Well, the reason some people store MANY of their songs on the iPOd is that they aren't always in front of the same computer.
For example: when I used my laptop all the time, my iPod was nearly empty. But when I gave the lappy to my wife to use for work, and switched back to my hard to use three year old Windows PC, suddenly I needed to get as many songs on it as possible so I didn't have to use that POS.
I also have different libraries at home, at work and on the lappy. The iPod is the only common interface, thus, there are some things I just HAVE to have on there. Like all my WeFunk sets, which are almost exclusive listening during long coding stints, trips, and at the gym. Basically, any time I need to zone out and run on the music's energy for a long period of time.
Or maybe joggers and fashion victims don't really care whether using 128 kbit AAC files causes a notable distortion in cymbal sustain and restriction of dynamic range during detailed passages.
Maybe they just want to toss music on the fucking thing and get on with their day.
Incidentally, I recently re-ripped all my "archival" VBR MP3s to 160 kbit AAC, because I liked the sound better. It's not as detailed, but AAC distortion is different from MP3 distortion and I think it's significantly less obnoxious. I can't tell the difference between AAC 160 and AAC 192+ unless I concentrate.
And some of us prefer to choose to own something cool and save our money elsewhere.
For example, I've saved over three thousand dollars these past four years by doing all of my own automotive repairs and maintenance on my family's three vehicles.
I feel much more satisfied soaping up after a long session under my wife's Subaru than I did burning MP3 CDs back when I still had my Rio Volt.
Well, the idea of the original iPod was that yes, you CAN bring every song you have with you whereever you go. So just in case you want to hear Frank Zappa's "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" in the car at noon on the way to lunch, you can just dial it up.
So it appealed to audiophiles and control freaks.
The idea of the iPod Mini is that it's a massively portable, durable, attractive device. It will play 1000 of your favorite songs, which is still 83 albums. Probably the equivalent of the average Joe's "CDs I listen to pile."
So it appeals to "normal" people who want the LOOK of the iPod, the ease of iTunes and of course iTMS without needing the massive capacity.
Anyway, for S&G I did an ipod playlist of everything I've listened to in the past three months. It's only 1086 songs -- and I listen all day long.
I don't think that most people would have a problem with getting more hard drive space, if it came free. But paying $50 more for a device that's physically twice as big is silly if you're only going to need to put 4 meg on it anyway.
I have the 30 gig, and when I first got it it was constantly full. A year later, I rarely go over the 23 gig mark, and that's only because of my "stuff to audition" folder (currently 10 gig). I regularly delete albums I never listen to and songs that I don't want to hear by accident if i'm on full tilt random at work. I like the Beatnuts' "Psycho Dwarf," but the chorus of "I want to fuck, drink beer and smoke some shit." doesn't go over too well...
See, most people don't move groups of large files. In fact, all of my current development work including graphics and a test database fit under 300 meg on my iPod.
And since I don't move that many files around, it would be nice to have a place to put them that was quarter the size of my current iPod. I mean, it's not a large device...but a device that was half its thickness would fit into the same pocket as my wallet.
The trick is, these cats are trying to do it from corn You know...that food that grows on a six foot stalk with maybe 8 viable ears, of which only the kernels are useful as a fuel source? Which must be shucked and the silk removed before that can be harvested?
Corn is a delicious food, but it's not even a good fuel source for HUMANS. It's ridiculously hard to grow for what you get.
This is a slight skew of the reason energy companies fuel alternative research. Yes, it is so they can own the patents. No they aren't marketing them full strength. But they aren't buying them just to bury them. They're buying them to hedge their bets.
Right now, the cheapest, most cost effective way we have to get energy, start to finish, is the burning of fossil fuels. But fossil fuels aren't unlimited. The energy companies KNOW this. They don't want to die with the supply.
So they pump money into research. And when it costs less -- and profits more -- to push an alternative than it does to continue with fossil fuels, they'll push that. And save fossil fuels for "premium" uses, like plastics and rocket fuel.
"Big oil" isn't "evil." They don't like fucking the environment. They've just adopted the attitude of price first, environment second...and they've become "big oil" because any company that put things the other way around never made it. We're talking about a market in which people grumble about paying an extra dollar twice a month. Appealing to the heartstrings of that cutthroat market isn't going to get your alternative fuel widespread adoption. It isn't good enough that fuels are clean and self sustaining: until they're cheap, too, they'll never do anything worthwhile.
This is a rather empty and cynical viewpoint. The thing with "Big Oil" is these are the last of the great resource barons. All of their profits are based on mining and delivering oil as cheaply as possible. As long as it costs more to use alternative fuels than to deliver fossil ones, "Big Oil" will deliver the fossil wherever possible. It's not that they're necessarily evil...they just don't want to waste money delivering a "clean" product which will cost more with no demand. I mean, Sunoco used to have 4 octane grades of fuel: 87,89,93 and 94. I ran 94, because I have a turbo and a run a program which will use the higher octane gas more efficiently. I could get 37 MPG out of that stuff, 3 MPG more than my average with 93 (which made it more cost effective than the premium, since the cost difference was only $.10). Now, due to people being unwilling to pay the extra $.10, they've dropped both their premium fuels...to 91 and 93.
Of course, I no longer go to Sunoco. But I'm sure the average cat never noticed or cared, either because their engine didn't perform any better or they didn't notice it when it did.
As for gas prices...yeah, there's a lot of speculation and money making off of that speculation, but that happens in every commodities market. I tend to look at it like this: I drive 20,000 miles a year, at an average of 32 mpg (34 when commuting, 27 when I'm pleasure driving). That's 625 gallons. Today I pay $1250 per year. Three years ago I paid $1062. Yes, that means I'm paying about $15 more per month on gas, but I'm not hurting to pay it. In that same time, my phone bill has increased from $30 per month to $155, thanks to a move to cellular. I get a lot more utility out of my car than I do out of my cell phone...so why complain about high gas prices? Why not complain about high everything prices?
Yeah, this is the "Apple effect." Used to be, if a smart company didn't say what they were working on, you assumed it was killer. But some companies are so sensitive to their stock price these days that many of them have begun announcing ideas before they've even BEGUN the research. Which makes everybody else look foolish.
Really, though, touting a non-acheivment only goes so far, when other people are actually acheiving it.
So build a compost heap. Ours is less than six feet square, sits under our deck and provides its volume in high potency fertilizer per year.
You could grow worms in it as well. If you like to fish, or enjoy REALLY rich soil.
And don't throw out your leaves in the fall! Cover your garden with them...it will help protect the soil and in the spring, you just turn them over into the soil. My wife's garden was just sand two years ago and already it's got perfect PH and a loamy texture.
After a wind storm, chop up fallen limbs and bind sticks in 3 feet by 1 ft diameter bindles. These create awesome fires in the winter...
Chucking yard waste is, in general, a pretty wasteful thing to do considering how useful it can be if you take the time (and have the space) to reuse it.
Not to mention the thousands of small companies that do nothing BUT research.
That's what VC funds are supposed to be for...you sink a few million into a company, and by the time it runs out, they might have a revolutionary product. Then some big guy swoops in, buys out the VCs at a hefty product, and markets the shit out of it.
Energy and biotech are two of the biggest areas for this type of thing. Read Scientific American some time...just about every issue there's a story of somebody who got their PhD and immediately started a company to continue the research. When they finally make that AIDS cocktail or H2 generator, glaxo (or GM) swoops in and gobbles the company up.
Um, if you're both on cable, you're already sharing the link. Each of you has 512k in burst, but you can't both sustain that. Otherwise, cable companies can get around selling 1000 people 512k links would need some mythical 512 megabit pipeline (okay, 10 or so T3s would do the trick, but that's be insanely expensive and not covered by the $45,000 per month they were bringing in when you factor in the cost of techs, etc)
So? If he wanted a quality DNS server, he would have asked about DJBDNS.
Dan Bernstein might be an, uh, "colourful" character, but his software is fast, easy to use, easy to admin, and all around better than anything Vixie & crew could offer. Plus this guy's devotion to security is nothing less than astounding. I trust his internet tools wherever possible...shit, i even run an instance of his no frills HTTP server for images.
The bad episode of DS9 was the one where Gul Dukat, now working for the Dominion, sends a communique out of the blue to Major Kira, telling her that her moms and Dukat were lovers. (Something he should have mentioned, you know, some time in the 15 years they knew each other.) So Kira appeals to the wormhole and travels back in time to change her mom's mind...shudder.
The rest were good -- even the eye-rolling "Ferengi travels back in time and meets humans at an Air Force base in Roswell, 1952" episode, which was at least hysterically funny. Like anything centerred on Quark, the only anti-hero in the whole of Star Trek.
I'd have to say DS9's continuity was REALLY profound. Come on, man, they abandon the station at the end of season 5, and it's occupied for the first few episodes of season 6. Not to mention the characters moving up and down political ladders based on their actions. A good example is Gul Dukat, who goes from cruel dictator to crippled militarist to outcast to rebel to traitor and then back to cruel dictator. And the whole time he maintains a relationship with the cast.
Even the one off episodes preserved the continuity, which was fun.
The only difference, if there is one at all, is that maybe Staczinski knew where he was going the whole time, while DS9 was a bit more seat of the pants. But after season 4, they knew what they were doing...and they made some GREAT sci-fi.
Screw the Borg. The only way to beat the Borg is with last minute science. I want to see something with the Dominion, who can be beaten instead with a last minute defection.
I dunno. I've been getting into DS9 lately, and it seems that show REALLY understood a lot of us wanted. It had continuity between episodes with occasional throw away episodes. It had solutions that often involved fighting first and asking questions later. It was (relatively) light on time travel and last minute engineering decisions. And it had characters interested in more than just the liberal pursuits of star fleet, with none more intriguing than the Ferengi bartender (who was a great anti hero who got all the best lines..."Thanks for saving us, but couldn't you have done that ten minutes ago?").
I fact, if they make a star trek prequel, I'd like to see one about the liberation of Bejorr. I doubt it would happen (since flashbacks have pretty much told this story), but it could be interesting.
Well, I guess one man's cynical hyperbole is another man's crass, inaccurate overstatement.
My point is: not everybody I know who went to public school is a commercialized automatonl. In fact, a great deal of the clever people I know went to public school. I went to public school. My ex-roommate went to Brooklyn High and was a steadfast Christian with excellent study skills and a keen grasp of calculus -- he used to tutor my upstate ass.
Yeah, some students aren't getting it. Yeah, some parents don't get that this isn't a teacher's fault. But this attitude of bureaocracy and despair isn't helping anybody. Students that want to learn are only going to learn if the teacher is willing to do her best. And teachers are only going to do their best when they don't feel it's hopeless. A lot of good comes out of public schools. It's more than worth the bad, and certainly better than any of the alternatives.
It doesn't matter what I feel. I wouldn't want to live in a world where crimes were forgiven merely because they were noncommercial. If commercial infringment is a crime, why shouldn't non-commercial infringement be one, especially if technology enables non-commercial infringement to be far more widespread and flagrant than any bootleggger.
Face it: a solitary bootlegger with a backpack full of surreptitious copies of the Black Album is peanuts in terms of the destruction of commercial viability of a work when compared to 20 million KaZaa users. Why should the former be a crime and the latter not -- simply because the authors of the original law could not foresee copying becoming so trivial?
After all, dubbing a mix tape takes care and time. 90 minutes for the original and as long per copy unless you have a high speed dubbing deck. There's not a lot to fear when a non-commercial copy of your work requires that an hour of somebody's time be given willingly. There's more to fear when it takes a few seconds and it can be done automatically on request without the owner ever knowing it was requested.
So do what I do: have your best digital photos printed back to film slides. It's not so expensive, your local art college will know where to get it done...and you can pick and choose which ones go onto the film. No wasting film on crappy shots!
If people want to "go digital" but not take any precautions to protect those tiny, precious bits, I don't have much sympathy for them. This is no different than throwing out your negatives or storing them improperly. Most CD-Rs won't survive their first skid on a carpeted floor...and most photographs won't survive a winter in a carboard box in the basement.
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Well, the reason some people store MANY of their songs on the iPOd is that they aren't always in front of the same computer.
For example: when I used my laptop all the time, my iPod was nearly empty. But when I gave the lappy to my wife to use for work, and switched back to my hard to use three year old Windows PC, suddenly I needed to get as many songs on it as possible so I didn't have to use that POS.
I also have different libraries at home, at work and on the lappy. The iPod is the only common interface, thus, there are some things I just HAVE to have on there. Like all my WeFunk sets, which are almost exclusive listening during long coding stints, trips, and at the gym. Basically, any time I need to zone out and run on the music's energy for a long period of time.
Or maybe joggers and fashion victims don't really care whether using 128 kbit AAC files causes a notable distortion in cymbal sustain and restriction of dynamic range during detailed passages.
Maybe they just want to toss music on the fucking thing and get on with their day.
Incidentally, I recently re-ripped all my "archival" VBR MP3s to 160 kbit AAC, because I liked the sound better. It's not as detailed, but AAC distortion is different from MP3 distortion and I think it's significantly less obnoxious. I can't tell the difference between AAC 160 and AAC 192+ unless I concentrate.
Well, you see, most people can't plan so far ahead that they know what they'll want to listen to 8 hours from now.
Massive hard disks allow us to be as picky as we want, thus spending less time managing music than we do playing it.
Furthermore, I have a car charger for my iPod.
And some of us prefer to choose to own something cool and save our money elsewhere.
For example, I've saved over three thousand dollars these past four years by doing all of my own automotive repairs and maintenance on my family's three vehicles.
I feel much more satisfied soaping up after a long session under my wife's Subaru than I did burning MP3 CDs back when I still had my Rio Volt.
Well, the idea of the original iPod was that yes, you CAN bring every song you have with you whereever you go. So just in case you want to hear Frank Zappa's "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" in the car at noon on the way to lunch, you can just dial it up.
So it appealed to audiophiles and control freaks.
The idea of the iPod Mini is that it's a massively portable, durable, attractive device. It will play 1000 of your favorite songs, which is still 83 albums. Probably the equivalent of the average Joe's "CDs I listen to pile."
So it appeals to "normal" people who want the LOOK of the iPod, the ease of iTunes and of course iTMS without needing the massive capacity.
Anyway, for S&G I did an ipod playlist of everything I've listened to in the past three months. It's only 1086 songs -- and I listen all day long.
I don't think that most people would have a problem with getting more hard drive space, if it came free. But paying $50 more for a device that's physically twice as big is silly if you're only going to need to put 4 meg on it anyway.
I have the 30 gig, and when I first got it it was constantly full. A year later, I rarely go over the 23 gig mark, and that's only because of my "stuff to audition" folder (currently 10 gig). I regularly delete albums I never listen to and songs that I don't want to hear by accident if i'm on full tilt random at work. I like the Beatnuts' "Psycho Dwarf," but the chorus of "I want to fuck, drink beer and smoke some shit." doesn't go over too well...
See, most people don't move groups of large files. In fact, all of my current development work including graphics and a test database fit under 300 meg on my iPod.
And since I don't move that many files around, it would be nice to have a place to put them that was quarter the size of my current iPod. I mean, it's not a large device...but a device that was half its thickness would fit into the same pocket as my wallet.
The trick is, these cats are trying to do it from corn You know...that food that grows on a six foot stalk with maybe 8 viable ears, of which only the kernels are useful as a fuel source? Which must be shucked and the silk removed before that can be harvested?
Corn is a delicious food, but it's not even a good fuel source for HUMANS. It's ridiculously hard to grow for what you get.
This is a slight skew of the reason energy companies fuel alternative research. Yes, it is so they can own the patents. No they aren't marketing them full strength. But they aren't buying them just to bury them. They're buying them to hedge their bets.
Right now, the cheapest, most cost effective way we have to get energy, start to finish, is the burning of fossil fuels. But fossil fuels aren't unlimited. The energy companies KNOW this. They don't want to die with the supply.
So they pump money into research. And when it costs less -- and profits more -- to push an alternative than it does to continue with fossil fuels, they'll push that. And save fossil fuels for "premium" uses, like plastics and rocket fuel.
"Big oil" isn't "evil." They don't like fucking the environment. They've just adopted the attitude of price first, environment second...and they've become "big oil" because any company that put things the other way around never made it. We're talking about a market in which people grumble about paying an extra dollar twice a month. Appealing to the heartstrings of that cutthroat market isn't going to get your alternative fuel widespread adoption. It isn't good enough that fuels are clean and self sustaining: until they're cheap, too, they'll never do anything worthwhile.
This is a rather empty and cynical viewpoint. The thing with "Big Oil" is these are the last of the great resource barons. All of their profits are based on mining and delivering oil as cheaply as possible. As long as it costs more to use alternative fuels than to deliver fossil ones, "Big Oil" will deliver the fossil wherever possible. It's not that they're necessarily evil...they just don't want to waste money delivering a "clean" product which will cost more with no demand. I mean, Sunoco used to have 4 octane grades of fuel: 87,89,93 and 94. I ran 94, because I have a turbo and a run a program which will use the higher octane gas more efficiently. I could get 37 MPG out of that stuff, 3 MPG more than my average with 93 (which made it more cost effective than the premium, since the cost difference was only $.10). Now, due to people being unwilling to pay the extra $.10, they've dropped both their premium fuels...to 91 and 93.
Of course, I no longer go to Sunoco. But I'm sure the average cat never noticed or cared, either because their engine didn't perform any better or they didn't notice it when it did.
As for gas prices...yeah, there's a lot of speculation and money making off of that speculation, but that happens in every commodities market. I tend to look at it like this: I drive 20,000 miles a year, at an average of 32 mpg (34 when commuting, 27 when I'm pleasure driving). That's 625 gallons. Today I pay $1250 per year. Three years ago I paid $1062. Yes, that means I'm paying about $15 more per month on gas, but I'm not hurting to pay it. In that same time, my phone bill has increased from $30 per month to $155, thanks to a move to cellular. I get a lot more utility out of my car than I do out of my cell phone...so why complain about high gas prices? Why not complain about high everything prices?
Yeah, this is the "Apple effect." Used to be, if a smart company didn't say what they were working on, you assumed it was killer. But some companies are so sensitive to their stock price these days that many of them have begun announcing ideas before they've even BEGUN the research. Which makes everybody else look foolish.
Really, though, touting a non-acheivment only goes so far, when other people are actually acheiving it.
So build a compost heap. Ours is less than six feet square, sits under our deck and provides its volume in high potency fertilizer per year.
You could grow worms in it as well. If you like to fish, or enjoy REALLY rich soil.
And don't throw out your leaves in the fall! Cover your garden with them...it will help protect the soil and in the spring, you just turn them over into the soil. My wife's garden was just sand two years ago and already it's got perfect PH and a loamy texture.
After a wind storm, chop up fallen limbs and bind sticks in 3 feet by 1 ft diameter bindles. These create awesome fires in the winter...
Chucking yard waste is, in general, a pretty wasteful thing to do considering how useful it can be if you take the time (and have the space) to reuse it.
I myself have developed a potent process to convert alcohol and processed chicken parts into methane gas.
At least, my wife tells me it's potent.
Not to mention the thousands of small companies that do nothing BUT research.
That's what VC funds are supposed to be for...you sink a few million into a company, and by the time it runs out, they might have a revolutionary product. Then some big guy swoops in, buys out the VCs at a hefty product, and markets the shit out of it.
Energy and biotech are two of the biggest areas for this type of thing. Read Scientific American some time...just about every issue there's a story of somebody who got their PhD and immediately started a company to continue the research. When they finally make that AIDS cocktail or H2 generator, glaxo (or GM) swoops in and gobbles the company up.
Shit, as long as a pint still comes in a big glass with a nice head, I don't care how they measure it.
Um, if you're both on cable, you're already sharing the link. Each of you has 512k in burst, but you can't both sustain that. Otherwise, cable companies can get around selling 1000 people 512k links would need some mythical 512 megabit pipeline (okay, 10 or so T3s would do the trick, but that's be insanely expensive and not covered by the $45,000 per month they were bringing in when you factor in the cost of techs, etc)
So? If he wanted a quality DNS server, he would have asked about DJBDNS.
Dan Bernstein might be an, uh, "colourful" character, but his software is fast, easy to use, easy to admin, and all around better than anything Vixie & crew could offer. Plus this guy's devotion to security is nothing less than astounding. I trust his internet tools wherever possible...shit, i even run an instance of his no frills HTTP server for images.
So...Hollywood is a Ferengi?
This new movie will probably get $150 million. How much is that in Gold Pressed Latinum?
The bad episode of DS9 was the one where Gul Dukat, now working for the Dominion, sends a communique out of the blue to Major Kira, telling her that her moms and Dukat were lovers. (Something he should have mentioned, you know, some time in the 15 years they knew each other.) So Kira appeals to the wormhole and travels back in time to change her mom's mind...shudder.
The rest were good -- even the eye-rolling "Ferengi travels back in time and meets humans at an Air Force base in Roswell, 1952" episode, which was at least hysterically funny. Like anything centerred on Quark, the only anti-hero in the whole of Star Trek.
I'd have to say DS9's continuity was REALLY profound. Come on, man, they abandon the station at the end of season 5, and it's occupied for the first few episodes of season 6. Not to mention the characters moving up and down political ladders based on their actions. A good example is Gul Dukat, who goes from cruel dictator to crippled militarist to outcast to rebel to traitor and then back to cruel dictator. And the whole time he maintains a relationship with the cast.
Even the one off episodes preserved the continuity, which was fun.
The only difference, if there is one at all, is that maybe Staczinski knew where he was going the whole time, while DS9 was a bit more seat of the pants. But after season 4, they knew what they were doing...and they made some GREAT sci-fi.
Screw the Borg. The only way to beat the Borg is with last minute science. I want to see something with the Dominion, who can be beaten instead with a last minute defection.
I dunno. I've been getting into DS9 lately, and it seems that show REALLY understood a lot of us wanted. It had continuity between episodes with occasional throw away episodes. It had solutions that often involved fighting first and asking questions later. It was (relatively) light on time travel and last minute engineering decisions. And it had characters interested in more than just the liberal pursuits of star fleet, with none more intriguing than the Ferengi bartender (who was a great anti hero who got all the best lines..."Thanks for saving us, but couldn't you have done that ten minutes ago?").
I fact, if they make a star trek prequel, I'd like to see one about the liberation of Bejorr. I doubt it would happen (since flashbacks have pretty much told this story), but it could be interesting.
Well, I guess one man's cynical hyperbole is another man's crass, inaccurate overstatement.
My point is: not everybody I know who went to public school is a commercialized automatonl. In fact, a great deal of the clever people I know went to public school. I went to public school. My ex-roommate went to Brooklyn High and was a steadfast Christian with excellent study skills and a keen grasp of calculus -- he used to tutor my upstate ass.
Yeah, some students aren't getting it. Yeah, some parents don't get that this isn't a teacher's fault. But this attitude of bureaocracy and despair isn't helping anybody. Students that want to learn are only going to learn if the teacher is willing to do her best. And teachers are only going to do their best when they don't feel it's hopeless. A lot of good comes out of public schools. It's more than worth the bad, and certainly better than any of the alternatives.
It doesn't matter what I feel. I wouldn't want to live in a world where crimes were forgiven merely because they were noncommercial. If commercial infringment is a crime, why shouldn't non-commercial infringement be one, especially if technology enables non-commercial infringement to be far more widespread and flagrant than any bootleggger.
Face it: a solitary bootlegger with a backpack full of surreptitious copies of the Black Album is peanuts in terms of the destruction of commercial viability of a work when compared to 20 million KaZaa users. Why should the former be a crime and the latter not -- simply because the authors of the original law could not foresee copying becoming so trivial?
After all, dubbing a mix tape takes care and time. 90 minutes for the original and as long per copy unless you have a high speed dubbing deck. There's not a lot to fear when a non-commercial copy of your work requires that an hour of somebody's time be given willingly. There's more to fear when it takes a few seconds and it can be done automatically on request without the owner ever knowing it was requested.
So do what I do: have your best digital photos printed back to film slides. It's not so expensive, your local art college will know where to get it done...and you can pick and choose which ones go onto the film. No wasting film on crappy shots!
If people want to "go digital" but not take any precautions to protect those tiny, precious bits, I don't have much sympathy for them. This is no different than throwing out your negatives or storing them improperly. Most CD-Rs won't survive their first skid on a carpeted floor...and most photographs won't survive a winter in a carboard box in the basement.