IT guy for this company. I took my orders from the CEO because the CTO was just psycho. In one of the meetings between me, the CEO and CTO the CTO accused me of being on "Mind Altering drugs" at work because I had a can of get this.. Jolt Cola on my desk (This CTO was a devout mormon)
The CEO fired the CTO, then decided to pack up our office and head north from Sunnyvale to Alameda. Being the IT guy, it was my job to make sure the computers made it up there safely. A few months later the company completely imploded, everyone went off to work for different companies, and that was that or so I thought.
About a year later I got a court summons. The CTO was suing me for $15 million dollars. I was being accused of "Stealing his source code" because apparently the company didn't own that little sun box I moved. After a few initial rounds in pre-trial we were all set to go to trial.
My lawyer and I were sitting out in front of the courtroom when we got a surprise. The judges assistant came up to us and started telling us the CTO was willing to settle for $1500. He explained it like this..
"You know toq, we're really sick of this asshole. Me, the judge, the other lawyers all think he's a cocksucker, but you already know that. Just take the settlement"
Me, "But I didn't do anything wrong"
Assitant, "Well let me put it to you another way. If you don't take this settlement, it's going to mean a trial, which is going to mean jurors, and a whole bunch of menusha I don't want to get into, but it's going to cost ALOT of money. The judge is going to look at the fact that you didn't take this $1500 settlement, and wonder why you costed all these people time and money"
Me: "So the judge just wants this out of his hair, is that what you're saying?"
Assistant: "Yes"
So I took the settlement, nothing went down on my record.
I'm guessing this $300 RIAA case is the same deal. The judge probably got sick of the team of lawyers that represent the RIAA tying up his courtroom with petty bullshit, and i'm guessing the person taking the settlement got the same speech I did.
ASL
Is the answer to enviromentally responsible, clean energy. Anyone want to argue my point?
It's a weed. It grows anywhere. Little water, little sunlight, it's happy.
We'd have to find a place with a plentiful water supply, cheap real estate, and lots of sun. My bets are the area's around the grand canyon. Plenty of sun, colorado river has lots of water.
Sure we'd have to build massive irrigation and pumping from the colorado, but that's easy stuff.
Late reply, late enough I won't get downmodded for calling you a dumb ass.
The article was about a global music collaboration project. My post was that Justin has been doin this work since 2004. Though it might not be open source, Justin has traditionally released his shareware with..
A reasonable price tag.
B No time limit on the trial period
C Fully uncrippled trial, all features enabled.
He did it with winamp, and he's carrying that same style with these new products. I think someone releasing software the way he does is really great, unlike all the other products out there who's trials make the software stop working after 30 days, or only lets you record to low bittrate audio. Remember Cool Edit? You'd open it up, and they'd only let you use 3 features of the software at a time during the trial. Kinda lame.
Maybe that's the problem.. You don't have a lameness detector. sux2bu.
I submitted this a looong time ago....
Justin Frankel, you know, wrote winamp? Sold Winamp? Well, he wrote this program called Ninjam that allows folks to collaborate music in psuedo real time.
http://www.ninjam.com/
He also wrote a DAW (digital audio workstation) called reaper.
http://www.reaper.fm/
as well as a programable software DSP called Jesusonic
http://www.jesusonic.com/
This all started circa 2004 or so. Justin has set up some public Ninjam servers, and everything played on these servers is released under the Creative Commons License...
http://autosong.ninjam.com/
Point being, I probably submitted this quite a few times over the years. Don't understand why slashdot would ignore a story about someone who pretty much revolutionized how we listen to music. Time for slash to get new editors again.
Small real estate company with several sattelite offices around the bay area. Owner was cheap. Sometimes a cheap boss can force you to be creative, which can be fun.
Most of the IPcop firewalls in the sattelite offices are running on PII or less machines, with the main office on a P4 1.4ghz. Freeswan VPN's are setup between all the office.
Not much more to say than that. Other than a few upgrades (easily done through the web interface) my ipcop boxes have had uptimes around 2 years. Very awesome, reliable firewall.
Surprised nobody else caught this.
A$5.5 Million.
Ass.s Million.
Sure it's a potty joke in l337 speak, which is why it surprises me that on a site of geeks we all missed it.
I'm not sure how to respond to this one without getting downmodded into the pits of hell, but here goes...
This article was very scant on what exactly intel isn't supporting. All it says is some blurb about requiring folks to download firmware before they can use their OS of choice on intel hardware.
WHAT HARDWARE ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
CPU? Chipset? NIC? Router? Switches? What.. What the hell are you complaining about? Bios updates for Motherboards?
I hate to bitch, but when you get some pretty good in depth stories rejected for lame hoopla like this, you get mad.
--toq
Prolly too late for a little karma whoring here, but since i've been here in karaoke 5 years, I have to tell this tale.
In 2001 I was a laid off Sysadmin in Silicon Valley. I had no desire to move from here, I was staying. I took a job at a karaoke bar after looking for 6 months to get back into the trade I had been in for 10 years. I figured at this point, anything as long as it was money.
Being a Sysadmin type, I showed the former KJ how to use a PC with karaoke. After he quit, I got promoted from doorman to KJ. Shortly after I got promoted, I started broadcasting the show online, got a shoutcast partner sponsorship from Nullsoft, got printed up in the new york times and the rest was history. My tips skyrocketed, business here at 7 Bamboo was slamming in 2003.
We got printed up in a lot of newspapers around here as well. Folks would come in, see our PC setup and figure if it's that easy, they could do the same thing themselves. San Jose has seen a hardcore proliferation in PC based karaoke setups over the last 2 years.
Well, here's where the trickle effect comes in.
I would say most of these new KJ's are pirating. 7 Bamboo has been in business over 20 years, and has a collection of about 6000 songs. (Retail value of over $15,000) Most of these new guys have collections of anywhere from 20-100,000 songs. How is it someone that has only been in business less than a year can afford that much karaoke? The answer is they can't, the answer is they just download songs from limewire, alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke and other P2P type places. Karaoke piracy is so rampant, it's really affected our attendance here.
In 2003, we were one of only 5 or 6 venues here in San Jose. Now there is over 50. When my old 70yro boss scratches his head wondering WTF is going on, it's hard to explain to him. Conversations go like this:
Toshi: Bobbysan, what's happening? (note, heavy japanese accent)
Me: Toshi, bad people, steal karaoke, start business
Toshi: Steal from us?
Me: No toshi, steal from the internet
Toshi: Should unplug the internet when you leave
Me: No not like that toshi
Toshi: Oh? Explain bobbysan
Me: There are places on the internet people download them for free
Toshi: Oh? Why don't we do the same?
You guys get the idea. Trying to explain this to a 70yro Japanese man is near impossible.
Bottom line though is there are so many new karaoke venues that have been enabled by piracy, it's really hurting us. We play it straight, but remember karaoke is a small pond compared to film or regular music. A small pebble of piracy here is like having a boulder chucked into a puddle.
--toq
This would be one. Since it's a slashvertisement article, i'm gonna join in the slashvertising fun. Click Here if you have winamp, watch some hot karaoke action on my live video stream from the 7 Bamboo karaoke lounge in San Jose California.
Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer are very closely related. I think the only major difference is the packaging.
From my model airplane experience, LiPo has been a pretty dangerous battery when used improperly. Here is 1 2 3 video's of small Lipo's (3 cells is the biggest) exploding.
As you can see from the videos, just a small lipo cell can create a big 6 foot fireball. LiPo explosions are like a chain reaction, if one cell blows, you can almost bet that any ajacent cells will explode as well.
Over at there is 100's of reported incedents of leaving LiPo's to charge, and the owner returns to find their kitchen/car/garage engulfed in flames. An improperly charging Telsa LithIon pack could probably blow the roof off your house.
3 cell Lithium Battery in a model aircraft 500 feet over my head is fine, but I wouldn't want to park a huge pack like what's in the Telsa anywhere near my house.
I strongly disagree...
AOL has some really good properties under its belt. Namely, i'm talking about Winamp. Let's not forget about all the Time Warner stuff they have access to as well.
With Winamp and it's shoutcast technologies, they have a good platform for content delivery, a really smart user base that constantly provides free features for Winamp through plugins. Since the 5x series Winamp has moved beyond just being a mp3 player, it has live streaming content, access to tons of Time Warner properties (Animaniacs/Freakazoid anyone?) and there's a ton more stuff planned on the horizon.
Recently a job for Music Director has popped up. Part of the description talks about things going towards social networking in the Winamp microchasm. As we know, Nullsoft is sort of the place where new AOL technologies are being developped, so it stands to reason that the social networking on the horizon for AOL and Winamp is going to include some aspects of both communities, myspace with NSV video is my guess.
The AOL client isn't completely suck ass either. Now before I get boo's from the peanut gallery let me explain... I run my own consulting company, and today I had to do some work at a lawyers office, and she's been using AOL as her email for years. She got a new PC, wanted me to transfer files from her old PC to her new PC, then hand-me-down her old PC to her assistant. I walked in thinking "OH noes! PST and outlook!" Since the AOL email client stores all the emails on the server, it was pretty painless. It wasn't *that* bad. They just logged in with their screen names, and like magic, all their stuff was there.
The AOL client isn't too shabby for reading news or other things either. Sure you can fire up Moz, but it's really not that bad... If AIM was so terrible, why do so many people use it?
About the only thing that has been bad with AOL is their dialup. Even there, not that bad. AOL has always had the biggest banks of blade modem banks. Dial up numbers just about anywhere you can think of.
It's a shame so many people judge AOL on what it was 20 years ago. Sure, it was crap then, but over the years AOL has been pretty good about responding to customers outcries about the bad, and then AOL has always moved quickly to resolve it. Remember when folks complained about busy signals? AOL took care of it. Hard time cancelling your account? AOL fired the person who got recorded, then told all their staff to not give customers a hard time. Despite all outward appearances of AOL being a hard company to deal with, force feeding their customers what they want, in reality the opposite is true.
Anyways, I have no beef against AOL. It's made the internet easier for some people, which is a good thing in my opinion. It takes a corporation with deep pockets to accomplish what AOL has, and my hats are off to them. Money well spent.
--toq
Sure lots of folks like to say that consoles killed the arcade, but I just don't believe it. Arcades have always offered "You can't get this experience at home."
What I think really killed the arcade industry was operators that had Mr Crabs or Scrooge Mc Duck as operators.
I can't remember how many times I went into an arcade, plopped a token/quarter in the slot only to find that a button was broken, or a joystick and or steering wheel was loose. When i'd go to the operator asking for a refund, it was always met with some fat guy smelling like he hadn't showered in a week pointing at a sign that said, "Play at your own risk, no refunds!"
$0.25 is all it would have taken to keep me happy and coming back to my local arcade. Instead of cultivating customers for the long term though, most arcade operators just don't care. Attendance started dropping off, and as a result people started turning to PC's and console systems for their fix.
You mean there's a chance I could be related to michael?
Or is it the constant smoke inhalation?
Kinda cool you mentioning composites, it allows me to segway into a little known fact about them.
I fly RC airplanes, on the net I hang out at rcgroups.com, wattflyer.com, and just generally browse here and there for info.
I'm a little lazy to look it up ATM, but one of the things folks that build rc planes use is carbon fiber rods to stiffen the wings. One of the drawbacks to CF though is it blocks RF. So when you're running your antenna wire, it's best to run it as far away from your CF rod as possible to avoid blackout areas.
The idea of an RF control system inside of a CF plane is scary. Especially after how many horror stories i've heard from my fellow RC pilots about their RX suddenly cutting out because they didn't take proper precautions with the CF.
There's too many categories in IT.
Programmers
Desktop Support
QA
I'm sure the list can go on.
I don't think a Union would be good for programmers. Programming is more or less a personal skill, some programmers have an almost rock star status for their greatness, and they should have a rock star salary to go with it. You can't really certify a programmers skill level.
Desktop support should be unionized. I worked 10 years in IT before the bubble burst. My bubble burst 2 weeks after I bought my house, then 9/11 happened 2 weeks later.
I have friends at Xilinx. The entire bay area desktop support was outsourced to Ireland or Scotland(I get the two confused, apologies in advanced). All desktop support was handled by remote desktop, with drop in ghosted machines to fix more serious problems.
Problem was, it turns out that employees and managers did not like the outsourced remote support. Face it, when someone fucks up their computer with remote support, it's not like you got a desktop guy there upon who's broad masculine shoulders you can cry upon. Or the flip side, pass the failure of the machine onto them.
So Xilinx got all new desktop support people now. They didn't bother calling back the ones they shitcanned either. (Or at least the ones I know).
I can say within a very wide margin of confidence, that in the desktop support trade, it doesn't require a supergenius to go around installing apps, configuring email and printers, and being a nurse not only to sick PC's, but the users as well. For a group, we're pretty cookie cutter. We can be certified, trained, tested in addition to any experience we gain OTJ.
For me desktop was just a train stop along the way of computer science. I can do way beyond what I used to do 10 years ago.
Good thing the Axis didn't have these! We'd all be sprechen si deustch and eating kraut right now.
It matters alot where stuff gets manufactured. Especially in the case of Apple.
When everything Apple happened mostly in Cupertino, if Steve Jobs got a whim that something needed to be changed right that second, he could just take a golf cart over to the other campus, bark out some orders and probably %80 of them could understand the mans english.
Now he has to make a call to someone else. That person takes his orders to "make a plexiglass window with cool LED's" and translates them to "Blossoming lotus spreads its petals for the bees inside" That bad translation gets out to the manufacturing floor where %2 of the people *might* understand steves direct order and totally fuck it up. The other %98 percent say "That's a fucked up translation" and goes about building the machine like all the other machines being ordered on the line.
Finally, it takes a week or two for the first production run machines to arrive. QA back at ASUS realizes there's a %30 failure rate, but figure they'll take their chances on RMA's and refurbs. Apple just gets the cream of the crop machines to look at before the entire production run starts shipping.
The new machines are in stores, people are buying them not realizing %30 of them are ticking time bombs waiting to fail. Some do, folks get pissed off and return them.
There is some value in having your manufacturing 2 blocks away from your office. You have very tight nit control over quality, and changes to the assembly line can be done on a daily basis.
Finally, the reason i'm making this argument, this used to be part of the price of buying an apple. Apples used to be made to very high standards, at least compared to screwdriver shop PC's. I'm still a PC fan, you can't beat the satisfaction of "rolling your own" and saving a buck or two in the process, but that was never apples market. Apples market has always been "I just want to plug it in and it works" You can't have that guarantee with the shoddy overseas craftsmanship happening now.
[b][1] In other words, if anyone is going to say "Apple sucks" on this front[/b]
Apple sucks.
I'm just itching for some troll modding, so here goes.
Apple used to have it's manufacturing here in the US. Not just their manufacturing, their design, marketing, the whole shebangs.
What has happened to apple, like what has happened to a lot of companies is they've outsourced. Yes, the big evil globalization. The large corporate excuse to use underpaid labor in other countries, the excuse to dump tons of enviromentally unfriendly chemicals into the wild, the excuse to make crap overpriced products that are really no different than their competitors.
So much for think different.
Apples computers used to be cutting edge. I've never been a macfan myself, but I've worked with plenty. I've seen innovations out of apple that made me wish the PC had the same innovating designs.
I thought the G3 powerbook was amazing, just a few tabs, keyboard comes off, and you have complete access to your hard drive, ram, and just about everything.
Same goes for the G3 blue tower. Swing out motherboard design, easy access to everything.
G3 Cube, used thermal convections, heat pipes, and proper venting to create a positive airflow on top.
So many cool ideas, well put together and packaged. Even though I couldn't run windows on these boxes, they were still very cool to me.
It just sucks to see apple going the way of the PC.
Duke Nukem 3D project managers?
I'm working on a download system for karaoke music in winamp. I've asked myself this question when concerning karaoke, but the same thing applies to regular music.
Our system downloads a XML catalog of karaoke songs through an RSS feed. Why don't artists sell downloads themselves?
Webhosting with a little PHP IPN & RSS= $5@mo? Less even?
Paypal fee's = $0.30 @ song
Domain Name = $35 @ year
I've tried contacting several artists about selling karaoke downloads of their music, but most of the managers i've talked to are kind of dipshits. Why give someone else such a big cut of your sales when you could just as easily setup a system yourself?
The own a browser.
First round, they tried to steer the web in their direction. Fortunatly open standards kept things under the public's control.
IE7 they're starting to get a little better supporting stuff like AJAX, and PNG transparencies. What i'm seeing is a shift in Microsoft from "Let's make all the rules" to "Let's adopt everything".
Not a long comment, but that's my thoughts on their strategy.