But nostalga does not rub off onto those that were not there at the time. The only people that will be interested are those from that time frame and can relate directly to it. It limits your market.
I was testing a MAME setup at the house with a decent collection of games. My 12 year old son is into gaming. He has an XBox, PS2, Dreamcast, plays various games on the computer and gets a few monthly game magazines.
His only comments on MAME were, the graphics on the games "suck" and no better the N64 and the games are boring. I'm talking DigDig, PunchOut, Donkey Kong, Double Dribble here!! Maybe he'd show some interest if I could dig up some cheats and add some Snoop as BGM.
I assume the people that use WMA have no idea what they are doing and do not use it long once they try to listen to that music on something other then the computer they encoded it on. I do not know much about WMA and the DRM involved when using MS media player but that seems to be the most frequent method of "Encoding for Dummies". That being said.. When I do freelance computer work for some small businesses or fill in for someone else that does the same. Every so often, someone asks me why they can not listen to the music that the other secretary copied to her computer. I do not go into details but I suggest they find something that uses MP3 and not use Media player. What I'd really like to do is bust out EAC and Lame, show them how to use a Sharpie and disable autoplay if needed and how to get to the real audio tracks on a multisession disc. Way beyond the scope of why I am there.
Depends on where you live. I am on the fringe of a rural area. If it was not for my neighbors or others in the general area with thier Bobcats and snowplows, many of us would be stuck. Some are actual contractors certified with the state and some are not. No one has to park anywhere near the road so the risk of hitting a parked car is very low. Using farmers in a rural area makes sense as they can use thier big tractors that are not needed in the fields during the winter. They are required by state law to maintain a snow plow on for the entire season and must be able to be called upon within certain hours. Since many of these tractors have more capability then what the county and state maintain, they are often called out of thier normal areas to perform specific tasks. There's probably not many tractors in big cities but construction equipment would be a good candidate.
Re:Sad state of affairs...
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In theory, that should work. In reality, the letter opener person on the other end will probably toss your bill in the can. I've wondered about the same thing with EULA's and contracts. Imagine changing terms in a credit card contract you get in the mail. Changing the interest rate, the late fees, etc, putting your initials on all changes, signing the contract and mailing it back the postage prepaid envelope. In theory.. By them sending you a card, they would have had to agree to the ammended contract and you should be bound by those terms. A contract is an agreement between two parties. Do you really think that would work? Legally, it should but I doubt it would.
Another hidden cost: Rebates.
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The trend in rebates is getting annoying also. Take a look at a BestBuy ad. 90% of the products have rebates to get the advertised price. These people are driving themselves into the ground with trying to manipulate the lowest advertised price. I assume at some point consumers are going to have enough and stop buying there, maybe it will be when every single product in the store has a $20 rebate.
Off topic but I went there on black Friday. I did not expect the door busters to still be there but I thought at least a few of the Fri/Sat only things would still be there. I looked for about 15 things in the ad and the only thing that was still in stock was a pair of $15 speakers. They've been in business long enough to get a general idea of what to stock and how much, "15 per store" is insane and not even worth the printing space in the weekly ad. Thier lack of stock was NOTHING but a blatent attempt of bait and switch to get you in the store. Walmart has it's flaws but they were still putting out pallets of $29 DVD players at 2:00pm. BestBuy probably sold all 5 of thiers (5 indivudual units, not pallets) by 6:01am and the probably were $119 with 3 different $30 mail in rebates that all required the original UPC code and 12-26 weeks to deliver.
These tactics are all "hidden costs" that consumers are subjected too.
Not trolling here, I do not know much about the iTMS format.
What can play the encrypted AAC from iTMS? Does it require special licensing, secuirty, or software to play them? The more open or accepted the format, the more support and choice you will have. If the barrier for entry is high or costly, you will have a limited choice. This is not a new concept.
Sprint does not do this. Occasionally they or one of thier resellers (Radio Shack, BestBuy etc..) have rebates on some phones when purchased with service but generally, the phones cost the same, with or without service. They have been pushing the camera phones like the Sanyo 8100 pretty hard so it has had a new service only rebate for quite some time but that is the exception. The good thing is if one of your phones is lost, stolen, or broken, you can replace it relatively cheap. The other carriers sell thier bottom of the barrel phones for $.01 +$200 without activation.
I have a common/home on my Samba box also that is NFS exported to another Linux machine that I use for Squid and various other small things. I have not mounted it from the Linux workstations though. Since those same home directories are smb shares I do not know the risks of sharing them out to both, although for home use I guess it does not matter. My next step is ldap or nis but for now, I've been creating the accounts manually and specifing the UID/GID myself, with only 4 of 5 users, its not hard to do. Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. My two Linux servers are 7.3 also, it works and I leave it that way
Why stop at copyright laws. I believe the root of this problem and many others is campaign finance reform that actually has an effect. Looking at lobby and special interest groups efforts BIG picture is nothing more then bribery. "Here's some money, go do what is best for me!!". How we have come to accept this practice is well beyond me. Just because it's been happening for so long does not make it right. Try offering the policeman who pulls you over for speeding a $20 bill. How could your intentions be interpetted any other way then bribery? Just because the police enforce the law and congress makes the law should not be a difference, the end result is the same. Bottom line... Those that pay get thier way.
It's a shame to see a legal document with such vague terms. Issues like this keep trial lawyers in business!! Is substantial relative and to what? $1000 may not be substantial to a big 5 marketing firm but that would be a substantial amount for me to spend on data collection. Assuming a company profits $10 million a year and they spend $10k on data for a report, that would be the same as an individual making $50k/year spending $500. If the court does not assume "substantial" as a relative term, then this legislation is most definatley biased toward big business.
I'm interested what grades/classes you teach and how well the kids were able to "adjust" to using linux though... I'm assuming minimal to zero learning curve, or were there some bumps?
Sorry, the only kids I was refering to was my offspring. Only two kids involved as far as I know! Actually they had no problem at all using it. It took them some time to get used to find things like changing the background and themes but that was it.
The Hawaii Open source Education Foundation (HOSEF) has had quite a few successful projects with OS and Linux in schools. The foundation was a LUG but has grown into a decent grouping of volunteers using OS with existing/donated equipment in schools. Worth checking out.
no more downloaded porn, How does Linux prevent d/l of porn?
I converted my kids primary machines to the Knoppix HD-install (no boot cd required and now basically Debian). I have not had a problem with the machines since and it has everything they NEED except games (Abiword, Mozilla, and Gaim). I use Samba and IMAP in the house so they still have access to all of my shared files and media and thier own "My Documents" directory and thier email just as they do from any of my Windows machines. The only thing I have not worked on yet was a roaming profile concept so they can have the same look, feel, and applications across different Linux machines when they login. They have this ability now with my Win machines with a profiles share and an apps share and I have a common \home on the Samba machine that can be mounted as \home on their machines but have not taken that step yet.
I am sending yet another reply to my own reply. The torrent I linked in parent is for the full Mandrake 9.2 distro, NOT for the live cd in the article. My inital post was about lack of torrents in general and I was happy to find Mandrake does indeed use torrents (although not yet for the live cd). Sorry for the link confusion and poor judgement on my part.
I'm not a Mandrake users, a quick look of the linked article did not appear to have a torrent and the download links seem to be all be membership based only?
Is there a licensing issue with "redistribution" of Mandrake ISO's or just a way to encourage support for Mandrake products? I'm not flaming here, just asking what the philosophy behind this is as torrents would seem to be a more logical method of distribution and could reduce a percentage of those costs that require membership fees in the first place.
Not that I completely agree with Googles decision but I would not exactly associate an addiction or chemical dependency to being "dumb". Ideally, you would always make the smartest decision for your own well being but that decision making process gets warped by the addiction. If this was not the case, 99.999% of people using tobacco would quit today.
Your method makes sense for an individual who puts more value into the physical laptop then what is stored on the HD. I don't think Wells Fargo really cared about the laptop iteself when the data on it was easily worth 1000 X more. It was nice that they got it back and found the culpruit and can now make an assessment of the damage but is making the laptop accessible to guest worth the risk to the data? I don't know. It's not like a common criminal or even this somewhat "above average" criminal has the forensic knowledge to easily defeat encryption or read data directly from a HD's platter and this was not a sting operation with fake data. Someone needs to make a risk assessment for these situations and be able to justify it when the shit hits the fan.
Nice plug attempt for the iPod. The apparent lack of left handed ability is not a problem for a left handed person and IMHO, not something that needs to be designed around. If a left hander has not got used to the general right usage, the Rio is the least of thier problems. Have you seen pair of left handed scissors since you left grade school? How many left handed people actually configure the mouse buttons and/or use the left hand for the mouse? How about a left handed joystick for a console game or even the real arcade games? Of course just about every game now uses many buttons and both hands but the old school games and joysticks were based on the right hand. I don't think I could use my Blackberry if the scroller wheel was actually on the left, same with my cell phone configuration. I would guess that unless a product is symetrical, right handed use was probably a design consideration.
As a lefty, I can say that I see no left handed conspiracy going on. Maybe a small percentage may have not been able to adapt. You get used to what you have. I even golf right handed because that's what clubs I had when I started, I putt lefty though.
Some of those packages get "diverted" into strange places too. We have at least 2 laptops a year that get lost along the line somewhere. You can see the diversion with the number tracking though, it gets a departure scan from point C but never a recieved scan at point D. Although, we suffer less loses with FedEx then any of the other commercial carriers.
I used to buy mine at the local Woolworths. They were 10 cents each. You could get extra balls per dime on one of the machines by turning the knob real slow to a certain point and wiggle it back and forth. All we really did with them was whip them around the store. That was our fun until a nearby pizza place got Space Invaders and Astroids.
I agree with the illegal alien part but the rest of your story is complete bull. Have you ever been to a city/county board meeting in your area? Walmart gets no more pull then then any large developer.
10 years ago in my county, they rezoned 1000's of farm land to support high end "luxury homes". The basis was that the land value would go up and get people to the county with more money which would cause the tax burden to shift and money supply to go up. Guess what, my county taxes have gone up every year since, traffic is terrible and a decent percentage of school classrooms and buildings now have a hitch and wheels. I'm still waiting for that "benefit" to come around.
Re:The difference from walkmen (walkmans?)
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 1
Substitute "iPod" for "marijuana" in your twisted tale and it makes a little sense. Reality is for people who can't handle drugs.
What do you mean by capable? I have 2 linux machines at home that are not capable of running X Windows. One is a headless floppy based router and the other is my headless Samba sever. I assume each *could* run X if I installed everything that was required to run X windows but as they sit now, they are scaled down to do what I need which is not X.
Slashdot Mirror
Chick..
"Hey, what's that in your pocket?"
You..
"Ahh, a 1.44 floppy"
That's just not cool
Chicks dig 4.5GB of pure DVD+RW
But nostalga does not rub off onto those that were not there at the time. The only people that will be interested are those from that time frame and can relate directly to it. It limits your market.
I was testing a MAME setup at the house with a decent collection of games. My 12 year old son is into gaming. He has an XBox, PS2, Dreamcast, plays various games on the computer and gets a few monthly game magazines.
His only comments on MAME were, the graphics on the games "suck" and no better the N64 and the games are boring. I'm talking DigDig, PunchOut, Donkey Kong, Double Dribble here!!
Maybe he'd show some interest if I could dig up some cheats and add some Snoop as BGM.
I assume the people that use WMA have no idea what they are doing and do not use it long once they try to listen to that music on something other then the computer they encoded it on. I do not know much about WMA and the DRM involved when using MS media player but that seems to be the most frequent method of "Encoding for Dummies". That being said.. When I do freelance computer work for some small businesses or fill in for someone else that does the same. Every so often, someone asks me why they can not listen to the music that the other secretary copied to her computer. I do not go into details but I suggest they find something that uses MP3 and not use Media player. What I'd really like to do is bust out EAC and Lame, show them how to use a Sharpie and disable autoplay if needed and how to get to the real audio tracks on a multisession disc. Way beyond the scope of why I am there.
Depends on where you live. I am on the fringe of a rural area. If it was not for my neighbors or others in the general area with thier Bobcats and snowplows, many of us would be stuck. Some are actual contractors certified with the state and some are not. No one has to park anywhere near the road so the risk of hitting a parked car is very low. Using farmers in a rural area makes sense as they can use thier big tractors that are not needed in the fields during the winter. They are required by state law to maintain a snow plow on for the entire season and must be able to be called upon within certain hours. Since many of these tractors have more capability then what the county and state maintain, they are often called out of thier normal areas to perform specific tasks. There's probably not many tractors in big cities but construction equipment would be a good candidate.
In theory, that should work. In reality, the letter opener person on the other end will probably toss your bill in the can. I've wondered about the same thing with EULA's and contracts. Imagine changing terms in a credit card contract you get in the mail. Changing the interest rate, the late fees, etc, putting your initials on all changes, signing the contract and mailing it back the postage prepaid envelope. In theory.. By them sending you a card, they would have had to agree to the ammended contract and you should be bound by those terms. A contract is an agreement between two parties. Do you really think that would work? Legally, it should but I doubt it would.
The trend in rebates is getting annoying also. Take a look at a BestBuy ad. 90% of the products have rebates to get the advertised price. These people are driving themselves into the ground with trying to manipulate the lowest advertised price. I assume at some point consumers are going to have enough and stop buying there, maybe it will be when every single product in the store has a $20 rebate.
Off topic but I went there on black Friday. I did not expect the door busters to still be there but I thought at least a few of the Fri/Sat only things would still be there. I looked for about 15 things in the ad and the only thing that was still in stock was a pair of $15 speakers. They've been in business long enough to get a general idea of what to stock and how much, "15 per store" is insane and not even worth the printing space in the weekly ad. Thier lack of stock was NOTHING but a blatent attempt of bait and switch to get you in the store. Walmart has it's flaws but they were still putting out pallets of $29 DVD players at 2:00pm. BestBuy probably sold all 5 of thiers (5 indivudual units, not pallets) by 6:01am and the probably were $119 with 3 different $30 mail in rebates that all required the original UPC code and 12-26 weeks to deliver.
These tactics are all "hidden costs" that consumers are subjected too.
Not trolling here, I do not know much about the iTMS format.
What can play the encrypted AAC from iTMS? Does it require special licensing, secuirty, or software to play them?
The more open or accepted the format, the more support and choice you will have. If the barrier for entry is high or costly, you will have a limited choice. This is not a new concept.
Sprint does not do this. Occasionally they or one of thier resellers (Radio Shack, BestBuy etc..) have rebates on some phones when purchased with service but generally, the phones cost the same, with or without service. They have been pushing the camera phones like the Sanyo 8100 pretty hard so it has had a new service only rebate for quite some time but that is the exception. The good thing is if one of your phones is lost, stolen, or broken, you can replace it relatively cheap. The other carriers sell thier bottom of the barrel phones for $.01 +$200 without activation.
I have a common /home on my Samba box also that is NFS exported to another Linux machine that I use for Squid and various other small things. I have not mounted it from the Linux workstations though. Since those same home directories are smb shares I do not know the risks of sharing them out to both, although for home use I guess it does not matter. My next step is ldap or nis but for now, I've been creating the accounts manually and specifing the UID/GID myself, with only 4 of 5 users, its not hard to do. Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
My two Linux servers are 7.3 also, it works and I leave it that way
Why stop at copyright laws. I believe the root of this problem and many others is campaign finance reform that actually has an effect. Looking at lobby and special interest groups efforts BIG picture is nothing more then bribery. "Here's some money, go do what is best for me!!". How we have come to accept this practice is well beyond me. Just because it's been happening for so long does not make it right. Try offering the policeman who pulls you over for speeding a $20 bill. How could your intentions be interpetted any other way then bribery? Just because the police enforce the law and congress makes the law should not be a difference, the end result is the same.
Bottom line...
Those that pay get thier way.
It's a shame to see a legal document with such vague terms. Issues like this keep trial lawyers in business!!
Is substantial relative and to what? $1000 may not be substantial to a big 5 marketing firm but that would be a substantial amount for me to spend on data collection. Assuming a company profits $10 million a year and they spend $10k on data for a report, that would be the same as an individual making $50k/year spending $500. If the court does not assume "substantial" as a relative term, then this legislation is most definatley biased toward big business.
I'm interested what grades/classes you teach and how well the kids were able to "adjust" to using linux though... I'm assuming minimal to zero learning curve, or were there some bumps?
Sorry, the only kids I was refering to was my offspring. Only two kids involved as far as I know! Actually they had no problem at all using it. It took them some time to get used to find things like changing the background and themes but that was it.
The Hawaii Open source Education Foundation (HOSEF) has had quite a few successful projects with OS and Linux in schools. The foundation was a LUG but has grown into a decent grouping of volunteers using OS with existing/donated equipment in schools. Worth checking out.
no more downloaded porn,
How does Linux prevent d/l of porn?
I converted my kids primary machines to the Knoppix HD-install (no boot cd required and now basically Debian). I have not had a problem with the machines since and it has everything they NEED except games (Abiword, Mozilla, and Gaim). I use Samba and IMAP in the house so they still have access to all of my shared files and media and thier own "My Documents" directory and thier email just as they do from any of my Windows machines. The only thing I have not worked on yet was a roaming profile concept so they can have the same look, feel, and applications across different Linux machines when they login. They have this ability now with my Win machines with a profiles share and an apps share and I have a common \home on the Samba machine that can be mounted as \home on their machines but have not taken that step yet.
I am sending yet another reply to my own reply. The torrent I linked in parent is for the full Mandrake 9.2 distro, NOT for the live cd in the article. My inital post was about lack of torrents in general and I was happy to find Mandrake does indeed use torrents (although not yet for the live cd). Sorry for the link confusion and poor judgement on my part.
Okay, I'm an idiot. I found the torrent link from the mirrors page.
I'm not a Mandrake users, a quick look of the linked article did not appear to have a torrent and the download links seem to be all be membership based only?
Is there a licensing issue with "redistribution" of Mandrake ISO's or just a way to encourage support for Mandrake products? I'm not flaming here, just asking what the philosophy behind this is as torrents would seem to be a more logical method of distribution and could reduce a percentage of those costs that require membership fees in the first place.
Not that I completely agree with Googles decision but I would not exactly associate an addiction or chemical dependency to being "dumb". Ideally, you would always make the smartest decision for your own well being but that decision making process gets warped by the addiction. If this was not the case, 99.999% of people using tobacco would quit today.
Your method makes sense for an individual who puts more value into the physical laptop then what is stored on the HD. I don't think Wells Fargo really cared about the laptop iteself when the data on it was easily worth 1000 X more. It was nice that they got it back and found the culpruit and can now make an assessment of the damage but is making the laptop accessible to guest worth the risk to the data? I don't know. It's not like a common criminal or even this somewhat "above average" criminal has the forensic knowledge to easily defeat encryption or read data directly from a HD's platter and this was not a sting operation with fake data. Someone needs to make a risk assessment for these situations and be able to justify it when the shit hits the fan.
Don't buy people things that need money fed into them forever.
Glad your not my parent. What do you suggest? Jewerly, and clothes? That would get old real quick.
Damn, Kris got our name in the family christmas pool again this year, looks like another picture frame or a vase.
Nice plug attempt for the iPod.
The apparent lack of left handed ability is not a problem for a left handed person and IMHO, not something that needs to be designed around. If a left hander has not got used to the general right usage, the Rio is the least of thier problems. Have you seen pair of left handed scissors since you left grade school? How many left handed people actually configure the mouse buttons and/or use the left hand for the mouse? How about a left handed joystick for a console game or even the real arcade games? Of course just about every game now uses many buttons and both hands but the old school games and joysticks were based on the right hand. I don't think I could use my Blackberry if the scroller wheel was actually on the left, same with my cell phone configuration. I would guess that unless a product is symetrical, right handed use was probably a design consideration.
As a lefty, I can say that I see no left handed conspiracy going on. Maybe a small percentage may have not been able to adapt. You get used to what you have. I even golf right handed because that's what clubs I had when I started, I putt lefty though.
Some of those packages get "diverted" into strange places too. We have at least 2 laptops a year that get lost along the line somewhere. You can see the diversion with the number tracking though, it gets a departure scan from point C but never a recieved scan at point D. Although, we suffer less loses with FedEx then any of the other commercial carriers.
I used to buy mine at the local Woolworths. They were 10 cents each. You could get extra balls per dime on one of the machines by turning the knob real slow to a certain point and wiggle it back and forth. All we really did with them was whip them around the store. That was our fun until a nearby pizza place got Space Invaders and Astroids.
I agree with the illegal alien part but the rest of your story is complete bull. Have you ever been to a city/county board meeting in your area? Walmart gets no more pull then then any large developer.
10 years ago in my county, they rezoned 1000's of farm land to support high end "luxury homes". The basis was that the land value would go up and get people to the county with more money which would cause the tax burden to shift and money supply to go up. Guess what, my county taxes have gone up every year since, traffic is terrible and a decent percentage of school classrooms and buildings now have a hitch and wheels. I'm still waiting for that "benefit" to come around.
Substitute "iPod" for "marijuana" in your twisted tale and it makes a little sense. Reality is for people who can't handle drugs.
What do you mean by capable? I have 2 linux machines at home that are not capable of running X Windows. One is a headless floppy based router and the other is my headless Samba sever. I assume each *could* run X if I installed everything that was required to run X windows but as they sit now, they are scaled down to do what I need which is not X.